is safety valve snitching made in china

A “safety valve” is an exception to mandatory minimum sentencing laws. A safety valve allows a judge to sentence a person below the mandatory minimum term if certain conditions are met.  Safety valves can be broad or narrow, applying to many or few crimes (e.g., drug crimes only) or types of offenders (e.g., nonviolent offenders). They do not repeal or eliminate mandatory minimum sentences. However, safety valves save taxpayers money because they allow courts to give shorter, more appropriate prison sentences to offenders who pose less of a public safety threat. This saves our scarce taxpayer dollars and prison beds for those who are most deserving of the mandatory minimum term and present the biggest danger to society.

The Problem:Under current federal law, there is only one safety valve, and it applies only to first-time, nonviolent drug offenders whose cases did not involve guns. FAMM was instrumental in the passage of this safety valve, in 1994. Since then, more than 95,000 nonviolent drug offenders have received fairer sentences because of it, saving taxpayers billions. But it is a very narrow exception: in FY 2015, only 13 percent of all drug offenders qualified for the exception.

Mere presence of even a lawfully purchased and registered gun in a person’s home or car is enough to disqualify a nonviolent drug offender from the safety valve,

Even very minor prior infractions (e.g., careless driving) that resulted in no prison time can disqualify an otherwise worthy low-level drug offender from the safety valve, and

Other federal mandatory minimum sentences for other types of crimes – notably, gun possession offenses – are often excessive and apply to low-level offenders who could serve less time in prison, at lower costs to taxpayers, without endangering the public.

The Solution:Create a broader safety valve that applies to all mandatory minimum sentences, and expand the existing drug safety valve to cover more low-level offenders.

Many federal criminal defense attorneys are not aware of the pitfalls of the federal safety valve provisions. Persons charged with federal drug crimes need to retain an experienced criminal attorney familiar with all aspects of federal criminal law. An inexperienced or unknowing lawyer can expose a client to catastrophic risks. Here is why.

As we are all keenly aware, the federal government’s “war on drugs” is ensnaring hundreds of people with little or no criminal records who are caught up, for a myriad of reasons, with the distribution of drugs. This can range from a person carrying cash for a friend to pay for an airline ticket, to delivering a package to another person in exchange for cash to pay the rent or feed a child. Because of very harsh federal sentencing laws, the smallest players in a drug ring often end up being the most harshly treated. Most of time this is because the leaders of drug operations very often end up cooperating against others – including those below them whose “loyalty” they often gained through fear and threats of harm. Oftentimes, those persons caught on the lowest rungs of a drug conspiracy find themselves with few alternatives because they do not have significant information to provide to federal prosecutors, who retain exclusive control over who gets cooperation departures under the federal sentencing guidelines. As a result, defendants with minor or minimal culpability in a drug operation frequently end up on the receiving end of prosecutions involving tremendously high sentencing guidelines and, more critically, large minimum mandatory sentences.

In many situations, the only relief from mandatory sentences for those with little or no criminal history is the so-called “safety valve.” Many lawyers talk about the safety valve, but very few understand what it is and what it truly entails. It is perhaps the most misunderstood and most difficult opportunity for relief from mandatory minimum sentences and the sentencing guidelines. Federal crimes lawyers who do not specialize in federal criminal defense work run the risk of harming their clients through misguided efforts to gain relief under the safety valve provision.

It is critical to remember that there are only two ways to avoid minimum mandatory sentences upon conviction for a drug trafficking or drug conspiracy offense in federal court. One way is to cooperate with law enforcement and provide “substantial assistance” in the prosecution of others under section 5K1.1 of the guidelines. The other is to seek relief under the safety valve — Section 5C1.2 of the federal sentencing guidelines. (18 U.S.C. § 3553(f)) This section allows a judge to reduce federal sentencing guidelines and ignore mandatory minimum sentences in determining punishment for eligible defendants.

But while understanding the possible benefits of relief under the safety valve is easy, becoming eligible for the relief is more difficult and fraught with peril for the unwary defendant. In fact, a failed attempt to gain “safety valve” relief can have a tremendously negative impact on a federal criminal defendant.

Section 5C1.2 allows guideline reduction and relief from mandatory minimum sentences when 1) a defendant ‘s criminal history is one point or less under the guidelines, and 2) the defendant truthfully discloses before sentencing everything the defendant knows about his own actions and those who participated in the crime with him. While a defendant is not required to testify in court or become a cooperator, the section does requires that he sit down with federal agents and prosecutors and tell them everything he knows about the charged crime. While a defendant won’t be a witness against others in his case, he still must tell on them. Government agents can affirmatively use the defendant’s information against others in the case without any limitation.

For example, if the defendant tells agents that he stored drugs in his brother’s house, agents can use that information to get a search warrant and raid that house for evidence, even though the defendant would never want his brother to be harmed. Moreover, because the defendant would not be a “cooperator,” prosecutors would be free to name him in their search warrant applications and make no effort to hide the source of their information.

Talking to the government in the context of a safety valve interview can potentially expose the client to consequences worse than those faced by cooperating witnesses.

Next, the attorney has to be 100% certain that the client is telling everything he knows and is not holding back information about himself or others. This requires that attorney be sure of what the government knows in the case before allowing a client to meet for a safety valve interview. If the government thinks that the client is lying, they can make the safety valve process impossible by telling the court about their impressions. If the government can prove the client is lying, then a court is free to increase a client’s sentence for obstruction of justice. Even worse, a client may also lose guideline point reductions for accepting responsibility for the offense and become subject to harsh mandatory minimum sentences.

A defense attorney has to know what the evidence the government has before allowing his client to even think about the safety valve. Anything less can expose the client to catastrophic risk.

The bottom line is that defendants considering a “safety valve” reduction had better have counsel who is experienced in federal criminal law and the pitfalls of federal criminal statutes – even those designed to help defendants. Before becoming a defense attorney, I spent almost a decade prosecuting federal criminal cases in U.S. District Court in Maryland. If you have any questions, contact Federal defense attorney Andrew C. White at Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin & White. There is no situation with which we are not familiar.

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As every criminal defense lawyer knows, there are some very draconian minimum mandatory sentences in Federal criminal court.  There are federal minimum mandatory sentences for certain drug offenses, firearm offenses, and for defendants who have certain convictions.   There are two ways to break the minimum mandatory sentence, which then allows a judge to sentence you below the minimum mandatory.  The first is called “substantial assistance.”  Basically, if you snitch and the government wants your information, uses your information, and they determine that it was worthy of a sentence below the minimum mandatory, they can file a substantial assistant motion and if granted by the judge, the minimum mandatory would no longer apply.  You can only get less than the minimum mandatory sentence if the prosecutor files the motion.  If they decide not to file the motion, the judge must sentence you to the minimum mandatory sentence up to the maximum sentence.  But what if you don’t want to snitch? What if you don’t have any information that the government is interested in?  There is one more option that will allow the judge to sentence you below the minimum mandatory sentence: Safety Valve.

The “Safety Valve” provision is a provision of law codified in 18 United States Code §3553(f).  It specifically allows a judge to sentence you below the minimum mandatory required by law.  However, you must be eligible.  There is also a two level reduction in the sentencing guidelines under United States Sentencing Guidelines §2D1.1(b)(17).

A common requirement that disqualifies people is the prior criminal record requirement.  Basically, anything other than a minor one time conviction will disqualify you.  However, old convictions may not count and some minor convictions also do not count.  There is a whole section in federal sentencing guidelines manual that addresses which prior convictions count and how many points are assessed.

In order to get safety valve, you, through your criminal defense attorney, must contact the prosecuting attorney before your sentencing hearing, and tell them that you want to provide them with a statement.  You must be willing to tell them everything you know about the offense, who else was involved, and you must be forthcoming and truthful.  It will be up to the judge to determine whether you meet this requirement.  You should not wait until the last minute either, as the prosecutor has no duty to take your statement within a short period of time before the sentencing hearing and the judge has no duty to continue your sentencing hearing to give you time to provide the government with a statement.

One difference between Safety Valve and Substantial Assistance is that there is no requirement for you to cooperate against anyone else.  So, once your provide the information to the prosecutor, you should become eligible to seek safety valve at your sentencing, without having to cooperate against anyone else.

If you are not convicted under one of these statutes, there is no Safety Valve option.  For example, Safety Valve is not an option for someone convicted under the Aggravated Identity Theft statute that carries a 2 year minimum mandatory sentence consecutive to any underlying sentence.  Similarly, if you were convicted of similar conduct to those eligible for safety valve, but were convicted under a statute not listed above, you still would not be safety valve eligible.  For example, if you were convicted fo possession with intent to distribute cocaine while aboard a vessel subject to United States jurisdiction in violation of 46 U.S.C. app. §1903(a), you would not be eligible for safety valve, even though someone convicted of the same conduct on land would be eligible.

After graduation, Mr. Lasnetski accepted a position as a prosecutor at the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville. During the next 6 1/2 years as a prosecutor, Mr. Lasnetski tried more than 50 criminal trials, including more than 40 felony trials. He was promoted in 2007 to Division Chief of the Repeat Offender Unit.  Mr. Lasnetski was also a full time member of the Homicide Prosecution Team. In 2008, Mr. Lasnetski formed the Law Office of Lasnetski Gihon Law and began defending citizens in criminal court.  He represents clients in both State and Federal criminal courts.

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EPA regulations under Title VI of the Clean Air Act (CAA) are designed to protect the ozone layerozone layerThe region of the stratosphere containing the bulk of atmospheric ozone. The ozone layer lies approximately 15-40 kilometers (10-25 miles) above the Earth"s surface, in the stratosphere. Depletion of this layer by ozone depleting substances (ODS) will lead to higher UVB levels, which in turn will cause increased skin cancers and cataracts and potential damage to some marine organisms, plants, and plastics. The science page (http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/index.html) offers much more detail on the science of ozone depletion. and to provide for a smooth transition away from ozone-depleting substances (ODSODSA compound that contributes to stratospheric ozone depletion. ODS include chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), halons, methyl bromide, carbon tetrachloride, hydrobromofluorocarbons, chlorobromomethane, and methyl chloroform. ODS are generally very stable in the troposphere and only degrade under intense ultraviolet light in the stratosphere. When they break down, they release chlorine or bromine atoms, which then deplete ozone. A detailed list (http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/ods/index.html) of class I and class II substances with their ODPs, GWPs, and CAS numbers are available.).

EPA is also charged with enforcing these regulations. Enforcement actions range from civil fines to criminal prosecutions. Enforcement is performed within EPA by the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

If you suspect or witness unlawful releases of ODS refrigerant or other violations of CAA regulations, report an environmental violation to EPA. See a list of fugitives accused of violating environmental laws, including smuggling ODS and evading arrest, for more information.

The most immediate consequence of possessing illegal CFCs/HCFCs is having them confiscated. The U.S. Customs Service, under its laws and regulations, may confiscate any goods that enter the United States illegally. The U.S. Customs Service can confiscate illegally imported CFCs/HCFCs all the way down the distribution chain. Purchasing your CFCs/HCFCs from a reputable wholesaler or distributor does not relieve you of responsibility. If the CFCs/HCFCs you possess were illegally smuggled into the United States, you could lose the valuable product, even though you paid for it.

There are many other potential consequences of purchasing or possessing illegal CFCs/HCFCs. If the U.S. Customs Service confiscates your CFCs/HCFCs, you might become the subject of an investigation by the Customs Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Investigations of your company might involve interviewing your employees and reviewing your records. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) also might decide to audit you or your company regarding payment of the excise taxes on CFCs.

To make sure you purchase or possess legal CFCs/HCFCs, you should know where the specific brand was produced and the name of the manufacturer. Making sure you have legal material that meets the industry purity standard is good business practice. The U.S. EPA recently identified sales of a product marketed as Cool Penguin “F-12.” Sold in small cans through online retail platforms for motor vehicle air conditioner use, some cans of Cool Penguin consisted of CFC-12, CFC-114, HCFC-142b and HCFC-22, along with non-ozone depleting components. Under current regulations, not only is the import of these cans illegal, no person may sell or distribute, or offer for sale or distribution, any regulated ozone-depleting substance that they know, or have reason to know, was imported illegally (e.g., without appropriate allowances or after the phaseout date for that chemical). For more information on the phaseout of ODS, please visit EPA ODS Phaseout.

Before you buy CFCs/HCFCs, you should ask the seller for documents of prior ownership of the product (and a laboratory analysis of the quality). Investigating the source of the material and the chain of ownership is your responsibility. If the material was imported, you should know when, where, and from whom it was imported. You also should ensure that the packaging for the material is appropriate. Illegally imported refrigerant is sometimes packaged in wrong size containers or fixed with improper valves. Remember, if you purchase or possess CFCs/HCFCs that entered the United States illegally, the U.S. Customs Service can confiscate the product.

The following is a partial list of recent, major completed cases. Additional information on other cases, including older ones, can be found at EPA"s Enforcement website here.

Schnitzer Steel Inc. has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $1,550,000 and implement compliance measures worth over $1,7000,00 to prevent the release of ozone-depleting refrigerants. The settlement resolves alleged violations of the Clean Air Act at 40 scrap metal recycling facilities throughout the United States. Schnitzer is also required to implement an EPA-approved Refrigerant Recovery Management Program and perform an environmental mitigation project involving the destruction of all R-12 in scrapped appliances and automobiles received at its facilities.

JTR handles the maintenance, service, repair, and disposal of appliances containing ozone-depleting refrigerants and their substitutes. EPA alleged that on at least two separate occasions, JTR knowingly vented R-22 and R-410a refrigerant during servicing of those appliances. Under the settlement, JTR will pay a $28,919 civil penalty and resolve the alleged violations.

Derichebourg Recycling USA Inc. has reached a settlement for Clean Air Act Violations at 10 scrap metal recycling facilities in Texas and Oklahoma. The federal complaint alleges that Derichebourg failed to recover refrigerant from appliances and motor vehicle air conditioners before disposal. Under the settlement, Derichebourg will pay a $442,500 civil penalty, halt any further release of ozone-depleting refrigerants, and implement a Refrigerant Recovery Management Program at its 10 U.S. facilities.

Connecticut Scrap, LLC and their five related scrap metal companies in Connecticut and Rhode Island agreed to pay a penalty of $160,000 and take important steps to comply with the Clean Air Act. These measures included certifying that Connecticut Scrap, LLC is complying with the regulations designed to limit releases of refrigerants used in air conditioning systems and cooling equipment that harm the ozone layer and climate system.

American Fire Technologies (AFT) has agreed to pay a penalty of $57,397 for importing 2,825 kg of used Halon 1301, a Class I ozone-depleting substance (ODS), without prior approval from the EPA consistent with the petition requirements.

AKE Safety has agreed to pay a penalty of $52,345 for violating the halon emissions reduction requirements by releasing Halon 1211 during promotional demonstrations and for failing to properly label fire extinguishers containing Halon 1211. AKE Safety has corrected the violations by ceasing to perform demonstrations that release Halon 1211 to the environment and properly labeling its products.

Southeastern Grocers Inc., owners and operators of regional grocery store chains BI-LO LLC, Winn-Dixie Stores Inc., Fresco y Más and Harveys Supermarket, have agreed to reduce emissions of ozone-depleting gases from refrigeration equipment at 576 stores under a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. Under the settlement, finalized January 21, 2020, Southeastern Grocers will spend an estimated $4.2 million over the next three years to reduce their company-wide average leak rate to 17% and upgrade fifteen stores to advanced refrigerants that have lower global warming potentials and do not deplete the ozone layer. The company will also pay a $300,000 civil penalty.

Trident Seafoods Corporation has agreed to reduce emissions of ozone-depleting substances from refrigeration equipment on its vessels, under a proposed settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Justice to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. Under the settlement, Trident will spend up to $23 million to reduce refrigerant leaks from refrigerators and other equipment, use non-ozone depleting refrigerants, and improve company-wide compliance. The company will also pay a $900,000 civil penalty.

Mahmoud Mohamed Alkabbani, the owner of USA Car Parts, entered into an agreement with a Chinese company to purchase R-22, which was packaged in cylinders bearing counterfeit “Glacier” trademarks. The 2013 contract with the Chinese company listed the product as R-134a – which does not deplete the ozone layer – but a second, secret agreement called for the Chinese company to actually sell R-22 to Alkabbani.

Terminix International Company LP and U.S. Virgin Islands operation Terminix International USVI LLC were sentenced for violations of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands pest control company illegally applied fumigants containing methyl bromide in multiple residential locations in the U.S. Virgin Islands, including the condominium resort complex in St. John where a family of four fell seriously ill in March 2015 after the unit below them was fumigated. According to the plea recommendation, TERMINIX LP and TERMINIX, USVI are to pay a total of $10 million in criminal fines, community service, and restitution payments. Under the agreed recommendation, TERMINIX, USVI will pay $4 million in fines and $1 million in restitution to the EPA for response and clean-up costs at the St. John resort. TERMINIX LP will pay a fine of $4 million and will perform community service related to training commercial pesticide applicators in fumigation practices and a separate health services training program.

U.S. Seafoods of Seattle will implement enhanced leak detection practices and replace freezer equipment to address violations of the Clean Air Act resulting from releases of ozone-depleting substances from two of its fish processing vessels in Alaska. EPA investigators discovered that in 2012 the freezers on two vessels owned by U.S. Seafoods -- the F/V Seafreeze Alaska and the F/V Alliance -- were leaking an ozone-depleting refrigerant called R-22. EPA found that the vessel owners and operators failed to repair the leaks in a timely manner and failed to confirm that the freezers were not leaking when finally repaired. U.S. Seafoods will pay a $135,000 penalty, replace some or all of its current R-22 freezers with units that use ammonia, and retire those not replaced. The company will also implement enhanced leak detection and repair practices.

Under a settlement with the EPA, two pesticide distributors, Superior-Angran LLC and Superior Angran Caribbean Inc. of Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, were required to come into compliance with the Clean Air Act and federal pesticides law. The two companies also agreed to pay a $210,000 fine and provide professional training for pesticide applicators. From 2013 to 2015, Superior-Angran purchased, stored and sold two pesticides containing methyl bromide without complying with the Clean Air Act’s ozone-depleting substances reporting and recordkeeping requirements. Superior Angran Caribbean exported the same two pesticides containing methyl bromide without complying with the Clean Air Act’s ozone-depleting substances reporting requirements.

Shannon Wayne Harrold, 48, of Glenford, Ohio, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 54 months in prison and ordered to pay $29,045 in restitution for violating the Clean Air Act by cutting the tubing on air conditioning units he was stealing, which released a regulated refrigerant into the environment. In August and September 2015, Harrold engaged in a scheme to steal air conditioner units in order to sell the copper and parts from the units at scrap yards. He targeted suburbs in Central Ohio, stealing several units and dismantling them on site. “Refrigerants deplete the ozone layer which protects people from the harmful effects of ultraviolet radiation such as skin cancer, so it’s imperative that they are handled properly and in accordance with the law,” said Jeffrey Martinez, Special Agent in Charge of EPA’s criminal enforcement program in Ohio. “Through the illegal venting of refrigerants and the sale of stolen air conditioner parts, the defendant violated the Clean Air Act, which protects public health and clean air. EPA and its law enforcement partners are committed to the investigation and prosecution of illegal conduct that jeopardizes public safety.”

The national grocery store chain Trader Joe’s Company has agreed to reduce emissions from refrigeration equipment at 453 of its stores under a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and the EPA to resolve alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. Under the settlement, Trader Joe’s agreed to spend an estimated $2 million over three years to reduce coolant leaks from refrigerators and other equipment and improve company-wide compliance. The company also agreed to pay a $500,000 civil penalty.

Enviro-Safe Refrigerants, Inc., of Pekin, Illinois, has agreed to pay a $300,000 civil penalty and cease marketing and sale of unapproved flammable hydrocarbon refrigerants as substitutes for ODS. Enviro-Safe allegedly violated CAA requirements through the marketing and sale of two flammable hydrocarbon refrigerant products, ES 22a and ES 502a, as substitutes for ODS without providing the requisite information to EPA for review and approval. EPA has not approved any flammable hydrocarbon as a replacement for ODS in systems not specifically designed for flammable refrigerants and has warned that use of flammable refrigerants in those systems presents a risk of fire or explosion.

A settlement between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Navy will help reduce potentially harmful discharges of ozone-depleting substances at the Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. Under the settlement, the Navy will pay an $83,900 penalty for violations of the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The Clean Air Act violations pertained to regulations designed to reduce discharges of ozone-depleting substances used as coolants in air conditioning units. EPA alleged that the facility did not perform leak rate calculations when it serviced the units. The Navy has implemented improved training and recordkeeping to help ensure proper servicing of equipment.

Martin C. Eldridge III, 35, of Columbus, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 31 months in prison for violating the Clean Air Act when he cut the tubing on air conditioning units he was stealing and released HCFC-22 into the environment. Eldridge and others stole at least 49 air conditioner units between August and October 2013 in order to sell the copper and parts from the units at scrap yards. When he cut the tubing that connected the air conditioner to the business or residence, a refrigerant known as HCFC-22 was released. Following prison time, Eldridge will be under court supervision for 12 months during which time he must perform 200 hours of community service.

Metal Dynamics, a Detroit scrap metal and iron recycling company, has agreed to pay $110,000 in penalties and invest $400,000 to resolve allegations that it violated the CAA. Under the settlement, Metal Dynamics agreed to implement a CAA compliance program at its facility to eliminate the harmful release of ODS and has also agreed to modify its torch cutting of metals to keep harmful particulate emissions at or below legal limits.

Costco Wholesale Corporation has agreed to cut its emissions of ODS and greenhouse gases from leaking refrigeration equipment at more than half of its stores nationwide. Costco will pay $335,000 in penalties for federal CAA violations and will fix refrigerant leaks and make other improvements at 274 of its stores, which EPA estimates will cost about $2 million over the next three years. Costco violated the CAA by failing to promptly repair leaks of a hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) refrigerant, HCFC-22, between 2004 and 2007. Costco also failed to keep adequate records of the servicing of its refrigeration equipment to prevent harmful leaks.

eAir, LLC (eAir), a Florida corporation with its headquarters in Miami, was convicted and sentenced in federal court in Miami in connection with the illegal sale and distribution of refrigeration equipment that contained restricted ozone depleting substances, in violation of the federal Clean Air Act. eAir pled guilty for knowingly violating a requirement and rule relating to stratospheric ozone protection through the sale and distribution in interstate commerce of a product manufactured on or after January 1, 2010 containing the refrigerant gas HCFC-22. eAir was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay a $200,000 criminal fine. In addition, as a special condition of probation, eAir was ordered to implement and enforce a comprehensive Environmental Compliance Plan, to pay community service in the amount of $75,000, and to reimburse the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for costs incurred in storing illegal merchandise.

In a settlement agreement with the United States, Safeway, a national grocery store chain, has agreed to pay a $600,000 civil penalty and implement a corporate-wide plan to significantly reduce ODS emissions from refrigeration equipment at 659 of its stores nationwide, estimated to cost approximately $4.1 million. The settlement involves the largest number of facilities ever under the CAA’s regulations governing refrigeration equipment.

Alexander Morrissette, age 27, of Monroe, Georgia was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison after having pleaded guilty to two counts of knowingly releasing ozone-depleting substances into the environment. The term of imprisonment is to be followed by 3 years of supervised release. Morrissette was ordered to make restitution of $178,846.81, the amount of money needed to repair several commercial air conditioners illegally harvested for scrap metal. Randall Scott Wimpey, a Co-Defendant, age 31, of Snellville, Georgia, was previously sentenced to 15 months in federal prison.

Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Inc. (BIV), has agreed to pay a $300,000 civil penalty to settle a series of alleged violations of the CAA at its veterinary health products facility in St. Joseph, Missouri. The complaint alleges that the facility’s annualized leak rates of one or more of its industrial refrigeration systems exceeded 35 percent on one or more occasions during a five-year period. It also alleges BIV failed to perform leak testing and follow-up verification tests, develop retrofit or retirement plans for leaking equipment, complete retrofit or replacement of leaking equipment, and maintain proper service and maintenance records for its equipment. BIV has also agreed to replace refrigeration equipment at its Fort Dodge, Iowa, facility, switching older equipment that use ODS for new units that do not use ODS.

Brendan Clery was sentenced to 18 months in prison for illegally importing HCFC-22 into the United States. He was also ordered to pay a $40,000 criminal fine and forfeit illegal proceeds exceeding $900,000. Clery illegally smuggled approximately 20,460 cylinders of restricted HCFC-22 with a market value of $1,438,270. At no time did Clery, or his company Lateral Investments, hold unexpended consumption allowances that would have allowed them to legally import the refrigerant. This case is part of a larger criminal investigation known as "Operation Catch-22."

On September 4, 2009, Victor Diaz, doing business as Reliance Trading Company, attempted to illegally import two hundred 30 pound cylinders of HCFC-22 from Mexico into the United States, through California"s Calexico East Port of Entry. CBP officials said that when Diaz was asked for his permit to import R-22, through a broker Diaz supplied CBP officials with documents unrelated to the importation of R-22. CBP officials added that prior to this incident; Diaz and Reliance Trading Company were told by CBP officials at another border crossing station that prior permission from U.S. EPA is required for the legal importation of R-22.

Beginning in early August 2008, Danny and Sabrina Arnot, Beard, Joyner, and a fourth defendant, targeted businesses with commercial-sized air conditioners in Stephens, Hall, Franklin, and Hart Counties. Arnot, working with his wife or with his other accomplices, Beard and Joyner, dismantled the air conditioning units so that they could steal the copper and aluminum parts. To steal the copper parts, they had to cut a copper coil in each unit which released HCFC-22 into the atmosphere. The defendants were sentenced as follows: Arnot was sentenced to time served, 36 months probation, to perform 240 hours of community service and to pay $1,300 special assessment. Beard was sentenced to time served, 36 months probation, to perform 240 hours of community service and to pay $1,000 special assessment. Joiner was sentenced to time served, 36 months probation, to perform 240 hours of community service and to pay $200 special assessment. All three share $13,000 restitution to be paid to the victim who is the owner of Dunlap Stainless located in Gainesville, Georgia.

The city of Tacoma, Washington, will pay nearly $225,000 in penalties for the release of CFCs stemming from its refrigerated appliance disposal service, according to a consent decree lodged by the U.S. Department of Justice on behalf of EPA. The city will also pay nearly $300,000 for new pollution-reduction projects in Tacoma.

Mar-Cone Appliance Parts Co. (Marcone), a Missouri corporation with its headquarters in St. Louis, was convicted and sentenced today in connection with the illegal receipt, purchase, and sale of ozone-depleting refrigerant gas that had been smuggled into the United States contrary to the Clean Air Act. Marcone pled guilty to knowingly receiving, buying, selling and facilitating the transportation, concealment, and sale of approximately 100,898 kilograms of HCFC-22, which had been illegally smuggled into the United States contrary to the Clean Air Act. Marcone was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay a $500,000 criminal fine. Marcone was also ordered to perform community service by making a $400,000 payment to the Southern Environmental Enforcement Training Fund, a not-for-profit training organization. In addition, as a special condition of probation, Marcone was ordered to implement and enforce a comprehensive Environmental Compliance Plan. Finally, Marcone was ordered to forfeit to the United States $190,534.70, which represents proceeds received as a result of the crime.

Dov Shellef, a businessman from Great Neck, New York, was convicted on 86 counts of conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service in the collection of approximately $1.9 million in excise taxes due on sales of CFC-113. The jury also convicted Shellef for subscribing to false corporate tax returns, wire fraud, and money laundering. Shellef faces a maximum prison sentence of five years for the conspiracy, three years for the false corporate tax return, 20 years for the wire fraud convictions, and 20 years for the money laundering convictions.

IN THE EARLY 21st century — a decade into the experiment of the public internet, which was introduced in 1991, and with Facebook and Twitter not yet glimmers of data on the horizon — a new phrase slipped into Chinese slang: renrou sousuo, literally translated as “human flesh search.” The wording was meant to be whimsical, suggesting the human-powered equivalent of what were then fairly novel computer search engines. (In English, the nuances are lost; no zombie inflection was intended.) A request would go out for wangmin (web citizens), or in this case the more intimate wangyou (web friends, internet users sharing a common passion or cause), to come together as a kind of ad hoc detective agency in order to ferret out information about objects and figures of interest. It was just an outlet for fandom. But soon attention turned toward supposed wrongdoers, those thought to exhibit moral deficiency, from a low-level government official spotted flashing a designer watch far above his pay grade, hinting at corruption, to, more horrifically, a woman in a “crush video” — a fringe genre of erotica that traffics in animal cruelty — wielding stilettos to stomp a kitten to death. Once these offenders were identified and their personal details exposed online, they were hounded, verbally flogged and effectively expelled from the community.

To a Western observer, this was human flesh indeed: a pound of it, exacted. Media coverage in the West framed renrou sousuo as an exotic phenomenon, almost unheard-of outside China. It couldn’t happen here. When The New York Times ran a feature on it in 2010, one commenter wrote, “I am surprised by the intensity of the searches and I think this is an Eastern trait. Most people in the West can’t be bothered, we are too individualistic and well served by existing mechanisms” — even though English already had its own word, “doxxing,” for such online revelations, with roots in 1990s computer hacker discussion boards. Weiwei Shen, a founding editor of the Tsinghua China Law Review, made a similar, if more subtle, argument in a 2016 essay, noting that the human flesh search was a “grass-roots” effort and thus far more likely to arise in “collectivist” China, as opposed to go-it-alone America.

So much has been written about cancel culture in the past year that weariness sets in just reading the words. What it is, what to call it and whether it even exists are all in dispute. The term is shambolically applied to incidents both online and off that range from vigilante justice to hostile debate to stalking, intimidation and harassment. Any of the following might qualify: outcries last summer over cellphone video footage of a white tech executive yelling expletives at a Filipino-American family at a restaurant in California (he reportedly resigned from his company); speculations that a pop star’s father was secretly a C.I.A. agent and thus an accomplice to colonialism and genocide; editors at The New York Times and The New York Review of Books stepping down after running controversial pieces that provoked dissent from their own staff; the suspension of a white professor who used a Chinese word in class that sounded like a racial slur in English; a beauty YouTuber shedding close to three million subscribers in a single weekend after a colleague accused him of betrayal and emotional manipulation (he has since recouped these losses and currently claims an audience of more than 23 million); and far-right conspiracists dredging up an anti-Trump filmmaker’s old, puerilely offensive tweets (he was fired by Disney, then rehired eight months later).

Once we spoke of “call-out culture,” but the time for simply highlighting individual blunders for the edification of a wider audience, as in a medieval morality play, seems to have passed. Those who embrace the idea (if not the precise language) of canceling seek more than pat apologies and retractions, although it’s not always clear whether the goal is to right a specific wrong and redress a larger imbalance of power — to wreak vengeance as a way of rendering some justice, however imperfect; to speak out against those “existing mechanisms” that don’t serve us so well after all; to condemn an untrustworthy system and make a plea for a fairer one — or just the blood-sport thrill of humiliating a stranger as part of a gleeful, baying crowd. Some prefer the more sober term “accountability culture,” although this has its own complications, having been heretofore deployed in the corporate and public sector to support the need for a hierarchy or external authority to hold employees and institutions to their commitments, with an eye to boosting results: a measure of productivity, not behavior or values.

To say “cancel culture,” then, is already to express a point of view, implicitly negative. Although cancel culture is not a movement — it has neither leaders nor membership, and those who take part in it do so erratically, maybe only once, and share no coherent ideology — it’s persistently attributed to the extremes of a political left and a fear-mongering specter of wokeness, itself a freighted term, originally derived and then distorted from the Black vernacular “woke,” which invokes a spirit of vigilance to see the world as it really is. (The experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley may have been the first to introduce “woke” to the mainstream as an adjective, in his 1962 essay on Black idiom, “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” in which he noted how words change with the color of the people who use them: “At one time, the connotations of ‘jive’ were all good; now they are bad, or at least questionable.”) Yet cancellations come just as easily from those aligned in thinking with the far right: Recall how, in 2014, a group of video gamers pressured corporations — under the guise of championing ethics in journalism — to withdraw advertising dollars from media outlets that had criticized lack of diversity in the game industry, and at the same time terrorized female gamers and writers with rape and death threats.

To some, this very amorphousness is the danger, making cancel culture a culture in the microbial sense, of a controlling environment — a “stifling atmosphere,” in the words of “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which appeared in Harper’s in July as a call to arms against the perceived new dogmatism (without ever naming it), signed by 153 academic and artistic luminaries, some of whom themselves had been mobilized against (i.e., canceled) for expressing what the letter characterized, somewhat abstractly, as “good-faith disagreement.” Many have dismissed this letter, mostly on the grounds of: It was ever thus. Cancel culture doesn’t exist because it has always existed, in rumors, whispers and smear campaigns, and censorship and retribution are far worse when sponsored or tacitly sanctioned by the state, as with the imprisonment and kangaroo-court convictions of those exercising free speech under totalitarianism, or the blacklisting and barring from employment of suspected Communists in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, a collaborative effort between the House Un-American Activities Committee and an eager-to-please private sector. The speed, sloppiness and relative anonymity of social media haven’t created a radically new strain of bullying; they just facilitate and exacerbate an old one. And some would argue that it’s not bullying at all, but the opposite: a means to combat abusive behavior and exploitation of power, and a necessary corrective to the failure of the state to protect its citizens.

Left unanswered is what explains the urgent need to not just call out but condemn — the resurgence of ancient beliefs in scapegoating and human sacrifice; the shift in American society from guilt to shame; the evolution of a digital form of carnival and misrule as a safety valve to let out all our pent-up rage — and why, even as pundits decry cancel culture as a mob running amok, the powers that be somehow remain in place, unchanged.

“CANCEL” IS A consumerist verb, almost always involving a commodity or transaction. Readers cancel magazine subscriptions; studio heads cancel TV shows; bank tellers cancel checks to show that they’ve been exhausted of value. The journalist Aja Romano, writing in Vox, tracked down what may be the first popular reference to canceling people instead of things in Mario van Peebles’s 1991 cult movie, “New Jack City,” when the crime boss Nino Brown slams his girlfriend down on a table — she’s protesting his fondness for murder — and sloshes champagne over her, saying, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.” The rapper 50 Cent reprised Nino’s line in his 2005 hit “Hustler’s Ambition,” and Lil Wayne did the same five years later in “I’m Single.” As this informal usage entered broader slang (again, like “woke” and much of contemporary American lexicon, taken from Black culture), it fused with the more common meaning of the verb and became an imperative to revoke allegiance. In perhaps the earliest instance of cancel culture to include the term, in 2014, the official Twitter account of the Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report” posted a joke that could be taken as a denigration of Asians, and the activist Suey Park responded with the hashtag #CancelColbert — only to end up getting doxxed and canceled herself, with so much vitriol directed her way that she fled her home and started communicating with burner phones.

In “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (2020), the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson reaches back to the Book of Leviticus to examine one of the mechanisms underlying hierarchy and the insistence of exclusion: the scapegoat, or sa’ir la’aza’zel — a literal goat, ceremonially endowed by the high priest with “all the guilt and misdeeds” of the community and driven out into the wilderness. The Greeks practiced a kindred rite, using a human sacrifice, the pharmakos, who was beaten and promenaded in the streets before being exiled, which was considered a kind of death. (Some historians believe that executions took place as well, but others find the evidence inconclusive.) This was at once diversion and atonement, a way for a dominant group to label an “other” as evil and cast that evil out, as if it would then no longer abide within them and they could imagine themselves “free of blemish,” Wilkerson writes.

The modern scapegoat performs an equivalent function, uniting otherwise squabbling groups in enmity against a supposed transgressor who relieves the condemners of the burden of wrestling with their own wrongs. What is lost, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues in “A Secular Age” (2007), is the ambivalent, numinous duality of the sacrificial victim. (“Pharmakos” comes from “pharmakon,” which is both itself and its opposite: medicine and poison at once, healer and killer.) No longer is it acknowledged, however tacitly or subconsciously, that the scapegoat, whether guilty or not of a particular offense, is ultimately a mere stand-in for the true culprits responsible for a society gone askew (ourselves and the system we’re complicit in). Instead, the scapegoat is demonized, forced to bear and incarnate everyone’s guilt, on top of their own.

These expulsions are necessarily public, which is something of a historical regression: When the colonial theocracy of 17th-century America gave way to the Enlightenment and democracy, penalties as spectacle — whippings, arms and legs trapped in stockades and pillories, Hester Prynne’s scarlet A — fell out of fashion and, as the British journalist Jon Ronson notes in “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” (2015), were largely abandoned as a government-mandated punishment, although they continued in extrajudicial form in the lynchings of Black people, from Reconstruction through the 1960s. In keeping with the American ideal of self-reliance, citizens were expected to be attuned to their own sense of guilt. The 20th-century American anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing about cultural differences between Japan and the West, distinguished guilt as a legacy of Judaism and Christianity, suffering from the internal knowledge of having failed to live “up to one’s own picture of oneself,” versus shame as the fear of external criticism and ridicule. Guilt guides conduct even in the absence of social sanctions, when nobody knows you’ve done anything wrong; shame “requires an audience,” a social network, to force you to change.

But guilt still derives from communally agreed-upon standards, be they manifest as religion, ideology, a legal code or just the rudimentary ethics without which no group can survive. The increasing atomization of American society in the 21st century has brought an unmooring from such consensus. As standards have shifted, some have grasped for stone only to find a handful of dust. If you can’t trust others to follow their conscience or even have one, and you’ve lost faith in the ability or desire of institutions to uphold what is good — if you no longer believe that we live in a city upon a hill, that our society is just or even aspires to be — there may be no recourse (short of revolution) but to scold and menace, like modern-day Puritans. The act of shaming draws a neat line between good and bad, us and them. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the etymology of “cancel” leads to the Latin “cancelli,” derived from “cancri”/“cancer,” a lattice or grid of crossed bars: a barrier, in other words, linked by dissimilation to “carcer” (prison), and in its early adaptation to English taken literally, as a crossing out, lines drawn through words on paper.

THE SHEER ARBITRARINESS of some of the targets of cancel culture — singled out among many who might have committed comparable sins, often neither public figures nor possessors of institutional power but utterly ordinary people before their swift, simultaneous elevation-degradation to infamy — lends a ritualistic distance to the attacks, enabling a casual cruelty, as in the American writer Shirley Jackson’s infamous short story “The Lottery” (1948), when the villagers qualmlessly turn on one of their randomly selected own. The French philosopher René Girard, in “Violence and the Sacred” (1979), notes that “the very fact of choosing a victim bestows on him the aura of exteriority … the surrogate victim is not perceived as he really was — namely, as a member of the community like all the others.” To justify vindictiveness, you can’t recognize yourself in those you denounce; you have to believe, as Taylor writes, that they “really deserve it.”

Critics of cancel culture see parallels in the Jacobins of the French Revolution in the 18th century, the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the estimated 600,000 to 2 million private citizens — out of a population of around 17 million — who acted as part-time informants for the Stasi, the East German secret police, from 1950 to 1990. None are proper analogues, for all derived their punitive power from the state. Allusions are also made to the Spanish Inquisition, which persecuted heresy from the 15th century to the 19th, and the Salem witch trials in late 17th-century Massachusetts, both a joint effort of church and state, when there was little distinction between them. These examples are relevant only in showing how the archaic use of violence to affirm purity has evolved to serve latter-day ideologies. In France, the spree at the guillotine was rationalized as the pursuit of good: a Reign of Terror to yield a Republic of Virtue. (The revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, who famously declared in 1794 that without terror, “virtue is impotent,” supported the future elimination of the death penalty even as he ordered executions by the thousands.) Mao Zedong embroidered the same theme in a letter to his wife in 1966, invoking “great disorder under heaven” in order to achieve “great order.” And while some Stasi informants may have reported on their friends and neighbors out of fear, researchers have determined that most did so to safeguard the state’s righteousness and, by extension, their own.

Compared to these authoritarian regimes, however, cancel culture is rudderless, a series of spontaneous disruptions with no sequential logic, lacking any official apparatus to enact or enforce a policy or creed. If anything, it’s anti-authoritarian: Historically, Westerners do not approve of informing on behalf of the government and its enforcers, giving the act shaded names like “snitch” and “narc,” the latter explicitly defined in an 1859 British slang dictionary as someone who “breaks faith.” Children are advised not to be tattletales. (We’re more comfortable with whistle-blowers, who speak out against the powerful.)

What cancellations offer instead is a surrogate, warped-mirror version of the judicial process, at once chaotic yet ritualized. It’s a paradox reminiscent of the mayhem in medieval Catholic traditions of carnival and misrule, wherein the church and governing bodies were lampooned and hierarchy upended — all without actually threatening the prevailing hegemony, and even reaffirming it. “Misrule always implies the Rule that it parodies,” the American-Canadian anthropologist Natalie Zemon Davis has written; the very excess and occasional destructiveness of the revelries gave testament to the wisdom of those normally in charge. Davis suggests that these festivals offered “alternatives to the existing order.” But why would the church, which presumably brooked no alternatives, condone such subversion? From its perspective, carnival was a convenient catharsis: a brief hiatus from the moral strictures of daily life, when the populace was allowed to indulge their mutinous impulses and expend their restive energies, the better to return to compliance on the morrow.

It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures — high-level politicians, corporate titans — let alone institutions. Those most vulnerable to harm tend to be individuals previously unknown to the public, like the communications director who was fired in 2013 after tweeting, from her personal account, an ill-thought-out joke about Africa, AIDS and her own white privilege (she landed another job six months later) or the data analyst who was fired last spring after tweeting, in the wake of protests against the death of George Floyd in police custody, a study that suggested that riots depressed rather than increased Democratic Party votes (his employer has denied that the tweet was the cause for his dismissal) — although both situations reveal less about the impact of cancel culture than the precariousness of at-will employment, in which one can be fired for any reason, whether legitimate or not. The more power someone has, the less affected they are: The British writer J.K. Rowling, one of the signatories of the Harper’s letter, has been publicly excoriated in the past year for expressing her views on gender identity and biological sex, but people continue to buy her books; disgraced high-profile comedians who’ve returned to the stand-up circuit, not always repentant, have been rewarded with sold-out shows. When the mighty do fall, it often takes years, coupled with behavior that’s not just immoral but illegal. The studio head Harvey Weinstein was indicted for crimes, not canceled.

In a 1972 conversation with the French theorist Michel Foucault, the French philosopher Benny Lévy (then using the nom de guerre Pierre Victor) pointed to the example, at the end of World War II, of “those young women whose heads were shaved because they had slept with the Germans” — while a number of those who had actively collaborated with the Nazis went unpunished: “So the enemy was allowed to exploit these acts of popular justice; not the old enemy — the Nazi occupation forces … but the new enemy, the French bourgeoisie.” In keeping a narrow focus on small-scale violations of the social contract, cancel culture has uncomfortable kinship, as the American essayist Meghan Daum has written, to the “broken windows” policing put into practice starting in the 1980s, based on a theory by the American criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson that posited that cracking down on minor crimes would prevent larger ones. Instead, it led to the scourge of stop-and-frisk, in which ordinary people, innocent of a crime and disproportionately of color, were routinely and repeatedly treated like suspects and searched, manhandled and interrogated as such.

The trespasses cited in cancel culture often do encapsulate and typify greater ills, as when a white woman called the police on a Black birder in Central Park last spring and falsely claimed that he was threatening her. Holding these acts up as evidence of the dailiness of inequity might be revelatory for some and even budge the needle on how people think of racism, misogyny and class oppression in America today. As the British sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote, when crowds muster against perceived threats to public mores — in what we call a moral panic — those threats, while exaggerated, are still potent as “warning signs of the real, much deeper and more prevalent condition.” But moral panics were traditionally engineered by those in power to reassert the need for modes of control, or by commercial interests to profit off the attention that comes via scandal. They were forms of manipulation, diverting public ire from structural injustice toward a specific ostracized group as an embodiment of evil, or folk devils, a coinage by Cohen in the late 1960s. (Fear of cancel culture is itself a moral panic — a moral panic over moral panics, one orchestrated on high over those generated extempore below.)

CANCEL CULTURE MAY have reached its apotheosis this September when a professor of history and Africana studies at George Washington University admitted online that she was white, not Black, as she had been posing for her entire career. “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself,” she declared, but then added, “What does that mean? I don’t know,” nullifying the entire premise. Self-abasement was tendered, but no concrete action. She affirmed the importance of cancel culture as “a necessary and righteous tool for those with less structural power to wield against those with more power,” yet insisted, “I can’t fix this,” as if she could embrace accountability without actually doing anything to alter her actions; as if she had no power to remove herself from power. Only after the university began investigating her public statement did she resign from her tenured position, nearly a week later.

On Twitter, people speak scoffingly of canceling themselves, as a joke or a pre-emptive measure, since presumably any of us could be canceled at any time, living in our glass Instagrams, leaving a spoor of digitized gaffes behind us. (The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan eerily anticipated cancel culture in his 1967 book “The Medium Is the Massage” — the title was a typesetter’s error that McLuhan embraced — expressing concern, before the first resource-sharing computer network was even completed, about the “womb-to-tomb surveillance” made possible by “the electrically computerized dossier bank — that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes.’”) There’s the tacit hope that if we have the grace to cancel ourselves first, our ostracism will be temporary, a mere vacation from social media. Absolution is reduced to performance, a walk with bowed head through jeers and splattered mud. Instead of retreating into introspection and actually examining our behavior, we submit to punishment and imagine ourselves thereby purged of both sin and the need to do anything about it. We emerge clean, or so we let ourselves believe.

But what is the point of all this flagellation, of self and others, if meanwhile the structures that enable wrongdoing continue to creak and loom, doing business as usual? The scapegoat was not always a marginal figure. Consider Oedipus, the tyrannos-pharmakos of Thebes and unknowing sinner whose crimes brought great suffering to his people — blighted crops, plague — and who had to be sacrificed that they might live. This specter, of the sovereign laid low, appears to haunt the American entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who in his 2014 treatise-slash-self-help manual “Zero to One” (co-written with Blake Masters) casts a glance at the restive hordes below: “Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution” — although it’s worth noting that today’s potentates rule unhindered by the bygone fetters of interfering gods and binding prophecies.

There was a time when we lived in a moral economy, which is to say, an economy that acknowledged, if not always observed, moral concerns. The British social historian E.P. Thompson used the term as a framework for understanding food riots in 18th-century England, when, in times of dearth, people set their sights on profiteers and organized what he described as “a kind of ritualized hooting or groaning” outside shops to make their displeasure known. Today we hoot and groan still, but seemingly everywhere and at everything, so that even the worthiest and most urgent causes get lost in the clamor. The many subcultures whose complaints buoy the larger, nebulous cancel culture tend to fixate on minutiae, which can distract from attempts to achieve broader change.

And this may be an intentional distraction. Every obsessive search on Google for proof of wrongdoing, every angry post on Twitter and Facebook to call the guilty to account, is a silent ka-ching in the great repositories of these corporations, which woo advertisers by pointing to the intensity of user engagement. “Despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers … this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital,” the British cultural critic Mark Fisher wrote in his 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle.” Twitter, cancel culture’s main arena, is not the digital equivalent of the public square, however touted as such. We think of it as an open space because we pay no admission, forgetting that it’s a commercial enterprise, committed to herding us in. We are customers but also uncredited workers, doing the free labor of making the platform more valuable.

For now, this is the circus that sates us, that keeps us from waking to the truth of our life and turning, glowering, toward the barred gates. We burn our effigies, forgetting that they’re actual people like us, as our overlords look on from afar, brows knitted but not quite worried, not yet. Still, these “modern kings” would do well to remember: In Sopho