This week, UK ministers and political leaders from Britain’s overseas territories will come together at the joint ministerial council. This summit is intended to build a united strategy for our partnership with the overseas territories, built on shared democratic values and respect for human rights.
But this partnership also comes with the obligation to adhere to certain standards. For those campaigning to eradicate money laundering and fraud from the UK’s economy, that involves tearing down secrecy and promoting full corporate transparency and robust accountability through publicly accessible registers of beneficial ownership.
Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministers
The US spy tech company Palantir has been in talks with the Ministry of Justice about using its technology to calculate prisoners’ “reoffending risks”, it has emerged.
The proposals emerged in correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act which showed how the company has also been lobbying new UK government ministers, including the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
Berlin, November 14, 2024—A local business owner and his security guards insulted and attacked journalist Ana Raičković after following her and her family to their car outside a restaurant in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, on Sunday, November 10.
One man grabbed Raičković, editor for online newspaper Pobjeda, by her throat and threatened her and her family with physical violence and death; another grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the car door. Raičković filed a report with police the night of the attack, and police arrested three suspects.
“It is a welcome development that Montenegrin authorities acted swiftly in response to the physical attack against journalist Ana Raičković. They must now ensure that all those responsible are held accountable,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Threatening or attacking a journalist because of their reporting is completely unacceptable. Montenegrin authorities must send a clear signal that violence against journalists will not be tolerated.”
Pobjeda reported that the attack was in response to Raičković’s reporting and TV appearances. about the business owner’s dealings and court cases.
She was treated in an emergency room for neck bruising, head lacerations, and a swollen arm.
The independent trade group Trade Union of Media of Montenegro said the business owner has a “history of aggression towards journalists” and that the police investigation of previous threats he made against a journalist in 2019 ended without “criminal or misdemeanor responsibility.”
CPJ’s email to the press department of the Ministry of the Interior in Podgorica did not receive a reply.
Australian steel maker Bisalloy provides armour for Israeli tanks and is due to begin work on the AUKUS submarine deal. The Malcolm Turnbull-backed company is facing protests tomorrow against unlawful supply. Yaakov Aharon investigates.
In 2017, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and then Ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma travelled to Israel to sign an arms deal. This deal marked the beginning of a steep increase in Australia’s arms trade with Israel, which often relies on Bisalloy’s specialty steel as central to the supply line.
The International Court of Justice stated in July that it is against international law to arm Israel. It called on all Member States of the ICJ to apply strong diplomatic and economic pressure against Israel in order to bring about the end of the military occupation of Palestine.
While the Australian government has repeatedly denied that there is a two-way arms trade with Israel,
Bisalloy has released numerous statements announcing that their relationship with the Israeli arms trade is as strong as ever.
In the past weeks, it was announced by the Department of Defence that 66 permits for two-way arms exports to Israel were under review, while 16 permits were silently amended or ended due to concern over the “very high number of civilian casualties” in Gaza.
Bisalloy’s shareholders
Between October 7, 2023 and November 14, 2024, Bisalloy Steel Group’s (ASX:BIS) shares have risen from $2.06 to $3.62, or 75%.
As of January 2023, Turnbull & Partners Pty Ltd owned 2.372m shares (as per ASX disclosures), currently worth $8.4m. His company became a substantial shareholder in July 2021. Dave Sharma was obliged as an MP to disclose in December 2022 that both he and his wife had investments in Bisalloy.
The largest shareholder is Bisalloy chairman David Balkin, with 7.78m shares. Balkin served as president of the Jewish Communal Appeal from 2005-2011, where he remains in the roles of director and Honorary Life Governor.
Peter Smaller is the second largest shareholder. Smaller was the president of Jewish National Fund Australia (JNF) from 2012-2017, and remains a director of the charity. Further, Smaller is the executive chairperson of Southern Steel Group, which also owns Bisalloy shares while distributing raw materials to Bisalloy.
Both the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Communal Appeal are fundamentally pro-Israel organisations. JNF’s mission statement is “developing the land of Israel, strengthening the bond between the Jewish people and its homeland.”
A plethora of arms deals
In July 2017, Minister of Defence Christopher Pyne visited Israel to initiate the Australia-Israel Defence Industry Cooperation Joint Working Group.
On 31 October 2017, Bibi Netanyahu, Malcolm Turnbull and Dave Sharma attended the 100th anniversary of The Battle of Beersheba in Israel, where ANZAC cavalry charged Ottoman forces and captured the city.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the ANZAC Museum and Memorial Center. Image by Diego Mittleberg.
Peter Smaller led a delegation to the event consisting of 80 of JNF Australia’s supporters and donors, including David Balkin. The Beersheba ANZAC Memorial Center, mostly built with JNF funds, was unveiled.
“Following a successful trip to the Middle East, Justin Suwart, Business Manager – Armour, has returned to Australia with a positive outlook for Bisalloy Steels’ business opportunities in the region, particularly those in one of Australia’s key trading partner countries, Israel. “Israel is already the largest export market for BISALLOY® Armour grade steel, and following meetings with both customers and end-users, we believe there are some strong opportunities to further increase sales in the region,” said Mr Suwart…
“… This was evidenced recently during a visit to Israel by Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to witness the signing of a defence industry cooperation memorandum.”
By November 9, Israel’s state-funded arms manufacturer Rafael, had created an Australian subsidiary, Varley Rafael, opened an office in Melbourne – and soon after that – a factory in Newcastle. Giora Katz, the executive VP at Rafael, said:
“We have recently signed agreements with Australia’s Bisalloy for the supply of metals for the manufacture of military systems and with Varley for the creation of cooperation and the establishment of an infrastructure for joint production of Spike LR2 anti-tank missiles.”
On February 9, 2018, Bisalloy announced that Rafael had handpicked them for a $900,000 contract to provide steel parts for armoured vehicles.
Malcolm Turnbull visited Bisalloy’s Wollongong factory in March 2018 to boost an announcement that Rheinmetall, in a teaming agreement with Bisalloy, had won the contract for the Australian Government’s $5.2B ‘LAND 400’ program, commissioning the production of 200 Boxer Combat Recon Vehicles (CRV) by 2020. The Boxer CRV design relied on Rafael for Spike anti-tank missile technology and the Trophy protection system.
In the first 100 days of the war in Gaza, Israel issued Germany with 200 requests to provide armoured vehicles and tank munitions. An Israeli request in November 2023 specifically asked for 10,000 120-millimeter Rheinmetall precision rounds. In order to approve all of Israel’s requests as a “priority,” Germany relied on existing military stock rather than industrial production.
According to a statement by Australian-owned arms manufacturer NIOA Group in December, it had signed a joint venture partnership with Rheinmetall in Germany. The statement said that NIOA is
“a major tenant at the government owned, contractor-operated (GOCO) munitions facility at Benalla in Victoria where it is manufacturing 120mm munitions for the Abrams tank along with 30mm and 35mm cannon ammunition… the Rheinmetall NIOA Munitions forging factory in Maryborough, Queensland [is] delivering key munitions for allied nations.”
The NIOA Munitions chairperson is Christopher Pyne, who had also initiated the Australia-Israel Defence Industry Cooperation Joint Working Group.
Rheinmetall won a €2.7B contract with the German government in March this year for the production and supply of 123 Boxer Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs).
Meanwhile, Rheinmetall Australia secured another $1B contract to deliver a further 120 ready-made Boxer Heavy Weapon Carriers (HWC) vehicles to Germany. Richard Marles MP, the Minister for Defence, called it
the biggest defence export agreement in Australia’s history.
The Boxer APC and HWC vehicles would be assembled in Rheinmetall’s Queensland factory, and would use Bisalloy armoured steel, Rafael’s Spike anti-missiles and the Trophy counter system.
On April 2, 2024, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited the Rheinmetall factory in Queensland to mark the beginning of the deal. For the press conference, Albanese stood in front of a new and glossy Rheinmetall tank while wearing an even newer and cleaner hi-vis vest.
However, the conference was interrupted by breaking news that an Australian World Central Kitchen aid worker, identified that afternoon as Zomi Frankcom, was murdered in Gaza. An IDF drone hunted and murdered Frankcom alongside six of her colleagues, despite the fact that they travelled along an IDF-approved route and had switched to different cars three times in an effort to lose the drone’s trail.
SBS News filmed the conference and appeared to have done their best to paint Albanese in a flattering light as he fielded questions about Frankcom’s death and whether he would take action against Israel. The camera is zoomed in and the tank in the background is blurred.
In return for his services that day, Rheinmetall gifted Albanese a miniature Boxer model.
Albanese at Rheinmetal (Image supplied)
Activists protests
Activists from Wollongong Friends of Palestine will be staging the fourth community picket outside Bisalloy Steel this Friday, looking to “stop all work at the site for as long as possible.”
Safaa Rayan, who is Palestinian and local to the area, has attended the previous three pickets. She has lost sleep worrying over the safety of her family members who remain in Gaza and the West Bank, saying, “To know that a company so close to where I live is actively supporting the country responsible for the murder, displacement and imprisonment of our family members is profoundly disturbing”.
Lena Mozayani, Safaa’s sister, said, “Our aunty and cousins were sheltering in North Gaza, and their apartment building was completely surrounded by tanks. They were totally stuck. They couldn’t access urgently needed medication,” Lena said.
I just wonder when the CEOs and shareholders of Bisalloy will see our families as equally deserving of life as their own families.
Some taxi and hire car industry members are furious with the proposed settlement of one of Australia’s biggest class actions. Zacharias Szumer reports.
Uber’s agreement to pay over $270 million to Australian taxi and hire car industry members was hailed as ‘historic’ and a ‘world-first’when announced in March.
At the time, lawyers from the law firm that took on their case praised the outcome, saying “thousands of everyday Australians [had] joined together to stare down a global giant”.
But some of the 8,700 taxi owners, licensees and drivers who took part in Australia’s fifth largest class action believe their cut is “woefully unfair”.
After subtracting Maurice Blackburn’s legal costs and the litigation funder’s commission, the plaintiffs get just a fraction of what they lost when Uber illegally entered Australia over a decade ago and proceeded to decimate the taxi industry.
‘Big losers’ in the class action market?
Although the precise settlement details are still confidential, one plaintiff told the Victorian Supreme Court in September that most would be left with something “pretty close” to $15,000-$21,000.
Queensland Taxi Licence Owner’s Association boss Paul Scaini told the Supreme Court that such compensation was “woefully inadequate” given that Uber had directly caused his family damages of roughly $1 million.
“My family had to sell their home … I find it amazing that the legal team now considers it somehow equitable that class members be the big losers.”
Possibly cutting further into the plaintiffs’ cut, several thousand taxi and hire car industry members, who had not registered for the class action, have sought to sign on since the settlement was announced.
Scaini told MWM in October that Maurice Blackburn, which chalked up over $38.6 million in legal fees, promised the plaintiffs justice, not “a token settlement”.
In court, he claimed the decision to settle “boiled down to the litigation funder’s desire to get their hands on $81,541,000 right now rather than have to wait for class members getting any fair and equitable results”.
Like most Australian class actions, this one was funded by an investor: Harbour, which is the largest privately owned litigation funder in the world.
The return on investment for firms like Harbour can be quite high – which is often justified by the level of financial risk.
If the case went to trial and the taxi drivers lost, Harbour wouldn’t only lose the money they’d put up; they’d also be on the hook for any costs above the amount they had insured.
This case came with “unique risks and unique scale”, Harbour’s barrister told the court in September while arguing in favour of the settlement and the investor’s 30 percent cut.
Harbour did not respond to MWM’s requests for comment.
Several plaintiffs said Maurice Blackburn had previously expressed confidence in taking the case to trial and the settlement announcement took them by surprise.
Brisbane taxi owner Stephen Lacaze said the case’s principal lawyer first came “riding into town on Bradman-like batting averages and the reputation of Maurice Blackburn”.
She “made it very clear that this would be a slow, grinding process, but assured all that Maurice Blackburn had the runs on the board, expertise, and will to see it through”, Lacaze told the court in September.
Scaini said that, given Uber’s track record as a tenacious legal foe, “Everyone should have understood from the outset that this matter may drag on for 10 years or more and with relevant and related costs.”
Rod Barton – who was boss of the Victorian Taxi and Hire Car Association when the suit was filed in 2019 – told MWM that this could have been a fool’s errand.
“We could highly likely have won the case in the court, but I 100 percent guarantee that Uber would’ve then appealed … because they’ve got the money”.
“We would’ve ended up in court for another five years, for what? To get a similar amount of money?” he said, citing the additional costs of the case dragging out.
The case against Uber was lodged in 2019 and an additional case was added in 2020.
“A lot of the taxi people don’t really understand the complexities of all this”.
Scaini told MWM that Barton’s assessment was correct.
“Most licence owners are far too professionally unsophisticated to properly express what has happened to them”.
He also claimed that none of the lead plaintiffs were present at the negotiations that led to the settlement decision. MWM was unable to confirm this.
Scaini acknowledged that, “without Maurice Blackburn and Harbour, we would likely not have had the capacity to hold Uber to account”.
“Not unless somebody else perhaps took a shine to us”.
Barton told MWM that this was unlikely.
He said he “brought the case to Maurice Blackburn after spending nearly 12 months shopping it around trying to get a class action moving”.
“The reality was that nobody wanted to take it on”.
In response to the deregulation of the taxi and hire car industry, Barton established the Transport Matters Party in 2017. He served as a member of the Victorian upper house from 2018 to 2022.
He said that the funding agreement with Harbour was the best deal they could find.
“There’s no secret to this. These mobs go around and they fund class actions what they reckon they can win”.
“Everybody who joined the class action knew from the very beginning” that Harbour would take a 30 percent cut of any settlement, Barton said.
“I know people are very upset, but the people responsible for the loss of the licence values are the state governments, not Uber.”
Previous cases brought against state governments in Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia have all failed.
“We all wanted to win millions, but no one was ever, ever going to do it,” said Barton, adding that he lost his home when Uber wiped out his hire car business.
“I sympathise with [those objecting to the settlement], because I’m in exactly the same position.”
“I want my home back again, but I ain’t going to get it.”
“No other country, as far as I’m aware, has been able to hold Uber accountable for their illegal activity”.
Noisy minority or ‘beaten’ majority?
Scaini and Glazebrook were two of 10 objectors who attended the September hearing to protest the settlement.
“When push comes to shove, when people needed to come and mount their case, it was less than a dozen people out of eight and a half thousand,” Barton told MWM.
In response, Scaini told MWM: “There were a hell of a lot more objections. It was only that 10 people chose to talk to those objections in the court.”
According to the court-appointed contradictors, 85 objections were made about the settlement itself.
Scaini said relatively few plaintiffs lodged formal objections because they were “beaten and let down” by promise of adequate compensation being snatched away.
Maurice Blackburn told MWM it was “proud to have secured a $271.8 million settlement” and that it “consider[s] the settlement to be fair and reasonable”.
DISCLOSURE: The writer’s sister is a senior associate at Maurice Blackburn. She was not involved in the Uber class action.
While political pundits billed the Harris/Trump race as the most important election of a generation, is it really going to change anything in a nation where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the billionaires run the politicians? Marcus Reubenstein.
With Donald Trump back in the White House, aside from perhaps some social policy, how much will change in America?
Two weeks ago, CEO of private equity behemoth BlackRock, Larry Fink told a conference “It really doesn’t matter” who wins the U.S. presidential election. Fink reiterated his point saying, “We work with both administrations and are having conversations with both candidates”.
That’s now how things work, the all-powerful cartel of billionaires, private equity and investment banks in the U.S. don’t talk to the government and ask for things to get done; the government goes to them to be told what to do.
The world is in a new cold war with the U.S. on one side and China on the other, yes there’s an arms race but the key battleground is economic might and geopolitical influence. America remains the world’s overwhelming military power, but China is in the ascendancy in economic might; thanks to the growing success of BRICS, its position is reaching unassailable in geopolitical influence.
Those desperate for the U.S. to preserve its global hegemony sell this cold war as being “communism versus capitalism”. Thanks to western rhetoric extending back to the end of World War Two, it is very easy to sell the idea of communism bad, capitalism good.
But is capitalism all it’s cracked up to be? Is it good for Australia, so inextricably tied to the U.S., to be navigating major geopolitical challenges when corporate America reckons it doesn’t matter who’s running the world’s biggest capitalist nation?
The authoritative U.S. dictionary, Webster’s defines capitalism as, “An economic system characterised by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.”
Fink – “it doesn’t matter”
In simple terms, those with the capital—billionaires and corporations—run the U.S. government. Fink advanced this proposition succinctly in saying, “I’m tired of hearing this is the biggest election in your lifetime. The reality is over time it doesn’t matter”.
One reason it doesn’t matter is the fact that those with capital can easily funnel it into the coffers of U.S. politicians in return for access and influence. Figures reported by Open Secrets show this year BlackRock made $US1.8 million in campaign contributions. Another $US2 million was spent on lobbying, a well-oiled revolving door with 32 of its 44 lobbyists having previously held positions in the U.S. government.
Then there’s the direct plug into the US government, U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Eric Van Nostrand was plucked from a senior role at BlackRock by Joe Biden’s Administration.
Another key figure, Mike Pyle worked as a senior economic to the failed Kamala Harris 2020 primary campaign, before his appointment as Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economics in the Biden Administration. Two months ago, he moved back to New York as deputy of a BlackRock group that has nearly $5 trillion in assets under management.
Pyle is a poster child for revolving doors, he worked for the Obama Administration, before moving to BlackRock in 2014, then back to Washington DC in 2019, now sitting pretty at BlackRock to manage trillions of dollars in investments in the world’s largest economy run by a president his boss says doesn’t really matter.
Should Trump win the election there are rumours swirling around that Fink might leave his post as BlackRock CEO to become Treasury Secretary. In July, Trump poured cold water on that suggestion, but for someone who changes position as often as Trump, that doesn’t necessarily mean Fink is not headed for Washington DC.
Last month BlackRock announced its total assets under management reached $A17.6 trillion, up from $A13.9 trillion the previous year. Comparing this to global GDP, only the U.S. and China have economies larger than BlackRock’s assets; its assets are 6.4 times the value of Australia’s economy.
The fact that capital is running the U.S. has real impact on Australia, 25.1 percent of foreign investment in Australia comes from the U.S., by contrast China, our largest trading partner, accounts for a paltry 1.9 percent of foreign investment in Australia.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
In June, U.S. solar manufacturer Qcells became the second company in the world to register its solar panels with EPEAT, a labeling system that sets sustainability standards for electronics makers. By doing so, the company triggered an obscure regulation that requires federal agencies to purchase EPEAT-certified solar panels. If, say, NASA wants to build a solar farm to power a research facility, it must now purchase panels that meet EPEAT’s strict sustainability requirements — including a first-of-its-kind limit on the carbon emissions tied to solar manufacturing.
There’s just one problem: Although EPEAT launched its solar standards in 2019, as of today, there are only six EPEAT-registered solar panels on the global market. And there are currently no EPEAT-registered solar inverters, devices that convert the direct current electricity a solar panel produces to alternating current electricity, which the grid uses. That doesn’t leave a lot of choices for the federal government, or anyone else who wants to purchase sustainably-produced solar equipment.
That’s why, in October, the Department of Energy, or DOE, launched a new prize that offers up to $450,000 to U.S.-based solar panel and inverter manufacturers that achieve EPEAT certification for their products. As a new wave of domestic solar manufacturing kicks into high gear, the DOE hopes the prize will ensure that companies use efficient processes, sustainable materials, fair labor practices, and low-carbon energy.
“The fact of the matter is, not all solar [products] in their production are created equal,” said Patty Dillon, a vice president at the Global Electronics Council, the sustainable technology nonprofit that manages the EPEAT ecolabel.
Solar panels convert the sun’s rays into electricity in a process that emits no greenhouse gases, which makes them essential for fighting climate change. To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates that the world must add 630 gigawatts of new solar power annually by 2030 — up from the 135 gigawatts installed in 2020.
But some solar panels are more climate-friendly than others. Polysilicon, which is used to make the sunlight-harvesting cells inside silicon panels, is made using an energy-intensive process often powered by fossil fuels. The frames that hold solar panels together are made of aluminum, which is typically smelted in China using coal-powered electricity. The manufacturing processes that turn these materials into a solar panel also require energy, which can lead to more emissions. On a global level, the difference between solar panels manufactured using clean energy and those made with fossil fuels could amount to tens of billions of metric tons of carbon pollution by the middle of the 21st century.
Workers process aluminum alloy frames for solar panels in Hai’an, China.
CFOTO / Future Publishing via Getty Images
To minimize those emissions, along with other environmental challenges like the use of toxic chemicals and the disposal of solar e-waste, companies must take a hard look at their supply chains and, in some cases, engage in difficult clean-up work. The DOE’s new prize, “Promoting Registration of Inverters and Modules with Ecolabel,” or PRIME, encourages companies to do so by going through the EPEAT registration process.
“EPEAT certification enables companies to show how they have been taking the steps to have more environmentally friendly supply chains and manufacturing processes,” Becca Jones-Albertus, who directs the DOE’s solar energy technologies office, told Grist.
Solar companies seeking EPEAT registration must meet a list of criteria that span four broad themes: climate change, sustainable resource use, hazardous chemicals, and responsible supply chains. Depending on how many standards a manufacturer meets, it can receive an EPEAT Bronze, Silver, or Gold designation.
In addition, as of June, solar manufacturers registered with EPEAT are required to meet the industry’s first-ever criteria for embodied carbon, the emissions generated when a product is produced. For each kilowatt of power produced, no more than 630 kilograms of CO2 can be emitted during the production of an EPEAT-registered solar panel. The limit, Dillon says, represents about 25 percent fewer carbon emissions than the global average. Solar panels that fall below the “ultra low carbon” threshold of 400 kilograms of CO2 per kilowatt of power earn a special EPEAT Climate+ designation.
“That basically represents the best in class,” Dillon said.
It’s difficult to make a direct comparison to fossil fuel plants, since most of their emissions come from operations rather than building infrastructure. But other research has found that over their lifespan, solar plants are considerably more climate friendly, emitting roughly 50 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of energy produced compared with about 1,000 grams per kilowatt-hour for coal.
Meeting EPEAT’s requirements isn’t easy, which might explain why there are only two companies — QCells and the Arizona-based First Solar — currently listed on the registry. And only two solar panels manufactured by First Solar have earned the ecolabel’s Climate+ badge. QCells, which manufactures two EPEAT-registered panels at a factory in Dalton, Georgia, spent about two years going through a “very extensive” certification process that involved collecting data across its supply chain and submitting to a third-party audit, corporate communications lead Debra DeShong told Grist.
Arrays of solar cells on conveyor belt at Qcells’ facility in Dalton, Georgia.
Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post via Getty Images
“It’s not an easy task,” DeShong said. “It requires resources and it requires a will.”
Other companies may now be motivated to try. QCells’ additions to the EPEAT registry in June activated the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which requires the federal government to purchase goods that meet standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, except in limited circumstances where it’s impractical to do so. In the case of solar panels, that means EPEAT-registered products. The DOE’s PRIME Prize, which provides U.S. solar manufacturers $50,000 for starting the registration process and up to $100,000 per product for up to four products that complete it, offers additional incentive. Jones-Albertus told Grist that the prize was designed to “roughly offset the cost of collecting all the data and moving through the registration process.”
Solar companies “told us that they’re interested in EPEAT certification, but they haven’t gotten there yet,” Jones-Albertus said. “We’re hoping to provide incentives so that companies go through the EPEAT registration process sooner.”
Companies peering deep into their supply chains for the first time might discover they have to make some changes to meet EPEAT registration requirements. To slim down the carbon footprint of its panels, a solar manufacturer might have to switch to a low-carbon polysilicon supplier. (QCells, for instance, is purchasing polysilicon from a facility in Washington state that produces the stuff using hydropower.) Or it might decide to swap out virgin aluminum frames manufactured overseas for recycled steel ones built domestically by Origami Solar, a change that can reduce carbon emissions tied to the frame by upwards of 90 percent. To meet EPEAT’s optional recycled content criteria, a manufacturer could decide to start purchasing recycled panel glass from a company like SolarCycle.
Making these sorts of manufacturing supply chain alterations takes time and money beyond what the new DOE prize will provide. But Dillon, of the Global Electronics Council, is optimistic that more companies will start registering their products with EPEAT now that federal purchasers require it.
Erik Petersen, the chief strategy officer at Origami Solar, believes the Biden administration’s push for clean domestic manufacturing, combined with growing consumer interest in supply chain transparency, will spur more U.S. solar companies to ensure their products meet high sustainability standards.
“What’s exciting is all of these forces are coming together at the same time,” Petersen told Grist. “That really gives the industry an incentive to do the right things.”
When the Racetrac chain of convenience stores was deciding whether to install electric vehicle chargers, project lead Rushi Patel started with a blank Excel sheet and a lot of questions. Did the financials make sense? Where is the best to install them? What features should they have? The answers to questions like these could go a long way toward establishing an economic argument for building out America’s public EV charging infrastructure.
“We found our guests using new types of fuels, like electrons, and we wanted to be with them as part of that journey,” said Patel, the diversified energy manager at Racetrac’s parent company Metroplex Energy. But he was clear that “it’s important to have an offer that does make money.”
Patel slowly started to populate his spreadsheet in 2021, filling cells with EV adoption rates, utility prices, construction costs and a range of other metrics. He also took the company’s executives on a two-hour tour of charging spots in Atlanta, where Racetrac is based. One was tucked behind a shopping plaza, the other was deep within the bowels of a mall garage. It was clear to them that Racetrac could do better.
Two years later, Racetrac installed its first Level 3 fast charger in Oxford, Alabama — complete with the company’s logo and a canopy to shade people from the sun as they pump electrons. It has since opened seven more in three states. So far, he said, “[the business model] is holding up pretty well.”
Those eight chargers are among the 61,000 that blanket the country, a figure that has more than doubled since 2022. The increase comes as mounting evidence shows EV charging stations can be a boon to businesses, and not only by selling electricity.
A recent study in the journal Nature Communications looked at chargers in California and found that, pre-pandemic, businesses saw an average annual boost of $1,500 when at least one of the devices stood nearby. Another paper examined Tesla Supercharger installations nationally and saw they brought a 4 percent increase in visitors to a business. The effect was particularly pronounced if the chargers were within 500 feet, and if it was the first one in the area. This boon is due to the fact that it can take 30 minutes or more to fully charge an EV, giving drivers plenty of time to shop.
“The places that tend to get the biggest bump, is the place that aligns with how long it takes you to charge your car,” said Gordon Burtch, an author of the paper and a professor of information systems at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “Sit-down restaurants aren’t benefiting as much as fast-food restaurants.”
The Racetrac chain of convenience stores has installed electric vehicle chargers at eight stores in three states, having found that the business case “is holding up pretty well.” Photo courtesy Rushi Patel / Racetrac
A range of companies have seen the upside of installing chargers. Walmart is building its own network of chargers to add to the more than 1,300 chargers already at its stores. Kohl’s and Starbucks are adding more hardware. Subway plans to add “charging oasis parks,” complete with picnic tables, Wi-Fi, and playgrounds. Some places are even offering free charging to entice potential customers.
“Owning and operating a charger on its own can be really tough,” said Jim Burness, the founder of National Car Charging, which manages more than 11,000 charging points across the country. “If you add in the increased shopping basket, the economic case becomes pretty easy.”
Patel says Racetrac is indeed seeing a bump in sales while people stop to plug in. The quality of the experience seems to make a big difference, he added, which is why the company has invested in features like canopies.
“If you’re going to fill your regular vehicle up under a canopy, there should be no reason you can’t do the same [with an EV],” he said, noting that a well-lit facility that includes access to clean restrooms also goes a long way toward drawing patrons.
“If you dial in the offering and make the experience great, not only will they pay a premium, but they’ll come back,” said Karl Doenges, executive director of charging analytics at The Transportation Energy Institute. But both he and Patel noted that there are still challenges to overcome; most notably how to coordinate utility costs with customer pricing.
Utilities often charge commercial accounts two fees: one for the amount of energy consumed and one fixed amount based on the peak demand for the month. Rates can also vary depending on the time of day. This can make determining how to price a charger difficult.
Doenges says operators have been experimenting with time of use pricing, and increasingly, dynamic pricing based on demand, similar to Uber surcharges. According to Patel, some utilities are also developing models that better suit EV charging patterns, which is why Racetrac chose Alabama for its first charger. But, he said, “the hardest part even today has been the way electricity is priced.”
Chargers can also be very expensive to install, ranging from thousands of dollars for a Level 2 charger to hundreds of thousands for a much faster Level 3 device that can do the job in as little as 20 minutes. On that front, at least, there are significant federal incentives available to help. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law established the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which is currently rolling out across the country with a goal of creating 500,000 new stations by 2030. Racetrac received $619,575.87 to install four chargers at its store in Dublin, Georgia.
While Patel wouldn’t elaborate on Racetrac’s expansion plans, he said more chargers are coming, and he’s confident that if the company builds them, enough customers will come to make it worth the expense. “We’ve done a ton of analysis,” he said. “We’ve gone deep.”
Analysis from business and trade department says bill will significantly strengthen workers’ right. This live blog is closed
In the past the weirdest budget tradition was the convention that the chancellor is allowed to drink alcohol while delivering the budget speech. But since no chancellor has taken advantage of the rule since the 1990s (and no one expects Rachel Reeves to be quaffing on Wednesday week), this tradition is probably best viewed as lapsed.
But Sam Coatesfrom Sky News has discovered another weird budget ritual. On his Politics at Jack and Sam’s podcast, he says:
Someone messaged me to say: ‘Did you know that over in the Treasury as they’ve been going over all these spending settlements, in one of the offices, its full of balloons. And every time an individual department finalises its settlements, one of the balloons is popped.’
There couldn’t be a more important time for us to have this conversation.
The NHS is going through what is objectively the worst crisis in its history, whether it’s people struggling to get access to their GP, dialling 999 and an ambulance not arriving in time, turning up to A&E departments and waiting far too long, sometimes on trolleys in corridors, or going through the ordeal of knowing that you’re waiting for a diagnosis that could be the difference between life and death.
We feel really strongly that the best ideas aren’t going to come from politicians in Whitehall.
They’re going to come from staff working right across the country and, crucially, patients, because our experiences as patients are also really important to understanding what the future of the NHS needs to be and what it could be with the right ideas.
Union whistleblower Andrew Quirk questions the clean-up of corruption in the building industry and foreshadows a further decline in building standards if this is not achieved.
In its rush to liquidate the corrupt leaderships of the Victorian and NSW construction unions, the government has failed to part the head from the snake. The current New South Wales organisation, for instance, largely reports to the exiled leadership some of whose members are facing criminal charges..
There are now millions and millions of dollars in outstanding workers’ entitlements due from companies, some owned by violent and very greedy criminals.
These crooks will now consider liquidating their companies to avoid paying unionised CFMEU workers, who are also the victims of their crimes. In many cases, the companies will re-emerge to rip-off more workers as ‘phoenix firms’, aided and abetted by lazy or corrupt unionism.
In the normal process of investigating a failure to pay entitlements the union (that is a union with organisers of integrity), sends an official to look at the building site induction records, compare them to various other records, examine the shortfall and get the builder to hold the money until the members are paid their entitlements.
If the outstanding sum is significant, the men sit in in the sheds until the builder coughs up. Failure to recoup outstanding entitlements from corrupt building companies in 2014 resulted in death threats delivered by members of the current exiled NSW CFMEU leadership to the then senior executive officer of the union, Brian Fitzpatrick, as he tried to draw attention to this issue.
This is the original crime from 2014 which garnered organised crime more than $1 million. Led by now convicted organised crime figure George Alex, it was widely known that corrupt union officials received $5000 a week.
Evidence to the Trade Union Royal Commission strongly suggested a senior CFMEU organiser personally visited George Alex’s house to receive the money in envelopes conveniently left in the toilets.
Recently released police tapes further reveal Alex boasting of the large number of CFMEU officials in his pocket.
The hive-like influence of organised crime groups within the construction industry is supported by a venal ecosystem of bottom-feeding liquidators and lawyers. Putting on public record through official reports the presence of these figures is vital and a process the administrator has commenced. These people thrive in the shadows and fear the slow grinding exposure of their criminality.
Follow the money
It is however just as important to follow the money. Some of the current officials and organisers still operating the NSW branch of the CFMEU are unlikely to enforce these entitlements as their loyalties are still likely to lie with the exiled leadership holed up at the Sydney Branch of the MUA. Why the MUA would give grace and favour to this lot is beyond me.
To identify an entitlement shortfall in labour hire or traffic control, you need to inform a branch official. If you do this, you still run the risk that, via the exiled leadership which was decapitated due to its links with organised crime, the investigation may become known even before the builder is notified of an industrial dispute.
I know of this first-hand. When I raised concerns in 2014, the national CFMEU held a sham internal inquiry, the details of which leaked directly to organised crime figures.
While the administrator has significant powers and resources, it should be noted that in many ways they are evenly matched by organised crime, who are resourced by the proceeds of their crimes, have extensive personal networks and can call on the services of expensive lawyers and liquidators.
Containing the influence of organised crime might be more straightforward nationally, given the majority of these companies are limited to labour hire and traffic control. However, the corruption in New South Wales has spread to the Gyprock sector which has dire implications for the infrastructure projects of the New South Wales state government.
Falling standards
At this point, I’d ask anybody reading this to indulge me in a little construction mansplaining. Building a hospital, school or police station is obviously different from building home units
There are all sorts of specialist requirements to each of these constructions: police interview rooms which are not soundproof are obviously useless; evacuation and fire suppression systems in schools have their own set of safety requirements; hospitals require everything from parking, waiting rooms, and administration blocks even before you install the specialist medical equipment.
In NSW under the notorious former CFMEU leadership there has been a wholesale deskilling of the plasterboard sector as the contracts were routinely awarded on neither cost nor skill but on influence or bribery. The plasterboard guys are the people who lay out the internal walls that define a building. In a normal block of units, a fire suppressant board with acoustic properties might go in the lift lobby, after that, it’s all the run-of-the-mill plasterboard you see at Bunnings.
In a hospital, however, you will have several different types of specialist plasterboard. In terms of the internal fit-out this is also the key trade in that it interacts most with the other trades. There is always a temptation for a shoddy builder to employ a second-rate plasterboard contractor. You just employ a first-class tradie to go round and clean up the crap job, to put lipstick on the pig so to speak.
All that’s required is the job must last just long enough for any liability the builder has to expire, after that the people that bought the buildings can go and eat dirt.
Unfolding disaster
This in essence is the source of the slow-moving disaster unfolding in the New South Wales home unit sector. Shoddy labour patched up long enough for the builders to hop off into the sunset with their money. It is also in essence the scope of the potential disaster left by this corrupt former CFMEU officialdom. Shoddy hospitals, shitty schools and second-rate police stations.
Bear in mind this deskilling has occurred against the neo-liberal backdrop of underfunding skills training, and the privatisation of building inspectors.
The benefit for the corrupt officials is a bribe, the benefit for the corrupting subcontractors it’s a contract. For the builder, the benefit of this corruption is a cheap contract which features substandard wages and conditions for workers. To pretend the builder does not know about all this beggars belief.
As a state government with local knowledge and as the builder, the New South Wales government does at least have some steps it could take against this chicanery.
Requiring an immediate copy of induction books and an examination of wages and entitlements paid on infrastructure projects are all obvious first steps. Because of the disaster in the unit building sector the state government also has the construction knowledge necessary to assess the performance of these projects.
It is important to note that this attack on EBA conditions is currently being undertaken by a prominent second-tier infrastructure specialist on state government projects as we speak.
The fact is, the former leadership was undermining workers’ entitlements and allowing the roll-out of shonky EBA conditions. The state government, the administrator – and any incoming clean union leadership – will need to act in the interests of the members to get this all cleaned up.
After years ofpressure from environmental advocates, the global retail giant Amazon announced last week that it has eliminated plastic air pillows from its global network of “fulfillment centers,” as Amazon calls its warehouse and distribution facilities. Around the world, products inside the company’s packages are now cushioned by paper-based padding that can be collected in curbside recycling programs.
“We are committed to improving how orders are shipped, for the good of customers and the planet,” Amazon wrote in a blog post.
The announcement represents the fulfillment of a promise Amazon made in June to work “toward full removal” of plastic air pillows from North America by the end of the year. At that time, the company said it had already replaced 95 percent of its air pillows across the continent with paper filler. Years before that, in 2021, Amazon eliminated plastic air pillows in Australia, and in 2022 it did the same for orders shipped from its warehouses in Europe.
Oceana, a nonprofit ocean advocacy group, has dogged Amazon for several years over its use of plastics, largely through a seriesofreportsquantifying the company’s overall plastic footprint and its contribution to aquatic plastic pollution. Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, said Amazon’s announcement is “actually quite significant,” even though the phaseout doesn’t apply to orders shipped by third-party sellers. Amazon hasn’t disclosed what fraction of its sales are fulfilled in that way. “It’s great news for the oceans and for the globe in general that the world’s biggest e-commerce company did this,” Littlejohn said.
Still, Amazon continues to use tens of thousands of tons of plastic every year in other forms of packaging — much of it thin, filmy plastic used in delivery bags and padded mailers. Plastic film is not only virtually impossible to recycle, but also the most common form of plastic litter in coastal waters and the most lethal type of plastic to large marine animals. Oceana and other environmental groups say the company should strengthen its plastic-reduction promises by setting deadlines to move away from all types of single-use plastic packaging, and scaling up reusable alternatives.
“We want the company to make a commitment to do more,” Littlejohn told Grist. He said Amazon’s actions could influence other large retailers to also reduce their plastics use.
So far, Amazon’s greatest progress on plastic reduction has happened in international jurisdictions, potentially due to stronger regulations on single-use plastics. The company’s warehouses in India have been plastic packaging-free since 2020, and its European distribution centers stopped using plastic delivery bags in 2022. Those changes contributed to a 9 percent self-reported decline in global plastic use between 2022 and 2023, according to an Amazon spokesperson.
A blue-and-white Amazon mailer in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Getty Images
Plastic reduction has been slower in the U.S., perhaps because of the sheer size of its largest market. Oceana has estimated that Amazon generated 208 million pounds of plastic packaging trash in the United States in 2022 — about 10 percent more than the previous year — although this doesn’t account for the company’s most recent efforts to transition to paper. In its recent blog post, Amazon said it has now retrofitted more than 120 automated packing machines across the country so they can make paper bags, rather than plastic ones.
Amazon also hinted in its 2022 sustainability report that it was “phasing out padded bags containing plastics,” presumably referring to its ubiquitous blue-and-white mailers. Littlejohn said Amazon should make this commitment more precise by clarifying its geographical scope and a timeline for accomplishing it.
The company also said in its most recent sustainability report that it’s “working to reduce our use of single-use plastic packaging in favor of household-recyclable alternatives.” Littlejohn said that the emphasis on curbside recycling — instead of specialty take-back programs at retail stores — is meaningful. Currently, the company’s blue-and-white mailers feature a label directing customers to “store drop-off” recycling receptacles at locations like Kohl’s, Safeway, and Stop & Shop. But investigations from the media and environmental groups have shown that plastic collected in these receptacles is often sent to landfills and incinerators, rather than to a recycler. Plastic film that does get reprocessed is downgraded into nonrecyclable products like deck chairs.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to previously announced plastic reduction efforts, including the complete elimination of plastic packaging from two U.S. distribution facilities.
“We recognize the importance of reducing single-use plastic, in the U.S. and globally, but this can’t be done overnight,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. They went on to say that Amazon is “obsessed with getting this right for customers, and we’re incredibly proud of the progress so far.”
Amazon also said in its blog post from last week that its first priority is “to remove packaging altogether,” meaning it tries to ship products in their original packaging rather than adding Amazon-branded sleeves, bags, boxes, and padding. As of December of last year, Amazon was shipping one-third of its sales in North America without any additional packaging, and it said it would increase this fraction to two-thirds by December 2024.
As You Sow is a nonprofit shareholder advocacy organization that has filed several resolutions at Amazon asking the company to disclose and reduce its plastic packaging footprint. Conrad MacKerron, the organization’s senior vice president, noted that there are still plenty of opportunities outside of Amazon’s e-commerce business to cut down on unnecessary plastic packaging. For example, he said, Amazon sells many private-label food and beverage products that are packed in flexible plastic, like bags of nuts and candies. These products contribute to plastic pollution, even if they’re shipped to buyers in a paper envelope.
Amazon also owns Whole Foods, one of the largest grocery chains in the United States, where entire aisles of products are sold in flimsy plastic packaging that is virtually impossible to recycle. Many of these products are sold under the Amazon-owned label 365 by Whole Foods Market. “Unlike PET bottles, that flexible packaging cannot be recycled really anywhere in the world at this point. All of that goes to the landfill,” MacKerron said. He said he’d like to see Amazon “reevaluate” its grocery store plastic use, “given that there’s nothing on the horizon that’s going to provide a recycling option” for it.
An adviser to Senate President Hun Sen was arrested at Phnom Penh International Airport on Friday after returning from a business trip to China, two Cambodian news outlets reported.
It was unclear what charges Duong Dara could be facing. Earlier this year, he was named in a complaint filed by villagers in southern Svay Rieng province that accused a Phnom Penh company of scamming them out of investments that ranged between US$40,000 and US$120,000.
The Fresh News online news site and the Koh Santepheap newspaper reported that Duong Dara was arrested in connection with a citizen’s complaint. No further details were given.
Duong Dara was appointed secretary of state for the Council of Ministers – the government’s Cabinet – last year and has also worked as a personal assistant to Hun Sen.
Duong Dara is credited with creating and overseeing Hun Sen’s popular Facebook account, where the former prime minister continues to post statements and personal observations, as well as video clips from public appearances.
The arrest comes several days after Hun Sen wrote on Facebook that another adviser, Ly Sameth, had defrauded several Cambodians over the last two years by soliciting bribes in exchange for favors and government positions.
Ly Sameth, an adviser to former Cambodian President Hun Sen, in an undated photo. (Ly Sameth via Facebook)
Hun Sen wrote on Facebook on Monday that Ly Sameth’s assets should be frozen and Phnom Penh court officials should issue an order to return money he accepted from people.
Police officers went to Ly Sameth’s house on Tuesday morning, but he wasn’t at home and authorities were unable to locate him on Wednesday, Phnom Penh Municipal Police spokesperson Sam Vichheka said. Authorities haven’t charged Ly Sameth, he said.
Business interests
The complaint submitted at Svay Rieng Provincial Court in June stated that the Phum Khmer Group promised that its duck farms, animal feed factories, restaurants and real estate holdings would generate a monthly 4% payment for investors.
One investor told Radio Free Asia that he never received any interest or dividend payments, as promised in the signed contract.
Phum Khmer’s chief executive, Som Sothea, stopped responding to messages, another investor told RFA in June. Som Sothea is believed to be a close friend of Duong Dara.
Phum Khmer Group Chief Executive Officer Som Sothea in an undated photo. (Som Sothea via LinkedIn)
Several investors told RFA that Duong Dara and his younger brother, Duong Virath, all have shares in the Phum Khmer Group.
Duong Dara said on his Facebook page in June that – other than joining company workers in distributing food to the poor on one occasion – he has no involvement with the Phum Khmer Group’s business interests.
RFA was unable to reach Duong Dara for comment on Friday.
Sam Vichheka, Phnom Penh Municipal Court spokesman I Rin, Phnom Penh Municipal Police Commissioner Chuon Narin also didn’t respond to requests for comment on the arrest.
Translated by Yun Samean. Edited by Matt Reed.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.
Daniel Humm, chef of Eleven Madison Park, and celebrated artist Francesco Clemente are teaming up to debut Clemente Bar, a new cocktail lounge located one floor above Humm’s iconic three-Michelin-starred restaurant. The bar, opening October 10, is set to be an intimate yet creative space where plant-based cocktails and art take center stage, reflecting both Humm’s culinary ingenuity and Clemente’s whimsical, dreamlike artwork.
“We saw the bar as an opportunity to connect with these guests in a more relaxed setting,” Humm tells VegNews, reflecting on how the clientele at Eleven Madison Park has evolved since the restaurant went plant-based in 2021. “We wanted to create a place where they could experience this level of plant-based cooking and incredible cocktails in an environment that also felt cool and very personal.” Humm notes that Clemente, a close friend, was the perfect creative partner to shape the bar’s look and feel.
Clemente Bar/Instagram
Clemente Bar isn’t just a casual afterthought; it’s designed to be a destination on its own. “It seemed right that the new space would live right above [the restaurant] as a hidden gem,” Humm says. “We want Clemente Bar to be a part of the Eleven Madison Park family yet stand apart in its own right.”
At the restaurant, food leads the way, but at Clemente Bar, cocktails will take the spotlight, while food plays a complementary role. “We’ve designed it to be an intimate cocktail bar for people to go to on its own or for Eleven Madison Park guests to visit pre- or post-dinner,” he adds.
Evan Sung
A thoughtfully curated menu
The menu at Clemente Bar, created in collaboration with beverage director Sebastian Tollius and bar manager Richie Millwater, will feature creative takes on classic cocktails. The drinks are categorized by composition or tasting notes such as “fresh,” clarified concoctions, low ABV, and spirit-forward. Guests can expect playful combinations like a Negroni–piña colada hybrid inspired by Samoas Girl Scout cookies; the 5th Leaf, a pisco- and vodka-based option that tastes like crisp pears; or the sour Doctor’s Orders made with aquafaba and peated scotch.
Jodi Hinds
Each cocktail comes with imaginative garnishes, such as an iced Campari coin for the Negroni-colada, or a mini churro atop a raicilla old-fashioned.
“The cocktails are all very elegant in their presentation with these amazing flavor profiles that are both new and familiar, with many evoking feelings of nostalgia,” Humm shares.
Evan Sung
The bar will also offer an inventive menu of plant-based snacks, keeping in line with the philosophy that has driven Eleven Madison Park’s transition to entirely plant-based dining. “In the bar, we have a whole menu of snacks that you can have with drinks and eat with your hands, like sake pickles, an Agedashi tofu dog, a Nashville-inspired fried mushroom sandwich, and crispy tempura fries,” says Humm.
For those looking for a more immersive experience, the bar’s tasting counter offers a four- to five-course menu, each paired with a cocktail. “It’s super delicious food paired with cocktails where you can really see the bartenders making each cocktail in front of you,” Humm explains, adding that the experience is designed to be quick and enjoyable, lasting about 90 minutes.
Evan Sung
The plant-based menu will also showcase ingredients sourced from Humm’s farm, Magic Farms, located upstate.
“I think it’s incredibly important to continue pushing forward and doing what we can to create a more sustainable food industry,” Humm says. “I love that people are accepting more plant-based food when it comes to fine dining, and we’re excited to showcase how it can work in a more casual bar setting as well.”
UNESCO
With his recent appointment as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Global Food Education, Humm emphasizes the need to drive awareness of the impact food choices have on the environment. “It’s a key time to collectively drive awareness in the choices we make in our food to lead us to a more sustainable and purposeful future,” he adds.
Ye Fan/Clemente Bar Instagram
Art meets hospitality
Clemente Bar’s visual identity will be shaped by three stunning murals created by Clemente, whose work has long graced galleries and museums around the world. His vibrant, symbolic artwork brings a unique character to the space, adding layers of meaning to the bar’s design. “Both the design and menu have been crafted in harmony to ultimately create a beautiful meeting point for New Yorkers like the famous artist bars of the past from around the world,” Humm explains.
The bar’s interior, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works, features textured walnut paneling, dark marble surfaces, and a vintage couch, creating a warm, inviting atmosphere where guests can relax and soak in the art and ambiance.
Jodi Hinds
A vision for the future
Humm hopes that Clemente Bar will become a welcoming destination for both locals and visitors. “Rather than a one-off special visit, we want it to become a welcoming return spot for guests and locals, where they feel they can come whenever they want for high-quality cocktails and bites,” he says.
Despite the challenges currently facing the restaurant industry, Humm remains optimistic. “Fine dining is both a creative endeavor and a business. Challenges often create innovations, so there is a lot to be excited and hopeful about within the restaurant industry and fine dining as a whole,” he shares. With Clemente Bar and a new restaurant in the West Village slated for the end of next year, Humm continues to evolve his approach to fine dining.
The celebrated chef is no stranger to this kind of culinary evolution. In 2021, he transitioned Eleven Madison Park to a fully plant-based menu. “We took the jump to transform Eleven Madison Park into a plant-based fine-dining restaurant knowing in our hearts that this is what we believed in,” Humm said at the time.
As Humm looks ahead, he’s also gearing up for the release of his first plant-based cookbook, Eleven Madison Park: The Plant-Based Chapter, which he describes as a behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant’s transformation to a plant-based kitchen. The limited-edition book captures the creative journey of one of the world’s most celebrated restaurants.
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
Senators continue to probe the investigation into ABC Bullion by ASIC and auditors Deloitte, querying the methods used and why whistleblower evidence seems to have been ignored. Kim Wingerei with the story.
Australian bullion companies have had a rough ride lately. Last year, Perth Mint operators, the Gold Corporation, accepted an ‘Enforceable Undertaking‘ after a lengthy investigation by AUSTRAC found that the company had failed to comply with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) laws. East Coast competitor ABC Bullion was cleared by ASIC earlier this year after an investigation into its bullion storage practices, while its parent, Pallion Group is in ATOs crosshairs.
ASIC engaged ‘Big 4’ auditor Deloitte to conduct an audit of ABC Bullion. Economist and bullion dealer John Adams, who instigated the ASIC inquiry, believes the audit process was inadequate, a sentiment echoed by Senator Roberts.
On September 10, Malcolm Roberts asked why “ASIC did not physically inspect any ABC Bullion or Pallion group facility for 9½ months.” He went on to state that “a mere 3½ weeks after the ASIC investigators tipped off ABC Bullion that it was under investigation, ABC Bullion moved an undisclosed quantity of physical bullion from a tiny room in the Sydney CBD to an industrial building located in Marrickville.”
ABC Bullion is a subsidiary of the Pallion Group, which is under investigation by the ATO, chasing $200 million in unpaid GST.
ASIC commenced the investigation into ABC Bullion in July 2022. However, Deloitte was not formally appointed until February 2023. Their role was to audit the physical storage and movement of bullion between ABC’s facilities following the initial report of alleged misconduct from Adams submitted in April 2022.
Adams questions both the length of time it took to commence the audit and its methodology.
In response to parliamentary questions put on notice by Senator Roberts, ASIC revealed to Parliament on 23 October last year that ASIC “engaged an external consulting firm to carry out an assurance of physical stock based on randomised selection.”
Adams suggested to MWM that “randomly counting physical gold and silver bars when the allegation was that physical gold and silver bars are missing is a puzzling audit methodology.”
When confronted by Senator Roberts on 19 March 2024 in a private briefing held in Federal Parliament as to why didn’t ASIC count all the physical bullion that ABC Bullion was required to contractually hold, ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court stated that ASIC “didn’t have the financial budget.”
Deloitte was paid approx. $300,000 for the audit.
Audit process
Adams has told MWM that having created an assurance plan in January 2023, ASIC investigators met with ABC Bullion on multiple occasions in January, February and March 2023 after informing them that an audit would take place.
These meetings occurred partly because ASIC was not willing to seek a court-approved search warrant and instead required the permission of ABC Bullion and its parent company, Pallion Group, to access its physical premises.
While the contents of meetings are unknown, one email obtained via a Freedom of Information request suggests that ASIC investigators provided a redacted copy of the assurance plan to ABC Bullion in or around late January or early February 2023.
Beyond this, ASIC acquiesced to ABC Bullion’s demand of having ASIC officials and Deloitte employees obtain new police checks (which ASIC paid for).
ASIC also actually paid for Deloitte employees to receive training to use equipment capable of testing the purity of physical gold and silver bars (which took several weeks to organise) rather than find a market operator who could perform this function immediately.
According to Adams, the most troubling part of the audit process was that it appears
ASIC went out of its way to guarantee that ABC Bullion knew precisely when to be fully prepared for the audit.
They did so when ASIC provided ABC Bullion with ten days’ notice prior to the first site inspection, which occurred on Friday, 28 April 2023, in Marrickville, NSW.
Subsequent site inspections occurred on Tuesday, 2 May and Thursday, 4 May 2023, in the Sydney region with only 24 hours’ notice and on Thursday, 11 May 2023, in Perth with six days’ notice.
Again, when confronted by Senator Roberts as to why ASIC didn’t conduct physical site inspections across multiple locations on a single day, Deputy Chair Court cited financial constraints.
Whistleblower claims
After ASIC initially cleared ABC Bullion of any wrongdoing, Adams submitted a follow-up ‘Critical Review” to ASIC, which was dismissed in August this year.
During this review, Adams was able to find a new whistleblower (the second in two years) with intimate details of ABC Bullion’s operations, especially in the April – May 2023 period.
Working with Adams, this whistleblower agreed to a 23-page statement in which they stated that while having no knowledge that ABC Bullion was under criminal investigation by ASIC, they had heard rumours out of Sydney in April 2023 that the company was about to be subjected to a major and very serious audit.
The whistleblower also states that in late April 2023, within the ten-day notice period provided by ASIC (approximately 2 – 3 weeks prior to the 11 May 2023 site inspection in Perth), he was told to drop everything and ship approximately one metric tonne of physical gold and silver bullion from Perth to Sydney within 24 hours – an unprecedented and uncommercial instruction which they had never received before.
Such instructions to urgently ship physical bullion back to Sydney were also issued to ABC Bullion’s Brisbane and Melbourne offices.
MWM understands that none of these retail stores ever performed client storage services, meaning that the physical bullion that was shipped back to Sydney was company inventory.
During the same period of time of mid to late April 2023, the whistleblower also heard that Pallion Group’s refinery arm – ABC Refinery – had shifted its production schedule to urgently manufacture a large quantity of physical bullion for ABC Bullion while delaying production for other clients.
These actions, according to the whistleblower, coincided with rumours out of Sydney that there were concerns that ABC Bullion held insufficient physical bullion for clients and that the deficit required to be backfilled prior to the audit commencing.
The whistleblower also contends that once the audit was over, a significant portion of the bullion that was shipped from Perth to Sydney in April 2023 was shipped back to Perth after 11 May 2023.
Given the whistleblower revelations, Adams expected ASIC “to take a keen interest as the integrity of the audit and its results put into question.”
Upon receiving Adams’ Critical Review Report on 3 June 2024, ASIC was eager to interview the new whistleblower on a voluntary basis.
However, as soon as the whistleblower requested that ASIC produce a record of the conversation or transcript of the voluntary interview, ASIC refused without any justification.
When the whistleblower then subsequently requested a section 19 legal notice to participate in a formal examination where a transcript would be produced by law, ASIC refused again with no justification.
Instead, ASIC informed the whistleblower that they would solely consider their witness statement. The whistleblower never heard back from ASIC.
ABC Bullion has previously denied any wrongdoing in a statement to MWM.
MWM put questions regarding the audit process to Deloitte but has received no reply. ASIC has also declined to comment on the investigation or the audit process.
A Gaslit Nation listener at the Democracy Defender level asked for a handy guide to help a small business owner considering voting for Trump to reconsider. If you need help convincing the small business owners in your life not to vote against their interests, Gaslit Nation has you covered! This special episode breaks down all the reasons Trump will be disastrous for small business owners, including the bribes they’ll have to pay after Trump finishes turning our country into lawless Russia, which has been the plan all along, as Gaslit Nation first warned.
This week’s bonus show also covers the VP debate. Why didn’t Walz dogwalk Vance like Harris dogwalked Trump? Walz is the guy who coined “weird,” so we know he could have destroyed Vance, listing all the ways he’s a Peter Thiel tool. Why didn’t he? The answer may be in Walz’s closing words. His warnings at the very end gave us important insight and guidance into what to expect in the tense months ahead, as discussed in this week’s bonus show. Our discussion with investigative journalist Greg Palast, about his new must-watch film Vigilantes, Inc., and the audience Q&A at our live-taping, is included in this week’s bonus show. Look out for more live-tapings soon!
To our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher, keep your questions coming as the Gaslit Nation Q&A continues! If you didn’t hear your question answered this week, look out for it soon. Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
To hear this full bonus episode, get all shows ad-free, invites to exclusive events, join other listeners in our Victory group chat, and more, subscribe at Patreon.com/Gaslit. Discounted annual subscriptions available!
Come As You Are Weekly Political Salons! Join us every Monday at 4 PM ET via Zoom! Let’s share frustrations, ask burning questions, seek support, and help shape Gaslit Nation. Everyone’s voice matters—whether you’re a political junkie or just finding your voice, you belong here! Recordings available exclusively on Patreon.
Upcoming Virtual Live Tapings:
October 22 12pm ET: Dr. Bandy Lee, author of The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind
October 24 7pm ET: How to Make a Podcast workshop – we need your voice!
Show Notes:
How to Effectively Communicate in a Time of Polarization: Digital Defenders – Freedom Over Fascism with Anat Shenker-Osorio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO8vyp45sEw
Biden won’t put his name on aid checks (unlike you know who) Last year, Trump prioritized putting his name directly onto COVID relief checks. This year, Joe Biden is more interested in governance than self-promotion. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/biden-won-t-put-his-name-aid-checks-unlike-you-n1260398
The Great Grift: How billions in COVID-19 relief aid was stolen or wasted https://apnews.com/article/pandemic-fraud-waste-billions-small-business-labor-fb1d9a9eb24857efbe4611344311ae78
Trump Erased Millions of Possible PPP Fraud Flags in Last Days in Office Officials cleared nearly all potential fraud flags given to loans above $2 million just days before Trump left office. https://truthout.org/articles/trump-erased-millions-of-possible-ppp-fraud-flags-in-last-days-in-office/
This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
Coal miner Simon Turner was recovering from a broken back when the penny dropped. He was victim of a billion-dollar wage scam pulled off by BHP and its labour hire firms. Michael West reports.
Simon Turner recalls the accident clearly. It was December 2015, 11.20 in the morning. Location: BHP’s enormous Mount Arthur coal mine in the Hunter Valley.
“The mine was shut down for dust but I was in the coal crew and a digger-driver couldn’t see me and hit me with the bucket of the excavator. I was taken by ambulance to the hospital at Muswellbrook.”
He didn’t know it then, but the coal miner had broken his back. He didn’t know either that he’d been classified as an ‘office worker’.
“A BHP employee came out to see me in hospital and said we need you to come back to meet with the superintendent. I later learned I had a broken back but they told me the scanning machine didn’t work.”
The paperwork said I worked in an office and was paid 28k a year
There’s a law against coal miners being employed as casual workers. It’s the Black Coal Award. Nonetheless, BHP and its labour hire associates, with the knowledge of the union, the CFMEU’s insurance and superannuation associates, the mining lobby groups and the NSW state government, were all participants in the rort.
Simon Turner only found out he was “illegally employed by a labour hire company” when he was convalescing with a broken back and thumbing though his employment papers.
“So I went to meet with the superintendent. Get this, he wasn’t there at work, he had to come into the mine site. “Listen mate, we’ve had too many LTIs (lost time injury), he told me. “Don’t report it, and if you do report it you won’t have a job. Just come into work and make sure you get paid. You won’t have to do anything. Just sit here.”
Turner later found out his employment had been classified as an office worker. He and other coal miners started a class action but that fell apart and Turner has been negotiating with BHP and the Minerals Council for compensation and justice for underpaid coal workers since.
“[The contracts] were all done illegally. “I was living below the poverty line for over six years … my full pay under the Award should be $137k a year. I was being paid $400 a week!”.
“The drivers of the underpayment are the big mining companies
“The drivers of the underpayment are the big mining companies,” another miner told MWM. “They (BHP, Glencore, Peabody and others) write a contract so the supply of casual labour cannot be met by using the minimum standard which is set out in the industry award.”
Says Turner: “They (BHP) are complaining about not paying people what they are legally entitled to … at the end of the day they construct the contract with the labour hire company which makes it impossible for the statutory legal minimum to be paid”.
Underpayment of workers that is, by express design of the mine operators. In this case BHP.
CFMEU a good distraction for BHP
The scandal engulfing the CFMEU has been a convenient distraction for BHP and the other mine operators. While the media has revelled in the salacious detail and mostly focused on union corruption in isolation – that is, ignoring corporate involvement – BHP and its proxies have confronted the government over its Same Job Same Pay laws.
“Hysteria” is the way Resources Minister Madeleine King framed the reaction by the mining lobby and the Coalition. “Whether in opposition or government … they’re the first to go to the Murdoch press to do a story around what they don’t like about what a Labor government chooses to do and it wouldn’t matter what it is”..
Her remarks were pointed at BHP, the most strident of the industry critics, which claimed the new labour laws could cost 4500 jobs.
BHP and the unions had abandoned the black coal workers in the Hunter Valley.
Same Job Same Pay is Labor’s move to clean up the labour hire rort but it has not addressed the historical injustice which Turner estimates at $2.5B in underpayments since 2010.
The issue is politically tricky because the Liberals will always back the corporations over the unions and, says Turner, Labor has been hamstrung by the involvement of the unions, so key to its funding base.
Roberts: “miners abandoned”
One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts though has been a lone voice on this issue and raised it in the Senate this week, saying BHP and the unions had “abandoned the black coal workers in the Hunter Valley”.
Roberts has also fingered the labour hire operators and the Fair Work Commission – as well as the unions and BHP, saying the FWC had not followed its own Act, specifically by its failure to comply with s134 of Fair Work Act which says FWC must ensure that the Awards remain the minimum standard.
The unions, says Simon Turner, have endorsed the Enterprise Agreements struck between the workers and the labour hire companies which have allowed BHP to operate with cheap casual labour.
The Mining and Energy Union – the MEU of the CFMEU – which has split from the Construction and Forestry division, denies it endorses the underpayments; rather that these are deals struck separately over which the union has no control.
“The Black Coal Award does not provide for casual employment,” the MEU told MWM. “However Enterprise Agreements in the coal industry do provide for casual employment and there is nothing that the MEU can do about that if workers vote them up and the Fair Work Commission approves them.
“The ‘protected rate of pay’ … is a result of Same Job Same Pay laws fought for by our Union to close the legal loophole used by big mining companies to drive down wages. All applications for ‘Same Job Same Pay’ to lift rates for labour hire workers in our industry have been made by the MEU.”
Coal to Newcastle
Simon Turner had two surgeries on his back before Christmas in 2015. “I then find out that BHP had sacked me two days after I was injured. It’s in writing that I was terminated, and that the insurer paid me directly. I got the Separation Certificate. But guess what – they put on there‘resignation’.
“And (in the box at 3) to say a workers compensation claim been made, or would be made in the future, they ticked no.”
He found that workers comp provided for 78 weeks pay and that the legislated monopoly insurer was Coal Mines Insurance, owned by 50-50 by the NSW Minerals council and the CFMEU.
“After that I didn’t get paid, Chandler Macleod said the matter was with the insurer. But I then found out it was with CGU, which is the NSW statutory scheme. The scheme for average weekly earners is PIAWE (Pre Injury Average Weekly Earnings) but this scheme doesn’t apply to coal miners.
“After a fight with them I got to view the Certificate of Currency for the policy (insurance policy with CGU) which insured me – it now involved the NSW government. On that policy, they had me down as an office worker, and I only earned 28k a year.
“I started making complaints. It went to the NSW Government. They covered it all up and paid me a PIAWE. They dropped it to $400 a week on workers comp. NSW Workcover.
“CGU could not insure me. Chandler Macleod couldn’t pay me – I was told *because* they sacked me and didn’t tell me. I was being paid directly from the insurer. Not the monopoly insurer but by Chandler Macleod via enterprise agreement which was paying everybody illegally. It didn’t just happen to me. It happened to plenty of people.”
When the pay rate is illegal so is everything which derives from it
We now know, says Turner, that the mine owner BHP (and this applies to the other multinational mine operators Peabody and Glencore and Anglo) and the labour hire companies had a contract which was less than the award so it made it impossible for the labour hire company to pay the award.
“When the pay rate is illegal so is everything which derives from it: tax, super weekly entitlements, workers comp.
Says another former coal miner: “That’s tens of thousands of illegally employed mine workers currently and historically employed under enterprise agreements approved by the Fair Work Commission that have erroneously allowed the removal of their minimum protection. They were paid 40% of the Award”.
The MEU does not hold out hope for compensation for BHP’s salary arbitrage: “We don’t believe there is currently a legal avenue for casual coal miners to receive entitlements backpay (as it was overturned by the previous Parliament by the Morrison Government and One Nation) however we are optimistic about Same Job Same Pay laws significantly improving pay rates for labour hire workers going forward”.
This post was originally published on Michael West.
Dynamic pricing has played its way into the Australian live music scene, courtesy of Live Nation and its subsidiary, Ticketmaster. But who benefits from the higher prices, musician Josh Barnett asks.
A well-known feature of pricing for air travel and hotel bookings, the practice of ‘yield’ driven pricing is now being applied to the sale of concert tickets. Apparently, bleeding fans dry just once isn’t enough. With Green Day’s 2025 Australian tour as the latest contender, concertgoers are now facing seat prices as high as $500, all thanks to Ticketmaster’s so-called “In Demand” pricing.
In Demand pricing means simply that ticket prices fluctuate in real time based on demand. It’s a bit like watching the stock market while you’re desperately trying to nab a seat for a show, except instead of stocks, it’s your hard-earned dollars evaporating before your eyes.
Do the musicians make more money?
As a musician, I completely understand the need for bands to maximise their income. Since the introduction of streaming and the loss of sale of physical CDs, a majority of artists’ income has to either come from digital streaming or from performing live.
Does this dynamic pricing help the band? The short answer is yes, but not as much as you might think.
Dynamic pricing has been marketed as a way for artists to earn more money by capturing revenue that would otherwise go to scalpers (for sold-out shows). Ticketmaster and Live Nation often claim that dynamic pricing allows artists to “price tickets closer to their true market value,” ensuring the revenue ends up in the hands of musicians instead of in the secondary market. Except in Australia, while not illegal, ticket reselling is highly regulated.
Most states do not allow for the resale of tickets for more than 10% of their original cost, but that regulation does not appear to apply to dynamic ticket pricing, which can often lead to much higher pricing>
Artists do get a bigger cut of that market-driven price, but artists are not in control of the pricing mechanisms. The final price is often dictated by Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s algorithms, which respond to demand in real time to maximise their profits.
So, while bands like Green Day may benefit from higher revenue thanks to dynamic pricing, it’s really Live Nation that’s the biggest winner. In this vertically integrated market, the artist is still at the mercy of corporate giants, even when dynamic pricing claims to “support” them.
The idea that dynamic pricing is designed solely to benefit the musicians is an oversimplification at best and, at worst, another marketing spin from the corporate machine.
Green Day’s 2025 “Saviors” tour, ironically named given the gouging their fans are experiencing, rolled out tickets under this dynamic pricing scheme. General admission is a cool $200—if you’re lucky. But if you want a seat where you can actually see the band, be ready to fork over as much as $500. Fans who once idolised Green Day’s rebellious, anti-corporate roots now find themselves paying exorbitant sums to support a band that once played in dingy basements for next to nothing.
Ticketmaster claims this gouging isn’t its fault, pointing the finger at the artists and their teams for setting prices. “It’s for the fans’ own good,” they say—after all, who wouldn’t want to pay ‘market value’ rather than falling prey to those evil scalpers?
The ticketing duopoly
Let’s not kid ourselves—this isn’t some innocent pricing model responding to fair market demand. This is market manipulation in broad daylight. The concert ticketing business is controlled by a tiny handful of players, and Live Nation is the undisputed king. They own Ticketmaster, a massive share of the venues, and even manage many of the artists. They’ve essentially created a vertical monopoly over the entire live music supply chain, with fans paying the price.
And it’s not just Green Day—Oasis fans in the UK saw prices for their reunion tour spike from £135 to a mind-boggling £355 while they were still in the queue.
Australia’s live music market is following a similar pattern of consolidation. And with local authorities like the ACCC slow to intervene—unlike their counterparts in Europe and the US—Live Nation and Ticketmaster are free to exploit Australian fans with little oversight.
Bringing international acts to Australia is expensive due to a combination of factors, including high transportation and logistics costs for flying in artists, crews, and equipment.
Additionally, there are limited major cities to tour, so artists must cover vast distances between shows, driving up travel and accommodation expenses even further. Venues and production costs are often higher compared to other parts of the world, and with fewer opportunities to perform, acts need to charge more to cover their overheads and still make the tour profitable.
This all adds up to pricier tickets for Aussie fans.
Where’s the ACCC?
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has been characteristically quiet on this one. Sure, they’ve acknowledged dynamic pricing is legal—as long as it doesn’t mislead consumers. But what constitutes “misleading”? Apparently, it’s not enough that prices surge while customers are trapped in a virtual waiting room, helplessly watching their dream tickets inch further out of financial reach.
The ACCC’s stance doesn’t seem to account for the fact that in markets like live music, supply and demand aren’t as flexible as they are in other industries. Hotel rooms and flights have alternatives. But for a Green Day or an Oasis concert? You’ve got one shot, and if you miss it, good luck. This isn’t about giving fans “fair access” to tickets—it’s about seeing how much ‘blood’ can be squeezed from the proverbial stone before people snap.
Culture at a Price
Beyond the dollars and cents, there’s a deeper issue at play here. Concerts are supposed to be shared cultural experiences, places where communities come together. They’re supposed to be accessible. But with dynamic pricing, increasing costs, online fees and so many more extra costs, only those who can afford the steep costs are left to be able to enjoy their favourite bands. Everyone else? Shut out.
The current system prioritises profit margins over people, turning what should be an affordable cultural event into a luxury experience. The cost of live music is becoming yet another marker of inequality. If we’re not careful, these shared experiences, these moments that shape our cultural identity, will be reduced to nothing more than an exclusive club for the well-heeled.
Where to from here?
So, what’s the solution? Do we throw our hands up and accept dynamic pricing as the new normal?
Not quite. If Live Nation’s monopoly is too big to be challenged head-on, then maybe it’s time for the government to step in. Regulation doesn’t have to be a dirty word. In the US, the Justice Department is taking Live Nation to court over its abusive market power. In the UK, regulators are investigating dynamic pricing practices.
Here, we’re still waiting.
For now, we’re stuck with a broken system where fans pay through the nose for a glimpse of their favourite artists. And as long as companies like Live Nation dominate every aspect of the live music market, don’t expect the situation to change anytime soon.
In the meantime, maybe we should all start saving for Dua Lipa’s 2025 tour tickets—because if Green Day’s prices are anything to go by, it’s going to be another expensive ride.
The South Australian government wants at least 10 innovative companies from interstate or overseas to set up shop in the state this year under a new $1 million a year Investment Accelerator Program. Officially launched on Tuesday, the program will seek to create high-skilled and well-paid jobs in priority sectors like health and medical, critical…
A South African company is reported to be the most probable bidder for shares in New Caledonia’s Prony Resources.
As part of an already advanced takeover of the ailing southern plant of Prony Resources, the most probable bidder is reported to be South African group Sibaneye-Stillwater, local new media report.
Just like the other two major mining plants and smelters in New Caledonia, Prony Resources is facing acute hardships due to the emergence of Indonesia as a major player on the world market, compounded with New Caledonia’s violent unrest that broke out in May.
The Johannesburg-based entity is a significant player on the minerals world market (including nickel, platinum and palladium) and owns, amongst other assets, a hydro-metallurgic processing plant in Sandouville (near Le Havre, western France) with a production capacity of 12,000 tonnes per year of high-grade nickel which it bought in February 2022 from French mining giant Eramet for 85 million euros (NZ$153 million).
Sibanye-Stillwater appears to follow a well-planned scheme, aiming at building an integrated project that would control all of the nickel extraction and production stages.
The ultimate goal would be, for the South African player, to become a leader on the production market for innovative electric vehicles batteries, especially on the European market.
Southern Province President Sonia Backès had already hinted last week that one buyer had now been found and that one bidder had successfully reached advanced stages in the due diligence process.
If the deal eventuated, the new entity would take over the shares held by Swiss trader Trafigura (19 percent) and another block of shares held by the Southern Province to reach a total of 74 percent participation in Prony Resources stock, as part of a major restructuration of the company’s capital.
Prony Resources, in full operation mode, employs about 1300 staff.
Another 1700 are employed indirectly through sub-contractors.
It has paused its production to retain only up to 300 staff, in safety and maintenance mode, partly due to New Caledonia’s current unrest.
New Caledonia’s Koniambo (KNS) mining site aerial view. Image: KNS
The plant’s furnaces were placed in “cold care and maintenance” mode at the end of August, six months after major shareholder Anglo-Swiss Glencore announced it wanted to withdraw and sell the 49 percent shares it has in the project.
This caused close to 1200 job losses and further 600 among sub-contractors.
Other bidders still interested
KNS claimed at least three foreign investors were still interested at this stage, but none of these have so far materialised.
Talks were however reported to continue behind the scenes, with interested parties even ready to travel and visit on-site, KNS Vice-President and spokesman Alexandre Rousseau told Reuters news agency earlier this month.
‘Okelani Group One’ But a so-called “Okelani Group One” (OGO), made up of three local partners, said their offer could revive the project with a different business model.
They say they have made an offer to KNS’s majority shareholder SMSP (Société Minière du Sud Pacifique, New Caledonia’s Northern province financial arm).
OGO president Florent Tavernier told public broadcaster NC la 1ère much depended on what Glencore intended to do with the staggering debt of some US$13.7 billion which KNS had accumulated over the past 10 years.
Another OGO partner, Gilles Hernandez, explained: “We would be targeting a niche market of very high quality nickel used in aeronautics and edge-cutting technologies, especially in Europe, where nickel is now classified as ‘strategic metal’.”
Although KNS was designed to produce 60,000 tonnes of nickel a year, that target was never reached.
OGO said it would only aim for 15,000 tonnes per year and would only re-employ 400 of the 1200 laid-off staff.
New Caledonia’s third nickel plant, owned by historic Société Le Nickel (SLN, a subsidiary of French mining giant Eramet), which is also facing major hardships for the same reasons, is said to currently operate at minimal capacity.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
In every presidential election, office seekers elbow each other to position themselves as favoring tax breaks for the electorate. Kamala Harris raced in quickly with proposals for a tax break for the middle class and a tax deduction of up to $50,000 for new small businesses ─ two debt producing polices. To her credit, the vice president intends to roll back a Trump administration law by raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, a needed revenue-raising policy. The first two tax proposals sound good but aren’t good. Both candidates favor Child tax credits, a worthy policy for a huge class of voters and another example of pandering to the taxpayers.
The Middle Class Tax Cut
No matter how it is sliced, diced, or spiced, this middle class tax cut benefits nobody, harms the nation, and questions Harris’ credibility. The presidential aspirant said in her acceptance speech that she will be a president for all peoples in the nation. Singling out a tax cut for the more fortunate does not match her words. Unexplained is why this special class needs a tax cut.
Tax cuts are usual when demand is low, such as in a recession. The present economy is healthy with plenty, and I do mean plenty, of new Teslas in my middle class neighborhood. Elevated consumer demand is subsiding, noted by the decrease in consumer-inflated prices and increase in stock and housing market asset prices. Money is flowing into assets and a middle class tax cut will accelerate the trend.
Taxes transfer money between the government and the public. Neither method adds or subtracts to the money supply nor allows more or less available spending to the economy ─ the purchasing power stays the same, which means the purchasing of goods and services remain the same, and the GDP remains the same Lowering taxes mainly assists the already employed, and that is not the major priority. Who pays taxes ─ the employed. Who receives tax breaks ─ those who pay taxes. Lowering taxes redistributes federal assistance from needy persons to the employed. Which is preferable, redistributing income so the employed have more to spend or redistributing the income so the underemployed have something to spend?
Stimulating the economy by tax breaks is a psychological phenomenon. The talk, exaggerations, promises, and general optimism of tax breaks fashion a more optimistic public, which supposedly stimulates spending, investment, and courage to carry more debt. Creeping in to the debate is another assumption ─ those who have excess funds will invest and stimulate growth. Not considered is they might invest in speculative ventures that only churn money or might purchase imports, which decreases purchasing power of domestic production.
GDP has steadily grown, with a few bumps, in the last 80 years, and no relation to lowering of taxes has been shown. A government report: Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945, Thomas L. Hungerford Specialist in Public Finance, September 14, 2012 at concludes:
The top income tax rates have changed considerably since the end of World War II. Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The average tax rate faced by the top 0.01% of taxpayers was above 40% until the mid-1980s; today it is below 25%. Tax rates affecting taxpayers at the top of the income distribution are currently at their lowest levels since the end of the second World War. The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced ─ lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.
Because taxable incomes do not include inflation and these have increased greatly during the last decades, it is difficult to compare tax rates in 2024 with earlier tax rates. Peering through data, they seem just as low as they were in 2014, when the government report was published, or at a near historic post-World War II low. Why go lower?
Tax Deduction of up to $50,000 for New Small Businesses
The principal hindrance to starting a small business is the high interest rate. Tax deductions will not help small businesses that have no access to funds and no profits to tax. The proposal affects a minor portion of the small business community and is subsidized by a major portion of the economy ─ those who can also use tax breaks.
This tax benefit is a policy seeking a problem. Newly created small businesses have exploded in the post-pandemic period. An April, 2024 Treasury Department report relates,
Small businesses created over 70 percent of net new jobs since 2019. In the previous business cycle, small businesses created 64 percent of net new jobs.
Small business optimism is rebounding as inflation falls. Multiple measures of business optimism show substantial increases in recent months. More than 70 percent of small business leaders expect revenues to grow over the next year, the most since the pandemic.
Entrepreneurship continues to surge: the United States is averaging 430,000 new business applications per month in 2024, 50 percent more than in 2019. The subset of applications for businesses most likely to hire employees has also risen to 140,000 per month, 30 percent more than in 2019. Over 19 million businesses have been formed since Biden’s inauguration, and these are not just sole proprietorships or fly-by-night operations. The subset of applications for businesses most likely to hire employees has increased 30 percent from 2019.
The Main Street Alliance(MSA) establishes priorities for small businesses. Its 2025 agenda does not include a suggestion for a tax deduction. The Alliance advocates for “stronger antitrust enforcement, fair tax policies, and expanded access to capital. This includes efforts to revise the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, support the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice Antitrust Division, and fight against cuts to critical small business funding from the Small Business Administration (SBA) and other agencies.”
MSA “plans on supporting the continued implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, paid family and medical leave, investments in child care, and enhanced subsidies for health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.”
Child Tax Credit
Kamala Harris’ economic plans include a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns and a continuation of the pandemic-era Child Tax Credit (CTC). The latter expanded the Child Tax Credits and boosted the benefit to $3,600 for children under six years old and to $3,000 for children from 7 to 17 years of age.
Seems beneficial to subsidize those in need, which are usually growing families. In addition, it is good economics — places funds in hands of those who will spend them for essentials and move them through the economy. The question that Harris has not answered is, “To what level of income will the credits apply?” My recommendation is that credits should also be based on assets and slide off gradually from $60,000 income to $100,000 income. Their effects on inflation need study.
Corporate Tax Rate
Before Trump lowered the maximum corporate tax rate to a flat 21 percent, the 35 percent rate for income greater than $18.3 million, had been relatively constant for 32 years, and economic gyrations had not shown to be due to that rate.
The effective corporate tax rate graph tells another story — corporations have taken advantage of tax breaks and loopholes to reduce their taxes.
The problem is not high corporate tax; the problem is the ability of corporations to avoid paying taxes. If tax breaks and loopholes unique to U.S. corporations, such as accelerated depreciation, using excess tax benefits from stock options to reduce federal and state taxes, and industry specific tax breaks were reduced or eliminated, then the tax rate could also be reduced; the government charges with one legislation and discharges with another legislation. Corporations are responsible for finding loopholes to avoid taxes, and the government is responsible for providing the loopholes.
The posed advantages of a lower corporate tax rate — increased funds for investment translating into increased production, which increases employment and Gross Domestic Product might be true if corporations used the greater part of their profit for increased investment. However, corporations have used the excessive profit for executive bonuses, for stock buybacks, for corporate takeovers, and for augmenting retained earnings. With corporate profits at all-time highs, “S&P 500 Q1 2024 buybacks were $236.8 billion, up 8.1% from Q4 2023’s $219.1 billion and up 9.9% from Q1 2023’s $215.5 billion.”
Left out of the corporate books is responsibility to support infrastructure – transportation, communication, utilities – government research, government loans, credit guarantees, bailouts, assistance to education, job training, subsidies, and other programs that benefit corporations. Shouldn’t corporations repay a fair share of the financial assistance that guarantees their prosperity?
The oft-quoted assertion that high tax rates have been the primary driver for corporations to move facilities to nations that have low tax rates is not proven. Manufacturing close to market and utilization of low labor rates have been the more prominent drivers. Commentators spuriously define the words tax havens, tax deferred, and tax inversions to confuse the public, and promote the mistaken belief that U.S. corporations can change their domicile and easily escape major payments of the corporation’s federal taxes on income earned outside the United States.
Corporations, whose sales contain much intellectual property (Microsoft), are able to shift certain profits on sales, but this cannot easily occur for profits earned from trade or business of defined products manufactured outside the United States. If repatriated, these profits are eventually subjected to U.S. taxes.
The key proposition, which is overlooked, is that government spends all of corporate taxes and all the money circulates in the economy, some invested, some increasing production, some increasing employment, and all adding to or maintaining GDP. Why is this proposition “the key proposition?”
Economics becomes simplified when it is realized that all money is debt. The money supply can only be increased by either banks’ lending money from Reserves and essentially creating money, or by the Federal Reserve engaging in Open Market Operations ─ purchasing government debt that is financed by the Treasury Department. Treasury prints money that appear as IOUs at the Federal Reserve. If money remains dormant as excessive retained earnings or circulates speculatively as stock buybacks, the money, which is debt is not wisely used; it is comparable to borrowing money at 6 percent and then, rather than purchasing a product, investing it at 3 percent. All money in the economy is debt and all the debt is paying interest and being constantly retired and renewed.
This last tidbit is, admittedly, controversial and needs more discussion. It is the essential of the capitalist system, which grows by reinvesting profits ─ capital generating capital ─ and where all the money supply, including profits, that is needed to generate capital is equal to the debt in the system. Positive trade balances play a role, but generally, capitalism only moves forward by increasing debt.
Trump Tariffs
One mystery that has clouded the Biden administration is negligence in canceling the Trump administration’s tariffs on goods from China. During their debate, Trump questioned Harris on why, “if the Dems do not support the tariffs, has the Biden administration kept them?” Harris did not supply an answer.
Tariffs are used to either increase government revenue ─ the principal method before the income taxation system ─ or to protect domestic industries.
Former President Trump proudly declared that his tariffs had harmed the Chinese government. Is the function of a U.S. president to harm another government? He also claimed that foreign companies are paying for tariffs. “Multiple studies suggest this is not the case: the cost of tariffs have been borne almost entirely by American households and American firms, not foreign exporters.”
Protection is difficult to gauge; tariffs may have helped some producers and harmed companies who use the imported goods and now have to pay higher prices for the commodity. The export country, in this case, China, can retaliate and raise taxes on imports from the U.S. and harm American industries.
Have the tariffs protected the steel industry, the principal industry in the tariffs? The answer came in December 2023, when Nippon Steel announced a $14.9 billion takeover deal of U.S. Steel.
Conclusion
In conventional economic theory, the government formulates a budget and taxes the public to pay for the budget. If the tax revenues do not reach the expenditures, then either the government cuts the budget ─ done during Bill Clinton administration ─ or issues debt. What is never done is to have taxes planned to follow budget considerations. The promises by presidential contenders of cutting taxes are promises that have no rational; future budgets will be forced to be planned about tax revenue rather than having tax revenue agree with budget plans, a bad way to run a country.
Whistleblower Roxanne Mysko reported systematic safety violations at the trucking company where she worked – amid a rise in deaths involving large trucks across Australia – only to have her life turned upside down. Andrew Gardiner reports.
Trucking industry whistleblower Roxanne Mysko walked free from South Australia’s Supreme Court earlier this month, after surrendering to sheriffs at the Adelaide court house and fully expecting to be carted off to prison. To say it was a load off her mind would be an understatement for Roxanne, who faced a warrant for her arrest.
“I’d been told to expect some jail time when I turned up to court,” Roxanne told MWM . “But it seems the Chief Justice, Chris Kourakis, saw there was a lot more to the situation than me breaching a court order (Contempt of Court).”
“Now, to some extent, I can get on with my life.”
It appears from documents independently sighted by MWM that there was, to borrow Roxanne’s phrase, a lot “more to the situation” at Port Adelaide-based Express Cargo Services (ECS) which terminated her in 2020 after she raised serious breaches of Chain of Responsibility (CoR) and safety protocols. It comes amid a rise in deaths involving large trucks (as a proportion of all road fatalities) which many involved in the industry say should by now have made trucking safety a major issue for Australians.
Documents and statements regarding ECS and other trucking companies, independently verified by MWM, appear to confirm:
Fatigue among company drivers and subcontractors, who are alleged to have worked up to 26 days straight (the relevant law states drivers must have a 24-hour break every seventh day);
No safety audits of 70 subcontractors from 2007 to 2020, many in violation of CoR requirements which began in 2014;
No licence checks on 70 subcontractors;
No vehicle maintenance audits over an extended period;
Speeding by trucks supposedly limited to 90 km/h;
No documentation for all CoR safety procedures for any truck or freight movement anywhere in Australia.
If proven, such breaches of safety law can lead to millions of dollars in fines.
In earlier interviews with MWM, Roxanne said the “culture of corner cutting” in the trucking industry “should be a “national scandal.” Instead, those raising the alarm remain a small, sometimes-persecuted minority often largely ignored by regulators like the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR).
Previously, Roxanne told MWM her post-dismissal whistle-blowing led to the bullying of her and her family, a police raid and a series of court actions that almost saw her jailed and may yet see her bankrupt. “I owe ECS $350,000 in legal fees awarded against me in an earlier court case, and I frankly don’t have that kind of money,” she told MWM in June.
Among other things, the 2023 court order against Roxanne gagged her from contact with “ineligible recipients” not covered by whistleblower protections, which she’d previously emailed as part of her attempt to bring serious safety breaches to the attention of regulators and partner companies.
MWM is not suggesting ECS has acted unethically or in violation of workplace or transport safety laws, and unless stated, has established the alleged facts around ECS’ safety record, opinions on the extent of whistleblower protections and subsequent conduct by the company independently of Ms Mysko.
Friends of Roxanne say she’s now turned her attention to possible wrongful-dismissal action against ECS, which terminated her after just two weeks, during which she had raised various internal alarms about driver safety and indicated her intention to contact regulators, as required of her under the law. “They sacked me without providing a reason, and did it while I was away from the office driving for the company near Hay in NSW,” she’d previously told MWM.
A woman of limited means, Roxanne has been seeking pro bono representation in the matter.
In recent weeks, truckies and their union have been buoyed by the addition of a road transport division to the Fair Work Commission (FWC) which is expected to help set tougher safety standards and to boost enforcement often lacking in the past. “With a new system to tackle the root causes of chronic safety issues in the industry, we hope to see (NHVR) close the loop on enforceable standards and make roads safer,” Transport Workers Union National Secretary, Michael Kaine, told MWM.
Roxanne agrees, describing the new division as a “game changer for drivers” and all the other smaller operators. “Rest assured I’ll be getting in touch with the FWC in the months ahead,” Roxanne said with a grin.
When John Holbrook first started working as a pipefitter in the early 1990s, jobs were easy to come by in his corner of northeastern Kentucky.
A giant iron and steel mill routinely needed maintenance and repair work, as did the coal “coking” ovens next to it. There was also a hulking coal-fired power plant and a bustling petroleum refinery nearby. Fossil fuels extracted from beneath the region’s rugged Appalachian terrain supplied these industrial sites, which sprung up during the 19th and 20th centuries along the yawning Ohio River and its tributary, Big Sandy.
“Work was so plentiful,” Holbrook recalled on a scorching August morning in Ashland, a quiet riverfront city of some 21,000 people.
Ashland retains its motto as the place “Where Coal Meets Iron,” and railcars still rumble by. But after years of downsizing production, the steel mill’s owner demolished the complex in 2022. A decade ago, the coal plant switched to burning natural gas to generate electricity, which requires less hands-on maintenance. Meanwhile, thousands of jobs vanished from surrounding coalfields as mining became more mechanized, market forces shifted, and clean air policies took hold.
Many families have since moved away. The tradespeople who’ve stayed often drive for hours to work on the new construction projects sprouting up in other places, like the massive factories for making and recycling electric-car batteries in western Kentucky and the electricity-powered steel furnace in neighboring West Virginia. If America is undergoing a manufacturing boom, it hasn’t yet reached this hard-hit stretch of the Bluegrass State.
But that could soon change.
In March, Century Aluminum, the nation’s biggest producer of primary, or virgin, aluminum, announced that it plans to build an enormous plant in the United States — the nation’s first new smelter in 45 years. Jesse Gary, the company’s president and CEO, has pointed to northeastern Kentucky as the project’s preferred location, though he said there were still a “myriad of steps” before the company reaches a final decision.
The Chicago-based manufacturer is slated to receive up to $500 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the facility, which could emit 75 percent less carbon dioxide than traditional smelters, thanks to its use of carbon-free energy and energy-efficient designs. The award is part of a $6.3 billion federal program — funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — that aims to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-industry sectors.
The Ohio River seen from Ashland, Kentucky, right. John Holbrook at his office in Ashland.
Aluminum demand is set to soar globally by up to 80 percent by 2050 as the world produces more solar panels and other clean energy technologies. The makers of the essential material are now under mounting pressure from policymakers and consumers to clean up their operations. In North America alone, aluminum producers will need to cut carbon emissions by 92 percent from 2021 levels to meet net-zero climate goals.
Century already owns two aging smelters in western Kentucky. The new “green smelter” is expected to create over 5,500 construction jobs and more than 1,000 full-time union jobs. If built in eastern Kentucky, the $5 billion project would mark the region’s largest investment on record.
“We just need a crumb or two, just a little giant smelter,” Holbrook said with a laugh when we met at his office near Ashland’s historic main street. A short walk away, stones used in the city’s original iron-making furnaces stand as monuments overlooking the Ohio River.
Today, Holbrook heads the Tri-State Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents unions in a cluster of adjoining counties in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. He’s part of a broad coalition of labor organizers, local officials, environmentalists, and clean energy advocates who are urging Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, to work with Century to secure the smelter and hammer out a long-term deal to provide clean energy for it.
“It’d be a godsend for that area,” said Chad Mills, a pipefitter and the director of the Kentucky State Building and Construction Trades Council. The region “needs it more than you can imagine.”
The impact of Century’s new smelter would ripple far beyond this rural stretch of verdant peaks and meandering creeks.
The planned facility is set to nearly double the amount of primary aluminum that the United States produces — helping to revitalize a domestic industry that has been steadily shrinking for decades owing to spiking power prices and increased competition from China. In 2000, U.S. companies operated 23 aluminum smelters. Today, only four plants are operating, while another two have been indefinitely curtailed. That includes Century’s 55-year-old plant in Hawesville, Kentucky, which has been idle since June 2022.
The decline in U.S. production has complicated the country’s efforts to both make and procure lower-carbon aluminum for its supply chains, experts say.
Globally, the aluminum sector contributes around 2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions every year. Nearly 70 percent of those emissions come from generating high volumes of electricity — often derived from fossil fuels — to power smelters almost around the clock.
As U.S. primary production dwindles, the country is importing more aluminum made in overseas smelters that are powered by dirtier, less efficient electrical grids. Ironically, an increasing share of that aluminum is being used to make solar panels, electric cars, heat pumps, power cables, and many other clean energy components. The metal is lightweight and inexpensive, and it’s a key ingredient in global efforts to electrify and decarbonize the wider economy.
But aluminum is also mind-bogglingly ubiquitous outside the energy sector. The versatile material is found in everything from pots and pans, deodorant, and smartphones to car doors, bridges, and skyscrapers. It’s the second-most-used metal in the world after steel.
Last year, the U.S. produced around 750,000 metric tons of primary aluminum while importing 4.8 million metric tons of it, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Meanwhile, the country produced 3.3 million metric tons of “secondary” aluminum in 2023. Boosting recycling rates is seen as a necessary step for addressing aluminum’s emissions problem, because the recycling process requires about 95 percent less energy than making aluminum from scratch. But even secondary producers need primary aluminum to “sweeten” their batches and achieve the right strength and durability, said Annie Sartor, the aluminum campaign director for Industrious Labs, an advocacy organization.
“Primary aluminum is essential, and we have a primary industry that’s been in decline, is very polluting, and is very high-emitting,” Sartor said. Century’s proposed new smelter “could be a turning point for this industry,” she added. “We all would like to see it get built and thrive.”
An employee walks by Century Aluminum’s smelter in Hawesville, Kentucky, in a 2017 photo. The smelter has been idle since 2022.
Luke Sharrett for The Washington Post via Getty Images
A new green smelter wouldn’t just boost supplies of primary aluminum for making clean energy technologies. The facility, with its voracious electricity appetite, is also expected to accelerate the region’s buildout of clean energy capacity, which has lagged behind that of many other states.
Century expects its planned smelter to produce about 600,000 metric tons of aluminum a year. That means it could need at least a gigawatt’s worth of power to operate annually at full tilt, equal to the yearly demand of roughly 750,000 U.S. homes. By way of comparison, Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, is home to some 625,000 people.
But Kentucky has very little carbon-free capacity available today.
About 0.2 percent of the state’s electricity generation came from solar in 2022, while 6 percent was supplied by hydroelectric dams, mainly in the western part of the state. Coal and gas plants produced most of the rest. Still, after decades of clinging tightly to its coal-rich history, Kentucky is seeing a raft of new utility-scale solar installations under development, including atop former coal mines.
And manufacturers in Kentucky can access the renewable energy being generated in neighboring states as well as regional grid networks like PJM. Swaths of eastern Kentucky are covered by a robust array of high-voltage, long-distance transmission lines operated by Kentucky Power, a subsidiary of the utility giant American Electric Power.
Lane Boldman, executive director of the Kentucky Conservation Committee, said that investing in clean energy and upgrading grid infrastructure would offer a chance to employ more of Kentucky’s skilled workers.
“It’s exciting, because it actually modernizes our industry and leverages a local workforce that has a great expertise with energy already,” she said when we met in Lexington, near the rolling green hills and long white fences of the area’s horse farms. “There are ways you can create economic development that are not so extractive, that just leave the community bare.”
Lane Boldman says she became an environmental advocate years ago after seeing how coal strip mining was harming Appalachian communities.
Maria Gallucci/Canary Media
Northeastern Kentucky isn’t the only location that Century is considering for the smelter. The company is also evaluating sites in the Ohio and Mississippi river basins. The final decision will depend on where there’s a steady supply of affordable power, a Century executive told The Wall Street Journal in early July. (A spokesperson didn’t respond to Canary’s repeated requests for comment.)
Century is aiming to secure a power-supply deal to meet a decade’s worth of electricity demand from the new smelter, according to the Journal. The goal is to finalize plans in the next two years and then begin construction, which could take around three years. In the meantime, the U.S. will continue to see a rapid buildout of solar, wind, and other carbon-free power supplies connecting to the grid.
Governor Beshear has participated in discussions about the smelter’s power supply, in the hopes of landing Century’s megaproject and all of its “good-paying jobs.” His administration “continues to work with multiple experts to determine a location in northeastern Kentucky that includes a river port and can support workforce training as well as provide the cleanest, most reliable electric service capacity needed,” Crystal Staley, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, said by email.
Environmental advocates say the aluminum plant represents a chance to reimagine what a major industrial facility can look like: powered by clean energy, equipped with modern pollution controls, and built with local community input from the beginning. Starting sometime this fall, the Sierra Club is planning to host public meetings and distribute flyers in northeastern Kentucky to let residents know about the giant smelter that could potentially be built in their backyards.
“It’s an opportunity for us to engage people who might shy away from other aspects of being an environmental activist and say, ‘Hey, this is something that we can embrace, because it’s going to help us create jobs so that people can stay in their region,’” said Julia Finch, the director of Sierra Club’s Kentucky chapter. “This is a chance for us to lead on what a green transition looks like for industry.”
Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth’s crust. But turning it into a sturdy, usable material is a laborious and dirty process — one that begins with scraping topsoil to extract bauxite, a reddish clay rock that is rich in alumina (also called aluminum oxide). The trickiest part comes next: removing oxygen and other molecules to transform that alumina into aluminum. Until the late 19th century, the methods for accomplishing this were so costly that the tinfoil we now buy at the grocery store was considered a precious metal, like gold, silver, and platinum.
Then in 1886, Charles Martin Hall figured out an inexpensive way to smelt aluminum through electrolysis, a technique that uses electrical energy to drive a chemical reaction. Not long after, he helped launch the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, which went on to become the U.S. aluminum behemoth presently known as Alcoa.
Around the same time that Hall was tinkering in his woodshed in Oberlin, Ohio, a French inventor named Paul Louis Touissant Héroult was making a similar discovery in Paris. Modern aluminum smelters now use what’s called the Hall-Héroult process — an effective but also energy-intensive and carbon-intensive way of making primary aluminum metal.
Smelting involves dissolving alumina in a molten salt called cryolite, which is heated to over 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Large carbon blocks, or “anodes,” are lowered down into the highly corrosive bath, and electrical currents run through the entire structure. Aluminum then deposits at the bottom as oxygen combines with carbon in the blocks, creating carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
Today, this electrochemical process contributes about 17 percent of the total CO2 emissions from global aluminum production. It also causes the release of perfluorochemicals (PFCs) — potent and long-lasting greenhouse gases — as well as sulfur dioxide pollution, which can harm people’s respiratory systems and damage trees and crops. In 2021, PFCs accounted for more than half the emissions from Century’s Hawesville smelter and a third of the emissions from its Sebree smelter in Robards, Kentucky, according to the Sierra Club.
Newer smelters can dramatically reduce their PFC emissions by using automated control systems, which Century deploys at its smelter in Grundartangi, Iceland. Researchers are also working to slash CO2 by developing carbon-free blocks. The technology involves using chemically inactive, or “inert,” metallic alloys in the anodes through which the electrical currents flow. Elysis, a joint venture of Alcoa and the mining giant Rio Tinto, says it is making progress toward the large-scale implementation of its inert anodes and has plans for a demonstration plant in Quebec.
The alternative anodes may not be ready in time for a project like Century’s planned green U.S. smelter. Previously, large-scale buyers of aluminum, such as automakers and construction companies, had anticipated that inert anodes would help slash CO2 emissions in the aluminum supply chain in time for companies to meet their 2030 climate goals. But now that’s looking less likely.
“There’s a feeling now that it’s just taking longer to develop that technology,” said Lachlan Wright, a manager of the climate intelligence program at RMI, a clean energy think tank. One challenge might simply be the limited production capacity for the new anodes, which can’t yet meet the demands of a large aluminum user. Beyond that, “It’s not exactly clear what some of the barriers are there,” Wright added.
Still, when it comes to tackling aluminum’s biggest CO2 culprit — all the electricity it takes to run a smelter — the solutions already exist, in the form of renewable energy and other carbon-free sources.
“We don’t need a new or emerging technology,” Sartor said. “We need huge amounts of existing technology, and it needs to be available in places that work for the industry.”
Deep in the heart of Kentucky’s coal country, the scarred and treeless lands of former surface mines are increasingly being repurposed to supply that clean energy.
On another sun-blasted day in early August, I met with Mike Smith in Hazard, a city of some 5,300 people that’s enveloped by the Appalachian Mountains and built along the winding curves of the North Fork Kentucky River.
We hopped in his white pickup truck and headed toward his family’s 800-acre property. For years, they leased the land to Pine Branch Mining, which dynamited the mountaintop to reach coal seams buried beneath the surface. “I can’t say that I was for it,” Smith told me as we drove past modest homes tucked into creekside hollers and up a bumpy gravel road. Today, he said, “the only coal that’s left here is under the river.”
After the mine closed a decade ago, the land was reclaimed: smoothed out, packed down, and covered with vegetation to prevent erosion. Now, the property is about to undergo its latest transformation, as the home of the 80-megawatt Bright Mountain Solar facility.
Landowner Mike Smith and Louise Sizemore of Edelen Renewables surveyed the former mining site that will soon become the Bright Mountain Solar farm during a visit on August 7.
Maria Gallucci/Canary Media
Avangrid, the lead developer, plans to begin installing solar panels here next year, according to Edelen Renewables, the project’s local development partner. Edelen is also helping to advance other “coal-to-solar” projects in the region, including the 200 MW Martin County Solar Project under construction as well as BrightNight’s 800 MW Starfire installation. Rivian, the electric-truck maker, has signed on as the anchor customer for the $1 billion Starfire project, which is in the early stages of development.
Building on old mining sites can be more expensive and logistically trickier than, say, putting panels on flat, solid farmland. For one, hauling equipment to the former mines requires driving big, heavy vehicles up narrow mountain roads. Smith’s site is divided into uneven tiers of unpaved land. On our visit, he expertly accelerated his truck up a steep dirt path. When we reached the top, I audibly exhaled with relief. Smith gently laughed.
Despite the challenges, there’s an obvious poetry to building clean energy in a place that once yielded fossil fuels. Ideally, it can also bring justice to communities that are still hurting economically and spiritually from the coal industry’s inexorable decline. Bright Mountain and other coal-to-solar developments are projected to generate millions of dollars in local tax revenue over their lifetimes, using land that was left unsuitable for anything other than cattle grazing.
“You’ve got to reinvent yourself,” Smith told me as we gazed at the empty expanse of land where the solar project will eventually stand. Dragonflies darted by, and a quail called from somewhere on the property. “That’s the only way we can survive.”
The next day, I met Adam Edelen, the founder and CEO of Edelen Renewables, at his office in downtown Lexington. Sitting in a wicker rocking chair and sipping a pint glass of sweet tea, Edelen lamented the years of “outright hostility” to renewable energy development in the state. However, some Kentucky policymakers are starting to recognize the need to clean up the state’s electricity sector — if not explicitly to tackle climate change, then at least to attract manufacturers like Century Aluminum that want to power their operations with carbon-free energy sources.
The Martin County Solar Project spans 900 acres on the old Martiki mine site in Pilgrim, Kentucky.
Edelen Renewables
“Now, we’re in this headlong rush to make sure we’ve got a diversified energy portfolio to meet the needs of the private sector,” Edelen said. For Century in particular, he added, “The issue is that they need cheap power and they need green energy, neither of which Kentucky has a lot of.”
Electricity accounts for about 40 percent of a smelter’s total operating expenses. To remain cost competitive, aluminum producers need to hit a “magic benchmark” of around $40 per megawatt-hour, said Wright of RMI. Currently, power-purchase agreements for U.S. renewable energy projects are in the range of $50 to $60 per megawatt-hour — a significant difference for facilities that can consume 1 megawatt-hour of electricity just to produce a single metric ton of aluminum.
Provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act could help to narrow that price gap for Century and other primary aluminum makers.
The 45X production tax credit is a keystone of the IRA, which President Joe Biden signed into law two years ago. The incentive allows producers of critical materials, solar panels, batteries, and other types of “advanced manufacturing” products to receive a federal tax credit for up to 10 percent of their production costs, including electricity.
The IRA also set aside another $10 billion for the 48C investment tax credit, an Obama-era program that’s now available to help manufacturers install equipment that reduces emissions by 20 percent. Aluminum producers could use the tax credit to cover the cost of technology that improves their operating efficiency while also slashing CO2 pollution.
Edelen Renewables says the 48C tax credit will apply to all the coal-to-solar projects, which the company hopes can supply some of the electricity needed for Century’s green smelter. Under the expanded program, renewable energy projects built in “energy communities,” including former coal mine sites, can receive tax credits worth up to 40 percent of project costs, significantly lowering the final cost of electricity associated with the installations.
Eastern Kentucky “has played such a vital role in powering the country’s economy for the last 100 years,” Edelen said. Coal communities “deserve a place in the newer economy, and they’re hungry for that.”
Construction on the Martin County Solar Project began in 2023 and is slated to be completed later this year.
Edelen Renewables
Over in Ashland, John Holbrook said he’s anxiously watching to see if northeastern Kentucky will find its place in the nation’s green industrial transition. If Century selects the region to host its new aluminum smelter, the area’s trade councils and union apprenticeship programs will be more than ready to start training and recruiting workers, he said.
But Holbrook and other local labor leaders aren’t holding their breath. Several people I spoke to recalled the elation they felt in 2018 when the company Braidy Industries broke ground near Ashland on a $1.5 billion aluminum rolling mill — and the heartbreak that followed years later when Braidy backtracked on the plant and its promise of hundreds of jobs. Braidy’s former CEO was later accused of misleading the company’s board members, state officials, and journalists about the project’s true financial status.
While the Braidy scandal was a unique affair, the fallout still lingers in discussions about Century’s green smelter. “I think they’d have to start moving trailers in before we’d feel confident to start saying, ‘Yeah, this is really happening,’” Holbrook said from behind his wide wooden desk.
Still, he remains “cautiously optimistic” about the prospect of Century building its aluminum plant here. “It would be region-changing,” he said. “And life-changing.”
Does your art history background impact how you approach the label?
It’s sort of like a classic liberal arts degree that you don’t have a real plan for. What I like about art history, even self-taught and my own personal education beyond college, is that it grounds you. There’s an anti-history thing happening right now, where I feel like it’s like let’s throw out the old guard. A lot of it’s with good reason, I get why. The idea of institution, higher education, the idea of cis white male artists being this pedigree. I like that things are being upended. I like seeing how culture moves back and forth.
It’s more about human nature and that a lot of these things that we think are new are not actually new. We think we’re at the precipice of the most dynamic time because there’s more information, more science, more money. People have been dealing with these fears for thousands of years, about government, about taste, and about how to present yourself. There’s so much available now to learn, especially free. It’s great to have a study, whatever that is, that grounds you. It’s a nerve wracking time if you have no basis in history.
People have been stressed about art and money and expression for a long, long time. I think that’s comforting in a weird way. TV was the devil, and maybe still is, but everyone was like, “Oh, the TV viewing public, everyone’s going to be so stupid.” Then that was the internet and then now. You have to remember that we’re part of a bigger continuum. It helps you from getting overwhelmed.
You described the Detroit scene that Ghostly was born out of as ‘serious.’ What stands out?
I never exactly thought of it in that frame. I would maybe have used the word sincere at the time. Even friends of mine and I had a fake manifesto about sincerity, and we were in college. It seems extremely precious now, but the idea was more like, to use your word, “Let’s take it seriously and apply our shared efforts.” Especially now we’re all kind of afraid to be parodies of ourselves and we’re afraid to be overzealous. It’s a weird flip-flop, but there’s an intention that a lot of artists have that I admire.
It doesn’t mean being self-serious. Taking your work seriously is important, even if it’s early. Valuing it even though people around you may not. You have to lean into what you do for someone else to lean into it. That’s a hard line to hit. Wanting to be taken seriously by Detroit, which was and is a very intentional place, people will judge if you don’t come correct which I like about it, but also be okay being yourself. It’s that dance between awareness and self-awareness, intention and sincerity.
It’s interesting how the size of a city can impact this.
That’s why you incubate your own scene too. There’s a macro scene of the city that comes before you, the history of the city, especially in New York and LA. Then there’s the people you communicate with daily that you are doing gigs with. We used to have club nights in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Every week it was a little bit of exercise. I probably didn’t think of it that way, but you’d bring the new MP3 that you just exported, play it, road test it. Obviously if it sucks, you’re not failing, but you’re iterating.
I like the idea of keeping yourself inside of a group of people that you trust that also want it as bad as you do. Then taking that to the stage. You get your butt kicked a lot. A lot of my memories with the label is overreaching too hard on certain projects or being over our heads on certain things where we thought we were ready for something we weren’t. It forces you to reeducate and not be afraid. It is a cliché, but failure really is part of the deal.
Were there non-American labels you saw as templates?
For sure. Historically there’s the DNA labels of indie music culture, Rough Trade, Factory Records and 4AD, the seventies, eighties British thing. In Detroit there were a lot of local labels, still are, that are self-owned, self-financed and self-distributed. It made it seem accessible, back to the DIY aspect of it. Both were templates. One was more majestic or mystical to me. That you could have a band as weird as Joy Division and they could in some form change the world, but then locally have records that were made in a basement, travel the world and change the world too, like a Jeff Mills or an Underground Resistance. They’re lessons in presentation. How do you tell a story? Especially without video, without internet, how do you get a message across? I love the theatrics and the presentation of independent labels as a template. How do you tell a story without tons of capital or access to major marketing? Great record labels have been doing that for decades.
When did you first notice America embracing electronic music? What change did it bring?
It’s not quite as cyclical anymore. I think about the EDM thing a lot, how it was tricky. At the time people were like, “Well, electronic music is blowing up.” Maybe it’s because I’m not the best A&R person, but it’s okay to know that you don’t have to be part of every wave, to use another surfing metaphor. It doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just like, “Well, that’s a wave someone else is taking and hopefully it will lift us too.” Some good things came out of that era. We didn’t have a direct line to it, but I do think it led to rising tides raising all boats. Sometimes we forget that not every audience is our audience, and that’s okay. We’re not failing because we’re not reaching every single person who might like electronic music.
What are some of the larger music tech shifts you’ve weathered?
It’s harder as you get older because your risk tolerance changes. Music is still driven by young people, so you want to adhere to that. As an Ann Arbor person, I accept that I’m not going to like everything and nor should I. You bring other people in who have a better sense of it. My attitude has always been, in all of these micro movements, there’s usually something that’s being presented that will benefit our philosophy and the type of artists that we work with.
We came in at the same time as piracy and Napster, Limewire, a big part of how music got to people in a CD era. That benefited a lot of artists, it also created a sense of the idea of taste sharing. That’s why I do my newsletter. The fun of that and the fun of MySpace was, I could look into your crate, so to speak, and see what you’re into. That’s a human instinct that isn’t going to go away. Streaming obviously has detractors, but you’re like, “Okay, how do I reach as many people as possible?” Social media is a double-edged sword, but these are all tools.
You try to have a critical eye of what’s not working. I believe in misusing platforms. Don’t just try to do what the most successful person does, do it the way that’s a little wonky and people will still understand what you’re doing. Our job as creative people is to make the most of the tools that are available and that includes misusing them.
What’s your work-life balance like?
I admire people who have a good demarcation of personal and professional. Integrating fun or habit into your practice. I’m getting better, but it’s hard because it still is a “nine to five” world you have to deal with. You have to make sure people are available, try to make the most of each other’s time. Writing the newsletter is my best effort at something consistent, more for the sense of shipping something that has no business objective. It’s just pleasure, connection and community. You have to schedule everything from my experience. I’m still learning how to do that.
You’ve maintained the newsletter for a few years now, right?
Just about three. It’s almost like having a pen pal. The fact that it’s routine and formalized makes it easy to explain what it is. Whenever people are like, “I want to start a newsletter” I’m like, “What’s the thing you consistently want to do?” Some people can rip a blog post once a week and it’s hot and fresh, but I don’t want to be afraid I’m not going to have an idea or I have to come up with a bad one just to ship. It’s a form of giving flowers and showing appreciation.
What are some of the most important conversations you have with up and coming artists?
We all think we speak the same language and ‘success’ is a weird word because it implies validation financially or people wise. Maybe satisfaction is a better word. It’s like satisfaction is such a big part of creative work, whether you’re releasing it, shepherding it or editing it. Some people just like to be part of the process and help. We’re helping someone see themselves. Great managers do this. Asking what actually is success? Each record, project, book, is like building a statue. I think about mountaineering, you don’t just go up. It’s not a linear thing. It’s important to ask, what do you want out of this? That doesn’t mean the whole artistic move that you’re making. It means this project, what is this? Is it “I want to go on tour”? Okay, let’s put everything towards that energy. I want to stream a lot, I want to license music. People are afraid of setting goals, myself included, because you’re afraid of not getting them, but if you don’t, you’ll end up being like, was that worth my time? That’s the pain of not identifying what the goal is as a group or as an individual.
I’m into the idea of artistic practice. How do you get inspiration? How do you ship, how do you communicate, how do you share? Developing what you see as a practice that’s sustainable. I am very much in favor of when artists can or want to have day jobs. I think it’s a great thing. Put yourself in a position to be able to continue to make work as your best bet to succeed. Creativity is this daring-ness. It’s a lot more about consistency and attentiveness than doing something wild. It’s iteration versus inspiration. It’s a little bit of both.
A Hamilton couple convicted of exploiting Pacific migrants have had their convictions quashed after the New Zealand’s Court of Appeal ruled there had been a miscarriage of justice.
Anthony Swarbrick and Christina Kewa-Swarbrick were found guilty on nine representative charges of aiding and abetting, completion of a visa application known to be false or misleading and provision of false or misleading information, at a trial in the Hamilton District Court in February 2023.
A month later, Kewa-Swarbrick, who originally came from Papua New Guinea, was sentenced to 10 months home detention. She completed nine months of that sentence.
Swarbrick served his full eight months of home detention.
In February this year the Court of Appeal found that in Swarbrick’s case, the trial judge’s summing up of the case was “not fair and balanced” leading to a “miscarriage of justice”.
It found the trial judge “undermined the defence” and “the summing up took a key issue away from the jury.”
“Viewed overall, the Judge forcefully suggested what the jury would, and impliedly should, find by way of the elements of the offence. The Judge made the ultimate assessment that was for the jury to make. The trial was unfair to Mr Swarbrick for that reason. We conclude that this resulted in a miscarriage of justice,” the decision states.
It ordered Swarbrick’s convictions be quashed and a retrial.
Christina Kewa-Swarbrick . . . “Compensation . . . will help us rebuild our lives.” Image: RNZ
Charges withdrawn
It came to the same conclusions for Kewa-Swarbrick in April, but the retrial was abandoned after the Crown withdrew the charges in May, leading to the Hamilton District Court ordering the charges against the couple be dismissed.
Immigration NZ said it withdrew the charges after deciding it was no longer in the public interest to hold a re-trial.
The couple, who have since separated, are now investigating redress options from the government for the miscarriage of justice.
“We lost everything. Our marriage, our house. I lost a huge paying job offshore that I couldn’t go back to because we were on bail,” Swarbrick told RNZ.
“It’s had a huge effect, emotionally, financially. We had to take our children out of private school.”
Swarbrick had since been unable to return to his job and now had health issues as a result of the legal battles.
Kewa-Swarbrick said the court case had “destroyed” her life.
“It’s affected my home, my marriage, my children.”
Not able to return to PNG
She had not been able to return to Papua New Guinea since the case because she had received death threats.
“My health has deteriorated.”
The couple estimated they had spent at least $90,000 on legal fees, but their reputation had been severely affected by the case and media reports, preventing them from getting new jobs.
The couple’s ventures came to the attention of Immigration NZ in 2016 and charges were laid in 2018. The trial was delayed until 2023 because of the covid-19 pandemic.
Immigration NZ alleged the couple had arranged for groups of seasonal workers from Papua New Guinea to work illegally in New Zealand for very low wages between 2013 and 2016.
The trial heard the workers were led to believe they would be travelling to New Zealand to work under the RSE scheme in full time employment, receiving an hourly rate of $15 per hour, but ended up being paid well below the minimum wage.
However, Kewa-Swarbrick and Swarbrick argued they always intended to bring the PNG nationals to New Zealand for a cultural exchange and work experience.
“They fundraised $1000 each for living costs. We funded everything else. And when they got here they just completely shut us down,” said Kewa-Swarbrick.
She said it was “a relief” to finally be exonerated.
“The compensation part is going to be the last part because it will help us rebuild our lives.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Your recent paintings are much more abstract and bodily than what I’ve seen of your work. How did this shift in your practice come to be?
It came through thinking about how I wanted to grow and mature as a painter and what kind of painter I really wanted to be. I saw my figurative work as a really good start, but I wanted to be a painter where there’s a bit more ambiguity and mystery and refinement within each piece. And the way I tried to solve that problem was through abstraction and formal experimentation in the studio.
I had this big painting in my studio, and I was taking a detail photo of that. And when I saw the detail, I thought that this, in itself, should be a painting. And when I made that painting, I loved it. Then I refined that painting, and from there I made it bigger, I used more colors, different colors. I started going formally, and I liked what I saw.
I think this body of work is really expansive. It can go in so many directions. What could I do if there’s more shapes on the next one? What could I do if there’s more texture? If there’s an area of way more detail in one section and huge swaths of one color in another, how would that change what people infer from the work?
Is this excitement—about all the different directions this kind of painting can go in—something you felt with prior bodies of work?
This feels more me. It feels like no one else could do this. This is my idea as an artist. And this looks like my work. I like it when people make associations with me and other artists, but no one’s ever made a painting that is exactly like mine. My newest painting is a step towards me.
Elana Bowsher, Green Landscape, 2024, oil on linen, 60 x 70 inches (152.4 x 177.8 cm)
It’s so hard to have the confidence to make a shift like that in your practice. Was it hard to explain to other people when you shifted your practice in this new direction? Did you face any pushback?
Yes, I did. But not with Hannah [Hoffman] and Adrianna [Cole]. They got it right away. But, yeah, there were previous people who I’ve worked with who were like, “Stick to the pelvic bones.”
I think the job of an artist is to just try and keep pushing yourself, and I don’t understand when people don’t do that. It’s like, it’s your job. You want to get better at your job and keep growing.
Definitely.
I always look at my paintings with a very critical eye. I’m sure most artists do. And I think, how do I get better, and how do I become more me as an artist? And because I had the support I care about, I thought, well, I don’t care what other people think. You’ve got to be a little rebellious as an artist, even if it’s quiet rebellion.
How do you balance that career aspect of artmaking with art as a creative pursuit?
I’m very interested in the business side of this world. I like thinking about that part. And I will say, with my show at Hannah Hoffman, I went all in on the creative part.
Elana Bowsher, Pelvis, 2024, oil on linen, 60 x 70 inches (152.4 x 177.8 cm)
I started working on it in February. I made a list of goals of what I wanted, which some of them were just that I wanted the show to have a certain mood. I wanted it to be very sensual and a bit moody. I didn’t know exactly what kind of mood, but I wanted it to feel mature and bodily, and I wanted to be brave. And so, with that set of instructions to myself, I just went all in.
I decided that I would ignore the people, or the part of me that said, “Just do the same work.” And I thought it was actually a prudent business decision, also. For my first actual solo show in LA, to make a big leap, because that shows myself and the viewers that I am growing… So, I thought it was a business and an artistic move. At this point, I’m not far enough in my career to be stuck with one thing. I want to set myself up to have a very free and expansive new body work.
You said that you like thinking about the business side. What do you mean by that?
Right now, it’s an interesting time. I think, to be honest, a lot of artists and gallerists started upping their pricing in a really significant way that wasn’t equating to the amount of shows they had had. So we were just careful with pricing. I think it’s important to not rush that side of things.
Obviously, it’s very scary to have this as your job. You feel like you need to take every opportunity, but actually it’s a good business decision to say no to things. I’ve learned that the hard way. I’ve made decisions based off stress, off monetary stress and thinking other opportunities wouldn’t come. But I think all you can do is learn from that.
And then it’s also so important to find the right fit business-wise. With this show and working with Hannah, it was the exact right fit for both of us. Because she saw the work and responded to it. She watched this body of work grow, especially over the past year, until she offered me a show. There was no forcing a square peg in a round hole or whatever. And that’s lucky.
I’m curious to hear about how this work connects to LA, where you and I both live. I feel like I see so much art that’s more vocal about the fact that it’s by an LA painter. But this feels very otherworldly. The pinks I recognize a bit from LA.
That’s a really good question. It’s funny, because a collector came into my studio, and was like, “That’s so funny that you’re from San Francisco, because these look like Bay Area colors.”
Elana Bowsher, Untitled, 2024, oil on linen, 13 x 10 inches (33 x 25.4 cm)
I really didn’t know what they meant. But then I was thinking about Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. And my painting does have that! The dirty, muddy stuff. Which probably comes from the weather there.
I think what I get from LA is more practical. The cost of living here, while exorbitant, is not as exorbitant as New York. Or the Bay. I think that LA gave me the freedom to have changed bodies of work and explore. We have that freedom a little bit more here.
The color palette, I think it just… I didn’t want 10 different color palettes in this show. Most of the underpainting is brown, and so, even though there’s cooler and warmer paintings, it is all united by this muddy, earthier tone. I think I could probably answer your question better after I get back from New York in the fall, to see if my palette changes.
Elana Bowsher, Dive, 2024, oil on linen, 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
I feel like there is something kind of Alice Waters about your painting.
Yeah. Love her.
What are you going to do in New York?
I am taking over a friend’s studio. I’m going to paint. I’m going to make works on paper. I’m going to experiment with new materials. I’m just going to try and grow and challenge myself. Obviously, I’ve gone to New York a lot, and I always go and see shows there, but even just being there and going to see the type of work that’s there, I hope it will push me further.
You have an interesting narrative with painting, where the artwork is a challenge, a battleground. Can you trace the roots of that back in your life?
I was a very serious ballerina. That’s a very challenging art. You’re never good enough. And I went to very rigorous high school, too.
I think I definitely approach painting as problem-solving. That probably comes from how I grew up. In San Francisco, in the community I was raised in, it was so much about being better, getting better. So I push myself, not even in a stressful way. But there’s always problems that come up in a painting or making a work of art, and so, I think, well, how do you solve those problems? And that’s not a negative thing. I take it as motivation.
I don’t know why you would be an artist if you aren’t willing to face a challenge. It’s already so difficult, so why would I do it if it was not exciting, if it didn’t move me forward as a human? If I didn’t want a challenge, I would choose something else.
Elana Bowsher, Abstract Plume VI, 2024, oil on linen, 50 x 40 inches (127 x 101.6 cm)
If you are so conscious of being critical of your work, is it hard to know when to end?
That’s something I talk with my therapist about a lot. Like you have to have a critical eye as a writer, as a painter, whatever. But hopefully, when you’re working you can let that subside a little bit.
Like being in the painting is one way to emerge on the other side of your self-criticism.
That is actually why I listen to podcasts when I paint. It’s a little bit distracting in a really good way, so it takes away my anxiety, my fully critical brain. It’s a little bit distracting in a really beautiful way. If I am listening to music, it has to be really lyric-heavy music. If it’s too moody or there’s no lyrics, I get too in my head.
What kind of podcasts?
Murder podcasts.
You’re not the first painter that I’ve talked to that listens to true crime while they paint. Actually, have you considered working in any other mediums?
Yeah. I went to UCLA mostly for ceramics and sculpture. I would definitely like to bring that part of my practice back in, to meld it with this new body of work in some way. And ceramics is so much a part of LA and San Francisco art history, so it would really make sense for me. I just have to figure out how to enter that, where it makes sense in conversation with painting.
Did you go to an MFA program?
No.
What was it like trying to be an artist when you were right out of undergrad?
I worked for a couple artists. I worked for Shio Kusaka for about eight months. I feel like all artists should do that, and most artists do, but that was good training. At least, to see how she ran her day. It’s not so much about the technical stuff, but, yeah, speaking of the business stuff—Shio and Jonas [Wood] are so clued into how to be good businesspeople. And then I worked for Liz Glynn, who’s a sculptor, and I did the ceramic part of her projects. And those were really good learning experiences.
After that I decided to immerse myself in the LA art community. I had a full-time job, and I was doing my art in the afternoons and evenings. I felt like I was pushing myself enough that I didn’t want to interrupt that flow and go do an MFA program. I felt like I was meeting enough people and looking at enough work that I was feeding myself.
Where do you see your work going within painting?
I think experimenting with more texture, more depth—those are two things I really want to push for the next paintings. I really liked working at a larger scale. Eight feet long by five feet. Working at that scale feels very exciting.
After I take a good break, I feel very excited about all the areas I could move towards. I’m really excited to incorporate drawing into the new works. I would love to do a works on paper show or a works on cardboard show. How would that work? How would that mess things up in a good way?
Elana Bowsher, Hannah Hoffman, June 29 – August 10, 2024, install view
The Victorian Greens have demanded an independent inquiry into Australian police tactics and alleged excessive use of force today against antiwar protesters at the Land Forces expo in Melbourne.
State Greens leader Ellen Sandell said her party had lodged a formal protest to the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC).
“We have seen police throw flash grenades into crowds of protesters, use pepper spray indiscriminately, and whip people with horse whip,” she also said in a X post.
“These are military-style tactics used by police against protesters who are trying to have their say, as is their democratic right.”
Police used stun grenades and pepper spray and arrested 39 people as officers were pelted with rocks, manure and tomatoes in what has been described as Melbourne’s biggest police operation in two decades, reports Al Jazeera.
The Victorian Greens and I have demanded an independent inquiry into Victoria Police tactics and excessive use of force at the Land Forces protests in Melbourne today. pic.twitter.com/p8iLU073S0
The Land Forces expo protest. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot
The pro-Palestine protesters, also demanding a change in Canberra’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza, clashed with the police outside the arms fair.
Thousands picketed the Land Forces 2024 military weapons exposition. Australia has seen numerous protests against the country’s arms industry’s involvement in the war over the past 11 months.
Protesting for ‘those killed’ in Gaza
“We’re protesting to stand up for all those who have been killed by the type of weapons [in Gaza] on display at the convention,” said Jasmine Duff from organiser Students for Palestine in a statement.
About 1800 police officers have been deployed at the Melbourne Convention Centre hosting the three-day weapons exhibition. Up to 25,000 people had previously been expected to turn up at the protest.
Two dozen people were reported as requiring medical treatment, said a Victoria state police spokesperson in a statement.
Demonstrators also lit fires in the street and disrupted traffic and public transport, while missiles were thrown at police horses.
However, no serious injuries were reported, according to police.
Deputy Greens leader backs protesters
In a speech to the Senate, the deputy federal leader of the Greens, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, offered her solidarity to “the thousands protesting in Melbourne today to say no to the business of war”.
Australian Greens Deputy Leader Senator Mehreen Faruqi . . . [Australia’s] Labor government is complicit in genocide”. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot“[The governing] Labor tries to distract and deflect, but there is no deflection. So long as we have defence contracts with Israeli weapons companies, the Labor government is complicit in genocide, so long as you refuse to impose sanctions on Israel, this Labor government is complicit in genocide, and there are no excuses for inaction,” she said.
“The UK has suspended some arms sales to Israel. Canada today is halting more arms sales to Israel.
“What will it take for [Australia’s] Labor government to take action against the apartheid state of Israel?”
Police used stun grenades and pepper spray and arrested 39 people at today’s Land Forces expo in Melbourne, Victoria. Image: V_Palestine20
Internal WhatsApp messages have surfaced – exchanges between current and former employees of ABC Bullion – which cast doubt over the group’s precious metals storage. Kim Wingerei reports.
As revealed by MWM, economist John Adams has been encouraging ASIC to properly investigate the storage practices of ABC Bullion for several years. ABC is an Australian precious metals trading company which Adam’s says has engaged in misleading storage practices. ASIC did conduct an investigation but found no wrongdoing.
For its part, ABC Bullion strongly denies any wrongdoing and accuses Adams of being “reckless and misleading”.
The discontinued ASIC investigation was brought up by Malcolm Roberts in the Senate last night (Tuesday, September 10), the Senator saying, “ASIC is failing the Australian people.” He highlighted how ASIC spent over nine months and more than $300,000 on an investigation that found nothing, despite the company storing bullion on behalf of clients in a building that may not have been legally occupied and consequently may not have been properly insured.
Roberts also questioned the involvement of Prime Minister Albanese in effectively endorsing ABC Bullion and its parent company, Pallion, at a press conference in October 2023, when, in addition to the ASIC investigation of ABC Bullion, Pallion was the subject of a long-running investigation by the ATO in relation to a GST-scam.
MWM has now been shown WhatsApp messages from the staff at ABC Bullion that show the questionable practices alleged by Adams not only took place but were a well-known practice at the company. According to Adams, the members of the chat group called ‘The Good Place’ consisted of seven current and former ABC Bullion employees who made a series of damning statements about ABC Bullion and its Managing Director, Janie Simpson.
These encrypted messages, spanning approximately 70 pages, were supplied to Adams by an ABC Bullion employee turned whistleblower. In the whistleblower’s 23-page statement provided to ASIC, they confirmed that the encrypted communications were authentic as well as named each participant in the WhatsApp Group chat*.
Specifically, the whistleblower named a former Sales and Business Development Manager, a former accounts manager, and a current National Sales Manager.
Mrs Grout went public in March 2021 via Reddit.
The context of the WhatsApp messages came after an ABC client, Mrs Julie Grout, went public on social media platform Reddit in March 2021, having received a phone call that her physical silver bullion property held in ABC Bullion’s secure storage product did not exist.
This revelation was despite Mrs Grout paying storage fees for over six months and receiving ABC Bullion Metal Account Statements stating that her physical bullion was in storage under ABC Bullion’s custodianship.
In a statement to MWM, the client still recounts the horror she experienced in dealing with ABC Bullion’s storage program:
“My experience with ABC Bullion was horrific. Despite them issuing statements that my property was held in their storage facility, the truth was the complete opposite. I continue to stand by my previous comments that their storage program is a sophisticated scam.”
In response to Mrs Grout going public, current and former ABC Bullion employees made the following admissions in The Good Place:
“Tell the ops dude for a solution. Guy has x amount of metal been paying storage fees and we haven’t stored it for him ever.”
“You know how fucked it will be if got out? The secure storage program is way worse as your charging clients for a service that it is not provided. Its a fraud”
“Just covering for the business XXXX hahaha we know what we do with “secure”. We sell it and order more to replenish, repeat cycle.”
“When I was working in accounting I felt like I’m doing something terribly illegal every month end when stock and storage reports were getting finalised.”
“1. Your charging a big premium to the client without paying premium to buy the metal. 2. Your charging a clients for a service of storing it when your not storing it.”
“Xxxxx throw it straight on Janie. We tried to stop her selling other ppls metal.”
MWM understands that ASIC never interviewed Mrs Grout despite them having access to these revelations.
In response to questions sent to ABC Bullion, a company spokesperson stated that “No grievance or whistleblowing reports have been received from any employee or confidential source at any time, relating to or regarding the allegations made by John Adams.” ABC Bullion also states that they have only ever had one [other] complaint about their storage practices, a claim that was resolved with the client. ABC Bullion’s full statement is available here.
ABC Bullion changes its terms
Shortly after the Reddit post, ABC Bullion appears to have sought to limit the possibility of other storage defaults by altering the length of time that it had to meet redemption requests. They did so quietly without any notification to its clients or even to its own staff.
Specifically, in April 2021, ABC Bullion altered its website, changing the terms of redemption from 48 hours to 10 business days, which remains the stated retrieval time today. (Redemption time is the time from when a client gives notice of physical removal of bullion to when it will be available.)
The change to ABC Bullion’s website was met at the time with derision by employees within The Good Place.
One group member stated that the change “is the dumbest shit ever” while a former ABC Bullion accounts manager stated that ABC Bullion’s leadership was “so sneaky” and that “they are overconfident and pathetic.”
Moving bullion to illegally occupied building?
Our earlier story about ABC Bullion revealed how the company was storing bullion in an illegally occupied building at 2 Lillian Fowler Place in Marrickville and how this took place 3 1/2 weeks after ASIC had commenced its investigation into the company’s practices.
The ASIC investigation was concluded with a finding of “no wrongdoing.” An ASIC spokesperson told MWM that “ASIC does not comment on details of its investigation and enforcement methods.”
According to John Adams, both ABC Bullion and ASIC have questions to answer, given the facts and documentation he uncovered during his investigation, including the messages from the WhatsApp chats as well as the evidence from the local council showing that the Marrickville building did not have a Certificate of Occupation (CoO) until August 27 this year, incidentally the day after our first article was published.
ABC Bullion refutes this but offers no proof or specifics other than stating, “The Occupation Certificate was received prior to any engagement with Michael West media, including your 26 August story.”
John Adams remains dissatisfied with the ASIC investigation, telling MWM:
“These secret encrypted messages show that my 608-page report of alleged misconduct that was lodged with ASIC were not baseless or a conspiracy theory. Any suggestion along these lines is nothing more than a nonsensical ad hominem attack.
“Rather, the truth of the matter is a former ABC Bullion employee turned whistleblower was able to demonstrate a secret network of current and former employees who openly confessed to long-running improper storage practices at ABC Bullion, even calling their own employer as engaging in fraud.”
“ABC Bullion also needs to explain as to why did the company, in April 2021, require an additional 8 business days to retrieve physical bullion from their vaults if everything was in order?”
“Lastly, ASIC needs to explain to Australian taxpayers what did it find when it investigated these WhatsApp messages.”
___
* MWM has decided not to publish the names of the individuals involved.
Clemente Bar/Instagram
Evan Sung
Jodi Hinds
Evan Sung
Evan Sung
UNESCO
Ye Fan/Clemente Bar Instagram
Jodi Hinds
Upcoming Virtual Live Tapings:
“Tell the ops dude for a solution. Guy has x amount of metal been paying storage fees and we haven’t stored it for him ever.”
The change to ABC Bullion’s website was met at the time with derision by employees within The Good Place.