Friday, 21 December 2018

The Republican Majority's Last Act: A Government Shutdown

The Atlantic
The Republican Majority's Last Act: A Government Shutdown

The federal government on Friday evening stood on the verge of its second partial shutdown of the year, as congressional leaders and the White House scrambled to reopen negotiations hours before a midnight deadline. The talks represent the final act of unified Republican control in Washington—and a bookend to showdowns of years past over federal spending and immigration.

With President Donald Trump dug in on funding for a southern border wall, a shutdown of the nine federal departments Congress hasn’t already funded for 2019 appeared inevitable for most of the day. The Senate sat paralyzed for nearly five hours at one point, as Republicans were unable to muster the votes even to consider—let alone pass—a House spending package that included $5.7 billion in funding for the wall.

“We’re totally prepared for a very long shutdown,” Trump told reporters at the White House before the Senate had even finished voting. A prolonged lapse in funding could shutter national parks and museums over the holiday travel period and furlough hundreds of thousands of federal employees, forcing them to skip at least one paycheck over Christmas. (They will likely be paid retroactively whenever the government reopens.)

Read: [The Trump presidency’s lowest point yet]

By 6 p.m. eastern time, the best the Senate could do was to agree merely on the scope of 11th-hour negotiations, which would include leaders of both parties and the White House. The goal was a broad agreement that would fund most government agencies for all of 2019 while settling the dispute over border security that has driven the two parties apart.

“There is no path forward for the House bill,” Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, the retiring Republican and Trump critic, declared on the Senate floor. “The only path forward is to a bill that has an agreement between the president and both houses of Congress. And the next time we vote will be on the agreement, not another test vote.”

Flake and another retiring Republican, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, had withheld their support from beginning debate on the bill the House passed, in a bid to jostle the leadership back to the bargaining table. The gambit worked—to a point.

It seemed clear by Friday evening that Congress would miss the midnight deadline, ensuring at least a brief lapse in federal funding. But with talks reopened, it was possible that any shutdown would be short and have a limited impact. The House planned to reconvene on Saturday, in a sign that a shutdown was likely.

If the negotiations break down again, however, it’s entirely possible that much of the government will remain closed for the rest of the year, until the new Congress convenes in January, with Democrats controlling the House majority.

This would be the second government shutdown of the year, after funding lapsed for four days in January as the two parties fought over immigration. But while Democratic demands for a deal that protected Dreamers precipitated that shutdown, the blame for this one will fall squarely on Trump and his demand for a taxpayer-funded border wall.

Earlier in the week, the Senate unanimously approved a measure to keep the government running through February 8; Republicans supported the bill in part because they’d been told Trump was likely to sign it. But the president reversed course, instead heeding calls from hard-liners in the House Freedom Caucus and conservative media to dig in on the wall.

After Trump informed Speaker Paul Ryan in a White House meeting that he would not sign the Senate-passed bill, the retiring GOP leader, in one of his final acts as a member of Congress, bowed to the president’s wishes and added $5.7 billion in wall funding, along with $7.8 billion in disaster relief. The bill passed Thursday evening largely along party lines, as Republicans defied a prediction by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi that there were not enough votes for the wall in the House.

It was a pyrrhic victory for Republicans, however. The bill was doomed in the Senate from the moment it passed the House, as Democrats were united in providing enough votes to sustain a filibuster. On Friday, Trump made another futile bid to pressure Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to deploy the so-called nuclear option and eliminate the legislative filibuster. But McConnell, as he has repeatedly before, reiterated that he didn’t have enough votes to change the rules.

Read: [A shutdown would be a fitting end to the GOP majority]

When the measure came up in the Senate early Friday afternoon, not only did it not come close to the 60 votes it needed to advance, but it struggled to win the simple majority necessary to even begin debate. In a sign of how abruptly Trump changed course, McConnell had to hold the vote open for hours while he waited for senators to return to Washington; many had already gone home for the holidays on the belief that they had averted a shutdown.

By Friday night, both the House and Senate had returned, but lawmakers could only wait—and hope—for an agreement to vote on.

The Atlantic Daily: Disarray and Departures

Programming note: The Daily will take a break on December 24 and December 25, and return each day with selections of the best Atlantic stories from this past year for the remainder of 2018. It’ll be back in full swing on January 2, 2019.

What We’re Following

Shutdown: Is it the most deadlocked time of the year? The U.S. government has been teetering on the edge of another shutdown, this time of the nine federal departments Congress hasn’t funded for 2019. The sticking point continues to be funding to build up the Southern border wall.

In 1995, then–Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich set the government on the path to a shutdown by sending President Bill Clinton a bill he knew Clinton wouldn’t sign. But the move had consequences for American politics that few could’ve foreseen; the same will be true of President Donald Trump’s standoff with Senate Democrats, however it resolves, writes Todd Purdum.

Any Given Friday: The White House foreign-policy team is in a bit of disarray—with Defense Secretary James Mattis’s resignation capping off the week—while the president pushes plans to withdraw several thousand troops from Syria and Afghanistan. (Though whether unending deployment should be framed as the only alternative to withdrawal is worthy of reconsideration, argues Conor Friedersdorf.) Stock markets are sinking in the U.S. and overseas. Are there staffers to replace the so-called adults in the room?

Cashless: As more and more stores go cashless and even cashier-less for the sake of efficient checkout experiences for customers, a clear group will be left out: the poor, and, in particular, unbanked people who may have low credit or work jobs that only pay in cash. Their options in the growing new digital economy are shrinking.

RBG: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent successful surgery Friday morning to remove two nodules found in her lungs during a CT scan last month. Though no other nodules remain, writes James Hamblin, that the two removed came in a pair could, alongside other factors, merit closer monitoring for metastatic disease in the future. For further reading, mull over Dahlia Lithwick’s piece on the irony of the modern feminist fandom around the justice.

Haley Weiss and Shan Wang

SnapshotThe five years that changed modern dating Since Tinder launched for all smartphones in 2013, dating apps have changed everything about how young people look for partners, introducing new problems and fixing some old ones. Ashley Fetters charts the complex evolution of today’s dating world. (Photo: Joe Readle / Getty)Evening Read

DNA tests have begun to reveal the genetic legacy of Jews who converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition. A recent study reveals the unexpectedly large extent of Sephardic Jewish ancestry that can be traced to Latin Americans today, writes Sarah Zhang.

In the case of conversos, DNA is helping elucidate a story with few historical records. Spain did not allow converts or their recent descendants to go to its colonies, so they traveled secretly under falsified documents. “For obvious reasons, conversos were not eager to identify as conversos,” says David Graizbord, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Arizona. The designation applied not just to converts but also to their descendants who were always Catholic. It came with more than a whiff of a stigma. “It was to say you come from Jews and you may not be a genuine Christian,” says Graizbord. Conversos who aspired to high offices in the Church or military often tried to fake their ancestry.

The genetic record now suggests that conversos—or people who shared ancestry with them—came to the Americas in disproportionate numbers. For conversos persecuted at home, the fast-growing colonies of the New World may have seemed like an opportunity and an escape. But the Spanish Inquisition reached into the colonies, too. Those found guilty of observing Jewish practices in Mexico, for example, were burned at the stake.

Read on.

What Do You Know … About Culture?

1. DC Comics’ latest superhero flick stars the Game of Thrones actor Jason Momoa as this comic-book character.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

2. This network, one of the top purveyors of kitschy made-for-TV films, recently released their 2018 holiday feature, titled A Very Nutty Christmas.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

3. This musician, who has broadcast their struggle with bipolar disorder publicly for more than a year, announced last weekend that they are no longer taking medication in order to bolster creativity.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

Answers: Aquaman / Lifetime / Kanye west

Poem of the Week

Here is a portion of “Winter’s Tale” by Maxine Kumin, from our May 2009 issue:

Even from my study at the back
of the house I can hear an orange drop
upstairs, one of the last to grow

on the dwarf tree you bought me
thirty years ago. When it tried
to overtake the window frame

we cruelly lopped side branches and still
it blossomed

Read the rest.

Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.

Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com

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Gingrich Shut Down the Government in a Fit of Pique 23 Years Ago

I’ve had it in my desk drawer for 23 years: a pink plastic pacifier, tucked into a piece of glossy card stock, with a cartoon of a diaper-clad Newt Gingrich brandishing a baby bottle and stomping his foot, and the caption, Now Boarding … Rows 30-35! It’s a treasured artifact of the 1995 government shutdown, when Gingrich confessed he’d forced the closing of the federal government partly because Bill Clinton had relegated him to a rear cabin aboard Air Force One on the way home from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral in Jerusalem.

Gingrich, then speaker of the House, triggered the shutdown that November by sending Clinton a stopgap spending bill he knew the president wouldn’t sign, because it raised Medicare premiums and cut environmental regulations. Clinton’s veto forced the closure of most of the federal government for six days—ostensibly over a point of principle.

todd s. purdum

But Gingrich soon confessed, at a press breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, that he had acted partly out of pique, because Clinton had seated him at the rear of the presidential plane and not talked to him on the long flight back from Israel. Moreover, Gingrich was forced to exit via the plane’s rear stairs—with the press and low-level aides.

“This is petty,” the speaker acknowledged. But, he added, “You’ve been on the plane for 25 hours and nobody has talked to you, and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp … You just wonder, Where is their sense of manners? Where is their sense of courtesy?” Gingrich acknowledged that his pique at the seeming slight had prompted him to send Clinton a tougher spending bill. “It’s petty,” he said, “but I think it’s human.”

The next day, the New York Daily News ran that cartoon of Gingrich on the front page, with a giant headline: “Cry Baby.” Some Democratic group or other—just which escapes me now—promptly circulated the pacifier card in a gleeful piling on.

[Read: Trump steals a page from Newt Gingrich]

Clinton won the political battle over that shutdown, and a subsequent one a few weeks later. In fact, his tough stance in the standoff helped pave his way to reelection in 1996. But Gingrich had his own sort of revenge: The same day that the speaker complained of his ill treatment, Clinton asked an unpaid intern who was filling in on the skeletal White House staff to join him in his private office. Her name was Monica Lewinsky, and the rest, as they say, is history.

However Donald Trump’s standoff with Senate Democrats ends this week, it seems safe enough to say that there will be consequences no one can now foresee. There almost always are.

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Once More Unto the Shutdown

We’re ending the year as it began: with the U.S. government headed toward another shutdown, this time chiefly over funding for President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he will resign at the end of February, citing disagreements with the president over foreign policy. Mattis is just the latest in a long line of senior administration staff, from John Kelly to Nikki Haley, who announced this year that they are leaving the White House.

Mattis’s resignation comes after Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops from Syria—a move that did not come as a shock to longtime Syria-policy experts. Mattis, who has always understood Trump’s deficiencies, agreed to serve him out of a sense of patriotism, writes Jeffrey Goldberg, and his departure signals a dangerous third phase of Trump’s foreign policy. But in coverage of Mattis’s resignation, Conor Friedersdorf writes that the news media has failed “to treat the withdrawal of troops [from Syria] as a legitimate, reasonable position.”

In the final Politics & Policy Daily of 2018, we’re featuring one last round of standout Atlantic politics stories from the past 12 months, including a complex portrait of Heidi Cruz, an assessment of the impact former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has had on the legal gains of the civil-rights era, and an intimate look at the unique weight of grief in the aftermath of the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Elaine Godfrey, Madeleine Carlisle, and Olivia Paschal

(Matthieu Bourel)

The End of Civil Rights
Vann R. Newkirk II
“...from the Black Belt in Alabama in the 1980s to the farthest reaches of the border fence today, the Sessions Doctrine is the endgame of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights.”→ Read on.

The Perpetual Disaster of the Trump Administration
David A. Graham
“It is as though the United States is stumbling, never quite falling on its face but never fully righting itself, either, caught perpetually mid-stumble. The only certainty is more weeks like this one. There is no exit.” → Read on.

The Jews of Pittsburgh Bury Their Dead
Emma Green
“Jewish tradition teaches that the dead cannot be left alone. Some call it a sign of respect for people in death, as in life. Others say that the soul, or nefesh, is connected to the body until it is buried, or even for days afterward, and people must be present as it completes its transition into the next world.”→ Read on.

(Todd Spoth)

Heidi Cruz Didn’t Plan for This
Elaina Plott
“As Heidi had discovered at the beginning of her marriage, signing on to a way of life is one thing; living it is another matter entirely. Despite her best efforts, Real Heidi and Campaign Heidi at times became one.”→ Read on.

The Democrat Who Could Lead Trump’s Impeachment Isn’t Sure It’s Warranted
Russell Berman
“It was Robin Bady, a 67-year-old neighborhood resident, who asked about impeachment: What were the chances, she wondered, that it could happen if Democrats won back the House majority this fall? It’s a question likely on the minds of millions of Americans at the moment, and more than just about anyone else in the country, [Jerry] Nadler is the person to ask.” → Read on.

We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.

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The Worrisome Word in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Cancer Diagnosis

On Friday, surgeons in New York removed the lower lobe of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s left lung. According to a statement from the Supreme Court, two nodules—which had been discovered in a CT scan after Ginsburg broke three ribs last month—were determined to be malignant.

Images before the surgery showed no evidence of cancer elsewhere in her body, and doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center reported that there was “no evidence of any remaining disease” after the procedure. According to the statement, no further treatment is planned.

What does this mean?

First, there’s a mandatory caveat in any such circumstance: A prognosis is impossible even for Ginsburg’s doctors to predict perfectly, and very limited information has been made public. Nevertheless, Ginsburg is a public figure whose health status is of particular consequence to American citizens, and readers of the Supreme Court’s statement are likely to draw conclusions. It is possible to add some context to the statement and to determine that this is neither a clean bill of health nor a clear sign of imminent peril.

After the news, I tweeted: “If you’re 85 and you break a rib and get a CT, the radiologist will very likely find pulmonary nodules. Most aren’t removed. Since hers are now out and there’s apparently no evidence of metastatic disease, the primary issue is recovery from the procedure.”

Most readers took this as good news. Though I didn’t mean to imply that she’s cleared. It’s true that nodules are very common—and a nodule is different from a mass, the distinction being the size. A nodule is, by definition, fewer than 3 centimeters (around an inch) in diameter. These two nodules are now gone, and there are apparently no others remaining.

But the word that makes the statement more complicated and concerning is two.

Pulmonary nodules are indeed extremely common, and most are benign. To find two malignant nodules in a person who smokes would not be especially surprising. However, if you have two separate malignant nodules in your lung and you do not smoke, doctors worry that this means they represent metastatic disease from a cancer somewhere else.

This is especially true if the patient has a history of cancer, as Ginsburg does. She had early-stage colon and pancreatic cancers removed in 1999 and 2009, respectively.

Lung nodules are generally removed when they are deemed suspicious for malignancy, meaning they either showed signs of growth or were not seen on prior oncologic screening. “Growing pulmonary nodules can be primary lung cancers, and synchronous ones do appear,” says Howard Forman, a radiologist and professor at Yale. “But in a patient with two primary known malignancies, we would need to know the pathology of the nodules before believing she is cured.”

The pathology report can tell us if the malignant cells are lung cancer—meaning a rare case of two simultaneous new lung cancers in a nonsmoker—or if they represent a recurrence of metastatic colon or pancreatic cancer, or if they are of some other origin. If this is the case, it would raise concern that although current scans showed no evidence of metastatic disease elsewhere, there could be yet-undetectable cancer cells already seeded in Ginsburg’s body.

The fact that the statement says the nodules are indeed malignant means that at least a preliminary pathology report has been done, but this crucial detail—what type of malignancy?—was either unclear or withheld from the statement. It reads only: “According to the thoracic surgeon, Valerie W. Rusch, MD, FACS, both nodules removed during surgery were found to be malignant on initial pathology evaluation.” (I emailed Rusch, who told me, “We have no additional information on the pathology at the present time.”)

“It all depends on the pathology report,” says the pathologist Anirban Maitra, the scientific director of the Ahmed Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “Cancer in the lung is not the same as primary lung cancer, especially in a person with a history of colon and pancreatic cancer. Right now it’s best for the medical community to wait for more details.”

“They might need to run special stains to distinguish lung versus colon versus pancreatic,” Maitra adds. “That could take a couple days and may or may not be conclusive.”

In any case, expect that Ginsburg will be monitored closely in coming years for metastatic disease. In the immediate term, recovery from a lobectomy can be a significant undertaking for an 85-year-old, and that is indeed the relevant health issue for the foreseeable future.

Trump, Unchecked

Unlike H. R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, and Nikki Haley, James Mattis was never going to go quietly. He has read too much history and is too cognizant of his duty for that. His letter of resignation was all the more devastating for its understatement. For more than a year, senior administration officials have constructed the fiction that the United States is following a foreign policy of competing with authoritarian powers. Anyone who has talked with one of these officials in private will be familiar with the mantra—look at the substance of the National Security Strategy, not the tweets. Never mind that the president never spoke of this strategy, even when he made remarks introducing it.

Mattis laid bare the reality. He wrote that his views “on treating allies with respect and also being clear eyed about malign actors and strategic competitors” make it impossible for him to continue to serve the president, because “you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are more aligned with your views on these and other subjects.”

In a post for Task & Purpose, Paul Szoldra, a former marine, pointed to a speech Mattis delivered in 2014, shortly after he retired from the Marine Corps. He was asked whether there was anything that would lead a four-star general to resign in protest. “You have to be very careful about doing that,” Mattis said. “The lance corporals can’t retire. And they’re going. That’s all there is to it.” He emphasized that he always expected to be heard by policy makers, but not to be obeyed. “My portfolio was narrower than the president’s. He was the commander in chief. He was voted in by the American people.” Be careful, he cautioned, because a leader’s first obligation is to that lance corporal. “You abandon him only under the most dire circumstances, where the message you have to send can be sent no other way. I never confronted that situation.”

That dire situation is now upon us. So what happens next?

[Read: James Mattis’s letter of resignation]

President Donald Trump’s views are well known to anyone who cares to look. In his speeches over the past two years, he has consistently identified four threats to America—immigrants, alliances, trade deficits, and terrorism. (He used to talk a lot about North Korean nuclear weapons, as well, but appears to have since struck a de facto bargain with Kim Jong Un. North Korea has ceased testing missiles and nuclear bombs, and relations between the two countries have warmed.) Over three decades, Trump has consistently expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders, especially in Russia. But above all, Trump wants the freedom to do as he wants, when he wants, free from constraints. He wants to be indulged. He wants to be a king.

The turning point of the Trump administration came on July 17, 2017. For the first six months of his presidency, Trump largely deferred to the so-called axis of adults of Tillerson, McMaster, and Mattis. When he diverged from their advice—when, for example, he refused to endorse Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty while speaking at NATO headquarters—he soon backtracked under pressure. But on July 17 he had had enough. He was sitting through yet another interagency meeting, this time on the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action. Not only did all of his advisers recommend staying in the deal—the three options in front of him required it. He agreed to effectively extend the deal one more time but demanded that the next time, he be given an option to withdraw.

After that meeting, Trump began to push back. He started giving orders unilaterally—to move the embassy to Jerusalem, to meet with Vladimir Putin, to meet with Kim Jong Un, and even to hold a military parade. But as long as the axis of adults remained in place, he was constrained. So he began to force them out. If there is a common theme behind the reshuffle, it is that Trump replaces independent thinkers with sycophantic loyalists or those too weak to stand up to him. If past practice is any guide, Trump will double down on loyalists when he replaces Mattis. Men such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo do not agree with Trump on many issues, but they value their loyalty to him personally above their own views and they will never try to thwart his will.

[Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet]

Bolton learned this lesson early on. When he became national-security adviser, many observers commented on the irony that his first task would be to implement a policy of diplomatic outreach toward North Korea, something he opposed so vociferously in his previous time in government that President George W. Bush fell out with him over it. Three weeks into the job, Bolton tried to sabotage the talks by claiming that the administration was looking to the Libya model, whereby Muammar Qaddafi unilaterally disarmed. It was apparently intended as a dog whistle that would pass unheard by Trump but that would cause the North Koreans to sink the talks before they began. The North Koreans were furious, as intended. The South Koreans also noticed, though, and complained to Trump. Pompeo backed them up, and Trump was furious. Bolton was excluded from high-level meetings with North Korean officials and was only added to the Singapore summit at the last minute. He learned his lesson—he has not again explicitly worked against the president.

Bolton now focuses on the issues he is interested in and the issues Trump is interested in, but nothing else. Bolton is preoccupied by international law and made opposition to the International Criminal Court and other institutions one of his top priorities. One European diplomat told me that Bolton has spent exponentially more time on dealing with the Western Sahara territorial dispute between Morocco and the Algerian backed Polisario Front—a pet issue of his for decades, given United Nations involvement—than with post-conflict planning for Syria. Days before Trump’s announcement of a retreat from Syria, Bolton briefed European officials that the United States would be staying. Even more significant, Bolton has effectively abolished the interagency process by which major national-security decisions are made in formal consultations with the relevant departments, thus allowing Trump to freelance to his heart’s content.

When Pompeo became secretary of state, he faced a fateful choice: forge an alliance with Mattis, or indulge the president at every turn. He chose the latter course; Trump once remarked that Pompeo is the only person on his team with whom he never fights. This choice trapped Pompeo in a vise. He became secretary when morale was low. He has helped to rebuild the department, but he has dramatically shrunk the role of secretary of state. Foreign diplomats I’ve talked to describe him as the secretary for Iran and North Korea because he works on nothing else. Even on these issues, he will not stand up for himself.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Mattis always understood Trump’s severe defects]

The president’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria is widely seen as benefiting Tehran. Pompeo, along with Bolton, tried to convince Trump to change his mind, but they folded once he made his decision. Pompeo is particularly wary of opposing. On North Korea, he persists in embracing the myth that a process of denuclearization is underway despite all evidence to the contrary. This puts him in the awkward position of looking foolish and naive. It’s a dangerous place for someone who is so ambitious, which is maybe why he has become so testy in his conversations with journalists when questioned about North Korea.

When Bolton and Pompeo began, they believed that they could persuade Trump to accept them bringing some of the Never Trumpers who opposed the president during the election on to their staff. Those hopes were dashed when Trump rebuked Mike Pence for trying to hire Jon Lerner as his national-security adviser; Lerner had worked for an anti-Trump political-action committee during the campaign. Pence, for his part, has been even quieter than Bolton and Pompeo, refusing to take any stance, even in private, that is at odds with the president. The talent pool has been almost drained dry; there is no untapped reserve of experienced, qualified, Trump-supporting national-security aides. While many people have resigned, other senior officials are remaining in place because they are worried about the real-world consequences of their positions remaining vacant indefinitely, or being filled by someone unqualified.

We are left with a Cabinet that is weak, terrified, and myopic. Meanwhile, the president is empowered and unbound—but also insecure and desperate. Nothing can be ruled out anymore. The president is free to indulge his visceral instincts unchecked. The unilateral declarations on Syria and Afghanistan are just the beginning. It is quite possible that he will try to withdraw U.S. forces from South Korea and Germany, renege on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, or strike a comprehensive grand bargain with Xi Jinping over the objections of Japan.

It will surely get worse. As the revelations from Robert Mueller’s investigation inflict blow after blow and the subpoenas fly from House Democrats, Trump will become more erratic and dangerous in his decision making. Of all the resignations, the second most damaging after Mattis may be John Kelly. Few liberals shed a tear for him on his departure, but his flaws were largely counterbalanced by one vitally important redeeming feature—he was a stabilizing force on national security. He could check Bolton and channel Mattis. He could play interference. And now he is gone, replaced by Mick Mulvaney, who has no national-security experience.

[David Frum: No more excuses]

America’s allies had hoped to ride out the next two years. Senior officials from multiple European and Asian allies told me that they had concluded by mid-2018 that they could engage with the administration but that things went off the rails whenever the president was directly engaged, which was usually on a foreign trip. They decided to deliberately reduce the opportunities for him to be involved. Thus, the 70th anniversary of the NATO summit would not be marked by a leaders’ summit, but would instead occur at the foreign-ministers level (it will be hosted by Pompeo in Washington, D.C.). The agendas for G20 and G7 summits are being pared back, frequently with the support of officials in Washington. But those plans count on an administration that checks Trump, not one that empowers him. It is very possible that America’s adversaries will try to take advantage of the disarray. If Putin or Xi makes a major move, such as trying to test America’s alliances, it will be soon.

With the hollowing out of the Trump administration, the onus now passes to Congress. In her book Troublesome Young Men, Lynne Olson tells the story of Conservative Party rebels in the 1930s who spoke up against their leader and brought Winston Churchill to power. One of the remarkable things about Trump’s first two years is that not a single up-and-coming Republican politician took a stand against the president. Other than John McCain, the only Republicans who did anything are either semi-retired (John Kasich) or retiring (Jeff Flake).

Even leaving morality to one side, that is surprising. Senators such as Tom Cotton see themselves as Trump’s successors, but some might have taken the other side of the bet, especially if they hope to be active in politics for the next two decades. If Trump fails and is discredited, those who paid a price for standing against him will be rewarded. Every defeat and every humiliation will be transformed into a badge of honor. There will be little reward for those who jump on the bandwagon after his fall has become inevitable. Republicans may have increased their majority in the Senate, but this dynamic could be a wild card. As Trump’s troubles deepen, the incentive for younger senators to become troublesome will grow. The confirmation hearings for Mattis’s successor will provide an early test of whether any have grown bold enough to break ranks.

There is a narrative arc to the Trump presidency—a radical, constrained by the system, who breaks out and follows his instincts. The next chapter is predictable. Possessing all the power he ever desired, he will be undone by his own character. All that remains to be seen is how, at what cost, and if his party will do anything to stop it.

Inside a Historic Win on Election Day 2018

On Election Day 2018, Malcolm Kenyatta, a third-generation activist from North Philadelphia, hoped to become a Pennsylvania state representative in the 181st District, which has a 26 percent deep-poverty rate. He made history by becoming the first openly LGBT candidate of color elected to state office in Pennsylvania.


Tim Harris, a friend of Kenyatta’s from college, had followed the activist’s trajectory since graduation. When he heard that Kenyatta was planning to run for Pennsylvania state legislature, Harris knew he had to be there with a camera. His short documentary, Going Forward, depicts Kenyatta’s experience of Election Day, from his 5 a.m. wake-up call to his historic victory as the results are announced late that evening. Along the way, Kenyatta drives around his neighborhood to talk to voters and addresses tough questions about the realities of what he will face in office.


Harris told The Atlantic that he intended to capture “what Election Day is like for a lower-level candidate campaigning in a district that’s desperate for a solution.” Kenyatta has long been an outspoken critic of policies that negatively affect his community. The film makes evident his personal investment in the issues his potential constituents face. “Malcolm actually knows the people in his district,” Harris said. “We could have made a feature out of him saying ‘Hi’ and hugging people.”


While filming, Harris and his team took a fly-on-the-wall approach. “We interviewed Malcolm during the quieter, more introspective moments,” he said.


At one point during the day, Kenyatta catches wind of an adversary who is attempting to discourage people from voting for him due to Kenyatta’s sexuality. Harris said he was pleasantly surprised by the candidate’s reaction. “He didn’t hesitate in wanting to speak with that person, and when he did speak with them, he did it in such a respectful way,” Harris said. “His ability to laugh it off was incredibly admirable.”


“Malcolm basically rejected all forms of negativity while he was campaigning,” Harris added. “Everything was about what he wants to do to improve his community.”

Photos of the Week: Halo Moon, Crouching Boy, Festive Penguins

Keyboard art in the Ivory Coast, darts fans in London, a new Boring Company tunnel in California, a coast-guard rescue in Turkey, a terrible fire in Brazil, huge protests in Budapest, a giant Santa in Shanghai, a naturalization ceremony in Los Angeles, and much more

The Year in Letters

The Atlantic’s readers wrote eloquently and passionately about a wide range of news events, stories, and complicated ideas this year. Here’s a look back at some of what they had to say.

February

After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Heather Sher, a radiologist who treated some of the victims, wrote about her experience in the emergency room.

“As a doctor,” she wrote, “I feel I have a duty to inform the public of what I have learned … It’s clear to me that AR-15 and other high-velocity weapons, especially when outfitted with a high-capacity magazine, have no place in a civilian’s gun cabinet.”

While not all readers agreed with Sher’s conclusion, many expressed gratitude for her decision to describe what she had seen. “Your thoughts and words were clear, rational, and provided a unique insight into what most of us will not (thankfully) ever see in our lifetime, but will spend days and weeks fearing,” wrote Cindy Pond of Harrodsburg, Kentucky.

Read more here.

March

The Munich Security Conference, Eliot Cohen argued in February, was a stark reminder that the global elite have nothing of substance to offer a world in turmoil. Benedikt Franke, the chief operating officer of the Munich Security Conference Foundation, took issue with Cohen’s claim that the conference had lost its way.

“While it may seem petty to get into a quarrel about something as trivial as a policy conference,” Franke wrote to The Atlantic in March, “I believe six of Eliot’s arguments in particular warrant a written response.”

Read more here.

April

In April, Sigal Samuel spoke with moral philosophers from around the world about the dilemma of American responsibility in Syria. “What if there is no ethical way to act in Syria now?” she asked. Many ethicists were at a loss.

Readers shared their own answers to that vexing question in their letters. Emily C. Susko of Santa Cruz, California, wrote a poem on the subject. It begins:

And now, now will we go to war?
Is that what we were supposed to have done before?

Overthrow the man who was misbehaving?
Insist we be the ones to do the saving?
Remake the demolished country in our image?
… Did we learn any lessons from the last world-war scrimmage?

Read more here.

May

Graeme Wood’s “The Refugee Detectives,” published in The Atlantic’s April issue, took readers inside Germany’s high-stakes operation to sort people fleeing death from opportunists and pretenders.

In May, a researcher on refugee flows, a program director at a German political foundation, and the policy director of the International Refugee Assistance Project wrote in to push back on Wood’s framing. “In search of an exciting story, Mr. Wood has left out important facts and nuances, an obfuscation that simplifies and exoticizes refugee narratives and stories in a damaging way,” wrote Ilil Benjamin, the researcher.

Wood responded directly to the critiques: “My article was written to infuriate exactly the class of letter-writer that has responded in tedious triplicate here,” he wrote.

Read more here.

June

“Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un shook hands, strode along colonnades, dined on stuffed cucumber and beef short rib confit, and signed a joint statement,” Uri Friedman wrote in June of the two leaders’ meeting in Singapore. It might have been the beginning of something big, Friedman argued, but it started out small.

Nathan King of Madison, Alabama, disagreed. “It is unreasonable to expect anything more than what Mr. Trump got,” he wrote, “so I find it unfair to claim he got very little in return. President Trump (and the world) really want only one thing: the complete denuclearization of North Korea. That will likely take years.”

Read more here.

July

The Justice Department announced in July that it was reopening its investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Vann R. Newkirk II saw the move as a cynical play. “It’s unclear just what could possibly come out of the case’s reopening,” he wrote.

Dave Tell, the author of the forthcoming book Remembering Emmett Till, replied to Newkirk’s piece with a counterargument. He agreed that it was unlikely that any potential outcomes of a reopened trial would be proportionate to Carolyn Donham’s “admitted role in inciting men to lynch a child in defense of her honor.” But, he wrote, “there are other reasons to welcome the continuing investigation. I’ve written extensively about the commemoration of the Till murder, and one of the many lessons I’ve learned is this: The long-delayed pursuit of justice can spark racial reconciliation in the most unlikely of ways.”

Read more here.

August

When Kofi Annan died in August, Krishnadev Calamur reflected on how the world’s failure in Rwanda had changed the former United Nations secretary-general’s worldview. One reader, D. S. Battistoli of Abenasitonu, Suriname, made a historical argument to lay out what he saw as the UN’s proper role in Rwanda and other conflicts—which is not to prevent genocide.

“It doesn’t seem to me that it can properly be said that the UN failed in, say, Rwanda, any more than it can be said that my hammock failed once again this morning to make my coffee,” Battistoli wrote.

Read more here.

September

In September, Christine Blasey Ford came forward to allege that the then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when the two were in high school. In the weeks leading up to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where both Ford and Kavanaugh testified, Americans once again faced a collective reckoning with the prevalence of sexual assault. The discussion, Megan Garber wrote, asked an insidious question: Is sexual assault simply the way of the world? Caitlin Flanagan wrote a forceful essay about her own high-school experience, titled “I Believe Her.”

In response, readers wrote in with their thoughts about Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Court and the significance of Ford’s story. Some even shared their own stories of assault.

Read more here and here.

October

On October 5, a jury found the Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder in the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, who was 17. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve wrote about the context for Van Dyke’s actions and the guilty verdict. “The city convicted one cop,” she wrote, “but the cop culture that created Van Dyke and others like him is still very much extant. Unless Chicago gets serious about reform, there will be more Laquan McDonalds because there are still Jason Van Dykes.”

In response, Elyse Blennerhassett of Brooklyn, New York, sent in an illustration that she and a friend had made about the case and a letter describing its meaning.

See the drawing and read more here.

November

The shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in November was clear evidence, Franklin Foer argued, that dormant hatreds have reawakened. In the wake of the massacre, he wrote, “any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning Trump’s Jewish enablers.”

As readers processed the killings, some reflected on their own Jewishness and their ties to Pittsburgh. “I am a former congregant of Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh,” wrote Stefanie Weiss of New York, New York. “I see many former Squirrel Hillers on Facebook mourning over the loss in our community, and realize that we grew up in such a special place that most of us, no matter how long ago we left, continue to feel like members of this community. We are collectively heartbroken at our loss of innocence.”

Read more here.

December

The recent news that the young Chinese researcher He Jiankui had allegedly made the first CRISPR-edited babies caused an international uproar. Ed Yong outlined the 15 most damning details about the experiment and the circumstances surrounding it. “It is still unclear if He did what he claims to have done,” Yong noted. “Nonetheless, the reaction was swift and negative.”

Atlantic readers echoed that concern. “He overtly violated the Hippocratic oath,” wrote Martha Lynn Coon of Austin, Texas, “that is, first do no harm.”

Read more here.

Christmas in La-La Land

LOS ANGELES—A cold coming they had of it, T. S. Eliot’s wise men did. I think of that line on crisp, clear December nights in Los Angeles, when the towering, century-old palm trees make our neighborhood seem as if it could pass for the Fertile Crescent, or at least the close-by Paramount Studios backlot where White Christmas was filmed.

Christmas in the Mediterranean climate of Southern California is a surprisingly festive and moving setting for a son of the frozen Midwest. There are no drifting white flakes (unless in the fuzzy form of ash from the devastating seasonal wildfires), but there is a bracing, almost horizontal winter sunlight streaming through the windows.

At the first light of dawn—at dog-walking and kids’ carpool time—the mercury has dipped to the low 40s, and natives are bundled up as if for Nome, while transplants like me parade around in khaki shorts. By noon, the clichés of outdoor living are simple realities, and by dark, a fire is in order in the living-room hearth—abetted by that great California tradition, not a gas log but a gas rod fireplace starter for lighting seasoned oak and pine.

In nearby Beverly Hills, the trunks of the palm trees are wrapped to their chins in miniature white lights, as if they were pearls on the necks in a Modigliani portrait or a debutante’s long white gloves. The Christmas trees for sale on the corner lots—fresh from the Sierras or Oregon—are as green and fragrant as any New England fir. In Marina del Rey, the glittering nighttime boat parade is as enchanting as a Vermont sleigh ride. And, really, where else on Earth could you surf at breakfast, ski at lunch, and still be chilled enough to feel like caroling after dark?

Southern California has all the usual commercial excesses common to modern consumer society, of course. Christmas decorations in retail stores and public spaces go up the morning after Halloween, as they do elsewhere, skipping cruelly over Thanksgiving. The first real rains of the season, lifting oil from long-dry pavement, produce the traffic snarls and accidents of Atlanta in an ice storm. Most poignantly, the homeless people clustered on the sidewalks of Hollywood and in makeshift tent cities under freeway overpasses are sobering reminders that in a place of such overwhelming plenty, there is still no room at the inn for too many Angelenos.

L.A. was the birthplace of the most popular Christmas songs of the 20th century, many of which were written in blistering summer heat (and by Jewish composers). The songwriter Sammy Cahn remembered getting a phone call from his partner Jule Styne during one particularly hot spell, announcing that their client Frank Sinatra wanted a new Christmas song. Cahn objected; how could anything top “White Christmas,” or for that matter, their own “Let It Snow”? Styne persisted: “Frank wants a Christmas song.” So “The Christmas Waltz” was born, “frosted windowpanes” and all.

For me, Los Angeles at Christmas especially evokes that honey-voiced bard of the holiday season, Nat King Cole, who integrated our then-lily-white neighborhood in 1948. His reward? An ugly racial slur burned into his front lawn, or staked on a sign in his yard (sources vary), and poisoned meat tossed into his garden, which killed his dog. In 1948, in California. When he died, in 1965, his funeral was held at St. James on Wilshire, the neighborhood Episcopal parish whose congregation is now a vibrant mix of Korean American, black, and Anglo worshippers—and his name adorns the local Post Office branch in what Eliot might call our “temperate valley.” Goodwill sometimes does win out.

Southern California’s bone-dry air and clear skies helped make it a center of modern American astronomy, and despite climate change and the inevitable air and light pollution of a sprawling megalopolis, it is still possible most nights to see the stars, or at least the lights of slow-moving planes headed for a landing at LAX. And in the age of Emmanuel or the era of Elon Musk, there is hope in the promise of the heavens.      

A cold coming they had of it, 2,000 years ago, and a cold coming we so often seem to have of it today. But in the clean winter nights of this bustling, semiarid, overpopulated, hyperkinetic coastal plain, we can still hear the quiet, and see the light.

The Disturbing Trend Behind America’s Soaring Gun Deaths

In 2015 and 2016, Americans faced an alarming statistic: After a couple of decades of overall decline, major data centers reported a sharp uptick of crime in big cities. Donald Trump spoke with dystopian foreboding in his 2016 inaugural address about the “American carnage” wreaking havoc in the country’s metropolises; earlier, at one campaign event, he asserted that “places like Afghanistan” were safer than American cities, where “you get shot walking down the street.”

In the years since, research has painted a much different picture—one that’s uplifting in some ways and dark in others. This week, a pair of crime and mortality reports circling in the news emphasizes that urban violence is decreasing but American cities still face “carnage” of an entirely different sort.

On December 7, the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence released an analysis of recent mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The results included a grim new record for gun violence: 39,773 Americans were killed by guns in 2017, a dramatic increase of more than 1,000 people from the year before. The responses to this report were fraught, with some people pointing to mass shootings as the major culprit, while others were quick to blame “inner-city” violence.

[Read: Americans are dying even younger]

But the murder rates in America’s cities appear to be falling. On Tuesday, the Brennan Center for Justice published an analysis of annual FBI crime data that concluded the murder rate in America’s 30 largest cities dropped 3.1 percent in 2017, and projected a decrease of about 6 percent in 2018. The Brennan Center looks only at data from major cities, but murders in more sparsely populated areas tend to match national trends, says Inimai Chettiar, the director of the Brennan Center’s justice program`

A few cities did see small murder-rate increases, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Las Vegas, which owed a 23.5 percent jump to the Mandalay Bay shooting in October 2017. But this broad downturn is more in line with the long-term decline in murder and crime than with the numbers from 2015 and 2016, signaling that those two years could have been blips in the data. “It’s very, very difficult to tell what caused those increases in 2015 and 2016, and what caused them to go back down, or even whether that was a real uptick or whether it was just fluctuation,” says Chettiar.

So now it’s 2018, and though more people are being shot, it seems fewer are being murdered. What gives?

A couple of factors are at play. The big one is suicide. As my colleague Olga Khazan reported in November, the suicide rate in America has gone up 3.7 percent in the past year. A 2017 CDC report found that with little exception, larger percentages of suicides each year are committed with firearms, while methods such as poisoning have increasingly fallen to the wayside. And the agency’s new report makes clear that the majority of people who kill with a gun shoot themselves, not others: Suicides account for 60 percent of the country’s gun deaths.

Suicide can easily be overlooked as a contributor to “gun deaths.” Gun-control measures that make headlines, such as the Trump administration’s move on Tuesday to ban bump stocks, are frequently intended to act as barriers to people seeking to harm others. A study released last year that looked at statewide changes in gun-purchasing laws from 1990 to 2013 found that purchase delays—the period of time between purchasing and receiving a firearm—cut down on the number of firearm suicides by 2 to 5 percent, with no corresponding increase in suicides by other methods. But since the study’s release in March, no states have implemented any major corresponding purchase delays.

Broadly, firearm-related suicide attempts are more common in states with looser gun laws. A person who attempts suicide with a gun is more than twice as likely to end up dead as someone who chooses any other method.

[Read: Why can’t the U.S. treat gun violence as a public-health problem?]

According to Chettiar, a methodological shift among murders, when they do occur, could also be contributing to gun-death data. “When we analyzed the 2016 FBI data, we found that gun violence accounted for almost all of the increase in murders that year—93 percent,” she says. FBI reports show that 73 percent of all homicides were committed with a firearm in 2017. That’s 2 percent more than in 2015, and 4 percent more than in 2013. (Knives are regularly in second place, at about 10 percent.)

What all of this data shows is that while crime may be receding in America’s cities, a different wave of tragedy continues to roll in. Cities have alarmingly high levels of opioid use, a blight that reaches out into suburban and rural areas as well. In 2017, overdose deaths (intentional and accidental) went up by 7 percent, to a record of 70,000—a number higher than deaths from HIV, car crashes, or gun violence at their peaks, as The New York Times points out. Addiction and suicide run hand in hand: Opioid-use disorder is associated with a 40 to 60 percent higher risk of suicidal thoughts. Misusers are 13 times as likely to die of suicide, including by intentional overdose, as nonusers.

Still, opioid-related suicides are only the latest addition to a stunning trend: Regardless of the method or cause, suicide has risen by nearly 30 percent in the United States since 1999. As Americans appear to have decreasingly taken one another’s lives, they’ve increasingly taken their own. There’s a tough road ahead to significant fixes, but without them, America’s death tolls will likely continue to break records.

Why Kirstjen Nielsen Sounds Like the Hulk

On a worrisome day in Washington—with a government shutdown looming and the defense secretary resigning—a clip of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen served as unexpected comic relief. Nielsen, speaking before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, responded to a question from Representative Tom Marino by saying, “From Congress I would ask for wall. We need wall.”

"I would ask for wall. We need wall." pic.twitter.com/mkgHZWFgyI

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 20, 2018

Nielsen was, of course, referring to the wall along the southern border with Mexico that President Donald Trump has demanded that Congress fund, precipitating the shutdown threat. When asked by Marino to clarify what she meant by “wall,” she explained that what the administration envisions is really a “wall system,” combining walls, fencing, and various technology.

Nielsen’s plea for “wall”—as opposed to “a wall” or “the wall”—drew torrents of ridicule on Twitter. Oliver Willis of Shareblue Media posted the clip, confirming that it was “an actual quote” from the secretary of homeland security and not from the Incredible Hulk, despite Nielsen’s primitive-sounding “Hulk smash” locution. Besides the Hulk, “We need wall” reminded some of Steve Carell as the low-IQ weatherman Brick Tamland in Anchorman awkwardly declaring “I love lamp.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes mused, “Did DHS make a style guide change that there’s no definite article before wall?” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo agreed that this seems like an intentional shift in usage, “but it’s not clear what the point is beyond sounding like you have some kind of focused brain damage.”

[Read: Trump keeps invoking terrorism to get his border wall]

Just last week, DHS was roundly mocked for a press release that used wall in a similar manner. When it was originally published on the department’s website, the release began, “DHS is committed to building wall and building wall quickly.” But just a few days later—after widespread derision on social media—the wording was silently changed so that the opening sentence read, “DHS is committed to building a wall at our southern border and building a wall quickly.”

Despite this editorial tinkering, it’s clear from Nielsen’s testimony that using wall without a preceding article (either the definite the or the indefinite a) is now a standard part of the Trump administration’s language on border security. And it’s fair to wonder whether Trump himself, with the clipped rhetoric he has fashioned both on the stump and on Twitter, is responsible for the stylistic shift.

Consider the evidence. Trump first sounded the alarm about the Mexican border in an all-caps tweet back in August 2014: “SECURE THE BORDER! BUILD A WALL!” Then in April 2015, still two months before he declared his presidential candidacy, Trump said in an interview on Fox News with Bret Baier, “People don’t realize Mexico is not our friend. We have to build the wall.”

[Ieva Jusionyte: What I learned as an EMT at the border wall]

The boiled-down version of “Build the wall” would become an oft-heard chant at Trump rallies, with the same trisyllabic cadence as other crowd favorites including “Drain the swamp” and “Lock her up.” Using a definite article to specify “the wall” served to make Trump’s vague campaign promise sound more concrete, something that his supporters would recognize as shared, common knowledge, appropriate for bumper-sticker sloganeering.

But once “the wall” was established as a Trumpian touchstone, even the definite article could be jettisoned, especially in the limited space of a tweet. On the morning of the Super Tuesday primaries on March 15, 2016, Trump tweeted out his campaign’s core message: “I will bring our jobs back to America, fix our military and take care of our vets, end Common Core and ObamaCare, protect 2nd A, build WALL.” Granted, Trump was running up against what was then a limitation of 140 characters on Twitter, but that “build WALL” closer would become a new kind of signature phrase (even after he could luxuriate in 280 characters when Twitter expanded the limit in November 2017).

Removing definite or indefinite articles in English is associated with terse “headlinese,” which also omits conjunctions and forms of the verb to be. Thus, a news headline might elliptically read “Government facing shutdown” rather than the more fully expressed sentence, “The government is facing a shutdown.” Trump’s tweets sometimes mimic this abbreviated style, especially when he is compressing his rhetorical standbys like “wall”—or, depending on his capitalization whims, “Wall” or “WALL.” Last March, when Trump was wrangling with Congress over how much of an omnibus spending bill would be allocated for border security, his tweets included such lines as “Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming,” “I had to fight for Military and start of Wall,” and, most cryptically, “Build WALL through M!” (He hit the character limit again, so “M” had to suffice for “Mexico.”)

[Read: A shutdown would be a fitting end to the GOP majority]

In turning “the wall” into “wall,” Trump isn’t simply saving a few characters, though. Forgoing the definite article can also change the syntactic role of wall from a “count noun” to a “mass noun,” as linguists put it. A count noun is, as the name implies, something you can enumerate discretely and express in the singular or plural, while a mass noun is reserved for something that resists differentiation into units, whether it’s an abstraction like fun or luck, or a substance like flour or cement. There was a time in the history of English when wall could more easily be thought of as a mass noun. The Oxford English Dictionary documents usage of wall from around 1600 with a sense of “walling”—that is, the materials that make up a wall, or walls considered collectively. As Politico’s Timothy Noah recalled when he heard Nielsen’s “We need wall,” Shakespeare used wall without an article in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The character Nick Bottom suggests that in the play-within-the-play, an actor should portray a wall through which the lovers whisper: “Some man or other must present Wall.”

Shakespeare aside, for most of its history, wall has been a straightforward count noun. But in the same way that mass nouns can sometimes be converted into count nouns (for a recent example, think of email), count nouns can also get “massified” on occasion. For instance, we tend to think of vote as countable, but in election-night coverage you might hear pundits use it as a mass noun, as in, “We don’t have enough vote to make a call in this race.”

Just as the mass-noun version of vote finds its place in electoral jargon, the massification of wall serves a particular purpose in Nielsen’s bureaucratic discourse, beyond simply emulating her boss.

For Nielsen, using wall as a mass noun makes it easier to talk about proposed structures along the border without committing to a single discrete wall, since whatever they’re planning along the border couldn’t possibly work that way. It is, after all, more of a “wall system” (with “steel slats,” we’re now told). The mass-noun spin on wall should tip off supporters that the border may be more nebulous than they imagined.

The Trump Administration’s Lowest Point Yet

Since the start of the Donald Trump administration, a morbid watch has been kept: Though the president is adept at creating his own crises, either intentionally or not, experts noted that he had not faced a full-scale crisis that was not of his own making. Those are the times that test presidents. How would Trump react when his moment came?

It’s fitting that during Advent, the season of waiting before Christmas, a crisis has arrived. But while it is, yet again, Trump’s own creation, it may be just as consequential as the calamity that the president’s critics have long feared. For the past two years, the nation and the administration have stumbled from crisis to crisis, yet the breadth and depth of the current peril might exceed even the period around James Comey’s firing in May 2017 and the aftermath of Trump’s meeting in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin in July 2018.

Friday dawned with the government heading inexorably toward a shutdown, driven by Trump’s intractable demands for a pricey and likely futile border wall. His administration is in chaos after Defense Secretary James Mattis, the most widely respected figure in the administration, announced his resignation Thursday in a stunning letter. His is only the latest of several high-level departures. Republican leaders are furious over the president’s plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Stock markets in the United States and overseas are tumbling. Meanwhile, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe continues to chip away at the foundations of the presidency, gradually compiling an astonishing chronicle of lawlessness and corruption in Trump’s inner circle—with much of Mueller’s work still either incomplete or not public.

[Read: James Mattis’s final protest against the president]

The Mattis resignation has sparked panic in Washington, but the shutdown is, for now, the more urgent crisis. Funding for large portions of the government runs out on Friday. Although Trump bragged last week that he’d be “proud” to shut down the government over Democrats’ refusal to fund his border wall, Congress and the White House on Thursday seemed headed for a quiet stopgap funding measure to keep the government running until February.

But then Trump was seemingly bullied into blowing up the compromise by harsh criticism from his allies in the right-wing media, including Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Breitbart News. The White House announced that he would not sign any bill without wall funding. Neither Trump nor anyone else has any viable plan for bridging the gap, other than hoping that nine Democrats in the Senate will flip and vote for a wall their party despises. Although Trump tweeted Friday morning that “if enough Dems don’t vote, it will be a Democrat Shutdown!” they have little incentive to go along with him, because he has already publicly boasted that he would take the blame.

As the government braced for a closure that could drag into the Christmas holiday, Mattis’s exit arrived unexpectedly. Though the defense secretary, a retired four-star general, had disagreed with Trump repeatedly in the past, his resignation was an astonishing rebuke of the president. Cabinet members seldom resign in protest, and his letter avoided praise for Trump while delivering harsh implicit criticism of the president’s disdain for alliances and affection for authoritarianism.

Mattis’s exit horrified not only Democrats and anti-Trump conservatives, but also some of the president’s closest allies. In what passes for a hair-on-fire reaction by Mitch McConnell standards, the Senate majority leader said, “I am particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership.”

Mattis was frequently reckoned to be a crucial brake on Trump’s worst impulses, protecting him from decisions even more disastrous than the ones he made. Whether that was true will likely become clear soon. Yet Mattis resigned because he was unable to dissuade Trump from announcing a precipitous withdrawal of American troops from Syria (in which the president falsely claimed that ISIS was defeated) or stop the president from an expected announcement of a pullout from Afghanistan. These decisions are in keeping with Trump’s campaign promises, but the hasty, nonstrategic methods of withdrawal rattled even critics of both military engagements.

Hawks were even more upset. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, lashed out at the announcements and questioned Trump’s choice. “The only reason they’re not dancing in the aisles in Tehran and ISIS camps is they don’t believe in dancing,” he said. While Graham has always favored military intervention, his criticism is notable because he has become a leading stroker of the president’s ego. The matter threatened to drive a spike between Graham and Trump, with the White House adviser Stephen Miller lambasting the senator on CNN Thursday evening.

It’s not just Washington that’s jittery. U.S. stocks fell on Thursday, their second straight day of large losses. While Trump has long boasted about the stock market as an indicator of his economic prowess, the markets have had a bad year. While America fitfully slept, Asian stocks also sank. The poor results have some analysts wondering whether the global economy is headed for a recession, and while presidents have limited control over the economy, at least some of the troubles can be traced to Trump. American stocks fell in reaction to a Federal Reserve interest-rate increase; Trump replaced the more dovish Fed Chair Janet Yellen earlier this year with Jerome Powell, who has proved more eager to hike rates. Meanwhile, Asian markets have been unsettled by Trump’s tariff threats. The president, who shows little real understanding of global trade, does not seem to have grasped that hurting China might drag down U.S. markets, too.

After Mattis’s exit, there will likely be more soon. Chief of Staff John Kelly was once perceived to be among the “adults in the room” (always a dubious moniker), though his reputation was tarnished by errors and Trump sidelined him months ago. Kelly is leaving the White House this month, and Trump, unable to get his top pick as a replacement, has tapped Mick Mulvaney, his chief budget aide, as the acting chief of staff. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is leaving, chased by a passel of scandals and investigations; Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross might not be far behind.

[Read: The Trump presidency falls apart]

Since Attorney General Jeff Sessions was sacked last month, Matthew Whitaker has been acting in his stead. On Thursday, the Justice Department announced that Whitaker would not recuse himself from overseeing Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Washington Post reporting revealed that Justice Department ethics officials have said that Whitaker ought to recuse himself, but he overruled the recommendation.

Despite antagonism from Whitaker, Trump, and the attorney-general nominee William Barr, Mueller has been moving quickly and effectively, racking up indictments and guilty pleas rapidly. This week, Trump’s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, was in court, but his sentencing was delayed after a federal judge questioned the lenient sentence Mueller’s team had recommended and asked whether Flynn might have committed treason. Mueller is also bearing down on Roger Stone, a longtime Trump associate suspected of serving as a conduit between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks for the dissemination of emails stolen by Russia.

Despite occasional reports that Mueller is nearly finished with his work, there’s little public evidence that’s the case, and the breadth of the corruption and dishonesty he has exposed in Trump’s inner orbit is already breathtaking. Mueller remains likely the greatest existential threat to Trump, which is one reason the president continues to feverishly attack him at every turn.

The president, who has never appeared to be up to the task of running the country, is acting more erratically and impulsively than ever. “Inside the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump was in what one Republican close to the White House described as ‘a tailspin,’ acting ‘totally irrationally’ and ‘flipping out’ over criticisms in the media,” the Post reported.

Such horrified anonymous quotes are a staple feature of the Trump presidency. They have spilled out in quotes to the press, in books by the authors Michael Wolff and Bob Woodward, and in the infamous anonymous op-ed by a self-proclaimed resister inside the administration. The Mattis resignation letter is surprising because it puts criticisms out in public. It also follows fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who earlier this month called Trump “undisciplined” and said the president had repeatedly wanted him to do illegal things.

As a matter of democratic norms, it’s good news when these criticisms come out from behind closed doors—far better than quiet sabotage actions. Yet the fact that Mattis, Tillerson, and others are speaking publicly is a troubling indicator of just how bad things seem to them.

Of course, there have been moments of acute crisis before, even amid the constant stream of crises. In one incredible 10-day stretch in May 2017, Trump fired Comey, disclosed sensitive classified information to Russian officials, threatened Comey, and gave a disastrously incoherent interview to The Economist. That same week, the public learned that Trump had pressured Comey to drop an investigation into Flynn.

In August 2017, Trump reacted sluggishly to white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and insisted that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

In January of this year, Trump grappled with the release of Wolff’s book, botched his own positions on immigration and intelligence policy, referred to African and Latin American nations as “shithole countries,” and canceled a trip to Britain in a fit of pique.

[Read: There’s no way out]

In July, Trump met with Putin in Finland, followed by a bizarre press conference in which he deferred to the Russian leader, sided with Russian denials about electoral interference over the unified conclusions of his own intelligence officials, and mused on allowing Russia to interrogate a former American ambassador to Moscow.

Yet while it is early, this moment seems perhaps even graver. There are fewer guardrails on Trump than ever before, as he replaces experienced and steady hands with more sycophantic ones. The scale of the current crisis is also unusually wide, taking in foreign wars, the global economy, the basic functioning of the federal government, and a major corruption investigation. Nor is this a simple if devilish confluence of related problems. The only common denominator in each of these is the president, a bull in a global china shop. Even if one, or two, or three of these problems could be resolved, it would leave the others. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Friday is the darkest day of the year.

The status quo is unsustainable, and yet it is impossible to predict any breaking point. The criticism that Trump is sustaining from Republicans is scathing. However, GOP leaders harshly criticized Trump after Comey, after Charlottesville, and after Helsinki, but eventually slunk back into alignment with him. Even Graham was back to attacking Democrats for their “hate” of Trump by Thursday night. Perhaps there are real cracks in the Republican wall of begrudging support for Trump, but past experience suggests there’s no reason to expect a true shift. The Democratic takeover of the House in January seems unlikely to solve anything; Congress is already in a stalemate, and the investigations that Democrats have promised will only further inflame Trump.

In January 2018, I wrote that practically everyone understood that the Trump presidency was a disaster: Democrats and Never Trump Republicans, of course, but also his allies, his aides, and even the president himself, who seems deeply unhappy—as he should be, given the direction of his presidency and his country. Yet there was no prospect for any conclusion. Trump shows no sign that he would resign. Democratic leaders remain wary of impeachment, and even if they did pursue it, the Senate would not convict and remove Trump. Invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment remains a pipe dream. The only certainty, I wrote, was more crises like that one. And now here we are: another crisis like that one, yet even worse, and still no exit.

The Books Briefing: A Readable Feast

You could say that meals—especially holiday meals—are stories in themselves. Beyond the suspense of waiting for a cake to come out of the oven, or the satisfying denouement served in a steaming bowl of soup, there’s a wealth of symbolism (not to mention potential for drama) in gathering to share life-sustaining, life-affirming food. Gustave Flaubert uses turkeys and plum jam to mark the passing years in Madame Bovary’s married life. And Naz Deravian finds a poignant history of Persia in her family’s handed-down recipes.

In Robin Sloan’s novel Sourdough, a disillusioned tech worker struggles to tend to a sourdough starter—and to the human relationships it represents. But the chef Samin Nosrat, who sees food as a way to bring people together, is firm in her belief that those connections are accessible to anyone. And the year’s best recipe books give home cooks the chance to craft their own culinary narrative, even when dining alone.

Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out. Check out past issues here. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.

What We’re Reading

Samin Nosrat wants everybody to cook
“Rather than inundate aspiring cooks with an index of glamorously photographed recipes to follow precisely, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat offers Nosrat’s readers something much more substantial: a cooking philosophy.”

📚 SALT, FAT, ACID, HEAT: MASTERING THE ELEMENTS OF GOOD COOKING, by Samin Nosrat

Writing an Iranian cookbook in an age of anxiety
“As the world thundered, I paved a new, diplomatic relationship with my measuring cups and timer, finding solace in their certainty. Whereas only months before I’d felt restricted by the written recipe, I now relied on it.”

📚 BOTTOM OF THE POT: PERSIAN RECIPES AND STORIES, by Naz Deravian

The strange pathos of the turkey in Madame Bovary
“What does a 19th-century French tragedy, in which a provincial housewife kills herself as a result of her debts and affairs, have to do with an American holiday that celebrates homecoming and overeating? The answer, quite simply, is turkey (along with plum preserve).”

📚 MADAME BOVARY, by Gustave Flaubert

Robin Sloan’s Sourdough is a fascinating riddle
“The starter has survived decades in the brothers’ caring hands—it’s used to make a sourdough bread that’s plated as a side dish to their spicy soup, a fiery broth that, seemingly magically, burns sickness and apathy from its eater. The starter’s survival now depends on a former standout computer-science student from the Midwest.”

📚 SOURDOUGH, by Robin Sloan

The 7 best cookbooks of 2018
“It’s hard not to want to try what’s on any page you turn to … Scanning the streamlined but explicit instructions, you think: easy, quick, works, boom.”

📚 SHAYA: AN ODYSSEY OF FOOD, MY JOURNEY BACK TO ISRAEL, by Alon Shaya, with Tina Antolini
📚 BOTTOM OF THE POT: PERSIAN RECIPES AND STORIES, by Naz Deravian
📚 FEAST: FOOD OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD, by Anissa Helou
📚 SOUL: A CHEF’S CULINARY EVOLUTION IN 150 RECIPES, by Todd Richards
📚 MILK STREET: TUESDAY NIGHTS, by Christopher Kimball
📚 EVERYDAY DORIE: THE WAY I COOK, by Dorie Greenspan
📚 SOLO: A MODERN COOKBOOK FOR A PARTY OF ONE, by Anita Lo

You Recommend

Last week, we asked you to tell us about the books you’ve read that best capture loneliness. Susan Lipman, a reader in Los Angeles, chose John Williams’s Stoner: “It is beautifully written, but its strength is in its ability to tell a story of a man’s life (that many would consider a failure) with dignity and compassion.”

Gitanjali Bhattacharjee recommends The Nowhere Man, by Kamala Markandaya, which “illustrates so many of the tensions that come with being an expatriate of a country that was once colonized by the British, or a child of those expatriates … Reading this book felt at once profoundly lonely as I empathized with Srinivas, the protagonist, and like I had found a necessary community, one for which I’d long been searching.”

What’s a book about food—whether it’s a cookbook with a bigger story behind its recipes, a novel with meals that make your mouth water, or a deep dive into an ingredient’s history—that you think everyone should read? Tweet at us with #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.

This week’s newsletter is written by Rosa Inocencio Smith. The book she loved reading most in 2018 was Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado.

Comments, questions, typos? Email rosa@theatlantic.com.

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The Quiet Integrity of James Mattis

Since Jim Mattis grounds himself in the classics, it seems fitting to mark his resignation with a passage from Epictetus: “Authentic freedom places demands on us.” The quiet integrity with which he has done his job modeled a stoicism rare in our febrile political climate and sadly lacking elsewhere in the Trump administration. Mattis’s resignation letter may have been his most important act as the United States’ 26th secretary of defense.

His resignation letter did two important things in these fraught times, as the president of the United States is corroding the norms that have defined our democracy: First, it made a strong case for the worldview that has dominated American foreign policy for the past 70 years, and second, it acknowledged that the elected president has a right to a Cabinet that works to advance the president’s objectives.

Arguing for an America that appreciates our friends and has cautious trepidation about our enemies is a striking criticism of the president’s view of the world. Many of the president’s advocates have tried to argue that “America first” doesn’t mean “America alone.” The outgoing secretary of defense just revealed that to be flatly untrue: Mattis’s main objection to the president’s policies was that they are damaging the international order of alliances that has been so conducive to the safety and prosperity of our country.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Mattis always understood Trump’s severe defects]

Two years is not an enormous amount of time to shape an institution as unwieldy as the Pentagon; Mattis’s legacy as secretary will not be what he accomplished internal to the department, or what by now appears to have been a transient increase in resources for the department.

His choice to do his job silently, while perhaps understandable given the president’s envious narcissism, has been detrimental to the war effort. Granted, the president and the Congress are principally responsible for taking the country to war and determining what level of our national effort to commit to war efforts. President Donald Trump is disgracefully detached from any sense of responsibility for the men and women he puts in harm’s way. Nor does the Congress shoulder its share of responsibility, declining to exercise its constitutional prerogative of deciding when America should go to war—its complicity in stretching the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to cover current operations should alarm all Americans.

But the secretary of defense also has obligations to his other constituents: the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of our country’s military services. The secretary owes them a voice not just in policy making but in shaping public understanding of their service, and Mattis has not provided that voice.

Policing civil-military issues is an important element of the secretary of defense’s job. No one knows that better than Mattis, the first recent veteran to serve as secretary since George Marshall in 1950, and the co-editor of an excellent book on civil-military relations. It was shocking, therefore, to see the president sign his travel ban in the Hall of Heroes at the Pentagon early in the administration. Allowing such a highly political decision to be enacted in that venue suggested a national-security basis for the policy and detrimentally associated our military with the ban. That the White House sprung that trap on the Department of Defense illustrates the gale-force political winds in which the secretary has been operating. And in grading his work, the force of those winds needs to be taken into account, just as the degree of difficulty is taken into account when grading Olympic diving.

[David Frum: No more excuses]

The president of the United States has transgressed civil-military norms frequently—treating speeches to troops as campaign rallies, using military titles for civilian appointees to give the appearance of military support for him personally and for his policies. The vice president, too, is a flagrant violator of civil-military norms. He used a Naval Academy graduation as a political rally. And Trump is attempting to cast Mattis’s resignation as a military retirement rather than a conscientious objection to his policies.

The president has not visited troops in combat zones. Mattis said he’d advised the president not to do so, that it was too dangerous. That excuse prevented the president from using the military as a political backdrop and associating it with his political choices. Nor have there been pictures of the president with troops deployed on the border. In these ways, Mattis did his best to shield the military from Trump.

Mattis attempted to appoint bipartisan defense experts in his department; he reached wide for counsel, built relationships on both sides of the congressional aisle, garnered the votes of 97 senators for last year’s Defense Appropriations Bill, and did well to protect the defense enterprise from politicization against overwhelming force. That will be his legacy.

In an incredibly poignant speech at the Merchant Marine Academy earlier this year, Mattis praised an unsung hero of the Korean War. On his own initiative, Leonard LaRue, who commanded the SS Meredith Victory, rescued 14,000 refugees during the North Korean offensive in 1950. “He was competent; he was aware of danger and stoically he dealt with it,” Mattis said. So, too, the 26th secretary of defense, James Norman Mattis.

The 5 Years That Changed Dating

On the 20th anniversary of The New York Times’ popular Vows column, a weekly feature on notable weddings and engagements launched in 1992, its longtime editor wrote that Vows was meant to be more than just a news notice about society events. It aimed to give readers the backstory on marrying couples and, in the meantime, to explore how romance was changing with the times. “Twenty years ago, as now, most couples told us they’d met through their friends or family, or in college,” wrote the editor, Bob Woletz, in 2012. “For a period that ran into the late 1990s, a number said, often sheepishly, that they had met through personal advertisements.”

But in 2018, seven of the 53 couples profiled in the Vows column met on dating apps. And in the Times’ more populous Wedding Announcements section, 93 out of some 1,000 couples profiled this year met on dating apps—Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel, Happn, and other specialized dating apps designed for smaller communities, like JSwipe for Jewish singles and MuzMatch for Muslims. The year before, 71 couples whose weddings were announced by the Times met on dating apps.

Matt Lundquist, a couples therapist based in Manhattan, says he’s started taking on a less excited or expectant tone when he asks young couples and recently formed couples how they met. “Because a few of them will say to me, ‘Uhhh, we met on Tinder’—like, ‘Where else do you think we would have met?’” Plus, he adds, it’s never a good start to therapy when a patient thinks the therapist is behind the times or uncool.

Dating apps originated in the gay community; Grindr and Scruff, which helped single men link up by searching for other active users within a specific geographic radius, launched in 2009 and 2010, respectively. With the launch of Tinder in 2012, iPhone-owning people of all sexualities could start looking for love, or sex, or casual dating, and it quickly became the most popular dating app on the market. But the gigantic shift in dating culture really started to take hold the following year, when Tinder expanded to Android phones, then to more than 70 percent of smartphones worldwide. Shortly thereafter, many more dating apps came online.

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over how Tinder could reinvent dating: Maybe it would transform the dating scene into an endless virtual marketplace where singles could shop for each other (like an Amazon for human companionship), or perhaps it would turn dating into a minimal-effort, transactional pursuit of on-demand hookups (like an Uber for sex). But the reality of dating in the age of apps is a little more nuanced than that. The relationship economy has certainly changed in terms of how humans find and court their potential partners, but what people are looking for is largely the same as it ever was: companionship and/or sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, the underlying challenges—the loneliness, the boredom, the roller coaster of hope and disappointment—of being “single and looking,” or single and looking for something, haven’t gone away. They’ve simply changed shape.

Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, two of Tinder’s founders, have said in interviews that the inspiration for Tinder came from their own general dissatisfaction with the lack of dating opportunities that arose naturally—or, as Rad once put it jokingly, “Justin needed help meeting people because he had, what’s that disorder you have where you don’t leave the house?”

Tinder has indeed helped people meet other people—it has expanded the reach of singles’ social networks, facilitating interactions between people who might never have crossed paths otherwise. The 30-year-old Jess Flores of Virginia Beach got married to her first and only Tinder date this past October, and she says they likely would have never met if it weren’t for the app.

For starters, Flores says, the guys she usually went for back in 2014 were what she describes as “sleeve-tattoo” types. Her now-husband Mike, though, was “clean cut, no tattoos. Completely opposite of what I would usually go for.” She decided to take a chance on him after she’d laughed at a funny line in his Tinder bio. (Today, she can no longer remember what it was.)

Plus, Mike lived in the next town over. He wasn’t that far away, “but I didn’t go where he lived to hang out, so I didn’t really mix and mingle with people in other cities,” she says. But after a few weeks of chatting on the app and one failed attempt at meeting up, they ended up on a first date at a local minor-league baseball game, drinking beer and eating hot dogs in the stands.

For Flores and her husband, having access to a bigger pool of fellow single people was a great development. In her first few years out of college, before she met Mike, “I was in the same work routine, around the same people, all the time,” Flores says, and she wasn’t exactly eager to start up a romance with any of them. But then there was Tinder, and then there was Mike.

An expanded radius of potential mates can be a great thing if you’re looking to date or hook up with a broad variety of people who are different from you, says Madeleine Fugère, a professor of psychology at Eastern Connecticut State University who specializes in attraction and romantic relationships. “Normally, if you met someone at school or at work, you would probably already have a lot in common with that person,” Fugere says. “Whereas if you’re meeting someone purely based on geographic location, there’s definitely a greater chance that they would be different from you in some way.”

But there’s also a downside to dating beyond one’s natural social environment. “People who are not very similar to their romantic partners end up at a greater risk for breaking up or for divorce,” she says. Indeed, some daters bemoan the fact that meeting on the apps means dating in a sort of context vacuum. Friends, co-workers, classmates, and/or relatives don’t show up to flesh out the complete picture of who a person is until further on in the timeline of a relationship—it’s unlikely that someone would introduce a blind date to friends right away. In the “old model” of dating, by contrast, the circumstances under which two people met organically could provide at least some measure of common ground between them.

Some also believe that the relative anonymity of dating apps—that is, the social disconnect between most people who match on them—has also made the dating landscape a ruder, flakier, crueler place. For example, says Lundquist, the couples therapist, if you go on a date with your cousin’s roommate, the roommate has some incentive to not be a jerk to you. But with apps, “You’re meeting somebody you probably don’t know and probably don’t have any connections with at a bar on 39th Street. That’s kind of weird, and there’s a greater opportunity for people to be ridiculous, to be not nice.”

Many of the stories of bad behavior Lundquist hears from his patients take place in real life, at bars and restaurants. “I think it’s become more ordinary to stand each other up,” he says, and he’s had many patients (“men and women, though more women among straight folks”) recount to him stories that end with something along the lines of, “Oh my God, I got to the bar and he sat down and said, ‘Oh. You don’t look like what I thought you looked like,’ and walked away.”

But other users complain of rudeness even in early text interactions on the app. Some of that nastiness could be chalked up to dating apps’ dependence on remote, digital communication; the classic “unsolicited dick pic sent to an unsuspecting match” scenario, for example. Or the equally familiar tirade of insults from a match who’s been rebuffed, as Anna Xiques, a 33-year-old advertising copywriter based in Miami, experienced. In an essay on Medium in 2016 (cleverly titled “To the One That Got Away on Bumble”), she chronicled the time she frankly told a Bumble match she’d been chatting with that she wasn’t feeling it, only to be promptly called a cunt and told she “wasn’t even pretty.” (Bumble, launched in 2014 with the former Tinder executive Whitney Wolfe Herd at its helm, markets itself as a more women-friendly dating app because of its unique feature designed to curb unwanted messages: In heterosexual matches, the woman has to initiate chatting.)

Sometimes this is just how things go on dating apps, Xiques says. She’s been using them off and on for the past few years for dates and hookups, even though she estimates that the messages she receives have about a 50-50 ratio of mean or gross to not mean or gross. She’s only experienced this kind of creepy or hurtful behavior when she’s dating through apps, not when dating people she’s met in real-life social settings. “Because, obviously, they’re hiding behind the technology, right? You don’t have to actually face the person,” she says.

Perhaps the quotidian cruelty of app dating exists because it’s relatively impersonal compared with setting up dates in real life. “More and more people relate to this as a volume operation,” says Lundquist, the couples therapist. Time and resources are limited, while matches, at least in theory, are not. Lundquist mentions what he calls the “classic” scenario in which someone is on a Tinder date, then goes to the bathroom and talks to three other people on Tinder. “So there’s a willingness to move on more quickly,” he says, “but not necessarily a commensurate increase in skill at kindness.”

Holly Wood, who wrote her Harvard sociology dissertation last year on singles’ behaviors on dating sites and dating apps, heard a lot of these ugly stories too. And after speaking to more than 100 straight-identifying, college-educated men and women in San Francisco about their experiences on dating apps, she firmly believes that if dating apps didn’t exist, these casual acts of unkindness in dating would be far less common. But Wood’s theory is that people are meaner because they feel like they’re interacting with a stranger, and she partly blames the short and sweet bios encouraged on the apps.

“OkCupid,” she remembers, “invited walls of text. And that, for me, was really important. I’m one of those people who wants to feel like I have a sense of who you are before we go on a first date. Then Tinder”—which has a 500-character limit for bios—“happened, and the shallowness in the profile was encouraged.”

Wood also found that for some respondents (especially male respondents), apps had effectively replaced dating; in other words, the time other generations of singles might have spent going on dates, these singles spent swiping. Many of the men she talked to, Wood says, “were saying, ‘I’m putting so much work into dating and I’m not getting any results.’” When she asked what exactly they were doing, they said, “I’m on Tinder for hours every day.”

“We pretend that’s dating because it looks like dating and says it’s dating,” Wood says.

Wood’s academic work on dating apps is, it’s worth mentioning, something of a rarity in the broader research landscape. One big challenge of knowing how dating apps have affected dating behaviors, and in writing a story like this one, is that most of these apps have only been around for half a decade—hardly long enough for well-designed, relevant longitudinal studies to even be funded, let alone conducted.

Of course, even the absence of hard data hasn’t stopped dating experts—both people who study it and people who do a lot of it—from theorizing. There’s a popular suspicion, for example, that Tinder and other dating apps might make people pickier or more reluctant to settle on a single monogamous partner, a theory that the comedian Aziz Ansari spends a lot of time on in his 2015 book, Modern Romance, written with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg.

Eli Finkel, however, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage, rejects that notion. “Very smart people have expressed concern that having such easy access makes us commitment-phobic,” he says, “but I’m not actually that worried about it.” Research has shown that people who find a partner they’re really into quickly become less interested in alternatives, and Finkel is fond of a sentiment expressed in a 1997 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper on the subject: “Even if the grass is greener elsewhere, happy gardeners may not notice.”

Like the anthropologist Helen Fisher, Finkel believes that dating apps haven’t changed happy relationships much—but he does think they’ve lowered the threshold of when to leave an unhappy one. In the past, there was a step in which you’d have to go to the trouble of “getting dolled up and going to a bar,” Finkel says, and you’d have to look at yourself and say, “What am I doing right now? I’m going out to meet a guy. I’m going out to meet a girl,” even though you were in a relationship already. Now, he says, “you can just tinker around, just for a sort of a goof; swipe a little just ’cause it’s fun and playful. And then it’s like, oh—[suddenly] you’re on a date.”

The other subtle ways in which people believe dating is different now that Tinder is a thing are, quite frankly, innumerable. Some believe that dating apps’ visual-heavy format encourages people to choose their partners more superficially (and with racial or sexual stereotypes in mind); others argue that humans choose their partners with physical attraction in mind even without the help of Tinder. There are equally compelling arguments that dating apps have made dating both more awkward and less awkward by allowing matches to get to know each other remotely before they ever meet face-to-face—which can in some cases create a weird, sometimes tense first few minutes of a first date.

And for some singles in the LGBTQ community, dating apps like Tinder and Bumble have been a small miracle. They can help users locate other LGBTQ singles in an area where it might otherwise be hard to know—and their explicit spelling-out of what gender or genders a user is interested in can mean fewer awkward initial interactions. Other LGBTQ users, however, say they’ve had better luck finding dates or hookups on dating apps other than Tinder, or even on social media. “Twitter in the gay community is kind of like a dating app now. Tinder doesn’t do too well,” says Riley Rivera Moore, a 21-year-old based in Austin. Riley’s wife Niki, 23, says that when she was on Tinder, a good portion of her potential matches who were women were “a couple, and the woman had created the Tinder profile because they were looking for a ‘unicorn,’ or a third person.” That said, the recently married Rivera Moores met on Tinder.

But perhaps the most consequential change to dating has been in where and how dates get initiated—and where and how they don’t.

When Ingram Hodges, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, goes to a party, he goes there expecting only to hang out with friends. It’d be a pleasant surprise, he says, if he happened to talk to a cute girl there and ask her to hang out. “It wouldn’t be an abnormal thing to do,” he says, “but it’s just not as common. When it does happen, people are surprised, taken aback.”

I pointed out to Hodges that when I was a freshman in college—all of 10 years ago—meeting cute people to go on a date with or to hook up with was the point of going to parties. But being 18, Hodges is relatively new to both Tinder and dating in general; the only dating he’s known has been in a post-Tinder world. When Hodges is in the mood to flirt or go on a date, he turns to Tinder (or Bumble, which he jokingly calls “classy Tinder”), where sometimes he finds that other UT students’ profiles include instructions like “If I know you from school, don’t swipe right on me.”

Hodges knows that there was a time, way back in the day, when people mostly met through school, or work, or friends, or family. But for people his age, Hodges says, “dating has become isolated from the rest of social life.”

Hailey, a financial-services professional in Boston (who asked to only be identified by her first name because her last name is a unique one and she’d prefer to not be recognizable in work contexts), is considerably older than Hodges, but even at 34, she sees the same phenomenon in action. She and her boyfriend met on Tinder in 2014, and they soon discovered that they lived in the same neighborhood. Before long, they realized that they’d probably even seen each other around before they met.

Still, she says, “we would have never interacted had it not been for Tinder. He’s not going out all the time. I’m not going out all the time. The reality is, if he is out at a bar, he’s hanging with his friends.

“And he’s not gonna be like, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ as we’re both getting milk or something at the grocery store,” she adds. “I don’t see that happening at all anymore.”

The Atlantic’s Kate Julian found something similar in her recent story on why today’s young people are having less sex than prior generations:

Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore … But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg effect when it comes to Tinder and the disentanglement of dating from the rest of social life. It’s possible, certainly, that dating apps have erected walls between the search for potential partners and the normal routines of work and community. But it’s also possible that dating apps thrive in this particular moment in history because people have stopped looking for potential partners while they go about their work and community routines.

Finkel, for one, believes that the new boundaries between romance and other forms of social interaction have their benefits—especially in a time when what constitutes sexual harassment, especially in the workplace, is being renegotiated. “People used to meet people at work, but my God, it doesn’t seem like the best idea to do that right now,” Finkel says. “For better or worse, people are setting up firmer boundaries between the personal and the professional. And we’re figuring all that stuff out, but it’s kind of a tumultuous time.” Meanwhile, he says, dating apps offer separate environments where finding dates or sex is the point.

But, naturally, with the compartmentalization of dating comes the notion that if you want to be dating, you have to be active on the apps. And that can make the whole process of finding a partner, which essentially boils down to semi-blind date after semi-blind date, feel like a chore or a dystopian game show. As my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2016,

Now that the shine of novelty has worn off these apps, they aren’t fun or exciting anymore. They’ve become a normalized part of dating. There’s a sense that if you’re single, and you don’t want to be, you need to do something to change that. If you just sit on your butt and wait to see if life delivers you love, then you have no right to complain.

Hailey has heard her friends complain that dating now feels like a second, after-hours job; Twitter is rife with sentiments similar in tone. It’s not uncommon nowadays to hear singles say wistfully that they’d just like to meet someone in real life.

Of course, it’s quite possible that this is a new problem created by the solving of an old one.

A decade ago, the complaint that Lundquist, the couples therapist, heard most often was, “Boy, I just don’t meet any interesting people.” Now, he says, “it’s more like, ‘Oh, God, I meet all these not-interesting people.’”

“It’s cliche to say, but it’s a numbers game,” Lundquist adds. “So the assumption is, the odds are pretty good that [any given date] will suck, but, you know. Whatever. You’ve gotta do it.”

Finkel, for his part, puts it a little more bluntly. To him, there’s one thing that all these wistful romantics, longing for the days of yore when people met in real life, are missing: that Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge—like eHarmony, OkCupid, and Match.com before them—exist because meeting in real life is really hard.

“I’m not saying that it’s not a hassle to go on bad dates. It is a nuisance. You could be hanging out with your friends, you could be sleeping, you could be reading a book,” he says. But, Finkel adds, singletons of generations past would “break out the world’s smallest violin” for young people who complain about Tinder dates becoming a chore.

“It’s like, Ugh so many dates, and they’re just not that interesting,” Finkel adds with a laugh. “It used to be hard to find someone to date!”

Four People Who Could Be the Next Defense Secretary

Rumors about James Mattis’s impending departure as President Donald Trump’s defense secretary have swirled for months. On Thursday, those rumors became reality.

Whoever succeeds Mattis—who resigned in protest over the president’s military policy—will face the same challenges as the outgoing defense secretary: an impetuous president, fraying alliances, and rising dangers from adversaries old and new. Significantly, though, the next defense secretary will almost certainly share Mattis’s views of the president’s decisions to withdraw troops from Syria and drastically reduce the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan. A nominee who doesn’t will face an uphill confirmation process, a muscular defense policy being one of the few remaining bipartisan issues in American politics.

Mattis will leave his post at the end of February. If no one is in place by then, Patrick Shanahan, the deputy secretary of defense and a former Boeing executive, will take over in an acting capacity—though the president can name an interim, as he has with other Cabinet posts.

Who are the contenders to be the next United States secretary of defense?

Jack Keane

The retired four-star general is a Vietnam veteran who previously served as a vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and is now the chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, a defense think tank in Washington, D.C., and a frequent contributor to Fox News. Soon after he was elected, Trump asked Keane to serve as defense secretary, but Keane declined, citing his wife’s recent death. But he did make two recommendations: Mattis and General David Petraeus, the former commander of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Keane is a defense hawk—and an outspoken one, at that. He recently criticized Trump’s proposal (which was ultimately reversed) to cut the defense budget to $700 billion. He also called the withdrawal of American troops from Syria a “huge strategic mistake” that Trump will “come to regret.”

The 75-year-old’s experience and candor could give him a relatively easy confirmation process in the Senate, but he may not want the job. “I don’t intend to go back into public service,” he told NPR on Thursday. “I’m confident the president will be able to find ... a capable person to serve the nation.”

Senator Tom Cotton

The Republican from Arkansas is a member of the Senate’s Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. Cotton, 41, is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was previously floated as a possible CIA director to succeed Mike Pompeo when he moved on to become Trump’s secretary of state. (The job instead went to Gina Haspel.)

Cotton is one of Trump’s staunchest supporters in the Senate, and particularly shares the president’s judgment that Iran is the major malign actor in the Middle East. But on other crucial issues, such as the importance of U.S. alliances, the withdrawal from Syria, and the drawdown in Afghanistan, the senator’s views hew more closely to the mainstream. Indeed, he and Senator Lindsey Graham—another potential contender—signed a letter criticizing the Syria decision and urging Trump to reconsider.

Still, his support for Trump could mean a rough confirmation battle. It’s also unclear whether he’ll want to a leave a position of influence in the Senate for a job that can be thankless, managing an unpredictable president who often veers off the agreed consensus. Additionally, given the president’s legal troubles and an incoming Democratic-controlled House of Representatives with subpoena power, Trump might want to keep his most reliable congressional allies in Congress.

Senator Lindsey Graham

The Republican from South Carolina is perhaps the president’s strongest backer in the Senate, an unexpected role for a man who began as a critic of Trump.

But Graham, a retired Air Force judge advocate general, is also a hawk who has been a strident critic of the withdrawal from Syria, comparing it to the Obama-era policy in Iraq, and the Afghan drawdown. He has broken with the administration on its defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. As defense secretary, he would be in charge of navigating the relationship with Saudi Arabia, one of world’s largest purchasers of American weaponry.

There is also the question of whether he would leave what could soon be an even better job:  Graham is in line to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has a pivotal role in confirming Trump’s judicial nominees.  

David Petraeus

The retired four-star Army general served as CIA director during the Obama presidency, and, along with being recommended by Keane for the job Mattis ultimately got, he was also considered for secretary of state by Trump.

Petraeus has said he would join the Trump administration under “certain conditions.” As the architect of the U.S. military “surge” in Iraq, which was widely credited with breaking the back of the insurgency wracking that country, he is highly unlikely to have a different view from Mattis about the U.S. military’s role around the world.

If nominated, though, Petraeus will face tough scrutiny in the Senate. Once the recipient of bipartisan accolades, the general’s reputation collapsed when it emerged that he had shared classified material with his lover, who was working on his biography, and then lied to the FBI about it. The scandal cost him his job at the CIA. In a week in which Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, appeared before a federal judge for lying to the bureau, Petraeus’s past will almost certainly be up for scrutiny.

Aquaman Has No Business Being This Good

Far be it from me to judge other nations, but there’s something rotten at the core of Atlantis, the underwater setting of the new DC Comics blockbuster Aquaman. The realm’s monarchical system of primogeniture has handed the throne to a warmongering maniac named Orm (played by Patrick Wilson). Relationships with the crab people of the Brine kingdom and the spiky monsters of the underwater trenches are at all-time lows. And the nation’s only plan to combat global warming is to try to invade the surface with an army on shark-back. Wait, does this all sound like a bizarrely complicated piece of high fantasy rather than a goofy comic-book film? I have great news for you, reader: It’s both.

James Wan’s Aquaman has no business being a good movie. It barely has business being a movie at all, given that DC Comics’ undersea hero has long been a butt of pop-culture jokes rather than a big seller, best known for talking to fish and having little to offer the Justice League when their adventures take place on the surface world. But this is 2018, the world is immersed in superhero movies, and Warner Bros. insists on having a robust “cinematic universe” for folks such as Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman to tool around in.

Enter Jason Momoa’s Aquaman. A thickly bearded, trident-wielding beach bro, he first made a cameo appearance in Batman v. Superman and then was given a little more to do in 2017’s Justice League. In that film, he was largely relied on to occasionally spear a monster or shout bits of encouragement such as “My man!” to his more famous teammates. Momoa, still best known for his work on Game of Thrones, gave an affable performance that suggested any potential solo film would have a freewheeling, surfer-movie vibe.

Not so much. Instead, in the hands of Wan (who created the Saw, Insidious, and Conjuring franchises and more recently directed Furious 7), Aquaman is a hilariously dense, intensely nerdy, and sublimely silly project, one where discussions of oceanic parliamentary law exist alongside a giant octopus playing the drums. It’s a film that feels more indebted to the assuredly zany work of directors such as the Wachowskis (particularly Jupiter Ascending) and Luc Besson (Lucy, Valerian) than to grim-and-gritty DC Comics movies such as Suicide Squad. And it’s anchored by Momoa’s easy-breezy approach, which keeps matters from ever feeling too overwhelming or arcane.

The plot of Aquaman? It’s simple: Aquaman is Arthur Curry, the product of a star-crossed romance between the lonely lighthouse keeper Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison) and the Atlantean queen Atlanna (Nicole Kidman). Raised on the surface, Arthur can nonetheless breathe underwater, talk to fishies, swim at superfast speeds, and whirl a weapon around in all kinds of cool ways. But having lost his mother under mysterious circumstances long ago, he’s uninterested in his royal heritage—until the sea princess Mera (Amber Heard) shows up and tells him he needs to find a mythical trident and save the world.

Most of Aquaman is a quest movie, with Arthur and Mera zipping from location to location (including the Sahara and Sicily) in search of trident clues, while the villainous Orm gathers his armies (mounted on sharks) to prepare to conquer us landlubbers. But then: There’s Dolph Lundgren as a seahorse-riding rival king whom Orm needs to form a political alliance with. There’s Vulko (Willem Dafoe), Orm’s grand vizier, who is playing both sides and secretly aiding Arthur. There’s the Black Manta (a wonderfully imposing Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a submarine pirate who seeks personal vengeance against Arthur. There’s a lot of chatter about diplomatic clearance and ancient treaties. Julie Andrews voices a 1,000-foot-tall leviathan.

There’s a lot going on in this movie, and Wan happily dumps it all in the viewer’s lap, highlights it in various shades of neon, and dials the visual inventiveness up to maximum. This is a sensory-overload movie, but in a good way—the action isn’t chopped to pieces and dully rendered as in so many superhero movies, and the film never pauses to address some unrelated spin-off or sequel in the DC world. This is a story about the fraught political situation of Atlantis, and the necessity of a consensus-building, holy-trident-wielding half-human coming in to institute various reforms. Some of those reforms might involve giant crab people. If you have a problem with that, the exits in your theater are clearly marked.

Aquaman serves as further evidence that the DC Universe can thrive if it embraces the grander sincerity of its godlike heroes rather than trying to ground them in the real world. Yes, Momoa knows how to have a good time amid all the underwater special effects and encyclopedic world-building. There’s plenty of humor and fun to be found in a film where Dolph Lundgren rides a giant seahorse into battle. But Aquaman works because it isn’t laughing at itself—it’s both joyously whimsical and confident in its own seaworthiness.

The Genetic Legacy of the Spanish Inquisition

In 1492, best known as the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Spain also decided to expel all practicing Jews from its kingdom. Jews who did not leave—and were not murdered—were forced to become Catholics. Along with those who converted during earlier pogroms, they became known as conversos. As Spain expanded its empire in the Americas, conversos made their way to the colonies too.

The stories have always persisted—of people across Latin America who didn’t eat pork, of candles lit on Friday nights, of mirrors covered for mourning. A new study examining the DNA of thousands of Latin Americans reveals the extent of their likely Sephardic Jewish ancestry, more widespread than previously thought and more pronounced than in people in Spain and Portugal today. “We were very surprised to find it was the case,” says Juan-Camilo Chacón-Duque, a geneticist at the Natural History Museum in London who co-authored the paper.

This study is one of the most comprehensive genetic surveys of Latin Americans yet. The team also found a mix of indigenous American, European, sub-Saharan African, and East Asian ancestry in many people they sampled—a legacy of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and more recent pulses of immigration from Asia. This is the history of Latin America, written in DNA.

[Read: Slavery and the Jews]

In the case of conversos, DNA is helping elucidate a story with few historical records. Spain did not allow converts or their recent descendants to go to its colonies, so they traveled secretly under falsified documents. “For obvious reasons, conversos were not eager to identify as conversos,” says David Graizbord, a professor of Judaic studies at the University of Arizona. The designation applied not just to converts but also to their descendants who were always Catholic. It came with more than a whiff of a stigma. “It was to say you come from Jews and you may not be a genuine Christian,” says Graizbord. Conversos who aspired to high offices in the Church or military often tried to fake their ancestry.

The genetic record now suggests that conversos—or people who shared ancestry with them—came to the Americas in disproportionate numbers. For conversos persecuted at home, the fast-growing colonies of the New World may have seemed like an opportunity and an escape. But the Spanish Inquisition reached into the colonies, too. Those found guilty of observing Jewish practices in Mexico, for example, were burned at the stake.

Chacón-Duque and his colleagues pieced together the genetic record by sampling DNA from 6,500 people across Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, which they compared to that of 2,300 people all over the world. Nearly a quarter of the Latin Americans shared 5 percent or more of their ancestry with people living in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including self-identified Sephardic Jews. DNA alone cannot prove that conversos were the source of this ancestry, but it fits with the historical record. This pattern of widespread but low North African and eastern Mediterranean ancestry in the population suggests that its source is centuries old, putting the date around the early days of New Spain. In contrast, more recent immigration to Latin America from Italy and Germany in the late 19th century shows up concentrated in relatively few people in a few geographic areas.

Geneticists have also noticed rare genetic diseases prevalent in Jews popping up in Latin America. “It’s not just one disease. It’s like, wow, this isn’t a coincidence,” says Harry Ostrer, a geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 2011, Ostrer and his colleagues decided to study two populations—in Ecuador and Colorado—with unusually high prevalence of two mutations often found in Jews. (One mutation was in the breast-cancer gene BRCA1, and the other caused a form of dwarfism called Laron syndrome.) And indeed, they found enriched Sephardic Jewish ancestry in the 53 people they tested. With advances in DNA technology, Chacón-Duque and his colleagues were able to carry out similar research, but on the scale of thousands of people.

The idea of Jews secretly living in the New World has attracted considerable mythologizing. Some of it verges into fanciful territory, like the rumors that Christopher Columbus was secretly a Jew looking for a place of refuge for his people. The Atlantic actually published a takedown of some of these stories in 2000, attributing the Jewish-seeming customs of “hidden Jews” in New Mexico to folk beliefs and the Church of God (Seventh-Day). DNA has borne out the fact that the conversos were ancestors to people in Latin American and the American Southwest today, leaving their descendants with the question of what to do with that identity.

By the 17th century, Graizbord says, most conversos had assimilated and lost any connection to Jewish customs. Today, some of their descendants are reclaiming their Jewish identity. They can join Jewish genealogy groups. Some have even converted to Judaism. DNA tests are fanning interest, too. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York politician whose family comes from Puerto Rico, recently revealed during a Hanukkah event that she has Sephardic Jewish ancestry.

Before Chacón-Duque joined this study as a scientist, he had actually submitted his own DNA as a participant. He, like the thousands of others who volunteered, was curious about his own ancestry. He grew up in northwest Colombia, and he had heard the stories. It was a local custom to slaughter a pig for festivities, and it was said that you ate pork publicly to prove you were not a Jew. From that and other tales passed through his family, he had wondered. It turns out he has converso ancestry, too.

How the Press Sustains the Forever War

When President Donald Trump was asked to identify America’s “biggest foe globally” earlier this year, he singled out the European Union. He regularly directs harsh criticism at the leaders of western-European allies, yet lavishes extravagant praise on murderous autocrats, even becoming the first president to profess “love” for a North Korean dictator.

There’s no doubt, in other words, that outgoing Secretary of Defense James Mattis was correct in the criticism strongly implied in his resignation letter—that Trump fails to treat allies with respect and fails to maintain a clear-eyed view of malign actors and strategic competitors.

And the widespread concern prompted by Mattis’s resignation is fully justified. Like Daniel Larison, who disagreed with many of Mattis’s policy positions, I worry that his replacement is likely to be inferior. Like James Fallows, I believe that Trump is “dangerous and unfit for office.” I wish he would resign.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Mattis always understood Trump’s severe defects ]

But one false note is being struck again and again in coverage of Mattis’s departure: the treatment of U.S. withdrawal from Syria as though it is a self-evidently reckless, borderline-illegitimate course.

The Associated Press wrote that Trump’s move “opens the door for major turmoil” in Syria. Here’s an excerpt from CNN.com’s coverage:

President Donald Trump once famously said he knew more about ISIS than US generals do. Now he wants to prove it. His big gamble on a sudden and rapid Syria pullout, which broke on Wednesday, is classic Trump in execution and content after he effectively declared mission accomplished and the defeat of ISIS. The President announced an apparently impulsive decision that shook the world, showed little sign of nuanced consideration, confounded top advisers and by the end of the day left Washington in chaos and confusion.

It was a move that appeared to clash with the central goal of his Middle East policy––containing Iran’s regional influence––since it could leave a vacuum for Tehran and other outside nations to fill. But while the manner of his decision was unorthodox for a President, the move itself tapped into a significant body of support among Trump’s supporters as well as grassroots Democrats that it is time for America’s post-9/11 deployments, several of which have no obvious exit strategy, to end.

Here’s a New York Times article:

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday hailed the decision by President Trump to withdraw United States forces from Syria, calling it “correct” because the American troops were not needed. Mr. Putin’s praise came a day after Mr. Trump said he was ordering the withdrawal because the United States military had achieved its goal of defeating the Islamic State militant group in Syria.

Given the unfinished business on the ground in Syria, however, the move was a surprise to many, including some senior presidential military and diplomatic advisers in Washington. The decision has been criticized, even among Republicans, as abandoning Kurdish allies in the face of a hostile Turkey and a still dangerous Islamic State, as well as leaving Syria open territory for the geopolitical ambitions of Russia and Iran.

Another New York Times article declared, “Political considerations drove Mr. Trump’s decision on Syria. He calculated that pulling out American soldiers would be a way to fulfill a campaign pledge, at a time when he was being forced to compromise on the wall.” After watching the reaction to the announcement on left-leaning cable news, Jim Antle mused, “MSNBC on Syria sounds like Fox News when Obama pulled out of Iraq.”

[Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet]

Syria could have been characterized as being “in turmoil” for the entirety of the U.S. presence there. It will be in turmoil even if U.S. troops stay indefinitely. Leaving American troops in Syria could be characterized as “a gamble” every bit as accurately as withdrawing them. Risking less blood and treasure in the Middle East and bringing home U.S. troops could be characterized as “the central goal of Trump’s Middle Eastern policy” as accurately as the question-begging “containing Iran’s regional influence.”

Fulfilling a campaign pledge to end a war after defeating rivals in both political parties who took the other side of the issue could be framed as a democratic check on the military-industrial complex as accurately as a craven move by an unprincipled leader to survive politically. That there is “unfinished business on the ground in Syria” would still be true if U.S. forces stayed deployed there for another 20 years.

It is proper to note the risks of U.S. departure. But most coverage of Trump’s move adopts only those frames that cast keeping Americans in Syria in a good light and withdrawing them in a bad light. Readers are told that Vladimir Putin hailed the decision, but no mention is made of the American spouses and children thrilling at the prospect of a loved one leaving harm’s way and coming home sooner.

The tenor of the coverage reflects abiding faith in the conventional wisdom of the Washington foreign-policy establishment that is difficult to square with the frequent errors of that establishment’s Middle East policy. It is dismissive of public opinion.

“Political commentators and anti-interventionist ideologues will note that withdrawing America’s modest footprint from Syria is popular with the public,” Noah Rothman declares in Commentary. “But what would you expect? Precisely no one in the political class is making a case for sustained and substantial American intervention in this conflict zone.” If almost no one in the political class is willing to make the case for a war (Lindsey Graham is always willing to make the case for a war), that strikes me as evidence for the proposition that fighting it anyway is unwise.

[David Frum: No more excuses]

And the press is utterly disinterested in the illegality of the unauthorized war. A notable exception is David French, who favors an ongoing U.S. presence, but noted last week—when it seemed as though Trump would keep troops in Syria indefinitely—“there’s a serious problem. Trump’s wise policy is blatantly unconstitutional. He is engaged in the invasion and continued occupation of a hostile foreign state. Even under his administration’s quite expansive definition of its military powers, that’s an act of war that requires congressional consent.”

If withdrawal turns out to be vindicated by future events, there is still cause for sound criticism of Trump, as Daniel Byman explains at Lawfare:

Making the risks much greater is the lack of process. The president did not coordinate the decision with his senior advisors. Indeed, National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of State Jim Mattis all had issued statements recently declaring that the United States would stay in Syria to counter Iran and to ensure other political goals. Allies have even less reason to trust the advisors speak for Trump, and by extension America.

Key allies like France and the United Kingdom, which have troops in Syria on the assumption that America has their back, also were not told, making them reluctant to take on new risks in partnership with America. With a better process, the United States could have at least shown respect for allies and pushed for promises from Turkey, concessions from Iran, and so on—by asking nothing, we will get nothing.

And America’s ability to constructively debate the president’s actions is not helped by the fact that his corrupt political allies, dubious campaign behavior, opaque business empire, and bizarre behavior all raise the possibility that he is being blackmailed to act in the interest of Russia, Turkey, or both.

Even so, disdain for Trump and excessive deference to the foreign-policy establishment has caused much of the news media to err in their coverage—to treat the risky, costly, unconstitutional policy of maintaining a troop presence in Syria indefinitely as though it is obviously best, and to fail to treat the withdrawal of troops as a legitimate, reasonable position, even though it fulfills a campaign promise, enjoys popular support, remedies ongoing illegality, and has many plausible arguments that recommend it over quite unappealing alternatives.

In this way, a forever war is sustained.

A Courting Peacock Can Shake Its Partner’s Head From Afar

A peacock’s tail is so ostentatious that you could easily miss other parts of its anatomy that, on any other bird, would be unmissable. On the heads of both male and female peafowl, there’s a crest of stiff, spatula-like feathers that resemble the helmet of a Roman centurion. It’s a flamboyant, standout trait that, under the circumstances, is just another decoration among many equally eye-catching ones.

But Suzanne Amador Kane, a physicist from Haverford College, has found that the crest is much more than a mere adornment. It’s also a sensor. Its feathers are tuned to vibrate at the exact same frequencies at which a displaying peacock rattles his tail. When a male shows off his trademark fan, the female he’s courting doesn’t just see him. She also feels him, in her head.

When Kane’s collaborator Roslyn Dakin first studied peafowl crests in 2011, she thought they might act as a signal. By looking at their length, thickness, or color, other peafowl could potentially judge the health or attractiveness of potential mates. But when Dakin analyzed the crests, she found that they’re not varied enough to be a reliable signal. “We couldn’t figure out a function for them,” says Kane.

Then they heard about the auklets.

Auklets are bizarre, puffin-like seabirds that nest in huge colonies, sound like trumpets, and smell like tangerines. Their heads are topped with striking, forward-facing ponytails that scientists had long seen as sexual ornaments: The bigger the crest, the sexier the auklet. But in 2010, Sampath Seneviratne and Ian Jones showed that the crests also act like a rat’s whiskers. The auklets use them to sense the walls of the rocky crevices in which they nest; when Seneviratne and Jones taped down these feathers, the birds were more likely to bonk their heads.

After Kane read about this discovery, “the next time I looked at peafowl crests, I saw them very differently,” she says. Peafowl don’t live in rocky crevices, so their crests are clearly not collision detectors. But perhaps, Kane reasoned, they could be vibration­ detectors. When male peacocks fan out their tails, they also shake them at high speeds—about 26 times a second. This creates a stunning visual illusion in which their eyespots seem to hover against a shimmering background. It also creates a rattling noise, and a wave of pressure that could conceivably vibrate the crest of a watching female.

[Read: Crows sometimes have sex with their dead]

To test this idea, Kane and her colleague Daniel Van Beveren acquired several peafowl crests from online vendors and zoos. “A lot of the specimens I got in very strange ways,” says Kane. “One bird was a zoo peacock that had the bad luck to fly into the polar-bear enclosure.”

On closer inspection, the team found that the crest has the right equipment to act as a sensor. At the base of each plume, there’s a tiny companion feather called a filoplume. These are also found in other birds, and they’re known to be mechanical sensors: Something shakes the big feather, the big feather nudges the filoplume, and the filoplume triggers a nerve cell.

Next, the team mounted the crests on mechanical shakers and showed that the constituent feathers resonate when shaken 26 times a second—the exact frequency at which displaying peacocks shake their tail feathers. Only the crest feathers behave like this; when the team tested feathers from other peafowl body parts, or from other big-crested birds, none of them resonated at that precise frequency.

Kane was astonished. “Something the length of a peacock tail feather should have a much different resonant frequency to these tiny crest feathers,” she says. “It’s as if you had a bass that sounded like a violin. It just can’t be a coincidence.”

As a final test of the sensor hypothesis, the team used speakers to play various noises at the crest feathers. White noise did nothing. Pop songs, such as “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees, had little effect. But a recording of an actual peacock’s tail-rattle made them vibrate.

“The study is rigorous,” says Gail Patricelli, an evolutionary biologist from the University of California at Davis, but “there is still a great deal we don’t know.” For example, “given that peafowl have ears that can hear across a wide range of frequencies, what’s the advantage of having this extra low-frequency channel for communication? Perhaps males and females use it as a private channel that doesn’t attract the attention of predators.”

If that’s the case, “what are they saying to each other?” Patricelli adds. “I’m big and healthy? I’m sexy? Or both? I’m imagining that males who are able to cause the feathers on a female’s head to literally vibrate may have had a significant advantage in sexiness!”

And don’t forget the peahens, says Kane. “There’s a long-standing idea males are the ones who are communicating, but if you actually observe them, the females frequently do these displays to each other, to the males, and to their young,” she says. “They could be taking part in the mating displays. Or issuing threats. Or encouraging the young to do mating displays.”

[Read: This hummingbird’s tail whistles, and no one’s sure why]

To better understand the significance of these vibrations, Kane wants to film the crests of living peafowl to see if they actually shake in response to each other’s displays. That’s easier said than done, since both the displaying bird and the watching one move around a lot during courtship. To begin, the team might blindfold peafowl to see whether they react to waves of air that mimic a rattling tail. They could also change the crest’s resonant frequency by stiffening it with varnish, then see whether a peafowl reacts differently to a tail display.

Kane also wants to study other birds, whose larger crests might be easier for a camera to follow. At least 35 candidate species have flexible crests and some kind of shaking display. These include the secretary bird (a “ninja eagle on stilts”), the Victoria crowned pigeon (a giant blue dove with a feather-duster head), the Himalayan monal (an acid-trip pheasant), and the hoatzin (a prehistoric-looking punk rocker that smells of cow dung). Perhaps these species, though already dramatic and eye-catching, are also walking around with secret sense organs, hidden in plain sight.

Trump Needs a Secretary of Defense Who Agrees With Him

James Mattis was an unusual choice for secretary of defense, an explicitly civilian role. It wasn’t so long ago that Mattis was the commander of Centcom, America’s sprawling military presence in the Middle East and Central Asia. Sure enough, there was a widespread sense in the Pentagon that Mattis was more inclined to trust senior military officials, many of whom he came to know over the course of his decades-long career as a Marine officer, than the senior civilian officials charged with overseeing uniformed personnel.

Given the importance of civilian control over the military, one might expect Mattis’s unorthodox approach to leading the Pentagon to have raised concerns among leading members of the national-security community. But it did not, for the simple reason that in contrast to President Donald Trump, whom he served only with great ambivalence, Mattis firmly adhered to the bipartisan internationalist consensus on foreign and defense policy. It is therefore not surprising that his departure has set off a panicked reaction.

[David Frum: No more excuses]

Particularly at the start of the Trump presidency, Mattis was a reassuring figure. He was living proof that despite Trump’s seemingly endless series of provocations, U.S.-led alliances would remain intact, and indeed might be strengthened. Consider that though the president has loudly and persistently questioned the wisdom of the U.S. commitment to the defense of its European allies, U.S. military spending in Europe has increased from $789 million to $4.77 billion during his tenure, with more expected to come. This was very much Mattis’s handiwork, as was the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, which called for a greater emphasis on great-power competition and meeting the challenge posed by a revisionist China.

For some time now, however, it has been clear that Mattis’s influence has been waning, as Tobin Harshaw observed late last month. Having failed to persuade Trump to remain in either the Iran nuclear deal or the Paris climate agreement, Mattis attempted to play the role of good soldier when it came to various other presidential priorities, with evident strain. Once the president decided that he would no longer tolerate an ongoing U.S. military presence in Syria, despite his defense secretary’s firm objections, Mattis’s departure was a foregone conclusion. Rather than remain in office a tortured man, mouthing support for the president’s agenda by day while working tirelessly to stymie it by night, Mattis has chosen to clear the way for a successor who is more aligned with Trump’s sensibilities.

And that is as it should be. As president, Trump deserves to have a secretary of defense who agrees with him that the U.S. military should withdraw from its foreign military adventures, and who has the bureaucratic skill to help him implement that policy in a responsible way—not, as we’ve just seen in the case of Syria, by repeatedly trying to make it happen, failing, and then peremptorily ordering it done. Though the precipitousness of Trump’s planned Syria withdrawal has been roundly condemned, there are many serious scholars who accept that, as the political scientist Daniel Byman recently observed, “the logic behind the continued deployment of the 2,000 or so U.S. troops in Syria was always a bit fuzzy.”

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Mattis always understood Trump’s severe defects ]

Others, taking a broader view, maintain that the greater Middle East is fast becoming a strategic backwater, and that the United States would do well to focus its diplomatic and military resources on the Indo-Pacific. A defense secretary who accepted Trump’s insistence that the Syria mission not be open-ended might very well have persuaded the president to accept a more deliberate process. That is exactly the defense secretary Trump needs.

As for who could fit the bill, that is a harder question to answer. Thus far, speculation has centered on a handful of retired Republican eminences and one or two of the president’s allies in Congress, but it isn’t clear that any of them have the requisite familiarity with the workings of the Pentagon. Trump could reach out to a veteran of the Obama or Clinton administrations who shares his anti-interventionist instincts, but it is unlikely that such an overture would be welcomed. Don’t be surprised if the president winds up tapping another recently retired general for the job—one for whom a sense of duty is reason enough to endure the frustrations it will no doubt entail.

Who Wins When Cash Is No Longer King?

Of the most popular coffee shops in San Francisco’s Financial District, only one is manned by a robot. Every morning, in a glass-and-wood booth on the corner of One Bush Street, customers queue around a whirring hydraulic arm, waiting for it to serve them cappuccino. It’s an odd sight. Cafe X has three San Francisco locations, and all are cashless and fully automated, with orders taken via app.

The one I pass on the way to work each morning is mere steps away from Amazon’s cashless Go store, where human cashiers and baggers have disappeared, and juice and milk are dispensed by wanding your phone over a sensor. Human attendants hover in the lobby to aid shoppers, mostly newcomers confused by the entire cashless scheme. And Amazon does have human employees who prep food and stock items.

Replacing checkout lanes with sensors and cash registers with swiveling iPads (frictionless shopping is the term of art here) makes for a novel shopping experience, one that Amazon hopes will help it gather shopper data to increase profits. Shoppers pay via the bank account attached to their Amazon profile, and each purchase is recorded and analyzed for insights into their behaviors and preferences. A sophisticated camera system—using the same technology that steers self-driving cars—monitors shoppers’ movements within the store. Even what they don’t do is recorded: For example, customers who pick up a carton of milk and then set it aside for a less expensive brand could have coupons sent to them.

Arguments against uploading the grocery store to the cloud include potential job losses for cashiers and baggers, but also cybersecurity and IT failures, particularly during disasters. Imagine dozens of shoppers running for sensors in the panicked hours ahead of tornadoes or winter storms. (Amazon has said its Go stores can handle an influx of shoppers, up to fire code.)

A December report from the United Kingdom also raised the issue of surveillance and abuse. Couples with shared bank accounts can easily track each other’s purchases in a cashless economy, which could make it easier for abusers to harass their spouse.

Still, cashless is catching on. A second Amazon Go location in the Financial District, a few blocks west, opened this week. Walmart and Tesco are exploring similar cashless stores. The popular fast-casual restaurant Sweetgreen, the men’s retailer Bonobos, and the Drybar hair salon have all sworn off paper bills, advising employees to simply turn people away if they can’t pay digitally. Visa just awarded 50 small businesses, almost all of them fast-casual food spots,  $10,000 each for winning its “cashless challenge.”

“We’re going cashless to keep up with the Millennial trend,” one chirpy winner says in Visa’s promotional YouTube clip. The winners value a post-cash setup because it makes for faster transactions and fewer trips to the bank, they say. “No one likes cash,” one owner concludes. “And we don’t like cash.”

Killing cash makes billions for credit-card companies. “Card swipe” fees, a roughly 1 percent charge that retailers pay to banks when shoppers pay using credit and debit cards, earned Visa and Mastercard about $43 billion last year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Shifting businesses toward “frictionless” card-only pay models is an enormous moneymaker, especially in high-volume food spots where people want to get in and get out as rapidly as possible.

It’s a quick and convenient design, and customers may not know that billions of dollars in invisible micro-charges are motivating the shift to “tap to pay” stores popping up in their neighborhood. But while the distinction between cash and money may be irrelevant to a new crop of Millennial-focused restaurant owners, some lawmakers are arguing that cashless design is classist. In November, the New York City councilman Ritchie Torres introduced a bill to ban all types of cashless retailers, Go stores, and restaurants. Similar bills have been introduced in Philadelphia and D.C. Chicago’s attempt at a ban failed.

“In some ways, making a card a requirement for consumption is analogous to making identification a requirement for voting,” Torres told Grubstreet last month. “The effect is the same: It disempowers communities of color.”

Seventeen percent of all black households and 14 percent of all Hispanic households had no bank account in 2017, according to a report from the FDIC. Some have poor credit; some work jobs where they’re paid only in cash. Cashlessness isn’t an option for them. Similar to how Go shoppers can’t get beyond the lobby without an app and an Amazon account, cashless stores, Torres says, create public spaces that all but bar low-income people from entry. The unbanked have two choices: Join a digital economy via the traditional banking institutions or disappear from these new spaces.

It will be interesting to see the how a cashless society helps or hinders people with even fewer resources. Consider the U.K.’s Greater Change pilot in August, supported by Oxford University’s Said Business School. The purpose of the pilot was to allow for cashless donations to the homeless. The charity offered lanyards to homeless people, each with an attached barcode. Simply scanning your phone over the person’s QR code sent a small amount of money to them.

Programs like these may result in a bump in donors, but there could also be stigma associated with redeeming the lanyards. If history is any indication, the effects of these technological changes on society’s most vulnerable people won’t be considered until they’ve become a reality.   

The Special Counsel Is Bearing Down on Roger Stone

Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, appears to be at the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia because of his uncanny predictions throughout 2016 about WikiLeaks, which published Democratic documents stolen by Russia during the election.

The self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” said several times in 2016 that he was directly in touch with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. But he has since walked that back, drawing more scrutiny from congressional and federal investigators and ensnaring several of his contacts in the process. “I had no contact with Assange,” Stone told ABC earlier this month, despite the fact that he exchanged private messages with WikiLeaks on Twitter in October 2016. He also said he would never turn on the president. “There’s no circumstance under which I would testify against the president, because I’d have to bear false witness against him,” Stone said. “I’d have to make things up, and I’m not going to do that.”

[Read: Roger Stone’s shifting story is a liability]

Now it could soon be Roger Stone’s time in the barrel. The House Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to release the official transcript of his testimony to Mueller, days after Mueller formally requested it—the last step necessary for prosecutors to bring a charge of lying to Congress, according to The Washington Post.

Mueller’s team has proved highly successful so far in getting even Trump’s most loyal associates to “flip” on the president using criminal charges as leverage. Just this month, Mueller struck a formal cooperation deal with Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen after charging him with lying to Congress about a Russian real-estate deal he and Trump were pursuing in 2016. If Stone is charged by Mueller with a similar crime and decides to cooperate rather than face jail time, it could spell danger for the president. Stone reportedly spoke to Trump regularly during the election, and could be in a position to fill in missing details about the campaign’s ties to WikiLeaks.

[Read: Is WikiLeaks a Russian front?]

It’s still not clear what Mueller thinks Stone may have lied about in his closed-door interview with the House Intelligence Committee last year. Asked for comment, Stone’s lawyer, Grant Smith, forwarded a letter he’d sent to the outgoing Republican chairman, Devin Nunes, on Thursday. “Mr. Stone’s testimony provided during the interview was forthcoming, truthful, and wholly consistent with his many detailed public statements on the matters being investigated,” Smith wrote. “Mr. Stone never had advance knowledge of the source or content of any releases by WikiLeaks or other organizations, and no person can prove, or truthfully claim, otherwise.”

The House panel, for its part, has homed in on at least one area of “deep concern” about Stone’s truthfulness: a supplemental statement Stone submitted weeks after his September 2017 testimony in which he identified a New York radio host named Randy Credico as his back channel to Assange. The supplemental statement, obtained by The Atlantic, is “one of the many areas where we have a deep concern that Mr. Stone was untruthful to our committee, especially in light of the new reports,” a committee aide told me earlier this month.

[Read: The Trump campaign says exploiting hacked emails is free speech]

In the supplemental statement, Stone insisted that he had merely asked Credico, an acquaintance of many years, to “confirm” Assange’s claim in June 2016 that WikiLeaks had Clinton emails that were “pending publication.” Credico had discussed Assange and WikiLeaks with Stone that summer, telling Stone in late August that Assange had “kryptonite on Hillary.” And in October, Credico predicted damaging email dumps while in London trying unsuccessfully to meet with Assange as a potential guest on his show. But there is no evidence that Credico was Stone’s original source of information about WikiLeaks’ plans.

The House Intelligence Committee’s concerns about Stone’s veracity have arisen as a result of a document drafted by Mueller’s team and made public recently by another Stone associate and right-wing writer, Jerome Corsi, which indicates that Stone’s supplemental testimony didn’t tell the full story. The document, called a draft statement of the offense, outlines charges Mueller is prepared to bring against Corsi for allegedly lying to investigators about his role as a back-channel communicator between Stone and WikiLeaks.

The document includes an email Stone wrote to Corsi in July 2016, shortly after WikiLeaks released stolen Democratic National Committee emails. It said, “Get to Assange at Ecuadorian embassy in London and get the pending WikiLeaks emails. They deal with [Clinton] Foundation, allegedly.” Days later, while traveling in Italy, Corsi replied to Stone with some news in another email, according to the Mueller document: “Word is friend in Embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging … time to let more than Podesta to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop” Clinton, Corsi wrote, referring to Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.

The recently revealed interactions between Stone and Corsi appear to strengthen Credico’s denials that he served as Stone’s key back channel to Assange. They also reveal that Stone wasn’t just looking for confirmation that Assange had the goods, as he told the panel in his supplemental statement. He was actively seeking out more stolen emails. And not through Credico beginning in August 2016, but through Corsi beginning in July 2016, according to the Mueller document.

Shortly thereafter, Stone famously predicted on Twitter that it would soon be Podesta’s “time in the barrel.” WikiLeaks later released the stolen Podesta emails one month before the election. Mueller has reportedly been trying to determine whether Stone and WikiLeaks coordinated that release to distract from the damaging Access Hollywood tape, which showed Trump making vulgar comments about women. The emails were dumped just minutes after the tape was released on October 7.

Stone’s communications with Corsi in November 2017 have also raised questions about whether they intended to make Credico a fall guy. Following Stone’s identification of Credico as his “intermediary” to WikiLeaks in his supplemental statement, the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Credico to testify as part of its ongoing Russia probe on November 28, 2017. Two days later, Stone emailed Corsi, asking him to write publicly about Credico ahead of his testimony, according to the Mueller document. Corsi replied, “Are you sure you want to make something out of this now? Why not wait to see what Credico does? You may be defending yourself too much—raising new questions that will fuel new inquiries. This may be a time to say less, not more.”

Stone agreed to “wait a day,” according to emails in the Mueller document, citing Credico’s intention to plead the Fifth—a move that Stone apparently encouraged, according to Credico, and that Mueller’s investigators are reportedly examining as part of a broader inquiry into whether Stone tried to intimidate Credico into cooperating with his version of events.

Stone is far from the only witness that House Intelligence Democrats are concerned about—Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell told MSNBC earlier this month that the committee had “pages of lies” told by witnesses that it was waiting to turn over to Mueller to cross-examine. All Mueller has to do is ask.

Kirsten Gillibrand’s Invocation of ‘Intersectionality’ Backfires

On December 4, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand tweeted something that was consistent with her established mode of communication: It was self-serving; it helped to distance her from her former identity as a lawyer for Big Tobacco and as a Democratic congresswoman from a conservative district who had supported gun rights and opposed any form of amnesty for illegal immigrants; and it wrapped her in the banner of feminism’s most urgent positions.

The tweet—which one can imagine a young staffer enthusiastically proposing—read:

The Future is

Female

Intersectional

Powered in our belief in one another

And we’re just getting started

For people who encountered the tweet but were not familiar with the slogan about the female future—which began as the rallying cry of lesbian separatists in the 1970s (those were the days) and is now the kind of feel-good feminist slogan that’s printed on baby clothes and sold in posh boutiques in my Los Angeles neighborhood—it was an incendiary concept. The message, which received 5,000 retweets and was ratioed into outer space, was interpreted by conservatives as one more sign of the feminist apocalypse, when men will divide their time between buying tampons for their female masters and writing themselves out of history.

[Read: Kirsten Gillibrand and the Al Franken fury]

Kirsten Gillibrand can give as good as she gets, but the response to the tweet was so overwhelmingly negative, and her political ambitions so large, that she decided she needed to walk it back—to about 1957. She went on CNN to have a talk with Van Jones, during which she employed the one number from the Hillary Clinton repertoire that just about everyone hates: She performed a kind of innocent-woman routine, shocked about the misunderstanding and eager to set things right.

Gillibrand told Jones that all she meant by the tweet was, “Please include the ladies in the future, because they’re not really included today.” Please include the ladies? Was she trying to kick-start the revolution or get a better tee time for her foursome at the country club? Maybe she was attempting to invoke Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies,” in which case she really needs to get a better grasp on the realities of the cable-news audience; on the fact that our “Founders”—and, presumably, their wives—are now understood by many progressives to have been white supremacists; and on the simple truth that kicking off a female-dominated future with an homage to a woman born in 1744 is like going from Tomorrowland to Frontierland: an exercise in theme-park feminism.

But if the huge audience for the tweet was unfamiliar with “The future is female,” the concept of intersectionality flew so far above them, they didn’t even see the contrail. “Intersectional?” a snappy Fox News host named Trish Regan said. “That’s a new one. I haven’t heard that one before.”

Intersectional feminism, which a small but vocal minority of people cares about passionately, and everyone else—even the host of a news program on national television—hasn’t heard of, is the most happening, most urgent form of feminism today. While its adherents often speak of the value of a collective, postcapitalist society, intersectional feminism is actually grounded in a rejection of the Marxist premise on which the modern women’s movement was founded.

[Caitlin Flanagan: The conversation #MeToo needs to have]

It proceeds from the sound notion that all women do not, in fact, constitute a single class, and the idea that the personal gains of—for example—a wealthy white lawyer with an expensive education and piles of ready cash will somehow trickle down to poor black women living in an urban slum is absurd. At this point, the only major feminist issue that equally affects rich and poor, white and nonwhite women is abortion. Other than that, American women occupy a variety of classes, which are growing more rigid than ever.

As a philosophy, it’s valid. As something that a middle-aged, hyper-successful white woman such as Gillibrand can play around with, it’s a hand grenade that’s going to explode in her mittens. When she told Jones, “It’s worrying that the top three presidential front-runners are white men,” she clearly assumed she could slice off one personally advantageous piece of intersectional theory and use it to wedge her way into the pack at the top. She’s used to feminism being a jet pack that she can fire up any time she needs a boost. Not this time.

This summer, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, I was on a panel with Brittney Cooper, the African American professor and author of the much loved book Eloquent Rage. She spoke at length and with vehemence about the realities of intersectional feminism. In the audience were many white women who had paid serious money for the chance to attend the session, and whose breathless excitement at Cooper’s oratory made Felicia Bernstein look like a cool-eyed purveyor of realpolitik.

Cooper explained that because of intersectionality, “now we can confront white women to say, ‘Your feminism is suspect if the only thing you want to do is use these social movements so that you can have access to the power that white men have. That’s not what we’re fighting for.’” There was a frisson of excitement in the audience, and she continued, explaining, “White women don’t want to change the fundamental paradigm of race and gender in this country; they want to exploit it so that they can gain access to the power that white men have. White women live in the house with white men, they were raised by white men, they raise white men—and what they want is to be able to rule the world like white men do.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Intersectionality is not the problem]

I thought of Cooper’s remarks about white husbands and white sons when I heard of Gillibrand’s “worries” about the three white men who are currently front-runners for the Democratic nomination. If there’s anything intersectional feminism has no time for, it’s white men—which must have seemed politically useful to her in the moment. According to the intersectional framework, white men aren’t part of the problem—they are the problem. The desperate attempt of progressive young white women to kick free from their shameful racial heritage by emphasizing the taxonomic distinction of gender is responsible for much of the most incendiary language about white men: They are trash, monsters, simultaneously bumbling incompetents and the soul of evil itself.

All of which led me to think of three relevant white males: Gillibrand’s husband and sons, who are also—per her newly embraced ideology—not the future. Her husband has amassed part of his fortune from his career as a venture capitalist. Her two young sons—who appear to me like a pair of thoughtful and well-behaved kids, but what do I know?—are being carefully educated, their intellectual pursuits an especial concern of Mephistopheles himself: Gillibrand has said that Dad is the parent most concerned with the boys’ academics.

So, like many accomplished, progressive white women who are enchanted by the rhetoric and possibility of personal gain offered by feminist intersectional theory, Gillibrand has embraced an ideology that she assumes allows for a special carve-out for the very special venture capitalists of this world—the sensitive ones, who are promoting right think to their sons, even as they create the kind of ironclad wills and trusts that secure their pampered futures. She assumes, also, that if she inculcates these good values in her sons—whom she obviously loves deeply—they, too, will be spared come the revolution. They won’t.

In this light, Gillibrand is apparently eager to do exactly what Cooper described: leverage the political power of a social movement to move her closer to the traditional seat of ultimate white male power, the American presidency.

In an interview set to air this weekend on CNN, Gillibrand talked about whether she will make a presidential run. “I’m going to think about it over the holidays,” she said, “with my children and my husband, and I will make a decision soon.”

So here is Kirsten Gillibrand—champion of Big Tobacco, erstwhile supporter of harsh immigration laws, gun nut—flaunting a 1950s obedience to her husband (“Honey, I’ve got a super-big favor to ask …”), promoting a righteous female-forward future, and endorsing an ideology that thinks her own precious sons are trash and that, furthermore, has much to say about the concept of “white feminism,” of which Gillibrand is a prime example.

But hope is not lost. Perhaps she will learn more about the intersectional future, decide to abandon her own advancement, and put her considerable clout behind an impressive and deeply accomplished potential candidate who really would help make the future intersectional: Kamala Harris. More likely, however, she will eventually jump on board the good ship Biden, because he is rapidly shaping up to be the best, last chance, and—like all careerists—she will be quick to align herself with emerging power no matter what intersection of race, class, and gender it brings with it.

The Intercept
Com mais de 4,8 mil comunidades sem títulos, quilombolas entrarão com ação por danos morais
Com mais de 4,8 mil comunidades sem títulos, quilombolas entrarão com ação por danos morais

O presidente Jair Bolsonaro, em sua já famosa fala no Clube Hebraica do Rio, destilou preconceito contra as comunidades quilombolas. Disse que em seu governo não haverá “nenhum centímetro demarcado” para reservas indígenas ou quilombolas. No discurso altamente ofensivo, o presidente eleito se referiu aos quilombolas com medidas utilizadas para pesar gado e tratou a titulação das terras como “benesse” ou “privilégio” concedido pelo Estado e não um direito constitucional – sua fala foi alvo de processo, mas o STF arquivou denúncia contra o então candidato do PSL com o voto de minerva do ministro Alexandre Moraes que classificou como “grosseira” e não crime de racismo.

Mas a despeito de um presidente que os despreza, 4,8 mil comunidades quilombolas entrarão com uma ação inédita no Supremo Tribunal Federal por danos morais pelos 30 anos em que estão sem a posse da terra garantida pela Constituição. Apenas 200 detêm esse direito, enquanto os outros 4,8 mil, ainda não.

Quem entrará com a ação no STF será a Federação Nacional de Associações Quilombolas, a Fenaq. “Isso está nas disposições transitórias do artigo 168 da Constituição Federal, em tratados internacionais, mas vem sendo postergado sem a menor cerimônia pelas instituições do estado brasileiro”, afirma Humberto Adami, advogado da Fenaq. “Isso independe de o governo estar à direita ou à esquerda e do presidente gostar ou não. É um cumprimento da Constituição Federal”, explicou Adami, que também é presidente da Comissão Nacional da Verdade sobre Escravidão Negra do Conselho Federal da OAB.

No caso dos quilombos, não é qualquer grupo que pode receber o título de quilombola. A Fundação Cultural Palmares é a primeira instância para reconhecer se a comunidade se encaixa dentro do que preconiza a Constituição Federal como “remanescentes de quilombos”. Para ter a posse definitiva, é preciso percorrer um longo percurso de 16 etapas até ser reconhecida pelo Incra, o órgão responsável pelo processo administrativo de identificação, reconhecimento, delimitação, demarcação e titulação das terras ocupadas.

O artigo 68 da Constituição Federal de 1988 deu um novo significado ao termo “quilombo”. Em sua definição original, de 1740, o termo era usado para identificar  espaços ocupados por pelo menos cinco escravos fugidos. Com a Constituição de 1988, no entanto, a palavra quilombo passou a designar a ocupação coletiva da terra e com ligações ancestrais ligadas à opressão e a escravidão. Após a promulgação da Carta de 1988, o estado brasileiro passou reconhecer a existência de outras formas de propriedade, orientadas por interesses coletivos. O decreto nº 4.887/2003 regulamentou o artigo 68, dizendo que os chamados “remanescentes de quilombos” são grupos étnico-raciais que possuem uma trajetória histórica própria, associada a uma ancestralidade negra que se reflete na constituição do território.

Mas o Democratas, antigo PFL, não gostou da mudança. O partido entrou com uma Ação Direta de Inconstitucionalidade,  ADI 3239, para bloquear seu reconhecimento. Solicitou que o decreto nº 4.887 fosse considerado nulo, em um processo que se arrastou por 15 anos até finalmente ser concluído em fevereiro, quando o STF derrubou a Adin.

O DEM sustentava que a autodeclaração como comunidade quilombola era um critério insuficiente para garantir a posse da terra. Além disso, queria que só fossem tituladas áreas que estivessem sob posse quilombola em 5 de outubro de 1988, data da promulgação da Constituição Federal. Na votação, o ministro Edson Fachin puxou um voto contrário ao marco temporal, que foi seguido pela maioria dos magistrados que rechaçaram a tese defendida por ruralistas, um fantasma que assombrava também os povos indígenas.

Com a ação por danos morais, a Fenaq pretende destravar a titulação das comunidade.

O STF entendeu também que a autodeclaração como quilombola não é o único critério, mas apenas um dos muitos que embasam a decisão. O ministro Barroso derrubou a argumentação de que a autodeclaração abriria brechas para fraudes. “A autodefinição feita pela comunidade quilombola é apenas o ponto de partida de um procedimento que – eu contei – é feita em 14 partes, e que inclui laudo antropológico, inclui manifestação do Incra e de todos os interessados. A ideia de que pudesse haver fraude é um pouco fantasiosa”, afirmou.

Humberto Adami acredita que é chegada a hora de dar um passo adiante. “A pergunta é: Quanto tempo mais vai demorar a demarcação dessas 4.800 comunidades quilombolas, nessa demora sem fim?” Com a ação por danos morais, a Fenaq pretende destravar a titulação das comunidades – o valor será estipulado pelo tribunal, em caso de vitória.

A morosidade nesta corrida com barreiras fragiliza as comunidades, que são o elo mais frágil da corrente e ficam demasiadamente expostas ao conflito. Como quase tudo o que envolve terras no Brasil, por conflito entenda-se uma luta intestina que pode acabar em morte.

A bancada ruralista, com sua famosa capacidade de articulação e pressão sobre os governos, tem prejudicado as comunidades quilombolas que, por motivos óbvios, não se encaixam no agressivo modelo de desenvolvimento do agronegócio. Os especuladores imobiliários também são grandes atores neste teatro. São muitos os exemplos. O quilombo do Sacopã, no Leblon, um dos metros quadrados mais caros do país é um deles. Assim como as terras quilombolas cobiçadas pela Vale do Rio Doce, no Maranhão, ou o Quilombo Rio dos Macacos, que disputa a área com a Marinha, na Bahia.

Santa Rita, uma história que dá um filme

Um bom exemplo é o quilombo de Santa Rita do Bracuí, em Angra dos Reis, no estado do Rio. Nove anos antes da abolição, em 1879, o comendador José de Souza Breves, irmão de Joaquim Breves, conhecido durante o império como “o rei do café”, libertou todos os seus escravizados e fez uma doação formal de terras para os que ali residiam.

A família Breves, na verdade, desembarcava, em sua praia, escravizados no período ilegal do tráfico e utilizava sua grande influência política para que o caso não terminasse em punições. O convívio entre os escravizados que aqui nasceram e os que chegaram em levas sucessivas escondidos nos navios dos Breves forjou uma comunidade que resiste até hoje.

José não tinha filhos, alforriou todos os seus escravos, deu a vários deles pensões vitalícias e lhes entregou duas enormes fazendas: a Fazenda Cachoeirinha, em Arrozal, e a Fazenda Bracuhy, em Angra dos Reis. As duas fazendas juntas mediam algo em torno de 1400 campos de futebol, com 2 km de linha para o mar.

A história poderia ser o final feliz de abolição com reforma agrária se, em 1956, essas terras não aparecessem no espólio de Honorato Lima, que havia sido o inventariante de plantão dos bens deixados por José de Souza Breves. Essa propriedade transferida por meios ainda hoje obscuros fez com que parte do patrimônio fosse parar em outras mãos. Nos anos 1970, com a abertura da rodovia Rio Santos as terras supervalorizaram e, em 1975, surgiu uma empresa dizendo ser dona de parte delas, sem dúvida a parte mais valiosa: a de frente para o mar.

A não demarcação de terras indígenas e quilombolas destrói o meio ambiente. 

Homens armados intimidaram os descendentes dos escravizados, e barragens foram erguidas em volta do Rio Bracuhy, fechando o acesso às terras que eram dos seus antepassados, de fato e de direito. Em 1978, com o apoio da Igreja e da Federação dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura, a Fetag, os herdeiros negros da fazenda entraram na Justiça. Só cinco famílias conseguiram comprovar a descendência dos negros que deram origem ao local e conquistaram o direito a um ínfimo quinhão da enorme doação de Breves. As demais perderam.

Em 1999, a Fundação Cultural Palmares reconheceu a comunidade, que ainda hoje não está totalmente demarcada pelo Incra em contendas judiciais eternas. Enquanto isso não ocorre, lotes vão sendo vendidos, estradas abertas, árvores derrubadas, o rio poluído. A não demarcação de terras indígenas e quilombolas destrói o meio ambiente.

O resumo de tudo isso é que, mesmo a doação constando do testamento do proprietário da terra, os quilombolas enfrentam até hoje a agressiva investida de grileiros e o avanço dos condomínios de luxo. Podemos imaginar o que não ocorre com as comunidades que receberam o chão em que vivem apenas pela palavra de senhores e ali permaneceram por gerações. O Bracuí é um entre milhares de casos que cobrem o Brasil de norte a sul.

O engenheiro negro e abolicionista André Rebouças, que dá nome ao túnel que liga a zona norte à zona sul da cidade do Rio, acreditava que os “pilares do atraso” nacional estavam firmados na mortal combinação entre escravidão, monopólio territorial e monocultura. É dele uma frase que, às portas da terceira década do século 21, soa desconcertantemente atual e profunda: “A abolição eu vivi para ver. A democracia rural, não. Quem possui a terra, possui o homem”. O ano de 2019 anuncia mais um capítulo para as históricas disputas em torno da terra. O STF terá a chance de estancar o sangue que já adubou por tempo demais o solo fértil da nação brasileira.

The post Com mais de 4,8 mil comunidades sem títulos, quilombolas entrarão com ação por danos morais appeared first on The Intercept.

Bancos que mandam no país agora começam a dominar a imprensa
Bancos que mandam no país agora começam a dominar a imprensa

Quase tudo que se consome de informação nesse país, algo como 70%, pertence a seis famílias: Marinho (Organizações Globo), Frias (Folha de S. Paulo, UOL), Mesquita (O Estado de S. Paulo), Saad (Bandeirantes), Abravanel (SBT) e Civita (Abril).

Os Civitas, porém, foram engolidos por uma dívida de R$ 1,6 bilhão, e a Abril entrou com pedido de recuperação judicial em agosto. Quase toda essa dívida, mais de R$ 1 bilhão, era com, voilá!, os bancos.

Quem deve R$ 1 bilhão aos bancos, já pertence de corpo e alma a eles. Nesta quinta, porém, fomos informados que a família Civita vendeu 100% da empresa para o investidor Fábio Carvalho.

O empresário, que vem colecionando empresas falimentares na última década é o onipresente BTG Pactual encarnado em carnes, ossos e talão de cheques. De acordo com o Valor Econônico, o BTG buscará comprar a dívida da Abril junto aos seus maiores credores (Bradesco, Itaú e Santander), passando ele mesmo para o lugar de credor único e magnânimo da nova-velha Abril. Com isso, BTG, que tem o futuro superministro da Economia, Paulo Guedes, como um dos seus fundadores, poderá decidir praticamente sozinho sobre o plano de recuperação judicial do antigo império da família Civita.

Em outras palavras, o BTG pretende e será o senhor dos destinos e da alma da Abril.

Sim, o BTG que já estava mergulhado nos bastidores não republicanos da política nacional, como ficou evidente na prisão de seu ex-presidente, André Esteves em 2015; o BTG que de modo muito heterodoxo passou a realizar e a divulgar pesquisas de intenção de voto para presidente, cujos efeitos sobre o mercado de câmbio, risco e juros é potencialmente forte o bastante para produzir fortunas a partir do éter; o BTG acusado pela CVM de realizar operações pouco cristalinas no mercado de dólar futuro; o BTG que foi casa de Paulo Guedes, Pérsio Arida e de outros tantos economistas pesos pesados por detrás das campanhas presidenciais; o BTG que está sendo acusado de usar informações privilegiadas para dar “o chapéu” na XP Investimentos – esse mesmo BTG quer agora ser o dono de fato de uma das maiores empresas de comunicação do Brasil.

Esse é o passo mais ousado até aqui, de um movimento já em marcha, de empresas do setor financeiro se tornarem donas de empresas da área de informação.

A XP Investimentos, que recentemente recebeu sinal verde do Banco Central para se transformar em banco e anda em conflitos com o BTG, comprou o site Infomoney, em 2011. A Empiricus tem participação nos sites O Antagonista e na revista Crusoé.

Os bancos controlarem a imprensa não é novidade no Brasil. A única novidade é que o domínio, antes feito via empréstimo e gastos com publicidade, agora chega por meio da compra direta.

A antiga estrutura de “empresa familiar, que ainda vigora na grande imprensa brasileira, deverá ceder lugar à estrutura mais moderna, de “sociedades anônimas”, de capital aberto, cujo controle acionário será mais difuso e opaco. Mas que estará, como sempre, nas mãos do grande capital comercial, industrial e financeiro.

Mais liberdade, mais concentração

Nada disso é novidade. Uma das mais famosas previsões de Marx n’O Capital (1867) era que mesmo que uma economia operasse no mais genuíno sistema laissez-faire (onde reina a liberdade econômica) haveria uma tendência natural sw aumento da concentração do capital. Isto é, haveria uma tendência de que um punhado de empresas gigantescas dominassem fatias cada vez maiores de todos os mercados.

David Leonhardt, em coluna recente no New York Times, mostrou dados sobre esse fenômeno para o caso americano, nas últimas duas décadas. A partir do século 19, com o evidente acerto da previsão de Marx, o fenômeno começou a despertar o interesse dos cientistas sociais. Um dos trabalhos mais conhecidos dessa safra é o de Lenin, publicado em 1917, mostrando que esse fenômeno ocorria também no setor financeiro, com os bancos passando a dominar todos os ramos da economia.

O Brasil é, infelizmente, um bom exemplo disso. Nossos cinco maiores bancos (Itaú, Bradesco, Santander, Caixa Econômica e Banco do Brasil) controlam 82% dos depósitos do país. Se somarmos o resto do setor financeiro, banco de investimento e fundos de pensão, temos aí o grande capitalista do Brasil e do mundo.

Se o principal produto do capitalismo da primeira revolução industrial era o tecido de algodão, hoje a principal mercadoria do capitalismo é o dinheiro. Dinheiro que se transforma em mais dinheiro numa espécie de ritual de magia, que causa espanto entre os não-iniciados. O dinheiro acumulado, reproduzido e investido por essas empresas é o verdadeiro centro dinâmico do capitalismo contemporâneo.

E, como sabemos, se dinheiro no bolso é liberdade, boleto embaixo da porta é servidão.

O fundo Previ, o maior do Brasil, tem simplesmente R$ 160 bilhões em ativos; o Petros, R$ 60 bilhões. Para se ter uma noção da relevância desses multiplicadores de dinheiro, o valor de mercado da Petrobras, a maior empresa brasileira, é estimado em R$ 300 bilhões.

Os bancos começam controlando as empresas por meio de empréstimos. Se um empresário quer construir uma nova fábrica ou lançar um novo jornal, ele precisa pegar um empréstimo de grande volume junto a um banco. E, como sabemos, se dinheiro no bolso é liberdade, boleto embaixo da porta é servidão.

Num estágio posterior, o banco não só empresta o dinheiro como ganha participação nos empreendimentos. Aí a dependência ou a simbiose se torna ainda mais evidente. E os bancos ganham participações em grandes empresas, e grandes empresas compram participação em outras grandes empresas. Forma-se, assim, a rede de conexões entre os grandes grupos econômicos, como ilustra a imagem abaixo retirada do livro “Capitalismo de laços” de Sérgio Lazzarini. Ela mostra a teia de grupos no Brasil em 2009, o laço entre dois grupos existe quando “um apresenta participações societárias com direito de voto… em uma firma afiliada do outro grupo”.

andrada-imagem-1545424433

Imagem: Reprodução/Livro “Capitalismo de laços” de Sérgio Lazzarini

Essa imagem é apenas o retrato microscópico do fenômeno de inter-relações entre os grandes grupos. Em uma economia capitalista, nenhum setor está totalmente imune a esse processo de concentração, de controle e de inter-relações, inclusive o setor da imprensa e do entretenimento.

Apesar da infinitude de sites na internet, quase 57% de toda a verba publicitária destinada à internet nos EUA acaba nas mãos do Google e do Facebook. No Brasil, Sky e NET controlam mais de 60% do mercado de TV’s por assinatura. Quase metade dos brasileiros assistem a rede Globo todos os dias, um número assustador em qualquer parâmetro internacional.

Os perigos da concentração do poder econômico (e informacional) foi muito bem analisado não só por marxista, mas por liberais, como Hayek (1944) e Milton Friedman (1962). Esses liberais afirmavam que o socialismo levaria inevitavelmente ao autoritarismo, pois o Estado passaria a ter não só o monopólio da violência, mas também o monopólio da vida econômica. Enquanto no capitalismo, a propriedade dos meios de produção estava dispersa entre um sem número de indivíduos, algo que servia de contrapeso à autocracia completa.

Os ricaços cansaram de apenas controlar os títeres dos políticos profissionais, resolveram eles mesmos tomar as rédeas do poder.

Porém, o lado mais dialético dessa história é que a partir da própria liberdade econômica põem-se em marcha forças concentradoras que criam empresas gigantescas que controlam praticamente todos os ramos de nossa vida cotidiana. A concentração do poder econômico coloca em risco não só a eficiência econômica, mas também a liberdade e a democracia.

No Brasil, vemos ainda uma outra manifestação desse processo: os ricaços cansaram de apenas controlar os títeres dos políticos profissionais, resolveram eles mesmos tomar as rédeas do poder Executivo.

Quase metade dos parlamentares eleitos faz parte do clube dos milionários (valor subestimado, já que diz respeito à renda declarada, não contabilizando os recursos “não contabilizados”). O que é o Partido Novo senão um clube de ricaços com fortes ambições políticas?

Em sua primeira eleição, eles conseguiram conquistar nada menos do que o governo do estado de Minas Gerais, através de Romeu Zema, cuja empresa fatura R$ 4,5 bilhões por ano. João Amoêdo, candidato à Presidência pelo Novo, superou figurões da política tradicional, como Marina Silva, declarou possuir quase meio bilhão de reais de patrimônio pessoal.

A partir de agora, o BTG, que já influi nos rumos de muitas empresas e em políticas, também vai influir no que você pensa sobre eles. O banco dificilmente admitirá que pretende interferir nos rumos editoriais da Abril. Mas quem garante que os editores que tomam decisões sobre capas e reportagens de títulos de prestígio como Veja e Exame não escutarão o sussurro do BTG nos bastidores? Bancos de investimento, como o BTG, e corretoras, com a XP, são mestres em entender os ventos da economia. Mas também parecem estar interessados em provocar as lufadas que podem turbinar seus investimentos. E a imprensa é uma dessas ferramentas.

Essa simbiose entre o grande capital financeiro e os grandes capitais produtivos – inclusive aquele produtores de informação – é algo maléfico do ponto de vista da eficiência econômica, mas também das liberdades políticas.

Esses barões já não agem mais nos bastidores. Eles já mandam e querem mandar ainda mais, controlando o que você come, em quem você vota e, agora, o que você lê.

The post Bancos que mandam no país agora começam a dominar a imprensa appeared first on The Intercept.

Confundido com assaltante que roubou R$ 50, Nelson foi à delegacia. Saiu 6 meses depois.
Confundido com assaltante que roubou R$ 50, Nelson foi à delegacia. Saiu 6 meses depois.

Poucos dias antes do natal de 2017, exatamente um ano atrás, no dia 22 de dezembro, o marceneiro Nelson Neves de Souza Jr., de 29 anos, recebeu uma ligação de uma tia no meio do expediente. A polícia procurava por ele. Naquele dia, Nelson foi do trabalho direto para casa, na favela Vila Sônia, em Praia Grande, no litoral paulista, para “entender o que estava acontecendo”. Ao chegar, foi imediatamente levado para uma delegacia por agentes da Polícia Civil. Só voltou para casa seis meses depois.

“Eu estava numa cadeia e não sabia por quê. Perguntava, buscava respostas, mas só me diziam que alguém da justiça iria falar comigo. Mas ninguém nunca foi”, conta, ao descrever o processo digno de Kafka a que foi submetido – no livro do escritor russo, um homem acorda e descobre que está sujeito a um longo e incompreensível processo sem que seja especificado em que crime estaria envolvido.

O crime pelo qual era acusado, descobriu depois, havia acontecido três anos antes. Segundo o inquérito policial, dois homens haviam abordado uma pessoa em Praia Grande e roubado seu dinheiro e um cartão de crédito, em frente a uma agência bancária.

Na hora do roubo, às 16h15, Nelson não poderia estar em Praia Grande, já que havia saído às 16h de seu emprego, no Porto de Santos, como comprova o cartão de ponto mostrado pela sua defesa. O porto fica a cerca de 20 quilômetros e mais de 30 minutos do local do crime.

O Ministério Público havia acatado a indicação de Souza como um dos autores do crime baseado em uma fotografia. O problema é que a pessoa na foto é um homem completamente diferente dele, fichado em 2011, três anos antes do crime acontecer. Esse foi, segundo os advogados Paulo de Jesus e Érico Lafranchi, que o defenderam, um dos muitos erros do processo.

A lentidão para avaliar o caso também chama atenção: o ofício enviado pelo advogado pedindo a soltura do marceneiro data de 17 janeiro de 2018, quatro meses antes da soltura do acusado, em 7 de maio.

“Claramente, o suspeito não é o meu cliente: a cor de pele e o cabelo são diferentes, os traços do rosto também não convergem com a imagem atribuída a ele. Bastava fazer a comparação da foto, que dizia ser o Nelson, com o próprio, que apresentou sua documentação, para constatar que havia um erro”, afirma Jesus.

Ele contou sua história ao Intercept.

Moro em Vila Sônia, em Praia Grande, desde muito criança. Sou marceneiro por profissão, mas há algum tempo já trabalho com carteira assinada no Porto de Santos, na área de serviços gerais. Eu tinha um emprego estável e estava realizando alguns planos de vida, como construir uma casa para mim, minha mulher e agora meus três filhos. Na época que esse crime contra mim aconteceu ela estava grávida e eu perdi o nascimento do meu filho.

Quando a polícia chegou lá em casa no dia 22 [de dezembro] com a ordem judicial, eu não acreditei. Achei que era um engano, como tinha acontecido no dia 14, quando eles me abordaram na rua, em frente à minha casa, enquanto eu esperava o transporte para trabalhar.  E eu fui para a delegacia e mostrei documentação e só. Achei que ia ser igual. Esclarecer tudo e voltar para casa. Mas não. Cheguei na delegacia e fui algemado. Eu perguntava o que estava acontecendo, por que eu estava sendo preso, mas ninguém falava nada. Parecia um pesadelo. Os policiais só diziam que alguém, algum oficial da justiça, ia entrar em contato comigo para me dizer, mas nunca recebi ninguém. Só fui descobrir qual era o crime depois que a minha família, com a ajuda dos parentes e dos amigos, contratou um advogado particular.

Antes de irem na minha casa, eles primeiro ligaram para a minha tia falando que precisavam falar comigo sobre uma assinatura que esqueci de fazer por conta de uma pensão. Mas eu não devia pensão nenhuma e no dia anterior eles já haviam ido na casa de meus avós, porque eu morava lá antes de me casar, e aí minhas tias falaram com ele. Quando eles chegaram lá, falamos normalmente. Quem não deve não teme, né? Como eu não devia pensão nenhuma, eles iam resolver. Mas agora eu vejo que era mentira, eles já estavam com a ideia de me prender na cabeça.

‘Nem pra cachorro eu daria a comida da prisão. Tem de tudo: pedaço de barata, pêlo de bicho. Qualquer pessoa pensando, não come. Mas lá ou você come ou passa fome.’

Eu nunca cometi um crime na minha vida, nos meus 29 anos, nunca. A gente é de comunidade, mas não é bandido, sou trabalhador. Passei quase seis meses na cadeia, sabendo que era inocente. Passei por um monte de coisas, mas a minha inocência me dava tranquilidade. Eu tinha certeza que ia conseguir provar e sair dali. Mas também sentia um sentimento de injustiça muito grande, o tempo todo. Eu passava a maior parte do dia trancado na cela. Lá, não tinha cama, nem colchão para todo mundo, tinham várias pessoas e só seis colchões, a gente dormia no chão mesmo, na pedra.  Tem até uns presos que ficam mais tempo soltos, mas eu não. Ficava o dia todo trancado, pensando. Eles só abriam a cela para a gente sair para comer.

Depois que a gente entra na prisão, é tratado como se fosse um qualquer, eles cortam o seu cabelo, você se sente um lixo. Logo que entrei, peguei conjuntivite. A gente divide a cela, que é pequena, com um monte de outras pessoas. Eu com aquele vírus, aquele incômodo, e demorei três dias só para conseguir passar um colírio no olho. Pedia, pedia e pedia, mas depois que você entra na prisão, não importa o crime de que é acusado, você é tratado como um nada. Três dias só para pingar um colírio.

Lá dentro, a gente vive um regime controlado, rígido. É obrigado a acordar às 5h, aí toma café, que parece água de peixe com pão dormido. Aí, volta pra cela. Depois tem almoço, que você só come porque não tem outra opção, porque senão vai ficar com fome. Acho que nem cachorro come aquela comida. Nem pra cachorro eu daria. Tem de tudo: pedaço de barata, pêlo de bicho. É uma lavagem mesmo, não tem outra palavra. É irracional comer aquilo. Qualquer pessoa que esteja pensando, não come. Mas lá não tem essa opção. Ou come ou passa fome.

Um dos maiores problemas é que para a polícia todo mundo ali é bandido igual. E tem gente que cometeu um monte de crime mais grave, diferente, mas eles tratam igual. Quando o GRI, o Grupo de Intervenção Rápida, entra, eles saem batendo em todo mundo. Eles dizem que é pra controlar [os presos], mas é para assustar. E você pensa em se esconder, mas aí, não tem pra onde correr, né? É cadeia. Você tá preso.

‘Depois dessa experiência eu não julgo mais ninguém, pode estar acontecendo o mesmo que aconteceu comigo.’

O que me deu forças para passar por isso foi a minha certeza de ser inocente. Eu perdi muita coisa nesse tempo: Natal, Ano Novo, nascimento do meu filho, meu próprio aniversário. Só consegui ver minha mulher depois de dois meses, e só ela. Perdi meu emprego. Hoje estou temporário, mas aquele fixo mesmo, não tem. Tive que adiar muitos planos. E muitas pessoas me julgam como a justiça me julgou, como culpado, mesmo eu tendo provado minha inocência. Tem muito preconceito porque fui preso. Até para o meu filho mais velho precisei explicar o que tinha acontecido várias vezes, porque no começo ele não queria entender. Ele chegou a acreditar que o pai dele era um criminoso.

A gente vai superando, eu estou superando. Mas ainda não consigo dormir a noite toda, não. Acordo de madrugada todo dia, como se tivesse lá na prisão, que é a hora que a gente é acordado.

Sinto revolta, decepção, tristeza. Tenho medo de voltar para aquele lugar. Não por conta dos outros. Até fiz amizade lá, porque depois dessa experiência eu não julgo mais ninguém, pode estar acontecendo o mesmo que aconteceu comigo. Mas nunca mais quero viver o que passei lá, é muita violência física e psicológica, a gente não tem nem espaço direito pra deitar, as celas estão sempre lotadas. Sempre. Somos tratados de qualquer jeito. Eu vou fazer sim alguma coisa contra isso, vou entrar com um processo já no começo do ano que vem, correr atrás dos meus direitos, contra essa injustiça. Mas a verdade é que tudo só para compensar mesmo. Porque o tempo que eu perdi, e as coisas que eu vivi, não tem como mudar. Não tem como voltar atrás, né? Nem apagar.

The post Confundido com assaltante que roubou R$ 50, Nelson foi à delegacia. Saiu 6 meses depois. appeared first on The Intercept.

Rep. Ro Khanna on Afghanistan: “Trump’s Instincts to Withdraw Are Correct, but the Tactical Implementation Matters”
Rep. Ro Khanna on Afghanistan: “Trump’s Instincts to Withdraw Are Correct, but the Tactical Implementation Matters”

The House of Representatives plans to vote in January on a new War Powers Resolution introduced by California Rep. Ro Khanna that would effectively end U.S. military intervention on behalf of Saudi Arabia in the Yemeni civil war.

But the president’s back-to-back announcements Wednesday and Thursday that American troops would be leaving Syria and Afghanistan has broadened the focus of de-escalation efforts — motivating progressive Democrats in the House to work on legislation that would ensure that withdrawal doesn’t worsen conditions in the region. 

Analysts say that leaving Syria could further destabilize the region and embolden the Islamic State as the group’s fighters start to slowly slip back into liberated areas. But it’s unclear what troops are still doing in Afghanistan, a country the U.S. invaded in the name of dismantling Al Qaeda and rooting out the Taliban. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin developing plans to withdraw half of the remaining 14,000 troops in the country.

Even before Trump’s surprise withdrawal announcements, Khanna planned to introduce a bill to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, America’s longest war. “I believe we need to pull our troops out of Afghanistan,” Khanna told The Intercept in an interview on Wednesday. “Taliban controls 70 percent. When the surge happened, Taliban controlled 40 percent. We aren’t making any progress there.”

Khanna said in an interview that he and colleagues in the Progressive Caucus would prioritize a final drawdown of troops from Afghanistan in the next session, but told The Intercept that he wasn’t sure yet what form that effort might take on the floor. “I don’t know the mechanism yet. Whether that would be a War Powers Resolution, whether that would be an alternative mechanism. But it will be a focus of mine, and I will advocate that it should be a focus of the Progressive Caucus to get us out of Afghanistan.”

“I want to work with people like Barbara Lee and the broader Progressive Caucus to make sure we had consensus on what the right approach is, because I know there are other members who also believe we need to pull out,” Khanna said. “But I definitely think that Democrats should be very, very clear and unambiguous that we need to pull out our troops in Afghanistan.”

“And we should take action,” he clarified, “whether that’s through the appropriations process, whether that’s through a War Powers Resolution, or whether it’s through some other authorization of force, revoking that and making clear that there is no authorization in Afghanistan. We should explore all the avenues and make sure we have a plan for concerted action.”

In a statement following Thursday’s announcement, Khanna said that the plan needs to be responsibly implemented over a short timeline and should move Afghanistan toward nonmilitary peace-building solutions acceptable to, and driven by, the Afghan people.

Success depends on “the engagement of regional actors such as Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China, and India,” Khanna said, and “a sense of the intelligence platforms and networks that can replace [troops] to guard against terrorist threats.”

Khanna said the current strategy of engaging in direct talks with the Taliban “is a good one,” and that the $43 billion spent on Afghanistan each year despite Taliban control of over 50 percent of the country “shows our military-first strategy and the surge is not working.”

“In sum, Trump’s instincts to withdraw are correct,” Khanna said, “but the tactical implementation matters.”

The post Rep. Ro Khanna on Afghanistan: “Trump’s Instincts to Withdraw Are Correct, but the Tactical Implementation Matters” appeared first on The Intercept.

Essas fotos mostram que a Lava Jato perdeu o medo de soar íntima da direita
Essas fotos mostram que a Lava Jato perdeu o medo de soar íntima da direita

Passavam poucos minutos das 19h de uma noite anormalmente quente em Curitiba quando a deputada federal eleita e ex-jornalista Joice Hasselmann, do PSL, caminhou sobre saltos-agulha rumo a uma tenda montada no pátio defronte ao Palácio Iguaçu, a modernista sede do governo do Paraná.

Metida num vestido preto de gala, com brincos, pulseira e anel de brilhantes, ela não ia sozinha. A seu lado, quase de braços dados e numa conversa ao pé do ouvido que transparecia alguma intimidade, vinha o juiz federal de segunda instância João Pedro Gebran Neto, famoso por ser o relator dos processos da operação Lava Jato na segunda instância, o Tribunal Regional Federal da 4ª Região.

Ambos faziam parte da lista de 81 pessoas que seriam, dali a alguns instantes, premiadas com a Ordem do Pinheiro, uma medalha que o governo paranaense entrega anualmente a personalidades “indicadas pela sociedade civil que fazem a diferença no estado”, segundo o discurso oficial.

Na prática, trata-se de quem o governante de turno quer agradar. Fã de corridas de carro, o ex-governador tucano Beto Richa, por exemplo, entregou a comenda ao comentarista Reginaldo Leme e a pilotos de pouca expressão. A atual ocupante do Palácio Iguaçu, Cida Borghetti, mulher do deputado federal e ex-ministro da Saúde Ricardo Barros, ambos do PP (ele é tesoureiro da legenda), preferiu paparicar integrantes da Lava Jato e políticos eleitos na onda conservadora que varreu o país, numa pouca discreta piscadela do partido ao presidente eleito Jair Bolsonaro.

Lado a lado com o partido mais enrolado

Hasselmann, sentada na primeira fila com as pernas de lado, parecia pouco interessada no balanço de governo que Cida Borghetti fazia no palco – passou quase o tempo todo com a cara enfiada no celular, em que volta e meia digitava algo. O Twitter dela e, talvez, o grupo do PSL no WhatsApp, iam a todo vapor. Só ergueu a cabeça, sorrindo, quando Borghetti desejou “boa sorte ao nosso presidente Jair Messias Bolsonaro”.

Ministro Dias Tofolli derruba liminar pró-Lula. O presidente do STF mostrou que o Supremo não pode se dobrar a molecagem de um único ministro subserviente ao PT e seus asseclas crimininosos. Tofolli age com bom senso. É um bom começo.

— Joice Hasselmann (@joicehasselmann) December 19, 2018

Um dos homenageados, Osmar Terra, ministro de Temer que manteve a cadeira no governo Bolsonaro, resumiu a real intenção da cerimônia: “Ricardo [Barros] ainda tem muito a fazer pelo Paraná e pelo Brasil.” Ao lado da mulher, o ex-ministro – e ex-vice-líder na Câmara dos governos FHC, Lula e Dilma – era um sorriso só.

Gebran Neto, responsável pela decisão que colocou Lula na cadeia, também não escondia a alegria. “Me sinto honrado. Sou curitibano, paranaense, e o fato de o governo estar homenageando seus cidadãos é motivo de muita alegria. Uma honra estar ao lado desses grandes paranaenses e uma alegria ver o reconhecimento do trabalho”, declarou. Com esposa e filhos a tiracolo, talvez nem tenha se lembrado de que o PP, partido da governadora e de Barros, é o mais enrolado na Lava Jato.

Ou que Joice Hasselmann, com quem entrou lado a lado na cerimônia, pouco antes defendera que Marco Aurélio Mello fosse “arrancado” do Supremo Tribunal Federal. O juiz da Lava Jato, homem discreto que jamais deu declarações polêmicas, aparentemente não viu problemas em fazer par com uma política que já dirigiu impropérios a figuras que ele julgou – cabe lembrar que foi Gebran, e não Moro, o responsável pela sentença que de fato levou Lula à prisão – e provavelmente voltará a julgar quando processos como o do sítio de Atibaia chegarem ao TRF4.

‘Espírito de fim de impunidade’

Naquele mesmo dia, a cúpula da Lava-Jato havia sido surpreendida – junto com o resto do Brasil – pela canetada do ministro Marco Aurélio Mello, que mandou soltar todos os presos do Brasil que estivessem cumprindo pena sem uma condenação final. O efeito era óbvio: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, preso a menos de dez quilômetros do rapapé a que Joice Hasselmann e Gebran Neto chegaram quase que de braços dados, poderia ser solto.

O ex-presidente, dessa vez, não teve nem tempo de arrumar as malas. A liminar de Marco Aurélio foi derrubada por uma decisão de Dias Toffoli.

Apesar da celeridade, a mera possibilidade de Lula ser solto provocou uma enorme mobilização na força tarefa da Lava-Jato. Em uma coletiva de imprensa de emergência, o coordenador da operação, Deltan Dallagnol, criticou a decisão de Mello: “ela vai contra o espírito de fim da impunidade que hoje inspira a sociedade brasileira”, disse, como se a lei estivesse a reboque dos ânimos da opinião pública.

Recém-afastado da Lava-Jato mas ainda procurador de Justiça, Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima também desabafou no Facebook. “Estou com vergonha de assistir a esse deprimente espetáculo. Aproveita-se do recesso, aproveita-se das festas, tudo para soltar Lula”, postou, letras sobre um fundo preto.

É possível entender os arroubos de Santos Lima; afinal, ele não faz mais parte da Lava Jato. Mas suas palavras, tal qual a pressa da força-tarefa em chamar a imprensa para protestar contra Marco Aurélio Mello, tornam cada dia mais críveis os relatos de advogados que negociaram delações em que os procuradores diziam que Lula era o “santo Graal” – quem o trouxesse à mesa teria todos os benefícios possíveis.

Junto com a nomeação do ex-juiz Sergio Moro, que abandonou a toga para ocupar um cargo político no gabinete de Bolsonaro, a mais importante investigação da história do Brasil vai deixando cada vez mais claro seu lado no espectro político. Em 2016, Moro, então juiz, deixou-se fotografar trocando sorrisos com Aécio Neves – que, depois, viria a ser alvo da Lava Jato. Também chegou a frequentar convescotes com João Doria Jr., a versão gourmet de Jair Bolsonaro.

Lula e o PT – que seguem alegando uma inocência em que só seus seguidores fanáticos conseguem acreditar – agradecem a força.

Ao descer do palco ao fim da cerimônia, Joice Hasselmann foi cercada por pedidos de selfies. Em seguida, sem se despedir de políticos do PSL do Paraná – o deputado federal Fernando Francischini também foi um dos agraciados com a Ordem do Pinheiro –, sentou-se no banco traseiro de couro claro de um imponente Jaguar negro com placas de São Paulo e partiu.

Ninguém falou sobre o Queiroz.

The post Essas fotos mostram que a Lava Jato perdeu o medo de soar íntima da direita appeared first on The Intercept.

‘O dia em que o cara que quis me destruir foi condenado a 41 anos de prisão’
‘O dia em que o cara que quis me destruir foi condenado a 41 anos de prisão’

Marcelo Valle Silveira Mello, 33 anos, foi condenado a 41 anos e seis meses de prisão por vários crimes, entre eles associação criminosa, divulgação de pedofilia, racismo e terrorismo. Todos crimes que ele cometeu na internet.

Ele está na cadeia em Curitiba desde 10 de maio deste ano, quando a Operação Bravata, lançada pela Polícia Federal, o prendeu pela segunda vez. De lá para cá, teve quatro habeas corpus negados.

Marcelo é cria da classe média-alta de Brasília. Filho único de um pai que morreu jovem, sua mãe é funcionária pública aposentada. Marcelo sempre foi tímido, antissocial, sem amigos. Segundo ele, foi vítima de bullying na escola. Também conforme ele próprio, quando criança, odiava perder de mulher em qualquer jogo. Além de detestar meninas, detestava negros, gays e esquerdistas em geral.

Encontrou na internet o espaço ideal para extravasar seu ódio. Foi criador de inúmeras comunidades no Orkut e fez amizades e contatos com homens misóginos de extrema-direita que pensavam como ele. Conseguiu se destacar pelo seu ódio sem fim e sua dedicação em atacar desafetos.

Em 2009, Marcelo foi o primeiro brasileiro a ser condenado por racismo na internet. Ao entrar em discussões contra a política de cotas em páginas da UnB (onde Marcelo cursou Letras com ênfase em Japonês durante um semestre), deixou claro seu ódio a negros. Declarou insanidade para não ter que cumprir a pena. Formou-se em Informática numa faculdade particular. Com esse currículo, tornou-se figura popular nos chans (fóruns anônimos, tão misóginos que mulheres por lá são apelidadas de “depósitos” [de porra]).

“E eu quico?”, como costumava dizer um aluno adolescente quando queria perguntar “E eu com isso?”

Eu, que sou autora de um blog feminista, professora de Literatura em Língua Inglesa na Universidade Federal do Ceará, casada, e quase 20 anos mais velha que Marcelo, nunca havia ouvido falar dele até 2011. Porém, pouco depois de iniciar meu blog, em 2008, conheci indiretamente um nível de misoginia que era inédito pra mim. Ingênua, eu não fazia ideia que existiam homens que se reuniam para xingar uma feminista que teve a coragem de relatar a vez em que foi estuprada e deixada para morrer numa poça do seu próprio sangue. Os comentários no post da blogueira americana lamentavam que ela não havia sido morta, duvidavam da sua história (ela seria feia demais para merecer ser estuprada), prometiam finalizar o serviço.

Ao ler isso, fiquei horrorizada. Não sabia que homens cruéis eram aqueles. Um tempo depois descobri que se autointitulavam MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists), ou defensores pelos direitos dos homens. Descobri com surpresa que há muitos homens que estão convictos que vivemos num matriarcado e que a verdadeira vítima da sociedade é o homem branco e hétero. Não fiquei muito surpresa ao descobrir que esses grupos, que existem nos EUA, Reino Unido, Canadá e Austrália, não lutam por direito algum – apenas odeiam mulheres e atacam feministas.

Meu primeiro contato com esse tipo de grupo no Brasil foi no caso Eloá, em outubro de 2008. Para quem não se lembra, um rapaz chamado Lindemberg invadiu a casa de sua ex-namorada Eloá, de 15 anos, em Santo André, e a manteve, junto com a amiga Nayara, em cárcere privado durante mais de 100 horas. O caso se tornou famoso porque programas de TV sensacionalistas tiveram a oportunidade de entrevistar o agressor por telefone durante o sequestro, enquanto ele mantinha uma arma na cabeça de Eloá, e porque a polícia paulista permitiu que Nayara, que havia sido liberada, voltasse ao cativeiro. No trágico final, a polícia invadiu a casa, e Lindemberg atirou em Eloá, que morreu, e em Nayara, que sobreviveu. O assassino foi preso.

Eu estava tão indignada com o caso e escrevi quatro posts sobre ele na época. Um deles era sobre uma comunidade no Orkut assinada pela “Ordem Suprema dos Homens de Bem” e chamada “Eloá virou presunto – foi tarde”. Na comunidade, a jovem de 15 anos assassinada covardemente era xingada de tudo quanto era nome, com ênfase na sua sexualidade, enquanto Lindemberg era saudado como herói por ter posto um fim “naquela puta”. Os participantes só reclamavam que ele não tinha também conseguido liquidar Nayara.

Eu somente vim a saber alguns anos depois que os MRAs dos países de língua inglesa se diziam masculinistas no Brasil, e que eles começaram a se juntar a partir de 2005 em comunidades no Orkut como “O Lado Obscuro das Mulheres” e “Mulher Só Gosta de Homem Babaca”. Nesses grupos, rapazes que não faziam sucesso com as garotas encontravam uma explicação: a culpa não era deles, mas delas, que não queriam “homens bonzinhos” como eles – homens tão bonzinhos que chamavam todas as mulheres (incluindo suas mães) de “vadias”.

Em fevereiro de 2011 descobri não só que esses grupos no Brasil se autointitulavam masculinistas, como que eles já me xingavam fazia tempo. Pelo jeito, eu era a única feminista que eles conheciam. Escrevi nesta data um post informativo chamado “O pensamento vivo (modo de dizer) dos masculinistas”, explicando quem eram esses estranhos rapazes que odiavam tanto as mulheres. Um mês depois, reuni num outro post, este humorístico, as “pérolas” deixadas nos comentários do post anterior. Foi a primeira vez que chamei masculinistas de “mascus”, uma mera abreviação. O termo pegou, ficou pejorativo, e rapidamente acabou com o masculinismo (pelo menos no nome) no Brasil, já que nenhum mascu queria ser chamado de mascu.

Em 7 de abril de 2011 a brincadeira acabou. Wellington Menezes, de 23 anos, entrou na escola estadual onde havia estudado, em Realengo, no Rio, e matou 10 meninas e dois meninos. Após ser atingido na perna por um policial, Wellington se matou. A mídia brasileira nunca explicou a discrepância do número de vítimas nem deu atenção às testemunhas, que diziam que o assassino atirava nas meninas para matar, e nos meninos, para ferir. Ou seja, a mídia não tratou o terrível massacre como um crime de ódio, como feminicídio, e sim como uma tragédia.

Assim como Lindemberg, Wellington virou herói entre os mascus. Mas, diferente do primeiro, o próprio Wellington era um mascu. Ele tinha queimado seus computadores antes de cometer o massacre, mas havia registros de suas ligações com fóruns mascus, tanto que a Polícia Federal passou a investigá-los. No mesmo dia do massacre, o maior blog mascu do Brasil, o de “Silvio Koerich” (não seu nome verdadeiro) deixou de ser atualizado. Seu autor somente reapareceu um semestre depois para anunciar que o blog estava fechando as portas, sem explicar o porquê. Logo depois, um blog com o mesmo nome e layout passou a publicar posts escabrosos, pregando a legalização do estupro e da pedofilia, o estupro corretivo para lésbicas, a matança de mulheres, negros e gays. Além disso, o blog oferecia recompensas para quem matasse o deputado federal Jean Wyllys e eu (éramos chamados de “escória”), e prometia um atentado ao prédio de Ciências Sociais da UnB, para matar o máximo de “vadias e esquerdistas”.

O blog de ódio permaneceu no ar durante longos meses e rendeu quase 70 mil denúncias à SaferNet. Ele não estava hospedado no Brasil e, sempre que um país o expulsava, ele reabria em outro. Com a ajuda do grupo Anonymous, descobrimos seus dois principais autores: Marcelo e Emerson Eduardo Rodrigues, que se dizia engenheiro (não era) e que havia gravado um vídeo racista na Índia dizendo atrocidades como “o estado natural do preto é a sujeira, o estado natural da mulher é a prostituição, o estado natural do homem branco é o trabalho”.

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Marcelo Valle Silveira Mello fazendo saudação nazista.

Foto: Reprodução

Em março de 2012, a Polícia Federal lançou a Operação Intolerância e prendeu Marcelo e Emerson em Curitiba. Na conta bancária de Marcelo foram encontrados 440 mil reais, dinheiro que sua mãe lhe havia passado. Marcelo e Emerson brigaram na cadeia, mas foram condenados a mais de seis anos e seis meses de prisão. Infelizmente, cumpriram apenas um ano e dois meses. Ao saírem, em maio de 2013, ambos me mandaram emails me responsabilizando por sua prisão e jurando que iriam me processar.

Não sei ao certo o que Marcelo fez nos seus primeiros meses soltos, mas já no segundo semestre de 2013 ele estava enfurecido. Abriu um perfil no Twitter com sua foto e nome e passou a mandar mensagens cada vez mais agressivas a mim, ao delegado que o havia prendido, e a outros desafetos. Mandou e-mails e deixou comentários (não aprovados e nunca respondidos) no meu blog com ofensas e ameaças. Ainda em 2013 criou seu próprio chan, o Dogolachan. Como fiquei sabendo? Porque no início de 2014 ele me enviou o link pro chan, para que eu pudesse acompanhar as ameaças.

As ameaças eram diárias, mensagens do tipo “essa Lola não sabe com quem tá mexendo. Achando que prisão é eterna, achando que se eu não ve [sic] o dedo dela em uma nova prisão que fodeu com minha vida eu não vou lá pro Ceara e mato ela”, e “Sonho todos os dias com essa gordona escrota morta, até imprimi uma foto dessa maldita e colei na minha porta e fico apontando minha 9mm pra foto dela. Essa desgraçada precisa ser parada por um homem sancto, se ela quer ser mártir das misândricas, então ela será”, e “Vou cravar a Lola de balas, sei q estamos ameaçando-a faz tempo, mas o dia da retribuição chegará. Nosso sancto wellington agiu sob nossas orientações”.

O Dogolachan de Marcelo desde o início se pôs a cultuar assassinos como Wellington (do massacre de Realengo), Elliot Rodger (que em maio de 2014 matou seis pessoas na Califórnia e se suicidou, após deixar um manifesto misógino de 140 páginas) e Anders Breiv ik (que em 2011 matou 77 pessoas na Noruega). Sempre que algum membro do chan falava em suicídio – algo extremamente comum entre homens fracassados em todas as searas de suas vidas – ouviam o coro “Leve a escória junto”. Em outras palavras, não se mate ainda. Antes vá numa palestra feminista, numa Marcha das Vadias, numa Parada do Orgulho Gay, numa Marcha das Mulheres Negras, e abra fogo. Só então se mate ou seja morto pela polícia, e torne-se um herói.

Marcelo não se conforma que uma feminista seja heterossexual, e que uma mulher gorda tenha um marido que a ame.

Outro passatempo de Marcelo era lançar “novos” sites de ódio, na tentativa de repetir a popularidade do Silvio Koerich. Eu ponho a palavra “novos” entre aspas porque os blogs eram todos iguais, com o mesmo design, o mesmo ódio e vários textos repetidos, trocando apenas alguns trechos e imagens. Nesses últimos cinco anos, Marcelo criou sites como Realidade, Homens de Bem, Tio Astolfo, PUAHate, Reis do Camarote, Filosofia do Estupro, e Rio de Nojeira, entre outros. Em 2015 e 2016, ele lançou “guias de estupro”, em que só mudava o nome da universidade, mas sua base era “como estuprar vadias” na USP, UFC, UFRGS, UFRJ e, claro, UnB.

Através dos sites de ódio, Marcelo cumpria três objetivos: o de divulgar sua ideologia, o de enfurecer o “gado” (qualquer pessoa que não seja um mascu) e o de tentar incriminar inimigos. Em cada um dos sites ele colocava o nome completo de algum desafeto como autor, como por exemplo o meu marido, Silvio, com direito a fotos e endereço residencial e comercial. Silvio também teve que registrar boletim de ocorrência, já que Marcelo tinha/tem grande obsessão por ele. Marcelo não se conforma que uma feminista seja heterossexual, e que uma mulher gorda tenha um marido que a ame. Logo, vários de seus planos envolviam a destruição de Silvio.

Em outubro de 2015, Marcelo inovou e criou um site com discurso de ódio no meu nome. Havia fotos minhas, link pro meu currículo Lattes, meu endereço e telefone residenciais em cada post. O objetivo confesso de Marcelo era que o “gado” me reconhecesse na rua e me linchasse. O site pregava coisas que eu jamais defenderia: aborto para fetos masculinos, infanticídio e castração de meninos, queima de bíblias, racismo. Num post “eu” (já que o blog era escrito em primeira pessoa, com meu nome) me vangloriava de ter realizado um aborto numa aluna em sala de aula, na UFC. O site viralizou, graças à divulgação de figuras reacionárias conhecidas, como o guru da extrema-direita Olavo de Carvalho e Roger Moreira, do Ultraje a Rigor. Eles sabiam que o site era falso e o divulgaram mesmo assim. Antes disso, na mesma semana em que o site foi lançado, Emerson, que havia reatado a amizade com seu ex-comparsa Marcelo, me denunciou ao Ministério Público como autora do site – e o MP acatou a denúncia. Foi surreal.

Entre janeiro de 2012 e abril de 2017, eu registrei 11 boletins de ocorrência contra Marcelo e sua quadrilha. Não foi fácil. O Estado do Ceará, onde vivo, não tem delegacia de crimes cibernéticos (e mesmo os 16 Estados que contam com esta delegacia ainda estão focados em crimes patrimoniais, não crimes contra direitos humanos). A Polícia Civil tem muitos outros crimes para resolver, e talvez lhe falte infraestrutura para lidar com sites anônimos hospedados em outros países. Na Delegacia da Mulher, a primeira pergunta feita pela escrivã é: o quê o agressor é seu? E Marcelo não é nada meu, graças à deusa, nem o conheço pessoalmente, nunca o vi, nunca falei com ele. E a Polícia Federal deixou claro que não investigaria as ameaças contra mim porque, segundo um superintendente que entrou em contato comigo em 2015 por e-mail, a PF só investiga crimes em que o Brasil é signatário internacional, como racismo e pornografia infantil (crimes pelos quais Marcelo também foi condenado). Só em abril de 2017, a Delegacia da Mulher finalmente me ouviu num depoimento de cinco horas ininterruptas e abriu um inquérito, que foi logo encaminhado para a PF.

Em abril deste ano, foi sancionada pelo presidente Michel Temer a lei nº 13.642/18, também conhecida como Lei Lola, em minha homenagem.

Mas nem tudo foi negativo. Por causa desta “verdadeira caçada, uma perseguição impiedosa pontuada por um jogo pérfido e sádico promovido por Marcelo em face de Dolores Aronovich Aguero, professora da Universidade Federal do Ceará”, como definiu  um desembargador federal em auto de setembro de 2018 para indeferir o pedido de habeas corpus de um advogado de Marcelo, a deputada federal Luizianne Lins (PT-CE) apresentou um projeto de lei para fazer com que a Polícia Federal investigue crimes de ódio contra mulheres na internet.

O projeto foi aprovado na Câmara dos Deputados em dezembro de 2017, durante os 16 Dias de Ativismo pelo Fim da Violência contra as Mulheres, no Senado na semana do dia 8 de março (Dia Internacional da Mulher), e foi sancionado pelo presidente em exercício Michel Temer em abril deste ano. É a lei nº 13.642/18, também conhecida como Lei Lola, em minha homenagem.

Um mês depois da sanção da lei, a Operação Bravata prendeu Marcelo. Teria também prendido Emerson, mas ele está foragido na Espanha. A Polícia Federal disse, na ocasião, que os crimes cometidos por Marcelo somavam 39 anos. No dia da sua prisão, pela qual eu aguardara ansiosamente durante cinco anos, tive que cancelar minha aula na pós-graduação. A felicidade era grande demais e, além disso, muitos veículos de comunicação me procuraram para entrevistas.

Porém, um mês depois, um fato veio para abalar minha satisfação e alívio. No dia 15 de junho, no Dogolachan, um rapaz de 29 anos chamado André, codinome Kyo, que fazia parte da quadrilha de Marcelo havia sete anos, e que inclusive era moderador do chan, deixou uma mensagem no fórum afirmando que não aguentava mais a sua vida e que iria cometer suicídio. Recados como esse eram frequentes, e mais frequente ainda foi a resposta: “Leve a escória junto”.

Vários membros do chan se prontificaram para pagar a passagem aérea de André, habitante de Penápolis, interior de SP, para Fortaleza, para que ele pudesse me matar e depois se suicidar. Na mesma noite, André saiu às ruas de sua pequena cidade, abordou duas moças que jamais havia visto, atirou pelas costas na nuca de uma delas, e se matou. Sua vítima, Luciana de Jesus do Nascimento, 27 anos, permaneceu vinte dias internada na UTI, e faleceu em 5 de julho. Para quem acha que mascus vão só fazer ameaças vazias, é bom se lembrar de Luciana.

Isto que contei aqui é apenas um resumo. Há muito, muito mais. Afinal, Marcelo e sua quadrilha me atacaram (e a muitas outras pessoas também) entre 2011 e 2012, e entre 2013 e 2018. Foram mais de sete anos de inúmeras ameaças (a mim e também a meu marido e minha mãe), de difamações, de mentiras contra mim, de sites no meu nome e no do meu marido. Nem mencionei a quadrilha ter enviado um e-mail para o reitor da minha universidade, dois dias antes do Natal de 2016, prometendo um atentado a bomba que mataria 300 pessoas na UFC caso eu não fosse exonerada. Ou as ameaças e ataques que Marcelo e sua gangue fizeram a duas advogadas minhas quando uma juíza determinou que eu não precisaria ir a Curitiba ficar frente a frente com um psicopata que me ameaçava há anos, num dos processos que ele moveu contra mim. Pois é, é tão surreal que os caras que te atacam, ameaçam e difamam são os mesmos que tentam te processar por danos morais.

Muita gente me pergunta como aguentei tudo isso durante tanto tempo. Bom, eu sei que sou forte. Eu vejo como outras pessoas reagem quando são atacadas de um jeito muito mais discreto. Eu tenho uma certa maturidade, a vantagem de ter começado um blog feminista quando eu já tinha 40 anos. E é maravilhoso contar com meu marido, que sempre me apoiou. Meu bom humor também é uma defesa fundamental. Rir realmente é o melhor remédio muitas vezes.

Mas talvez o principal motivo da minha resistência foi sempre lembrar quem eu sou, e quem são eles. Eles são seres cheios de ódio e não me atacam porque sou Lola (eles sequer me conhecem), mas por eu ser feminista. Um dos maiores elogios que já recebi foi do presidente da SaferNet, Thiago Tavares, que conheci num evento inspirador para jovens ativistas em Manaus, em agosto. Ele me elogiou por, apesar de todos os ataques recebidos, jamais me rebaixar ao nível dos misóginos. Não sou nenhuma santa, não tenho pena, mas não odeio Marcelo, nem quero sua morte, muito menos que ele seja torturado ou estuprado na prisão. Estou radiante com sua condenação e espero que ele fique na cadeia durante muitos anos. Mas sei que seu pior castigo é saber que, apesar de tanto esforço, ele não conseguiu nos calar.

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The post ‘O dia em que o cara que quis me destruir foi condenado a 41 anos de prisão’ appeared first on The Intercept.

Left-Wing Leaders in Spain Condemn the War in Yemen, but Keep Up Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia
Left-Wing Leaders in Spain Condemn the War in Yemen, but Keep Up Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia

In September, the defense minister of Spain abruptly canceled the sale of 400 laser-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia. The minister, Margarita Robles, cited concerns that the American-made bombs were likely going to be used against civilians in the ongoing war in Yemen, in violation of both the sale agreement and of Spanish law. Indeed, the same sort of U.S. bomb had been used in August in an airstrike on a school bus that killed dozens of children.

The move took many in the Spanish defense industry by surprise. Days later, a threat rippled through the Spanish press, which quoted unnamed Saudi sources saying that a larger defense contract — Spain’s biggest ever, to build five ships for the Saudi navy, worth over $2 billion — might be canceled in response. The press called it a diplomatic crisis; the government scrambled. Among calls for Robles’s resignation, the prime minister stepped in with assurances that the bomb sale would go through. The king of Spain called the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Shipyard workers took to the streets in protest, and the mayor of Cádiz, the small Spanish city where the ships were supposed to be built, came out in defense of the arms sales.

That mayor, José María González, is from Spain’s far-left populist party, Podemos, and has long considered himself an anti-war activist. In 2015, he publicly advocated for cutting all commercial ties with Saudi Arabia. But with a contract at stake that would fund thousands of jobs and sustain Cádiz’s military shipyard for years, González was clear about his views. “Bring on the [weapons] contracts,” he wrote in an op-ed following the episode.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, also publicly supported the contract. While members of Sánchez’s party, Spain’s center-left Socialist party, were voting in the European parliament to cut all military sales to Saudi Arabia, Sánchez reauthorized the sale of the laser-guided bombs. Spain and Saudi Arabia have close economic ties, including over $2 billion in arms exports each year. And among European leaders, Sánchez wasn’t alone. Many European governments, including those led by left-leaning parties, are still selling arms to Saudi Arabia despite increasing international outrage over alleged war crimes and human rights violations in the Yemen campaign.

Of the four largest European weapons exporters, only Germany has stopped sales to Saudi Arabia – and that came in response to the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (The U.S. Senate also recently voted to cut off military support for Saudi Arabia in the conflict, though the measure is unlikely to get past the House and White House, and the United States is still Saudi Arabia’s top weapons supplier.) The three others biggest sellers — Britain, France, and Spain — continue their exports with ample popular political support.

Andrew Smith, a spokesperson for the U.K.-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, said that left-leaning leaders in those countries have long been in favor of the arms trade. “French socialist governments have never been more likely to curb arms sales than liberal or conservative governments,” he noted by way of example.

In his op-ed, the mayor of Cádiz sought to explain his reasons for supporting the arms sales. Spanish workers, González wrote, were being forced into this situation by economics, politics, and Saudi strong-arm tactics. They were being forced “to decide between defending bread and defending peace.”

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Navantia, Spanish shipbuilder, in Cádiz, Spain, on Sept. 24, 2017.

Photo: Gordon Bell/Shutterstock

Cádiz is a small, sleepy island port on the south coast of Spain, and a key city in the Spanish arms industry. Sixty miles from the Strait of Gibraltar and next to the American and Spanish joint naval base in Rota, the city is famous for its cured tuna, its flamenco, and its naval destroyers. Shipbuilding is a lifeline for Cádiz and small cities on the other side of the bay, such as San Fernando, where Spain has been building warships since the 18th century.

Navantia, the Spanish national shipbuilder, will soon start work in San Fernando on an order from the Saudi navy for five corvettes — midsize warships with top-of-the-line communications technology, large canons, and missile-launching capabilities. The first ship is scheduled to be delivered toward the end of 2019. The contract is worth $2 billion and 6,000 jobs over five years. After the news broke that the deal was in jeopardy, workers at Navantia in San Fernando walked off the job and blocked a nearby highway in protest.

A few months later, Navantia was gearing up to start work on the Saudi contract. When I met him recently outside the shipyard in San Fernando, Jesús Peralta, head of the workers’ committee and one of the people who organized the protest, said he didn’t see a problem with selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, even if they will eventually be used in Yemen. Peralta likened it to selling weapons to any other country in conflict. Besides, he argued, if it’s not Spain selling the bombs or building the ships, some other country is going to do it. “A contract of this size is a huge breath of air for people here,” he said.

“We’ve been making military ships for 300 years,” Peralta added. “We’ve made ships for whole world — but we just build them. What they do with them is their problem.”

Not everyone at Navantia agrees. Joaquin Ruiz and Jose Anton Ortega have been building ships in San Fernando for about three decades each. Ruiz works on hydraulic systems and Ortega is a machinist. Both have worked on plenty of international contracts before, but never one that was so close to an active conflict. “We’re not going to feel good about building these ships,” Ortega said, “knowing that as soon as we deliver they’ll be firing on people.”

But the two men also admitted that, given a choice between building ships for the Saudi navy or leaving Navantia, both plan to stay on the job. Cádiz is one of the poorest regions of Spain; unemployment rates here have hovered around 30 percent for most of the last decade. “Right now, the only way out is this,” Ruiz said, referring to the military contracts. “There’s nothing else.”

Cádiz has a long industrial history of building ships, cars, and airplanes, said José Ruiz-Navarro, an economist at the University of Cádiz, and Cádiz shipyards have long prioritized military contracts over civilian ones.

“There is a supply of work that is ethically hard to justify, but that market is there,” Ruiz-Navarro said. “The underlying problem isn’t whether or not to sell ships to Saudi Arabia; it’s that we can’t support the workforce that we have here. That’s Cádiz’s real problem.”

Both Ortega and Ruiz, the workers from Navantia, said they would like to see company directors start to be more judicious about their clients. Building ships for the Spanish navy or allies that are not in conflict is one thing, they said; the Saudi situation is another. “Rejecting jobs like this would be the ideal option,” Ortega said. “It would be more logical and more righteous.”

There was another time where workers in San Fernando were set to work for a repressive government and responded differently. In July 1977, a ship belonging to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Esmeralda, docked in San Fernando for repair. The ship was notorious as a site for the detention and torture of political prisoners at the hands of Pinochet’s regime.

Then, workers also walked off the job in protest. They shut down the shipyard for days, refusing to work on the dictator’s ship. “In 40 years,” said Ruiz, “we’ve gone from refusing to work on ships of that nature to protesting in the streets for contracts to build more of them.”

After the protests, González, the mayor, came out in favor of the Saudi contract. His position was a difficult one to argue: In one sentence, he declared himself anti-war and against absolute monarchies, and in the next, he defended the sale to Saudi Arabia of ships that will likely be used in Yemen.

González refused multiple requests for comment. Others from his party, Podemos, the far-left populist party founded in 2014, which is now the third-biggest electoral force in Spain, do not share his opinion. Days after the protests, the national leader of Podemos called for all arms sales to Saudi Arabia to be frozen. Months earlier, Podemos had issued a full-throated condemnation of the Saudi-led war in Yemen, citing “three years of indiscriminate bombings of the civil population.” But the mayor has not backed down.

“Whether or not we build those ships in Cádiz, it’s not going to solve the problem of this war,” González told a Spanish TV reporter. “If we don’t build those ships, will the war in Yemen end? One way or another, those ships will get built.”

Sara Cantos, a journalist from Cádiz who covers the city for a local daily, said she wasn’t surprised when González came out in support of the arms sales, especially given the local and regional elections this year.“The mayor was trapped, in a way, by the state of the city and his own electoral interests,” Cantos said. “He knew that for many in Cádiz, it would have been unforgivable for him to not support the shipyards.”

When the news first broke that the sale of the laser-guided bombs would be canceled, it was initially reported that the prime minister, Sánchez, had signed off on the order. Later, the administration claimed that the defense minister had acted on her own. By the end of the episode, Sánchez stated that he had reinstated the sale because he was “prioritizing” Spain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia and the shipyard jobs in Cádiz.

For Sánchez’s Socialist party, this was a new position. In 2007 they passed a law seeking to limit the sale of Spanish arms to countries involved in human rights violations. Responding to criticism, a minister from Sánchez’s cabinet stated that laser-guided bombs won’t be used against civilians in Yemen. (The party did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Laura Mignorance, secretary general of Podemos in Cádiz, said that she does not see any contradiction in supporting the Navantia contract. Her party has been working on proposals to open up San Fernando and the other shipyards to more civilian construction, she told me. “We want to build a model where the military industry has less weight. That would allow us to diversify the industry and not rely on contracts that don’t respect human rights.”

Podemos’s proposals in Cádiz have been met with intense opposition. Peralta, the Navantia union leader, said he “doesn’t buy” the talk of pivoting toward more civilian contracts. Military contracts, he said, are where the money is. A spokesperson for Navantia refused multiple requests for comment.

Cantos said the proposals for diversifying industry in Cádiz are nothing new: “Twenty years ago, there were the same proposals: plans for new work, shifting the industry, etc. … And two decades later, the situation looks the same.”

Mignorance conceded that in the short term, if more contracts come from Saudi Arabia, locally, Podemos will support them. That calculation, she admitted, is about politics: “If we were to work against these contracts, we would have zero possibility of dialogue with [shipyard] workers.” Mignorance, like the mayor, laments being forced to choose between local workers and distant war victims — between bread and peace. In the end, they have chosen bread.

The post Left-Wing Leaders in Spain Condemn the War in Yemen, but Keep Up Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.

Arizona Judge in No More Deaths Case Had Secret Talks With Federal Prosecutors
Arizona Judge in No More Deaths Case Had Secret Talks With Federal Prosecutors

Attorneys for a border-based humanitarian aid volunteer facing two decades in prison are calling for the removal of the magistrate judge in the case after learning that the judge engaged in secret communications with Trump administration prosecutors, leading the veteran jurist to walk back a critical order in the high-profile case.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Scott Warren, a resident of Ajo, Arizona, facing federal felony charges for providing aid to undocumented migrants, said Bernardo Velasco, a magistrate judge at the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, pared back an order he issued in November calling for the release of communications sent to Border Patrol agents responsible for Warren’s arrest after engaging in unacceptable conversations with government attorneys prosecuting the case.

Warren’s lawyers, Gregory J. Kuykendall and Amy P. Knight, argued that the communications amounted to “improper influence by the government” and said that with the judge having accepted that secretly delivered influence, Velasco “can no longer issue rulings in this case with the appearance of the strict impartiality demanded of our judicial system.”

“This court should withdraw the referral of pretrial matters in this case to the magistrate judge,” the lawyers wrote, urging Velasco’s boss, District Judge Raner Collins, to take over all pretrial matters going forward. Hours after the motion was filed Wednesday, a hearing before Collins was scheduled for early January to consider the motion, while another judge overseeing pretrial motions related to humanitarian volunteers in Arizona removed himself from the cases after defense attorneys raised similar concerns of improper communications.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix and Velasco’s office in Tucson declined to comment on the matter.

With a trial scheduled for early 2019, Warren’s case comes at a time of soaring tensions over the Trump administration’s ongoing border crackdown. Should the government succeed in prosecuting Warren, it would likely send a chilling message to those working to address the crisis of death and disappearance in the borderlands, where a minimum of 8,000 people have died crossing north over the last decade and a half.

Warren was arrested on January 17, 2018, in Ajo, an unincorporated community located some 40 miles north of Mexico, in one of the Western Hemisphere’s deadliest stretches for migrants traveling on foot. The then-35-year-old college instructor, with a Ph.D in geography, was at a property known as “the Barn,” which has long been used by humanitarian groups who scour the desert, leaving water jugs on migrant trails, providing medical aid to those in distress, and reporting the recovery of human remains. Also on the property that day were two undocumented men from Central America who had crossed the border three days earlier, having spent multiple days and freezing January nights in the desert.

When Border Patrol agents descended on the property, they took all three men into custody. Accused of providing the migrants with food, water, and a place to sleep over three days, Warren was indicted by a grand jury in February on two federal felony counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy. If convicted and sentenced to consecutive terms, he could face up to 20 years in prison.

Scott Warren stands next to a community mural project created by the Ajo Samaritans, one of the humanitarian aid groups he works with in the region.

Scott Warren stands next to a community mural project created by the Ajo Samaritans, one of the humanitarian aid groups he works with in the region.

Photo: Laura Saunders for The Intercept

From the outset, the timing of Warren’s arrest raised questions in southern Arizona’s humanitarian aid community. Just hours before he was handcuffed, one of the groups Warren volunteers with, the faith-based organization known as No More Deaths, released a damning report and video evidence implicating the Border Patrol in the systematic destruction of thousands of jugs of water left for migrants crossing the desert. No More Deaths has been at the center of a broader Trump administration crackdown on humanitarian aid work in southern Arizona. In addition to the felony case, Warren is one of nine volunteers with the organization to be hit with federal misdemeanor charges for their work on the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge outside Ajo over the last year, including for leaving water in the desert, which the government describes as littering.

At a pretrial hearing in October, Warren’s attorneys questioned whether his felony arrest might have had something to do with the publication of No More Deaths’ report on the Border Patrol’s destruction of water jugs and called for the release of various types of discovery to determine whether that was the case. In a motion filed the following day, citing an email obtained by The Intercept — which showed that the Border Patrol agent in charge of the Ajo station was in fact circulating the No More Deaths report hours before taking Warren into custody — the defense team again pushed for broader disclosure of Border Patrol communications.

On November 7, Velasco ordered the government to produce all communications sent to the two Border Patrol agents who led the operation, from the time they clocked in until the time they clocked out. For Warren’s defense team, it seemed like a victory in case that has been marked with fights over the disclosure of pretrial evidence. But according to Wednesday’s filing, the success was short-lived.

In early December, Trump administration prosecutors privately communicated a written plan to Velasco to narrow the Border Patrol communications that had turned up in response to his order, arguing that some of the materials were related to other investigations, while others were related to Warren’s case but did not fall under federal guidelines requiring their disclosure. Velasco approved the prosecutors’ proposal in a one-line letter and in a motion that followed, writing that he had “found nothing helpful to the defendant’s case or theories of the case.”

The fact that Velasco entered into one-sided, private communications with the government on what to disclose in Warren’s case — what are known in legal terms as ex parte communications — and then made decisions about what would be relevant to the defense team without informing or consulting with them, was described in Wednesday’s motion as a disqualifying turn of events. “The prosecutors submitted a substantive argument concerning revision of a court order ex parte,” Warren’s attorneys wrote. “The magistrate judge considered and accepted that argument, and communicated back to the prosecutors, also ex parte. He only disclosed those communications to the defense upon their strenuous objection — at which point he had already made a decision based on a secret presentation made without the knowledge of, let alone any input from, the defense.”

In a separate development indicating deeper, behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the No More Deaths cases, Tucson Magistrate Judge Bruce G. MacDonald filed a notice Wednesday night saying that he was removing himself from the federal misdemeanor cases involving four No More Deaths volunteers after defense attorneys raised concerns about his involvement in the case. After assuring “the parties and attorneys that he has not had any improper communication or contact whatsoever with anyone about this case or any other case,” and adding that he was “disappointed the attorneys would question the integrity of this court,” MacDonald said he would be handing the case over to a colleague: Bernardo Velasco.

This is not the first time Velasco has been involved in high-profile case involving No More Deaths volunteers. In the mid-2000s, two college-age volunteers with the organization faced felony harboring charges for driving three sick migrants to a church for medical care. In the run-up to the trial, Velasco batted away one pretrial defense motion after another. But once Collins, the district judge, took over, the case was dismissed. Efforts to prosecute No More Deaths volunteers for leaving water on federal lands similarly ran aground in the 9th Circuit.

Whether the current batch of cases will follow a similar path remains to be seen. What’s clear, however, is the Trump administration’s desire to put a stop to the work of organizations like No More Deaths. Last year, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered border prosecutors to prioritize harboring cases, which Warren now stands accused of, while the head of the Border Patrol’s powerful union has publicly denounced the practice of leaving water for migrants in the desert.

For Warren’s fellow volunteers, the prosecutions fold into the wider campaign that the Trump administration has waged along the border. “These legal actions against our volunteers are just one component of a wider movement against undocumented people in the United States,” Justine Orlovsky-Schnitzler, a No More Deaths volunteer, wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times on Wednesday. “The deployment of active-duty troops to the border, widespread family separations and increasingly violent rhetoric from the Trump administration are all churning wheels in an apparatus of policies intended to make crossing the border a death sentence.”

The post Arizona Judge in No More Deaths Case Had Secret Talks With Federal Prosecutors appeared first on The Intercept.

Coca-Cola é investigada por esquema bilionário para não pagar impostos
Coca-Cola é investigada por esquema bilionário para não pagar impostos

Transbordante, vazando altas cifras e nomes poderosos aos litros, um conjunto de denúncias teve efeito efervescente num gabinete da Receita Federal, no centro de Santa Maria, interior do Rio Grande Sul, no dia 9 de outubro de 2018. Depoimentos chegaram preparados para desnudar operações fiscais bilionárias (e suspeitas) embaladas pelo rótulo de uma das marcas mais conhecidas e influentes do planeta: a Coca-Cola.

Naquela data, o órgão fiscalizador recebeu testemunhos e documentos reveladores sobre misteriosas transações que envolvem o Imposto sobre Produtos Industrializados, o IPI, e a maior fabricante brasileira do concentrado de Coca-Cola, a Recofarma Indústria do Amazonas Ltda. Sim, o “xarope de Coca”, considerado o principal insumo da “receita mágica e secreta” do refrigerante que vende 1,7 bilhão de latas, copos ou garrafas por dia no mundo, também é produzido na Amazônia, mais precisamente na Zona Franca de Manaus.

O Intercept e O Joio e o Trigo conseguiram acesso aos documentos internos da Receita Federal em que constam depoimentos realizados nos anos de 2017 e 2018. Neles, ao menos duas testemunhas fizeram declarações e apresentaram material de denúncia do superfaturamento de preços de produtos do sistema Coca-Cola e evasão fiscal.

Há anos, auditores da Receita suspeitam de superfaturamento no preço do xarope fabricado em Manaus. Inicialmente, o concentrado era produzido pelas próprias engarrafadoras, empresas que diluem o xarope em água e gás, colocam nas embalagens e distribuem os refrigerantes. Porém, incentivos fiscais criados na década de 1990 abriram a brecha para que as corporações de bebidas açucaradas instalassem fábricas no estado do Amazonas – uma operação que dá mais dinheiro, já que são muitas as isenções tributárias. Com sede de lucros, a Recofarma começou a operar por lá em maio de 1990, centralizando a fabricação do concentrado e deixando as envasadoras com as outras etapas produtivas.

No esquema, quanto mais inflacionado o preço do xarope, mais a empresa recebe créditos.

Em média, as engarrafadoras pagam entre R$ 140 a R$ 200 pelo concentrado da Recofarma, enquanto o mesmo produto é exportado a outros países por 22 dólares, em torno de R$ 70, no máximo.

Essa é a origem da suspeita da Receita Federal: como as engarrafadoras da Coca são tão competitivas (a megaempresa lidera a participação de mercado de refrigerantes no Brasil) pagando preços tão altos pela principal matéria-prima? Quando o auditor fiscal responsável por tomar os depoimentos em Santa Maria despejou o conteúdo das denúncias, ele encaixou uma importante peça nesse quebra-cabeças, um exemplo específico de manobras das quais a equipe do órgão fiscalizador só suspeitava até aquele momento.

No esquema, quanto mais a empresa inflaciona artificialmente o valor do xarope no mercado interno, maior o volume de créditos de IPI revertidos para as transações do sistema Coca-Cola. Esse valor, bilionário, se considerado todo o universo de franquias da corporação, pode ser usado para pagar outros tributos federais.

De acordo com os depoimentos, somente uma das envasadoras e a fabricante do xarope da Coca-Cola cometeram, em um ano, irregularidades com o IPI que resultaram no valor de pelo menos R$ 21,5 milhões. O esquema opera com o que a Receita Federal chama, no Plano Anual de Fiscalização 2018, de “planejamento tributário abusivo“.

R$ 35 do seu bolso para a Coca-Cola

Tudo gira em torno dos subsídios fiscais da indústria. As fabricantes de refrigerantes recebem de R$ 0,15 a R$ 0,20 do governo para cada lata consumida. Em garrafas de dois litros, o valor fica entre R$ 0,45 e R$ 0,50. Todo contribuinte brasileiro, tome ou não Coca-Cola, repassa à indústria R$ 10 ao ano só em IPI. Entre o que deixa de entrar nos cofres públicos e o que sai, cada brasileiro arca com R$ 35 anualmente em incentivos transferidos especialmente às gigantes de bebidas Coca-Cola, Ambev e Brasil Kirin, que possuem fábricas de xaropes na Zona Franca.

Isso ocorre porque a Constituição determina que as empresas não paguem um imposto mais de uma vez entre uma etapa e outra da industrialização. Para evitar um efeito em cascata, o poder público cria uma compensação sobre o imposto que foi pago na etapa anterior. Na prática, isso significa que, se a engarrafadora compra o concentrado de Coca-Cola a R$ 100 a uma alíquota de 20%, tem direito a R$ 20 em créditos.

O problema é que o IPI é zero na Zona Franca de Manaus. Ainda assim, as engarrafadoras que compram o xarope da Recofarma cobram o crédito em cima do imposto cheio, o que, por si só, já é uma distorção tributária, de acordo com a legislação brasileira e avaliações da equipe da Receita.

Coca e Ambev recebem a maior parte dos R$ 2 bilhões saídos só do IPI dados anualmente a quem compra concentrados de refrigerantes, chás e sucos na Zona Franca. Esse não é o único incentivo: essas indústrias têm isenções de pelo menos outros quatro impostos. Em uma estimativa conservadora, elas deixam de recolher, por ano, mais de R$ 7 bilhões.

A peça que faltava

Os depoimentos realizados em Santa Maria mostraram em detalhes como a Recofarma e a engarrafadora CVI Refrigerantes, pertencente à Companhia Vontobel de Investimentos e franqueada da Coca-Cola no Rio Grande do Sul, superfaturaram os créditos. A denúncia dá exemplos práticos de como o superfaturamento na venda do concentrado e a consequente inflação artificial dos benefícios tributários são mantidos sem que a envasadora tenha prejuízos ou que o sistema de preços da Coca-Cola Brasil entre em colapso.

De acordo com os documentos aos quais tivemos acesso, ocorre um “acerto por fora” entre a Recofarma e a CVI, o que garante que todas as partes envolvidas ganhem – menos o consumidor e os cofres públicos, claro. Por meio de uma expressão contábil que aparece nos depoimentos como “encontro de contas bancárias”, é descrito que a CVI e a Coca-Cola inflacionam os créditos de IPI via notas fiscais superfaturadas pela fabricante do xarope, a Recofarma.

‘O repasse é realizado sem emissão de qualquer NF’, disse um dos depoentes à Receita.

A CVI, na outra ponta, recebe as notas fiscais como se fosse uma operação normal. Mas não as paga de fato (total ou parcialmente), já que o dinheiro retorna por meio de transferências bancárias, garantindo a devolução da grana que a compradora “pagou” a mais pelo xarope.

Os denunciantes dizem que as empresas dividem meio a meio os créditos gerados artificialmente com o IPI. Segundo a denúncia, a manipulação financeira é coordenada pela Recofarma e, geralmente, envolve quantias milionárias, transferidas sistematicamente no dia 20 de cada mês. “O repasse é realizado sem emissão de qualquer NF. Apenas uma planilha transmite a composição dos valores”, disse um dos depoentes à Receita. As empresas simulariam a entrada de recursos como reembolso de despesa de propaganda e até manutenção de geladeiras e freezers, de acordo com os depoimentos. “Essa sistemática, com certeza, é realizada por todo o sistema Coca-Cola no Brasil”, enfatiza uma testemunha.

recofarma-1545329654

Recofarma se instalou confortavelmente na Zona Franca de Manaus.

Foto: reprodução/Google Street View

A CVI é uma das menores fabricantes da marca no Brasil em termos de volume produzido e faturamento entre as 42 operadas por 16 grupos empresariais franqueados, todos coordenados pela Coca-Cola Indústrias. Ou seja: há a possibilidade de esse esquema ser muito maior.

A denúncia abriu uma nova linha de investigação na Receita. A partir da transação entre Recofarma e CVI, os auditores agora querem analisar as demais operações da Coca-Cola no Brasil.

Por dentro da fábrica de créditos

As planilhas anexadas às declarações, denominadas de “espelhos de lançamento contábil”, compreendem quase 12 anos, de agosto de 2002 a abril de 2014. Elas contabilizam o “encontro de contas Recofarma x CVI” em vários períodos. Somente a mais recente, de maio de 2013 a abril de 2014, torna cristalina a dimensão dos valores desse “ajuste”. O cruzamento de dados que fizemos mostra que a empresa gaúcha recebeu mais de R$ 21,5 milhões em apenas 12 meses no “caixa 2” do IPI.

As transações são investigadas ao menos desde 19 de novembro de 2017, data de um depoimento fundamental. Nele, o auditor fiscal perguntou a um dos denunciantes qual o parâmetro de determinação dos valores reembolsados e recebeu a afirmativa de que a base é calculada de acordo com “o volume proporcional de compras de concentrado realizadas pelos franqueados junto da Recofarma”. É o indício que evidenciou o tipo de relação da empresa com a franqueada.

Empresa tinha liberdade para usar os recursos como quisesse.

Mas uma parte do diálogo entre o fiscal e o depoente chamou atenção. Perguntado como os recursos do esquema são usados pela fabricante, a testemunha revelou que “uma vez que os recursos foram recebidos pela CVI, ela tinha total liberdade para dispor deles como melhor lhe aprouvesse”.

A Coca-Cola Brasil respondeu à reportagem. Foi econômica, mas admitiu a existência da investigação. Por meio da assessoria prestada pela Agência Textual, a megaempresa afirmou que, em 28 anos na Zona Franca de Manaus, “mantém a mesma política de preços, e a forma de operação segue o modelo estabelecido por lei para todas as empresas do Polo de Concentrados”. Segundo a empresa, “o caso mencionado está na esfera administrativa, em fase de recurso”.

O responsável pela contabilidade da CVI, Vicente Piccinini, se comportou de forma ainda mais sucinta e evasiva: “esta demanda [as perguntas da reportagem] foi respondida ontem, pela Textual, agência do Sistema Coca-Cola Brasil”, disse.

Tráfico de influência

A CVI não tem exatamente um bom histórico quando se trata de tributos. Em 2012, foi citada num escândalo de tráfico de influência na Receita Federal. Documentos obtidos com exclusividade pela revista Época indicavam irregularidades cometidas dentro do órgão. O autor dos desvios de conduta era o auditor fiscal Pedro dos Santos Anceles, que hoje não trabalha mais na Receita.

Anceles foi demitido no final de 2011 por ter repassado informações sigilosas a empresas. A demissão por improbidade administrativa partiu do então ministro da Fazenda Guido Mantega, no primeiro ano de mandato da presidente Dilma Rousseff.

Pedro Anceles dava palestras e cursos e chegava a se ausentar do trabalho para dar consultorias ao setor privado, além de participar, como funcionário da Receita, do julgamento de um recurso movido contra multas recebidas por um cliente a quem prestava serviços. E lá estava a CVI, acusada de envolvimento num dos casos mais graves de que o ex-auditor participou. Em 2007, a fabricante de refrigerantes do Rio Grande do Sul havia sido autuada em três processos distintos por sonegação de tributos, incluindo PIS e Cofins.

CVI deve mais de R$ 15 milhões em impostos.

Segundo a Procuradoria-Geral da Fazenda Nacional, a PGFN, Anceles prestou consultoria para a empresa. “Constata-se que a natureza do trabalho prestado é incompatível com o cargo de auditor fiscal e de delegado de julgamento, haja vista que foi verdadeira consultoria tributária, atividade que configura patente conflito de interesses”, ressaltaram os procuradores. Nessa época, Anceles era delegado de julgamento do Fisco justamente no município de Santa Maria.

Nas bases de dados da Receita, a empresa também não está bem na foto. Em registros deste ano, do dia 29 de março, a CVI constava da lista da dívida ativa federal como uma das maiores devedoras de ICMS da décima região fiscal, com mais de R$ 15 milhões não recolhidos, que estavam na fase de discussão judicial.

Recofarma: sinônimo de Coca-Cola e lobby

A Coca-Cola Brasil é uma subsidiária da matriz americana, a The Coca-Cola Company. Atuante por meio de uma divisão nacional, ela controla o sistema da marca no país e possui duas fábricas engarrafadoras próprias, a Coca-Cola Indústrias Ltda e a Recofarma Indústrias do Amazonas Ltda, produtora de xarope que abastece todas as fabricantes no Brasil e também Argentina, Colômbia, Paraguai, Venezuela, Uruguai e Bolívia.

No Brasil, nomes de peso da política são parte do sistema. O segundo maior engarrafador de Coca por aqui é o senador tucano Tasso Jereissati, atrás apenas da própria Coca-Cola. A empresa dele, Solar, figura também entre as 20 maiores envasadoras da marca no mundo, graças ao monopólio que exerce no Nordeste.

Por influência ou não de políticos como Jereissati, a Coca tem conseguido manter os incentivos à compra de concentrados da Zona Franca. Para que se tenha uma ideia, a receita da Coca na América Latina em 2015 foi de US$ 1,023 bilhão – cerca de R$ 3 bi, segundo a cotação atual.

Governo tentou acabar com a farra dos créditos. Senadores reagiram.

Em 2018, o governo federal aprovou um decreto para reduzir de 20% para 4% as alíquotas de IPI – na prática, a medida daria fim à farra dos créditos. Mas os senadores, não à toa, atuaram firmemente para revogar a medida – em 11 de julho, aprovaram um projeto para tentar restituir os subsídios públicos à indústria.

A iniciativa foi encabeçada por três senadores do Amazonas – Vanessa Grazziotin, do PCdoB, Eduardo Braga, do MDB, e Omar Aziz, do PSD, eliminando a divisão por legendas e criando, por motivações nada nobres, um bloco suprapartidário que unificou parlamentares conectados à Zona Franca de Manaus e às corporações de refrigerantes. Na Câmara dos Deputados, o projeto chegou a avançar, mas foi arquivado após votação contrária na Comissão de Finanças e Tributação.

O caso é um novo episódio de um ano complexo para a empresa. No mundo todo, impostos sobre bebidas adoçadas foram adotados para coibir o consumo de refrigerantes e foram acumuladas mais e mais evidências dos danos à saúde provocados pelo produto carro-chefe da The Coca-Cola Company. O Brasil ofereceu uma temporada particular de dissabores.

Agora, o verão promete ser quente para a Coca.

The post Coca-Cola é investigada por esquema bilionário para não pagar impostos appeared first on The Intercept.

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