Soon after losing his 2018 primary against progressive newcomer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a major political upset, 10-term Congressman Joe Crowley joined one of K Street’s largest lobbying outfits, and fresh reporting reveals that the former chair of the House Democratic Caucus is now working to torpedo his party’s proposed tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy.

A recently filed document on the Senate’s disclosure website shows that Crowley and other lobbyists at Squire Patton Boggs—a massive corporate law firm whose clients include Amazon, Royal Dutch Shell, UnitedHealth, and the Saudi monarchy—were hired in July by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), “one of Wall Street’s most powerful advocacy groups,” The Intercept reported Friday.

“SIFMA, whose members range from BlackRock and J.P. Morgan to Amazon Web Services and IBM,” The Intercept noted, “has deployed Crowley to court his old colleagues as Democrats finalize legislation to implement President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better initiative, which seeks a fairer tax system and greater revenue to pay for expanded Medicare coverage, universal pre-K, and other domestic priorities.”

According to Sara Sirota, a reporter at the news outlet:

Senior lawmakers-turned-lobbyists like Crowley typically serve their special interest clients by convincing former allies to promote industry talking points to committee chairs or party leaders. On September 24, Texas Democratic Reps. Vicente González, Henry Cuellar, and Filemón Vela sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.] and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] a letter criticizing the proposed tax increases on corporations’ foreign profits that Crowley is now targeting for SIFMA. Crowley’s former leadership PAC donated to all three congressmen’s campaigns over his time in Congress, and Vela was a vocal supporter of Crowley’s leadership ambitions.

[…]

This wasn’t the only time González, Cuellar, and Vela tried to undermine House Democrats’ Build Back Better Act. They also joined New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s unsuccessful attempt to weaken the party’s unity and commitment to finish the reconciliation process, which allows the bill to pass with a simple majority.

Although Crowley opposed the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act when he was in Congress—describing it as a “tax scam” benefiting the “largest, wealthiest multinational corporations in the history of the world”—the former lawmaker is now collaborating with Wall Street to undermine Democrats’ attempts at progressive reform.

SIFMA is particularly opposed to efforts to raise the rate on global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) from its current level of 10.5%—established four years ago by Republicans and deemed a handout to multinational corporations by Democrats—to 16.5%.

That modest increase is lower than the rate sought by Biden and a majority of congressional Democrats, who want to equalize the GILTI tax rate and the domestic corporate tax rate—now at 21%, but potentially higher if current legislative proposals succeed—in order to disincentivize offshoring.

Sirota pointed out that IBM’s “global tax policy director earlier this year said Democrats’ plan to fix that scam is ‘penalizing companies that have been operating overseas for years.’”

SIFMA has also “made its opposition to the Build Back Better Act’s tax increases on the wealthiest individuals clear,” Sirota added. “Days after the Ways and Means Committee finished marking it up, SIFMA Managing Director Tim Cameron released a statement on September 17 criticizing capital gains tax hikes, restrictions on individual retirement account contributions, and other changes intended to reduce inequality.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

As the United Nations Biodiversity Conference wrapped up Friday, critics are once again pointing to the glaring absence of the United States from negotiations to strengthen an international treaty to restore and protect the variety of life on Earth that has been ratified by every country except the U.S.

“The world cannot afford for China and the U.S. to not find ways to work together to address climate change and nature loss.”

The U.S. did send a team to this week’s meeting, which was hosted by China and attended in-person and virtually because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—a crisis that has highlighted the need to reform humanity’s relationship with nature.

U.S. delegates, however, had no official say and could only observe, as diplomats from around the globe debated how best to update the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and hashed out strategies to safeguard the world’s flora, fauna, and ecosystems, increasingly under threat due to the relentless quest to maximize profits at all costs.

The resulting “Kunming Declaration“—a pledge that was welcomed by conservation advocates, who also emphasized the urgent need to match words with bold and concrete policies—sets the stage for the development of a post-2020 global biodiversity framework, which governments are scheduled to negotiate further in January 2022 and adopt next May at part two of the U.N. Biodiversity Conference.

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“Washington’s obstinance is striking,” Sara Schonhardt wrote Friday in E&E News. “It is not without consequence either. Because the United States has refused to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, it cannot vote on procedures that continue to shape the treaty. And critics say the lack of participation in this arena hurts U.S. diplomacy in other environmental matters, such as global warming.”

Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Schonhardt that “it reinforces the notion that the U.S. is a fair-weather partner when it comes to environmental conservation, including issues of climate change.”

According to E&E News:

Nearly all the blame lies with the U.S. Senate, which for years has balked at approving the treaty. But the Biden administration hasn’t spent much political capital on it either—in a year that officials often describe as pivotal for the climate.

For decades, Republican lawmakers have argued against ratification because they say it would require that the United States bring its laws and regulations into conformity with global standards and infringe upon U.S. sovereignty. In addition, American industry groups have raised concerns that entry into the deal would pose a risk to intellectual property rights.

Patrick rejected both of those talking points. The CBD “doesn’t oblige the U.S. to do anything it’s not already doing,” he said, adding that U.S. environmental laws are relatively strong compared with the rest of the world.

The U.S. Senate’s refusal to ratify the CDB—sometimes referred to as the Paris agreement for nature—is “embarrassing,” Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The American Prospect‘s Lee Harris. 

Harris wrote Friday that “the continued snub dates back to lobbying by the biopharmaceutical industry, which objected to intellectual property provisions and wanted to maintain its ability to extract natural resources from developing countries.”

As The Prospect reported:

Habitat destruction threatens more than the extinction of the charismatic megafauna—panda bears, rhinos, elephants, and other cuddly animals that are most popular stuffed. It is also a key contributor to the emergence of infectious diseases, bringing people and livestock in contact with wildlife.

Around the world, humans continue to expand the wildland-urban interface. In the past year, that encroachment set off record-breaking fires across mismanaged land in California and Covid-19, as farming and resource extraction give pathogens opportunities to spread to human hosts.

Following a year when conspicuous examples of the perils of biodiversity loss came from the world’s top two polluters, however, only China is leading rhetorically on responsible land management.

COP 26, the U.N. conference on climate change that starts in just over two weeks in Glasgow, has received far more attention—including from the U.S., which rejoined the Paris agreement in January.

Harris, however, noted that the biodiversity crisis “is arguably an even more complex and intractable problem.”

Although the global extinction crisis is driven in part by rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gas pollution, it will take more than slashing fossil fuel emissions to restore vital ecosystems, revive pollinators whose populations are declining, prevent the further collapse of freshwater mussels that play a key role in keeping waterways clean, and protect the Amazon rainforest—”the lungs of the world” recently transformed from a carbon sink into a net emitter.

The Biden administration, for its part, “has endorsed a proposal to protect 30% of national lands and waters by 2030,” E&E noted. The so-called 30×30 goal “is expected to be a centerpiece” of the new CBD, though such an approach has been criticized by some ecologists.

Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, told the news outlet that “the world cannot afford for China and the U.S. to not find ways to work together to address climate change and nature loss.”

“Our survival requires it,” he stressed.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.