Logo após o rompimento da barragem do Fundão, em Mariana, os prefeitos das 39 cidades atingidas se viram às voltas com questões práticas. Tarefas como garantir água potável, construir abrigos temporários para os desabrigados, limpar as ruas, reparar pontes e postes de luz levados pela avalanche de lama. Por alto, os gastos emergenciais foram calculados em R$ 53 milhões pela Samarco, junção das multimilionárias Vale e a BHP Billiton, que prometeu cobrir essas despesas tão logo fosse possível e depois descontar da futura indenização aos municípios. O deslizamento de 2015 deixou 19 mortos e espalhou rejeito de minério por 650 km de rios, até a foz do rio Doce.
Três anos depois, os prefeitos ainda estão atrás do dinheiro. Mas a estratégia da empresa mudou. Agora, a Fundação Renova, indicada pela Samarco para lidar com as indenizações de Mariana, propõe dar os valores da até então indenização emergencial pela assinatura de um documento em que as prefeituras se comprometem a abandonar qualquer ação em curso contra a Samarco e a não processar a empresa nem agora nem no futuro. Em troca: os municípios têm o dinheiro dos gastos emergenciais enfim depositado.
A pressão tem funcionado: até o fechamento desta reportagem, 19 dos 39 municípios atingidos pelo rompimento da barragem já tinham aceitado o acordo. A Renova tem abordado os prefeitos individualmente, sem a presença dos advogados dos municípios, tentando convencê-los das vantagens de assinar o documento.
“Eles chegam falando ‘não mexe com esse negócio de ação não, amanhã o dinheiro tá na conta, a sua cidade nem tanto dano teve…’”, conta Duarte Gonçalves Jr., do PPS, prefeito da cidade de Mariana que está à frente das negociações desde o início. Segundo ele, muitos prefeitos, sobretudo de cidades menores, com a economia ainda afetada pela contaminação do Rio Doce, têm aceitado o dinheiro da Renova a fim de colocar as contas em dia. Com os mandatos encerrando em dois anos, também não custa aumentar o caixa dos municípios em alguns milhões.
‘O que a Renova está fazendo é defender os interesses de Vale e BHP. Hoje, eu defendo com todas as minhas forças que a fundação precisa acabar. Ela não funciona.’Duarte foi um dos entusiastas da criação da fundação. Hoje, admite que foi um erro e advoga pela criação de um consórcio direto entre governo federal, estadual, MP e municípios para gerir os recursos para a reparação. “O que a Renova está fazendo é defender os interesses de Vale e BHP. Hoje, eu defendo com todas as minhas forças que a fundação precisa acabar. Ela não funciona”, critica.
Em janeiro, uma nova barragem da Vale rompeu, dessa vez em Brumadinho. Os procuradores do MPF em Minas proibiram a Renova de atuar na região de Brumadinho “sob pena de desvirtuamento de sua finalidade e do enfraquecimento dos programas específicos que buscam debelar as consequências do desastre ambiental da Bacia do Rio Doce”. Em coletiva nesta segunda, eles disseram que há relatos de moradores de que integrantes da fundação estiveram na cidade a fim de propor ações reparadoras e que, caso isso seja confirmado, irão emitir uma recomendação para evitar que o modelo de Mariana seja reproduzido em Brumadinho.
A própria criação da fundação é uma solução pouco comum para um desastre de magnitude e complexidade até então inéditos como o de Mariana. A Renova foi instituída por meio de um acordo entre as mineradoras e os municípios, que precisou ser ajustado em novembro uma vez que ela não estava cumprindo com a sua parte do combinado.
A instituição deveria, de acordo com seu termo de criação, ser independente. Mas, na verdade, é administrada diretamente por ex-executivos da Samarco, dona da barragem, e da Vale, além de ex-servidores de cargos estratégicos dos governos de Minas Gerais e do Espírito Santo – o que coloca em xeque seu papel como a responsável por reparar os danos causados, atender os atingidos e dar voz ativa de participação nas decisões para as pessoas das cidades afetadas pelo desastre.
Fundação propõe 0,05% da indenização previstaA estratégia em relação à indenização dos municípios mudou porque a Samarco teme uma ação coletiva já em curso proposta pelo escritório inglês SPG Law, que também tem procurado os municípios atingidos direta e indiretamente pelo rompimento da barragem e já representa 200 mil vítimas e as prefeituras de 24 cidades. Como o Reino Unido é a casa de uma importante subsidiária da BHP, a legislação do país permite que os danos causados pelo rompimento sejam cobrados também pela justiça britânica. Nas contas do escritório inglês, a indenização que deveria ser paga pelas empresas pelos danos causados pela tragédia deve chegar a 5 bilhões de libras (cerca de R$ 24 bilhões). Já o acordo proposto pela Renova para as 39 cidades afetadas é de apenas R$ 53 milhões – ou 0,5% do que prevê a ação movida no Reino Unido.
A SPG Law já conseguiu veredictos contra poderosos como a Volkswagen, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, entre outros.“A justiça inglesa é historicamente mais célere, independente e eficaz. Mas tentaremos agilizar ao máximo os direitos das pessoas atingidas”, diz Tomas Mousinho, advogado do escritório inglês, que espera ter uma decisão em até três anos. Caso ganhe a ação, o escritório deve receber 30% do total. A SPG Law já conseguiu veredictos contra poderosos como a Volkswagen, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, o Departamento de Agricultura dos Estados Unidos e a British Airways, entre outros.
No Brasil, a ação civil pública do Ministério Público Federal que pede R$ 155 bilhões em reparação foi suspensa em agosto até agosto de 2020 na “tentativa de um acordo mais amplo”, segundo o procurador-geral do Ministério Público de Minas Gerais, Antônio Sérgio Tonet. Outra ação do governo federal que pedia R$ 20 bilhões de multa foi extinta. O que está valendo é um Termo de Ajuste de Conduta, espécie de acordo de cavalheiros entre as partes que determina a participação dos atingidos nas medidas a serem tomadas para a recuperação da região.
Foto: Douglas Magno/AFP/Getty Images
Questionada sobre a ação movida pelo escritório inglês, a fundação informou por e-mail que “não reconhece como legítimas ações que tratam dos danos do desastre ajuizadas fora da jurisdição brasileira”. A Renova também defende seu direito de “discutir o ressarcimento diretamente com os municípios, o que tem sido feito desde 2017” e alega em sua defesa que o termo oferecido “explicita em várias cláusulas que a quitação refere-se exclusivamente aos gastos públicos extraordinários”.
Não é o que dizem as cláusulas 8.3, 8.4 e 8.5 do termo de quitação apresentado às prefeituras. Nelas, a Renova exige expressamente que o município desista da ação coletiva movida perante a High Court of Justice em Liverpool – Reino Unido contra a BHP Billiton e suas subsidiárias, “obrigando-se a comunicar tal desistência às Cortes inglesas e a quem mais se fizer necessário”. Também exige que as cidades abram mão de eventuais ações futuras.
“É uma vergonha a tentativa de manipular a justiça brasileira para decidir pelos interesses próprios da Vale e BHP. Ainda querem forçar a gente a negociar em relação a tudo que tiraram de lucro? Eles têm uma obrigação a cumprir”, diz o prefeito Duarte Jr.
Foto: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
Caratinga, cidade mineira de 91 mil habitantes na região do Vale do Aço, é um dos municípios que aceitaram o acordo proposto pela Renova. De acordo com a prefeitura, em nota enviada à reportagem, o que levou a aceitar o termo da Renova foi “o fato de o recurso proposto ser suficiente para quitar os gastos extraordinários tidos com o rompimento da barragem”. Afetada indiretamente, a cidade comandada pelo prefeito Welington Moreira de Oliveira, do DEM, recebeu R$ 630 mil e espera ser contemplada por recursos como os destinados para o saneamento básico, mas ressalta que “o desejo é que o assunto seja resolvido de forma mediada a fim de evitar ações judiciais”.
Há também municípios tentando uma terceira via. Governador Valadares, maior cidade do trajeto, com 280 mil habitantes, conseguiu na justiça brasileira uma decisão que anula as cláusulas que pedem a retirada de ações no Brasil e no exterior e exige o pagamento imediato de R$ 6,3 milhões propostos pela Renova no acordo inicialmente oferecido à cidade. A decisão foi revogada, levando as ações para a 12ª Vara Federal de Belo Horizonte, que tem sido favorável à Renova. Ainda cabe recurso. Esses conflitos são recorrentes desde 2015. A briga jurídica permanente, diz Duarte Jr., é justamente o que a Renova quer, adiando ao máximo a reparação e fazendo com que os municípios se desgastem até cederem.
Regência vivia quase que apenas do ecoturismo. A atração acabou. O rio continua repleto de lama.No Espírito Santo, as cidades Colatina e Linhares, onde o Rio Doce deságua no oceano e em parte do Complexo de Abrolhos, negaram a proposta da Samarco. No caso de Colatina, foram oferecidos R$ 4,3 milhões. No de Linhares, R$ 5,1 milhões. Até o desastre as duas cidades, eram destinos turísticos em expansão. Regência, um pequeno povoado de Linhares, vivia quase que apenas do ecoturismo e da verba trazida pelos surfistas interessados pela pororoca – onda que se forma no encontro de águas doce e salgada. A atração acabou. O rio continua repleto de lama.
A Renova se recusou a responder às perguntas sobre a exigência de abandono das ações judiciais e sobre o possível assédio direto a pessoas atingidas sem a intermediação dos advogados e se ainda se considera independente de Vale e BHP, como seus diretores gostam de alegar. Procurado para comentar o caso, o Ministério Público de Minas Gerais alegou dificuldades de agenda para não atender a reportagem.
Vale e BHP, as duas maiores mineradoras do mundo, registraram lucro líquido de R$ 48 bilhões apenas em 2017. Só para os seus acionistas, a BHP Billiton pagou R$ 17 bilhões no último ano, o que daria cerca de 340 vezes o valor dividido pelas 39 cidades atingidas. Os 40 milhões de metros cúbicos de lama tóxica – cerca de 15.680 piscinas olímpicas – despejados nos 680 km da bacia do Rio Doce até o Oceano Atlântico, no Espírito Santo, são o maior crime ambiental da história do Brasil e o maior desastre com barragens já registrado no mundo, em danos e em extensão. O processo aberto no exterior é a maior ação coletiva da história do Reino Unido, com mais de 250 mil atingidos brasileiros, 21 prefeituras, o povo indígena Krenak e até a Igreja Católica.
Desde o início, Vale e BHP tentaram se afastar ao máximo da responsabilidade pelo desastre, vendendo a ideia de que a Samarco seria uma empresa de governança “independente”. Quando a barragem rompeu, a Samarco era considerada “a melhor mineradora do Brasil” por três anos consecutivos pelo prêmio Melhores & Maiores da revista Exame. Somente em 2014, registrou lucro líquido de R$ 2,8 bilhões de reais, o quinto maior do Brasil naquele ano. Tentar se afastar da Samarco, mais que uma tentativa de preservar a própria imagem, é estratégia jurídica de Vale e BHP. Duas competidoras mundiais que, com o irresistível apelo do lucro da Samarco, deixaram as diferenças de lado.
A Vale e a BHP já anunciaram que a Samarco deve voltar a explorar minério de ferro em 2020.Além das indenizações e dos crimes ambientais em que as mineradoras foram envolvidas, 21 réus, entre diretores da Samarco, Vale e BHP, respondem também por “homicídio doloso qualificado por motivo torpe, por meio insidioso ou cruel e por meio que tornou impossível a defesa das vítimas”.
A justiça, no entanto, já abre brechas para que eles saiam impunes. José Carlos Martins, vice-presidente do Conselho de Administração da Samarco na época e ex-diretor da Vale durante dez anos, teve a ação penal extinta.
A Quarta Turma do Tribunal Regional Federal da 1ª Região também atenuou a acusação contra André Ferreira Cardoso, que era representante da BHP no comitê gestor da Samarco. A decisão modificou a classificação jurídica dada pela acusação do Ministério Público Federal de homicídio, cuja pena varia de 12 a 30 anos de prisão, para inundação com resultado de morte, que tem pena máxima de oito anos de prisão. A medida pode valer para os outros executivos acusados. O MPF disse que irá recorrer.
Longe de significar um aprendizado prático para fortalecer a fiscalização e a rigidez em licenciamentos, como nos mostra Brumadinho, hoje o Brasil tem 45 barragens com risco iminente de desabamento – 80% a mais que 2017 – e 723 classificadas como de risco e potencial de dano alto. Mais: só 3% das 24.092 barragens existentes foram fiscalizadas em 2017 pelos agentes federais ou estaduais. A Agência Nacional de Mineração tem apenas 5 servidores especializados em geotecnia para fazer vistorias. A barragem de Fundão era classificada como de risco “baixo”. O que dá a exata medida do tamanho do problema que o país enfrenta.
Enquanto isso, a Vale – que encheu o peito para afirmar no começo de 2018 que o estado de suas barragens era “impecável” – e a BHP já anunciaram que a Samarco deve voltar a explorar minério de ferro no início de 2020.
The post Samarco oferece dinheiro para que prefeitos abram mão de indenização bilionária por Mariana appeared first on The Intercept.
Congress made its most aggressive use ever of the War Powers Act to end an ongoing conflict at the end of 2018, with the Senate approving — and the House coming just short — a resolution that would have required the United States to end its support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., re-introduced that resolution, and with the House in Democratic control, it’s expected to pass both chambers this year and head to the president’s desk, setting up a confrontation over U.S. involvement in the war.
Since 2015, the United States has provided logistical support to Saudi Arabia, in addition to tens of billions of dollars in arms sales. The resolution, which seeks to end that, picked up momentum in the wake of the butchering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
But inside the House, a much lower-profile development played a critical but overlooked role: a Democratic primary campaign in Washington state. Significant credit for that resolution’s earlier momentum, say people closely involved in the process, belongs indirectly to Sarah Smith, a long-shot congressional candidate who challenged Democratic Rep. Adam Smith in Washington last year, making it to the general election before losing. Adam Smith at the time was the top-ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee and is now the panel’s chair, and Sarah Smith mounted her challenge largely in opposition to what she cast as his hawkish foreign policy approach, with a specific emphasis on Yemen.
Adam Smith, facing the challenge from Sarah Smith, became an outspoken advocate of using the War Powers Resolution in the fall to go up against the Trump administration, including by becoming a leading sponsor of a new War Powers resolution on Yemen. Now that he has won re-election, he remains a supporter of the effort, but his enthusiasm for it has changed noticeably.
House Armed Services Committee ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) questions witnesses during a hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 12, 2018 in Washington, DC.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“The War Powers resolution thing,” Smith told trade reporters who cover the Pentagon and the weapons industry in a post-election interview in December, before groaning. “There’s no way in the world you can write these stories that’s going to come out in a way that’s positive for me, but I’ll say it anyway: The War Powers resolution is only so useful.”
His shift in rhetoric underscores the impact primary challenges can have on internal House politics, but it also could make him vulnerable to another challenge in two years.
“Primary challenges put pressure on Democrats in many blue districts to be more accountable to progressive and Democratic voters in their districts.”“For nearly a year Adam Smith faced a primary challenge from Justice Democrat Sarah Smith who routinely brought up his hawkish foreign policy views and campaign donations from defense contractors as central issues in the campaign,” said Waleed Shahid, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed Sarah Smith’s candidacy. “In many of our races, even when we lost, there was a clear ‘primary effect’ when Democratic incumbents started to embrace more progressive policies and rhetoric. Primary challenges put pressure on Democrats in many blue districts to be more accountable to progressive and Democratic voters in their districts.”
Adam Smith might think it’s hard to write this story in a way that comes out positively for him, but let’s try anyway. It’s fair to say he is not by any stretch the most hawkish member of Democratic leadership and is regarded by progressive foreign policy advocates as somebody who’s willing to work with them. “From Afghanistan to Yemen to the budget, it’s never been Smith we had to move, to be honest,” said one advocate who works with Smith, but asked not to be named for fear of repercussion from House leaders. “Sometimes his staff severely holds him back, but often, he’s been rather helpful behind the scenes in triangulating to move Steny off one bad position or another,” the advocate said, referring to Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., a pro-Israel hawk and the No. 2 Democrat in the House.
Smith is a politician, and even if his primary race, and the anti-incumbent mood that swept the party in 2018, influenced his Yemen posture, there’s nothing inherently immoral with taking into account the views of the public when it comes to public policy positions. According to people involved with the effort to pass the Yemen resolution, the starkest change in Smith’s approach came in the wake of the June 26 primary victory by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, who shocked the political world by unseating Joe Crowley, who was in line to be speaker of the House.
That appeared to focus Smith’s mind on his own primary election, scheduled for August 7. Washington state uses a top-two system, meaning that all candidates run in the same primary, and if the top-two finishers are from the same party, both of those candidates go on to the general election. Polls showed that Sarah Smith, dogging him relentlessly, was in striking distance of finishing second.
Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory had confused many veteran politicians, who sensed that things were changing, and nothing could be taken for granted. Throw in two people named Smith on the ballot, and things could go terribly wrong for one of them. When the primary came around, Adam Smith was the top vote-getter, and Sarah Smith narrowly edged out the top Republican challenger, winning the second spot on the general election ballot.
“All of a sudden, Adam started to change his tune.”Sarah Smith said she could sense Adam Smith becoming less hawkish in real time. “I went after him about Yemen every time I got an opportunity to and I kept hammering him. When Ro [Khanna] was leading the charge, I started talking about how Ro is a junior congressman in his first term and he is leading on this, where Adam has failed for years, and I talked about how we didn’t just get involved in Yemen. And then Alex [Ocasio-Cortez] won and people started noticing my campaign and me talking about getting us out of Yemen and they started to become very interested, and all of a sudden, Adam started to change his tune,” Sarah Smith said.
Adam Smith rejects this characterization entirely. “I was actually on the Yemen stuff before I even knew she existed,” he told The Intercept. “It’s not just about Yemen, it’s about Saudi Arabia more broadly, the authoritarian crackdown, obviously the murder of Khashoggi. They are becoming more and more lawless in the way they’re acting and not just in Yemen, but elsewhere. … I’m happy to push our administration and Congress to do more on that issue.”
His opposition to U.S. involvement in Yemen, however, became decidedly more forceful as Sarah Smith’s candidacy became more potent. In 2016, Smith was just one of 16 Democrats to vote against defunding Saudi Arabia’s use of cluster bombs. On July 26, 2018, Smith trumpeted his success in winning restrictions on war activity in Yemen in a defense appropriations bill passed by the House. It wasn’t terribly strong, however. The bill, also backed by Khanna, prohibited the U.S. military from providing in-flight refueling to Saudi and other coalition aircraft involved in the Yemen war, unless the secretary of state could certify that “the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE are taking certain actions related to the civil war in Yemen.”
On September 6, a month after Sarah Smith clinched a primary win, Adam Smith announced that he was introducing a War Powers Resolution, with Khanna, and Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., to end the Yemen war.
I will introduce a War Powers Resolution to withdraw U.S. forces from the war in Yemen, along with @RepRoKhanna @repmarkpocan and a number of our colleagues in Congress. https://t.co/5tgjaF2R5s
— Rep. Adam Smith (@RepAdamSmith) September 6, 2018
Given his perch on the Armed Services Committee and his influence on matters of foreign policy, Adam Smith’s public push for the resolution was a signal to rank-and-file Democrats that it was an issue worth supporting, and the party broke en masse in favor of the resolution. Both Hoyer and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is another leading hawk in the House, endorsed the Yemen resolution in late September.
Adam Smith went on to win the general election easily, beating Sarah Smith, 68-32. A week after Election Day, House Republicans beat back the resolution. A month later, it came up again, and this time it barely failed, with five Democrats voting with Republicans against it.
That same morning, Smith sat down with the trade reporters to offer his pessimistic take on the resolution.
His anger at how Saudi Arabia and the UAE were carrying out the war — “the closing of ports, the cutting off of aid and food, a relentless bombing campaign, and the civilian devastation that’s resulted from that is largest humanitarian crisis in the world” — was undiminished, but the War Powers Resolution wasn’t going to stop it, he said, Breaking Defense reported.
He noted that U.S. presidents have almost unfettered control over the military, and that Congress would have to completely cut funding from the military to block the president’s actions. “It’s not so much that the War Powers Resolution is going to make the administration go, ‘Oh, shit, well we really wanted to do this, but since you hit us with this, we won’t,’” Smith told the reporters in December. “It’s that it will put public pressure on them to change what they are doing — and we’ve already seen they’ve stopped the refueling.”
When Smith referenced the resolution that he and Khanna had introduced, he characterized it as solely Khanna’s resolution. “I’ve worked with Ro Khanna, and even in his resolution, he makes it very clear he’s not stopping us from confronting Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups within Yemen,” Smith said. Indeed, the resolution carved out an exception for U.S. operations targeting Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Despite doubting the effectiveness of the resolution, Smith said that Khanna and Sanders’s efforts are important “because it raises awareness and attention to the problem and the question of what we ought to be doing in Yemen.”
That type of endorsement, however, leaves plenty of room for advocates of war to believe that the chair of the Armed Services Committee is no longer part of the Sanders-Khanna posse working furiously to end U.S. involvement in the conflict.
Asked by The Intercept where he would rank the War Powers Resolution as an effective tool to nudge Saudi Arabia in the right direction, he demurred. “I wouldn’t rank these things. Look, I mean, we cannot dictate to Saudi Arabia their foreign policy, so we shouldn’t have illusions about that. We have to figure out where can we nudge and prod and push them in a direction that is better. So I think it’s a mistake to look at it as if there’s something we can do that would just like that change the way they interact,” he said. “My great hope for that region is that the Sunni and the Shia and the Persians and the Arabs can find some sort of peaceful resolution to their current disputes.”
House candidate Sarah Smith campaigns to unseat longtime Rep. Adam Smith on Oct. 26, 2018, in Seattle, Wash.
Photo: Elaine Thompson/AP
Sarah Smith said that if Adam Smith backslides on Yemen, she’s willing to challenge him again, but she’s watching to see how he does as the chair of the House Armed Services Committee before making the decision. (Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Sarah Smith in 2018, and given Ocasio-Cortez’s higher profile, Smith noted, a second endorsement could mean that the challenge would pose a bigger threat.) “I’m not an opportunistic person. I’m just a calculated person. And so if he says he’s as progressive as he is, and if he makes all these promises on the campaign trail, I will be as supportive as I can be, as long as he is meeting his end of the bargain,” she said. “If he fails to meet his obligation, I’m going to make notes of every single time he’s failed and I’m going to challenge him again.”
One area Sarah Smith tried but did not succeed in pushing Adam Smith last year was the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which would bar the Pentagon from arming three militant groups with a presence in Syria, including Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. (The Pentagon has armed Syrian rebels on the condition that their weapons be used only in the fight against ISIS, and the assertion that the U.S. has actively armed terror groups in Syria has little basis in fact.) The bill was introduced by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and co-sponsored by a small bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Khanna and Rep. Barbara Lee, but Adam Smith declined to co-sponsor it. “He’ll talk about, ‘Oh, I’m so progressive, I’m working with Ro very closely on this. It’s abhorrent what we’re doing in Yemen,’” Sarah Smith said of her former opponent, “but if you push him on any other bill beyond that, he won’t talk about it, radio silence, or he’ll have a million excuses. He is the excuse king.”
Adam Smith, though, said that his position on Yemen has nothing to do with Sarah Smith. Asked about her contention that his resistance to the Stop Arming Terrorists Act suggested weakness on his willingness to confront Saudi Arabia, he took a swipe at her residence, which sits just across the district. “I’m happy to talk about the issue, but I really don’t care what that one individual is going to say. She’s not even actually a constituent,” he said.
The post Primaries Matter: How a Long-Shot Challenge Shifted the Debate on the War in Yemen appeared first on The Intercept.
On December 11, 1981 in El Salvador, a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet. The final death toll was over 800 people.
The next day, December 12, was the first day on the job for Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. Abrams snapped into action, helping to lead a cover-up of the massacre. News reports of what had happened, Abrams told the Senate, were “not credible,” and the whole thing was being “significantly misused” as propaganda by anti-government guerillas.
This past Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named Abrams as America’s special envoy for Venezuela. According to Pompeo, Abrams “will have responsibility for all things related to our efforts to restore democracy” in the oil-rich nation.
The choice of Abrams sends a clear message to Venezuela and the world: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while producing a stream of unctuous rhetoric about America’s love for democracy and human rights. Combining these two factors — the brutality and the unctuousness — is Abrams’s core competency.
Abrams previously served in a multitude of positions in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, often with titles declaring their focus on morality. First, he was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs (in 1981); then the State Department “human rights” position mentioned above (1981-85); assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs (1985-89); senior director for democracy, human rights, and international operations for the National Security Council (2001-05); and finally, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy (2005-09).
In these positions, Abrams participated in many of the most ghastly acts of U.S. foreign policy from the past 40 years, all the while proclaiming how deeply he cared about the foreigners he and his friends were murdering. Looking back, it’s uncanny to see how Abrams has almost always been there when U.S. actions were at their most sordid.
Abrams, a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, joined the Reagan administration in 1981, at age 33. He soon received a promotion due to a stroke of luck: Reagan wanted to name Ernest Lefever as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, but Lefever’s nomination ran aground when two of his own brothers revealed that he believed African-Americans were “inferior, intellectually speaking.” A disappointed Reagan was forced to turn to Abrams as a second choice.
A key Reagan administration concern at the time was Central America — in particular, the four adjoining nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. All had been dominated by tiny, cruel, white elites since their founding, with a century’s worth of help from U.S. interventions. In each country, the ruling families saw their society’s other inhabitants as human-shaped animals, who could be harnessed or killed as needed.
But shortly before Reagan took office, Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua and a U.S. ally, had been overthrown by a socialist revolution. The Reaganites rationally saw this as a threat to the governments of Nicaragua’s neighbors. Each country had large populations who similarly did not enjoy being worked to death on coffee plantations or watching their children die of easily treated diseases. Some would take up arms, and some would simply try to keep their heads down, but all, from the perspective of the cold warriors in the White House, were likely “communists” taking orders from Moscow. They needed to be taught a lesson.
Photo: Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images
The extermination of El Mozote was just a drop in the river of what happened in El Salvador during the 1980s. About 75,000 Salvadorans died during what’s called a “civil war,” although almost all the killing was done by the government and its associated death squads.
The numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. El Salvador is a small country, about the size of New Jersey. The equivalent number of deaths in the U.S. would be almost 5 million. Moreover, the Salvadoran regime continually engaged in acts of barbarism so heinous that there is no contemporary equivalent, except perhaps ISIS. In one instance, a Catholic priest reported that a peasant woman briefly left her three small children in the care of her mother and sister. When she returned, she found that all five had been decapitated by the Salvadoran National Guard. Their bodies were sitting around a table, with their hands placed on their heads in front of them, “as though each body was stroking its own head.” The hand of one, a toddler, apparently kept slipping off her small head, so it had been nailed onto it. At the center of the table was a large bowl full of blood.
Criticism of U.S. policy at the time was not confined to the left. During this period, Charles Maechling Jr., who had led State Department planning for counterinsurgencies during the 1960s, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the U.S. was supporting “Mafia-like oligarchies” in El Salvador and elsewhere and was directly complicit in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”
Abrams was one of the architects of the Reagan administration’s policy of full-throated support for the Salvadoran government. He had no qualms about any of it and no mercy for anyone who escaped the Salvadoran abattoir. In 1984, sounding exactly like Trump officials today, he explained that Salvadorans who were in the U.S. illegally should not receive any kind of special status. “Some groups argue that illegal aliens who are sent back to El Salvador meet persecution and often death,” he told the House of Representatives. “Obviously, we do not believe these claims or we would not deport these people.”
Even when out of office, 10 years after the El Mozote massacre, Abrams expressed doubt that anything untoward had occurred there. In 1993, when a United Nations truth commission found that 95 percent of the acts of violence that had taken place in El Salvador since 1980 had been committed by Abrams’s friends in the Salvadoran government, he called what he and his colleagues in the Reagan administration had done a “fabulous achievement.”
The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation sorts through bags of loose photographs from the National Police Archives on July 27, 2006, as they study police atrocities and murders committed during Guatemala’s 30-year civil war.
Photo: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post/Getty Images
The situation in Guatemala during the 1980s was much the same, as were Abrams’s actions. After the U.S. engineered the overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, the country had descended into a nightmare of revolving military dictatorships. Between 1960 and 1996, in another “civil war,” 200,000 Guatemalans were killed — the equivalent of maybe 8 million people in America. A U.N. commission later found that the Guatemalan state was responsible for 93 percent of the human rights violations.
Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as Guatemala’s president in the early 1980s, was found guilty in 2013, by Guatemala’s own justice system, of committing genocide against the country’s indigenous Mayans. During Ríos Montt’s administration, Abrams called for the lifting of an embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Guatemala, claiming that Ríos Montt had “brought considerable progress.” The U.S. had to support the Guatemalan government, Abrams argued, because “if we take the attitude ‘don’t come to us until you’re perfect, we’re going to walk away from this problem until Guatemala has a perfect human rights record,’ then we’re going to be leaving in the lurch people there who are trying to make progress.” One example of the people making an honest effort, according to Abrams, was Ríos Montt. Thanks to Ríos Montt, “there has been a tremendous change, especially in the attitude of the government toward the Indian population.” (Ríos Montt’s conviction was later set aside by Guatemala’s highest civilian court, and he died before a new trial could finish.)
NicaraguaAbrams would become best known for his enthusiastic involvement with the Reagan administration’s push to overthrow Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government. He advocated for a full invasion of Nicaragua in 1983, immediately after the successful U.S. attack on the teeny island nation of Grenada. When Congress cut off funds to the Contras, an anti-Sandinista guerrilla force created by the U.S., Abrams successfully persuaded the Sultan of Brunei to cough up $10 million for the cause. Unfortunately, Abrams, acting under the code name “Kenilworth,” provided the Sultan with the wrong Swiss bank account number, so the money was wired instead to a random lucky recipient.
Abrams was questioned by Congress about his Contra-related activities and lied voluminously. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information. One was about the Sultan and his money, and another was about Abrams’s knowledge of a Contra resupply C-123 plane that had been shot down in 1986. In a nice historical rhyme with his new job in the Trump administration, Abrams had previously attempted to obtain two C-123s for the Contras from the military of Venezuela.
Abrams received a sentence of 100 hours of community service and perceived the whole affair as an injustice of cosmic proportions. He soon wrote a book in which he described his inner monologue about his prosecutors, which went: “You miserable, filthy bastards, you bloodsuckers!” He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on the latter’s way out the door after he lost the 1992 election.
PanamaWhile it’s been forgotten now, before America invaded Panama to oust Manuel Noriega in 1989, he was a close ally of the U.S. — despite the fact the Reagan administration knew he was a large-scale drug trafficker.
In 1985, Hugo Spadafora, a popular figure in Panama and its one-time vice minister for health, believed he had obtained proof of Noriega’s involvement in cocaine smuggling. He was on a bus on his way to Panama City to release it publicly when he was seized by Noriega’s thugs.
According to the book “Overthrow” by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, U.S. intelligence picked up Noriega giving his underlings the go-ahead to put Spadafora down like “a rabid dog.” They tortured Spadafora for a long night and then sawed off his head while he was still alive. When Spadafora’s body was found, his stomach was full of blood he’d swallowed.
This was so horrific that it got people’s attention. But Abrams leapt to Noriega’s defense, blocking the U.S. ambassador to Panama from increasing pressure on the Panamanian leader. When Spadafora’s brother persuaded North Carolina’s hyper-conservative GOP Sen. Jesse Helms to hold hearings on Panama, Abrams told Helms that Noriega was “being really helpful to us” and was “really not that big a problem. … The Panamanians have promised they are going to help us with the Contras. If you have the hearings, it’ll alienate them.”
… And That’s Not AllAbrams also engaged in malfeasance for no discernible reason, perhaps just to stay in shape. In 1986 a Colombian journalist named Patricia Lara was invited to the U.S. to attend a dinner honoring writers who’d advanced “inter-American understanding and freedom of information.” When Lara arrived at New York’s Kennedy airport, she was taken into custody, then put on a plane back home. Soon afterward, Abrams went on “60 Minutes” to claim that Lara was a member of the “ruling committees” of M-19, a Colombian guerrilla movement. She also, according to Abrams, was ”an active liaison” between M-19 ”and the Cuban secret police.”
Given the frequent right-wing paramilitary violence against Colombian reporters, this painted a target on Lara’s back. There was no evidence then that Abrams’s assertions were true — Colombia’s own conservative government denied it — and none has appeared since.
Abrams’s never-ending, shameless deceptions wore down American reporters. “They said that black was white,” Joanne Omang at the Washington Post later explained about Abrams and his White House colleague Robert McFarlane. “Although I had used all my professional resources I had misled my readers.” Omang was so exhausted by the experience that she quit her job trying to describe the real world to try to write fiction.
Post-conviction Abrams was seen as damaged goods who couldn’t return to government. This underestimated him. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., the one-time chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tangled fiercely with Abrams in 1989 over the proper U.S. policy toward Noriega once it become clear he was more trouble than he was worth. Crowe strongly opposed a bright idea that Abrams had come up with: that the U.S. should establish a government-in-exile on Panamanian soil, which would require thousands of U.S. troops to guard. This was deeply boneheaded, Crowe said, but it didn’t matter. Crowe presciently issued a warning about Abrams: “This snake’s hard to kill.”
Photo: Dennis Brack,Pool/Getty Images
To the surprise of Washington’s more naive insiders, Abrams was back in business soon after George W. Bush entered the White House. It might have been difficult to get Senate approval for someone who had deceived Congress, so Bush put him in a slot at the National Security Council — where no legislative branch approval was needed. Just like 20 years before, Abrams was handed a portfolio involving “democracy” and “human rights.” Venezuela
By the beginning of 2002, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, had become deeply irritating to the Bush White House, which was filled with veterans of the battles of the 1980s. That April, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Chavez was pushed out of power in a coup. Whether and how the U.S. was involved is not yet known, and probably won’t be for decades until the relevant documents are declassified. But based on the previous 100 years, it would be surprising indeed if America didn’t play any behind-the-scenes role. For what it’s worth, the London Observer reported at the time that “the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams” and he “gave a nod” to the plotters. In any case, Chavez had enough popular support that he was able to regroup and return to office within days.
IranAbrams apparently did play a key role in squelching a peace proposal from Iran in 2003, just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The plan arrived by fax, and should have gone to Abrams, and then to Condoleezza Rice, at the time Bush’s national security adviser. Instead it somehow never made it to Rice’s desk. When later asked about this, Abrams’s spokesperson replied that he “had no memory of any such fax.” (Abrams, like so many people who thrive at the highest level of politics, has a terrible memory for anything political. In 1984, he told Ted Koppel that he couldn’t recall for sure whether the U.S. had investigated reports of massacres in El Salvador. In 1986, when asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee if he’d discussed fundraising for the contras with anyone on the NSC’s staff, he likewise couldn’t remember.)
Israel and PalestineAbrams was also at the center of another attempt to thwart the outcome of a democratic election, in 2006. Bush had pushed for legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza in order to give Fatah, the highly corrupt Palestinian organization headed by Yasser Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, some badly needed legitimacy. To everyone’s surprise, Fatah’s rival Hamas won, giving it the right to form a government.
This unpleasant outburst of democracy was not acceptable to the Bush administration, in particular Rice and Abrams. They hatched a plan to form a Fatah militia to take over the Gaza Strip, and crush Hamas in its home territory. As reported by Vanity Fair, this involved a great deal of torture and executions. But Hamas stole a march on Fatah with their own ultra-violence. David Wurmser, a neoconservative who worked for Dick Cheney at the time, told Vanity Fair, “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.” Yet ever since, these events have been turned upside down in the U.S. media, with Hamas being presented as the aggressors.
While the U.S. plan was not a total success, it also was not a total failure from the perspective of America and Israel. The Palestinian civil war split the West Bank and Gaza into two entities, with rival governments in both. For the past 13 years, there’s been little sign of the political unity necessary for Palestinians to get a decent life for themselves.
Abrams then left office with Bush’s exit. But now he’s back for a third rotation through the corridors of power – with the same kinds of schemes he’s executed the first two times.
Looking back at Abrams’s lifetime of lies and savagery, it’s hard to imagine what he could say to justify it. But he does have a defense for everything he’s done — and it’s a good one.
The year was 1995. A young Elliott Abrams taught us how to laugh. Maniacally. When Allan Nairn brought up his involvement in the mass murder and torture of indigenous people in Guatemala. pic.twitter.com/N2nfDQAUrf
— Allen Haim (@senor_pez) January 25, 2019
In 1995, Abrams appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show” with Allan Nairn, one of the most knowledgable American reporters about U.S. foreign policy. Nairn noted that George H.W. Bush had once discussed putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity. This was a good idea, said Nairn, but “if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed” — which would mean also prosecuting officials like Abrams.
Abrams chuckled at the ludicrousness of such a concept. That would require, he said, “putting all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.”
Abrams was largely right. The distressing reality is that Abrams is no rogue outlier, but a respected, honored member of the center right of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. His first jobs before joining the Reagan administration were working for two Democratic senators, Henry Jackson and Daniel Moynihan. He was a senior fellow at the centrist Council on Foreign Relations. He’s been a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and now is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. He’s taught the next generation of foreign policy officials at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He didn’t somehow fool Reagan and George W. Bush — they wanted exactly what Abrams provided.
So no matter the gruesome particulars of Abrams’s career, the important thing to remember — as the U.S. eagle tightens its razor-sharp talons around yet another Latin American country — is that Abrams isn’t that exceptional. He’s mostly a cog in a machine. It’s the machine that’s the problem, not its malevolent parts.
The post Elliott Abrams, Trump’s Pick to Bring “Democracy” to Venezuela, Has Spent His Life Crushing Democracy appeared first on The Intercept.
Minnesota police have spent 18 months preparing for a major standoff over Enbridge Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline that has yet to receive the green light to build in the state. Records obtained by The Intercept show that law enforcement has engaged in a coordinated effort to identify potential anti-pipeline camps and monitor individual protesters, repeatedly turning for guidance to the North Dakota officials responsible for the militarized response at Standing Rock in 2016.
Enbridge, a Canada-based energy company that claims to own the world’s longest fossil fuel transportation network, has labeled Line 3 the largest project in its history. If completed, it would replace 1,031 miles of a corroded existing pipeline that spans from Alberta’s tar sands region to refineries and a major shipping terminal in Wisconsin, expanding the pipeline’s capacity by hundreds of thousands of barrels per day.
The expanded Line 3 would pass through the territories of several Ojibwe bands in northern Minnesota, home to sensitive wild rice lakes central to the Native communities’ spiritual and physical sustenance. Given that tar sands are among the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel sources, Line 3 opponents underline that the pipeline is exactly the kind of infrastructure that must be rapidly phased out to meet scientists’ prescriptions for mitigating climate disasters.
The Line 3 documents, which were obtained via freedom of information requests, illustrate law enforcement’s anxiety that pipeline opponents could galvanize support on a scale similar to the Dakota Access pipeline struggle, which drew thousands of protesters to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in southern North Dakota.
A police response like the one in North Dakota is a significant concern for Line 3 opponents. At Standing Rock, law enforcement used water cannons, rubber bullets, armored personnel carriers, and sound cannons in an operation that resulted in serious injuries. Aided by private intelligence and security firms working for the pipeline, they gathered information on protesters via aerial surveillance, online monitoring, embedded informants, and eavesdropping on radio signals. In a time of growing resistance to fossil fuel industries, the public-private partnership served as a chilling example of law enforcement agencies acting as bulwarks of the oil industry.
Police use a water cannon against Dakota Access pipeline protesters near Cannon Ball, N.D., on Nov. 20, 2016.
Photo: Stephanie Keith/Reuters
In 2017, Enbridge began construction on the tiny portion of Line 3 that cuts into Wisconsin. Local police reports describe two security firms, Raven Executive and Security Services and Securitas, keeping tabs on protesters and reporting their activities to law enforcement. It was the protests in Wisconsin that sparked the multistate coordination led by Minnesota. The state’s fusion center developed a reputation as “the keepers of information for the Enbridge protests,” as one sheriff’s analyst put it, receiving information on Line 3 opponents from police departments in at least three states. While fusion centers were originally established to facilitate counterterrorism intelligence-sharing, they have increasingly played a role in monitoring, interpreting, and criminalizing political activity.
Meanwhile, opposition research firms that market their services to energy companies have also singled out Line 3 as the next likely flashpoint of opposition to a U.S. pipeline project. Executives of the public relations firm Off the Record Strategies and the private intelligence firm Delve, which the National Sheriffs’ Association contracted in 2016 to dig up information on DAPL opponents, gave an overview of their work at a pipeline industry conference in 2017. “If you look at Line 3, they’re already arresting activists in Minneapolis. They’re already doing encampments in Wisconsin,” Delve CEO Jeff Berkowitz told conference attendees, according to audio obtained by The Intercept. “I think the next one is potentially going to be worse than DAPL.”
Tribal attorney Tara Houska, who is Ojibwe from the Couchiching First Nation and the national campaigns director for Honor the Earth, has been deeply involved in organizing against Line 3.
“It’s clear that Enbridge is doing everything they can to have a very highly skilled force of security and law enforcement at their fingertips to do what they can to stop any resistance to Line 3,” said Houska, who also took part in the struggle at Standing Rock. “And if anything, it seems like what they’re doing is much more coordinated than what we saw in North Dakota.”
Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
As Line 3 construction got underway in Wisconsin, protesters stalled the pipeline’s progress by locking themselves to equipment and using disabled cars to erect a blockade. Between August and September 2017, police arrested at least 13 people. Incident reports turned over by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office show that during this time, Enbridge security guards routinely contacted sheriff’s deputies to report the activities of pipeline opponents.
In July, a security guard whose LinkedIn page indicated that he worked for Raven Executive and Security Services informed a sheriff’s deputy that his company “monitors the online activities of the pipeline protesters.” Another security officer reported that the company’s excavators had mysteriously been moved, then used his audience with the sheriff’s office to mention a vague tip about Winona LaDuke, the Ojibwe former vice-presidential candidate and a staunch Line 3 opponent. LaDuke had been seen in the area recently, the security officer said, and her “boyfriend” had been heard stating that he wanted to “do something to the pipeline.”
Throughout August, Neo Gabo Benais, who is from Ojibwe country, posted the coordinates of Line 3 construction sites on social media and shared photos and videos taken from inside the sites. The same month, an Enbridge security guard reported to the sheriff’s office that he had “posted threatening messages on Facebook.” Another caller identified as a Securitas employee said he had been seen “driving slowly around the pipeline 3.”
Neo Gabo Benais told The Intercept that in 2002, an Enbridge pipeline ruptured near where he lived and fished in Minnesota, spilling 252,000 gallons of crude into a marsh. “I’m just trying to spend their money up,” he said. “It’s really a waste of time, them surveilling me.”
According to its website, Raven is “owned and operated by current and former law enforcement professionals.” In 2015, the company launched Raven Executive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle services. A filing with Federal Aviation Administration indicates that Raven intended to utilize its drones to inspect “energy pipelines.”
Securitas is an enormous, publicly traded corporation with operations in over 50 countries. It owns the nation’s oldest private security company, Pinkerton, which became notorious for its union-breaking activities and infiltration of leftist organizations at the turn of the 20th century.
Neither Raven nor Securitas responded to requests for comment. Enbridge did not respond to requests for comment.
Photo: Dan Kraker/Minnesota Public Radio via AP
In September 2017, the Wisconsin Statewide Intelligence Center emailed information about recent arrestees to the fusion centers in their home states of Minnesota, South Dakota, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana.
The next month, an analyst from the Minnesota Fusion Center pledged to ensure that law enforcement in disparate counties would be “well-informed of any potential hazards relating to the Line 3 project.” In an email sent to the fusion center, a crime analyst from Minnesota’s Beltrami County noted, “There is concern about Winona LaDuke.” The analyst listed four properties that LaDuke was suspected of owning and speculated about which might be used to put up protesters.
Another email sent to the fusion center noted that Jackie Fielder, a San Francisco-based organizer with the fossil fuel divestment organization Mazaska Talks, had arrived at one of the protest camps in Minnesota. The report speculated not on criminal activity but on whether her presence could signal “increased support from Mazaska Talks and its connections.”
“A fusion center has no business keeping track of a nonviolent divestment campaign that aims to promote Indigenous rights,” Fielder told The Intercept.
LaDuke agreed. “I don’t understand why I’m being looked at as a criminal when a corporation is proposing to destroy my water,” she said. “I am not a criminal, I am a water protector.”
By May 2018, the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office had established a shared web resource concerning Line 3 opposition, to which 19 police officers in eight jurisdictions had access, as well as the fusion center.
“The Minnesota Fusion Center recognizes and values citizens’ constitutionally protected rights to speak, assemble, and demonstrate peacefully,” Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said in a statement. “Because public demonstrations are sometimes targeted by individuals seeking to commit crimes or promote violence, the fusion center routinely monitors public sources for potential hazards to the people of Minnesota and its critical infrastructure.”
Brendan McQuade, assistant sociology professor at SUNY Cortland and author of a forthcoming book on fusion centers, sees the Minnesota records as part of a more troubling trend. “What the police aren’t mentioning is that people will likely be living lives of terror and privation by the end of the century due to climate change, and it’s these battles right now that will decide whether that happens,” he said. “Instead, they are casting even entirely nonviolent actions as threats to so-called critical infrastructure.”
Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, left, and Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney at the Morton County Courthouse on April 4, 2018, in Mandan, N.D.
Photo: Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune via AP
As law enforcement and emergency managers tightened their coordination and intelligence-sharing on protesters, they repeatedly turned for guidance to North Dakota officials who had been involved in repressing the Standing Rock fight.
In September 2017, Cody Schulz, then-disaster recovery chief for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services, gave a quasi-scientific overview of NoDAPL at a Minnesota emergency managers conference. He claimed that at any given time, around 400 protesters at Standing Rock were “willing to commit criminal acts,” while 80 were “willing to commit dangerous or violent acts.” Other slides attempted to justify the use of fire hoses and dogs to quell protests and stressed the need for a robust public relations operation.
In late 2017 and early 2018, members of the Cass County Sheriff’s Office, a major architect of the DAPL police operation, gave three more presentations on lessons learned in North Dakota to law enforcement in Wisconsin and Minnesota, including an association of SWAT officers.
At the Platts Pipeline Expansion and Development Conference in November 2017, Delve CEO Jeff Berkowitz and Off the Record Strategies CEO Mark Pfeifle gave a presentation to pipeline executives on how to prepare should opposition to future infrastructure projects develop the way NoDAPL did.
As part of law enforcement’s counterinformation campaign in response to NoDAPL, Berkowitz said, Delve developed “sort of fake ‘wanted’ posters, with the rap sheets of some of these folks.”
Pfeifle said one of his company’s goals was to deter protesters from becoming involved in the movement to begin with. “A lot of things that we were doing were being done to put a marker down for the protesters. And, ‘OK, if you’re going to go protest somewhere? There’s going to be consequences from it.’”
Prior to their work for the National Sheriffs’ Association, both executives spent years as elite Republican spin doctors. Pfeifle worked as an Iraq War public relations specialist for the George W. Bush administration, while Berkowitz directed the Republican National Committee’s multimillion-dollar opposition research operation.
Neither Delve nor Off the Record Strategies responded to requests for comment.
Photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune/AP
Construction is already complete across most of Line 3’s route, and Enbridge has told shareholders that it intends to have oil flowing by November. But it awaits final approvals in Minnesota from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and several permitting agencies. This past June, despite receiving 68,000 comments opposing Line 3, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission unanimously voted to grant Enbridge a “certificate of need” for the project.
The Minnesota Department of Commerce filed a lawsuit challenging the approval last month — a rare instance of one state agency suing another over a major infrastructure project. Outgoing Gov. Mark Dayton made a statement opposing the project on the grounds that most of the tar sands bitumen would not meet demand in Minnesota but would instead “flow through our state to supply other states and countries.” Gov. Tim Waltz told reporters in January that he was weighing whether to drop the lawsuit.
Resistance to new pipelines has taken a major toll on the tar sands industry. In August, a Canadian judge scuttled federal permits for the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion, ruling that the federal government had failed to adequately consult with Indigenous nations in the pipeline’s path. In November, responding to a lawsuit by tribal and environmental groups, a federal judge in Montana ordered the U.S. State Department to complete a new environmental impact review of the Keystone XL pipeline.
In December, Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced that her government would curtail the province’s oil production, particularly from tar sands, saying that there wasn’t enough pipeline capacity to ship the crude to market, although sagging prices and market saturation are also major factors.
“Enbridge — they need this to stay alive. This is their last vampire suck of blood. I’m looking at this vampire, and I’m like, I’ll do everything I can for you not to get that,” LaDuke said. “From Lake Superior to the border to the river where the pipeline will come in if they are allowed to go forward — the majority of this area is water, 10,000 lakes. It is a beautiful place, so it is worth fighting for.”
The post How Police, Private Security, and Energy Companies Are Preparing for a New Pipeline Standoff appeared first on The Intercept.
Roughly six months ago at New York’s Sing Sing prison, John Dukes says he was brought out with cellmates to meet a corrections counselor. He recalls her giving him a paper with some phrases and offering him a strange choice: He could go up to the phone and utter the phrases that an automated voice would ask him to read, or he could choose not to and lose his phone access altogether.
Dukes did not know why he was being asked to make this decision, but he felt troubled as he heard other men ahead of him speaking into the phone and repeating certain phrases from the sheets the counselors had given them.
“I was contemplating, ‘Should I do it? I don’t want my voice to be on this machine,’” he recalls. “But I still had to contact my family, even though I only had a few months left.”
So when it was his turn, he walked up to the phone, picked up the receiver, and followed a series of automated instructions. “It said, ‘Say this phrase, blah, blah, blah,’ and if you didn’t say it clearly, they would say, ‘Say this phrase again,’ like ‘cat’ or ‘I’m a citizen of the United States of America.’” Dukes said he repeated such phrases for a minute or two. The voice then told him the process was complete.
“Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this prison system,” he remembers thinking as he walked back to the cell.
Dukes, who was released in October, says he was never told about what that procedure was meant to do. But contracting documents for New York’s new prison phone system, obtained by The Appeal in partnership with The Intercept, and follow-up interviews with prison authorities, indicate that Dukes was right to be suspicious: His audio sample was being “enrolled” into a new voice surveillance system.
In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.
Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona’s Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology (Connecticut did not respond to repeated interview requests; Georgia declined to answer questions on the matter).
Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people’s phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public.
It’s particularly alarming, they add, that the technology’s use in prisons can ensnare people beyond their walls. “Why am I giving up my rights because I’m receiving a call from somebody who has been convicted of a crime?” asks Jerome Greco, a digital forensics attorney at New York’s Legal Aid Society. Greco argues that the mining of outside parties’ voice prints should require a warrant. “If you have a family member convicted of a crime, yet you haven’t been, why are you now having your information being used for government investigations?”
Illustration: Alexander Glandien for The Intercept
Voice-print technology works by dissecting physical features that distinguish individuals’ voices, such as their pitch. With this data, the program’s algorithm generates a computer model of their vocal signatures, known as “voice prints,” which can be stored in a database for comparisons with utterances recorded in the future.
In recent years, voice recognition technology has come to be associated with consumer offerings, like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, but the technology was originally developed for military and intelligence applications. Over a decade ago, as The Intercept reported, U.S. intelligence agencies were using voice recognition programs to identify the voices of top Al Qaeda officials in their online audio postings.
Similarly, the algorithms and structure behind the prison telecommunications firm Securus Technologies’ particular voice software, known as Investigator Pro, were developed in part through a $50 million grant from the Department of Defense. The software was licensed to JLG Technologies, a company that Securus acquired in 2014. According to Securus’s 2017 proposal for New York, the technology was developed because “DOD needed to identify terrorist calls out of the millions of calls made to and from the United States every day.”
But it wasn’t long before major prison technology firms, such as Securus and Global Tel Link, began marketing the technology to U.S. jurisdictions that were seeking to extract and store voice prints associated with incarcerated people in their systems. “IPRO [Investigator Pro] has a 10-year track record of providing pinpoint voice accuracy capability country-wide in 243 states, county, and local correctional agencies,” notes Securus in the Pinal County contract.
The enrollment of incarcerated people’s voice prints allows corrections authorities to biometrically identify all prisoners’ voices on prison calls, and find past prison calls in which the same voice prints are detected. Such systems can also automatically flag “suspicious” calls, enabling investigators to review discrepancies between the incarcerated person’s ID for the call and the voice print detected. Securus did not respond to a request for comment on how it defined “suspicious.” The company’s Investigator Pro also provides a voice probability score, rating the likelihood that an incarcerated person’s voice was heard on a call.
Michael Lynch, an intelligence coordinator for the Alachua County Jail in northern Florida, confirmed that his county recently agreed to purchase Securus’s voice recognition program. Lynch said that the voice prints produced by the program will be permanently archived at Securus’s facility in Texas. He said the jail hopes the technology will address the problem of incarcerated people using each others’ personal identification numbers, or PINs. “The problem is inmates that are committing other criminal acts or contacting victims or witnesses and using other inmates’ PIN to do that,” he said in a phone call. “Voice [biometrics] will tell us who’s making the calls.”
Image of Securus’s Investigator Pro VoiceSearch tool from a 2017 approved contract proposal to Pinal County, Ariz.
Screenshot: The Investigator Pro
Securus’s voice recognition program can also identify the voices of people outside prisons, both former prisoners and those who have never been incarcerated but communicate with people inside.
New York and Texas state corrections officials confirmed that their agencies retain the voice prints of formerly incarcerated people, like Dukes, allowing them to identify them by name if currently incarcerated people call them in the future.
And New York and Pinal County, Arizona, confirmed that their voice recognition programs can identify the voices of outside callers.
New York’s contract proposal with Securus states that outsiders’ voice samples can be used to “search for all other calls” in their recorded call database to find where those voices occur. In an email, New York prison officials confirmed that this program will give investigators the ability to extract a voice print from an outside caller and use it to “identify that a call recipient has participated in multiple phone calls.” They added that the program will not have names associated with outsiders’ voice prints.
In a statement, Pinal County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Navideh Forghani also confirmed this outsider voice-tracking capability, noting that while their software does not identify non-incarcerated people by name, it can track “suspicious activities,” such as “multiple inmates speaking to one person on the outside on a reoccurring basis.”
With this technology, a press release for Investigator Pro notes, an investigator can now answer questions like, “What other inmates are talking to this particular called party?” and “Are any of my current inmates talking to this released inmate?”
Prisoners’ rights advocates worry that outsider voice surveillance technology could also be used to coordinate crackdowns against prison organizing campaigns.
“Using this technology to trace the voices of outside callers and flag those who speak with more than one person in a system, staff can use calls with outside organizers to quickly identify the incarcerated activist they support,” said Bianca Tylek, director of the Corrections Accountability Project, which works to curb the influence of commercial interests in the criminal justice system. Tylek noted that during the 2018 national prison strike, corrections staff routinely retaliated against incarcerated activists by using tactics like solitary confinement, job termination, and facility reassignment.
Illustration: Alexander Glandien for The Intercept
Advocates assert that corrections agencies have been building up large-scale voice-print databases with limited input from the public or from incarcerated people and their families. While some state corrections agencies have put out public notices to families about payment options for new phone systems, they seldom mention the voice-print databases, which are rarely discussed outside of industry conferences and internal talks with contractors.
“Every time there’s a new contract, there’s new surveillance, but they don’t say anything,” said Tylek. “I’ve never seen authorities post a public notice about new surveillance updates or tell families.”
Keeping their plans opaque has allowed authorities to quietly pressure incarcerated people into giving up their biometric data — or to enroll them without their knowledge. According to Securus’s 2019 Investigator Pro contract with Alachua County, Florida (which includes Gainesville), “Inmates will participate in a covert voice print enrollment process.”
In Texas, state prisoners must enroll in the voice recognition program if they want to make calls. According to Jeremy Desel, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Investigator Pro’s voice enrollment process is “the lock and key” to the Texas state prison phone system. Likewise, in Pinal County, Arizona, phone access is severely limited for prisoners who decline to enroll in the voice recognition program. “If inmates choose not to participate, they can still utilize the phone system but only to make phone calls to their attorneys,” said Forghani, the county sheriff’s office spokesperson.
In some cases, prisoners participate without even knowing, said Martin Garcia, a 33-year-old who is incarcerated at Sing Sing in New York.
“A lot of guys don’t know technology,” he said. “They’ve been in there so long, they’ve never heard of Google.” The voice enrollment procedure, he continued, is seen as “just another thing they follow to talk to their family.”
Garcia was upset to hear that Securus’s voice-tracking capabilities, as described in its approved contract with the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, could mine prison call databases to identify which other prisoners outside callers had contacted. “Are they criminals just because they’re talking to someone incarcerated?” he said. “To me, you’re criminalizing relationships. Some people may be hesitant to interact with me if they could be put in a database.”
After being briefed by The Appeal and The Intercept about the program, New York State Assembly Member David Weprin publicly called on the state Department of Corrections to give incarcerated people more choice regarding the voice recognition program. At a Tuesday hearing, Weprin, chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Correction, asked the Department of Corrections’ acting commissioner, Anthony J. Annucci, to add a provision that allows incarcerated people with legitimate concerns about voice surveillance to “not be denied phone privileges.” Annucci did not immediately agree to the request, instead pointing out that people have the option to make unmonitored calls to their attorneys.
In a statement to The Appeal and The Intercept, Weprin said he is “concerned with the deployment and use of voice recognition software” in New York state prisons and will be working with his colleagues to further investigate the technology.
Building the DatabasesThe rapid, secretive growth of voice-print databases is “probably not a legal issue, not because it shouldn’t be, but because it’s something laws haven’t entertained yet,” noted Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “It’s not surprising that we’re seeing this around prisons, just because it can be collected easily,” she continued, referring to biometric voice data. “We’re building these databases from the ground up.”
The scale of prisons’ emerging voice biometric databases has not been comprehensively documented nationwide, but, at minimum, they already hold more than 200,000 incarcerated people’s voice prints.
New York’s Department of Corrections, which incarcerates just under 50,000 people, confirmed that approximately 92 percent of its population had been enrolled in the voice recognition system. State corrections authorities for Florida, Texas, and Arkansas, which hold about 260,000 prisoners combined, also confirmed that they are using Investigator Pro’s voice recognition technology. Connecticut and Georgia’s state corrections systems, which incarcerate roughly 13,000 and roughly 52,000 people, respectively, have also purchased Securus’s voice-print technology.
The databases of recorded calls from which prison authorities could search for outsiders’ voice samples could also potentially include millions of recorded calls for state and countywide systems. According to the design requirements New York’s Department of Corrections gave to Securus, for example, the company must be able to record every call, archive all call recordings for a year, and maintain any calls flagged for investigative purposes “indefinitely” through the life of the contract, which ends in 2021. (In the documents, Securus estimated that 7 percent of prison calls made per year would total 1.5 million calls, suggesting that the call database could retain over 20 million calls.)
Greco of the Legal Aid Society says he understands the value of such monitoring capabilities, pointing out that incarcerated people do sometimes have to deal with other prisoners taking their PINs or threatening their families for money. But the extension of this technology into the monitoring of people outside prisons, and the lack of transparency and regulation of these new databases concerns him. If voice prints were shared with police, for example, they could try to compare them with voices caught on a wiretap, he notes, despite scientists’ skepticism about the reliability of voice print matches for criminal prosecutions. New York State’s Department of Corrections declined to answer questions regarding whether it would share the data with other agencies.
Either way, Greco said, there’s cause for concern. “Once the data exists, and it becomes an accepted part of what’s happening, it’s very hard to protect it or limit its use in the future,” he said.
That has implications far beyond prisons, argues Garcia, the man incarcerated at Sing Sing. “First you use this on the people marginalized in society, criminalizing the families of those incarcerated,” he said. “But, especially in Trump’s America, the sky is the limit with this.”
The post Prisons Across the U.S. Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People’s Voice Prints appeared first on The Intercept.
The former chair and CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, speaks during a presentation on his book “From the Ground Up” on Jan. 28, 2019 in New York City.
Photo: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
Is this a joke?
Billionaire Howard Schultz is considering running for president of the United States. The ex-Starbucks CEO and former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics, who has zero experience in government or politics, thinks Donald Trump is “not qualified” to be commander-in-chief.
To misquote Phoebe Buffay from “Friends”: “Hello, kettle? This is Howard. You’re black.”
If Trump is “not qualified,” then what the hell is Schultz? In all fairness to the pretend president, Trump is able to command crowds and attention like no other politician on the right. His name recognition was off the charts when he ran in the Republican primaries in 2016. The former Starbucks boss, on the other hand, is a charisma-free zone; the only crowds he seems to attract are his humiliating Twitter ratios.
The truth is that despite claiming to be “bored” by Trump, and voicing his opposition to the president’s “vitriolic display of bigotry and hate and divisiveness,” Schultz has far more in common with the reality star-turned-POTUS than he might like to admit. His Trumpian ego has made him — an old, rich white guy who got rich selling coffee! — think he can be Leader of the Free World™.
There’s also his Trumpian dishonesty. Schultz, the “lifelong Democrat,” has spent the past few days hurling a series of false accusations not against Trump, but against Democrats. He attacked Sen. Kamala Harris’s support for “Medicare for All” as “not American,” which is absurd given that Medicare itself has been around for more than 50 years, while “Medicare for All” is polling at 70 percent, with majority support even among Republicans.
He claimed that the “majority of Americans” are opposed to “a 70 percent income tax in America,” as suggested by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Another lie. A recent Hill-HarrisX survey found that 59 percent of voters support the Ocasio-Cortez tax proposal (which only applies to income over $10 million), including a clear majority of independents.
Schultz also said that “the greatest threat domestically to the country is this $21 trillion debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations.” Again, false. A number of leading economists disagree with him on the debt. And, as HuffPost’s Zach Carter points out, “his $21.5 trillion debt monster is an exaggeration: It includes trillions of dollars the government owes to itself.” (Oh, and for the record, a whopping 2 percent of Americans cite the federal debt as “the most important problem facing the country today.”)
There’s the Trumpian stinginess too. According to an investigation by The Young Turks, in 2017, Schultz donated less than 1 percent of his $3.4 billion net worth to his own charity. “All told,” reported TYT, “Schultz has given an estimated two-and-a-half percent of his wealth to the family nonprofit, based on tax filings dating back to 1999.” Sound familiar?
The former Starbucks CEO doesn’t like paying higher taxes, either. Schultz, the self-styled deficit hawk, isn’t opposed to Trump’s deficit-busting tax cuts — only the size of them. He has lambasted Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s new proposal for a wealth tax as “ridiculous.” Should we be surprised? As a billionaire himself, he’d have to pay a 3 percent wealth tax, according to the Warren plan.
His beloved overpriced coffee chain doesn’t have a much better record on taxation. In 2017, Starbucks’s European division paid a mere $5.9 million in taxes, on U.K. profits of $213 million — or an effective tax rate of just 2.8 percent.
Then there’s the Trumpian ignorance. The self-deprecating Schultz, unlike the president, is willing to concede that he is not the “smartest person in the room.” That may be an understatement, though. For a start, why does he think he has any chance of winning the presidency in 2020? What’s his route to victory in a two-party system? Schultz, the political neophyte, does not even understand how presidential candidates get on the ballot. He thinks that polls showing that 4 in 10 Americans identify as “independents” means his own independent presidential campaign will attract widespread support — when reams of evidence suggest that self-styled independents are (closet) partisans. “Only about 7 percent of people who identify as independents truly don’t like either party,” reported NPR on Tuesday, citing research from political scientist Samara Klar, author of the book “Independent Politics.”
Schultz, it seems, is Trump without the tan, the bluster, or the border wall. And if he decides to run in 2020, his independent candidacy, to quote former Obama strategist David Axelrod, will be a “gift” to the Republican incumbent — potentially splitting the anti-Trump vote and giving this racist disaster of a president another four years in the Oval Office.
Guess who agrees?
Team Trump. Consider the president’s very deliberate tweet on Monday, goading the coffee mogul to enter the 2020 race as an independent:
Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the “smartest person.” Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019
Consider also the very deliberate praise heaped on Schultz by the likes of Hugh Hewitt and the hosts of “Fox and Friends.”
Is there a way, then, of dissuading the ill-informed, egomaniacal Schultz from burning through hundreds of millions of dollars on a pointless, Trump-boosting presidential campaign? Will op-eds like this work? How about a consumer boycott of Starbucks? Maybe more protests at his book-signing events? Kudos, in fact, to the protester who heckled Schultz at a Barnes & Noble in New York on Monday evening, summarizing the case against him in eight pithy words: “Don’t help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire asshole.”
The post The Unbearable Stupidity of Howard Schultz’s Presidential Fantasy appeared first on The Intercept.
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The White House is openly plotting to bring down the government of Nicolas Maduro in Caracas. It is being openly promoted as a campaign to steal Venezuelan oil for the benefit of U.S. corporations, and some powerful Democrats are cheering Trump on and joining the conspiracy. Elliott Abrams, one of the premiere butchers of the U.S. dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s, has been named the point man in the effort to bring regime change to Venezuela. This week on Intercepted: Investigative journalist Allan Nairn talks about the history of U.S. crimes in Central America, the time he told Abrams, on national television, he should stand trial for war crimes, and the threat of U.S. military action in Venezuela. Corporate media coverage of Venezuela has been atrocious and largely uniform with the role of successive U.S. administrations in destabilizing the country almost never highlighted. Former Hugo Chávez adviser Eva Golinger and journalist and educator Roberto Lovato discuss how Venezuela was thrust into economic crisis, who is responsible, and what Washington really wants.
Transcript coming soon.
The post Donald Trump and the Yankee Plot to Overthrow the Venezuelan Government appeared first on The Intercept.
A deep freeze is working its way through the Midwest. Schools are closed and states of emergency have been declared as cities from Minneapolis to Indianapolis deal with subzero temperatures that plunged to 20 below. The chill is the result of a polar vortex—and because of the marvel of modern meteorology, which precisely predicted the event a week ago, cities and states were able to cobble together response plans ahead of time. Of course, this cold front shouldn’t calm any anxieties about climate change: The past four years were the warmest on record.
After going 35 days without pay during the government shutdown, many federal-government workers were left lining up at food banks or filing for unemployment assistance. The longest-ever shutdown was a glaring reminder of the financial instability of working- and even middle-class Americans—and the lack of social programs to keep them afloat. It could take some households months to fully recover, especially in families with government contractors, who likely won’t receive any back pay.
Venezuela’s economy has been on the verge of collapse, leading to a mass exodus of millions of Venezuelans to neighboring Colombia. The country has responded to the influx of migrants in an unorthodox way: welcoming them with open arms. The continued stream of border crossers, however, is heightening the pressure on Colombia to reconsider its strategy. Venezuela’s economic crisis has also incited a political power struggle, and the Trump administration has flirted with sending troops to the country to force the ouster of Nicolás Maduro. Conor Friedersdorf writes that, if Trump indeed stokes a war, it would be a reckless blunder that should have Congress thinking seriously about impeachment.
Evening Reads
(Tim Kopra / NASA)
If humans ever do travel to a planet beyond Earth—whether it’s by choice or necessity—they’ll face a major challenge apart from just getting there: food. The journey would be so long that astronauts would need to grow crops from seeds in space, but figuring out how to achieve that is easier said than done:
Outer space, as you might expect, is not kind to plants, or people, or most living things, except maybe for tardigrades, those microscopic creatures that look like little bears. If you stuck a daisy out of the International Space Station and exposed it to the vacuum of space, it would perish immediately. The water in its cells would rush out and dissipate as vapor, leaving behind a freeze-dried flower.
→ Read the rest.
(Towfiqu Photography / Getty)
Millions of struggling Americans are turning to their grandparents as a safety net. The average grandparent couple gives more than $2,000 to their grandkids each year—an amount that has risen considerably over the past decade:
But no matter how well intentioned these transactions are, the fact that many young Americans turn to the Bank of Grandma and Grandpa is evidence of their struggles and the lack of an adequate safety net to keep them afloat. Giving money to grandchildren is also one way that well-off families pass on privilege and wealth not just to the next generation, but to the one after that—a way that Americans stay rooted in the social stratum into which they were born.
→ Read the rest.
Coretta Scott King, who passed away 13 years ago today, is remembered as an afterthought to her larger-than-life husband, Martin Luther King Jr. But, as The Atlantic wrote in its reflection on the latter’s legacy, Scott King was more than her husband’s sidekick:
Notably, she pushed him to come out publicly against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He held back, fearing criticism, but she did not. In 1965, she addressed an anti-war rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York. Later that year, she took her husband’s place when he changed his mind about addressing a peace rally in Washington, D.C. Asked whether he had educated his wife on these issues, he said, “She educated me.”
Read the full piece by Jeanne Theoharis.
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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It’s Wednesday, January 30. The first day of negotiations to avoid a second government shutdown kicked off today on Capitol Hill, where 17 senators and representatives who have been charged with finding a solution to the impasse over border-wall funding have until February 15 to reach a deal. President Donald Trump said that conferees are “wasting time” if they don’t discuss a physical barrier.
Let’s Talk: Michael Cohen’s testimony to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees next month will take place behind closed doors—which means he’ll likely be more forthcoming about Trump and the Trump campaign’s alleged dealings with Russia than he would be during a public testimony, reports Natasha Bertrand.
On Tap: Stacey Abrams recently told The Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk II that she’s considering running for a Georgia Senate seat in 2020, or again for its governorship in 2022. Next week, she’ll be the first black woman to deliver a party’s State of the Union rebuttal, and the fact that the Democratic Party has tapped her for the task is a sure sign that it has big plans for her in the future.
Still Running Short: The shutdown is over, but many federal workers and their families are still struggling. One federal contractor told The Atlantic’s Joe Pinsker that she’s been forced to ration her children’s asthma medication to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the House approved a pay raise of 2.6 percent for federal workers, after Trump canceled a scheduled 2.1 percent raise in December.
The Will of the People?: In November, Utah voters approved a Medicaid expansion that would have ensured free coverage for 150,000 people in the state. Now the Republican legislature is actively trying to place restrictions on that coverage—a move that they say will make it fiscally responsible, but that advocates say is “trampling on the most fundamental principles of representative democracy.”
Bundle Up: Forecasts predicted that some places in America might feel as cold as 50 degrees below zero today, forcing many to stay home from work and school. Some of these forecasts accurately predicted the exact degrees the temperature descended to, demonstrating just how accurate modern weather forecasting has become.
— Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle
Snapshot
A warning sign is covered by ice at Clark Square Park in Evanston, Illinois. A deadly arctic deep freeze enveloped the Midwest with record-breaking temperatures on Wednesday, triggering widespread closures of schools and businesses, and prompting the U.S. Postal Service to take the rare step of suspending mail delivery to a wide swath of the region. (Nam Y. Huh / AP)
Ideas From The AtlanticThe Environmental Issue Republicans Can’t Ignore (Cynthia Barnett)
“We must hope that the red-state governors’ attention to water will lead them to act on climate change, because the sorry truth is that even the boldest work on water won’t mean much if we
can’t also stop warming.” → Read on.
Teaching the Bible in Public Schools Is a Bad Idea—For Christians (Jonathan Merritt)
“If conservative Christians don’t trust public schools to teach their children about sex or science, though, why would they want to outsource instruction about sacred scripture to government employees?” → Read on.
There’s No Case for War With Venezuela (Conor Friedersdorf)
“To me, bluffing when one cannot lawfully follow through is a generally high-risk, foolhardy approach to international relations, but it’s still preferable to the alternative explanation: a risky, unilateral war of choice that shouldn’t even be a possibility.” → Read on.
◆ Why Trump’s Superfans Dig Ocasio-Cortez (Ben Schreckinger, Politico)
◆ The Undoing of a Nation (Anthony Broadman, High Country News)
◆ TAKEN: How Police Departments Make Millions by Seizing Property (Anna Lee, Nathaniel Cary, and Mike Ellis, The Greenville News
◆ The Personal Toll of Whistle-Blowing (Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker)
◆ Virginia Governor Northam Faces Fierce Conservative Backlash Over Abortion Bill (Laura Vozzella, The Washington Post)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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As the sun rose on Wednesday, 26 million Americans peered out their windows onto a land chilled to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. And that’s when the air was still: When the wind picked up, as it did from Chicago to the Dakotas, it could feel like it was 50 below. Boiling water tossed from a pot turned into a cloud of snow before it could hit the ground.
The experience was half Uz, half Oz. But had Dorothy’s house been relocated to Mount Everest, not Munchkinland, her journey still would have been more pleasant than many midwesterners’ Wednesdays. They spent the day essentially shut down, as hundreds of schools, offices, universities, and even an ice castle closed. The National Weather Service advised against “talking” or “taking deep breaths” outside so as to keep delicate lung tissue from freezing on contact.
The vortex was felt nearly across the entire continent. As many as 225 million Americans—from Alabama to Nevada—could have started their 8 a.m. commute in below-freezing temperatures.
It is dangerous, record-breaking, can’t-look-away weather. Yet this cold snap’s arrival was preceded by a marvel so spectacular that we hardly noticed it: It was correctly predicted. As early as a month ago, forecasters knew that colder-than-average weather would likely strike North America this month; a week ago, computer models spit out some of the same figures that appeared on thermometers today.
Meteorologists have never gotten a shiny magazine cover or a brooding Aaron Sorkin film, and the weather-research hub of Norman, Oklahoma, is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Palo Alto. But over the past few decades, scientists have gotten significantly—even staggeringly—better at predicting the weather.
How much better? “A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980,” says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. “Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future.”
The paper is a birthday present from meteorology to itself: The American Meteorological Society turns 100 this year. But it also acts as a good report card on how far weather prediction has come.
“Modern 72-hour predictions of hurricane tracks are more accurate than 24-hour forecasts were 40 years ago,” the authors write. The federal government now predicts storm surge, stream level, and the likelihood of drought. It has also gotten better at talking about its forecasts: As I wrote in 2017, the National Weather Service has dropped professional jargon in favor of clear, direct, and everyday language.
“Everybody’s improving, and they’re improving a lot,” says Richard Alley, an author of the paper and a geoscientist at Penn State.
With the current polar vortex, the first signs came almost a month in advance. On the final day of 2018, scientists detected what they call a “sudden stratospheric warming event,” high above the North Pole. The stratosphere, a layer of air about 20 miles above the surface, was being rocked by waves of warm air from below.
“What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” warned the meteorologist Andrew Freedman at the time. “Sudden stratospheric warming events are known to affect the weather in the U.S. and Europe on a time delay.” The next 60 days would probably be colder than average, he said.
By January 20, much of North America hit its first cold snap of the season. Then, a week ago, the European weather model began to project that a dangerous air mass would descend over the central United States. “It’s safe to say that the [European] weather model cannot get any colder for the Midwest,” said the meteorologist Ryan Maue on Twitter. “Wind chills would be in the -40 degree to -50 degree Fahrenheit range as well. This would be bad … but hopefully the model moderates.”
The model barely budged. On Wednesday morning, Minneapolis recorded a wind chill of 52 degrees below zero.
This kind of pattern—where a seasonal climatic projection (“It will be colder than average at the end of the month”) precedes a definite week-ahead forecast (“It will be 40 degrees below zero on Tuesday”)—will become more common in the years to come. Meteorologists are increasingly uniting weather models and climate models, allowing them to project the general contours of a season as it begins.
“The conventional wisdom was that weather prediction would saturate after a week or so” because the atmosphere is chaotic, Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, told me. But “new areas of forecasting … really take an Earth-systems-science approach. It’s no longer just [modeling] the atmosphere by itself.”
Understanding months-long events like El Niño, for instance, has allowed meteorologists to go beyond the seven-day forecast. Alley, the Penn State professor, says that he is awed by the new models. Well-studied features of Earth’s climate—like the temperate Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean—emerge in computer models, even though developers have written code that only mimics basic physics. “You translate Newtonian physics into a sphere and get Coriolis [force],” he says. “There’s no line in the code that says, Please make a Gulf Stream. But it is the physics of the Earth, so when you spin it up, the Gulf Stream appears because it has to.”
We are now surrounded by the products of these miraculous models. In 2009, a back-of-the-envelope study estimated that U.S. adults check the weather forecast about 300 billion times per year. Perhaps in all that checking we have forgotten how strange the forecast is, how almost supernatural it is that people can describe the weather before it happens. More than 1,000 years ago, the Spanish archbishop Agobard of Lyon argued that no witch could control the weather because only God could understand it. “Man does not know the paths of the clouds, nor their perfect knowledges,” he wrote. He cited the Book of Job for authority, which asks: “Dost thou know when God … caused the light of his cloud to shine? Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds … ?”
It’s no slight to any whirlwind—arctic, divine, or otherwise—to point out that Americans now certainly do know the balancings of the clouds. There is a basic-cable channel devoted to the topic.
VILLA DEL ROSARIO, Colombia—Thousands of people stand idly about, families sitting near heaps of luggage. Groups cram into every bit of available shade, eager to ignore the shouts of salesmen hawking potatoes or medication. Nearby, bus companies promote “no passport” travel inland.
This is what a migration crisis looks like. For more than two years, a steady stream of people—many toting little more than ragged backpacks and bags—have crossed into this Colombian town and others like it, escaping their crumbling homeland, Venezuela, which has been weathering an economic collapse and, more recently, a political crisis.
Thus far, Colombia has opened its doors as millions of people have flocked to its border. Politicians here know there is no way to keep these migrants out, so instead of railing against its neighbor or raising the drawbridge, they have focused on integrating those who arrive, efforts that have been commended by aid agencies. But with almost 1.5 million Venezuelans here, equivalent to about 3 percent of Colombia’s population, and more arriving every day, the country may soon be entirely overwhelmed.
[Read: Latin America gets its own migrant crisis]
The difficulty is shared the world over by countries bordering troubled states, whether it be Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey having to cope with the fallout of the conflict in Syria, or Bangladesh erecting refugee camps for Rohingya Muslims leaving Myanmar. While news coverage often focuses on the impact of migration on the United States and Europe, it is these neighboring countries that bear the brunt of the exodus and that must deal with the humanitarian crises they cause. And like those countries, without ample foreign aid, Colombia is near the point where it will not be able to cope.
“I’ve never seen a government trying this hard to register people and leave the borders open,” Trisha Bury, a deputy director for the International Rescue Committee, a migration nonprofit, told me near the Venezuelan border. “Unfortunately, the scale of this crisis, and the speed at which it changes, is more than Colombia can handle.”
A Venezuelan woman and her son talk to Colombian police officers in Villa del Rosario before being deported to Venezuela in August 2018. (Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)Just 10 years ago, Colombians looked up to their neighbors to the east. Not only were Venezuelans the wealthiest people on the continent, but the country had the most equal income distribution, as well as a fiercely patriotic and charismatic leader and ample energy reserves. Colombians listened with bewilderment and awe as Hugo Chávez, the self-proclaimed revolutionary president of Venezuela, moved the masses and called for a proud pan-Latino identity. Millions even fled Colombia for Venezuela, mostly rural poor displaced by their country’s decades-long civil war. No one imagined then that the two countries’ relationship would change so dramatically.
When Chávez died, in 2013, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, inherited a country in decline. The economy was cratering, and inflation was accelerating. Maduro, blaming a Colombian conspiracy for the economic problems, expelled thousands of Colombians living in a frontier area and shut the border.
[Read: How populism wrecked Venezuela]
When it finally reopened, the flow of people began going in the opposite direction. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans poured into Colombia on the first Sunday the border was open, in July 2016. Initially, many simply bought medicine and food and returned home to Venezuela, though some stayed. As the situation worsened in Venezuela, that shift became more permanent: At least 65,000 Venezuelans moved into Colombia in the first 90 days after the reopening; a year later, that figure had risen to 470,000; and in November 2018, it surpassed 1 million. An estimated 150,000 people have migrated to or through Colombia from Venezuela each month for the past year. That’s about as much as one of the infamous “migrant caravans” that capture attention in the United States per day, every day.
The UN has said it expects the numbers of migrants to become comparable with those crossing the Mediterranean in 2015. By 2021, the Colombian foreign minister has said, his country may be playing host to 4 million Venezuelans. The figures are shocking in any circumstance, let alone for a country that has experienced little incoming migration in recent memory.
Those crossing the border include people such as Gustavo Colón. “I’m going to walk until I find work,” Colón, who used to work at a chicken-processing plant in Maracay, Venezuela, told me. “That’s my mission.”
The 23-year-old was resting by the roadside after a day’s walk into Colombia, eating a tamale that a local had given him. The Venezuelan’s goal was to make some money to send home to his wife and newborn so that they could eventually take the bus to join him on this side of the border. The tamale, rice and chicken stuffed in a banana leaf, was the heartiest meal he could remember eating, he said.
“I thank all the Colombians for having received us Venezuelans so kindly,” he said before resuming his journey, heading down a mountainous highway alongside thousands of his countrymen.
Colombia has never tried to stop people like Colón from coming in. Officials knew they couldn’t. The border between the countries, much like the one dividing the United States from Mexico, runs more than 1,000 miles through open country and is punctuated by hundreds of illegal crossings.
Venezuelans walk along a pathway to try to reach Colombia via an illegal border crossing in August 2018. (Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters)From the very start, the national migration authority here worked to document the new arrivals, but struggled to keep up. It issued hundreds of thousands of identity cards to Venezuelans, allowing them to come and go freely within a specially designated border zone, though not further inland, and created a new immigration status applicable to Venezuelans already in the country. More than half a million Venezuelans were given the right to work. Though officials extended the registration period three weeks past its scheduled conclusion, the program expired in late December 2018. Officials say they are adapting the program; analysts say this is likely because they expected the influx would have slowed by now.
According to Felipe Muñoz, a former official at the Inter-American Development Bank who is now the Colombian official in charge of running the border zone, his country wants to shift the migrant issue from a humanitarian situation to “a process of development” whereby Venezuelans “can produce and earn income.” The Colombian authorities, he said, “are developing policy to help them earn.”
[Read: How seriously should the world take Trump’s Venezuela threat?]
This influx could present an opportunity for economic growth in Colombia. If properly registered and settled, the new arrivals could start small businesses, generating employment and income across the country. “There is vast literature in economics showing how migrants are entrepreneurs at a much higher rate than locals,” said Dany Bahar, a Venezuelan-born economist who studies migration at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “The act of migrating itself is an act of risk taking, and that’s the kind of profile of an entrepreneur.”
Colombia has also made a major effort to get Venezuelan children in school. The government understands, aid groups often note, the long-term dangers that result when a generation of youths have to fend for themselves on the streets in a country that already struggles with drug trafficking and violence. In 2017, a decree allowed all foreign children to study in Colombian primary schools.
But here, the pressures are beginning to show. Many schools in the border zone have taken in up to 300 students without adding new teachers. As migrants typically settle in the poorest areas of cities, schools with the fewest resources are bearing the heaviest load. And because Venezuelans have access to only limited emergency care at Colombian hospitals, waiting rooms and wards at clinics across the country have become overcrowded. With local housing stock unable to cope with the numbers of newcomers, many migrants can be found sleeping in town plazas.
Muñoz said the government had prioritized support to parts of the country that had the most migrants. But managing these huge numbers remains a challenge, raising worries that Venezuelan doctors or engineers unable to find work will end up picking coffee on Colombian farms, depressing wages for everyone; that children will be diverted into drug gangs; and that untreated health problems could spread.
“It’s impressive that the Colombian government has opened its arms,” Provash Budden, the Americas regional director for the aid organization Mercy Corps, told me. “But there has to be a longer-term plan.”
Olivier Morin, a photographer with Agence France-Presse, recently visited northern Norway to spend some time whale-watching and swimming in a frigid fjord with a group of orcas as they hunted for herring. The Reisafjorden region near the city of Tromso remains a “winter playground” for these whales, even as they are pushed farther north every year because warming waters force the herring ever northward in search of spawning areas that are the right temperature—37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). Although the orca population in the region is thriving at the moment, Norwegian authorities are considering some regulations to further protect the whales.
“There were arms everywhere,” Drew Harvell recalls. “It looked like a blast zone.”
It was 2013, eight days before Christmas. Harvell and her colleagues were walking along Seattle’s Alki Beach, sweeping their headlamps over wet gravel exposed by a receding tide. Wherever they looked, they saw dead and dying sea stars. Some had disintegrated into white mush. Others were still alive, their body riddled with sores and their arms twisting at grotesque angles. Yet others seemed to be pulling themselves apart. “There were arms separating from sea stars, arms walking off by themselves,” says Harvell, an ecologist at Cornell University who studies marine diseases. “That was my first experience of the magnitude of it.”
Similar omens had been accumulating all fall. Harvell had received emails about a mysterious disease outbreak afflicting sea stars in British Columbia. She had read blog posts about “a huge mortality event” that was littering the seafloor with disintegrating arms. She had heard reports that even captive sea stars in the Vancouver Aquarium were dying. This unprecedented phenomenon, known as sea star wasting disease (SSWD), ultimately affected more than 20 species. Similar die-offs had occurred before, but never at this scale. All along the western coast of North America, from Alaska to Mexico, the stars were blinking out.
[Read: The great sea urchin crisis]
Harvell and her colleagues considered a laundry list of possible causes, including storms, pollutants, and radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. But the syndrome always looked like an infection, and in 2014 the team identified a possible culprit—a virus that it called sea-star-associated densovirus, or SSaDV. The virus doesn’t cause SSWD in every affected species, though, so there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the syndrome’s cause (or causes). Its impact, however, is undeniable.
In a new analysis, Harvell collated data from more than 10,000 surveys carried out by trained citizen scientists diving off the Pacific Coast. Their observations showed that SSWD has brought one especially susceptible species—the mighty sunflower star—to near-total ruin.
The sunflower star is the starfish equivalent of a Tyrannosaurus—a huge, voracious, unmistakable alpha predator. With a three-foot diameter, up to 26 arms, and hundreds of tubular feet, it runs down clams, sea urchins, and snails at a top speed of six inches a second. “This thing was as common as a robin,” Harvell says. “You would go on a dive and always see sunflower stars.” But since 2013, the sunflower star has largely vanished from most of its former 2,000-mile range; only in Alaska do appreciable populations still remain. In just a few years, an emerging disease has caused the continental-scale collapse of a once-common species, and has started to remake the underwater world.
“Some people have said that maybe they migrated to deeper water and they’re down there somewhere,” Harvell says. But data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have snuffed out that hope. They show that from 2013 to 2015, the sunflowers completely disappeared from the deep waters off of California and Oregon, and declined by 99.2 percent near Washington. In 2016, NOAA researchers couldn’t find a single individual in almost 700 trawls. This past summer, they saw just one. “That shocked everyone, including me,” Harvell says.
Two photos of the same rock, 20 days apart (Neil McDaniel)The loss of any species is a tragedy. But the loss of the sunflower is especially devastating because it’s a keystone predator—a creature that has a disproportionately large influence on the world. The legendary ecologist Bob Paine coined the keystone concept in 1963, after yanking starfish from a Washington beach and hurling them into the sea. A year later, the mussels that the starfish would have eaten had overrun the shoreline, displaced the creatures that had formerly lived there, and remodeled the landscape.
SSWD is effectively carrying out the same experiment, but on an epic scale. In the absence of the sunflowers, the sea urchins they hunt are running amok, eating their way through the Pacific’s kelp forests. Kelp is a tagliatelle-like seaweed whose meter-tall fronds shelter vast communities of marine life. If the kelp forests fall, an entire ecosystem will fall too, including several commercially important species such as abalone, crab, and countless fish.
Such changes have already begun, and particularly in places where the other major predator of sea urchins—the sea otter—has also declined. Once-lush worlds of green and yellow foliage are now “urchin barrens”—desolate domains of purple spines and chewed stumps. “Kelp forests along the West Coast have been hit hard, and are likely to diminish further as these sunflower-star predators become extremely rare,” says Carol Blanchette from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
[Read: 11 billion pieces of plastic are riddling corals with disease]
“Things are currently not looking great,” says Melissa Miner from the University of California at Santa Cruz. “But from talking to researchers and divers, my understanding is that [the sunflowers] are still present throughout their entire range; you just need to look harder for them now. My hunch is that this is a fast-growing species, which might have the potential to recover quickly if whatever is causing SSWD subsides. I think there is hope.”
But disease is only part of the story. Harvell’s team found that the sunflower’s decline coincided with abnormally strong heat waves, and the higher temperatures rose above their usual levels, the more likely the stars were to disappear. Harvell suspects that warm waters could have either boosted the growth of whatever microbe is behind SSWD or stressed the sunflowers, making them more susceptible to infections. “The warming didn’t necessarily trigger the outbreak, but I think it increased the impact of the disease,” Harvell says.
This may be the norm in the future. In Harvell’s upcoming book, Ocean Outbreak, she documents several cases in which infections have wreaked havoc on coral, abalone, salmon, and other marine creatures. In some cases, the changing climate has worsened these contagions.
Land-living animals face the same double whammy. While the sea stars were disintegrating, on the other side of the world two-thirds of the world’s population of saiga—a bulbous-nosed Asian antelope—dropped dead. They died without warning, in a few days, over an area the size of Florida. And they seem to have been killed by a normally harmless nasal bacterium that, thanks to an unprecedented spell of heat and humidity, infiltrated their bloodstream and poisoned them. Climate change plus contagion equals mass mortality: It’s a chilling equation for a changing world.
Usually, the only things that most Americans can remember about the annual response to the president’s State of the Union address are the memes: the extremely awkward sips of water; the shiny lips and weirdly prominent sports car; the stilted, staged setup. The speaker’s actual remarks, which represent the messaging of the president’s opposition party, are usually secondary—earnest, perfunctory, and then, mercifully, over. The real function of these televised speeches, sandwiched between hours of nitpicking commentary, is to signal that a party has identified its chosen speaker as a rising star.
That’s why the Democrats’ selection of Stacey Abrams to deliver this year’s response is so intriguing. Abrams, who narrowly lost the Georgia governor’s race to the Republican Brian Kemp in November, has perhaps become more prominent and integral to the party since her defeat. The speech will likely function less as an acknowledgment of her potential, and more as a genuine rebuttal to President Donald Trump—one delivered by a politician who’s already become an avatar of effective anti-Trumpism messaging, thanks to her campaign against Kemp, and at a time, days after the government shutdown, when the president is newly vulnerable.
“At a moment when our nation needs to hear from leaders who can unite for a common purpose, I am honored to be delivering the Democratic State of the Union response,” Abrams said in a statement Tuesday, after her speech was announced. “I plan to deliver a vision for prosperity and equality, where everyone in our nation has a voice and where each of those voices is heard.”
Those themes are core pieces of Abrams’s message. On the campaign trail last year, her stump speech was notable for the way it outlined policies in terms of how they’d practically affect voters’ lives and pockets, whether it was connecting a proposed Medicaid expansion to black infant and maternal deaths, or identifying climate change as a culprit in natural disasters in southern Georgia.
Abrams also focused on several issues that are critical to the national political conversation right now, a record she could lean on in trying to create an effective counter to Trump. According to a recent Gallup poll, immigration, health care, and race relations are among voters’ most urgent concerns. In 2018, Abrams became one of the most prominent politicians to promote Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and she backed that expansion as a “starting point” for achieving universal health-care coverage. Her immigration platform included opposition to law-enforcement crackdowns on sanctuary cities and undocumented immigrants. And she is—after losing a race haunted by allegations of voter suppression—undoubtedly the national face of the Democrats’ pro-voting-rights movement; her focus on expanding the electorate undergirded the racial-justice platform that was central to her campaign. “Stacey Abrams reflects our party’s shared values of equality and inclusion,” Alabama Representative Terri Sewell, who is leading the House Democrats’ voting-rights efforts on Capitol Hill, said in response to Abrams’s selection.
The invitation to Abrams comes at a critical time for Democrats. The longest government shutdown in history ended just last week, but not before it exposed new weaknesses in Trump’s public support, as well as deep faults in the American economy. Describing why Abrams was chosen to give the Democrats’ address, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer identified a “lack of leadership” from the administration “as American families are still feeling the impacts of [Trump’s] self-imposed shutdown.” While Americans do largely blame the president for the closures, according to public polling, the shutdown has sharply lowered their opinion of government as a whole and their faith in the economy.
Democrats, at this precarious moment, will be trying to deliver a strong, coherent alternative to the chaos emanating from the White House. And they evidently think Abrams can achieve that: She’s functioning as a sort of political leader in exile, commanding influence among Democrats and being tapped to represent the party despite not holding an office or being officially involved in national-committee leadership. And she is considering running for office again; she told me in a recent interview that she’s weighing her options for either a Senate run in 2020 or a gubernatorial rematch in 2022.
[Read: The Democrats’ Deep South strategy was a winner after all]
Abrams is far different from the past two speakers whom the Democrats have chosen to rebut Trump. Last year, Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy III was tapped to deliver the counter-speech, but he wasn’t as publicly well known: Though Kennedy was and is a rising star, Abrams has already managed to turn a statewide race into a national profile. In 2017, former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear rebutted Trump’s first address to Congress. In a speech staged at a diner in coal country, he delivered a symbolic, heavy-handed appeal to white heartland voters that was once thought to be the most viable path forward for Democrats. In contrast to Beshear, Abrams represents a new electoral strategy for the party, rooted in expanding the Democrats’ voting base and deemphasizing the voters who flipped to Trump.
And unlike the previous two speakers, Abrams is also, noticeably, a black woman. She will be the first black woman to ever deliver such an address, and the first black politician since former Representative J. C. Watts in 1997. Her selection suggests that the Democratic Party wants to keep up with its changing coalition. The elected officials in the national Democratic Party are more racially representative than they’ve ever been, more women are in Congress than ever before, and the field of 2020 Democratic contenders already looks to be the most diverse in any major-party presidential primary. But beyond matters of representation, Abrams’s selection signals that the party views her message as the best encapsulation of its vision in the era of Donald Trump—and as the best counterpunch to a president who’s fighting to remain in control.
Elaine Godfrey contributed additional reporting to this article.
The first Ruth Prawer Jhabvala story I ever read is also the scariest. In “Aphrodisiac,” published in The New Yorker in 2011, a newlywed woman from a rural part of India, accompanied by her childhood nanny, begins life with her new husband’s family, a cosmopolitan clan in Delhi. Their presence seems eerily to link to misfortune. The story keys into themes familiar to those whose lives are often defined by them—Indians, on the subcontinent and abroad: class friction; mother-in-law tension; a belief in supernatural forces, no matter one’s bent of education; a comfort with a range of feminine representation, from evil to saintly.
I read the author’s byline and pictured a young woman of mixed heritage. As a second-generation American born to Indian parents, I thought I saw an emotional peer, a fellow straddler of worlds. The story felt at once at home in The New Yorker and cut from one of the Indian folktale collections I read as a kid, stocked with poisoned nipples and villainous in-laws. It also echoed the class-oriented violence commonly relayed in Indian newspapers, in the vein of the 2008 Man Booker–winning novel, The White Tiger, about a servant who turns on a master, written by the former journalist Aravind Adiga.
I was wrong on the particulars. Jhabvala, who died in 2013, at 85, two years after the publication of “Aphrodisiac,” was, of course, neither a Millennial nor a bearer of Indian blood. She was, however, a master interlocutor, her identity an endless source of confusion for readers who wondered, as I did, what sort of person could pull off this type of work. German and Jewish by birth, she called herself a forever refugee, diverted by World War II to England where she fell in love with the short story, and with a young Parsi architect. With Cyrus Jhabvala, she moved to Delhi in the mid-20th century at the close of the Raj—the shorthand term for British rule in India—by which time the country had become somewhat of a backwater destination for Europeans. She wrote toward the end of 25 years there of her own unhappiness, seeming to draw a link between her state of mind and the place’s “heat and dust,” to cop the title of one of her most famous books.
She was frequently mistaken in the West for being Indian when she began to write fiction. Meanwhile, her outsider’s eye often put off local critics. Perhaps this double vision explains why I wonder at my own attraction to her work. Jhabvala’s vantage point yields a mixed tone in regard to India and Indians that recalls to me the shape of my own youthful attitude toward the aunties and uncles around me in Texas, who lacked my generation’s fluid social mobility—an attitude born of distance and proximity, insight and, occasionally, contempt.
A recent collection of Jhabvala’s short stories, At the End of the Century, packages the writer for a new audience, in a new time. Jhabvala’s career was multifaceted and quietly celebrated: She won an O. Henry Award; a Booker Prize (for the novel Heat and Dust); and two Academy Awards, as one-third of the famous “three-headed god,” as James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, and Jhabvala were known. Fueled in large part by Jhabvala’s spare screenplays—most adapted from novels—Merchant Ivory Productions made a name first as an India-centric house, and then as a reliable source for elegant European period dramas.
Jhabvala may have written of Indians, but she wrote largely for the Western Hemisphere. “I have no fans in India,” she told a Los Angeles Times writer in 1993, with what the article described as a “one-note laugh.” A self-confessed “chameleon” at ease in saris or slacks, Jhabvala doled out insights not often shared across racial or class lines. Such a position—an “our woman in India,” to remix the Graham Greene title—would be harder to pull off today, when few audiences are ever exclusive, when everyone seems able to hear everyone else.
Counterpoint PressThe characters collected in At the End of the Century thus deploy, through Jhabvala’s satirical lens, what could be thought of as endangered speech. “Even physically the English looked cold to her,” goes a line in the story “Miss Sahib,” “with their damp white skins and pale blue eyes.” The England-born teacher who moors the story finds during a stint at home that she longs to return to India, to be once more “surrounded by those glowing coloured skins; and those eyes! The dark, large, liquid Indian eyes! And hair that sprang with such abundance from their heads.” In “A Lovesong for India,” an Englishwoman married to an Indian man loses her vibrancy as she ages, while the Indian wives of her husband’s colleagues evolve from “beautiful girls … into magnificent women.” “A Course of English Studies” features a dreamy Delhi-ite who is in England to study literature. In one scene, she brushes the cheek of her English landlady with a kiss. The “dry, large-pored skin” stirs an oppositional memory: “Mummy’s skin, velvet-smooth and smelling of almond oil.”
Lines that could read as standard Orientalism, here feel more like the opening of a secret. Jhabvala writes how people talk, or how people used to talk. Her stories bespeak a slice of time during which people could both interact with others quite unlike them and talk with the expectation of privacy with people quite like them: a world post–Wright brothers, pre-internet. I think of a comment an aunt made to me with clinical seriousness, one that could double as a line in a Jhabvala story. Recalling how a white American customs officer once stopped in surprise at her year of birth, she outlined a sweeping formula of contrast: “When they’re young, their skin looks better than ours. But when they’re old, ours looks better.”
Jhabvala’s blunt characterizations can edge into typecasting. If they haven’t flowered into magnificent birds, the Indian women in these stories tend to lose their beauty to sloth and food, to widen as the European women in the stories never seem to, to bear paan-stained teeth and an animal scent. “I can’t stand the smell!” yells the prim schoolteacher in “Miss Sahib,” once she’s back in India and no longer consumed by nostalgia. Her target is the overbearing, fleshy Indian woman a few flats below, whom the schoolteacher remembers as a spirited young girl. The neighbor insists on plying the British woman with snacks, to the extent that the latter comes to abhor “not only the smell of the food, but also that of Sharmila’s heavy, perspiring body.” The teacher dreams of respite in cultural terms: of “the green mountains and clean, cool air” to the north of India, of a boarding house of her memory, “with its English landlady and very clean stairs and bathrooms.”
In another story, “An Experience of India,” an unnamed expatriate gets jaundice and similarly turns on a symbol of India she once not only tolerated but also admired. “Although Ramu always wore nicely laundered clothes,” the British narrator tells the reader, of her servant, in her sick state she notes “a smell of perspiration … both sweetish and foul [that] filled me with disgust.” She imagines a vest under his clean shirt, “black with sweat and dirt, which he never took off but slept in at night in the one-room servant quarter where he lived crowded together with all his family in a dense smell of cheap food and bad drains and unclean bodies.”
Visceral strains of commentary on India by non-Indians arguably don’t run through the world as untrammeled as they once did. A memorable recent example became known largely due to the backlash that ensued: Lena Dunham’s 2013 explanation to Rolling Stone that she cut her first and only visit to India short due to an “onslaught of pure humanity.” The realm of fiction arguably keeps open possibilities that nonfiction closes off. Jhabvala, though, didn’t shield herself from recrimination; she openly identified with the emotions so many of her non-Indian characters exhibit in their adopted home. She did so most explicitly in an oft-quoted passage from one of her best-known essays, “Myself in India.” In it, she uses language both personal and universal to describe the condition of the foreigner in India. She also reveals a metaphor central to her work. Just as the British schoolteacher of “Miss Sahib” first loves, then despises, her Indian neighbor, so too does any newcomer to India face a reckoning. “First stage, tremendous enthusiasm—everything Indian is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous; third stage, everything Indian abominable,” Jhabvala wrote, of a cycle she’d been through repeatedly. (“I think of myself as strapped to a wheel,” she continued.)
She herself met India “dazzled and besotted,” she explained. “People said the poverty was biblical, and I’m afraid that was my attitude too. It’s terribly easy to get used to someone else’s poverty if you’re living a middle-class life in it.” In time, she found the poverty unbearable, that “it wasn’t possible to accept it, and I also didn’t want to.” (As self-deprecating as Jhabvala is, a familiar bias can be detected in the balance of her attention: Westerners’ valuations of India can seem tied, as a rule, to how the country makes them feel, as if they, not it, are the subject.)
To overlay biography onto fiction is a practice often used to minimize, rather than illuminate, a writer’s legacy. For a reader aware of Jhabvala’s biography, however, parallel streams in her fiction can seem to insist on comparison. The British wife who accepts India as a cost of matrimony in “A Lovesong for India” might recall Jhabvala’s comments about her own move. “I knew nothing about it,” she wrote at one point, of her interest in the country before marriage. “If my husband had happened to live in Africa, I’d have gone there.” The jaundice that afflicts the character who imagines her servant’s dirty vest echoes Jhabvala’s own case of the illness, contracted during the writing of Heat and Dust. She thus wrote the book in a sort of hallucinatory state, caught “in a wave of revulsion for everything Indian,” according to one assessment of her life, published soon after her death.
Heat and Dust won Jhabvala fame in the West, but received a thornier response in India (the best known pan, by the poet Nissim Ezekiel, called it “stereotyped in its characters and viciously prejudiced in its vision of the Indian scene”). “Once they found out I wasn’t Indian, they didn’t like my books at all,” Jhabvala told The Guardian in 2005, appending her own version of the chorus of critics: “‘She doesn’t look deep; she doesn’t know anything about us.’” The writer Anita Desai—one of Jhabvala’s most prominent Indian admirers, who wrote the foreword for At the End of the Century—crossed paths with the writer when both were young women, and they struck up a friendship. A frequent commenter on Jhabvala’s legacy, Desai once echoed her friend’s notion of an Indian critical insularity driven by insecurity. “It’s very sad that there was, and continues to be, resentment towards a foreigner writing about India with such frankness and irony,” she said in 2005.
Yet if Jhabvala was, as she put it, strapped to a wheel in India, the perception by some critics that she treated characters with varying degrees of care makes sense. Someone who feels emotionally at the mercy of a foreign place might be excused during her toughest times for depicting that place and its inhabitants with less than full humanity. Most of the stories in At the End of the Century feature commentary by cultural adversaries about one another: British women cataloging the strengths and weaknesses of the Indian men and women around them, and vice versa, as if assessing cattle. Jhabvala’s “stories work better,” goes a line in a Washington Post review, written in 1986, “when [she] has more sympathy for her main subject.” More than a decade later, a 2004 New York Times review of a short-story collection blamed her “overdeveloped satirical impulse” on “her state of spiritual exile.” Life as a “perennial outsider” turned her “cold-eyed” as a philosopher or mystic. At a remove, the critic concluded, one cannot perform the task of the novelist: to “enter, at least temporarily, her characters’ illusions in order to recreate them convincingly on the page.”
Indeed, Jhabvala’s moodiness arguably accounts for her strengths. Her hawkish eye pairs with an intolerance for the sort of romanticism that attends other European chroniclers of India. She herself connected the dots between the inheritance she was born into and the one she married into, between a Jewish and Indian sensibility. “I could understand the jokes before I understood Hindi,” she told The Guardian, discussing cultural affinities she found in the realm of Indian family matters and humor. (Affinities of sensibility may account for why Jhabvala at her prickliest reminds me of one of my caustic, clever aunts.)
Jhabvala published Heat and Dust three years before another book on India by a British woman made waves: M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, an epic romance that later inspired film, TV, and musical adaptations. A recent, excellent analysis of Jhabvala’s strengths as a storyteller by the historian Maya Jasanoff for The New Yorker contextualizes the author’s work amidst “a flurry of Raj nostalgia.” Around the time of the Merchant Ivory adaptation of Heat and Dust came the TV miniseries version of The Far Pavilions. Also in the TV mix was The Jewel in the Crown, and on-screen, Gandhi and A Passage to India.
Kaye in particular provides a neat counterpoint to Jhabvala that reveals the latter’s singular genius. Born to a British army couple in Simla, India, Kaye would go on to marry a British general. She wrote, as she lived, inside a bubble: The heroine of The Far Pavilions is Indian royalty; she’s also mixed, a feature elevated in the narrative as the source of her virtue, desirability, and overall exceptionalism (the TV adaptation cast a blue-eyed American as this Indian princess). Kaye laid the blueprint for what a New York magazine review of the adaptation called “a subcontinent—of the trashy imagination,” in a gleeful skewering that takes down the book too.
In the Jhabvala story “Passion” (not included in the new collection), a British woman draws a contrast between her and her roommate’s Indian male lovers that comes to mind in this context: One man is redolent of “tigers, sunsets, and princes,” a.k.a. “the India one read about in childhood”; the other, however, is “real,” evoking an “everyday urban, suffering India that people in the West didn’t know about.” The same Guardian interview quotes an argument by the critic Aamer Hussein for Jhabvala as the first writer in English to consider the lives of the urban poor in north India, “people with small jobs and modest artistic aspirations, their lives often blighted with failure.” And Jhabvala took aim with equal measure too. She chronicled hypocrisies as India transformed into an independent land: full of post-Raj, English hippies under the spell of gurus, as well as upper-crust Indians living segregated lives inside homes stocked with crafts from the country’s hinterlands. “Nobody else in India had that clarity of vision of the new society,” Desai told The Guardian.
Later in life, Jhabvala left India for New York and wrote about a side of the world where she described herself as finally at home. Proustian memories stirred her from the pickle aisles in delis; she found a community of decamped eastern Europeans. The stories she wrote in this later setting, included toward the end of the new collection, lack the unsettling power of her India-set ones. I found myself missing my ornery correspondent of the past, despite her biases. I missed subjects caught between worlds, whose biting observations about others recalled to me my relatives and myself, all of us able to say to one another the unsayable things. For if Jhabvala revealed herself at times to be a crank when out of her element, so might most people, in the privacy of their own homes.
President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen lied to Congress about issues central to the Russia investigation out of “blind loyalty” to his longtime boss. But now the man who once said he would take a bullet for Trump plans to correct the record before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees—perhaps giving lawmakers more insight than they’ve ever had into the president’s dealings with Russia before and during the election.
Cohen’s much-hyped public testimony before a separate panel, the House Oversight Committee, was expected to be highly restricted to avoid interfering with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, with which Cohen has been cooperating for several months. (Cohen postponed that hearing following attacks from the president and the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on his wife and father-in-law.) But the intelligence-committee hearings will be conducted behind closed doors, giving Cohen the opportunity to have a freer exchange with the members.
[Read: Three remarkable things about Michael Cohen’s plea]
Cohen is willing to answer questions about what he’s told Mueller and other issues related to the ongoing investigation, according to two people familiar with his plans. (They, like other people I spoke with, requested anonymity to discuss the private deliberations.) However, his legal team is also in talks with Mueller’s office to determine whether there are any parameters for his testimony. The House Intelligence Committee is also “in consultation with the special counsel’s office to ascertain any concerns that they might have and to deconflict,” according to a committee aide.
“The reason that he agreed to testify privately for the intelligence committees is, first and foremost, because he owes them,” one of the people familiar with Cohen’s plans said. “He pleaded guilty to lying to them and owes them an apology.” Cohen admitted in court late last year that he lied to Congress when he told them that negotiations to build a Trump Tower Moscow ended in January 2016, and that he hadn’t discussed it much with Trump. In fact, Cohen testified, he agreed to travel to Russia in connection with the Moscow project and took steps to prepare for Trump’s possible trip there after he clinched the Republican nomination.
Cohen is “more open to answering questions” about these and other Russia-related issues than he would have been in a public setting, according to this source, as long as he remains “secure in the knowledge that both committees will protect his testimony and prevent leaks.”
[Read: Michael Cohen takes Mueller inside the Trump Organization]
The Senate panel, which subpoenaed Cohen earlier this month, and its House counterpart declined to preview what questions they intend to ask. But the central purpose of the interviews is for Cohen to correct the record on his previous false statements to the committees about the timing of the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations—and, crucially, whether Trump or anyone in the White House directed him to lie in the first place. BuzzFeed News reported earlier this month that Mueller had evidence that Trump had asked Cohen to lie about the timing of the real-estate deal, prompting the special counsel’s office to release a rare statement contradicting aspects of the story. But House Democrats made it clear that, if it were confirmed that the president had tried to obstruct justice in order to hide his involvement in business negotiations with the Kremlin during the election—while Russia waged a hacking and disinformation campaign to undermine Trump’s opponent—it would be cause for impeachment.
Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Wednesday morning that the panel expects Cohen to address the Moscow real-estate deal, which was also a potential source of leverage for Russia throughout 2016 as Trump—and his family—kept the negotiations a secret from voters. Cohen admitted late last year to discussing the Moscow deal with Trump’s family members “within” the Trump Organization.
Donald Trump Jr., an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was only “peripherally aware” of the Moscow deal in 2016. It is not clear what he told the House Intelligence Committee, which has not yet released the transcripts of the closed-door interview. But Cohen’s corrected testimony could illuminate whether other witnesses have been honest during congressional testimony about their role in, or knowledge of, the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations in 2016, and Russia’s interference more broadly.
[Read: Michael Cohen pays the price for his ‘blind loyalty’ to Trump]
“I think this common thread of lying to Congress and particularly to congressional committees may ensnare a number of other potential targets in the special counsel’s investigation,” Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Monday. “And it could become a matter of criminal action.” On Friday, the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone was indicted by Mueller for lying to the House Intelligence Committee about WikiLeaks, prompting Schiff to reiterate that the Intelligence Committee’s “first order of business” once it is constituted—which has been delayed by Republicans—will be a vote to send the official witness transcripts to Mueller. “We will continue to follow the facts wherever they lead,” he said.
Ever since the government shutdown ended last Friday, Yvette Hicks said her cable company, her electric company, the bank that processes her auto-loan payments, and her life-insurance company have been calling her “back to back to back.” They want to know when they’ll be paid.
Hicks, a 40-year-old security guard working as a contractor for the federal government, had been wondering the same thing about her own income, having gone without work or pay during the 35-day shutdown.
During that time, she had to dip into her savings so that the electric company didn’t cut off power to her home in Washington, D.C., and she was forced to ration her children’s asthma medication—they needed it every four hours, but Hicks couldn’t afford to keep up that frequency. With bills piling up over the past month, she estimates that even now that she’s back to work, it’ll take until “the end of March, maybe” for her to get her finances back to where they were before the shutdown.
Hicks is one of the millions of Americans whose livelihoods were upended by the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Just because that shutdown is over doesn’t mean that it isn’t still shaping the lives of American families, including contractors like Hicks who didn’t work and likely won’t receive back pay, and the roughly 800,000 federal workers who will. The individual stresses—both financial and emotional—may have eased, but they persist even as people return to their working rhythms.
[Read: The shutdown showed how precarious Americans’ finances really are]
The timing for a shutdown is never good, but it was especially bad for Bebe Casey, a 52-year-old businesswoman in New Hampshire. In late December, her mother was in the hospital at the end of her life, and Casey’s husband, a Customs and Border Protection employee, was ordered to continue working, with the expectation of later receiving back pay. The combination of a parent in the hospital and financial uncertainty was taxing. “This has just been a really hard last six weeks,” she told me.
Things turned out all right financially for Casey’s family, thanks in part to the end-of-year bonus she received. “If I hadn’t had that, then we would’ve been late on lots of stuff,” she says. “We were lucky.” Still, she’s a little nervous about upcoming financial obligations, such as making a college-tuition payment for her daughter next week. “We’re gingerly going through day by day right now, still trying to stuff as much money as we can away in case this happens again,” she says.
On the other side of the country, Mel May was experiencing similar uncertainty during the shutdown. May, a 55-year-old employee of the Federal Aviation Administration living in Albuquerque, was also expected to come into work without pay. “It was very stressful,” he said of making sure his bills were paid. He had trouble getting a loan to cover his rent and other bills, and ended up having to borrow money from his girlfriend.
In the end, May didn’t fall behind on any payments. “Everybody worked with me—even Comcast, of all people,” he said. Still, things were tight. He got cleared for unemployment assistance, started looking into getting a new job, and ate frugally—“lots of eggs, lots of oatmeal,” he told me. He’s glad he’ll start getting paychecks again soon.
The people I spoke to for this story told me of the stress they’d experienced during the shutdown and were well aware that they could experience it again soon, if a new agreement to fund the government is not reached by February 15. Yvette Hicks was worried that if she was out of work again, it’d take her even longer to get back on track financially.
Some aftereffects of the shutdown have been subtler, though. One 23-year-old federal contractor—he asked not to be named, for fear of repercussions at work—told me that this early exposure to the potential precarity of government work was discouraging. “For all of the merits of working for the government, it has shown me some of the disadvantages of working on something that’s at the mercy of politics,” he said. The shutdown may have lasted 35 days, but some of its effects will extend well beyond that.
Amal Ahmed contributed reporting to this article.
Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, a new HBO documentary about two of the most celebrated newspapermen of the 20th century, has the passionate, thunderous, and occasionally weepy tone of a good barroom eulogy. Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill represent, various interviewees attest, the last of their kind: journalists writing for and about the working man, self-educated voices for New York’s disenfranchised, reporters who also sometimes managed to be poets. Together, they embody the sharp thrill of a time when to cover the news was to be a hard-drinking, iconoclastic, ink-and-grease-stained truth teller. As Spike Lee puts it in one moment, “These guys were like superstars.” Later, Tom Brokaw adds that Hamill was “so authentically male.”
Directed by the journalist Jonathan Alter and the documentarians John Block and Steve McCarthy, Deadline Artists often feels as if it’s eulogizing not just Breslin and Hamill (Hamill is still alive and writing; Breslin died in 2017) but also a golden era of journalism itself. Alter told Page Six that he wanted to capture the heart of a time “when print journalists could be swashbuckling figures”—a moment when Breslin could advertise beer in television commercials and appear on Saturday Night Live, and when Hamill could date Jacqueline Kennedy and Shirley MacLaine at the same time.
With all the hushed reverence, though, comes a sense that something truly valuable has been lost. “These journalists today go to the elite colleges,” the legendary magazine writer Gay Talese says in one interview. Hamill and Breslin, the movie argues, were “anchored in a place and time,” able to tell stories about underserved communities because they themselves were of the people.
A hagiographic documentary certainly has its place—just ask the Academy, which nominated Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie, RBG, for an Oscar earlier this year. It’s just that Deadline Artists often seems enthralled by a version of the narrative that even Breslin and Hamill question in moments, one in which the emptying-out of traditional newsrooms and the checking of anarchic reportorial habits signal a fatal, irreversible decline.
[Read: The media’s post-advertising future is also its past]
“There aren’t any more Breslins and Hamills,” an uncredited voice says in the movie. “This was the last expression of great 20th-century muscular American journalism.” Maybe, but it’s hard not to read “muscular” as a euphemism for something else, some ineffably virile quality that both Breslin and Hamill apparently had in abundance. And the sentiment undermines the astonishing reporting being done every day to expose inequality and injustice in America, in a much more challenging economic climate for news.
When it functions as a dual biography, Deadline Artists is a fascinating film. It’s drawn more to the bombastic, outspoken, abrasive Breslin than the ruminative Hamill, but it makes a case for the ways in which both changed newspaper journalism for the better. They each fell into the profession with a simplicity that would make contemporary J-school students weep—Breslin became a copy boy earning 18 dollars a week, while Hamill, after writing persuasive letters to the editor of the New York Post, was personally invited to join the editorial team, after which his first story ran on page 1.
The writers made a name for themselves by seeking out lesser-told stories, Breslin in the bars and back rooms of Queens, and Hamill across America, Europe, and Asia. Breslin’s coverage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination changed the shape of what newspaper journalism looked like by focusing on the men at the edges of history—the gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery, the emergency-room doctor who tried in vain to save the 35th president’s life. In 1968, Breslin and Hamill were in the immediate vicinity of Robert F. Kennedy when he was murdered; Hamill summed up the scene by writing, “We knew then that America had struck again.”
Both men inevitably became celebrities, lauded for their tenacity, their commitment (Hamill, while sparring with the new owner of the Post, refused to step down and oversaw proofs from the diner by the office), and their fearlessness. Breslin’s ego seems to inflate rather unappealingly at this point in the film, when he’s shooting commercials for Grape-Nuts and corresponding personally with the Son of Sam killer. Called to ask whether he’s covering a house fire in which two people have died, he imperiously replies, “More must die before Breslin goes.” And, in his ugliest moment, he publicly berates a young, female, Korean American reporter who’s criticized one of his columns for being sexist, unleashing a tirade of racial slurs that gets him suspended for two weeks.
Deadline Artists dutifully includes this stain on Breslin’s biography, even if it subsequently drafts family members and friends to explain it. “I think the suspension probably killed him because I don’t think he had a bigoted bone in his body,” his son says. “Jimmy is an impulsive guy from the streets, and I thought he just made a huge mistake,” Gloria Steinem adds. “[Jimmy] doesn’t like when other people criticize him,” Breslin’s second wife, Ronnie Eldridge, explains. “He was terrible in many ways,” recalls The New York Times’s Gail Collins, “but his sense of sympathy was just amazing.” The filmmakers briefly interview Ji-Yeon Yuh, the woman whom Breslin verbally abused, but they seem more interested in propping up Breslin’s bona fides as a champion of the disenfranchised than in considering, even fleetingly, how the ribald newsroom culture the movie glorifies might also have helped keep a generation of talented reporters on the margins.
Alter, Block, and McCarthy are convincing in their argument that Breslin and Hamill shaped the way news stories are told, inspiring a generation to try to emulate their melding of dogged reporting and writerly craft. Breslin’s coverage of the emerging AIDS crisis in New York when few other reporters dared is held up as yet another example of how he foregrounded people whose plight merited national attention. But the implication underlying Deadline Artists’ swooningly nostalgic portrait of a bygone era—that things were better then—is undercut by one of its subjects. Journalism, Hamill says, is “always being enriched by the new people who come.” It’s a much-needed counterpoint in a film that could use more of them.
Earlier this month, tiny green plants sprouted on the moon.
The plants arrived as cotton seeds, tucked inside of Chang’e 4, a Chinese spacecraft that had landed, in a historic first, on the far side of the moon, the side that never turns toward Earth. The seeds came with the comforts of home: water, air, soil, and a heating system for warmth. Huddled together, the seedlings resembled a miniature, deep-green forest. A hint of life on a barren world.
And then, about a week later, they all died.
Lunar night had set in. Without ample sunlight, surface temperatures near the spacecraft plummeted to –52 degrees Celsius (–62 degrees Fahrenheit). The sprouts’ heating system wasn’t designed to last. The plants froze.
Outer space, as you might expect, is not kind to plants, or people, or most living things, except maybe for tardigrades, those microscopic creatures that look like little bears. If you stuck a daisy out of the International Space Station and exposed it to the vacuum of space, it would perish immediately. The water in its cells would rush out and dissipate as vapor, leaving behind a freeze-dried flower.
[Read: A new clue in the search for forests on distant planets]
China’s experiment marked the first time biological matter has been grown on the moon. (There is biological matter on the moon already, in what NASA politely refers to as “defecation collection devices.”) But plants have blossomed in space for years. They just need a little more care and attention than their terrestrial peers.
The first to flourish in space was Arabidopsis thaliana, a spindly plant with white flowers, in 1982, aboard Salyut, a now defunct Russian space station. The inaugural plant species was chosen for practical reasons; scientists call Arabidopsis thaliana the fruit fly of plant science, thanks to a fairly quick life cycle that allows for many analyses in a short time.
Now, plants grow on the International Space Station, humankind’s sole laboratory above Earth. They are cultivated inside special chambers equipped with artificial lights pretending to be the sun. Seeds are planted in nutrient-rich substance resembling cat litter and strewn with fertilizer pellets. Water, unable to flow on its own, is administered carefully and precisely to roots. In microgravity, gases sometimes coalesce into bubbles, and overhead, fans push the air around to keep the carbon dioxide and oxygen flowing.
The most advanced chamber on the station, about the size of a mini fridge, has precise sensors monitoring the conditions inside, and all astronauts need to do is add water and change filters. Scientists back on the ground can control everything, from the temperature and humidity to levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
Plants did not evolve to exist in this unusual setup. But astronauts have grown several varieties of lettuce, radishes, peas, zinnias, and sunflowers, and they do just fine. “Plants are very adaptive, and they have to be—they can’t run away,” says Gioia Massa, a scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center who studies plants in microgravity.
Scientists were surprised to learn that the lack of gravity, the force that has shaped our biological processes, doesn’t derail plants’ development. On Earth, plants produce a filigree-like pattern of roots, as they grow away from their seeds in search of nutrients. Scientists had long assumed the movements were influenced, in part, by the force of gravity. On the International Space Station, roots exhibited the same pattern, without gravity as a guide.
“Plants don’t really care about the gravity so much if you can get the environment right,” Massa says.
For NASA, the growth chambers on the space station are the predecessors of extraterrestrial farms beyond Earth. If human beings ever travel to another planet, they will need enough food for the journey. NASA has spent years perfecting thermo-stabilized or freeze-dried entrées and snacks for astronauts on the International Space Station, from scrambled eggs to chicken teriyaki. The meals are meant to last, but they wouldn’t survive the long journey to Mars, says Julie Robinson, the chief scientist for the International Space Station.
“We don’t have a system today that would preserve all the nutrients in food for all that time, even if it was frozen,” Robinson says.
Future Mars astronauts will likely bring with them an assortment of seeds, a Svalbard-like vault to kick-start the first generations of crops. None will be able to grow in Martian soil, which resembles volcanic ash; it’s devoid of the organic matter—formed on Earth by generations of decomposed plants—that supports life. It also contains chemical compounds that are toxic to humans. Astronauts could flush out the toxins with their own chemical solutions and convert the soil into something workable, but it may be easier to replicate the growth chambers on the International Space Station instead.
On Mars, plants will likely grow in climate-controlled greenhouses, from nutrient-rich gels and under bright lighting, with water delivered through liquid solutions at their roots or by a fine mist released from the ceiling. And anyone living on Mars will need many of these alien gardens; you can’t grow a salad from a petri dish.
Astronauts have already made a space salad. In 2015, astronauts on the space station were allowed to try the leaves of a red romaine lettuce that was cultivated in NASA’s first fresh-food growth chamber. They added a little balsamic dressing and took a bite. “That’s awesome,” the NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren said then. “Tastes good.”
No one on Earth has sampled a space vegetable yet, according to Massa. Some plants grown on the station are sent down to the ground for study in the lab, but they usually come back frozen or preserved in a chemical solution. “Frozen would be better, but I don’t think lettuce popsicles will be very popular anytime soon,” she says.
NASA scientists are thinking about more than nutrition in these experiments. Growing plants just for the sake of growing plants is quite nice. Research has shown that gardening is soothing and can be beneficial for good mental health. Future deep-space astronauts, cooped up in a small spaceship for years with the same people, will need all the soothing activities they can find. Plants, especially flowers, grown not for consumption but for decoration may help far-flung astronauts feel connected to the comforts of Earth.
“There’s a great deal of joy in growing and watering the plants and producing a flower,” Robinson, the ISS scientist, says. “There can also be some real sadness if plants you’ve been cultivating are not successful and are dying on you.”
Anyone who has enthusiastically purchased a succulent and witnessed it inexplicably wilt days later might relate. Imagine the magnitude of that disappointment on Mars, where the closest store is all the way across the solar system, and the only option is to grow another one.
My husband and I have been pretty good at saving money over the years, which means that we have enough of a cushion to start passing along some of it to our children and grandchildren while we’re alive, rather than leaving it behind as their inheritance. If we live another 20 years, give or take, as the actuarial tables say we might, our offspring in 2040 might have less need for the extra money than they do today, when they’re young. We’re living by the slightly morbid axiom my mother would invoke whenever she gave me a big check for a birthday or an anniversary: “I’d rather give it with a warm hand than a cold one.”
Grandparents across the U.S. are making similar calculations. According to the AARP, almost all American grandparents say that they offer some sort of financial support to their grandchildren, typically in the form of helping pay for their education (53 percent), living expenses (37 percent), or medical bills (23 percent). A recent survey by TD Ameritrade found that the average grandparent couple spend $2,383 a year on their grandkids. This figure is undoubtedly skewed by the wealthy (and disproportionately white) people who give their grandkids the largest amounts—but even grandparents who are just scraping by try to share what they can. And it doesn’t include other ways of helping beyond giving money, such as by being unpaid daycare providers.
Intergenerational gift-giving has grown substantially in the past decade or so. One analysis of Census Bureau data found that between 1999 and 2009, the amount that Americans over 55 gave to their adult children increased by more than 70 percent. During that period, the amount given specifically for primary- and secondary-school tuition and school supplies—that is, to be spent on the grandkids—nearly tripled.
[Read more: The age of grandparents is made of many tragedies]
Financially, my husband and I are lucky; we’ve been careful with our spending, yes, but more than that, we’ve had relatively well-paying, stable careers. Most Americans our age aren’t so lucky: Just 39 percent of working adults in the United States have managed to save enough to get themselves through five years of retirement, let alone give a leg up to their progeny.
But even without adequate savings, parents and grandparents these days are quick to offer monetary help to younger generations—sometimes raiding the nest egg they might need for themselves. “Financial managers advise the elderly to hold on to the money they’ve saved, to use it to care for themselves in old age, to avoid becoming the responsibility of their children,” Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University, told me. But many grandparents have a hard time listening to this advice, she said, because they can see that their children and grandchildren are even more financially insecure than they are. Giving money serves two functions, Gerson said—it’s “a way of expressing love,” and a way to help ensure “that your children’s children will have a decent spot in the world.”
But no matter how well intentioned these transactions are, the fact that many young Americans turn to the Bank of Grandma and Grandpa is evidence of their struggles and the lack of an adequate safety net to keep them afloat. Giving money to grandchildren is also one way that well-off families pass on privilege and wealth not just to the next generation, but to the one after that—a way that Americans stay rooted in the social stratum into which they were born.
Gerson pointed out that robust social programs benefiting grandparents might be what make them feel able to offer support in the first place. In the 20th century, poverty among the elderly was “greatly erased,” she told me, “thanks to policies such as Social Security.” According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, 9 percent of Americans older than 65 have an income below the poverty line—but if Social Security didn’t exist, that number would balloon to 39 percent.
Yet while poverty among the elderly has plummeted, childhood poverty has held steady—as programs like food stamps and Aid to Families With Dependent Children have been overhauled and the cost of college has skyrocketed. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, children younger than 18 are more than twice as likely to be poor as adults older than 65. That stark difference in their fortunes makes it hard for grandparents to turn away from the youngest generation, whose needs are so obvious. As Gerson put it, grandparents are “stepping into the void” created by the loss of social safety nets.
[Read more: The crushing logistics of raising a family paycheck to paycheck]
Stepping into that void most enthusiastically are grandparents of color, according to a 2012 study by the AARP. African American and Latino grandparents were more likely than their white counterparts to spend money on schooling: 65 percent of African American grandparents and 58 percent of Latino grandparents helped pay for their children’s education, compared with 53 percent of all grandparents polled. African American grandparents were also far more likely than other groups to assist with everyday living expenses. They were also more likely to be a little bit indulgent. “I give to my grandkids because they ask for things,” said 52 percent of African Americans and 43 percent of Latinos, compared with about 30 percent of grandparents overall.
While older Americans are dealing with their own financial woes—insufficient savings, for instance, and a mountain of medical bills—they still tend to feel more secure than their children, for whom pension plans and health-care coverage in old age are even more uncertain. Indeed, today’s grandparents might be the last generation to feel as if they have more economic wiggle room than their kids do. Older Baby Boomers, who are now in their late 60s and early 70s, grew up in a time of economic expansion and relative job security, when Americans could still earn a solid middle-class income with just a high-school degree. That places them in a better position to share the wealth with their families than Gen Xers, when the majority become grandparents.
But today’s grandparents are probably not quite as financially secure as they think they are, according to Teresa Ghilarducci, an economist at the New School and the author of How to Retire With Enough Money. Many of them have inadequate insurance for unexpected medical bills, especially long-term care, she told me, and they might not realize that “their costs for house cleaning and personal services are likely to go up as they become more fragile.” A lot of people have trouble understanding what retirement really costs and how much to save, Ghilarducci said. (Her rule of thumb: Savings should equal eight to 10 times your annual salary preretirement.) Even worse, if a recession happens in the next couple of years, she told me, it could reduce elders’ retirement money (from savings and part-time work) by as much as 20 to 25 percent.
While wealthier Americans can blithely give away money to their kids and grandkids without thinking twice, many working- and middle-class Baby Boomers struggle to help out. The TD Ameritrade survey found that one in four grandparents had to dip into savings to give money to grandchildren. And about 8 percent said that the desire to offer financial help to the youngest generation was leading them to put off retirement.
We do it anyway, often against financial analysts’ advice, because it’s hard to resist giving money to the children right in front of us rather than socking it away for a future that no one can foresee. It’s a sign of what Gerson calls “family cohesion”—the urge to help the grandchildren we love, even if we then ignore our own future needs, when we sense they lack something that we can provide.
President Donald Trump has recently turned his attention, and the focus of the U.S. foreign-policy debate, toward the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where two men are pushing rival claims to be the head of state. The opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, has the support of the United States. But despite mass protests, the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro refuses to step down.
The Trump administration’s efforts to force his ouster and bolster his opponent’s claims have included oil sanctions, the diplomatic maneuverings described by my colleague Uri Friedman, and harsh rhetoric. I want to focus on a subset of that rhetoric: threats of military force.
[Read: How seriously should the world take Trump’s Venezuela threat?]
In 2017, Trump stated, “We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.” The AP reports on a bygone occasion when he privately underscored that posture:
As a meeting last August to discuss sanctions on Venezuela was concluding, President Donald Trump turned to his top aides and asked an unsettling question: With a fast unraveling Venezuela threatening regional security, why can’t the U.S. just simply invade the troubled country? The suggestion stunned those present … including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom have since left the administration.
This account of the previously undisclosed conversation comes from a senior administration official … McMaster and others took turns explaining to Trump how military action could backfire and risk losing hard-won support among Latin American governments to punish President Nicolas Maduro for taking Venezuela down the path of dictatorship, according to the official. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.
As recently as Monday, National-Security Adviser John Bolton told reporters, “The president has made it very clear on this matter that all options are on the table.” He appeared to signal that U.S. troops might be sent to the region. And Senator Lindsey Graham told an Axios reporter that Trump had recently mused to him about a military option.
[Read: The White House’s move on Venezuela is the least Trumpian thing it’s done]
Trump has always been more hawkish than most people realize. Still, it is hard to know how much of this is earnest and how much is bluffing. If Team Trump is merely bluffing, the saber-rattling could conceivably pay off by yielding concessions, or undermine U.S. interests by alienating Venezuelans against the side we’re backing, or have no real effect. To me, bluffing when one cannot lawfully follow through is a generally high-risk, foolhardy approach to international relations, but it’s still preferable to the alternative explanation: a risky, unilateral war of choice that shouldn’t even be a possibility.
That’s because the Trump administration has no legal basis to intervene militarily in Venezuela without prior authorization from Congress. This Congress seems unlikely to authorize the deployment of U.S. troops to Venezuela. And while I’ve seen no polling on the matter, I strongly suspect that the public would oppose a new war there, and that if a war were begun, neither Congress nor the public would possess the resolve to see it through to a successful conclusion.
A war of that sort might be less likely if the media organizations reporting on Trump administration saber-rattling always pointed out that actually waging war would be flagrantly unlawful, rather than proceeding as if this is a matter properly decided by the White House. But much of the press has accustomed itself to an imperial presidency, so the Constitution’s mandates often go unmentioned.
Still, if the Trump administration unilaterally wages war in Venezuela, violating the separation of powers in the Constitution—a document that the president is sworn to protect and defend—the House should move to impeach the president.
“We all of us sleep with strangers in our heads,” David Thomson declares near the beginning of Sleeping With Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire. That sentence as aptly describes the physical experience of dreaming as it does the omnivorous nature of sexual fantasy. Much of Thomson’s work over a career now into its fifth decade—he’s 78—has dwelled in the ambiguous space where dreams, fantasies, and movies overlap. To call the London-born, San Francisco–based Thomson a film critic isn’t quite right. Nor does the label of film historian fit, exactly, though his knowledge of the cinematic past is certainly formidable in its depth and detail. Rather, he’s an autobiographical essayist who approaches movies as a psychic toy set to be dismantled and rearranged according to the dictates of his own voluminous memory and florid imagination.
Thomson, the author of more than 30 books—including biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles and monographs on Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, and Gary Cooper—has been called the greatest living writer about film. He’s also been dismissed as a loquacious show-off in love with his own meandering voice. When the latest edition of his best-known book, the monumental and monumentally weird The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, was released in 2014, I allied myself more closely with the former camp than the latter. This labyrinthine reference work can be infuriating, but it is a one-of-a-kind compendium of thumbnail biographies of performers, directors, writers, and the occasional cinematographer or costume designer. Thomson sums up not the life or career of particular creators, but his impressionistic experiences with their work.
Thomson’s approach to the collective psychosocial phenomenon he sometimes designates simply as “movie” (“ ‘movie’ was a place people longed to be”) is guided by a deep-seated critical principle: Desire is a form of understanding. At its best, this method inspires passages of lively first-person prose. The lengthy dictionary entry on James Dean, Thomson’s generational compatriot and one of his favorite actors, includes a sense memory of the plush pile carpets and easy-to-evade usherettes at the Granada Theatre, in the South London district of Tooting, where he sneaked into a showing of Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. His commitment to letting himself love what he loves and hate what he hates can make for soaring arias of praise as well as scathing dismissals. Sarah Polley’s direction of Julie Christie in Away From Her “has shown us that certain characterizations in fiction may be as far-reaching as explorations into space, higher mathematics, or the genome project.” The Danish provocateur Lars von Trier is “brilliant in a way that gives that term a bad name.”
Thomson’s belief in the primacy of subjective experience and deep currents of feeling can also give rise to a murky blend of hyperbole and abstraction. Here he is on Juliette Lewis, who has gone from playing a teenage nymphet in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear to specializing in off-kilter aging party girls. “I can’t help regarding her as something beyond the real—as some mythic or warning enterprise,” he writes in his dictionary, before apologizing for this cryptic reading with the caveat that “this is a book about response.” That reliance on gut response—as his ill-received 2006 book, Nicole Kidman, revealed—can sometimes derail him. Described by one critic as an “unseemly mash note,” it was less a biography than a work of torrid fan fiction, sometimes bordering on soft-core pornography. In one especially prurient passage, Thomson describes a dream he had during an afternoon nap, a reimagining of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour in which the prostitute played by Catherine Deneuve—an actress he identifies as Kidman’s cinematic predecessor—is reincarnated as Kidman herself, clad in “a very revealing white brassiere, a size or two too small.”
[Read: Clive James on David Thomson’s ‘New Biographical Dictionary of Film’]
In undertaking Sleeping With Strangers, Thomson had originally planned to write a book about the history of “gayness” in film. He set out to explore the notion that “the atmosphere of all movies had a gay air—as in a mounting suspicion that America’s approved romantic formulae might be demented.” In the early chapters that spring from this idea, Thomson finds a through line of queer subversion in even the most staunchly heterosexual of classic Hollywood genres: the Western, the musical, the screwball comedy. But while he was writing, the explosion of the #MeToo movement persuaded him to expand the scope of the book. In its final form, Sleeping With Strangers also takes on the history of male privilege and female oppression in Hollywood, both onscreen (in the representation of female sexuality) and off (in the hidden-in-plain-sight world of casting couches and on-set affairs).
KnopfSleeping With Strangers wisely does not claim to offer an exhaustive or chronological survey of sex in film—an impossible undertaking, given that the medium from the beginning has been about little else. Instead, Thomson approaches his subject thematically, shaping chapters around, for example, the coded love between the heroes of classic Westerns and their loyal sidekicks (“Buddies and Cowboys”); the existence of a thriving gay subculture within the Hollywood social scene as early as the 1930s (“Gable and Cukor”); the complicity of gossip columnists and talent agents, many of them also gay, in concocting offscreen heterosexual romances for less-than-straight movie stars (“The Cat’s in the Bag, the Bag’s in the River”). Devoting himself to the proposition that “if our culture is to survive, or deserve survival, then ‘straight’ people need to accommodate and learn from gay experience,” Thomson attempts to tease out an alternative history of sexual identity—a freer, fuller understanding of the varieties of desire—embedded in the film industry’s officially straight story.
Thomson is at his best when he’s mining these hidden veins of meaning, noticing a detail in a familiar film that helps you see the movie in a new way. I loved his affectionate reading of Laurel and Hardy’s partnership as, quite literally, a match made in heaven: “God made Laurel and Hardy as a tribute to what little he recalled of the comedy of marriage … Just as they had made no decision to be together, so they lacked the option or the willpower to part.” And his tossed-off observation that Vera Farmiga “is inserted like a bay leaf in the male stew” of Scorsese’s The Departed sums up in a single metaphor a long, regrettable Hollywood history of women as faintly discernible flavoring.
In the chapters that deal with homosexuality, Thomson cheerfully acknowledges his position as the very viewer at whom the movies have been aimed all along: the straight guy so clueless that he didn’t notice the secret queer film history happening under his nose. It’s the rare straight man well past middle age who tries to radically change how he thinks about a subject so fundamental. There’s a nobility in that quest, even when, still a novice at queer theory, Thomson sometimes fumbles the lingo, appearing to conflate the trans experience, bisexuality, and even vaguely kinky straight behavior under the generously spreading umbrella of “gay.” Far from defending his hetero turf, he seems to delight in the work of gay artists such as the costume designer Travis Banton, who saw straight sex as “laborious and rather silly with its pantechnicon of love, marriage, and growing old together.”
When he writes about the onscreen representation of female sexuality, Thomson seems less at ease and, tellingly, has less to say; his musings about women occupy far fewer pages than those about gay men. Still, many of his insights about the movies themselves shine. In Marlene Dietrich’s gloriously artificial costumes (designed by Banton) for the films she made with her longtime director and possible lover, Josef von Sternberg, Thomson sees a treatment of feminine beauty so mannered that it constitutes an inquiry into the limits of glamour. Wearing Banton’s glittering creations, Dietrich becomes a pure image, “a ravishing icon who treated men like flies.” Sternberg’s great achievement as a director, Thomson writes, “was to signal contempt for traditional romance.”
But when it comes to the subject of offscreen, three-dimensional women and their exploitation by the Hollywood machine, Thomson’s evident good faith can’t save him from moments of tone-deafness painful enough to stir qualms: Did he make the right choice in adding a bay leaf to this already complex stew? In a chapter called “The Male Gaze,” Thomson details the casting-couch process by which the 16-year-old Natalie Wood allegedly won her part in his adolescent favorite, Rebel Without a Cause. His purpose in describing the relationship between Wood and the film’s 43-year-old director, Nicholas Ray, is ostensibly to give voice to the vivacious but insecure girl born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, who “had called herself Natalie Wood since childhood.”
In the eyes of the law and of most parents I know, 16-year-olds still count as children. But Thomson appears not to have gotten the memo about statutory rape, and can’t seem to resist downplaying Wood’s qualifications for the role outside of a willingness (or, as Thomson frames it, eagerness) to sleep with the director. “So Natalie wanted to be noticed by this powerful and attractive man,” he writes in a tone that’s disconcertingly dishy, “and all she had going for her were her amazing eyes, her bursting need, and being sixteen.” This meager list of résumé items hardly jibes with the fact that—as Thomson himself notes two paragraphs later—Wood had already captured the hearts of moviegoers at age 8 in Miracle on 34th Street. In fact, she had spent half her life as a successful child star. Wood may well have enthusiastically slept with Ray to secure the role, but that doesn’t mean she was old enough to give meaningful consent, any more than it suggests that her presumed sexual availability was Ray’s only motive to hire her. Thomson’s effort to restore agency to Wood ends up curiously skewing in favor of the man who exploited her.
Thomson’s struggle to fully grasp the first principle of the #MeToo movement—that women’s accounts of their experiences deserve, at long last, not to be drowned out by men’s voices—goes from awkward to enraging in a chapter near the end titled “Burning Man.” In 1978, while teaching at Dartmouth and reviewing movies for a Boston paper, Thomson developed a deep friendship with the young filmmaker James Toback, whose first movie, Fingers, Thomson regarded, then and now, as “one of the great debuts in American film.”
That title, and Toback’s very name, are hard to hear in 2019 without envisioning the director’s own importunate fingers in stomach-curdling proximity to one of the hundreds—yes, hundreds—of women who came forward in late 2017 to accuse him of sexual harassment or assault. His alleged pattern was to lure young women off the street with promises of film stardom. According to Thomson, it was his shock at the revelations about his friend that first led him to include stories drawn from Hollywood’s long and varied history of preying on women.
Given that the Toback allegations (all of which he denies) changed the course of a work in progress, I would have expected to find this epiphany close to the beginning of a book often concerned with the sort of manipulative quid pro quo that the director’s behavior exemplifies. To Thomson’s credit, he does some soul-searching and honest reappraisal as he looks back over decades of closeness to Toback, whose entry in the Biographical Dictionary was so chummy that it was written in the second person, beginning with “Dear Jim.” Thomson recalls reading, in Toback’s 1971 book on the football star and sometime actor Jim Brown, about the orgies his friend had participated in at the home of the retired Cleveland Browns running back. Thomson now sees with sorrow that “it was a spree in which the women were pliant instruments … Some of them must have gone away damaged and in despair.”
But the way Thomson concludes this chapter raises serious doubts as to whether he really understood the #MeToo concept to begin with. Rather than expressing anger or sadness for the, again, hundreds of women whom Toback allegedly abused, Thomson expresses the hope that his old friend’s newest project might help him out of a rough spot that’s lasted, wow, a little more than a year now. Toback has lost 60 pounds! He is “writing with zest”! His next book—100 or more pages of which Thomson has already seen, because apparently whatever rift the scandal caused between them did not stand in the way of proofreading—“could be his great work.” I’m sure that millions of women, on top of the many alleged abuse victims already mentioned, will join me in congratulating Toback on his remarkably short and consequence-free time in the doghouse.
The history-within-a-history of Thomson and Toback’s friendship aside, much of Sleeping With Strangers has the rueful mood of a film lover reconsidering a lifetime spent desiring in the dark—and then recognizing, decades later, that his desire was not as innocent as it seemed. When you’re inside the protected bubble of “movie”—when that bubble exists to enclose and enchant people like you—it can be hard to see what and who has been left on the outside. What this seductive yet at times repellent book never fully grapples with is the privilege required to grant yourself that innocence.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “Desire in the Dark.”
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — In November, Utah’s voters defied their state legislature and moved to adopt Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in the state. With strong majority support, Utahns passed Proposition 3, a ballot initiative that would expand Medicaid coverage to all poor and near-poor adults. Joining Idaho and Nebraska, Republican-led states that passed similar initiatives in November, Utah reflected a divide between political leadership in ruby-red states—which has often opposed anything to do with Barack Obama’s signature policy—and the will of even Republican voters, who often like the plan and the prospect of more affordable coverage for more people.
But Utah, like some other Republican-led states where the Medicaid expansion has received support from the electorate, is now seeing immediate challenges to the law passed by popular democracy. With legislators tasked with crafting the sales tax and the budgetary changes needed to implement Proposition 3’s coverage, the GOP is pushing to add restrictions to benefits and eligibility of the expanded Medicaid program. Citing budgetary concerns, Republican legislators say they are doing what they can to advance the wishes of voters and the mandate to expand insurance, while also being fiscally responsible. But supporters of the proposition see in these plans a stealthy maneuver to repeal and replace the expansion before it even exists, and see it as part of a larger movement by Republicans nationwide to stonewall the progress of expanded health insurance, even when it runs counter to what their constituents want.
[Read: Medicaid expansion’s troubled future]
On Monday, hundreds of protesters descended on the state capital, intent on preserving the exact letter of what voters approved with Proposition 3 in November. That ballot initiative expanded Medicaid coverage to all non-elderly adults with an income under 138 percent of the federal poverty line and would pay for that expansion with an increase in the state sales tax, which state analyses found would raise about $90 million in revenue. If the initiative were implemented as expected, it would go into effect on April 1, extending free coverage to about 150,000 people, including many like the low-income workers who showed up Monday to protest.
Republican lawmakers, who control both houses and the governor’s mansion in the state, were never keen on the plan to begin with. But faced with undeniable public support in polls for Medicaid expansion, in 2018 the state legislature passed a bill that would expand Medicaid to some adults below poverty, an expansion of some 70,000 covered lives, but less than half of what proponents of Proposition 3 pitched. But that bill required a novel waiver from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
[Read: How to stop Medicaid expansion]
It was clear then that Republicans viewed their partial expansion as a way to circumvent public sentiment. In a June 2018 confidential memo to the White House and to President Donald Trump, the state warned that “there is significant risk that Utah will vote to expand fully with a November ballot initiative” and that “allowing partial expansion would result in significant savings over the 10-year budget window compared to full Medicaid expansion by all.” But in the end the Trump administration viewed a decision to grant waivers for partial expansions as a capitulation to Obamacare. CMS did not make a decision on granting that waiver by the time Utah voters on November 6 went out and passed the much more expansive version of the expansion.
Now, as the start date for Utah’s Medicaid expansion approaches, proposals in the state House and Senate that mirror some parts of the original partial expansion are back on the table. Last week, State Senator Allen Christensen told the Deseret News, “We’re going to make the program work within the money the proposition provided.” The bill Christensen introduced that’s currently under consideration in the state Senate would apply only to people in poverty, establish caps on spending, make eligibility and verification more complicated and restrictive for applicants, establish work requirements for beneficiaries, and introduce lockout periods for people who violate the conditions. A bill under consideration from the state House would roll back the Proposition 3 version of the Medicaid plan so that Christensen’s could take its place. Both bills were under consideration by the Senate Health and Human Services Standing Committee on Tuesday.
[Read: How GOP voters are getting in the way of a Medicaid rollback]
Republican lawmakers have cast these moves as ones that would save the Medicaid expansion that voters wanted, not dismantle it. According to the Associated Press, Senate President Stuart Adams, a Republican, indicated that Utah’s legislature intended to pass a Medicaid expansion, but that it needed to be accomplished in a “fiscally prudent way.” Republicans point to a predicted $10.4 million budget shortfall for the state in 2021.
But proponents of Proposition 3 see this as a rejection of the self-determination of voters. “These politicians are trampling on the most fundamental principles of representative democracy,” said Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of the Fairness Project, a group that advocates for statewide Medicaid expansions and spearheaded several ballot-initiative efforts in GOP-led states in 2018. “Legislators who vote for this bill would be disrespecting the voters of Utah, disrespecting the struggling families who were expecting access to health care, and disrespecting the basic principles of representative democracy.”
Other objections to the GOP’s plan also mention that it—like the 2018 attempt to circumvent the ballot-initiative process—relies on the grant of a waiver from CMS that may never come. According to the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “CMS denied earlier requests from Arkansas and Massachusetts that they receive the enhanced matching rate to cover only part of the expansion population. Thus, there’s a high chance that CMS wouldn’t approve a new waiver proposal from Utah with the same type of request and, consequently, no coverage expansion would ever occur.” In addition to the real, probable risk of the proposed expansion never materializing, even if the federal government does go against precedent and approves Utah’s proposed waiver, it would take months to be able to implement it properly, meaning coverage certainly won’t start in April.
Critics of Utah’s GOP see its actions as reminiscent of other Republican efforts across the country to stonewall the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and turn Medicaid into a more conservative program, even when it means going against direct democracy. In 2017, 59 percent of Maine’s voters approved a Medicaid-expansion ballot initiative. Then-Governor Paul LePage, a Republican, simply ignored that initiative, refusing to implement the reform until state legislators made changes in funding the program. Advocacy groups sued LePage. Janet Mills, a Democrat, was elected governor in 2018, and when she assumed office, she implemented the program. Other Republican governors have—with the blessing of the Trump administration—championed the implementation of work requirements in Medicaid, and have sought increased flexibility through waivers to create programs that cover fewer people, increase cost exposure for covered people, and make eligibility verification more frequent and onerous. In two other states, last November saw expensive, major campaigns to defeat Medicaid expansions from ballot initiatives.
As is true in Utah, these actions all highlight the tightrope the GOP is now walking. In national and state polls, Americans across party lines have indicated support for the ACA’s coverage expansion, have especially favored Medicaid expansions, and have favored funding mechanisms for those expansions. All of this was true and is true in Utah, and was made explicitly clear by direct democracy last fall. Yet the expansion could still fail to materialize, a development that would put representatives squarely against the will of the people they represent.
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared on his inauguration day that water is “part and parcel of Florida’s DNA,” and vowed to fight the pollution and toxic algae that choked the state’s beaches and fresh waters last summer, his critics rolled their eyes to the Tallahassee heavens above. DeSantis had a poor environmental voting record in Congress. He’d helped found the House Freedom Caucus, which urged President Donald Trump to eliminate the Clean Water Rule and dozens of other environmental safeguards.
But two days later, the critics looked to those same heavens in wonder. Florida’s new governor began his tenure with one of the furthest-reaching environmental orders in state history, calling for a record $2.5 billion for Everglades restoration, a harmful-algae task force, a chief science officer, and an office of resilience and coastal protection to fund and coordinate Florida’s response to rising seas. Under the headline “Florida’s Green Governor,” the state’s largest newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, declared that DeSantis “has done more to protect the environment and tackle climate change in one week than his predecessor did in eight years.”
DeSantis’s actions reflect a broader effort by some red-state governors to confront the unifying issue of water, even though they remain quiet, if not completely silent, on the larger crisis of a warming world.
Concern about climate change has surged to record levels over the past year. Yet anti-science operatives funded by the fossil-fuel industry still relentlessly spread misinformation; the recent video “Why Climate Change Is Fake News” has drawn 10 million views on Facebook. And as his administration systematically rolls back environmental regulations, Trump seems to like stoking distrust of the scientific establishment. It is no surprise, then, that political affiliation continues to shape belief: 86 percent of Democrats believe the climate is changing, compared with 52 percent of Republicans, according to a University of Chicago/AP poll released last week.
[Read: They’re here to fix climate change! They’re college Republicans.]
What’s happening to water around the nation, however, permits no alternative claims: the piles of stinking algae and rotting fish heaped up on both coasts of Florida last year. The hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage and hog waste that swirled in the North Carolina floodwaters after Hurricane Florence. The chalky walls—now too large to be called bathtub rings—exposed as Arizona’s Lake Mead drops to record-low levels.
Like DeSantis, Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey focused on water in his first major address of the new year—without using the words climate change. During his reelection campaign, water was “one of the issues I was asked about most by real people,” he said. Noting that Arizona faces a January 31 deadline to figure out how to reallocate its dwindling portion of the Colorado River, Ducey urged the legislature to see beyond politics and partisanship to “do the things that matter and secure Arizona’s future.”
“At the top of that list,” he said, is “securing our water future.”
It was the same in Idaho, where newly elected Republican Governor Brad Little devoted part of his State of the State speech to “Idaho’s lifeblood”—water—spotlighting the once arcane issue of Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer replenishment.
These red-state GOP governors are not taking aim at greenhouse-gas emissions like their blue-state Republican counterparts Governors Larry Hogan of Maryland, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Phil Scott of Vermont. Still, environmentalists should not dismiss their momentum on water. In several states won by Trump, water, literally a chemical bond, is also proving a bond that brings disparate people, groups, and political parties together around shared concerns for the Everglades, the Great Lakes, the Colorado River, and other liquid life systems. “We have this phenomenon where one of the ways to work on climate change without triggering the cultural wars is to work on water,” says John Fleck, the director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program, who researches the Colorado River and solutions to water scarcity.
[Read: The GOP just lost its most important climate moderates]
Water progress is climate progress. It takes an intense amount of energy to extract water, treat it, and dispose of it, and to clean water when it’s polluted. Nationally, water consumption peaked in 1980 and has dropped steadily, even as the economy and population have grown. That shift, in waterworks and minds, affirms Americans’ willingness to live differently once we understand how painless the better path is. The same will be true for decoupling carbon growth from economic growth, though it may have to wait out Trump: U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions surged last year, even as a near-record number of coal plants shuttered.
If DeSantis, Ducey, and Little can make strides on water, they will also make strides for the Republican Party, said Christine Todd Whitman, a former EPA administrator and Republican governor of New Jersey. “It comes down to issues of human life and safety,” she said, “and that’s what we’re supposed to be all about.” America’s Everglades and Chesapeake Bay restorations, Great Lakes compact, Colorado River drought planning, and other hard-won partnerships have taken decades of bipartisan leadership to bear fruit. By preserving and even strengthening those state-federal alliances in the Trump era, the governors help their party salvage a legacy to which the GOP is entitled.
A half century ago, President Richard Nixon pushed the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, and other safeguards in response to a broad public outcry over the industrial and sewage pollution then fouling rivers, bays, and coastlines. This June 22 will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire credited with sparking that outcry. But amid all the events and retrospective articles planned to commemorate that date, the more important one to remember might be 1868. That was the first of at least a dozen times the Cuyahoga burst into flames, sparking a century of pollution disasters, some fatal.
[Read: The Republicans who want Trump to fight climate change]
All that time, Americans accepted industrial pollution as an inevitable consequence of progress. Now we don’t have the hundred years we spent watching the Cuyahoga burn to watch the planet do the same. We must hope that the red-state governors’ attention to water will lead them to act on climate change, because the sorry truth is that even the boldest work on water won’t mean much if we can’t also stop warming.
In the early 2000s, Australia faced a drought so severe that abandoning major cities such as Perth seemed like a real possibility; the continent was feeling the water effects of climate change earlier than the rest of the world. For two decades, the Aussies have pioneered desalination, water markets, sewage recycling—and generally some of the most conscientious water habits in the developed world. And yet all that is not enough. It is summer in Australia. This month, record temperatures have contributed to wildfires, horses found dead in dry watering holes, and unprecedented fish kills in the iconic Darling River.
Hundreds of thousands of fish float belly up there, in striking and sickening similarity to Florida’s summer. DeSantis said it best: Water issues “do not fall on partisan lines.” Nor, ultimately, will climate change.
Shortly after Fox & Friends aired a segment about proposed legislation to incorporate Bible classes into public schools on Monday morning, President Donald Trump cheered these efforts on Twitter. “Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!” Trump wrote.
The segment followed a USA Today report on January 23 that conservative Christian lawmakers in at least six states have proposed legislation that would “require or encourage public schools to offer elective classes on the Bible’s literary and historical significance.” These kinds of proposals are supported by some prominent evangelicals, including Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, the Texas mega-church pastor John Hagee, and even the actor Chuck Norris. They argue that such laws are justified by the Bible’s undeniable influence on U.S. history and Western civilization.
If conservative Christians don’t trust public schools to teach their children about sex or science, though, why would they want to outsource instruction about sacred scripture to government employees? The type of public-school Bible class that could pass constitutional muster would make heartland evangelicals squirm. Backing “Bible literacy bills” might be an effective way to appeal to some voters, but if they were put into practice, they’re likely to defeat the very objectives they were meant to advance.
Debates over whether religion has a place in public schools are as old as public education itself. Some of America’s earliest grade schools were private and church-run, and they almost always included religious education. In colonial New England, which had early public schools, religious texts, including the Bible, were generally assigned a central role. In the 19th century, however, as a greater array of local governments started public schools to provide nonsectarian education for all children regardless of religion or social status, that began to change.
As the historian Steven K. Green writes in The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine, many of these common schools still included Bible reading and were influenced to some degree by Protestantism. But they largely avoided providing devotional content and eschewed proselytizing students. After all, as Green says, “a chief hallmark of nonsectarian education was its purported appeal to children of all religious faiths.” The ostensibly secular nature and mission of these common schools miffed many Protestants at the time, much as they do today.
These early schools were controlled by the states, but the federal government began to assert a greater role in the 20th century, as the Supreme Court started to constrict the presence of religion in public schools. This included the landmark 1948 case of McCollum v. Board of Education, in which the Court ruled that “a state cannot consistently with the First [Amendment] utilize its public school system to aid any or all religious faiths or sects in the dissemination of their doctrines,” as well as the highly controversial 1962 case of Engel v. Vitale, in which the justices declared that compulsory prayer in public schools was unconstitutional because it violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause. These decisions helped spark the modern culture wars and the rise of the religious right, a movement that sought to fight the “secularization of public schools,” which included the reincorporation of prayer and Bible reading.
[Read: Why schools are banning yoga]
Donald Trump is an unlikely choice to play the role of champion for this cause. The thrice-married real-estate mogul who claims to have never asked God for forgiveness has said that he attended Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, but the congregation responded that he is not “an active member.” Trump claimed on the campaign trail that the Bible was his favorite book, but he couldn’t cite his favorite verse when asked. (He finally named his favorite verse eight months later, but seemingly didn’t understand how to interpret or apply it.)
But while Trump might not care much about the Bible personally, he knows it is politically important to many of the conservative Christians who support him. According to a recent study conducted by the Barna Group, a staggering 97 percent of churchgoing Protestants and 88 percent of churchgoing Catholics said they believed that teaching the Bible’s values in public school was important. Trump’s odd tweet is likely an effort to shore up his base, rather than a passionate plea for a new educational initiative.
Following Trump’s tweet on Monday, some legal scholars argued that teaching the Bible in any form in a public school would violate the First Amendment. But others, such as John Inazu, a law and religion professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference, believe that this would depend on the nature of the classes.
“The Court’s approach to the establishment clause is convoluted and unclear, so it is difficult to say whether a Bible literacy class is unconstitutional,” Inazu told me. “It’s a historical fact that the Bible has influenced Western civilization and U.S. history, so it’s plausible that you could teach a class like this if it is done in a way that promotes cultural literacy.”
[Read: Cheerleaders for Christ]
Inazu added that the courts would also consider the motive behind instituting such classes. If they determine that the motivation behind Bible-literacy bills is to privilege Christianity, the classes could be ruled unconstitutional. That’s bad news for those pushing these bills because, as USA Today reported, they are the product of “an initiative called Project Blitz coordinated by conservative Christian political groups” who seek to “advocate for preserving the country’s Judeo-Christian heritage.” (It’s telling that they aren’t also advocating teaching the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita as part of world-history education.) So even if these bills pass, the classes they’ll spawn will likely not last long.
But assume for a moment that no ulterior motive is behind these bills, and that the conservative Christian activists and lawmakers are merely deeply concerned that America’s schoolchildren receive a better cultural-historical education. And also assume that teaching a Bible class in a public school is not a violation of the establishment clause, as many legal scholars claim. As Inazu pointed out, for a Bible class in public school to have any hope of passing constitutional muster, it would need to be academic rather than devotional. Which is to say, it couldn’t actually impart biblical values to students, and it would need to draw from scholarly consensus. And this is where the whole enterprise would backfire.
Start at the beginning. Many conservative Christians believe that the opening of the book of Genesis teaches a literal seven-day creation of the world by God around 6,000 years ago. But most academic Bible scholars believe that this text should be read poetically, and not as history or science. They interpret these passages as making theological points from the perspective of its ancient writers, rather than commenting on the truthfulness of Darwinian evolution or any other modern debate. Additionally, most conservative Christians believe that when Genesis tells about Adam and Eve, it is referencing two historical figures who were the first humans who ever lived. But geneticists assert that modern humans descend from a population of people, not a single pair of individuals.
[Read: Homeschooling without God]
The potential problems don’t stop with the Bible’s creation narrative. Conservative Christian parents across America teach their children a Bible story about a man name Noah who built a giant boat to house all of Earth’s animals during a cosmic flood. But scientists say that such a flood is impossible; there isn’t enough water in the oceans and atmosphere to submerge the entire Earth. Historians point out that strikingly similar stories are told in sources other than the Bible, some which pre-date the biblical tale. This story, many scholars conclude, was not meant to be literal. And what of the Bible’s story of Jonah being swallowed by a great fish and surviving in its belly for three days? A marine biologist will tell you it’s anatomically implausible, and many biblical scholars say the story is intended to be understood allegorically, anyway.
That evangelical understandings of the Bible differ from scholarly consensus doesn’t make them incorrect, but it does mean that the material taught to public-school students would likely diverge from what they are learning in church and at home. Can you imagine young Christian students coming home from school and informing their parents that they’ve just learned that all these cherished Bible stories are in fact not historically correct? How would evangelical parents react when their fifth grader explains that their teacher said the Apostle Paul said misogynist things and advocated for slavery? And what if the teacher decides to assign the Catholic version of the Bible, which has seven books that Protestants reject as apocryphal?
And this only addresses issues of historicity and interpretation. The social teachings of the Bible could also create issues in a public-school setting. A recent thesis project in sociology at Baylor University suggested that increased Bible reading can actually have a liberalizing effect, increasing one’s “interest in social and economic justice, acceptance of the compatibility of religion and science, and support for the humane treatment of criminals.” Every community that reads the Bible places unequal stress on certain books or passages. While evangelicals are generally more politically conservative, teachers in public schools might choose to emphasize the Bible’s many teachings on caring for the poor, welcoming the immigrant, and the problems of material wealth.
Bible-literacy bills are unlikely to pass in most states, and even if they do, they might be soon ruled unconstitutional. But conservative Christian advocates would do well to think through the shape these classes will likely take if their efforts are successful. They might end up getting what they want, only to realize that they don’t want what they’ve got.
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