RED EYE ON THE NEWS . . . January 3, 2024

Columbia and NYU are landlords that happen to offer classes
NY Times, 12/10–State lawmakers will unveil legislation on Tuesday that would eliminate enormous property tax breaks for Columbia University and New York University, which have expanded to become among New York City’s top 10 largest private property owners. The bills would require the private universities to start paying their full annual property taxes and for that money to be redistributed to the City University of New York, the largest urban public university system in the country…The amount the schools save annually has soared in recent decades as the two have bought more properties, and the value of their properties has also increased…the city’s wealthiest universities were bigger and richer than ever before, amassing vast real estate portfolios that have drained the city budget…Columbia has grown its physical footprint to become the city’s largest private landowner.

KKKops murder one man and arrest protesters as anger builds in Decatur, AL
SPLC, 11/17–“Over the course of the times we’ve had rallies and demonstrations to protest there’s been nine arrests,” said Aneesah Saafiyah…Her father, Danny Saafiyah Sr… “Our protests haven’t been violent. None have been. No one has been attacking the police or anything like that. It’s just the intimidation tactics that the police use.”

Stephen Clay Perkins, 39, was shot to death in the early hours of Sept. 29 in front of his home…Perkins was hit seven times. He was declared dead at a local hospital…Despite early assurances that the bodycam footage would be released in mid-October, that did not happen. As of today, the family has still not seen it.

Oil in Guyana means profits for ExxonMobil
Der Spiegel, 11/24–"There's the new Guyana! Guyana with oil!,” Nicholas Deygooo calls out as the boat heads towards his artificial island. "It wouldn’t be possible without Exxon!”…Within just a few months, floating dredgers created some 44 acres of new land, roughly the size of 24 football fields. Such a thing has never been seen before in Guyana, the sparsely populated country on South America’s Atlantic coast, sandwiched between Venezuela and Suriname…Enormous oil reserves were discovered off the coast here in 2015, shortly before 200 countries agreed to the Paris Climate Agreement, which was to herald the end of the fossil fuel era. Huge quantities of first-class "light sweet crude” are buried below the ocean floor, highly valued for its low sulfur content and the relative ease with which it can be refined…According to the plans forged by ExxonMobil and Guyana’s government, the country will produce more crude oil per capita than any other country on the planet within five years. Despite the fact that the climate crisis poses a greater threat to Guyana than almost any other country in the world.

Capitalists weigh their anti immigrant racism with their need for workers to exploit
Washington Post, 11/9–National Population Projections estimate that the population will peak at almost 370 million in 2080 before receding to 366 million in 2100, an increase of only 9.7 percent between 2022 and 2100. That is far below the rate the country has grown each decade for most of the nation’s history…Immigrant adults tend to be younger and have higher fertility rates than their native-born counterparts. Demographers say they are key to providing enough people to fill the labor force and balance out the swelling population of older Americans, and avoid the fate of countries such as Japan and Germany, which have among the world’s highest share of people over 65. “These projections make clear that immigration is absolutely essential to the nation’s future population growth,” said William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the data. “It is also necessary to counter the extreme aging we will otherwise experience with the youthfulness of immigrants and their children.”