Bad Math: “One of the White House’s most consequential environmental rollbacks may be in self-inflicted legal danger,” writes Robinson Meyer. The administration’s clean-cars rollback plan is riddled with literal miscalculations. Many of the blaring headlines about a major new World Wildlife Fund report are mischaracterizing how many species humans have been responsible for wiping out. The reality is not exactly that “humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animals since 1970,” though the real news is still grim, writes Ed Yong.
In-State: The U.S. midterm elections are now less than a week away. As prominent political figures criss-cross the country to stump for state and local-level candidates, they have an opportunity to burnish their own presidential ambitions—is this former vice president, for instance, eyeing a 2020 bid? Here’s a look at the West Virginia Republican legislature’s impeachment of the justices on its state supreme court, and the consequences of a politicized judiciary. And here are several concrete ideas for expanding voting rights.
Halloween Traditions: The tradition of going door-to-door demanding candy seems like it’s not quite what it used to be for many U.S. families. If parents aren’t taking their children door-to-door for candy, where are they taking their children instead for costumes and treats? Plus: The everlasting joys of scary stories for kids.
Snapshot
An Atlantic analysis zooms in on four types of American counties that could end up playing an outsize role in whether Democrats can retake the House, which Republicans have controlled for the past eight years. Among them, counties that voted Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016, and majority-minority counties, writes Priscilla Alvarez. (Data visualization by Frankie Dintino and Caitlyn Hampton.)Evening ReadRomance novels have a spotty record when it comes to depicting relationships of consent: their plots often deal in aggressive pursuits or situations where a “No” implies “Yes.”
While many romance novels woo readers with the guarantee of a happy ending, the genre has a fraught relationship with how exactly its characters end up there. The most infamous subcategory of romance, so-called bodice-rippers, first gained massive popularity during the 1970s with stories of helpless women saved from the tedium of their lives by the love—and overpowering libido—of lustful, virile men….
Concerns about the genre’s depiction of love and sex have received renewed attention as coverage of the #MeToo movement shifts to acknowledge the role that cultural products play in shaping consumers’ understanding of consent. In a November 2017 interview with The Washington Post, Hillary Clinton dismissed romance as a genre full of “women being grabbed and thrown on a horse and ridden off into the distance,” which she cited as an example of “how men often are very aggressive toward women who love it” in art.
In the years since bodice-rippers first rose to prominence within the genre and the marketplace, romance writers have been grappling with the questions raised by these sorts of assumptions about their work.
Hannah Giorgis talks with an author who’s decided to approach the genre differently.
What Do You Know … About Science, Technology, and Health?1. A recent report revealed that a former top executive at this major technology company received a $90 million payout, after being asked to resign over serious sexual-misconduct allegations.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. Mission over: The ____________________ telescope, NASA’s beloved exoplanet-searching spacecraft launched into orbit in 2009, has run out of fuel.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. Groups dedicated to sharing and commiserating over everything from diabetes to addiction to rare diseases to infidelity support communities have mushroomed online on this platform.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Google / Kepler / Facebook
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
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PITTSBURGH—On Tuesday afternoon, two groups staged marches against President Donald Trump, moving toward each other from opposite sides of Forbes Avenue. If Not Now opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and Bend the Arc “[fights] for justice for all” through a Jewish, progressive frame. Eventually they merged, and together made their way toward the Tree of Life synagogue, singing Jewish songs and solemnly carrying signs condemning hate.
These marches were an expression of the anger in the Pittsburgh Jewish community. Anger about the attack on their fellow Jews. Anger about bigotry and anti-Semitism in the United States. Anger about America’s toxic, xenophobic political environment—which, they argued, is facilitated by Trump. But they also hinted at some of the political fracture lines within the Jewish community.
In broad strokes, a majority of Jews in Pittsburgh—and in America, for that matter—probably agree with some version of these arguments about Trump. A recent poll found that three-quarters of American Jews disapprove of the president and his policies, especially on immigration and his handling of anti-Semitism.
But in the face of an extraordinary, horrific event like this shooting, it’s not clear how tragedy should be translated into the realm of politics. The Jews of Pittsburgh have been united after this attack. But certain groups also disagree about what this moment means for American Jews, and how they should take action.
After Trump had gone and dusk had fallen in Squirrel Hill, people started heading home. But as they dispersed from the little hill next to the intersection of the two main streets here, where the main protest had been staged, sirens, shouting, and singing began.
One of the leaders of Bend the Arc in Pittsburgh, 38-year-old Joshua Friedman, started walking quickly down the hill. “I think If Not Now is trying to have a civil disobedience,” he said. “They’re sitting in the middle of the street. Wait, what the fuck is the point of a civil disobedience right now? The fucking president is long gone.”
Friedman was tired; it was the end of an emotionally exhausting day. But he was frustrated, he said. “They’re not contributing anything to the discourse. The opportunity for civil disobedience would have been to block the motorcade hours ago.” Now, he said, “they’re kind of shitting on our program.”
In many ways, these two progressive groups share the same goals. “We’re all hugely aligned on the need to link anti-Semitism and white nationalism,” said Max Berger, one of If Not Now’s founders who was at the protest, and “to go on the offensive against Trump and the Republicans.” The groups have different flavors, though: If Not Now is smaller and to the political left of Bend the Arc, and more explicitly focused on Israel.
[Read: The Jews of Pittsburgh bury their dead]
Hundreds of people came out for the marches. Over the past three days, more than 82,000 people have signed an online letter from Bend the Arc arguing that Trump has “emboldened a growing white nationalist movement” and that Saturday’s massacre was “the direct culmination of [Trump’s] influence.” The murderer at the Tree of Life synagogue cited the work of HIAS, a Jewish group that supports and resettles refugees, as a reason for his attack. The letter asked Trump to “cease your assault on immigrants and refugees,” and to “stop targeting and endangering all minorities.”
The city’s Sunday vigil for the shooting victims was not overtly political, but thinly veiled comments about the country’s political environment got huge standing ovations.
That was the reaction to this line, from Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto: “We will be a city of compassion, welcoming to all people, no matter what your religion, or where your family came from on this Earth, or your status.” And this line, from Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, whose congregation, Tree of Life, was one of the three congregations in the synagogue that were attacked: “Words of hate are unwelcome in Pittsburgh,” he said. “I want to address for a moment some of our political leaders who are here. Ladies and gentlemen, it has to start with you, as our leaders.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, however, Pittsburgh’s leaders have disagreed over how pointed their calls for change should be. Peduto asked Trump to wait to visit until the families of the victims were finished mourning. Myers, on the other hand, welcomed him. “I’m a citizen,” he told CNN. “He’s my president. He is certainly welcome.”
[Read: A broken Jewish community]
The groups that decided to protest took this one step further: As Trump’s motorcade approached Tree of Life on Tuesday, where the president and his family paid tribute to the victims, they stood nearby and turned their backs, shouting, “Vote! Vote! Vote!”
“There’s a leadership gap in the Jewish community, where the institutions that are supposed to be representing us are both-sides-ing this moment,” said Berger, of If Not Now. “I find that to be unbelievably offensive.”
On the most basic level, the protests in Pittsburgh were an argument that the synagogue shooting should not be dismissed as the work of an isolated, deranged person, but rather seen as part of a larger climate of hatred and xenophobia. It’s possible to read the protests as a grieving place for people who don’t fit in typical institutional Jewish spaces, including those who objected to the presence of Naftali Bennett, Israel’s pro-settlement, right-wing diaspora minister, at Sunday’s vigil.
But the protests were also Jews arguing with themselves over what their community should do at such a horrific, extraordinary moment. “This is about Jews figuring out what it means to be Americans,” Berger said. For two generations, he argued, Jews have been able to feel comfortable and assimilated in this country. Now, he said, many people are questioning that comfort: “What if our persecution is now in the place we thought we were safe in?”
[Read: Pittsburgh honors two brothers, ‘gentle giants’ of their community]
Some Jews in Pittsburgh may support Trump. Still others, like Myers, may think that, whatever their personal feelings, it’s right to welcome the president when he comes to town after a national tragedy.
But there were disagreements even among those who didn’t want Trump to come. Bend the Arc focused its protest on defending immigrants and minorities and denouncing white nationalism and anti-Semitism. If Not Now shared those goals, but added to them: Diana Clarke, one of the group’s organizers in Pittsburgh, told me that the goal of the “civil disobedience” that followed the main protest “was to have a public space for mourning for folk murdered on Saturday that did not celebrate the police.” As the Bend the Arc marchers passed by Pittsburgh Fire Bureau Station 18, they whooped and clapped in appreciation for the police officers and first responders who had supported them after the shooting. Clarke, however, has “been disturbed by media coverage … of cops who were injured rather than Jews who were killed.”
The Jews in Pittsburgh are angry and mourning, and many of them seem to agree that there is a connection between America’s political environment and what happened to their community. To a large extent, they are unified. But as the days after the shooting turn into weeks, and the weeks turn into months, old dividing lines—over Israel, over political language, over working within a system or protesting from the outside—may reemerge, even here.
Then again, perhaps it’s fitting that Pittsburgh’s Jews are turning this horrible moment into a chance to fight for what they believe—even if they occasionally fight with one another. It is, in its own way, a defiant return to normalcy. “Isn’t that what we do?” Friedman said. “We argue.”
Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey), Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2), and Olivia Paschal (@oliviacpaschal)
Today in 5 LinesRobert Bowers was indicted on 44 counts, including federal hate crimes, in the murder of 11 people in Saturday’s synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In the most detailed account of the event to date, Turkish officials said that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was strangled just after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month, and that his body was later dismembered.
President Donald Trump told reporters that the U.S. could send up to 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, in response to the caravan of migrants traveling there from Central America.
Trump will speak at a rally in Fort Myers, Florida, in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, who is in a tight race against Democrat Andrew Gillum. The rally is set to begin at 7 p.m. ET.
Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo both called for a ceasefire in Yemen’s civil war.
Today on The AtlanticLook Here: According to an Atlantic analysis, these four types of counties will determine whether Democrats retake control of the House for the first time in eight years. (Priscilla Alvarez, Frankie Ditino, and Caitlyn Hampton)
That’s False: Earlier this week, Trump claimed that America is the only country with birthright citizenship. There are at least 30 others. (Yasmeen Serhan and Uri Friedman)
A Showdown in West Virginia: The Republican-controlled West Virginia state legislature impeached all five of the state’s supreme court justices, underscoring what can happen when the judiciary becomes political. (Kevin Townsend)
Biden His Time in Iowa: Eyeing a 2020 presidential bid, former Vice President Joe Biden stumped for Democratic House candidate Abby Finkenauer, criticizing the Trump administration and riling up voters. (Edward-Isaac Dovere)
Back in My Day: The landscape of American trick-or-treating is changing. Here’s how. (Julie Beck)
Snapshot
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray speaks with a poll worker before voting early on Halloween at the Franklin County Board of Election in Columbus, Ohio. (John Minchillo / AP)What We’re ReadingHalloween in Milwaukee: In the most segregated metropolitan area in the country, Halloween reveals deep economic and racial divides. (John F. Muller, Politico)
Andrew Gillum’s Sprint to the End: Jamil Smith profiles the Florida Democratic candidate in the last few weeks of his high-profile gubernatorial race. Gillum wants to start governing—but is Florida ready for a Democrat like him? (Rolling Stone)
‘Birth of a Birthright’: This is the man whose Supreme Court case secured American citizenship for all people born on U.S. soil. (Jonathan M. Katz, Politico)
Hypocritical: In blaming President Trump for the attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue, Democrats are doing exactly what they’ve previously condemned, argues Marc A. Thiessen. (The Washington Post)
Order in the Court: Former Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist dated in law school. Then, he proposed. (Nina Totenberg, NPR)
‘Racist, Marxist Filth’: After right-wing groups encouraged students to film their left-leaning professors and post the recordings online, many of the professors faced death threats. For their own safety, some of those teachers were forced to move. (Brian Howey, Reveal)
VisualizedThe Life of a Lie: George Soros is not funding the migrant caravan. So how did that theory multiply so rapidly? USA Today investigates. (Brad Heath, Matt Wynn, and Jessica Guynn)
Unprecedented: This year’s slate of midterm candidates is among the most diverse in the nation’s history. See the potential ‘firsts’ they represent. (The New York Times)
As DNA tests such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA become increasingly prevalent, concerns about genetic privacy are mounting—and with good reason, says the Atlantic writer Sarah Zhang. In the latest Atlantic Argument, Zhang explains how the recent spate of arrests that were made due to DNA databases—the most famous being the Golden State Killer—are just the beginning.
“Soon, it won’t be hard to imagine a world where everyone can be found for whatever reason through a relative’s DNA,” Zhang says in the video.
One of the mysteries of Facebook is that whenever public sentiment about the company feels most mixed, it delivers smashing results for Wall Street that keep any social consequences from depressing the company’s share price. This was true even during the depths of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which began with a major price drop and ended with Facebook at a new all-time high, $209.94 a share, ahead of its earnings announcement in mid-July.
Since that report, which revealed slowing user and profit growth, Facebook’s share price has been tumbling steadily, falling to about $150. Even Tuesday’s earnings, which crushed expectations, did not right the Facebook ship. User growth is still slowing, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg cautioned that the product that built the Facebook-advertising empire, News Feed, has become outmoded. It won’t disappear overnight, but it will capture less and less of the total attention inside Facebook’s ecosystem. Replacing it, bit by bit, will be a mix of things: Stories, messaging, video, and more targeted “community” features like Marketplace and Dating.
The shift is substantial enough that Zuckerberg invoked the single biggest change in Facebook’s history: when the website Facebook.com became the phone app Facebook. This was the story of the company’s biggest trouble in the market and as a platform, back in the early days of its initial public offering. It’s hard to believe now, but it was not at all clear that Facebook could make the leap from desktop to mobile while growing revenue. There was tremendous skepticism about the company’s business fortunes, pretty much all of which turned out to be wrong. Not only did Facebook become dominant on mobile, it turned News Feed into a money-printing machine.
Yahoo FinanceThis is the lens through which to read Zuckerberg’s key statement to investors Tuesday: “I want to be up front that even assuming that we get to where we want to go from a feed-only world to a feed-plus-Stories world, it will take some time and our revenue growth may be slower during that period, like it was while transitioning our products to mobile.”
Zuckerberg is really saying two things: First, this is a change that is as big as they get. “I just think that this is the future,” he said. “People want to share in ways that don’t stick around permanently, and I want to make sure that we fully embrace this.” Second, Zuckerberg is summoning the resilience of his company. That is to say: Remember the last time investors worried about Facebook making it through a huge product transition, and then its share price went from an average of $35 in 2013 to $176 over the next five years?
But Zuckerberg’s admissions throughout the investors call are remarkable. More or less, he said the company has been wrong on several of its core product ideas over the past few years, and that now it is adopting its competitors’ postures.
You could have sworn Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel was speaking through Facebook’s CEO on the call when Zuckerberg began talking about messaging. “Public sharing will always be very important, but people increasingly want to share privately too, and that includes both just smaller audiences with messaging and ephemerally with Stories,” Zuckerberg said. “People feel more comfortable being themselves when they know their content will only be seen by a smaller group and when their content won’t stick around forever. Messaging and Stories make up the vast majority of growth in the sharing that we’re seeing.”
This is a pretty wild admission from Zuckerberg. The very thing he built Facebook around—a public record of your life—is not the social norm he thought it would be. Messaging apps that recaptured “sharing” as a private, ephemeral phenomenon and not Facebook’s public, permanent practice were one of the key threats to Facebook that experts identified to The Atlantic as far back as 2014. Facebook now has three major messaging platforms, counting Instagram as well as WhatsApp and Messenger. And it is clear that this notion of sharing has eroded the power of News Feed. In its own way, this is a victory for privacy advocates.
Then there was the discussion of video. In 2014, Zuckerberg said News Feed would be “mostly video” in five years. Video, after all, drove up engagement metrics. But, he admitted Tuesday, people didn’t like it. “For a few years, we saw a trend where people’s time was increasing primarily because they were consuming more video and public content, even as they interacted with friends and family less,” Zuckerberg said. “But people were telling us what they wanted was to interact with people more. So we didn’t think that this trend was sustainable.”
[Read: How Facebook’s chaotic push into video cost hundreds of journalists their jobs]
The company reversed course and “purposefully reduced time spent on things like lower-quality viral videos and news.”
All these admissions and reversals and refinements reopen a crucial question about Facebook: Is the platform the social-media wave driving user behavior, or is it, as Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Evans puts it, “extremely good at surfing user behavior”?
More and more, the evidence suggests that, since building News Feed, Facebook has been chasing user behavior, not changing it.
Now that Zuckerberg sees a diminished role for News Feed, especially viewed across the Facebook, Inc. portfolio, what happens next? Facebook, Inc., may be well positioned to continue surfing the user wave, but it seems possible that the blue Facebook app of 2020 or 2021 will be an almost unrecognizable descendant of the one that we knew through the mid-teens.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s trouble policing its advertising system’s role in politics continues. Our own investigation found how a liberal group had easily evaded meaningful transparency while leading purchases of political ads coming into the midterms. Vice News was able to get Facebook’s approval for a variety of false advertisers; it impersonated all 100 senators, the Islamic State, and Mike Pence, making a mockery of the company’s built-while-flying ad-transparency system. While Democratic causes and candidates buy huge sums of ads, Facebook’s aging user base shares content predominantly from the extreme-right-wing media ecosystem in the United States. And that’s to say nothing of the multitude of governments from Brasilia to Brussels to Delhi that could force Facebook to change its products or under-the-hood mechanics. In China, strong competitors for the global market loom.
[Read: A giant midterms spending gulf on Facebook]
As all these changes happen simultaneously, Facebook’s future seems as murky as it has been in many years. As users, as investors, as citizens, it’s not clear what the Facebook, Inc., of tomorrow will be as it responds to the most challenging year of its corporate existence. Then again, even as I write, the company’s shares have rebounded and are up more than 4 percent today.
Earlier this month, David Sims wrote about how Griffin Dunne’s ostensible comedy mixed horror, empowerment, and romance in ways that were unusual for the era.
I’m a colleague of David Sims’s at The Atlantic, and I consider him one of my favorite culture writers. After reading his recent piece on the film Practical Magic, I wanted to expand on his observations about the film’s theme of independent women and go deeper into what it means to me. To me, this film is personal.
My sisters and I used to dance around the kitchen making smoothies to Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut” and try to light candles by the strength and will of our breath. I’d collect leaves and petals in a bowl in an attempt to cast young Sally Owens’s spell to never fall in love, and if a broom fell in the house, it would mean “Company’s coming.” Sims talks about how the movie bombed in the box office, but it became a cult classic among young Millennial women like myself. I believe that Sims’s take on the film can’t possibly encapsulate this female perspective, simply because he likely had a very different relationship to Practical Magic (and entertainment like it) than women like me did, women who needed to believe that there was something magical and powerful about us that men couldn’t touch.
I like to ask women, friends and strangers alike, if they were witches when they were younger. Responses usually range from an embarrassed or reluctant nod of the head to, “Hell yeah; I still am.” My own anxious youth involved plenty of Ouija-board seances and attempts to levitate friends who lay light as a feather and stiff as a board at slumber parties. Most important, I’d never miss an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Charmed. Witch-themed entertainment has been so attractive to young women because it seems to empower us. Onscreen representation of strong women is cinematically and socially vital. But after 20-plus years of magical women on-screen, every witch from the Owens sisters to the “Power of Three” (in Charmed) is about as powerful as a pink pussy hat. The symbolism is there, but is it enough?
Sims describes the film as one dominated by the theme of independent women. Power begets independence, and in the history of the Western world, at least, women are powerful for being either a saint or a sinner, a Madonna or a witch. Well-behaved women are revered by men and therefore given a place of honor in society, but it’s the witches who take power, demand respect. Which is likely why so many little girls fantasize about being witches, about having some control over the domain of their lives and over men. And this is also likely why, in the woke #MeToo era, witch revivals abound. As Sims points out, Practical Magic was a “clear harbinger of a gentrifying moment for onscreen witchcraft.” That gentrification is happening again, taking the theme of female empowerment through magical means to the next level. Charmed has been remade with a mixed-race and mixed-sexuality cast, and Sabrina has been reincarnated into a feminist bad bitch who justifies female rage in a horror-filled world. Even Broad City so aptly demonstrated the power of witches last season when Ilana overcame her inability to orgasm post-Trump and Abbi reconciled herself with her natural aging process.
It’s no secret that witch-themed entertainment is cathartic because magical powers maketh a strong woman who can beat a man. But that’s also the problem: If there’s one cynical thing that all these TV shows and movies have in common, it’s that possession of magical powers is often the only way for a woman to defeat a man. Without magical assistance, she’s just a normal woman, a bland supporting actress to the more important male story about men going to space or solving intense mathematical equations. So yes, Practical Magic is still relevant, especially when seen in the context of all the other ass-kicking witches casting spells and breaking balls across the silver screen. Because 20 years later, women still can’t cast a spell on mansplaining male bosses or flip over buses of rapist frat boys or orb away from the creep following us down the street. So my question is, when does fantasy stop and reality begin? When does female empowerment transcend the magical into the actual?
Rebecca Bellan
Astoria, N.Y.
Since Monday, news networks and social media has been abuzz with the claim that, as the Guardian among others tweeted, “humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animals since 1970”—a stark and staggering figure based on the latest iteration of the WWF’s Living Planet report.
But that isn’t really what the report showed.
The team behind the Living Planet Index relied on previous studies in which researchers estimated the size of different animal populations, whether through direct counts, camera traps, satellites, or proxies like the presence of nests or tracks. The team collated such estimates for 16,700 populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, across 4,000 species. (”Populations” here refers to pockets of individuals from a given species that live in distinct geographical areas.)
That covers just 6.4 percent of the 63,000 or so species of vertebrates—that is, back-boned animals—that are thought to exist. To work out how the entire group has fared, the team adjusted their figures to account for any biases in their data. For example, vertebrates in Europe have been more heavily studied than those in South America, and prominently endangered creatures like elephants have been more closely studied (and been easier to count) than very common ones like pigeons.
Ultimately, they found that between 1970 and 2014, the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent on average. That is absolutely not the same as saying that humans have culled 60 percent of animals—a distinction that the report’s technical supplement explicitly states. “It is not a census of all wildlife but reports how wildlife populations have changed in size,” the authors write.
To understand the distinction, imagine you have three populations: 5,000 lions, 500 tigers, and 50 bears. Four decades later, you have just 4,500 lions, 100 tigers, and 5 bears (oh my). Those three populations have declined by 10 percent, 80 percent, and 90 percent respectively—which means an average decline of 60 percent. But the total number of actual animals has gone down from 5,550 to 4,605, which is a decline of just 17 percent.
[Read: It’s a mistake to focus just on animal extinctions]
For similar reasons, it’s also not right that we have “killed more than half the world’s wildlife populations” or that we can be blamed “with wiping out 60 percent of animal species” or that “global wildlife population shrank by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014.” All of these things might well be true, but they’re all making claims about metrics that were not assessed in the Living Planet Index.
The uncertainties mount when you consider that the 63,000 species of vertebrates are vastly outnumbered by the untold millions of species of invertebrates—spineless creatures like insects, worms, jellyfish, and sponges, which comprise the majority of animal life. Their fates are murkier because scientists have collectively spent less time monitoring them. They are harder to study, and draw less attention than the allegedly more charismatic vertebrates—although plans are afoot to give them their due.
The average 60 percent decline across populations also obscures the fates of individual species. In the hypothetical scenario above, lions are still mostly fine, the tigers are in trouble, and the bears are on the brink of extinction. And of the species covered in the actual Living Planet Index, half are increasing in number, while only half are decreasing. This means that for those that are actually in decline, the outlook is even worse than it first appears.
None of this is to let humanity off the hook. Since prehistory, humans have killed off so many species of mammals that it would take 3 to 7 million years of evolution for them to evolve an equivalent amount of diversity. At least a third of amphibians face extinction, thanks to climate change, habitat loss, and an apocalyptic killer fungus. Even invertebrates aren’t off the hook. There might be less data for them, but the data that exist paints an alarming picture of rapidly disappearing insects, even in supposedly pristine forests. Meanwhile, in the oceans, coral reefs are bleaching too quickly to recover, with half of the corals in the Great Barrier Reef having died since 2016. All of this evidence points to a period of “biological annihilation” that some have likened to the five great mass extinctions of the past. When the reality is this sensational, there’s not much need to sensationalize it even further.
Bottom line: Things are bad. One could argue, then, that it is unnecessarily pedantic to correct the 60-percent figure. Why nitpick in the face of catastrophe? Surely what matters is waking people up, and if an inexactly communicated statistic can do that, isn’t that okay?
I don’t think it is. Especially now, in an era where conspiracy theories run rampant, and lies flow readily from the highest seats of government, it’s more important than ever for those issuing warnings about the planet’s fate to be precise about what they mean. Characterizing the problem, and its scope, correctly matters. If accuracy can be ignored for the sake of a gut punch, we might as well pull random numbers out of the ether. And notably, several news organizations, like Vox and NBC, managed to convey the alarming nature of the Living Planet Index, while accurately stating its findings. The dichotomy between precision and impact is a false one.
With the unveiling of the Statue of Unity in India today, there is a new name topping the list of the tallest statues in the world. The new monument to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel stands 597 feet (182 meters) tall, overtaking the previous record holder, the 420-foot (128-meter) Spring Temple Buddha, in China’s Lushan County. Using Wikipedia’s standard of measuring to “the highest part of the human (or animal) figure, but excluding the height of any pedestal,” we present images below of the 15 tallest statues in the world as of today, plus five bonus photos of some more famous—if smaller—colossal monuments.
Apoiadores levantam seus chapéus durante um comício do presidente Donald Trump em 15 de março de 2017, em Nashville, Tennessee.
Foto: Andrea Morales/Getty Images
O PRESIDENTE DONALD TRUMP é uma ameaça à segurança nacional.
Ele prega o ódio. Ele incita a violência. Ele inspira ataques.
Todos sabíamos disso antes da prisão de Cesar Sayoc, na sexta-feira, acusado por uma série de crimes ligados a dezenas de bombas enviadas aos políticos Democratas mais proeminentes da nação, entre outros. Como meu colega Trevor Aaronson escreveu, Sayoc é “um fervoroso apoiador de Trump”. Veja sua van, seus posts nas redes sociais ou ainda os depoimentos de seus colegas.
Eu não tenho dúvidas de que Trump ajudou a radicalizar Sayoc. Ainda assim, os defensores de Trump tentam distanciar seu herói deste vilão em particular. Assim como, é claro, o próprio presidente. “Nós vimos um esforço recente da mídia em utilizar as terríveis ações de um indivíduo para marcar pontos políticos contra mim”, disse Trump em um comício na sexta à noite.
“Um indivíduo”? Quem ele está tentando enganar? Sayoc pode ser a figura mais recente a combinar seu amor por Trump com um amor pela violência contra os oponentes de Trump, mas ele está longe de ser o primeiro a fazer isso. Na verdade, houve diversas ameaças violentas, ataques e mortes associadas a apoiadores de Trump nos últimos anos – alguns dos quais dominaram as manchetes da mesma forma que ocorreu com a tentativa de Sayoc de assassinar democratas de alto escalão, incluindo dois ex-presidentes dos EUA.
Desde o verão de 2015, um conjunto de apoiadores, fãs e simpatizantes de Trump tem agredido, baleado, esfaqueado, atropelado e jogado bombas em outros americanos. Eles tomaram vidas inocentes enquanto imitavam a violenta retórica do presidente, ecoando suas teorias conspiratórias racistas e, no caso de Sayoc, tendo como alvo exatamente as mesmas pessoas e organizações que Trump repetidamente alveja em alto e bom som em seus comícios e no Twitter: muçulmanos, refugiados, imigrantes, os Clinton, a CNN e manifestantes da esquerda, entre outros.
Não podemos permitir que os defensores de Trump na Fox News e no Congresso finjam que este foi um caso único; que as acusações contra Sayoc não são parte de uma onda crescente e preocupante de crimes violentos contra minorias e a mídia cometidos pela extrema-direita, por figuras pró-Trump e por milícias.
Assim, aqui está uma lista (parcial) de apoiadores de Trump que foram acusados de cometerem ataques horríveis nos últimos anos – alguns deles aparentemente inspirados pelo próprio presidente.
Scott Leader e Steve Leader, agosto de 2015
Em 19 de agosto de 2015, Scott Leader, 38 anos, e seu irmão, Steve Leader, de 30 anos, atacaram um morador de rua em Boston que eles erroneamente pensaram ser um imigrante irregular no país.
“Donald Trump estava certo”, eles disseram à polícia, após agredirem o homem com um cano de metal e urinarem nele. “Todos esses ilegais têm de ser deportados.”
A resposta de Trump? Ele acabou por dizer que o incidente teria sido “terrível”, mas apenas após uma prévia declaração a repórteres em que o então candidato referiu-se a tais apoiadores como “muito apaixonados. Eles amam esse país. Eles querem que esse país seja grande de novo. Mas eles são muito apaixonados. Pode-se dizer isso.”
Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright e Patrick Eugene Stein, outubro de 2016
Em 14 de outubro de 2016, o FBI prendeu três homens – Patrick Eugene Stein, Curtis Allen e Gavin Wright – por planejarem uma série de ataques a bomba contra a comunidade somali-americana de Garden City, no estado do Kansas. Ao se autodenominarem “the Crusaders” (os Cruzados), eles planejavam colocar em ação, no dia após a eleição presidencial em novembro de 2016, o que o jornal The Guardian disse que “poderia ter sido o ataque terrorista doméstico mais mortal desde o atentado a bomba de Oklahoma em 1995”.
Dois destes três homens eram apoiadores declarados de Trump e eram obcecados por teorias conspiratórias contra muçulmanos e refugiados. Para Stein, conforme um perfil na revista New York, Trump era “o Cara”. Allen escreveu no Facebook: “Eu apóio pessoalmente Donald Trump”. O trio ainda pediu que um juiz federal aumentasse o número de jurados pró-Trump em seu julgamento (no qual eles foram considerados culpados por conspirar a utilizar uma arma de destruição em massa e por conspirar contra direitos).
A resposta de Trump? O presidente, que em certa ocasião sugeriu que os americanos já teriam “sofrido o bastante” com a chegada de refugiados somali, nunca foi questionado sobre os três homens e nunca condenou seus planos.
Alexandre Bissonnette, janeiro de 2017
Na noite de 29 de janeiro de 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette abriu fogo contra fiéis no Islamic Cultural Center na cidade de Quebec, no Canadá, matando seis deles e ferindo 19.
Bissonnette, de 27 anos, era obcecado por Trump: ele buscou o presidente no Twitter, Facebook, Google e YouTube mais de 800 vezes entre 1º de janeiro de 2017 e o dia dos disparos. Um antigo colega de faculdade disse ao Toronto Globe and Mail que ele “frequentemente discutia” com Bissonette por conta do apoio deste a Trump.
No vídeo do interrogatório feito pela polícia, Bissonnette pode ser ouvido dizendo aos policiais que ele decidiu atacar a mesquita depois de o Primeiro Ministro canadense, Justin Trudeau, tuitar uma mensagem de boas vindas a refugiados após a proibição de viajar emitida pelo presidente americano – que foi decretada dois dias antes do ataque à mesquita.
A resposta de Trump? O presidente pode ter expressado suas condolências ao premiê canadense em privado, mas ele nunca mencionou publicamente os disparos, o assassino ou os seis muçulmanos mortos.
Michael Hari, Michael McWhorter e Joe Morris, Agosto de 2017
Em março de 2018, três supostos membros de uma milícia de extrema-direita, Michael Hari, Michael McWhorter e Joe Morris – foram acusados por sua conexão com o atentado a bomba ao Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center em Bloomington, no estado de Minnesota, em 5 de agosto de 2017. McWhorter teria dito a um agente do FBI que o ataque era uma tentativa de “assustar” muçulmanos “para fora do país”.
Ainda em 2017, Hari, que é dono de uma empresa de segurança, enviou uma proposta de 10 bilhões de dólares para construir o muro de Trump ao longo da fronteira entre os Estados Unidos e o México. “Nós veríamos o muro não apenas como uma fronteira física à imigração mas também um símbolo da determinação americana em defender nossa cultura, nossa língua e nosso legado de quaisquer estrangeiros”, disse Hari. Parece familiar?
Hari também seria o líder de um grupo chamado “White Rabbit Militia – Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters, Three Percent”, que postou mensagens on-line sobre “atividades do Deep State” (o “estado profundo” seriam os setores do governo que agem independentemente dos presidentes do momento, por vezes para sabotá-los) e “a tentativa do FBI de grampear a campanha de Trump e interferir nas eleições”.
A resposta de Trump? Até hoje, o presidente nunca se referiu publicamente, e muito menos condenou, o atentado a bomba à mesquita em Minnesota. Seu então conselheiro, Sebastian Gorka, sugeriu que o incidente poderia “ter sido propagado pela esquerda”.
James Alex Fields Jr., agosto de 2017
Em 12 de agosto de 2017, um carro colidiu com uma multidão de pessoas protestando contra uma manifestação neonazista em Charlottesville, no estado da Virgínia, matando Heather Heyer, de 32 anos. O suposto motorista do carro, James Alex Fields Jr., foi acusado por, entre outros crimes, atropelamento e fuga sem prestar socorro e assassinato em primeiro grau.
Fields, de acordo com um ex-colega de colégio, gostava de desenhar suásticas e falava sobre “amar Hitler”. Ele era um membro registrado do Partido Republicano e, conforme um ex-professor, também adorava Trump. Em entrevista à Associated Press, o professor “disse que Fields era um grande apoiador de Trump por aquilo que ele acreditava serem as visões de Trump sobre raça. A proposta de Trump de construir um muro na fronteira com o México era particularmente atrativa para Fields.”
A resposta de Trump? O presidente chamou os neonazistas em Chalottesville “pessoas muito boas” apenas três dias depois de Fields ter matado Heyer.
Brandon Griesemer, janeiro de 2018
Nos dias 9 e 10 de janeiro de 2018, o jovem Brandon Griesemer, de 19 anos, teria feito 22 chamadas à CNN. De acordo com um depoimento federal juramentado, em quatro dessas chamadas, Griesemer, um caixa de supermercado de Novi, no Michigan, ameaçou matar funcionários na sede da emissora em Atlanta.
“Fake news. Eu estou indo para atirar em todos vocês”, ele disse a um operador da CNN. De novo, parece familiar? Trump passou seu mandato inteiro criticando a CNN como “fake news”, marcando a emissora com críticas e abusos. De acordo com o Washington Post, um colega de colégio de Griesemer o descreveu como um apoiador de Trump que “chegou após a eleição e estava muito feliz”. O colega, dizia a matéria, “comparou a reação de Griesemer com a de um torcedor cujo time havia ganho um jogo importante.”
A reação de Trump? Na manhã do dia 23 de janeiro, o dia após as ameaças de Griesemer contra a CNN serem noticiadas, o presidente usou o Twitter para zombar … sim, você adivinhou… “a CNN fake news”.
Nikolas Cruz, fevereiro de 2018
Na tarde do dia 14 de fevereiro de 2018, o atirador Nikolas Cruz, de 19 anos, baleou e matou 17 estudantes e funcionários na Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School em Parkland, na Flórida.
De acordo com uma investigação da CNN, Cruz fazia parte de um grupo privado no Instagram em que ele “repetidamente apoiava visões racistas, homofóbicas e antissemíticas” e “se gabava por ter escrito uma carta ao presidente Donald Trump – e ter recebido uma resposta.”
Cruz também postou uma foto sua no Instagram vestindo o conhecido boné vermelho de Trump com os dizeres “Make America Great Again” e com uma bandana da bandeira americana cobrindo a metade de baixo de seu rosto. Ex-colegas confirmaram que ele também usava o boné vermelho de Trump na escola.
A resposta de Trump? A Casa Branca nunca confirmou ou negou ter recebido, ou respondido, uma carta de Cruz.
EU PODERIA CONTINUAR sem parar. Eu poderia falar sobre Jeremy Christian, que esfaqueou duas pessoas até a morte em um trem em Portland, no estado de Oregon, e escreveu “Se Donald Trump é o próximo Hitler, então eu estou me juntando à SS dele”; ou sobre James Jackson, que confessou esfaquear um morador de rua negro em Nova York e se inscreveu em canais do YouTube de extrema direita que apoiam Trump; ou sobre Sean Urbanski, que esfaqueou um tenente negro do exército americano até a morte e “curtia memes sobre Donald Trump”; ou sobre Dimitrios Pagourtzis, que matou 10 pessoas na Santa Fe High School no Texas e que seguia apenas 13 perfis no Instagram, incluindo os perfis oficiais da Casa Branca, de Donald Trump, de Ivanka Trump e de Melania Trump.
A verdade é que o quanto antes nós reconhecermos que o presidente dos Estados Unidos está ajudando a radicalizar uma nova geração de homens de extrema-direita raivosos, melhor.
Seria errado, é claro, culpar apenas Trump por esses ataques. Muitos desses agressores têm problemas mentais; vários deles também eram homens violentos, intolerantes e fanáticos muito antes de Trump lançar sua carreira política.
No entanto, fingir que o presidente não tem nada a ver com esses criminosos violentos ou seus crimes é absurdo. Comparar o enorme número de apoiadores de Trump que foram acusados ou julgados por ataques e tentativas de ataques a muçulmanos, hispânicos ou jornalistas com o único apoiador de Bernie Sanders que atirou no deputado republicano Steve Scalise em junho de 2017 é desonesto. Ignorar a forma em que Trump compôs um tom violento e criou um clima tóxico é lamentável.
“Está na hora de reconhecermos que a presença particular de Trump nas redes sociais é uma arma de radicalização”, escreveu o estrategista republicano e crítico de Trump Rick Wilson na sexta. “Ninguém mais na esfera política dos Estados Unidos alimenta os rancores, medos e preconceitos da base dele com igual poder.”
O presidente pode não estar apertando o gatilho ou plantando a bomba, mas ele está abrindo caminho para grande parte do ódio por trás desses atos. Ele está dando ajuda e conforto a homens brancos raivosos ao oferecer-lhes alvos claros – e, depois, ao falhar em denunciar sua violência. Ainda há dúvida, então, de que crimes de ódio estão crescendo? O que, como um estudo descobriu, “um em cada cinco agressores de incidentes por crime de ódio referenciaram o presidente Trump, a política de Trump ou um slogan da campanha de Trump” entre novembro de 2016 e novembro de 2017?
Cesar Sayoc não foi o primeiro apoiador de Trump que tentou matar e mutilar quem está no outro lado da retórica demonizante de Trump. E, infelizmente, ele não será o último.
Atualização: 27 de outubro de 2018, às 17h30
Minutos após esta matéria ser publicada na versão em inglês, notícias confirmaram que diversas pessoas foram mortas por um atirador em uma sinagoga em Pittsburgh, no estado da Pensilvânia. O atirador detido foi associado a posts contra judeus e imigrantes nas redes sociais. Pelo menos 11 pessoas foram mortas e seis feridas na Sinagoga Tree of Life (Árvore da Vida).
Tradução: Maíra Santos
The post Uma lista de agressores de extrema-direita inspirados por Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Over the last two years, Michael Enslow, a resident of Waterloo, New York, has been in a back-and-forth with a debt collector. The exchanges, familiar to many Americans, ended up in federal court, claiming that the debt collection company repeatedly refused to remove medical debt he long ago resolved from his credit report. Their error prevented him from getting preapproved for a mortgage.
Such chicanery is par for the course in the debt collection industry, which is known for abusive practices, including bullying consumers into paying debts they do not owe. What’s unusual about Enslow’s case is that he was mistreated by a company that his own representative in Congress, western New York’s Republican Rep. Tom Reed, founded.
What’s unusual about Enslow’s case is that he was mistreated by a company that his own representative in Congress, Rep. Tom Reed, founded.More than a dozen other consumers, including other New York residents, have filed complaints about Reed’s company, according to a docket maintained by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the agencies that oversees consumer lending companies. Several of the complaints claim that Reed’s firm harassed them for medical debt they never incurred or had already resolved.
For nearly two decades, Reed reaped financial rewards from the debt collection industry, managing a law firm that specialized in the trade. After his election to Congress in 2010, Reed resisted congressional rules that prohibited him from practicing law and required him to remove his name from his law firm. The Buffalo News reported that 194 court documents continued to carry his law firm’s name after he was elected. But his name remained until 2014, when Reed said he had sold his stake in the company to his brother. In response to an inquiry from The Intercept, Abbey Daugherty, a spokesperson for Reed’s campaign, said, “Tom is not involved in this business.”
Yet records show that the Reed household did not fully divest from the company, though the company was rebranded from the “Law Office of Thomas W. Reed,” to “RR Resource Recovery.” An ownership stake in the firm is now controlled by Jean Reed, the wife of Tom Reed. And the newly incorporated firm lists Tom Reed’s brother John as the registration agent.
Reed makes little effort to distance himself from the company. Records show that he owns a property company called Reed & Reed Properties that houses RR Resource Recovery. And his personal ethics disclosure shows that Reed’s household continues to own a stake in both firms and collect an income of up to $100,000 a year from the two companies.
When The Intercept asked Reed’s campaign about his continued involvement with and income from the two companies, Daugherty responded with a comment about Reed’s wife. “Hi,” Daugherty said in an email, “are you suggesting that as a woman she can’t run her own business or have her own independent life?”
From his perch in Congress, Reed has participated in several Republican-led attempts to unravel the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the primary federal agency that polices debt collection practices. The attacks would defang the very agency that has collected consumer complaints about Reed’s company.
Last year, Reed voted for the Financial CHOICE Act, a sprawling financial deregulation bill that rolls back CFPB’s mandate to regulate “unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices,” and weakens the agency’s independence by making the director an at-will employee of the president. In a conference call with reporters after the vote, Reed claimed that such a move was necessary to stop the CFPB from spending “millions on a Taj Mahal type of operation for their facility to serve these unelected, independent bureaucrats.”
The remarks echoed common — and misleading — talking points from opponents of the CFPB. The agency had occupied an aging building that once housed the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision. When a renovation came due, the agencies’ opponents twisted an inspector general’s report to exaggerate the costs, which were in line with ordinary construction costs.
Unfair Targeting for Debt CollectionEnslow is not the only person to lodge a complaint against the company Reed founded. The Intercept spoke to others and reviewed records, from as far back as 15 years ago, of residents in Reed’s district who said they were unfairly targeted by his company.
Kevin Shorthouse, a resident of Addison, New York, and one of Reed’s constituents, said he was hounded by the debt collection firm. “In 2003, I was out of work, and we had nothing, and it was bad,” said Shorthouse, an ironworker, in an interview. He said that while he was on unemployment, after losing his job at a plant, he missed a payment for a medical bill at Corning Hospital for his son.
Josh Brokaw, a local investigative reporter, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Trade Commission and found similar stories. A resident of Binghamton, New York, said RR Resource Recovery reported, multiple times, an unpaid claim to three credit agencies on a payment to a doctor that the patient had never seen and who was unaffiliated with the resident’s provider network. In another complaint, a resident of Endicott, New York, claimed that they mistakenly sent a check of $50 to RR Resource Recovery. The company cashed the check and refused a refund without a $30 surcharge, according to a record uncovered by Brokaw.
Over the last year, local activists raised Reed’s financial interest in medical debt collection, claiming that he profits from the current patchwork of policies, and that he would personally benefit further from his vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
One of the confrontations occurred at a town hall with the congressman last summer. “The reality is, the very business that you founded in Corning, it’s now called RR Resource Recovery, Offices of Tom Reed,” said a woman who identified herself as an attorney for locals who have fallen on hard times. “And very often, they don’t have health coverage. One of the first letters we get is from your firm, because you represent hospitals and medical providers who sue people when they can’t pay their medical bills,” she continued, noting that Reed’s wife has continued to collect a six-figure salary from the company over the years.
Reed did not directly respond to the allegation that his household benefits from medical debt. “Even if we went to single-payer health care, who do you think is going to pay for that?” Reed retorted.
Activism and advocacy for single payer or a more universal health care program has seen a resurgence in recent years. Such a shift would mean that Americans pay little to no premiums or deductibles.
Tracy Mitrano, Reed’s Democratic opponent for the 23rd Congressional District, has campaigned for “Medicare for All,” making the issue front and center in her campaign, along with bringing broadband to rural New York and tackling student debt. Reed, however, has largely sidestepped the issue of health care, instead campaigning on his support for President Donald Trump and deploying the catch-all insult he uses against every Democratic opponent, labeling Mitrano an “extreme Ithaca liberal.”
The post GOP Rep. Tom Reed Founded Medical Debt Collection Firm That Harasses His Own Constituents appeared first on The Intercept.
Operation Faithful Patriot, the Trump administration’s military campaign to secure the midterm elections by deploying troops to the southern border, is less than a week old, and it already features some of the same core failings that defined its post-9/11 predecessors. Like the invasion of Iraq, Faithful Patriot is a right-wing political project carried out through military means against a demonized nonwhite population, one that haunts the fevered dreams of many Republican voters. And, as some observers have already noted, Faithful Patriot, like the ongoing war in Afghanistan, does not appear to feature a clear end game.
The similarities don’t end there though. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, head of the U.S. military’s Northern Command, revealed that Operation Faithful Patriot is running on bad intelligence, which the decorated military commander is apparently comfortable regurgitating to the American public and the four-star general’s press shop is seemingly unable to account for.
The comments in question have to do with what O’Shaughnessy termed “the true nature” of the caravan itself. “We understand this caravan is different than what we’ve seen in the past,” the general told reporters, noting that this analysis was drawn from coordination with Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security component overseeing the ports, and the Border Patrol. “That is one of the things that as we work and train together with CBP to understand the true nature of this caravan and the ultimate effect of that makeup of the caravan,” O’Shaughnessy went on to say. “I think what we have seen is we’ve seen clearly an organization at a higher level than we’ve seen before.”
While the general’s line on the caravan — that it is a more organized operation than others in previous years — appears to be the line the enforcers of Operation Faithful Patriot have settled on to justify its existence, O’Shaughnessy’s press office at NORTHCOM did not provide evidence to support his assertion, despite repeated requests.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Gen. Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy revealed that Operation Faithful Patriot is running on bad intelligence.It is true that this caravan is different, but according to longtime Latin America experts and reporters on the ground, it is different for reasons that are the exact opposite of the justification coming from the general leading Faithful Patriot.
In years past, advocacy groups have organized caravans through Mexico both as a form of protection for migrants, particularly those traveling from Central America, and as a demonstration highlighting the lack of institutional safeguards that defines migration through the region. One such caravan, organized by the group Pueblos Sin Fronteras, drew President Donald Trump’s ire earlier this year, prompting the deployment of the National Guard to the southern border. That operation, known as Guardian Support, which includes some 2,000 National Guard personnel, is ongoing.
The current caravan, particularly at its peak, is indeed larger than past caravans, said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, but this one stands apart because it is less organized, not more so. “It’s completely improvised,” Isacson said. “There’s nobody there to make sure that people have access to emergency services, that they’re hydrated, that at some point along the line, they’re going to get decent legal advice so they don’t just walk into the United States completely blind. Pueblos Sin Fronteras at least did that, and they kept things more orderly.”
“It’s a much more organic thing,” Isacson noted, and while it may be large, “there’s nothing else there that shows that this is orchestrated.” He added, “I almost wish it were more orchestrated. It would be a much more orderly process.”
The caravan making the news remains deep in Mexico. Whether many of its participants will make it to the U.S. is an open question. If they do, it will likely be weeks from now. If those who do make it to the border wish to apply for asylum, it is their right under domestic and international law to do so — although there have been rumors of a potential executive order coming aimed at circumventing that right, and just this week, the president hinted at the construction of vast tent detention camps in response to the caravan’s arrival.
In its darkest form, the notion that the caravan has been orchestrated and organized by outside forces has been seized upon by right-wing extremists, white nationalists, and other bigots who describe its existence as evidence of an “invasion.” Trump administration officials up to the president himself have fanned the flames of racist paranoia, with the commander-in-chief baselessly claiming that the caravan was infiltrated by “unknown Middle Easterners.” It was that same conspiracy theory that Robert Bowers shared on right-wing social media before walking into a Pittsburgh synagogue and carrying out the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
As Isacson and numerous journalists on the road with the caravan have noted, this particular movement of people is more organic than its predecessors, less organized, and more of an exodus of desperate families and individuals than a coordinated demonstration.
In a piece for the Daily Beast earlier this month, Jeff Ernst and Sarah Kinosian, journalists based in the region, provided a detailed account of how the caravan began in Tegucigalpa, historically one of the deadliest cities in the Western hemisphere, with a group of less than 200 people, and steadily snowballed into a group of several thousand. While the Honduran government sought to pin the creation of the caravan on Bartolo Fuentes, an advocate for migrants, the piece noted that coverage by “the country’s most-watched cable news channel” played a critical role in attracting attention to the small groups who were planning a march north on their own. Fuentes has maintained that the caravan is a reflection of the dire conditions in Honduras, and the failure on the part of the government to provide for its people.
There are clear limits in comparing Operation Faithful Patriot to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The post-9/11 wars killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions, and destabilized entire regions of the world. At the same time, however, decades of U.S. intervention in Central America and a colossally violent, U.S.-backed drug war in Mexico have yielded a higher death toll, while gutting the institutions ostensibly designed to serve and protect civilian populations in some of the same ways that a conventional war would. These factors, alongside entrenched poverty, lack of jobs, and the effects of climate change on rural communities, have combined to make migration what it is today. While unauthorized border crossings are the lowest they have been in four decades, the frequently seasonal Mexican migrant of years past has been replaced by Central American families seeking refuge in the U.S.
In a press conference alongside O’Shaughnessy on Monday, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan stressed that Faithful Patriot is a law enforcement operation with military support. At the same time, the commissioner himself blurred the lines between military and law enforcement work, describing the tactical Border Patrol teams that will lead the effort as “troops.” A picture of what this effort would look like has begun to emerge. Between the press conferences Monday and Tuesday, the Pentagon and DHS have said the first wave of Faithful Patriot will include some 5,200 active duty troops, more than the U.S. currently has deployed in Iraq and Syria. Their operations will be limited, and they are unlikely to have direct contact with migrants. The units that are normally armed will remain armed on the border. Late Wednesday, reports surfaced that the president was considering upping the total number of troops deployed on the border to 15,000.
The blurring of law enforcement and military activity has been a multigenerational feature of the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, giving rise to a complex and frequently exploitative smuggling network on the southern side. According to some counts, as many 120,000 Central Americans have disappeared traveling north in recent years — this on top of a drug war that, by conservative estimates, has killed more people than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Caravans are meant to provide safety in numbers as migrants navigate this gauntlet. Since the first caravan began, others have cropped up across the region, suggesting that the rational decision to seek safety in numbers, with or without the help of an advocacy organization, could be catching on.
Even so, U.S. border security officials don’t seem to understand why migrants would join a caravan. “There’s no benefit to be part of a large group,” McAleenan said at Monday’s press conference.
There are reasons to believe that even within the halls of government, there is a recognition that Operation Faithful Patriot is a ridiculous boondoggle of historic proportions. Since its inception, Newsweek has published a series of reports based on leaked Pentagon documents showing that prior to the launch of the operation, the Trump administration was informed that “only a small percentage” of the migrants making their way north were expected to reach the border, and that the whole thing is likely to cost around $50 million. “I see it as a political stunt and a waste of military resources and waste of tax dollars,” R. Gil Kerlikowske, CBP commissioner from 2014 to 2017, told the Associated Press. “To use active-duty military and put them in that role, I think is a huge mistake. I see it as nothing more than pandering to the midterm elections by the president.”
While it is easy to brush aside Operation Faithful Patriot as merely political theater — because it certainly is that — the international effort to stop a group of families has real consequences on the ground. Under pressure from the Trump White House, the Mexican government has stepped up its migrant interdiction efforts. On Monday, a Mexican government crackdown on the Guatemalan border, which included a helicopter hovering directly above parents and children attempting to cross a fast-moving river, cost one man his life and left dozens of others injured.
On Wednesday morning, the president resumed tweeting:
The Caravans are made up of some very tough fighters and people. Fought back hard and viciously against Mexico at Northern Border before breaking through. Mexican soldiers hurt, were unable, or unwilling to stop Caravan. Should stop them before they reach our Border, but won’t!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018
Our military is being mobilized at the Southern Border. Many more troops coming. We will NOT let these Caravans, which are also made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our Border is sacred, must come in legally. TURN AROUND!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018
Such fearful rhetoric might play well with the president’s base. But for anybody whose brain has not been sizzled by Trump’s white nationalist talking points, it can only serve as proof of what Operation Faithful Patriot really is — the deployment of the most powerful military in the world against refugee families in order to stoke racist fears for political gain.
As for the so-called intelligence underwriting the operation, Isacson of WOLA is doubtful of its existence. “I don’t think it’s based on any intelligence,” he said. “I think it’s based on electoral calculations.”
The post The Military’s Justification for Sending Thousands of Troops to the Border Is the Opposite of the Truth appeared first on The Intercept.
Before deciding to run for Congress, Leslie Cockburn grabbed her notebook and her pen and spent three months touring Virginia’s 5th District, which stretches from the North Carolina border all the way to the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C. The reporting trip came naturally to Cockburn, who’d spent the last three decades as an acclaimed investigative journalist, including at CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
This time, though, she wasn’t looking to uncover any official malfeasance. Instead, she was trying to find out just how well her own politics meshed with those of the voters in the district. The conventional wisdom would predict a poor match — Donald Trump, after all, carried the district by a comfortable 11 points, and Cockburn had no interest in cynically shading her progressive politics to get elected.
That wouldn’t be necessary, it turned out. The people she met were not the conservative caricatures of rural voters drawn by consultants in Washington. Instead, they held broadly progressive views, even if they might reject that label. “If you talk to people in these rural areas, you find out that there are a huge number of very … what I call just mainstream, old-fashioned Democrats. It’s simple. Basic. They believe in a living wage. They believe in collective bargaining. They believe in decent health care for everyone,” Cockburn told The Intercept at a campaign event outside a Social Security office in Farmville, Virginia. She was there to accept an endorsement from the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which had chosen her over her GOP opponent Denver Riggleman, a Trump-backed Air Force veteran.
The Democratic Party has told anybody who’ll listen that it sees its path back to power in the House running through so-called Whole Foods districts populated by college-educated white voters who are turned off by the GOP’s more explicit turn toward bigotry in recent years. Those districts largely went for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 and are currently represented by Republicans in Congress, even after many of them went for Hillary Clinton in 2016. CNN has predicted a “suburban tsunami,” as these Romney-to-Clinton districts reorient themselves toward Democrats. Elsewhere, Democrats are hoping to win back the more working-class districts that went for Barack Obama in 2012 and then flipped to Trump in 2016.
Rural America, this wave of candidates thinks, is ready for a realignment.But Cockburn and a host of progressive populists around the country are looking to take it a step further, focusing instead on districts that went for Romney in 2012 and also for Trump in 2016. They’re running values-driven campaigns that take aim at the establishments of both parties, and the result shows a surprising number of close races in districts that national Democrats have long written off. Rural America, this wave of candidates thinks, is ready for a realignment.
“If You Build It, They Will Come”
On stage last weekend in Ames, Iowa, congressional candidate J.D. Scholten gave a nod to the Whole Foods meme making the rounds among pundits. “I saw this tweet the other day. It made me laugh. It said a blue wave means that Democrats are going to do very well within 20 miles of a Whole Foods,” said Scholten, drawing chuckles from the audience. “This district doesn’t have a Whole Foods. And I’m OK with that.”
Scholten, who is challenging white nationalist Steve King in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, has rejected the Blue Dog approach to targeting rural districts, which leans hard on business-friendly centrism, militarism, and social conservatism. He’s instead embraced the populist approach of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who traveled to Iowa to campaign on Scholten’s behalf.
In arguing that Democrats can win in the district, which Republicans have held for more than two decades, Scholten often recites the famous quote from the movie “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, they will come.” He’s not talking about building a Whole Foods or even a baseball stadium among the corn stalks — although he was once a minor league pitcher. He’s talking about offering a political platform that appeals to thousands of citizens in his district who want jobs, health care, and other signs of socio-economic comfort associated with the high-end grocery franchise. He believes that if he runs on these issues, voters will respond.
It was easy to believe him last weekend as he drew big crowds campaigning alongside Sanders. At one of more than half a dozen stops in the Hawkeye State, Sanders joined a small parade making its way through downtown Ames, where autumn had brought a carpet of yellowing ginkgo leaves to the sidewalk, and the crisp brick storefronts oozed with small-town appeal. Sanders trailed a small float topped by a papier-mache clock tower and a cardinal, both Iowa State symbols. But behind him was a throng of supporters in cornflower-blue “Scholten for Congress” shirts, followed by the candidate himself, bringing up the rear in his now-iconic Scholten for Congress camper, named Sioux City Sue.
JD Scholten, Democratic candidate for Iowa’s 4th congressional district, is interviewed by CQ Roll Call at their D.C. office, on July 27, 2018.
Photo: Thomas McKinless/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
Powered by ethanol and emblazoned with his logo, “Standing Tall for All,” the van has been home to the 6-foot-6 former ballplayer as he’s visited every county in the district — often, he jokes, sleeping in Walmart parking lots. “If you want change, you’re going to have to get uncomfortable,” he said during his stump speech. “I promise you, for the last 15 months, I’ve been uncomfortable.”
Before the parade, as participants gathered in a parking lot off the main procession route, Cynthia Paschen, the wife of Scholten’s primary opponent, John Paschen, told The Intercept that she didn’t hesitate to support Scholten after her husband’s loss. Between the candidate’s character and his platform, she explained, it was a no-brainer. Her affection for the candidate bordered on maternal — perhaps looking to play matchmaker, she noted to a reporter that Scholten was still single.
It was difficult to tell whether the audience was more excited about getting Steve King out of office or about the heady empowerment of independent grassroots fundraising.
Later, an Iowa State University crowd applauded as Scholten riffed about the climate crisis and whooped as he referenced debt-free college. But the biggest applause line followed his pronouncement that he’d out-fundraised his opponent, King, 2-to-1 — without taking corporate PAC money. Opposition to King, who notoriously courts white supremacist news outlets and retweets neo-Nazis, was a popular theme at campaign stops throughout the weekend. The Sioux City Journal, which had for years endorsed King, flipped this year to support Scholten, arguing that he would “bring no embarrassment to the district.” But on this occasion, it was difficult to tell whether the audience was more excited about getting King out of office or about the heady empowerment of independent grassroots fundraising.
As of October 17, Scholten had raised $1.7 million to King’s $740,000, according to Federal Election Commission reports; King has less than $200,000 on hand to spend in the final week, and Scholten’s television ads are airing unopposed. On Wednesday, Scholten announced that he’d raised more than $350,000 in the last 24 hours alone. It doesn’t appear that the national party will be coming to his rescue: Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, cut ties with him on Tuesday.
Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate. We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior.
— Steve Stivers (@RepSteveStivers) October 30, 2018
During the parade in Ames, 75-year-old Bevin Trembly called out “politicians for sale” while dressed as the Monopoly man, his costume complete with a white mustache and top hat. He held a sign that read, “If you can’t afford one, then vote!” Later, he reappeared at his alma mater, the University of Iowa, in plainclothes but on message with an ink stamp that read, “Not to be used for bribing politicians.” He offered to stamp the legal currency of any interested passersby.
It’s issues like these — corruption, “Medicare for All,” free public college — that resonate in both red and blue states and allow progressive Democrats to defy expectations in places far outside the influence of the Whole Foods set.
Trump carried the 4th District by nearly 30 points, but a new poll has King up by just 1 point, with a mere 38 percent approval rating, a flashing-red warning sign for an incumbent. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has put two Iowa races on its Red to Blue list, but Scholten isn’t on it.
Progressives in this red-for-now state seemed particularly eager to have someone, or a pair of someones, to be excited about. It’s not every year that a candidate emerges who inspires a trip to the polls, and it’s not every day that he’s willing to campaign with Bernie Sanders in rural Iowa. As a woman with a hand-drawn “be a voter” sign passed by on the parade route in Ames, one little boy asked, “Can I be a voter?”
“You can eventually!” chimed his caretaker.
At Iowa State, Scholten explained to the crowd why generating enthusiasm for progressive ideas really matters. He told a packed audience of several hundred people, mostly students, that he couldn’t afford health insurance as a baseball player. “My health insurance was praying at night,” he said. And, he noted, the district’s vitality is declining as a whole: Only 18 percent of tech grads from Iowa State stayed in Iowa after graduating. He wants to make the district a place where people want to stay.
Photo: Taylor Irby/The News & Advance/AP
On a Monday evening in October, Lynchburg’s local Chamber of Commerce hosted four congressional candidates: Cockburn and Riggleman were joined by 6th District candidates Ben Cline, a GOP state delegate, and Jennifer Lewis, a mental health worker and anti-pipeline activist.
Lewis’s hill is much steeper than Cockburn’s. Cook Political Report lists Cockburn’s district as R+6, meaning Republicans have a 6-point registration advantage and could generally be expected to win a neutral race there by 12 points. But in a wave year with the right candidate, it’s doable, and University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato recently named the race a toss-up.
Lewis’s district, meanwhile, is listed as R+13 and rated as solid Republican across the board. The 6th District also lacks some of the variables that help make a rural district competitive, such as a decent-sized city or a large university. In an era when partisanship drives a substantial portion of voters, too many Republicans who see the election as a team sport — or, perhaps, a blood sport — can put a district out of reach.
Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who won the 6th District by more than 30 points in 2016, is retiring, and Goodlatte’s son, who now lives in San Francisco, surprised everyone back home by endorsing Lewis. But it’s difficult to find people who believe she has a path to victory.
Another advantage that Cockburn has in the 5th District — which, in fact, does have a Whole Foods — is that it includes Charlottesville, the home of the University of Virginia. Major universities can pump the type of culture into a district that can create an opening for a progressive message to be heard.
Denver Riggleman speaks during a forum at the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance in Lynchburg, Va., on Oct. 22, 2018.
Photo: Taylor Irby/The News & Advance/AP
That Cockburn’s district is more favorable terrain affirms that not all rural districts, and not all rural voters, are the same. Lynchburg has a well-known college, too, but it’s the ultra-Christian Liberty University, which has the effect of producing a conservative infrastructure, rather than a liberal toehold. “White, working-class voters” is now shorthand for Trump and the GOP’s base, but that simplification erases key distinctions within the white community, most significantly religious affiliation. Pew Research Center found that white evangelicals — three-quarters of whom lack a college degree, a status often used as a proxy for working class — made up a fifth of the electorate in 2016 and went overwhelmingly for Trump, 77 percent to 16 percent. That means that Clinton actually won the remainder of white voters without a college degree by roughly 57 percent to 34 percent. In a district not dominated by evangelicals, that gives Democrats a shot.
At the forum, the two parties offered genuinely different visions for the future of the district. Both Riggleman and Cline, for instance, said that they opposed a federal minimum wage. Riggleman deployed what is often the most effective counter to hiking it to $15: the argument that Lynchburg, Virginia, is not Manhattan, and that different levels of income are appropriate in different areas.
The novelty of Cockburn’s argument demonstrates the upside of running candidates who are creative and independent.
But Cockburn responded with an innovative twist, arguing that a minimum wage of $15 an hour is important for workers so that they don’t put in a full week’s worth of work and still remain in poverty. Farmers, she noted, get subsidies from the government because we as a society have decided that farms are important as an end in themselves — both for what they produce but also for their value to local culture. Why can’t small businesses be treated as equally important? If a mom-and-pop shop is demonstrably contributing to the life, economy, and vitality of a small town, the government, she argued, should subsidize its wage costs. The novelty of her argument demonstrates the upside of running candidates who are creative and independent, rather than those who read from scripts written by consultants in Washington.
When it came to health care, Riggleman, who hopes to join the right-wing Freedom Caucus, nevertheless defended major elements of the Affordable Care Act, a sign of how far left the conversation has shifted.
Cockburn, for her part, spoke of single-payer health care. As a first step, she said, Medicare, with its low overhead, ought to be offered on the ACA exchanges to drive down costs, and in the meantime, the country should be moving toward making it universally available. The audience, which appeared to be dominated by Cockburn supporters, approved.
While Republicans around the country have gone to absurd lengths to link their opponents to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — Dave Brat, in the neighboring district, cited her 21 times in a debate against Abigail Spanberger, prompting a response that went viral — Cockburn never misses a chance to lump Riggleman in with the Freedom Caucus.
That linkage — along with Riggleman’s party identity — allowed Cockburn to tie her opponent to the caucus’s attempts to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, potent issues in rural districts that tend to include older voters. Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, joined Cockburn at the Farmville Social Security Office. Later that day, the duo led a discussion with voters at a campaign office on the same theme.
Cockburn thinks that her position on environmental issues — even if they’re not framed as green — also works in her favor. “We have wells, we care about water,” she said, noting that in the south side of the district, people are worried that the federal government may lift a ban on uranium mining. “The Trump administration has weighed in on that,” she said. “That is a bipartisan issue down there because everybody knows what happens when you have uranium tailings.”
A Nationwide PushThe dynamics of each congressional race vary from state to state and from district to district, but this cycle’s progressive populist push shows that Democrats can galvanize voters pretty much anywhere in the country — so long as their policy priorities reflect the reality on the ground.
James Thompson effectively kicked off the populist push in April 2017 with a surprisingly close special election run against Republican Ron Estes in Wichita, Kansas. The seat was previously held by Mike Pompeo, who resigned to become Trump’s CIA director and is now secretary of state. After losing by 7 points while running on an unapologetically progressive platform in Kansas’s 4th District, Thompson launched back into a challenge against Estes in 2018. Thompson out-raised the incumbent by some $50,000 last quarter.
The progressive messaging is also resonating in Pennsylvania’s 11th District, effectively channeling Amish country. Lancaster City, with its population of roughly 60,000 (including one Whole Foods that opened in June), provides something of a progressive base from which organizers can work outward into the countryside. Colleges dot the region, too. Trump carried the district by 26 points in 2016, but Democrat Jess King has made it a single-digit race and has several times more cash on hand in the homestretch than incumbent Republican Rep. Lloyd Smucker. Five Pennsylvania races have made it on to the DCCC’s Red to Blue list, but not this one. The most recent poll has King within 4 points.
WE ARE ONLY DOWN BY FOUR POINTS pic.twitter.com/95I9kcnrUB
— Nick Martin (@lancnick) October 30, 2018
In West Virginia’s 3rd District, where Trump beat Clinton by an astounding 49 points, state Sen. Richard Ojeda is polling even with his Republican opponent, Carol Miller. The district is home to Huntington, West Virginia, with a declining population of 47,000, as well as Marshall University and its 12,000 students. Ojeda’s force of personality — and his bold populist positions — has willed the district into play. The military veteran is now included on the DCCC’s Red to Blue list.
In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Matt Morgan was booted by the state election board from the primary ballot in the 1st Congressional District. But a boost from high-profile Midwestern leftist Michael Moore helped him pull more than 30,000 write-in votes to make it on to the general election ballot. Morgan is an underdog in a district that Democrats haven’t held since Bart Stupak retired in 2010. But there’s been little polling in the district, and he could wind up a surprise winner Tuesday night. The DCCC has four races in Michigan on its Red to Blue list, but Morgan’s is not one of them.
Photo: Carlos Osorio/AP
None of these candidates are favored by the prognosticators at FiveThirtyEight to win their races, but they all have a shot — some, admittedly, more than others. And simply by competing, they’re helping to change the map for Democrats. By cutting down margins in rural districts, these candidates could make the route to a Senate seat or the governor’s mansion easier for other Democrats in their states. Ojeda could help lift Sen. Joe Manchin over the finish line in West Virginia, and organizing by King, Morgan, and Scholten, for instance, could be a benefit to statewide candidates in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Iowa, respectively.
Simply by competing, they’re helping to change the map for Democrats.In Michigan, for instance, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow has run an underwhelming re-election campaign and is facing a surging GOP opponent. Every Democrat that Morgan brings to the polls gives Stabenow a boost. Michigan and Pennsylvania both have important gubernatorial and legislative contests, whose outcomes will not only help shape policy, but also determine who has control of the redistricting process.
A full-court rural press also forces Republicans to expend resources on so-called safe states and districts — such as Texas, to beat back Beto O’Rourke in his challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz — meaning that they have less to spend elsewhere to go on the offensive.
Aggressive competition in the rural districts of Iowa, Pennsylvania, or Michigan can only help Democrats’ chances of retaking those state legislatures. And in Kansas, there are a number of state Senate and House races within Thompson’s congressional district that are competitive in ways they might not have been without his organizing. Monica Marks, for instance, is running to flip a state House seat in northeast Wichita. She was a volunteer for Thompson’s special election campaign and his team recruited her to run, a prime example of how organizing begets opportunities in unexpected ways. With a slight shift in the legislature, the state could be able to expand Medicaid even if Democrats don’t take over, as a number of moderate Republicans now support it.
Because these candidates break the DCCC mold, which tends to prefer centrists who are business owners, prosecutors, or veterans — or all three, if they get lucky — it’s been hard for Washington to recognize what’s happening in some of the races. The Washington Post recently highlighted four districts in Virginia that could potentially flip on Election Day, but it designated three of those as the “most competitive” — with Cockburn’s considered the longest shot. Yet, at the same moment, the New York Times was finalizing live polls that found Cockburn up a point over her opponent, while one of the other three candidates, Democrat Elaine Luria in Virginia Beach, was down against hers by 8.
What makes Luria appear more competitive? Perhaps it’s her establishment bona fides. Luria had the backing of the DCCC in her contested primary against a progressive challenger. She’s a business owner and a former naval commander: She feels like a Democratic frontrunner. Cockburn faced two similar opponents in her own primary: R.D. Huffstetler, a Marine veteran with heavy financial backing, and Andrew Sneathern, a prosecutor who grew up on a farm.
The candidate presumed to be the frontrunner, Huffstetler, did not have the DCCC’s official backing but was endorsed by the New Democrat Coalition, a pro-business group of House Democrats who gave his campaign $8,000. He also had the support of Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who has been amassing clout within the Democratic caucus by recruiting and fundraising for military veterans — especially those of the moderate-to-conservative variety. His organization helped raise $100,000 for Huffstetler, and in a joint fundraising agreement with the state party, the candidate raised another roughly $40,000. He raised a total of $1.1 million, largely from big donors, before withdrawing from the race prior to the party’s nominating convention.
Democrats in Cockburn’s district used a county-by-county caucus to nominate their candidate, which played to both her politics and her strategic decision to focus heavily on her field program. Even in rural areas — in fact, particularly there — many of the most active Democrats are strong progressives. This reality has long frightened national Democrats, who worry that the activists will nominate somebody too far to the left to win in the general election — a fear used to justify intervening in favor of centrist candidates in primary elections.
FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver has noticed that the Democratic emphasis on suburban areas, many of whose residents voted for Romney in 2012 but Clinton in 2016, is not justified in the polling data. “The Romney-Clinton districts have been the subject of an awful lot of attention and even talk of a ‘suburban tsunami’; the Obama-Trump districts, less so. The thing is, though, if you actually look at the polls,” he wrote, “Democrats are doing just as well in the Obama-Trump districts. Probably a little better, in fact.”
If Cockburn and some of the other populists win, it could change the way the party approaches rural America.If Cockburn falls short, the loss will no doubt be chalked up to her progressive politics and unique profile. The same criticism will be saddled on any other progressive that doesn’t get across the finish line. But if Cockburn and some of the other populists win, it could change the way the party approaches rural America.
A rural-urban alliance has been the holy grail for political strategists since the first city was built. Linking the interests of workers in urban areas with laborers in the countryside is reminiscent of the New Deal coalition, with its populist economic program that reined in big banks and monopolies, lifted wages, and strengthened financial security, while investing heavily in development projects in the countryside. Aside from momentary alliances, however, such a coalition has largely remained elusive on a long-term basis, amid cultural divisions between town and country. But as the United States becomes more connected and homogeneous — the same chain restaurants, retail stores, and fashion styles are now found from coast to coast and in between — those cultural differences may be fading enough to create something closer to a level playing field for progressives.
The post What the Progressive Surge in Rural America Means for the Election — and Beyond appeared first on The Intercept.
Leading progressive organizations have joined together for a final-week, six-figure ad buy for the heavily outspent progressive Kara Eastman in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, even as a corporate Democratic group begins an early victory lap, forecasting her defeat.
The ad features a Trump voter touting Eastman’s support for “Medicare for All,” a rare rebuttal to the enduring conservative ad barrage against the idea.
Two groups that had declined to back her during the primary — EMILY’s List and House Majority PAC, the main independent expenditure arm for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is in charge of electing House Democrats — are also helping fund the ad. EMILY’s List controversially declined to endorse Eastman in her contest against a male Democrat, former Rep. Brad Ashford, with an anti-abortion record. Ashford had the backing of the DCCC.
Just two weeks ago, House Majority PAC pulled planned ads for Eastman’s bid against incumbent Republican Don Bacon, in an Omaha-area swing district that Trump won in 2016 by only 2 points. The withdrawal of support had officials from Third Way, a corporate-backed group that pushes Democrats in a conservative direction, crowing.
Third Way co-founder Jim Kessler maintained on Twitter that Nebraska’s 2nd District was “a race we should be winning, but the candidate is unfortunately too far left.”
Democrats are pulling the plug on Kara Eastman. A race we should be winning, but the candidate is unfortunately too far left. One of the few #BernierNation Dems to win a competitive primary. Lost opportunity. https://t.co/2c0TlQ2kDO @stephanieakin
— Jim Kessler (@ThirdWayKessler) October 17, 2018
The race has become a flashpoint for a meta-argument between D.C.-based liberal and centrist groups over how to best win elections in the age of Trump. Eastman, a public health nonprofit executive, was one of only two insurgent candidates to defeat a DCCC-backed challenger in a primary this year. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley both beat incumbents.)
If Eastman wins the general election, a blow would be dealt to the well-worn argument that Democrats must trim their sails in swing-seat races. Yet left out of the conversation is the role of money, as Eastman is being outspent by 2-1 when Republican outside money is factored in.
While FiveThirtyEight forecasts the race as a toss-up, several polls have shown Eastman trailing in the mid- to high single digits.
This has delighted people like Third Way’s Jonathan Cowan, who went after Eastman in a debate this month. Calling Eastman a “Bernie-style populist,” Cowan claimed that she “is getting crushed,” proving “we can’t win general elections with a set of socialist ideas and candidates that most Democratic primary voters just rejected.”
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, or PCCC, which produced the ad, criticized the centrist message. “They are barking from the sidelines,” he said. “We all want her to win, some of us did something about it and some of us didn’t.”
The TV ad, which will run through Election Day on broadcast and cable, features lifelong Republican Jeff Schlichting, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, touting the competitive advantages businesses would gain if America switched to a “Medicare for All”-style program. “As a financial analyst, I know American businesses pay too much for health insurance, giving foreign companies an advantage,” says Schlichting. “But Democrat Kara Eastman knows that if all Americans could get Medicare, it would save money for families and businesses, and we could increase benefits for seniors.”
The messaging addresses two complaints about “Medicare for All” that have been beamed into millions of homes this election season by Paul Ryan’s Congressional Leadership Fund, including into Nebraska’s 2nd District. CLF’s ads typically highlight that “Medicare for All” will cost $32 trillion over 10 years — a misleading figure that doesn’t take into account that this would decrease national health expenditures by $2 trillion, meaning that the transition would save Americans money while covering more people — and that adding people into the program will degrade it for seniors.
“We try to rebut both of those,” said Green, highlighting Schlichting’s comments that “Medicare for All” saves money and that seniors’ experience would improve under the new system, with less cost-sharing and more comprehensive benefits.
Mike Bocian, a pollster who has worked with the DCCC and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said he thought the ad’s approach was effective. “It attacks the Republican for votes damaging to your health care, like taking away pre-existing conditions, but it also calls out the ridiculousness of their attack,” said Bocian, who has also consulted for the PCCC but was not involved in the ad. “It’s a really interesting ad approach, and any which way you cut it, the fact that we’re debating health care is good for the Democrats.”
Until this ad buy, Eastman had been pummeled with outside spending, which hasn’t been taken into account in the debate over whether progressives can win swing seats.
The Congressional Leadership Fund has spent a total of $1,274,530 in the district on radio and TV, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Meanwhile, the DCCC, while listing Eastman on its “Red to Blue” roster of candidates, has made no meaningful contribution to her campaign. This has led to suspicions that national Democrats walked off the playing field in a race in which the candidate didn’t share their ideological priors and defeated their preferred option.
Eastman has been competitive in fundraising, raising nearly $2.4 million for the campaign. But Bacon has benefited from $1.75 million in outside advertising on his behalf in the race; Eastman has gotten just $68,935.
For their part, Eastman’s campaign told NBC News that they didn’t want outside groups running negative ads against her opponent and that she “has all the resources she needs to be competitive.” But as Green pointed out, while Eastman has outspent Bacon 2 to 1 on television ads placed by the campaigns, when you add the outside spending, she’s been outspent by 2 to 1.
Progressive groups have also been publicly criticized for not coming to the rescue of Eastman sooner. The PCCC did direct $70,000 in donations from supporters to Eastman’s campaign, as well as to staff support. The Progressive Turnout Project, another coalition partner, has invested $210,000 in the district for field organizers.
With the ad, liberal groups not only stepped up, but they were able to coax House Majority PAC back into the district for the final week, although it’s unclear exactly how much they contributed in funding. But lacking a large fundraising infrastructure to support candidates, liberal groups cannot mount the air power that national Democratic organizations can.
Change Campaign Super PAC, the campaign spending arm of the PCCC, sponsored the ad. Other groups supporting it include NARAL Pro-Choice America, Democracy for America, Working Families Party, Progressive Turnout Project, Climate Hawks Vote, MoveOn, and #VoteProChoice.
In a related campaign, a $20,000 digital ad buy from Fair and Balanced PAC, run by longtime liberal strategist Mike Lux, a Nebraska native, hits Bacon for voting for the bipartisan bank deregulation bill passed earlier this year. The ad highlights the provision that allows 85 percent of all banks and credit unions to more easily engage in racial discrimination, by rolling back data requirements that would enable regulators to detect fair lending abuses.
It’s one of the first Democratic ads to highlight the bank deregulation bill, also known as the Crapo bill because of its lead author, Idaho Republican and Senate Banking Committee Chair Mike Crapo. National Democrats have perhaps shied away from targeting supporters of that legislation because 16 Democrats in the Senate and 33 in the House voted for it.
The post Progressive Groups Make Last-Minute Push for Kara Eastman, as Corporate Democrats Prep Victory Lap appeared first on The Intercept.
It was this very week two years ago, just days before Election Day, that a sudden wave of campaign spending was unleashed in the presidential election, with Super PACs flooding the Rust Belt states with brand-new advertisements designed to stir anger at the Democratic ticket.
Much of the late-election spending centered on classic economic populist concerns: rising health care costs and the pervasive feeling that insider politicians are out to serve themselves, not the average American. The insidious, billionaire-backed push helped lock up the election for Donald Trump, who swept Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to win an electoral college victory.
But what really motivated voters in those states? It’s a puzzle that has roiled political observers. The question continues to cast a shadow over how the Democratic Party should reimagine itself and appeal to voters going into future elections.
A new research paper from the Institute for New Economic Thinking released today makes the case that Trump artfully exploited long-term economic distress to clinch the 2016 presidential election.
The paper challenges the popular conventional wisdom embraced by many pundits that the 62.9 million Americans who cast a vote for Trump were simply one-dimensional “deplorables” — troglodytes motivated narrowly by racist, sexist, and xenophobic rhetoric and little else.
A More Complex PictureThe authors of this new study — Thomas Ferguson, Benjamin Page, Jacob Rothschild, Arturo Chang, and Jie Chen — use a combination of figures from the American National Election Studies data set, along with aggregate data from congressional districts, to paint a far more complicated picture.
Trump eschewed traditional Republican orthodoxy, promising to protect Medicare and Social Security, while training his fire at the bipartisan consensus around free trade. Many voters conflate trade deals that have hollowed out the country’s manufacturing base and decades of stagnant wages with increased immigration, seeing the issues as inextricably linked. Trump spoke to this view, blaming immigrants and refugees for crime and terrorism, but also for economic hardship and national decline, a message that appeared to resonate with voters.
“Not only were several major economic factors important; our analyses make clear that the social and the economic were intertwined, both in Trump’s rhetoric and in the minds of many voters,” the study notes.
The study is careful not to claim that race and gender played no role in the election, and notes that Trump absolutely mobilized anger over identity, gender, religion, and national origin. But the effects were limited. Explicit gender and ethnic insults used by Trump appeared to help the real estate tycoon prevail largely in the primary election but may have harmed him among many swing voters in the general election.
Previous attempts to use ANES data to discern the connection between economic anxiety and Trump support have found little correlation.
Previous papers rely almost entirely on ANES’s short-term economic attitude questions, which the authors argue are “known to be error-ridden, subject to partisan and other biases.” What’s more, these questions only provide a limited range of fill-in-the-bubble answers that do not reflect the full range of sometimes conflicting views of voters.
The authors of the Institute for New Economic Thinking study incorporate open-ended responses to ANES questions, which allow voters to write out their own spontaneous responses to broad questions, rather than selecting a canned response.
The open-ended answers, they argue, show that social and economic factors were deeply connected for many voters, including crucial voters who swung from voting for Barack Obama to Trump, voters who went from supporting Obama to not voting, and voters who went from not voting in 2012 to backing Trump in 2016.
Voters expressed concerns about immigration and trade in ways that alluded to a complex mixture of both social and economic anxieties. Many worried that immigrants speak foreign languages, but conveyed such anxieties in tandem with (perhaps exaggerated) concerns about competition over jobs.
The authors also found that a drop over four years in the number of business establishments in a congressional district led to substantially more votes for Trump than for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, as well as voters expressing a sense of being left behind in the economic recovery tied closely to support for Trump.
For many voters, the very real impact of globalization, outsourcing, wage stagnation, increasing student loan debt, and an uneven economic recovery since 2008 financial crisis has been caused by largely invisible forces. The economic decisions that influence manufacturing, trade, or salaries are made miles away, behind closed doors and with little media coverage. The communities that are most affected are left wondering who’s to blame. Traditional politicians promise solutions but fail to deliver. That disparity means that voters feeling the short end of the economic order might easily fall prey to efforts to scapegoat much more visible trends in society, such as increasing diversity, immigration, and advances by women and minorities.
The authors suggest that economic stagnation for entire regions of the country, particularly in rural communities and once thriving manufacturing hubs, meant voters were most susceptible to the belief that America was on the “wrong track” and were likely to gravitate toward Trump. In response to open-ended questions, they expressed a desire for a tough-talking strong leader who could protect social safety net programs while taking a sledge hammer to trade and immigration.
The answers to the surveys show many individuals with a preference for Trump also asserted that there is no major difference between the parties, that health costs are too high, that moneyed interests control the political system, that increased imports into the country have destroyed local jobs, critiques that are often associated with left-wing economic concerns.
Voters rarely fit into neat ideological or moral boxes. A survey conducted by Reuters during the 2016 election showed that as many as a third of Hillary Clinton’s voters viewed African Americans as “more ‘criminal’ than whites” and “more ‘violent’ than whites,” despite the candidate stressing anti-racist principles on the stump.
Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The study repeatedly cites political theorist Hannah Arendt’s “alliance between the mob and capital,” the idea that powerful elites exploit widespread economic discontent and channel anger away from economic reform and toward social scapegoats.
Trump harnessed economic distress to blame minorities and immigrants for the nation’s woes. But he was certainly not the only billionaire using this strategy. The Koch brothers and other major donors have long channeled anger about the economy at religious and ethnic minorities. The small set of Super PACs and dark money groups that funded the late-election surge in pro-Trump advertising, along with the media conglomerates that gave Trump promotional coverage worth billions of dollars during the election, also certainly fit the mould of elite influence over the election. The “alliance between mob and capital,” the authors write, may be at the heart of Trump’s election victory.
The open-ended ANES survey results also show the wide and pervasive perception that Clinton was “corrupt.” In contrast to Clinton, Trump certainly attempted to position himself as an outsider to the political system, a business leader who could forge deals that no normal politician could. The authors caution that such an election, with two highly unpopular candidates and many distinctive personal traits, may not offer the ideal scenario for testing questions about the roots of populism.
But the election does offer some clues. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric was uniquely combined with a rejection of the business-centric consensus on trade and immigration. Virtually every major Republican, including all of the presidential candidates, had made assurances to cut social spending. Trump stood apart by offering a particular right-wing blend of populism and economic promises once associated with the Democratic Party. His brash rhetoric and willingness to ostracize minorities was part and parcel of his style of populism, which blended demagoguery about perceived outsiders with anger over inequality and lopsided economic policy.
The research paper, however, notes that future Democratic candidates should take heed that economic distress still motivates large swaths of the American electorate.
“Fundamentally, these guys [the Democrats] lost votes because the voters could not tell the difference between the two parties, they lost votes because people wanted relief from imports, they didn’t want globalization,” said Ferguson, one of the authors and the Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in an interview with The Intercept.
But the Trump playbook in many ways echoes other breakout underdog candidates.
In 2008, Obama campaigned aggressively against free trade agreements and outsourcing, mocking Clinton as “a cheerleader for NAFTA for more than a decade.” Obama established himself as a political outsider, deriding Clinton for taking “more money from lobbyists than any other candidate, Democratic or Republican.” Obama as a candidate managed to avoid any of the racism or sexism of the Trump campaign, while similarly positioning himself as an outsider uniquely situated to give voice to the rage against the political and economic establishment. That year, Obama went on to win states long viewed as ruby red, such as Indiana and North Carolina, along with every Rust Belt state.
The same could be said about Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a relatively obscure candidate with little political resources and facing a virtual blackout in broadcast media coverage, who catapulted ahead of Clinton in several states during the 2016 Democratic primary, by voicing concerns about economic anxiety over trade, health care, corruption and low wages.
“Lots of people feel completely left out from the recovery. There’s a dual economy. People feel squeezed from the middle class, they don’t know how they can send their kids to school,” Ferguson said. “There were a lot of poor people who should have voted Democratic but switched and we distinguish those groups in our study.”
The post Donald Trump Exploited Long-Term Economic Distress to Fuel His Election Victory, Study Finds appeared first on The Intercept.
There’s a new winner for the coveted title of most expensive ballot initiative campaign in American history. And it’s a race that’s been waged completely under the national radar.
In California, the dialysis industry has spent a record $111.4 million to oppose Proposition 8, which would cap what outpatient clinics can charge patients. Of that sum, $101 million comes from just two for-profit companies, Fresenius and DaVita, which serve around three-quarters of all dialysis patients in California and roughly the same portion nationwide.
The industry’s aggressive spending undercuts its core message in the campaign, that capping profits would lead to mass closures of dialysis clinics, threatening access to treatment. It’s easier to pull off such a plea of poverty when you don’t have $111 million available for television ads, mailers, and other campaign spending.
“These clinics are routinely understaffed, leaving patients at risk,” claimed Yes on 8 spokesperson Sean Wherley. The Yes on 8 campaign believes that the measure would not only rein in dialysis costs (which can run as high as $88,000 a year), but would also force the industry to improve staffing and hygiene at the facilities. “All of a sudden their profits are on the line and they cough up $111 million,” added Wherley, referring to Fresenius and DaVita.
The No on 8 campaign denied that it is attempting to buy an election. Spokesperson Kathy Fairbanks noted that California is an expensive state to campaign in. The sum thrown in by the dialysis industry “goes to show how disastrous Prop 8 would be for patients and clinic viability in California,” Fairbanks said. “Providers are taking Prop 8 very seriously because it would shutter clinics and jeopardize their patients’ lives.”
The incredible funding haul hit the record last week when Fresenius dropped another $5.44 million, according to filings from California’s secretary of state office. That eclipsed the previous nationwide record of $110 million set by the opposition to 2016’s Proposition 61, which would have limited the price of prescription drugs purchased by the state of California to the totals paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The orgy of funding was enough to defeat Prop 61 by 6.4 points.
This year, Prop 8’s opponents are following the same strategy, blanketing the airwaves with ads from doctors and patients warning of limited access to lifesaving kidney treatments if the measure passes. The Yes side, for its part, has raised $20 million in support of the ballot initiative. Most of that money has come from the Service Employees International Union, which put the measure on the ballot as part of a corporate campaign to organize dialysis facilities.
The only statewide poll for Prop 8, from SurveyUSA on October 10, showed support for the initiative leading 47-34. SurveyUSA called the race a toss-up, as propositions tend to lose steam closer to Election Day, especially facing of a wall of opposition money. The Yes on 8 campaign says its internal polling shows a statistical tie.
If anything, the campaign reveals the lucrative nature of dialysis and the oligopoly getting rich off it.
A 1972 law commits the U.S. government to pay for all dialysis treatments — essentially a filtering of a patient’s blood when their kidneys cannot perform the function — through Medicare, regardless of age. However, for patients with private insurance, the insurer covers the treatments for the first 30 months. This is a giant cash cow for Fresenius and DaVita, which charge several orders of magnitude more to commercial insurance companies than they do Medicare. All industry profits come from payments from private insurers.
Fresenius and DaVita have 3,900 clinics nationwide, serving about 70 percent of America’s half-million dialysis patients. Around 80,000 of those patients and 588 clinics are in California. The two companies earned $4 billion last year in profits from dialysis operations.
Critics in California and nationally have raised concerns about unsanitary environments and a general assembly-line rush to get as many patients on dialysis machines as possible. Last year, the California Department of Public Health cited dialysis clinics for 1,417 deficiencies during inspections.
Prop 8 would restrict payments to commercial insurance providers for dialysis to 15 percent above the cost of care. Any excess profits would have to be refunded, either to patients or the insurance companies that paid for the treatment. The proposal is similar to the “medical loss ratio” in the Affordable Care Act, which limits insurance company profits in a similar fashion.
Proponents believe that the initiative would improve the performance of dialysis clinics. “They can refund to patients, or they can send money back into care, by hiring staff or exterminators to keep out roaches,” said Wherley, the Yes on 8 spokesperson. If these investments lead to more efficient usage of dialysis clinics, it would increase revenues for the industry, adding the 15 percent paid to insurance providers to higher profits.
The industry claims that the caps would bankrupt its clinics in California. Because treatments covered by private insurance would be capped, and Medicare margins are tiny, the companies say the caps would have a more drastic impact. An industry-funded study claimed that 83 percent of state clinics would lose money. SEIU has questioned the calculations, which claim that certain administrative and managerial costs cannot be factored into the cap.
By contrast, two of the state’s leading insurance providers, Kaiser Permanente and Anthem Blue Cross, told a Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System board meeting that capping profits would not impact members’ “access to dialysis treatment, though Anthem noted it could lead to operational and pricing changes by chronic dialysis clinics.” In a statement from the Yes campaign, dialysis patient Lorraine Lewis said that Kaiser and Anthem’s comments disprove the industry’s argument: “The entire basis of the dialysis industry’s vote ‘no’ campaign is nothing more than groundless fear-mongering.” (The two insurance companies have not taken a position on the ballot initiative.)
No on 8 spokesperson Fairbanks dismissed the remarks from the insurance companies, saying that they referred only to city employees in Los Angeles, which as a government payer wouldn’t be affected by Prop 8. She added that insurance companies have not supported Prop 8, despite the prospect of lower dialysis charges. Fairbanks claimed that this is because clinic closures would shift dialysis treatments to hospitals. “That’s going to be far more expensive than it is today. That’s the reason insurers aren’t backing Prop 8,” she said.
Even without adjudicating this debate, the notion that Prop 8 would leave Fresenius and DaVita destitute when they have $111 million to spend on opposing it leaves critics cold. “It makes you wonder what are the prerogatives of the industry,” said Wherley. “When someone comes out that hard and heavy, is it really about the patients?”
Other corporations are dumping cash into California ballot measures this year. As The Intercept has reported, Blackstone and a number of corporate landlords have spent $77.5 million to block Prop 10, which would lift a statewide ban on rent control laws. And the ambulance company American Medical Response has put $30 million into supporting Prop 11, which would allow the company to continue forcing workers to be on call during breaks, despite a state Supreme Court ruling striking down the practice. Passage would help AMR avoid liability for its break practices, which could lead to it paying tens of millions of dollars in back wages to EMT workers.
Companies have even started spending for 2020 in California. Triton, a bail bond company owned by private equity firm Endeavor Capital, has spent $800,000 to qualify a 2020 ballot measure to overturn a state law passed this year that would effectively end the money bail system, leaving pretrial releasing decisions up to the courts.
Correction: Oct. 31, 2018, 4:50 p.m.
An earlier version of this story stated that the Yes on 8 campaign had raised $38 million. That figure, obtained through California Secretary of State records, actually double-counts funds moved between separate accounts for the campaign. The actual amount raised is $20 million.
The post The Dialysis Industry Is Spending $111 Million to Argue That Regulating It Would Put It Out of Business appeared first on The Intercept.
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