Ser jogador de futebol. Quanta gente já não sonhou com isso?
Com 11 anos, eu levei essa ideia a sério e entrei para as categorias de base de um time de Porto Alegre. Fiquei apenas seis meses. Felizmente, minha família tinha condições financeiras que me permitiram priorizar os estudos. Depois dessa breve experiência, só voltei a pensar no assunto aos 17 anos.
Engraçado que, quando você entra nesse mundo, percebe que os sonhos vão ficando cada vez mais distantes. E, ao mesmo tempo, você está lá, lutando. As pessoas de fora veem você como uma “estrela”, como se sua vida fosse igual à dos caras que aparecem na TV. Mas a realidade é uma merda. Acham que você tem dinheiro, um carro bom, roupas de marca, sendo que às vezes nem tem travesseiro pra dormir ou cobertor para se esquentar. No caso do meu ex-treinador Emerson, que jogou nas categorias de base, o cobertor era sua toalha de banho. Ele a deixava secando de manhã cedo para se cobrir de noite. Aliás, sorte a sua se houver arroz e feijão em dia de jogo, diferente do meu amigo “Índio”, que jogou o campeonato estadual no Mato Grosso. Lá o seu almoço era um pote de bananas – e isso que ele já jogava no profissional.
Uma vez perguntei se o treino iria continuar, e o treinador respondeu, me xingando: “tu tá com medo de raio?”Fora as condições precárias, vocês acham que a gente ganha quanto por mês? Dedicamos todo nosso tempo, esforço e foco para isso, dormindo regrado, acordando cedo, dando a vida nos treinos, faça sol, chuva, calor, frio e até raio caindo – uma vez perguntei se o treino iria continuar, e o treinador respondeu, me xingando: “tu tá com medo de raio?”
Depois de nos doarmos ao máximo, longe de nossas famílias, quanto vocês acham que recebemos de remuneração? Menos de um salário mínimo. Ou às vezes nenhuma, como ocorre com meu parceiro Luquinhas, que joga na quarta divisão de Portugal. Em outros clubes, é só um vale-transporte mensal, porque, querendo ou não, os jogadores precisam ir para os treinos durante a semana. Pelo menos disso os dirigentes se dão conta.
Mas e quando não dá para reservar a grana só para o transporte? E quando você tem filhos? Quando tem que ajudar a família com o pouco que ganha? Sua mãe? Seus irmãos? Eu tenho amigos que seguem no futebol, mas já abandonaram o sonho de se tornar grandes ou de ter uma vida melhor: eles jogam apenas porque é o que lhes resta, é isso que eles têm, e pronto. É o que eles foram ensinados a fazer, é o que eles sabem fazer em um país com cada vez menos investimentos em educação pública. E essa é a única saída “limpa” e “justa” que eles encontram, para quem sabe um dia sair da pobreza. Na verdade, eles têm outro caminho a seguir, e vocês sabem de qual eu estou falando. Esse mesmo: o crime. Às vezes, alguns até conseguem conciliar os dois, tráfico e futebol.
Na segunda-feira, mesmo dia em que o alojamento do Bangu pegou fogo, um ex-companheiro de clube, que está jogando a segunda divisão do Campeonato Gaúcho, no profissional, me pediu dinheiro emprestado porque a polícia pegou a droga dele, e ele estava devendo para os donos da boca. Decidiu vender drogas para aumentar sua renda, que não é suficiente para sustentar sua mãe e seus irmãos.
Imagem: arquivo/Ramiro Simon
Situação parecida aconteceu com meu amigo Adilio, que jogou comigo no profissional da segunda divisão do Rio de Janeiro. Ele nunca vendeu droga, nada disso. Mas, com o salário de R$ 1 mil que recebia, já ajudava a manter sua família e sua casa na favela. Só que a temporada durava apenas seis meses. No resto do ano, fechava “contrato” com o pai dele e virava pedreiro na pré-temporada. E o Léo, um dos melhores volantes do campeonato nessa mesma temporada? Lá estava ele, vendendo chá-mate na beira da praia durante as férias – quando não fazia um bico de barbeiro.
Em 2017, disputei a Copa São Paulo de Juniores pela equipe sub-20 da Chapecoense. Os clubes de cada grupo ficam no mesmo lugar durante a primeira fase. Dividimos hotel com o Nova Iguaçu, do Rio de Janeiro, e o Sampaio Corrêa, do Maranhão. Na sala de jogos, jogando pingue-pongue, um dos meninos do Nova Iguaçu perguntou quanto que a gente ganhava por mês. Eles ficaram impressionados: R$ 600, um salário do qual nós mesmos reclamávamos o tempo inteiro. Eles ganhavam R$ 80 por mês. Com o time do Maranhão não tivemos a oportunidade de conversar sobre isso, mas sei que eles ficaram três dias dentro de um ônibus para chegar até São Paulo, algo comum com equipes do Norte ou Nordeste que tentam jogar a principal competição de base do Brasil. As federações ajudam pouco ou nada.
Em 2015, mais de 82% dos jogadores de futebol recebiam menos de R$ 1 mil por mês, segundo a CBF.Eu poderia escrever um livro sobre todas as histórias que eu ouvi ou testemunhei no verdadeiro mundo do futebol. Isto que eu descrevi é a situação atual da imensa maioria dos atletas no Brasil. Mesmo entre os profissionais: em 2015, mais de 82% dos jogadores de futebol recebiam um salário inferior a R$ 1 mil, de acordo com a Confederação Brasileira de Futebol. E deve ter muita história pior, que eu nem sei ou nem imagino. Cada dia é uma surpresa: quando você acha que já viu de tudo, você acaba tomando banho de mangueira na frente do vestiário, porque os chuveiros estão todos estragados. No clube onde isso aconteceu, a água que tomávamos vinha em um cooler – na verdade, era uma mistura de água com grama, com bolhas de óleo por cima. Um amigo meu até brincava “rapaz, a piscina lá de casa é mais limpa que essa água”. Nós que vivemos do futebol não temos ideia do que pode acontecer. Sempre tem algo novo, mas nós não nos damos conta, porque estamos sempre focados no nosso sonho, que é o que nos motiva perante a inúmeras dificuldades e humilhações.
Ramiro jogando pela seleção gaúcha durante a Copa de Seleções Estaduais Sub-20, em 2017.
Foto: arquivo pessoal/Ramiro Simon
Acho que é por isso que o futebol continua. Porque no fundo, no meio de tudo isso, nós temos fé de que um dia sairemos dessa situação, de que um dia vamos alcançar este lugar privilegiado, que poucos conquistam, e que todo mundo assiste na televisão. Por mais impossível que pareça, e que a realidade do mundo grite na nossa cara que não dá, que é um em um milhão que chega lá.
Ainda assim, continuamos. A gente carrega a alma daquela criança sonhadora. Ela ainda sonha dentro de nós, esperando o dia em que nos tornaremos jogadores de futebol. Agora, aos 21, sigo correndo atrás desse objetivo. Sou volante e estou em teste para jogar em um time da primeira divisão do Canadá.
E é por essa persistência que a ganância de quem organiza o futebol passa despercebida. Às vezes até percebemos, mas não tem o que fazer, né? Vamos arriscar nosso sonho reclamando que gostaríamos de um salário digno? Ou de uma alimentação melhor? Ou de uma cama melhor? Ou um ventilador? É assim e deu. Se você incomodar muito, é mandado embora, e eles acham outro por aí. O que mais tem é garoto querendo o nosso lugar. Para a maioria dos que financiam o futebol no país, esses princípios básicos são “desperdício de dinheiro”, porque não dão retorno a curto prazo. Ninguém entrou nessa para perder, não é? E quem paga a conta somos nós. No pior cenário, pagamos com a vida. Foi o que aconteceu com os garotos do Flamengo.
Este é o mundo do futebol: milhares de sonhos no meio de falsidade, ganância, corrupção e egoísmo. E tudo isso longe da família, longe de casa, desde bem cedo. Abrimos mão de tudo pelo nosso objetivo.
Muitos falam que jogador de futebol só fala em Deus. Não é para menos: só Ele é capaz de nos manter firmes diante disso tudo. No papel, as chances são mínimas.
The post ‘Se você incomodar muito, está na rua. O que mais tem é garoto que sonha em viver do futebol.’ appeared first on The Intercept.
In a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration’s cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia, the House of Representatives passed a resolution directing the administration to remove U.S. forces from supporting the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen.
The measure, which passed by a vote of 248-177, is one of the first major pieces of legislation approved by the Democratic House. It is a significant achievement for the progressive wing of the party, whose members have long argued in favor of cutting off military support for Saudi Arabia.
The resolution, which invokes the 1973 War Powers Act, directs President Donald Trump to remove U.S. forces from “hostilities” in the Saudi-led intervention against an Iranian-backed rebel group in Yemen. In both the Trump and Obama administrations, the U.S. has provided weapons, targeting intelligence, and mid-air refueling support for the Saudi-led coalition.
A Republican-sponsored amendment, passed Wednesday, weakened the resolution slightly by allowing continued intelligence sharing with the coalition. The amendment, which passed by a vote of 252-177, allows the U.S. to continue sharing intelligence with foreign powers “if the President determines such sharing is appropriate.”
Under House and Senate rules, the resolution enjoys “privileged” status, meaning that it can bypass a committee vote. The Republican-held Senate passed a similar resolution in December by a vote of 56-41, but with a new Congress, the Senate will have to pass it again to send it to Trump’s desk. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has promised to bring it up for another vote.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who sponsored the resolution, told The Intercept that the vote was a “historic” assertion of Congress checking war powers.
“This has never happened before — since 1973. It’s Congress reasserting our role in matters of war and peace,” Khanna said. “It’s a major signal to the Saudis to end the war.”
When the House first considered the measure in 2017, it was championed by progressives like Khanna but opposed by Democratic leadership. When supporters reintroduced the measure in September, it had the backing of a number of top Democrats, including Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md. The explosion of anger surrounding the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October drew members from both sides of the aisle, many of whom saw it as a way to hold Saudi leadership accountable.
Humanitarian groups have held the Saudi-led coalition partially responsible for creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Since the war broke out in 2015, coalition warplanes have bombed food sources, water infrastructure, and medical facilities, all while delaying or restricting the flow of food into the country.
On Wednesday, however, debate largely centered on whether it was appropriate for Congress to use the War Powers resolution to check the president’s power.
“The Congress has lost its grip on foreign policy, in my opinion, by giving too much deference to the executive branch,” Elliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Wednesday on the House floor. “Our job is to keep that branch in check, not to shrug our shoulders when they tell us to mind our own business.”
Republicans opposing the bill argued that it would embolden Iran and expressed concern that it could open the door to Congress scrutinizing other U.S. military alliances.
“This overreach has dangerous implications far beyond Saudi Arabia,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “This approach will now allow any single member to use this privilege mechanism to second-guess U.S. security cooperation relationships with more than 100 countries throughout the world.”
Some progressive advocates welcomed that idea. “It’s no coincidence that progressives, both inside and outside Congress and across the country, drove the House of Representatives to invoke [the War Powers Resolution],” said Kate Kizer, policy director for the progressive group Win Without War. “This historic vote is just the opening salvo of building power behind progressive foreign policy.”
At the last minute, Republicans also managed to add language condemning anti-Semitism, an apparent shot at Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for a Sunday tweet about the Israel lobby that critics said invoked anti-Semitic tropes.
The post House of Representatives Orders Donald Trump to Stop Backing Saudi-led War in Yemen, Paving the Way for Decisive Senate Vote appeared first on The Intercept.
Immigrant rights groups are reacting angrily to the border deal to keep the government open, which President Donald Trump has said that he will sign into law, averting a shutdown. The bill, which has not yet officially been drafted, gives Trump more than $1 billion in funding for new barriers on the southern border, and funds a potential increase in immigrant detention capacity.
The barriers that the bill would fund are a rhetorical downgrade from Trump’s signature policy of erecting a border wall, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has repeatedly rejected to fund. Funding for immigration detention, which has soared under the Trump administration, was a key issue in talks over keeping the government open. Democrats had pushed for cuts to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention budget, but ceded that demand in the interest of moving negotiations forward. The bill would fund the government through September 30.
The central problem with the deal, leaders of the immigrant rights community say, is that Democrats, from a position of strength given their control of the House of Representatives, merely entrenched Trump’s immigration policy. The deal, they say, puts a bipartisan stamp of approval on the dark chapter of American history that Trump’s policies have brought upon us.
Ana María Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, said that Democrats appeared to be negotiating as if the November elections hadn’t happened. Trump made the midterms a referendum on his border wall, driving 24/7 news coverage of a migrant caravan walking through Central America. He declared the caravan a national crisis and sent the military to the border.
Voters responded by giving Democrats the biggest midterm win since Watergate.
“Schumer needs to understand that his mandate is different. He’s negotiating as if the elections didn’t matter,” said Archila, referring to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “I think that the deal essentially accepts Trump’s paradigm that there is a security crisis at the border that needs more investment and enforcement. It displays a level of a lack of moral grounding in some ways. The country now knows what enforcement looks like. It’s ugly. It’s children in cages. It’s families that’ll never see each other again. That’s what this funding will do.”
Javier Valdes, co-executive director of Make the Road NY, an immigration group, said that if the details of the deal match the reporting, he would urge Congress to reject it. His biggest objection is that it expands immigration enforcement, he said. “There’s been a national conversation about the role of ICE and detention, and folks expected we’d see something that actually decreased the level of detention and came with actual oversight. It’s not just about the wall. It’s the other enforcement mechanisms and the impact they’re having on our communities on a day-to-day basis.”
Republican leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy are pushing the deal, but it is not entirely clear how the rest of the GOP caucus, many of whom wanted to see a wall built, will vote on the funding bill. In some ways, opposition from immigration groups and progressives could make the deal more likely to pass, as the outrage convinces Republicans that the deal Trump got does indeed expand his deportation regime.
There are, on average, about 50,000 people in immigration detention on any given day, even though a 2018 spending deal provided funding for 40,520 beds. Democrats had fought to shrink or limit the number of beds available to immigration authorities, in an effort to slow the expansion of the administration’s deportation infrastructure. But the party withdrew that demand under pressure from Republicans, and the new bill allows for the further increase of detention capacity from the current level.
Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, lambasted the deal for “making major concessions on detention.”
“The funding bill was a chance to put a check on the detention system, which is a key driver of mass deportations.”“ICE’s budget has skyrocketed and despite this, they keep getting bailed out for overspending. Some action needs to be taken and reducing funding is a start,” Shah said. “The administration is quietly expanding detention all over the country in behind-the-scenes deals with local counties and private contractors, and the funding bill was a chance to put a check on the detention system, which is a key driver of mass deportations.”
Democrats were hamstrung in negotiations by their own previously enthusiastic support for deportations and border enforcement. Before Trump made the issue partisan by demanding a wall during his presidential campaign, both parties eagerly spent billions to militarize the southern border.
“For decades, both parties have built up the deportation [machine] without question, and this deal represents the ‘enforcement-only’ status quo that Washington has been stuck in for too long,” said Greisa Martinez Rosas, deputy executive director of United We Dream and a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. On Wednesday, activists from United We Dream, which advocates for immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, occupied a portion of the Cannon House Office Building.
“This was an old-fashioned shakedown — Trump threatened to shut down the government again unless Congress gave him and his deportation force more cash to execute their racist vision of mass deportation, and while Democrats gave him the money, immigrant families will pay the price,” Rosas said.
One senior Democratic aide, who was close to the negotiations but not authorized to speak publicly, said that the alternative to the deal that was struck was a continuing resolution, a temporary funding measure that would keep the system running as is. That meant that either way, there would be a further expansion of beds. “That’s the best argument,” he said.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said on Wednesday that she’s still trying to get all the details of the deal, but is strongly leaning toward voting no because of “the lack of accountability around the detention system” and the increased number of detention beds.
She said she would like a guarantee from the Trump administration that the Department of Homeland Security will use its funds as appropriated by Congress, instead of moving money around to fund the wall, as Trump has threatened. “Without that accountability, it becomes very difficult to approve that,” Jayapal said.
Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., said he’s “leaning as a strong no” on the deal. “I think for far too many times, Dreamers and immigration reform in general get pushed to the back,” Espaillat told The Intercept. “And we won’t have comprehensive immigration reform on a nice sunny day or on a spring morning. We will have it in the middle of a crisis that will yield a give and take, that will force people to reach a consensus, and I think we missed another opportunity.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., also told The Intercept she will “probably be voting no.”
The post Immigrant Rights Groups Trash Border Deal: “Immigrant Families Will Pay the Price” appeared first on The Intercept.
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who now serves as President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, called for the overthrow of Iran’s government on Wednesday during a rally in Poland staged by a cult-like group of Iranian exiles who pay him to represent them.
Speaking outside the Warsaw venue for an international conference on the Middle East attended by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Giuliani said that his message for the 65 governments discussing ways to confront Iran was simple. “The theocratic dictatorship in Tehran,” Giuliani said, “must end and end quickly.”
Former NY Mayor @RudyGiuliani in Warsaw:
In order to have peace & security in the Mid-East there has to be a major change in the theocratic dictatorship in #Iran. It must end & end quickly in order to have stability#FreeIranWithMaryamRajavi#PolandSummit#IStandWithMaryamRajavi pic.twitter.com/aKafMjxq4k
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) February 13, 2019
Giuliani went on to suggest that peace in the region would only come when Iran was ruled instead by his clients, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an exile group of former terrorists also known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mujahedin. The group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, already refers to herself as “President-elect.”
.@RudyGiuliani: We have seen regime change work & fail. In #Iran's case we don’t have to worry. There is a viable alternative. Maryam Rajavi's 10-point plan stands for a #FreeIran w/ a democratically-elected Gov instead of a tyrant/monarch.#FreeIranWithMaryamRajavi #WarsawSummit pic.twitter.com/EFJHIw2WUV
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) February 13, 2019
Off-stage, the U.S. president’s lawyer admitted that he was paid by the exile group, but stressed to reporters that he was in Warsaw on behalf of the MEK in his personal capacity and would not be attending the diplomatic conference organized by the State Department.
Even before the conference began, the Israeli prime minister appeared to shrug off efforts by the State Department and the Polish government to portray the gathering as broadly focused on Middle East peace, describing it as primarily a meeting of Iran’s enemies.
In video posted on the prime minister’s official Twitter feed, Netanyahu characterized a meeting with Oman’s foreign minister as “excellent,” and one focused on “additional steps we can take together with the countries of the region in order to advance common interests.”
According to the English translation of Netanyahu’s remarks in Hebrew prepared by his office, the prime minister then added: “What is important about this meeting — and it is not in secret because there are many of those — is that this is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries that are sitting down together with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran.”
A screenshot from video posted on the official Twitter feed of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s use of the word “war” seemed to throw Israel’s diplomatic corps into chaos. Within minutes, as journalists speculated that the prime minister’s office might have mistranslated his comment, Netanyahu’s spokesperson to the Arab media, Ofir Gendelman, wrote that the Israeli leader had described his nation’s common interest with Arab nations as “combatting Iran,” not “war with Iran.”
The subtitled video produced by the prime minister’s office was then deleted from his Twitter feed and replaced with the text of Gendelman’s alternative translation.
As my colleague Talya Cooper explains, however, Netanyahu did in fact use the Hebrew word for “war” in the video, which has not yet been deleted from his Hebrew-language YouTube channel. In a separate video, posted by Netanyahu’s office on Facebook earlier in the day, the prime minister had used the Hebrew word for “combat.”
Aron Heller, an Associated Press correspondent based in Jerusalem, also filmed the remarks and reported that although Netanyahu had mentioned “war,” his office said later that he was referring to “combatting Iran.”
Did @netanyahu really say “war” with Iran? I was there and the word was ”milchama” = war. pic.twitter.com/ZzhrDs2lWA
— Aron Heller (@aronhellerap) February 13, 2019
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, seized on the Israeli leader’s apparent Freudian slip as evidence that Netanyahu’s true aim of provoking a war with Iran was now out in the open.
We've always known Netanyahu's illusions. Now, the world – and those attending #WarsawCircus – know, too pic.twitter.com/0TSDzIak9e
— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) February 13, 2019
Zarif also suggested that the Trump administration and the exiles of the MEK might have been behind a suicide bombing on a bus in southeastern Iran on Wednesday, which killed 41 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
“Is it no coincidence that Iran is hit by terror on the very day that #WarsawCircus begins?” Zarif tweeted. “Especially when cohorts of same terrorists cheer it from Warsaw streets & support it with twitter bots? US seems to always make the same wrong choices, but expect different results.”
The foreign minister was clearly referring to the MEK, which spent three decades trying to achieve regime change in Iran through violence, including terrorist attacks. The well-funded exile group was also suspected of being behind social media trickery discovered by the BBC, which reported that Twitter bots had been deployed “to artificially create a trend which hints at popular support for the summit and — by extension — widespread resentment towards the Iranian establishment.”
The Iranian exiles have been caught in the past paying nonsupporters to fill out its crowds at rallies, a tactic reportedly used at the event in Warsaw on Wednesday, according to journalists on the ground.
The MEK is having a rally in Warsaw where as usual about a third of the crowd is random non-Iranians who've been bussed in from Slovakia and can't read the signs they're holding pic.twitter.com/NnJyqMxnEY
— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) February 13, 2019
Spoke to journalist in #WarsawSummit. He had attended the MEK terrorist org's rally. Many of the "demonstartors" were Slovak high school kids who couldnt really provide an answer as to why they were there.
Just as the MEK buys bots on Twitter, they do so in real life as well…
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) February 13, 2019
Members of the MEK helped foment the 1979 Iranian revolution, in part by killing American civilians working in Tehran, but the group then lost a struggle for power to the Islamists. With its leadership forced to flee Iran in 1981, the MEK’s members set up a government-in-exile in France and established a military base in Iraq, where they were given arms and training by Saddam Hussein as part of a strategy to destabilize the government in Tehran that he was at war with.
In recent years, as The Intercept has reported, the MEK has poured millions of dollars into reinventing itself as a moderate political group ready to take power in Iran if Western-backed regime change ever takes place. To that end, it lobbied successfully to be removed from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2012. The Iranian exiles achieved this over the apparent opposition of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in part by paying a long list of former U.S. officials from both parties hefty speaking fees of between $10,000 to $50,000 for hymns of praise.
Despite the claims of paid spokespeople like Giuliani and John Bolton — who predicted regime change would come at a lavish MEK rally in Paris just months before being named Trump’s national security adviser — the MEK appears to be as unprepared to take power in Iran as Ahmad Chalabi’s exiled Iraqi National Congress was after the American invasion of Iraq.
#JohnBolton 8 months ago among MEK supporters tells them they will overthrow #Iran’s regime and celebrate in #Tehran with Bolton himself present, “before 2019” pic.twitter.com/H7oaaU3faU
— Bahman Kalbasi (@BahmanKalbasi) March 22, 2018
Ariane Tabatabai, a Georgetown University scholar, has argued that the “cult-like dissident group” — whose married members were reportedly forced to divorce and take a vow of lifelong celibacy — “has no viable chance of seizing power in Iran.”
If the current government is not Iranians’ first choice for a government, the MEK is not even their last — and for good reason. The MEK supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. The people’s discontent with the Iranian government at that time did not translate into their supporting an external enemy that was firing Scuds into Tehran, using chemical weapons and killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including many civilians. Today, the MEK is viewed negatively by most Iranians, who would prefer to maintain the status quo than rush to the arms of what they consider a corrupt, criminal cult.
Despite such doubts, spending lavishly on paid endorsements has earned the MEK a bipartisan roster of Washington politicians willing to sign up as supporters. At a gala in 2016, Bolton was joined in singing the group’s praises by another former U.N. ambassador, Bill Richardson; a former attorney general, Michael Mukasey; the former State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley; the former Homeland Security adviser Frances Townsend; the former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I.; and the former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. That Paris gala was hosted by Linda Chavez, a former Reagan administration official, and headlined by Newt Gingrich, the former speaker who was under consideration to be Trump’s running mate at the time.
Fears about Bolton’s apparently open desire to start a war with Iran have been exacerbated by his boosting of the MEK and his steadfast denial of the catastrophe unleashed by the invasion of Iraq that he worked for as a member of the Bush administration. Last year, when Fox News host Tucker Carlson pointed out that Bolton had called for regime change in Iraq, Libya, Iran, and Syria, and the first of those had been “a disaster,” Bolton disagreed.
“I think the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that military action, was a resounding success,” Bolton insisted to Carlson. The chaos that followed in Iraq, he said, was caused by a poorly executed occupation that ended too soon. On the bright side, Bolton said, the mistakes the U.S. made in Iraq offered “lessons about what to do after a regime is overthrown” in the future.
Earlier this week, Sen. Chris Murphy pointed out, Bolton appeared to be laying the groundwork for war in a belligerent video message from the White House to mark the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution.
Here Bolton says Iran is seeking nuclear weapons. This simply isn’t true. The intelligence says the opposite and he knows it. He is laying the groundwork for war and we all must be vigilant. https://t.co/1zHR5vaEGn
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 12, 2019
The post As Rudy Giuliani Calls for Regime Change in Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu Raises the Specter of “War” appeared first on The Intercept.
A former Goldman Sachs lobbyist who now works as the top lawyer for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., declined to name 19 of his 20 former clients in his financial disclosure last year.
Mark Patterson, who also served as former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s chief of staff during the Obama administration, joined Schumer’s office last year. He had been a co-chair of the Perkins Coie law firm’s public and strategic affairs practice since 2014.
An archived version of Perkins Coie’s website says that Patterson provided “policy analysis and strategic counsel to clients such as major corporations, financial institutions and nonprofit organizations.” He gave few specifics in his 2018 financial disclosure, asserting that he had to withhold the identities of nearly all of his clients based on rules of professional conduct for lawyers.
It’s the same rationale that former Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., used last month to avoid naming nine of his 36 previous clients, as The Intercept previously reported.
A Schumer spokesperson did not respond to questions.
At Schumer’s office, Patterson is now at the center of a fight over corporate governance. Since President Donald Trump took office, organizations like Demand Progress and the Revolving Door Project have pressured Schumer to use the limited powers at his disposal to encourage stricter oversight by recommending progressive watchdogs to regulatory agency boards. (Schumer, as minority leader, selects appointees for Democratic seats on regulatory bodies, who then need to be formally nominated by the White House).
The effort has produced mixed results: Although Schumer last year proposed nominees that progressives support, the White House didn’t nominate two of them, and Republicans didn’t hold votes on the other two nominees.
A coalition of 20 organizations recently wrote to Schumer demanding that he work to fill Democratic vacancies at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Merit Systems Protection Board. The letter faulted Schumer for allowing Trump’s judicial nominees to win confirmation by unanimous consent. Schumer could have used those vacancies as leverage to force votes on his party’s regulatory nominees, the progressives argued.
HuffPost this week called the fight over the regulatory bodies a “moment of truth” for Schumer and Senate Democrats. Jeff Hauser, who leads the Revolving Door Project in Washington, D.C., believes that Patterson deserves some blame for the botched vacancies. After Patterson was hired, Schumer’s office told The Nation that the former Goldman lobbyist — unlike his predecessor — wouldn’t be involved in vetting appointments to federal commissions. That’s a problem, said Hauser.
“I think we should in general try to not hire people for senior jobs where they’re going to be recused from certain matters,” Hauser said. “It would make sense that your chief counsel would be involved in the SEC and FDIC hiring process. It’s something you want your chief counsel to be involved in. If he is complying with his recusal, that might explain the relative indifference, because the senior person on leadership staff who should be raising alarms that these nominations are languishing with Trump is disempowered.”
Hauser said Patterson’s financial disclosure “illustrates a lot of the weakness in our ethics rules, because there is insufficient skepticism about self-reported matters.”
“We only have his word that those 19 clients required that level of confidentiality,” Hauser said. “If he’s hiding his clients, it’s hard to even know what we don’t want him involved in, by definition, because he’s preventing us the ability to know what is a conflict of interest.”
This story is a collaboration between The Intercept and MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks money’s influence on politics.
The post Goldman Lobbyist Turned Schumer General Counsel Is Hiding Most Former Clients’ Names appeared first on The Intercept.
American descendants of slaves identifying themselves with the hashtag #ADOS have been openly critical of 2020 presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker over the past weeks.
Some prominent black political commentators are now speculating that these critics are Russian bots.
Angela Rye, a CNN political commentator and board member of the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, has said she believes that some ADOS arguments are not organic, but were “paid for by Russia.” She added that she’s “not saying everyone who uses the hashtag is a Russian bot,” but she does believe “it originated from Russian bots.” Rye went on to argue that the same is true of critiques relating to “some of the stuff around the crime bill” circa 2016 — presumably referring to critics of Hillary Clinton who questioned her support of the bill now widely understood to have caused overwhelming harm to black Americans.
We stand with #ados #notabot #tonetalks #angelaproject pic.twitter.com/9t1ty9cVeW
— Amos Jones (@amosnjones) February 5, 2019
On a segment of Joy Reid’s MSNBC show titled “how to spot a bot,” Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, argued that the ADOS hashtag is a way to identify foreign influence. “A lot of the ones that are pretending to be black people, black women in particular, who are focusing on black identity, have these sort of aspects in the ways that they’re talking about language,” she said. She went on to say that bots are posing as black Americans using “the vernacular or the language of someone that believes they are a part of our community” to claim authority to represent black Americans.
“This has become a challenge particularly for the Democratic candidates because obviously, in 2016, all this activity was directed to help Donald Trump, or to hurt Hillary Clinton, to do both,” Reid said. “So I’m wondering if this time the party is going to be a bit more prepared. Reid appeared to co-sign Mitchell’s claim, saying, “I did see a huge uptick of bot activity when Kamala Harris announced,” focusing on critics who argue that Harris “is not really black.”
For years, identifying as a black American “descendant” of slaves or ADOS has been a way for black Americans to advocate for the specific needs and interests of those brought to the United States via the transatlantic slave trade hundreds of years ago, as distinct from the interests of more recent African and Caribbean immigrants.
Some critics using the ADOS hashtag have focused on Harris’s race, pointing to Kamala’s Indian and Jamaican heritage as a possible explanation for why, as a prosecutor, she supported policies that disproportionately harmed black Americans. The ADOS movement does have some nativist elements. But it is also true that much of the commentary surrounding Harris appears to relate less to her racial background than her public record. Booker, also a target of ADOS criticism, is an American descendant of slavery himself.
As Attorney General Kamala opposed legislation requiring her office investigate police shootings. When CA was ordered to reduce prison overcrowding she argued against it. The question is basic: Would you elect @SheriffClarke? What's the hell is the difference? #ADOS #kamalaharris pic.twitter.com/LQwdy57UQr
— Tim Black ™ (@RealTimBlack) February 11, 2019
The creators of the hashtag — Antonio Moore, an attorney in California, and Yvette Carnell, a political commentator — are neither Russian nor bots and are demanding an apology.
Carnell told The Intercept that she thinks calling out ADOS is an effort to delegitimize the grassroots movement they’ve worked to cultivate and to “undermine a real debate that we have about Kamala Harris within the black community.” For years, Moore and Carnell have been doing regular YouTube and radio shows together where they discuss issues like reparations and the racial wealth divide under the lens of “native descendants of American slaves.”
Moore said that accusations like Reid’s are a McCarthyite tactic in the same vein as the attempts to publicly discredit Martin Luther King Jr. “It’s troubling, the lengths that these people will go to undermine authentic Black advocacy in order to prop up the Democratic establishment,” he said in an email. An MSNBC spokesperson declined to comment.
Indeed, people of color who challenge the Democratic Party from the left are often erased or dismissed as somehow not being real. During the 2016 Democratic primary, the hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhite spread as a response to the “Bernie Bro” stereotype, which wrongly claimed that nearly all Bernie Sanders supporters were young white men.
Carnell and Moore cited a truancy program Harris created as San Francisco’s district attorney that threatened parents with prosecution if their children missed school — a policy that progressives argue disproportionately hurts minority and low-income communities — as one of their main criticisms of her. As for Booker, they said they have a problem with his corporate alliances, specifically his ties to the pharmaceutical industry and widely criticized vote against allowing drug reimportation to the United States.
So….
Reparations for #ADOS
Debilitating effects of the Crime Bill
Questionable acts of Kamala Harris’ AG tenure
Dems lack of specific policies that roll back effects of injustice
are ‘divisive’ issues put out by Russian bots and not legitimate concerns of Black people?
— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) February 4, 2019
Moore said they will be holding their first American DOS conference in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 4-5, and intend to ask Booker and Harris to attend to “talk to black Americans about what their black agenda is.”
This is not the first time Reid has dabbled in conspiracy theories. Last year, Reid found herself in hot water when decade-old homophobic blog posts resurfaced. Instead of immediately apologizing, Reid told Mediaite — without offering any evidence — that hackers planted the offensive blog posts as “part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.”
Correction: February 13, 2019, 11:52 a.m.
Due to editing errors, a previous version of this article stated that Cory Booker is a “defendant” of slavery, rather than a “descendant.” The article also misgendered Yvette Carnell, who uses “she” pronouns.
The post Black Critics of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker Push Back Against Claims That They’re Russian “Bots” appeared first on The Intercept.
“I really don’t like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!'”
So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more.
It’s worth marking the moment. Because those could be the famous last words of a one-term president, having wildly underestimated the public appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth divide), and surging white supremacy.
Or they could be the epitaph for a habitable climate, with Trump’s lies and scare tactics succeeding in trampling this desperately needed framework. That could either help win him re-election, or land us with a timid Democrat in the White House with neither the courage nor the democratic mandate for this kind of deep change. Either scenario means blowing the handful of years left to roll out the transformations required to keep temperatures below catastrophic levels.
Back in October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a landmark report informing us that global emissions need to be slashed in half in less than 12 years, a target that simply cannot be met without the world’s largest economy playing a game-changing leadership role. If there is a new administration ready to leap into that role in January 2021, meeting those targets would still be extraordinarily difficult, but it would be technically possible — especially if large cities and states like California and New York escalate their ambitions right now. Losing another four years to a Republican or a corporate Democrat, and starting in 2026 is, quite simply, a joke.
So either Trump is right and the Green New Deal is a losing political issue, one he can smear out of existence. Or he is wrong and a candidate who makes the Green New Deal the centerpiece of their platform will take the Democratic primary and then kick Trump’s ass in the general, with a clear democratic mandate to introduce wartime-levels of investment to battle our triple crises from day one. That would very likely inspire the rest of the world to finally follow suit on bold climate policy, giving us all a fighting chance.
Those are the stark options before us. And which outcome we end up with depends on the actions taken by social movements in the next two years. Because these are not questions that will be settled through elections alone. At their core, they are about building political power — enough to change the calculus of what is possible.
That was the lesson of the original New Deal, one we would be wise to remember right now.
The New Deal was a process as much as a project, one that was constantly changing and expanding in response to social pressure from both the right and the left.Ocasio-Cortez chose to model the Green New Deal after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historic raft of programs understanding full well that a central task is to make sure that this mobilization does not repeat the ways in which its namesake excluded and further marginalized many vulnerable groups. For instance, New Deal-era programs and protections left out agricultural and domestic workers (many of them black), Mexican immigrants (some 1 million of whom faced deportation in the 1930s), and Indigenous people (who won some gains but whose land rights were also violated by both massive infrastructure projects and some conservation efforts).
Indeed, the resolution calls for these and other violations to be actively redressed, listing as one of its core goals “stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”
I have written before about why the old New Deal, despite its failings, remains a useful touchstone for the kind of sweeping climate mobilization that is our only hope of lowering emissions in time. In large part, this is because there are so few historical precedents we can look to (other than top-down military mobilizations) that show how every sector of life, from forestry to education to the arts to housing to electrification, can be transformed under the umbrella of a single, society-wide mission.
Which is why it is so critical to remember that none of it would have happened without massive pressure from social movements. FDR rolled out the New Deal in the midst of a historic wave of labor unrest: There was the Teamsters’ rebellion and Minneapolis general strike in 1934, the 83-day shutdown of the West Coast by longshore workers that same year, and the Flint sit-down autoworkers strikes in 1936 and 1937. During this same period, mass movements, responding to the suffering of the Great Depression, demanded sweeping social programs, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, while socialists argued that abandoned factories should be handed over to their workers and turned into cooperatives. Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of “The Jungle,” ran for governor of California in 1934 on a platform arguing that the key to ending poverty was full state funding of workers’ cooperatives. He received nearly 900,000 votes, but having been viciously attacked by the right and undercut by the Democratic establishment, he fell just short of winning the governor’s office.
All of this is a reminder that the New Deal was adopted by Roosevelt at a time of such progressive and left militancy that its programs — which seem radical by today’s standards — appeared at the time to be the only way to hold back a full-scale revolution.
It’s also a reminder that the New Deal was a process as much as a project, one that was constantly changing and expanding in response to social pressure from both the right and the left. For example, a program like the Civilian Conservation Corps started with 200,000 workers, but when it proved popular eventually expanded to 2 million. That’s why the fact that there are weaknesses in Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s resolution — and there are a few — is far less compelling than the fact that it gets so much exactly right. There is plenty of time to improve and correct a Green New Deal once it starts rolling out (it needs to be more explicit about keeping carbon in the ground, for instance, and about nuclear and coal never being “clean”). But we have only one chance to get this thing charged up and moving forward.
The more sobering lesson is that the kind of mass power that delivered the victories of the New Deal era is far beyond anything possessed by current progressive movements, even if they all combined efforts. That’s why it is so urgent to use the Green New Deal framework as a potent tool to build that power — a vision to both unite movements and dramatically expand them.
Part of that involves turning what is being derided as a left-wing “laundry list” or “wish list” into an irresistible story of the future, connecting the dots between the many parts of daily life that stand to be transformed — from health care to employment, day care to jail cell, clean air to leisure time.
Right now, the Green New Deal reads like a list because House resolutions have to be formatted as lists — lettered and numbered sequences of “whereases” and “resolveds.” It’s also being characterized as an unrelated grab bag because most of us have been trained to avoid a systemic and historical analysis of capitalism and to divide pretty much every crisis our system produces — from economic inequality to violence against women to white supremacy to unending wars to ecological unraveling — in walled-off silos. From within that rigid mindset, it’s easy to dismiss a sweeping and intersectional vision like the Green New Deal as a green-tinted “laundry list” of everything the left has ever wanted.
Now that the resolution is out there, however, the onus is on all of us who support it to help make the case for how our overlapping crises are indeed inextricably linked — and can only be overcome with a holistic vision for social and economic transformation. This is already beginning to happen. For example, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, who is heading up policy for a new think tank largely focused on the Green New Deal, recently pointed out that just as thousands of people moved for jobs during the World War II-era economic mobilization, we should expect a great many to move again to be part of a renewables revolution. And when they do, “unlinking employment from health care means people can move for better jobs, to escape the worst effects of climate, AND re-enter the labor mkt without losing” (her whole Twitter thread is worth reading).
Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Investing big in public health care is also critical in light of the fact that no matter how fast we move to lower emissions, it is going to get hotter and storms are going to get fiercer. When those storms bash up against health care systems and electricity grids that have been starved by decades of austerity, thousands pay the price with their lives, as they so tragically did in post-Maria Puerto Rico.
And there are many more connections to be drawn. Those complaining about climate policy being weighed down by supposedly unrelated demands for access to health care and education would do well to remember that the caring professions — most of them dominated by women — are relatively low carbon and can be made even more so. In other words, they deserve to be seen as “green jobs,” with the same protections, the same investments, and the same living wages as male-dominated workforces in the renewables, efficiency, and public-transit sectors. Meanwhile, as Gunn-Wright points out, to make those sectors less male-dominated, family leave and pay equity are a must, which is part of the reason both are included in the resolution.
Drawing out these connections in ways that capture the public imagination will take a massive exercise in participatory democracy. A first step is for every sector touched by the Green New Deal — hospitals, schools, universities, and more — to make their own plans for how to rapidly decarbonize while furthering the Green New Deal’s mission to eliminate poverty, create good jobs, and close the racial and gender wealth divides.
My favorite example of what this could look like comes from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, which has developed a bold plan to turn every post office in Canada into a hub for a just green transition. Think solar panels on the roof, charging stations out front, a fleet of domestically manufactured electric vehicles from which union members don’t just deliver mail, but also local produce and medicine, and check in on seniors — all supported by the proceeds of postal banking.
To make the case for a Green New Deal — which explicitly calls for this kind of democratic, decentralized leadership — every sector in the United States should be developing similar visionary plans for their workplaces right now. And if that doesn’t motivate their members to rush the polls come 2020, I don’t know what will.
We have been trained to see our issues in silos; they never belonged there. In fact, the impact of climate change on every part of our lives is far too expansive and extensive to begin to cover here. But I do need to mention a few more glaring links that many are missing.
A job guarantee, far from an opportunistic socialist addendum, is a critical part of achieving a rapid and just transition. It would immediately lower the intense pressure on workers to take the kinds of jobs that destabilize our planet because all would be free to take the time needed to retrain and find work in one of the many sectors that will be dramatically expanding.
This in turn will reduce the power of bad actors like the Laborers’ International Union of North America who are determined to split the labor movement and sabotage the prospects for this historic effort. Right out of the gate, LIUNA came out swinging against the Green New Deal. Never mind that it contains stronger protections for trade unions and the right to organize than anything we have seen out of Washington in three decades, including the right of workers in high-carbon sectors to democratically participate in their transition and to have jobs in clean sectors at the same salary and benefits levels as before.
A job guarantee, far from an opportunistic socialist addendum, is a critical part of achieving a rapid and just transition.There is absolutely no rational reason for a union representing construction workers to oppose what would be the biggest infrastructure project in a century, unless LIUNA actually is what it appears to be: a fossil fuel astroturf group disguised as a trade union, or at best a company union. These are the same labor leaders, let us recall, who sided with the tanks and attack dogs at Standing Rock; who fought relentlessly for the construction of the planet-destabilizing Keystone XL pipeline; and who (along with several other building trade union heads) aligned themselves with Trump on his first day in office, smiling for a White House photo op and declaring his inauguration “a great moment for working men and women.”
LIUNA’s leaders have loudly demanded unquestioning “solidarity” from the rest of the trade union movement. But again and again, they have offered nothing but the narrowest self-interest in return, indifferent to the suffering of immigrant workers whose lives are being torn apart under Trump and to the Indigenous workers who saw their homeland turned into a war zone. The time has come for the rest of the labor movement to confront and isolate them before they can do more damage. That could take the form of LIUNA members, confident that the Green New Deal will not leave them behind, voting out their pro-boss leaders. Or it could end with LIUNA being tossed out of the AFL-CIO for planetary malpractice.
The more unionized sectors like teaching, nursing, and manufacturing make the Green New Deal their own by showing how it can transform their workplaces for the better, and the more all union leaders embrace the growth in membership they would see under the Green New Deal, the stronger they will be for this unavoidable confrontation.
One last connection I will mention has to do with the concept of “repair.” The resolution calls for creating well-paying jobs “restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems,” as well as “cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites.”
This is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibly to reach for.There are many such sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to waste after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. It’s a lot like how this culture treats people. It’s what has been done to so many workers in the neoliberal period, using them up and then abandoning them to addiction and despair. It’s what the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of the population who are more economically useful as prison laborers and numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free workers. And the old New Deal did it too, by choosing to exclude and discard so many black and brown and women workers.
There is a grand story to be told here about the duty to repair — to repair our relationship with the earth and with one another, to heal the deep wounds dating back to the founding of the country. Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mindset — a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview, a transformation from “gig and dig” to an ethos of care and repair.
If these kinds of deeper connections between fractured people and a fast-warming planet seem far beyond the scope of policymakers, it’s worth thinking back to the absolutely central role of artists during the New Deal era. Playwrights, photographers, muralists, and novelists were all part of a renaissance of both realist and utopian art. Some held up a mirror to the wrenching misery that the New Deal sought to alleviate. Others opened up spaces for Depression-ravaged people to imagine a world beyond that misery. Both helped get the job done in ways that are impossible to quantify.
In a similar vein, there is much to learn from Indigenous-led movements in Bolivia and Ecuador that have placed at the center of their calls for ecological transformation the concept of buen vivir, a focus on the right to a good life as opposed to more and more and more life of endless consumption, an ethos that is so ably embodied by the current resident of the White House.
The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and storage, or carbon offsets.
But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to bury the overarching message: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibly to reach for.
The young organizers in the Sunrise Movement, who have done so much to galvanize the Green New Deal momentum, talk about our collective moment as one filled with both “promise and peril.” That is exactly right. And everything that happens from here on in should hold one in each hand.
The post The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal appeared first on The Intercept.
Congress has reportedly reached an agreement to fund the government and avoid another shutdown on Saturday, though with the grumbling in conservative circles about the deal, it’s anyone’s guess whether President Donald Trump will sign it. But even if the government doesn’t shut down again, the rare breakout of competence will have come too late for people like Dorothy Leong of Stratford, Connecticut.
Leong, 83, took out a reverse mortgage on her home in 2004, which gives seniors with equity in their home the opportunity to take money out and defer repayment until they die or resell the property. She used up the line of credit from the reverse mortgage long ago and receives no more money from the deal, but as with all reverse mortgages, she’s still required to cover property taxes and homeowner’s insurance. At the same time, Leong suffers from multiple medical maladies, including a recent heart attack and problems with her legs. With health care bills mounting, and her family’s only means of support being her Social Security check and a meager income from her disabled adult son, Leong eventually fell behind on tax and insurance payments.
Leong’s condition qualifies her for a government program called an “at-risk extension.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, which oversees the reverse-mortgage program, allows homeowners over 80 who have serious medical conditions to avoid foreclosure if they miss housing-related payments. The program seeks to avoid the cruelty of throwing sick elderly people out onto the street.
The at-risk extension, however, must be renewed every year. Leong was approved at the end of 2017 but needed a renewal at the end of last year. “Our experience is, if the doctor says these are the issues, HUD approves it,” said Sarah White, an attorney representing Leong, who sent her request for an extension to HUD on December 10. The government shut down 12 days later, and nobody at HUD ever approved the renewal.
Leong’s at-risk extension lapsed, and she was served with a foreclosure notice in late January on the home she’s lived in since 1962.
The case is one of several scenarios in which lack of staffing during a government shutdown could leave borrowers at risk of preventable, unnecessary foreclosures. HUD and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, which is also involved with home loans, have provided no data about how many foreclosures were advanced during the shutdown. But with critical bottlenecks inherent in the process, housing advocates warn that the number could be high — and even one preventable foreclosure is a policy tragedy.
A closed meeting room at the Capitol, as bipartisan House and Senate bargainers negotiate to avoid another government shutdown in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11, 2019.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP
If another shutdown hits, the backlog of cases would only increase. “People are losing homes that don’t need to,” said Alys Cohen, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center’s Washington office.
HUD spokesperson Brian Sullivan said that the agency is finalizing its contingency plan in the event of another government shutdown, including how to address foreclosure timelines. He declined to comment on how HUD was handling leftover cases from the initial shutdown, like Leong’s. USDA did not respond to a request for comment.
Over 9 million borrowers have loans provided or insured by either HUD or USDA. The majority of them are low-income individuals, seniors, or rural residents.
In addition to reverse mortgages, HUD insures loans through the Federal Housing Administration. Meanwhile, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency has two types of loan programs: a loan-guarantee program, which, like the Federal Housing Administration, backs mortgages made with private lenders, and a Direct Farm Ownership Loan program, in which the government issues the mortgages itself.
Direct loans can go toward the down payment or purchase of farms or ranches, expansion or renovation of an existing plot, or to fund capital expenses. They are often heavily subsidized, with monthly payments rising or falling depending on farm income. “I have clients with payments of $120 a month,” said Geoffrey Walsh, a staff attorney with the National Consumer Law Center.
These variable payments mean that farmers must constantly report their income so that the Farm Service Agency can adjust payments or approve an alternative to foreclosure. All FSA direct loans are handled through one centralized servicing center in St. Louis. And when the shutdown happened, that servicing center closed its doors.
“Nobody was answering the phone for 35 days,” said Walsh, describing the chaotic situation during the nation’s largest-ever government shutdown. Not only could alterations to direct-loan payments not be updated, but struggling borrowers at risk of foreclosure could also not be considered for loss mitigation programs to stay current on their loans.
While foreclosures on direct USDA loans are handled by private servicing companies or in some cases the local U.S. Attorney’s office, if there are disagreements over the amount owed or requests for hardship assistance, answers must come through the USDA’s centralized servicing center. Meanwhile, most foreclosures have timelines for borrower action to stop the march toward eviction and sale of the property. “None of those clocks stopped running during the shutdown,” Walsh said.
Eventually, the USDA caught on to the shutdown’s detrimental impact on farmers — yet it seemed unperturbed by the specific harms facing mortgage borrowers. On January 22, the agency reopened Farm Services Agency offices to assist farmers, but explicitly excluded Farm Ownership loans from the list of programs that would be serviced. The USDA told the National Consumer Law Center that it stopped foreclosure sales during the shutdown, but it never clarified how it handled foreclosure timelines.
The National Consumer Law Center asked the USDA for a stay of all foreclosure activity on its loans during the shutdown, but received no response. “There was no written guidance from USDA about what they were doing,” said Steven Sharpe, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio.
In January, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution profiled Willie Donaldson, a homeowner caught up in this situation. After losing his job due to a stroke, Donaldson appealed to the USDA’s rural housing program, which assisted him with his loan to help prevent foreclosure. But nobody answered the phone. His foreclosure hearing was scheduled for February 5.
When the shutdown ended, problems for USDA borrowers were not immediately alleviated. The centralized servicing center needs to work through a tremendous backlog of claims and appeals, with no additional funding support to accelerate the process. “We think it’s still a mess,” said Walsh.
The situation at HUD is similar to the USDA. In addition to reverse mortgage homeowners with at-risk extensions like Leong, newly widowed spouses whose names aren’t on the reverse mortgage need assistance from HUD to keep foreclosure at bay. But HUD officials who typically approve this deferral were furloughed during the shutdown. Borrowers with Federal Housing Administration-insured loans can normally contact HUD personnel for assistance to prevent avoidable foreclosures, like loss mitigation options; this help was also not available during the shutdown since the main point of assistance, the agency’s national servicing center, was almost entirely furloughed.
Advocates asked HUD for a foreclosure moratorium during the shutdown, without a response. “A couple times, we wrote to HUD and someone responded that they would do something on that case,” said Cohen of NCLC. “But it can’t be the case that you have to send an email to Alys Cohen to get your foreclosure stopped.”
White, Leong’s attorney, said her client was served with foreclosure on January 23. Connecticut has a mandatory mediation program that will prevent the foreclosure from occurring immediately. However, the stress of the situation has led to a further decline in Leong’s health. “She should not be in foreclosure again,” White said.
Any completed foreclosures could trigger payouts from the USDA and HUD’s mortgage insurance funds, costing the government money for no good reason.
Attorneys and housing advocates want the USDA and HUD to extend all foreclosure-related deadlines by 35 days to account for the shutdown. They also want an immediate stay on foreclosures in their programs and extended deadlines for assistance until the backlog is cleared. Finally, all foreclosures executed during the shutdown should be rescinded, they said.
If the government shuts down again, not only would the backlog of cases continue to pile up, but borrowers awaiting an answer on their particular situation would again have no recourse at the USDA or HUD, and find themselves at the mercy of a relentless foreclosure timeline. Many borrowers don’t have attorneys helping them through the intricacies of the system. Low-income rental assistance could also be affected by a renewed shutdown, and if that dries up, substantial numbers of evictions could ensue.
But merely averting a shutdown won’t avert the foreclosure the first shutdown caused.
The post How the Government Shutdown Caused a Foreclosure — and Could Cause More appeared first on The Intercept.
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The U.S. is weaponizing humanitarian aid in an effort to sell its regime change campaign against Venezuela. This week on Intercepted: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi officially endorses the attempted coup in Venezuela, joining forces with Donald Trump and his posse of neoconservatives. Venezuela’s Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Ron responds to the threats of military action and the reports about covert U.S. activity in the country. He also discusses the impact of the sanctions on Venezuela. Former United Nations rapporteur Alfred de Zayas is accusing the U.S. of attempting to “asphyxiate” Venezuela with economic warfare and says the U.S. should be investigated by the International Criminal Court. Zayas wrote a U.N. report on Venezuela in late 2018 that was scathing in its assessment of U.S. policy toward Venezuela under both Obama and Trump. He talks about what he found during his investigation. And we go inside the mind of journalist Sam Husseini, who tried to ask convicted criminal Elliott Abrams about his past and the present U.S. lies about Venezuela.
Transcript coming soon.
The post Neoliberalism or Death: The U.S. Economic War Against Venezuela appeared first on The Intercept.
After the foreclosure crisis of a decade ago, American homes were left empty and buyer-less. In that absence, big private investment firms scooped up nearly 200,000 homes under the premise that, as landlords, they could streamline an often shoddy renting process. But, for many of the renters who had thought they had struck gold with lovely homes and lush yards, things didn’t pan out that way. Tenants conveyed stories of rapacious corporate landlords who fleeced them at every turn, from not returning security deposits to forestalling and skirting necessary repairs. One family finally moved out after a series of flooding incidents left them with health problems and a decaying house.
The U.S. government seemed to be careening toward yet another shutdown—but then! Congressional negotiators agreed to a new funding deal, one that only includes a fraction of the billions that President Donald Trump requested for a border wall—the same sticking point that led to a 35-day partial government shutdown starting at the end of last year. While factions of the right-wing media are buzzing in Trump’s ear about a shutdown redux, he so far seems to be taking a different strategy than he did the last time around, indicating that while he doesn’t like the deal, he’ll (likely) vote for it anyways.
Allegations against Bryan Singer finally seem to be turning into an anvil weighing down his reputation and career. The director of Bohemian Rhapsody should be looking forward to the Oscars, where his film is up for Best Picture, but he’s been dogged by an exposé last month that laid out numerous allegations of sexual misconduct over his decades-long career. Despite the maelstrom of negative press, Singer hung on to his gig directing Red Sonja, which was slated to start production later this year, and for which he would have received a reported $10 million paycheck. Now, the company behind the film is putting the project on hiatus (it hadn’t yet secured any financing).
Evening Reads
(Hekla / Dasha Petrenko / Goodmood Photo / Shutterstock / The Atlantic)Since Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published in the U.S. in 2014, millions of people have absorbed her lessons on how to declutter and purge their homes of items that don’t bring them happiness. Years after doing the cleanout, most people speak favorably about the experience, though it fosters pangs of regret for some:
“The most missed item in all these purges was a special-edition pack of Pepsi bottles, each emblazoned with a cartoon alligator, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the University of Florida’s football program. The bereaved: Imani Clenance, a 34-year-old graduate of the university who lives in New York City. ‘Every now and then I think about those, like, Hmm, those might’ve been kind of cool to keep … But if I really wanted them, I could probably find them somewhere on eBay,’ Clenance says. (I looked—she could.)”
(Illustration: The Atlantic)
Steven Soderbergh, the director behind films like Ocean’s Eleven and Erin Brokovich , says in an interview with critic David Sims he has “a lot of crackpot theories about how moviegoing has changed and why”:
“One of the most extreme is, I really feel that why people go to the movies has changed since 9/11. My feeling is that what people want when they go to a movie shifted more toward escapist fare. And as a result, most of the more “serious” adult fare, what I would pejoratively refer to as “Oscar bait,” all gets pushed into October, November, December.”
Look Back
(Photo: Warren M. Winterbottom / AP)
In the above photo, FBI agents carry the Vietnam War draft resister Robert Whittington Eaton, 25, out from a home in Philadelphia, where Eaton had chained himself to 13 young men and women.
Also fifty years ago: Sesame Street premiered, humankind sets foot on the moon, and more. Glimpse more of the global events of 1969, in this gallery from The Atlantic’s photo editor Alan Taylor.
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Comments, questions, typos? Email newsletters editor Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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It’s Wednesday, February 13.
The House passed a bill to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen civil war. It’s essentially the same legislation that passed the Senate back in December, but was never taken up by the House.
Almost Averted: Even though President Donald Trump said he’s not “thrilled” with the bipartisan border-security deal reached by congressional negotiators, he’ll likely give the spending bill his signature anyway. According to multiple sources in the White House and on Capitol Hill, Trump, for the first time, feels as if he has more latitude to act unilaterally to build the wall. That could include rerouting funding from other agencies, or declaring a national emergency. “He’s inclined to sign it and go the executive-action route,” said one House Republican aide.
The deal still needs to pass through both chambers of Congress and receive a signature by the president before midnight on Friday to avoid another government shutdown.
Most Wanted: The U.S. Justice Department charged a former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence officer with revealing classified information about her former colleagues to the Iranian government. The agent, Monica Elfriede Witt, was born and raised in Texas but defected to Iran in 2013.
So Long: The administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brock Long, resigned from his position after less than two years on the job. Long oversaw the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, for which the government is still under heavy scrutiny. He has also been criticized for allegedly misusing government vehicles to travel to his home in North Carolina.
End of an Era: NASA announced that it will stop trying to contact the Opportunity rover, which was sent to Mars 15 years ago to search for signs of life. That leaves only one functioning rover on Mars, Curiosity, which landed on the planet in 2012.
Snapshot
Bacon, an Australian terrier, competes with the terrier group at the 143rd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on Tuesday in New York. (Frank Franklin II / AP)
Ideas From The Atlantic
(Image: Library of Congress)
The ‘Loyal Slave’ Photo That Explains the Northam Scandal (Kevin M. Levin)
“The performance of blackface reinforces the belief that blacks smiled through slavery, and later, the post-Reconstruction period of white-supremacist terrorism, on through the indignities of Jim Crow—that these darkest periods of American history were, in fact, not so dark, but joyous times when all people knew their place.” → Read on.
Maria Butina Is Not Unique (Joseph Augustyn)
“The gun-toting Russian graduate student who pleaded guilty in late 2018 to conspiracy to act as an illegal foreign agent creates a media frenzy every time she opens her mouth. Lost in the noise so far, however, is the fact that Butina may be one of many. For years, countries including Russia and China have regarded their citizens who study in the United States as an intelligence-gathering resource.” → Read on.
◆Minnesota Jewish Leaders Talked With Ilhan Omar About Anti-Semitism Last Year. Why They Remain Frustrated. (Dave Orrick, Pioneer Press)
◆ Everyone’s Running—And That Could Be Dangerous for the Democrats (Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight)
◆ Schumer Recruits Famed Fighter Pilot to Challenge McConnell in 2020 (Alex Isenstadt, Politico)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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Medias and William, a young couple in rural Uganda, are trying to have a baby—to no avail. They’ve been together a long time, and their options are becoming limited.
“People say, ‘She’s not a woman. She doesn’t have a child,’” Medias says in Paul Szynol’s short documentary, premiering on The Atlantic today. “I try to avoid people because they show me that I’m worthless.”
Not a Woman follows the couple on their journey to conceive. They turn to in vitro fertilization, a process that involves a series of invasive and painful procedures that are often unsuccessful. Throughout, Medias reflects on the enormous emotional toll infertility has taken on her life.
In Uganda, women without children encounter a considerable amount of social stigma. “They are derided, branded as useless, and often ostracized,” Szynol told The Atlantic. “Some women face domestic abuse or are driven out of their homes and into uncertain and perilous fates.” The stigma attached to childlessness is almost always shouldered by the woman, said Szynol, irrespective of whether it results from male-factor infertility.
After regularly visiting Uganda and speaking with dozens of men and women about their experience with infertility, Szynol decided to make a film about William and Medias because he was moved by their resilience. “Medias was vulnerable yet strong, pained yet dignified, and William, instead of succumbing to cultural pressures, remained supportive of his wife,” Szynol said.
With the film, Szynol hopes to “highlight the deep, widespread, and invisible suffering that infertility [causes for] millions of women in cultures that view them in such a reductive and utilitarian way.” The director was initially concerned about Medias’s reticence—he described her as being “inconsolably silent” throughout the process of filming—but it ultimately became clear to him that this was emblematic of the story he was telling. “Her wordlessness is a potent symbol of her and many women’s voicelessness in this situation,” Szynol said.
A half century ago, humans first set foot on the moon, hundreds of thousands of young people gathered in New York’s Catskill Mountains for a music festival that became a cultural milestone, and the war in Vietnam dragged on while protest and resistance grew. It was the year that Sesame Street premiered on Public TV, British troops were first sent into Northern Ireland, the Manson Family murders took place, that Richard Nixon became the 37th President of the United States, and much more.
Updated at 2:40 p.m. ET on February 13, 2019
The Mars probe came barreling in. It streaked through the planet’s atmosphere at about 12,000 miles per hour. With the surface in sight, the parachute unfurled. The probe fired its rockets to slow itself down, and inflated its airbags to cushion the landing. Touching down gently, it bounced across the clay-colored terrain.
When the dust settled, the probe unwound itself, like a flower opening towards the sun, and revealed its cargo: a rover, no bigger than a golf cart.
The rover, named Opportunity, was sent to study what the Martian surface was made of. If there had ever been life on this other planet, the composition of the alien dust, soil, and rock might hint at its nature. The rover’s work was slow and precise. For years, it rolled over plains and craters, digging into the ground and relaying its findings to Earth.
Then, last summer, it stopped. On Tuesday, following months of attempts to regain contact, the Opportunity team sent a final set of commands to the rover. After receiving no response, NASA declared that the Opportunity mission, after nearly 15 years, is officially over.
“I was there with the team, as the commands went out into the deep sky. And I learned this morning that we had not heard back,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science division, in a press conference. “It is therefore that I’m standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete.”
In June 2018, an enormous dust storm clogged the Martian atmosphere, blocking sunlight from reaching the surface. Opportunity, a solar-powered rover, couldn’t charge its batteries in the darkness and entered a deep sleep.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made more than 1,000 attempts to rouse Opportunity. The rover did not respond, even as the storm passed in September. The team held out for a windy season in January, which could wipe off any dust coating the rover’s solar panels. They ran out of options. Engineers transmitted a final set of commands to Opportunity on Tuesday night—one last chance—and received nothing but silence in return.
During its years on Mars, Opportunity crept along at a tiny fraction of a mile per hour. A robotic arm burrowed into the surface, exposing fresh rock, and scooped soil samples for analysis. Scientists back on Earth delighted as Opportunity returned detailed images of the landscape, and when the rover found evidence that Mars once had water, enough to support microbial life.
The engineers sent the commands, directing the rover where to drive and what to inspect, but it seemed, at times, as if Opportunity was doing the work on its own. The rover’s communication with mission control felt less like data transmissions from a mindless robot, and more like dispatches from a curious explorer.
[Read: Can Abigail Allwood find life on Mars?]
The end of Opportunity leaves only one functioning rover on Mars: Curiosity. Curiosity arrived on the planet in 2012 and, despite some technical problems of its own last year, is in good health. The rover is on the opposite side of the planet, and with Opportunity shut down, “we basically lost our surface presence on one half of Mars,” says Mike Seibert, a former Opportunity flight director. (Seibert was around for the last massive dust storm on Mars, in 2007, which the rover survived just fine.)
Curiosity doesn’t have the time or speed to trundle over and check on its friend. The only views NASA has of Opportunity come from robotic spacecraft that orbit Mars, like satellites circle the Earth. From here, Opportunity is a fuzzy smudge against a vast, rugged landscape.
For engineers and scientists, the pain of the mission’s demise is softened by this fact: Opportunity was supposed to die years ago. Opportunity was one of two rovers NASA landed on Mars in 2004. The other, named Spirit, touched down on the other side of the planet. The missions were expected to last three months, but they kept going for years.
[Read: The search for alien life begins in Earth’s oldest desert]
Spirit met its end in 2009. While exploring, the rover broke through some crust and slipped into a sand pit. Engineers commanded the rover to wiggle its wheels, but it was stuck. For the first time in its mission, Spirit wouldn’t be able to drive to a north-facing slope. The rovers looked for these slopes each winter, where their solar arrays could absorb as much sunlight as possible each day. “We saw it coming,” Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for both rovers, told me. “I knew from day one, if Spirit has to spend a winter on flat ground, that was going to be Spirit’s last winter.”
Opportunity was in good shape when the skies darkened last year. It was exploring a valley that may have been carved by powerful winds or flowing water. Over the years of the rover’s journey on Mars, mission planners had stared for hours at high-resolution images of the terrain to find intriguing spots for it to investigate. In total, the rover drove 28 miles, more than a marathon.
As engineers prepared to transmit their final commands, through massive radio antennas positioned around the world, the mood at JPL was somber, according to Tanya Harrison, a scientist on the mission.
“The rover surpassed every single expectation we could’ve possibly had,” Harrison said. “But I’m not sure anything can fully prepare you for the wave of emotion of hearing a mission you work on is coming to an end.”
Harrison and her colleagues now find themselves members of a rather depressing club in space exploration: scientists, engineers, and other NASA staff who have devoted years, sometimes decades, of their lives to spacecraft that eventually broke, exploded, or even disintegrated in the atmosphere of a planet. Some have compared the pain of ending a mission to losing a family member. “It’s like you have a loved one in a coma in the hospital,” John Callas, the Opportunity project manager, told reporters last year. “The doctors are telling you that you just got to give it time and she’ll wake up, all the vital signs are good, it’s just waiting it out.”
Read: [A window of opportunity closes on Mars]
Curiosity won’t be alone for long. NASA’s next rover is expected to land on the planet in February 2021. Another rover, built by the European Space Agency, will arrive in the same year.
They will follow in Opportunity’s tracks, casing the Martian rock for signs of life, present and ancient. Perhaps someday, more complex spacecraft will join them, not to stay, but to collect sample and fly back to Earth, delivering chunks of another planet for scientists to study for themselves.
Until then, Curiosity bears the burden of maintaining the rover streak on Mars, set in 2004 with Opportunity and Spirit.
“There are high-school freshmen this year that have lived their entire lives with functioning Mars rovers,” Seibert said. “I think everyone is going to be like, don’t break the car. It’s the only one we’ve got.”
The setup to this story can be contained in a few sentences that would have made no sense a decade ago, but now make perfect sense:
There is an Instagram account called @fuckjerry, which grew by taking jokes and memes created by other people and posting them, eventually growing an audience hungry for ever more jokes. The account spawned a media company, Jerry Media, and desperate ad executives from the world’s biggest companies now pay to be seen on FuckJerry, on the premise that that’s where they’ll reach young people who don’t have their eyeballs in the places they used to.
FuckJerry embodies some essential component of life online now—the same principle that leads everyday people to repost BREAKING tweets and treacly Facebook videos about cops giving kids ice cream. You can’t create the most popular content every day—but you can definitely see what it is and simply repost that. Some algorithm sees that post did well for you, and some number changes on a server in Ireland and your next post is slightly more likely to do a little bit better. Do that pretty well with other people’s jokes 5,000 times and you’ve got FuckJerry.
[Read: Memes are becoming harder to monetize]
Creators of funny things have long hated the account, along with the many, many similar viral aggregators. And it was in that context that the #FuckFuckJerry campaign began, as described by its creator, Megh Wright, in New York Magazine. Wright’s request was that people unfollow the account, as a start to dismantling its unjust profit machine. “[I]t wasn’t a campaign championed just by comedians,” Wright wrote, “actors, YouTubers, artists, men who definitely aren’t actually wolves, Steak-umm (yes, Steak-umm), and smaller meme-creators who are tired of FuckJerry building a profitable empire on a foundation of stolen content all made noise on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.”
#FuckFuckJerry’s villain was unlikable. The downside to unfollowing was tiny. The entreaties powering the boycott were funny and well-done. Celebrities with major followings got on board. The campaign worked about as well as a campaign like it could.
And here’s what that effect was: @FuckJerry went from 14.3 million followers to 14 million. The larger system of other rip-off accounts appears to be untouched. Comedy Central pulled their ads from the account.
FuckJerry’s creator, Elliot Tebele, responded with a Medium post promising that, going forward, the account would both credit jokes and get “advanced permission” before using material.
And so it was that #FuckFuckJerry ended up in the same boat as #DeleteFacebook, and before that, #DeleteUber: worthy, impassioned protests that have not changed the underlying economic structures.
Sociologists Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport have studied the ways that protest tactics and schemes have spread out of political culture and into other spaces, especially entertainment. They coined the phrase “ubiquitous movement practices” to describe how petitions, boycotts, and the like—once tactics used solely for political goals—are now deployed across all kinds of social and cultural concerns from trying to ensure Family Guy remains on the air to trying to get the Postal Service “to issue a Marx Brothers stamp.”
The economic system undergirding the influencer economy—the advertising agencies, marketers, companies—wants the FuckJerrys of the world to exist. So do the big platforms, which profit from these accounts’ ability to serve up and accelerate crowd-pleasing memes. The obvious way to target the system is to withhold the currency of the realm, which could be money or attention. And boycotts—even ones that don’t truly disrupt a business—can work because companies are concerned with their reputations.
[Read: Instagram’s Christmas crackdown]
But many of the recent attempts to reform individuals or platforms have had no organization attached to the boycott. “[T]he ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements,” wrote sociologist Zeynep Tufekci in 2017. “Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing.” Networked protests, as Tufekci calls them, offer new possibilities for creating change, but she has “also seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action.”
The most effective online campaigners, like Color of Change, have an organizational infrastructure for applying pressure on their targets alongside viral mobilizations.
This is no knock on Wright or the promoters of the various boycotts. They’ve shown there is demand for reform and harnessed the latent anger of creators. Now comes the other part.
Really going after #FuckFuckJerry would require implicating the whole economic system of attention. In a world in which distribution power gets built through viral influence by any means, the FuckJerrys of the world will exist.
In the 20th century, historian Jeffrey Hornstein argues that we became, as the title of his book puts it, a nation of realtors: Buying into the housing market meant buying into the country’s ideals, but also its less laudable economic practices. The online equivalent is that we’ve become a nation of influencers. To participate in public debate, tell jokes, or make art, one must also produce consumable posts that create the distribution pipe for your actual work. Some people use that power to sell flat-tummy tea or sneakers or hotel stays in the Maldives, but most people are just trying to sell themselves.
To live among the extremely online is to buy into this hierarchy of meaning. What grates is not just that FuckJerry is doing something wrong, but that they’ve gotten so popular doing it. They’ve cheated! But what if it’s not so much cheating as a revelation of the true nature of the game?
It took $1.1 billion and a 1,000-strong team to prove Einstein right about gravitational waves. In 2016, the scientists behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, announced that they had finally detected these ripples in the fabric of space and time, formed by colliding black holes. “LIGO was a masterpiece of 21st century engineering and science,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who studies the history of science. “But it was perhaps the most conservative experiment in history. It tested a 100-year-old hypothesis.”
“Big science,” of which LIGO is a prime example, is becoming more common. Funding agencies are channeling more money toward ever larger teams working on grand projects such as cataloging the diversity of our cells or sequencing the genomes of all species. There’s even a growing field of meta-research dedicated to studying how teams work—the science of team science.
Some projects require these large teams, and three members of the LIGO team eventually won a Nobel Prize. But the comparative neglect of small teams and solo researchers is a problem, Evans says, because they produce very different kinds of work. He collaborated with his colleague Lingfei Wu to look at more than 65 million scientific papers, patents, and software projects from the past six decades. In every recent decade and in almost every field, Wu’s analysis found, small teams are far more likely to introduce fresh, disruptive ideas that take science and technology in radically new directions.
“Big teams take the current frontier and exploit it,” Evans says. “They wring the towel. They get that last ounce of possibility out of yesterday’s ideas, faster than anyone else. But small teams fuel the future, generating ideas that, if they succeed, will be the source of big-team development.”
[Read: The quirks of smallness]
That “runs counter to the usual thinking that large teams, which are typically better funded and work on more visible topics, are the ones that push the frontiers of science,” says Staša Milojević, who studies information metrics in science at Indiana University Bloomington. She recently found a similar pattern by analyzing the titles of 20 million scientific papers and showing that bigger teams work on a relatively small slice of topics in a field. Other scientists have made similar points, but what Evans describes as a “Go teams!” attitude still persists. The results of the new analysis should “temper some of that enthusiasm for large teams and demonstrate that there may be a tipping point after which their benefits decline,” says Erin Leahey from Arizona State University, who has previously written about the “overlooked costs of collaboration.”
The new analysis is based on the ways in which researchers cite past work. For example, when scientists cite Einstein’s groundbreaking 1915 papers on general relativity, they tend not to refer back to the papers that Einstein himself cited. “They see it as a conceptually new direction that’s distinct from the things on which it built,” Evans says. But if scientists “think that something is an incremental improvement, they’ll tell the whole story in the references.” For example, a 1995 paper describing a long-theorized state of matter called a Bose–Einstein condensate is almost always cited together with the papers in which the physicist Satyendra Nath Bose and Einstein predicted the stuff’s existence.
Wu quantified these differences using a “disruption score,” originally created by other researchers to measure the innovativeness of inventions. Wu showed that it works well for scientific research. When ranked by their scores, papers that describe Nobel Prize–winning work appeared in the top 2 percent, as did those chosen by scientists who were asked to name the most disruptive papers in their field. Reviews that summarize earlier work are in the bottom half of the rankings, while the original studies they’re based on appear in the top quarter. It’s a “simple yet brilliant” method, especially because it works across data sources as diverse as papers, patents, and software, says Satyam Mukherjee of the Indian Institutes of Management.
Having tested this score in various ways to show that it’s valid, Wu used it to show that small teams produce markedly more disruptive work than large ones. That’s true even for patents, which are innovative by definition. It’s true for highly cited work and poorly cited work. It’s true in every decade from the 1950s to the 2010s. It’s true in fields ranging from chemistry to social sciences.
So why are small teams more disruptive? It’s possible that they do more theoretical work, while big teams (such as LIGO) are needed to test the resulting theories, but Evans and his colleagues couldn’t find any evidence for this in their data. Another possibility: The most groundbreaking scientists prefer working in smaller teams. But Evans doesn’t buy that, either. Even when the same people move from smaller teams to larger ones, he says, they end up doing less disruptive and more incremental science.
[Read: Science is getting less bang for its buck]
Instead, he and his colleagues found that large teams tend to build on recent, prominent work, while small teams delve more deeply into the past, drawing inspiration from older ideas that may have long been ignored. (Evans didn’t use a fixed definition of “small” or “large,” but most of his analyses compared teams ranging from one to 10 people; some scientists might consider a 10-person team to be on the small side.) At first, Evans was surprised by that difference; surely, large teams have more eyeballs and more collective memory? But he now suspects that scientists on larger teams also argue and interfere with one another, and that they’re more likely to find common ground in yesterday’s hits. They also require lots of funding, which makes them more pressured to pay the bills and drives them toward safer work. “What does a big movie-production studio bet on: Slumdog Millionaire or Transformers 9?” he asks.
But small teams also pay a heavy cost. Their disruptive work has no ready-made audience, and is less obviously relevant to their peers. As Evans and his colleagues found, such work takes much longer to be recognized and cited. Even if it eventually influences larger teams, as it often does, enough time passes that other researchers are less likely to cite the original, disruptive work.
You Na Lee, who studies scientific innovation at the National University of Singapore, says that research teams are now effectively behaving like firms, which also tend to be more disruptive at a small size. “This study is evidence that the ecology of science and the ecology of innovation are becoming very similar,” she says. The big difference is that the business world actively encourages entrepreneurship and small start-ups. That’s not true for science, but “unconditionally allocating pots of government grants for small wild spirits can be a bold policy move,” she says.
But Evans cautions that money won’t work in isolation. When he and his colleagues analyzed funding trends from 2004 and 2014, they found that when small teams were funded by top government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, they were no more likely to produce disruptive work than large teams. Something about the current funding environment seems to strip small teams of their natural advantages, forcing them to behave like big ones. “It’s not that we can just shove money in their direction,” Evans says.
Still, he argues that agencies must find better ways of encouraging small teams. They don’t just do different kinds of science, but they create work that large teams then build upon. Disenfranchise them, and you destabilize the foundations upon which big science rests. “In 10 years, we’ll be wondering where all the big ideas are,” Evans says. “Some people will wonder if science is slowing down and we’ve eaten all the low-hanging fruit. And the answer will be yes, because we’ve only built engines that do that.”
For Martin Law, Marie Kondo’s tidying regimen was life-changing, until it wasn’t. Law, a 32-year-old Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, went through with most of Kondo’s popular tidying method two years ago. “I managed to get rid of a great deal of items that I previously had found difficult to let go of,” he told me, including about half of his clothing.
After Law’s big cleanout, though, the stuff gradually crept back in. His kitchen gained a series of useful but not vital devices: a new cookie cutter, a larger whisk, a machine for making peanut butter. The accumulations of the past two years have added up. “The house is probably no better than it was—perhaps marginally better, but in reality probably no better,” he says. His commitment to having very little has, he confesses, petered out.
“If you adopt this approach—the KonMari Method—you’ll never revert to clutter again,” wrote Marie Kondo in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, published in the United States in the fall of 2014. Millions of people have bought her book, and many of those millions have since learned whether her promise holds for them as they systematically purge their homes of items that do not bring them happiness, or “spark joy,” as Kondo famously puts it.
I recently checked in with more than a dozen people who did their first KonMari-style cleanouts in 2015, 2016, or 2017. They were generally enthusiastic (even Martin Law) about the way Kondo’s book made them reconsider their relationship to material things, although many of them lamented the onslaught of new stuff that must always be kept at bay.
[Read: Marie Kondo and the privilege of clutter]
That process has come more easily to some than to others. “My house has never gone back to the way it was before I started doing this three years ago,” says KK Holland, a 37-year-old who lives in Santa Barbara, California. Yes, clutter occasionally mounts, but she works to keep it in check. “I remove items that no longer spark joy on an ongoing basis, and I am a pretty fierce guard of what comes into my house,” she told me.
At the end of 2017, she and her husband had a baby girl. “I’m happy to report our KonMari survived an infant,” Holland says. She insists that nothing makes her uniquely good at vanquishing clutter, but that Kondo’s approach has staying power because it prompts people to fundamentally revisit why they own what they own.
Most people I talked to, though, carved out exceptions to or ignored certain recommendations in the process outlined in the book. A couple of them kept more books than they thought Kondo would want them to. And two women—one in Massachusetts, the other in Hanover, Germany—independently told me they thought it was too onerous to remove everything from their handbags each day upon returning home, as Kondo prescribes.
And for some people, the project of going through every last thing they own, one by one, was too much to handle. Mike Fu, a 33-year-old Brooklynite, estimates that he made it through about three-quarters of the KonMari method three or four years ago. “I probably chickened out at the point where it was going through all the papers and non-clothing or -book objects,” he told me. Fu says he was at one point enticed by minimalist “lifestyle porn,” such as an image of a “sparsely decorated all-white living room with an iMac,” but he’s since come to terms with having a bit of clutter. And he and his partner are planning to give the KonMari method another try, “at our own glacial pace.”
Jasmine Bager, who’s 35 and lives in New York City, also tried a KonMari cleanout but decided it wasn’t for her. After she piled up all her clothing for a Kondo-style review a few years ago, she found the prospect of carrying through with the project too exhausting and avoided the pile, shifting it back and forth between her chair and her bed. She later came up with her own decluttering system, which she says works for her: Every day, when she leaves her apartment, she forces herself to take three items with her to get rid of.
There is some flexibility to Bager’s rule (a bag of garbage counts toward the quota, and she doesn’t follow it if she’s in a real hurry), but she has been sticking with it for more than a year. In the course of what she calls her “little game with the city,” she’s been leaving behind various objects—a magazine, a key chain, a book, shoes—around town, unlabeled, with an expectation that someone who needs them will claim them. Once, months after abandoning a headband she’d made herself, she was pleased to see a stranger wearing it at a subway stop near her apartment.
Whether or not they followed the instructions in Kondo’s book, Bager and the others I talked to for this story discarded a significant amount of stuff. Some thought about it in terms of volume—a Jeep Grand Cherokee’s worth of objects, or enough furniture to fill a two-bedroom apartment. One woman estimated that she and her husband chucked 60 to 70 percent of their belongings.
Even with all this throwing out, people have had very few regrets. Most told me they now don’t miss a thing, even stuff that they hesitated to discard. Some recalled isolated instances of (usually fleeting) second-guessing. Velma Gentzsch, a 40-year-old in St. Louis who KonMari-ed in 2017, says she wishes she still had the pair of brown leather boots she parted with. “I loved them, but they were half a size too big … [but] it’s not a huge deal,” she says.
Christina Refford, whose fourth KonMari-versary is this year, remembers twice going to her bookshelf—once for a stack of cooking magazines, once for Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women—only to realize that she’d tossed out what she was looking for. She wasn’t too bothered. “Almost anything I would’ve gotten rid of can be found somewhere else,” Refford says.
The most missed item in all these purges was a special-edition pack of Pepsi bottles, each emblazoned with a cartoon alligator, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the University of Florida’s football program. The bereaved: Imani Clenance, a 34-year-old graduate of the university who lives in New York City. “Every now and then I think about those, like, Hmm, those might’ve been kind of cool to keep … But if I really wanted them, I could probably find them somewhere on eBay,” Clenance says. (I looked—she could.)
Marie Kondo writes that when doing a cleanout, “starting with mementos spells certain failure,” for they are plentiful, meaningful, and often irreplaceable. Kondo recommends tackling this difficult category last because it’s so hard, and indeed it’s one that the people I talked to struggled with. Many of them still haven’t finished it.
Lisa Shininger, who’s 40 and lives in Dayton, Ohio, told me about a beloved, ragged old T-shirt that she agonized over when she KonMari-ed in 2016. It carried so many memories for her that discarding it would feel like discarding them too. After rescuing it from her get-rid-of pile a few times, she ultimately let it go, and now she reports that she doesn’t miss it.
“If something didn’t make it in a move, or somebody else got rid of it by accident and I didn’t know about it—those kinds of things I regretted not having anymore,” Shininger says. “But I found that [wasn’t the case] when I myself made the deliberate choice [to get rid of it].” She particularly appreciates Kondo’s suggestion that people thank their stuff as they bid it goodbye—she thinks that helps prevent regret.
One particularly diligent KonMari practitioner, a 62-year-old retired child psychologist living in Washington, D.C., mentioned a strategy that helped her with this stubborn class of belongings. (She asked me not to publish her name because she didn’t want her clients’ families reading about her personal life.) She took pictures of the art her children had made in school and some trinkets she’d received from her grandparents. “I enjoy looking at the pictures,” she said, “but do not miss the actual objects.”
Another devotee, Ian Bate, shared his own secret to success. “I was surprisingly ruthless about [mementos], partly because I have an advantage: I’m old.” Bate is 70, an age at which he says it’s become clear which memories matter most to him and, more practically, “who might or might not like [my stuff] after I’m gone.”
“A dramatic reorganization of the home causes correspondingly dramatic changes in lifestyle and perspective,” Kondo writes. “It is life transforming. I mean it.” Language like this makes her book veer into self-help territory, but based on the experiences of the people I talked to, Kondo wasn’t overpromising. Whether a matter of causation or just correlation, many of the people I spoke to also said that their cleanouts coincided with pivotal moments in their lives.
One had just broken up with a longtime boyfriend when she did hers two years ago, and is planning another with her new partner now that they have moved in together. One found that his cleanout finally unburdened him of keepsakes he’d inherited when his parents died almost a decade earlier. One KonMari-ed, and then made long-procrastinated headway on getting her finances in order. And one finally went on the six-month backpacking trip she’d been thinking about for a long time, once she didn’t feel weighed down by her stuff.
“I wish I had encountered the book when I was 30,” Bate told me. He reflected on his career as a “good American consumer” and concluded that the majority of what he’d bought over the course of his life wouldn’t meet his new KonMari-calibrated standard. “If I had done it back when I was 30,” he says, “I just would have saved myself a lot of hassle by not buying and having to dispose of endless piles of crap.”
In 2010, at the height of the foreclosure crisis, the federal government watched nervously as hundreds of thousands of families lost their homes. Empty houses blighted neighborhoods, their shades drawn, their yards overgrown. Without some kind of intervention, federal officials worried, the housing market would continue in its free fall, prices would keep dropping for existing homeowners, and the economic recovery, already tenuous, would be imperiled.
But who would fill these empty homes? Few Americans were in a buying mood, and for those who were, mortgages were harder to come by than they had been before the crash. So the government incentivized Wall Street to step in. In early 2012, it launched a pilot program that allowed private investors to easily purchase foreclosed homes by the hundreds from the government agency Fannie Mae. These new owners would then rent out the homes, creating more housing in areas heavily hit by foreclosures.
“There was this glut of foreclosed properties in parts of the country, and inadequate demand from the traditional home-buying population and even traditional investors,” Meg Burns, who was at the time the senior associate director of the Office of Housing and Regulatory Policy, told me. “We were trying to influence demand.”
It worked. Between 2011 and 2017, some of the world’s largest private-equity groups and hedge funds, as well as other large investors, spent a combined $36 billion on more than 200,000 homes in ailing markets across the country. In one Atlanta zip code, they bought almost 90 percent of the 7,500 homes sold between January 2011 and June 2012; today, institutional investors own at least one in five single-family rentals in some parts of the metro area, according to Dan Immergluck, a professor at the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University. Some of the nation’s hardest-hit housing markets were finally stabilized.
The investors argued that they could be good landlords—better, in fact, than cash-strapped small-timers. According to Diane Tomb, the executive director of the National Rental Home Council, a trade group established in 2014, single-family rental companies “professionalized” a sector traditionally run by mom-and-pop landlords, bringing with them 24/7 responses to maintenance requests and a deep pool of capital they can spend on homes.
They also projected they could make money, which no one had done on a large scale in the home-rental business. “We wanted to rescue these neighborhoods and create a long-term, permanent income stream for our shareholders,” says Frederick Tuomi, who was until recently the president of Invitation Homes, which is now the largest single-family rental company in the nation. (Tuomi is currently on a temporary leave of absence to care for a family member.)
Wall Street analysts and potential shareholders, however, were skeptical. Maintaining thousands of homes of different sizes, ages, and conditions across an entire metro area seemed like a logistical nightmare. “How can you operate and create scale in that situation?” Sam Zell, the billionaire real-estate investor, told CNBC in 2013. “I don’t know how anybody can monitor thousands of houses.” When the new rental companies started offering shares to investors on the public market in late 2012, the response was tepid.
But housing trends were on the side of the investors: America was becoming a renter nation. According to census data, between 2007 and 2017, the United States added less than 1 million households in owner-occupied homes, but 6.5 million in renter-occupied homes. Many families wanted to live in a spacious house in a good school district, but could no longer afford to do so as owners. The homeownership rate bottomed out at 62.9 percent in 2016, down from a high of 69 percent in 2005.
[Read: The never-ending foreclosure]
Of course, the trends that favored these new landlords were largely produced by a financial crisis that Wall Street had itself abetted. That some of the same investment firms that had played a part in the housing crisis were now poised to profit from it made for a dismal irony. But if the new companies could deliver on their promises of making home rentals easy, affordable, and worry-free, perhaps everyone could win: The companies could return a profit, the housing market could be shored up, and houses that had lain fallow after the crash could once again be happy homes.
That’s not what happened. I talked with tenants from 24 households who lived or still live in homes owned by single-family rental companies. I also reviewed 21 lawsuits against three such companies in Gwinnett County, a suburb of Atlanta devastated by the housing crash. The tenants claim that, far from bringing efficiency and ease to the rental market, their corporate landlords are focusing on short-term profits in order to please shareholders, at the expense of tenant happiness and even safety. Many of the families I spoke with feel stuck in homes they don’t own, while pleading with faraway companies to complete much-needed repairs—and wondering how they once again ended up on the losing end of a Wall Street real estate gamble.
In 2011, Rene and Erica Valentin were living with their two young children in a small two-bedroom apartment in suburban New Jersey. They had been saving for years to buy a house. But then Rene, now 42, was laid off as a district manager at Best Buy, and the couple decided that the only way they would ever be able to afford to buy was in a cheaper market.
Erica, now 34, applied to be an engineer at AT&T in an Atlanta suburb. When she got the job, the family picked up and drove south, moving into a two-bedroom apartment near the city center. They pinched pennies as Rene’s job search stretched into its second year. By the time he finally found a position in 2014—again at Best Buy—the family still couldn’t afford to buy. But their daughter, Sophia, was about to enter first grade, and the Valentins wanted her in a good school district and not to have to share a room with her brother. So they decided to rent.
A real-estate agent showed them around Lawrenceville, a sprawling suburb 30 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, where the homes are large and the schools are good. Every house they saw was owned by the same company, Waypoint Homes, which they told me the agent explained was a professional rental company, with 24/7 maintenance, quarterly check-ins, and deep pockets to spend on repairs.
They settled on a 2200-square-foot house on a quiet street. From the outside, it didn’t look like much—vinyl siding, black shutters, brick detailing. But it had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, walk-in closets, and a large, fenced-in backyard, all for just $1,373 a month. Soon enough, they were installing a tire swing in the backyard, hanging art on the walls, and putting up curtains in the kids’ bedrooms—dark blue for Antonio, light blue for Sophia. They paid their rent using Waypoint’s online platform, impressed by how far technology had progressed from the days of dropping a check in the mail. The property wasn’t theirs, exactly, but they finally felt like they could settle down.
As the Valentins were nesting, America’s new corporate landlords were looking for efficiencies. The companies set about standardizing flooring and appliances, which would, in theory, lower costs and make life easier on maintenance workers. They established centralized call centers to handle tenant communication, and installed smart locks so that potential renters and maintenance staff could let themselves in to look around or do repairs.
At the same time, the industry was consolidating. Investment groups created companies to manage the homes: Blackstone established Invitation Homes; Cerberus created FirstKey Homes; Colony Capital created Colony American Homes. And then those companies started merging.
In 2015 alone, Colony American Homes merged with Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust, Cerberus Capital Management acquired more than 4,000 homes from BLT Homes, and American Homes 4 Rent said it was acquiring American Residential Properties in a $1.5 billion deal. By 2017, two major players, Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, controlled nearly 60 percent of the market.
On calls with investors, those two companies touted their cost-cutting measures, which often involved pushing responsibilities onto tenants. In 2016, Jack Corrigan, the chief operating officer of American Homes 4 Rent, told investors that the company hoped to reduce spending on repairs, maintenance, and “turn costs”—preparing a home for a new tenant—from $2,500 per home to $1,600. That same year, Colony Starwood cut property-management costs 25 percent from the previous year; one of its money-saving innovations was to use videos and chat software to show tenants how to fix minor problems, so they wouldn’t have to request repair staff for a clogged garbage disposal or a leaking toilet.
The obligation to repair their own rental wasn’t the only responsibility passed on to tenants. I reviewed one Colony Starwood lease from 2016; it was 34 pages long and specified that tenants were responsible for landscaping, “routine insect control,” replacing air filters in their central air systems once a month, repairing broken glass (regardless of how it was broken), and repairing and maintaining sewer and sink backups. American Homes 4 Rent started levying “trip charges” if maintenance staff were sent out to homes to assist with repairs that the tenants should have performed themselves, David Singelyn, the company CEO, explained at a 2015 investor forum. Some companies began requiring that tenants buy renter’s insurance to cover the property itself, rather than just their belongings, a clause lawyers in some states say is unenforceable.
As the industry started to grow, the major players all described their desire to standardize and improve the business of being a landlord. But even to the companies’ employees, the effort to become more efficient started to look more like craven attempts to squeeze tenants. “It shouldn’t be just about making money, but that’s what it turned into,” Shanell Hanson, who was a property administrator for Colony American Homes in an Atlanta suburb from 2014 to 2016, told me. Hanson said the company had six maintenance workers for 2,100 homes in the area she managed. Residents would frequently call with substantial problems: Sewage was overflowing, or the house was full of mold. But with such a small staff, Hanson could rarely deal with the problems quickly. And the law was on the corporations’ side: If tenants want to seek financial remedy for a landlord not keeping the property in adequate condition, under Georgia law, they have to take the landlord to court, a costly and lengthy process. “It’s almost impossible to do without an attorney,” Lindsey Siegel, an attorney at Atlanta Legal Aid who works on housing issues, told me.
Hanson said she was instructed by a supervisor not to answer the phone when certain tenants called. “Her response would be, ‘We’re not fixing that, just don’t call the tenant back,’” Hanson said of the supervisor. Hanson said she was fired when she reported the company to OSHA because she worried that the homes were in such poor shape that the conditions for the maintenance staff she supervised were dangerous.
An Invitation Homes rental sign in a suburban Georgia neighborhood (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)In 2017, Invitation merged with Starwood Waypoint, the company that itself had merged with Colony American in 2015. Invitation said it could not comment on individual employees (or the alleged OSHA complaint), but that company policy protects whistle-blowers from retaliation, and that the company does not tolerate unsafe working conditions for maintenance workers. A spokeswoman added that the events Hanson alleges occurred when the company was under different ownership. (Fred Tuomi, the longtime Invitation CEO, was a senior executive at Colony American beginning in 2013, and headed the company as it merged with both Starwood Waypoint and Invitation.) Invitation also said that any employee not returning tenants' calls was not following its company policy.
Many other single-family landlord companies were cutting corners on maintenance and repairs. “As the corporation got bigger, it just got worse, in terms of what we had to work with and how we had to deal with problems,” a former Los Angeles leasing agent who worked for Waypoint between 2015 and 2017 told me. (She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she still works in real estate.) Regional teams received bonuses for keeping costs low, she said, which incentivized them to skimp on spending. Instead of responding to tenants personally, supervisors would send calls for maintenance to out-of-town call centers—which would in turn assign maintenance workers dozens of repairs in a day, not realizing that Los Angeles traffic could mean that relatively short distances could take hours to traverse.
Another former Waypoint leasing agent, in Florida, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because she is still in the real-estate field, told me that the company stopped replacing shower-curtain rods and changing locks when tenants moved out. When Waypoint learned that it was spending $5 million annually on paint, local managers were told to just touch up the walls rather than repaint them, giving the interiors a splotchy, unfinished appearance, she said. At one point, a mandate came down from a field manager that the company was going to do everything it could do not to return security deposits to tenants. “It wasn’t a company policy, and you will never find it in writing, but it was a verbal thing passed down to field project managers,” she said.
Charles Young, who was named the chief operating officer of Starwood Waypoint in 2015 and now serves in that position for Invitation Homes, told me that the company never told staff to avoid returning security deposits. Tuomi, of Invitation, said that while the companies may have been “horribly inefficient” at first, they’ve gotten better at responding to problems as they’ve gotten bigger, with the help of technology and more experience. Invitation launched an advance-scheduling and route-optimization program last year to improve the efficiency of its maintenance staff, according to Kristi DesJarlais, an Invitation Homes spokesperson. The company told me repeatedly that complaints about the early days of the single-family rental industry are no longer valid.
Rene and Erica Valentin’s problems with their rental home began almost immediately. Their pipes would periodically break, sending a stream of water onto their living-room carpet. Sometimes the water would be boiling hot—their kids once stepped in it and burned their feet, they told me. Getting someone to come fix the pipes was always a production. Erica said she would call, or file a complaint online, and it would take days, sometimes weeks, before she received a response. Repair workers would come and replace small sections of broken pipe, but Waypoint never investigated why the problem persisted. They didn’t replace the soggy carpet, either; a faint mildew smell started to permeate the house. The contractors Waypoint sent seemed, to the Valentins, unqualified—one didn’t have a car and had to call his mother to drive him to Home Depot to pick up a part. “You would expect this type of behavior from a one-person landlord who’s a jerk, but a big multimillion-dollar company—how do you treat your tenants like that?” Erica said. “They have the money to fix things.”
The Valentins thought about leaving, but moving is expensive, and they were still saving up to buy a house. They also worried that breaking a lease would ruin their credit. So they stayed, and the problems mounted. Their air-conditioning stopped working; the family waited eight sweltering Georgia summer days for a repairman, who told them that the wrong-size unit had been installed at the house and that it would never keep them cool. When they asked if Waypoint could install the proper unit, they told me the company did not respond. Waypoint merged with Invitation Homes in late 2017.
But despite the new ownership, the flooding continued. One Sunday afternoon in March 2018, they returned home and saw water rushing out of their house. They found their home submerged in four inches of water and their bulldog, Bam Bam, whimpering in a corner. They called Invitation and waited, moving their soggy couch to the garage, piling ruined children’s books and teddy bears on tables, wondering why the issue had never been fixed after dozens of calls.
The problem, it turned out, was more significant than a bad section of pipe. The house’s pipes had been the subject of a class-action lawsuit because they broke so frequently, and the pressure regulator in the hot-water heater was faulty, sending too much water into an already fragile system. They learned this from a contracting company that Invitation dispatched to diagnose—but not to fix—the problem. When Rene got back to the house from a trip to pick up a pizza, the contractors were packing up their equipment. Invitation was looking for someone to do it for a cheaper price, they told him.
A few hours later, another contractor showed up in a Honda Civic. With Invitation’s permission, he started pulling up the drenched wall-to-wall carpet and knocking down walls, leaving exposed nails and dust throughout the house, the Valentins told me. It was slow-going—the contractor didn’t know much about drywall, Rene said, and he was working alone. He set up industrial fans to dry out the wet concrete floor and advised the Valentins to wear masks if the dust bothered them for the next few weeks.
Erica and Rene Valentin hold a piece of soggy carpet in the house they rented from Invitation Homes. (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)An Invitation spokeswoman told me that according to company records, the Valentins had experienced some plumbing issues, but that those issues were “promptly addressed.” The company gave the family the option of staying in a hotel during the flood and at the company’s expense, the spokeswoman said. (The Valentins said that they were told to pay upfront for a hotel, and that the company would “consider a partial reimbursement” later. They said they were still required to pay rent during this time.)
Living in a decaying house was taking a toll on the family. The mold was aggravating their son’s allergies; the dust made him feel even worse. The day after the flood, his face began to swell. Erica started to cry as she realized that her efforts to find a good home had landed them in a place that was making her family sick. But she felt powerless to do anything about it.
The Valentins’ story is not unique. The tenants I spoke with said that their landlords ignored their requests for repairs and kept homes in hazardous condition. Many said they’d received eviction notices even if they’d paid their rent on time.
These negative experiences occurred across the industry. In 2016, LaSonia Kimball moved out of the Covington, Georgia, home she rented from Colony Starwood and awaited the return of her $750 security deposit. Instead, she was charged $4,297.40 for repairs such as hedge trimming and interior painting. She took the company to court to get it to drop the fees and give her back her security deposit, which it ultimately did, though it did not admit wrongdoing. (Invitation told me that Kimball’s deposit was retained “due to damages beyond normal wear and tear” but that it was eventually returned.)
Timothy and Michelle Poorman’s Invitation Homes rental in McDonough, Georgia, burned down in December 2017; according to a complaint filed in state court in August, a fire investigator found that the chimney, which was installed by Invitation Homes, had lacked necessary parts and had not been correctly ventilated. The Poormans are currently suing for compensation for their lost property. (Invitation said that it could not comment on pending litigation but that it disputes the allegations in the Poormans’ lawsuit.)
Waypoint Homes never did a move-in inspection after Carla Brown and her family moved into their home in Marietta, Georgia; her porch collapsed when she was standing on it and she broke her ankle. (She settled with the company.)
David Ochwangi rented a house from American Homes 4 Rent in Smyrna, Georgia, and repeatedly filed maintenance requests because the pipes were leaking; the company refused to make repairs and a burst pipe ruined thousands of dollars of electronics, appliances, and furniture, according to a complaint filed in Georgia state court.
The air-conditioning in Jennifer Callahan’s Florida home was wired incorrectly; when she complained that it was unsafe for her four-month-old baby to be in the house, where temperatures could reach 100 degrees, the American Homes 4 Rent office told her she was a “drama queen” and did not send someone to repair it for a week and a half, she told me. American Homes 4 Rent did not return multiple requests for comment.
Tenants also say that rather than taking advantage of economies of scale, the rental companies are taking advantage of their clients, pumping them for fines and fees at every turn. This impression is backed up by the financial reports of the companies themselves. American Homes 4 Rent increased the amount of money it collected from “tenant charge-backs” (essentially billing tenants for repairs after they move out) by more than 1000 percent between 2014 and 2018, according to company earnings reports, though it only grew the number of homes it owned by 70 percent over that period. In some states, Invitation Homes keeps the utilities in its name, and charges tenants a monthly $10.99 “utility service fee,” which is in addition to the cost of water, gas, and electricity. The company increased its “other property income”—the amount it collected from resident reimbursement for utilities, service charges, and other fees—by 114 percent between the first nine months of 2017 and the first nine months of 2018, despite only growing the number of homes it owned by 71 percent. On an earnings call in 2017, Invitation Homes’ then-CEO John Bartling said that “automated charges to residents” drove profits in the quarter, leading to a 22 percent increase in “other income.”
As early as 2015, single-family rental companies started filing eviction notices against tenants even if they were just a day or two late on the rent, according to Elora Raymond, a professor at Georgia Tech who was one of the co-authors of a study that looked at the eviction practices of single-family corporate landlords. By filing eviction notices, the companies can charge tenants a 10 percent late fee as well as hundreds of dollars in legal fees, even if the company doesn’t actually move to evict the tenant. The study, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, found that institutional investors in Atlanta were 18 percent more likely to file evictions than small landlords. One company cited in the study was in eviction proceedings against one-third of its tenants.
La Shay Harvey, a tenant of Invitation Homes in Covington, Georgia, told me she was charged a $95 late fee for missing rent one month even though she had paid her rent through Invitation Homes’ online portal, which had malfunctioned. She dropped off a money order the next day, but the company refused to accept the payment, eventually filing an eviction notice and sending her a bill for a $200 legal fee, a $75 insufficient funds fee, a $144 filing fee, and $199 in late fees, plus back rent, although she says she had tried to pay the rent. She took the company to court and won, but she will never forget coming home one day to see her daughter crying because of the eviction notice affixed to the front door. (Invitation disputes Harvey’s account, saying she has been late paying rent eight times since 2017.)
Houses require a lot of work under the best of conditions. Small-time landlords can do a poor job of managing properties. The tenant isn’t always right. But the volume of complaints, and the common themes among them—maintenance requests ignored, corners cut, costs passed on to the renter—suggest that the rental companies have failed to meet the pledge they made back when the incentives first kicked in: to make rental housing a business that benefits both tenants and investors. Tenants have filed more than 600 complaints about Invitation Homes and nearly 800 complaints about American Homes 4 Rent through the Better Business Bureau. (Together, the two companies own about 126,000 homes.) In a Facebook group of unhappy tenants, daily posts suggest that the companies continue to fail to respond to some long-reported problems.
Invitation Homes receives a 4.3 out of 5 from its tenants in internal surveys, the company said, adding that its business model depends on keeping people happy so that they’ll stay in their home, reducing turnover. Tuomi told me that as Invitation acquires more homes, it adds employees, stimulating local economies.
In May, Young, Invitation’s chief operating officer, took me on a tour of a few of its empty rental properties in the Sacramento suburb of Roseville. They were on quiet suburban streets, and they had wall-to-wall carpeting, evenly painted white walls, and spacious backyards. Young showed me how local staff go through an extensive inspection list before new families move into a home—turning on taps, checking power outlets, running the garbage disposal.
On the long drive back to Invitation’s office, I asked Young whether he thinks the company’s model of maintaining homes across far-flung metro areas is practical. In the beginning, when the industry was just getting started, it had some kinks to iron out, he allowed. But now, as Invitation reaps the benefits of scale, residents are happy, he said. Invitation gave me the names of three tenants who the company said would talk with me about their positive experience with the company, but none of the tenants responded to repeated calls.
The Valentins lived for weeks without carpets and with exposed nails. (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)Yet many of the renters I spoke with believe that to achieve the professionalism that Young described, the companies have had to adopt an adversarial relationship with tenants. In 2016, with the real-estate market heating up in metropolitan areas across the country, single-family rental companies also started pushing the limits of how much they could raise rent every year. American Homes 4 Rent raised rents by 11 percent between 2016 and 2018; the average rents in the top 30 markets in the country increased by just 6 percent over the same time, according to Zillow. American Homes 4 Rent owned 70 percent more properties in the first nine months of 2018 than in the same period in 2014, but it collected 150 percent more rent. “It’s up to us to educate tenants in a new way that there will be annual rental rate increases,” David Singelyn, the CEO of American Homes 4 Rent, said at an investor’s forum in 2017. “This has been a very passively managed industry for 30, 40 years, up until the institutional players came in.”
If investors were once wary of the single-family rental business, they aren’t any longer. The share price of American Homes 4 Rent was up 40 percent between August of 2013 and August of 2018. Investors such as Morgan Stanley and BlackRock increased their holdings in Invitation Homes in the third quarter of 2018. By December, the eight ratings firms covering the company had each given Invitation a “buy” rating, indicating that they believe it’s undervalued.
Single-family rental companies are now “darlings” of the real-estate sector, according to Haendel St. Juste, an analyst at Mizuho Securities who covers the industry. “You have this proof of concept now,” he told me. “They’ve exceeded expectations.” When I reached out to Sam Zell, the Chicago real-estate investor who had been skeptical of single-family rentals in the past, he, too, had changed his tune. “Technology has disrupted the real estate industry,” he said in a statement, “and the single-family rental sector may be a case in which resulting efficiencies have a big impact.”
Single-family rental companies are continuing to expand, suggesting that, rather than a temporary response to a generational crisis in the housing market, institutional ownership of single-family rentals may be a new fixture of the real-estate industry. Invitation Homes spent more than $200 million on new homes in the first nine months of 2018. As the supply of cheap homes for sale evaporates, American Homes 4 Rent has started building new homes to add to its stock.
A contractor piles wet carpet in the front yard of the house Erica and Rene Valentin rented from Invitation Homes. (Alana Semuels / The Atlantic)Despite the fact that the housing market has largely rebounded, the federal government continued financially supporting single-family rental companies until recently. In 2017, Fannie Mae provided a $1 billion loan guarantee for Invitation Homes, which allowed the company to benefit from lower interest rates than it would have received without the government’s backing, as well as more favorable loan terms. It wasn’t until August 2018 that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which was created in 2008 to oversee federal housing agencies, announced that it was ending its participation in the single-family rental market because the companies could be successful without the government’s help.
That success may be coming at the expense of would-be homeowners—the Americans Fannie Mae was created to assist. As the rental companies continue to acquire more real estate, they are competing with people who have repaired their credit in the decade since the recession, socked money away, and are now finally ready to buy again. “Our fear is that any home that goes into [an] investor’s portfolio isn’t just about homeownership today—it is locking that home out of potential homeownership for decades to come,” says John O’Callaghan, the president and CEO of the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership, a nonprofit that promotes affordable housing.
[Read: A house you can buy, but never own]
In some areas, renters say that it is difficult to find properties that aren’t owned by the big institutional investors. Heather Bryant’s Invitation Homes property in suburban Georgia had unreliable air-conditioning, a sewage system that frequently backed up, and a rodent problem that the company refused to address, she told me. But she and her husband kept re-signing the lease. “So many of the rental houses in Georgia are owned by them that it is nearly impossible to find someone who owns privately,” she told me. Iyesha Stringer moved out of one Colony American house in the Atlanta area, disgusted with the company because it had withheld 60 percent of her deposit and didn’t fix mold or flooding issues in the house. “I said I’d never rent from a big company again,” she told me. She moved into another property, only to find out a few months later that Colony American had bought the house and was going to start managing it. It’s now managed by Invitation Homes.
After four years of dealing with Invitation Homes, Erica and Rene Valentin decided they couldn’t take it anymore. When I visited them three days after the flood, they were still wearing face masks because their house was full of dust. Exposed nails lined the floor, and many of their belongings were stacked in the garage, one of the few places that had stayed dry. Desperate to get out, the family started to look at properties to buy. But home prices were on the rise, partly because of the presence of rental companies and institutional investors, which snapped up more than 5,000 homes in the Atlanta area in 2017 alone, according to Amherst Capital.
They eventually found a home they thought they could afford at $204,000. When they applied for a loan, however, they were denied. They had significant credit-card debt, and all their years of renting had deprived them of the wealth accumulation that has typically attended homeownership. They finally bought in Dacula, another suburb in growing Gwinnett County, for a little more than $300,000, but only after Rene took out a loan against his car to come up with the down payment. Now, they’re squeaking by on their monthly payments, but they know that one lost job could lead them to financial ruin. They like to say they found their dream home, but had to go through hell to get it.
In a sense, they were lucky. The Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in 2015, and it is getting costlier to borrow money. In Atlanta, home prices are rising three times as quickly as yearly increases in wages in the region.
That means many families will be forced to stay in institutional rentals. Instead of building wealth, they’ll continue to fork over rent money every month to companies looking for more ways to increase rents and fees.
Drive through the neighborhoods ravaged by the recession, and they may look back to normal. Once-empty homes are full of families, their lawns mowed, their lights on. But inside, these homes are different. They’re inhabited by renters, not owners. These families may live in a nice house and send their kids to a good school, but they don’t have independence, or the financial security that comes with owning your own home. A decade after being all but destroyed, they’ve yet to escape the crisis’s long shadow.
“For most of my career,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote last week, “I preached the old gospel of education reform. But now research and experience suggest that policy makers need to embrace a new path forward and leave the old gospel behind.”
As a retired assistant superintendent, it was refreshing to read Rahm Emanuel’s essay. According to Miles’ Law, where you stand usually depends on where you sit. Throughout my 26 years as an educator (19 faithfully served as a district and/or school-site administrator), my experiences have shown me that many politicians, along with a disproportionate percentage of community stakeholders, have low expectations for children in urban schools. Too often, the very same individuals to whom school-site educators look for support and appropriate resources are the ones placing stumbling blocks in the path of holistic success.
Providing autonomy to schools in urban communities is essential to both improving student academic success and enhancing valuable social-emotional skills. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing the disparity of overall student achievement between learners in urban communities and those in the suburbs. However, the anecdotal evidence as well as peer-reviewed research show that measurable gains can be achieved when school leaders and classroom teachers are allowed to work independently but with the support of central-office personnel, similar to the Finland model. Let the experts do their job; however, provide them with the tools necessary to ensure positive outcomes for the students. Kudos to Mayor Emanuel and all other open-minded politicians and school-board members who are risk takers!
Eugene Butler Jr.
Pembroke Pines, Fla.
Rahm Emanuel is a smart guy who has done some good things for Chicago, but on education, his only success has been to finally relent to those around him telling him that his reform playbook was ineffective. Chicago Public Schools’ neighborhood schools have been improving slowly but steadily for nearly 20 years thanks to thousands of hardworking teachers and administrators who have been fighting for students in spite of all the chaos around them, such as massive school closings, unwanted charter schools, ever-tightening budgets, onerous district mandates, the Common Core freakout, and dizzying turnover in district leadership.
But I give Rahm credit for acknowledging what has been so obvious to so many for so long: The old market-based reform gospel has been a huge and unnecessary distraction, and we need to get back to focusing on good management by (1) nurturing school leadership, (2) nurturing quality instruction, and (3) building on the value that schools bring to neighborhoods.
Denis Roarty
Oak Park, Ill.
Sorry, 61 percent literacy levels at high-school graduation is progress worthy of celebration?
Wow.
Alison Coad
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Can you simply replicate what one school district is doing in one area and implement it in another? In my opinion, there are too many moving parts. It’s the principals, teachers, and cultures that are making the difference, not the systems. I think a lot of money is spent trying to copy models that have worked in one area and that end up completely failing when implemented in another.
Colin Connery
Berkley, Mich.
I’ve always regarded Rahm Emanuel as something of a pit bull—ruthlessly closing Chicago schools and not particularly open to changing his view. I was wrong. He listened. In being open to a less narrow view of public-school education, he got on the right track with authentic education reform. We can succeed if we employ a child-centered paradigm, instead of myopically focusing on data and accountability.
Christopher Nye
Leadership Team, Educate the Whole Child
Great Barrington, Mass.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is right: Principals matter. In Chicago today, the average principal manages 48 team members, 553 students, and a budget of more than $5 million. We know schools with strong leaders attract and keep great teachers, foster more productive learning environments, and better engage families and the community. But the column revealed an even more important feature of Chicago’s principal focus: It starts and ends with listening to experienced principals.
My organization, the Chicago Public Education Fund, surveys Chicago’s school leaders annually. Our response rate hovers near 80 percent, and we use what we hear to partner with district leaders and act.
Other cities are listening to their principals, too. Over the past year, we have engaged more than 20 organizations across the country—from places such as Dallas, Minneapolis, Boston, and Memphis—to look closely at how they can better learn about and respond to the needs of their school leaders.
If we hope to change the conversation around success in public schools, we should all take a page from Chicago. We can start by listening to our best principals.
Heather Y. Anichini
President and CEO, the Chicago Public Education Fund
Chicago, Ill.
"The brain-dead debate between charter and neighborhood schools should be replaced with a focus on quality over mediocrity." I agree, @ChicagosMayor. “Labels” don’t matter, quality does. https://t.co/SLDiAyn1DA
— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 7, 2019Amen. Well-paid, well-sourced principals with appropriate latitude and community networks are the answer in Greenwich as well, as different from Chicago, as two districts could possibly be.
https://t.co/GQ4LeoBP2e
Lots of good stuff in here from @ChicagosMayor. His biggest legacy IMO as Mayor is the turnaround in Chicago Public Schools.
The next Mayor cannot turn back. #twill https://t.co/AEtGKmzzFM
Strong case from @RahmEmanuel on the importance of principal autonomy a strategy that also has been central to gains in New York City over the past 15 years: https://t.co/tYat7JYYh1
— Shael Suransky (@Shaelsuransky) February 7, 2019I appreciate @RahmEmanuel article to move the #edreform discussion. However, systems redesign is what is needed-not just “stronger” principals, teachers, etc. Salt water tanks are toxic 2 any fresh water fish! #edpolicy https://t.co/uOv3gqOnWB
— Ted Fujimoto (@tedfujimoto) February 6, 2019Rahm Emmanuel brags about his ed record. But, he closed 50 schools, the largest mass-school closure is modern US history, a move that researchers at UChicago studied & found left students "unprepared" & w/lower test scores see: (https://t.co/jJYJi9Irh7 ) https://t.co/1QMqRlmGVe
— Avi Asher-Schapiro (@AASchapiro) February 6, 20193/3 This doesn't sound like a new path to anyone who's worked in schools in the last couple of decades. We all know these things. Instead, it begs the question: Why are so many still struggling? https://t.co/eFEc2yIMMX
— Simon Rodberg (@simonrodberg) February 5, 2019I agree that quality is to be preferred to mediocrity, but Mr. Emmanuel glossed over those most fundamental of questions: what constitutes quality and how do we measure it?
I'm reminded of not-Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by… https://t.co/J8WdWueczr
Much of the lead-up to Friday’s government-funding deadline has felt like déjà vu. On Monday night, as with December’s eve-of-shutdown talks, Republicans and Democrats reached a deal that guarantees only a small fraction of the amount of money the White House has demanded for a border wall. And as they had in December, conservative lawmakers bristled at the proposal. Finally, as if on cue, media personalities such as Sean Hannity lambasted the compromise as “garbage.”
President Donald Trump, however, decided to rewrite his part of the script.
Throughout the last government shutdown, Trump was unequivocal in his demands. He made clear in multiple remarks, including his first address from the Oval Office, that he would not sign any bill that doesn’t include $5.7 billion for a wall.
But this time around, when presented with a compromise package that includes only $1.38 billion for a wall, the president seemed oddly nonplussed. On Tuesday afternoon, Trump made his first public comments on the deal. Along with wall funding that falls far short of the president’s initial request, the agreement also reduces the number of migrants and undocumented immigrants who can be held in detention by 17 percent.
“Am I happy? The answer is no, I’m not. I’m not happy,” Trump told reporters during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. But the president didn’t say that he would reject the plan, and instead, he suggested that he had other ways of securing funding for a border barrier. “I’m adding things to it,” he said. “It’s all going to happen, where we’re going to build a beautiful, big, strong wall.”
Those last comments offer a hint as to why Trump doesn’t share the ire of outside advisers such as Hannity, and may be inclined to sign the bill. According to multiple sources in the White House and on Capitol Hill, unlike in the last round of shutdown negotiations, Trump feels like he has more latitude to use executive powers to secure his desired wall funding. Those sources said that Trump has always been inclined to take charge of wall funding on his own, such as through the declaration of a national emergency. But his advisers urged him off that course throughout the January government closures, unsure of the measure’s legal ramifications.
[Read: Can Trump use a national emergency to build a wall?]
In the past few weeks, however, the White House has quietly laid the groundwork for an executive answer to Trump’s border-wall demands. The president may not be happy with the bipartisan funding deal struck on Monday, but he’s better prepared now than he was last month to make up for it.
“He’s inclined to sign it and go the executive-action route,” said a House Republican aide familiar with the president’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations. On Wednesday morning, CNN reported that Trump intends to approve the agreement, citing two people who have spoken with the president.
Trump would have several options for acting unilaterally after agreeing to keep the government open. He could declare a national emergency, which would allow him to circumvent Congress to tap into certain funds. The president could also pull money from different agencies and reprogram it for the construction of a border wall. Options include accessing Treasury forfeiture funds, diverting some Pentagon funds intended for counternarcotics operations, or using money from the Army Corps civil-works program. Each of these routes would help guarantee the funding Trump wants, but would carry risks as well, including swift legal retaliation from Democrats. “This is a legal question, and we’re very happy to relocate it from the halls of Congress into the courts,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told reporters last month.
During a press conference on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seemed to suggest that he was aware of Trump’s intentions to supplement the spending deal with executive action. “First of all, I hope he signs the bill, and second of all, I hope he feels free to use whatever tools he’s legally allowed to use to enhance his efforts to secure the border,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters. Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the conference committee that’s negotiating the agreement, added after the press conference that he plans to discuss options with the president. He said that Republican lawmakers were “universally more supportive” of transferring funds toward border-wall construction rather than declaring a national emergency.
But even with the threat of executive recourse looming, Democrats on Tuesday seemed pleased with the way the negotiations are playing out. “The deal worked out pretty good for us, frankly,” said one House Democratic staffer on the Appropriations Committee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. While Democrats didn’t get their desired cap on the number of immigration detentions allowed in the United States, the staffer said that the low figure negotiators reached for wall funding represents a kind of “unconditional Republican surrender.”
Conservatives, however, seem frustrated with the negotiations’ outcome. Over the weekend, according to the House Republican aide, members of conservative groups such as the Freedom Caucus made peace with the notion of a less than stellar deal—comforted, like Trump, by the promise of executive action. It was a different attitude than they had during the last round of shutdown talks, when conservatives close to the president, such as Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, urged him to keep the onus on Congress alone to fund the border wall. Over the weekend, those members reluctantly agreed that no deal to fully finance the wall was in sight, and that executive action was necessary, the aide explained.
But on Tuesday, following the release of more details about the conference committee’s bipartisan deal, conservatives were livid. “They’re fuming about how one-sided the agreement is,” the Republican aide said. “I would’ve said conservatives would support it with the expectation of executive action to follow, but the deal is bad enough where there may be some drama.”
Given the apparent conservative frustration, and with folks on Fox News continuing to sound the alarm, it’s worth wondering whether Trump will change his own tune, too. That’s what happened in December: Trump, at the 11th hour, absorbing backlash from the likes of Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, said he was no longer willing to sign a bill passed unanimously by the Senate to fund the government. The president may be sending strong signals now that he supports the current compromise, but hours of Hannity are still to come this week.
[Read: Sean Hannity is Trump’s shadow press secretary]
Lawmakers have until Friday at midnight to finalize the terms of the deal, push it through both chambers of Congress, and get a signature from the president. If they don’t make the deadline, the government will shut down again for the second time in less than a month—an outcome lawmakers from both parties have made clear would be unacceptable.
At this point, though, committee members are feeling confident, said the House Democratic staffer: “The only wild card here is Trump.”
After a gunman murdered 17 students and faculty on February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Nicole Hockley was urging patience. Hockley had just flown to South Florida from California, where, as co-founder and managing director of the anti-gun-violence organization Sandy Hook Promise, she had been working to prevent the type of mass shooting that had just occurred in Parkland.
Hockley met me two days after the shooting, at a bagel shop in Coral Springs. I’d come to interview her for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, where I worked as an editor and reporter some 11 miles east of Stoneman Douglas. Patience, Hockley told me, would be crucial during the difficult time ahead for the shooting’s survivors and the victims’ families. Well-wishers and journalists needed to understand that grief manifests in innumerable ways, and that shared outrage and loss will lead to calls for action, some immediately, others gradually. Change will come, she insisted, though it likely will be at the grassroots level, small and incremental. Sandy Hook Promise, after all, spent more than a year researching gun violence, school safety, and mental health before implementing its platform.
“When the people are really ready to raise their voices and demand things, that’s when you’ll get change,” said Hockley, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. “Until then, until people are really engaged, you’re not going to see meaningful change at [the state and federal] level.”
[Read: What I saw treating the victims from Parkland should change the debate on guns]
What Hockley didn’t know—what no one did—was that a group of Stoneman Douglas shooting survivors was gathering that same day at the home of Cameron Kasky, a gregarious theater kid who would, like some of the other fed-up teenagers at that meeting, fast become one of the most recognizable gun-control activists in the world. The speed at which Kasky and his friends created their movement, alternately known as #NeverAgain and March for Our Lives, and the conditions that allowed it to flourish, are the focus of the journalist Dave Cullen’s book Parkland, published this week to coincide with the first anniversary of the massacre. It follows January’s Parkland Speaks: Survivors From Marjory Stoneman Douglas Share Their Stories, a heartrending book edited by a Parkland English and journalism teacher, Sarah Lerner, and other works published last year that feature essays, speeches, and reportage by Kasky, David Hogg, Emma González, Delaney Tarr, and other students-turned-household-names.
Parkland is the first book about the shooting that’s not marketed toward teens and young adults. It also may be the most optimistic of the bunch. Cullen is less concerned with recounting the horror that took place in the school’s freshman building, and analyzing the institutional and societal failures that led to it, than he is in capturing the urgency that propelled the movement from Kasky’s living room to voting booths across the country.
As Cullen illustrates how the teenagers braved intractable politicians, death threats, and their own traumas to pursue their mission, Parkland can be an inspiring read. His behind-the-scenes interviews and interactions with the group’s leaders provide a lot of insight into their strategies and expectations—he spent 10 months texting and talking with the kids. As a clear sign of the students’ trust in him, Cullen was one of the few journalists—in fact, he was one of the few adults—allowed into the movement’s secret meeting place in “a nondescript strip mall” a short drive from the school. Here, he found kids being kids.
“There was a massive photo of Cameron’s brother Holden in the hallway, nearly floor-to-ceiling, just his head with a huge grin,” Cullen writes. “On a front wall they’d made a photo montage from some of the favorite cards they’d received. A big close-up of Emma [González] had been accessorized with a curly mustache.” Best of all is the way the teens mockingly posted to a wall nasty notes they’d received via snail mail from a troll who went so far as to include his return address. Cullen obviously connected with the kids, and he movingly relays their confidence that real and lasting change is within reach. If only he had taken more time to tell their story.
[Read: How Parkland students changed the gun debate]
His previous book, Columbine, a deep and impressive work of investigative journalism, was published 10 years after that school shooting. Parkland arrived just 363 days after the Stoneman Douglas murders. As such, the narrative often feels hurried, and Cullen occasionally succumbs to the first-they-did-this-and-then-they-did-that method of storytelling. His prose can seem unbridled. (“The kids were on a wild ride and their parents were buckled in with them.”) And one passage appears twice in the book: “Young voters have long been a sleeping giant of American politics, because most of them stay home. If they ever turned out in percentages to match their older counterparts, they could swing most elections.” Cullen swapped “most elections” for “many elections” in the repeated section, but every other word is the same.
Still, the author makes a strong case that America, after hitting “rock bottom” following the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 and the Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas, shootings in 2017, was ready for a movement on the scale of March for Our Lives. At the end of the book, he enumerates MFOL’s pre- and post-midterm wins, including the formation of nearly 100 chapters around the country, the “highest recorded turnout” (31 percent) of voters younger than 30 since 1994, and exit polls that “showed gun control as voters’ fourth-most-important issue, surpassing any previous result.” Progress continues beyond the book’s pages: Last week, Congress held its first hearing on gun violence in eight years, and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence issued Florida its first passing grade (C-minus) on the organization’s annual gun-law scorecard, a feat that the center credits to “high school activists [who] stepped up and spoke out.”
With the election behind them, and with some having graduated from high school or about to, March for Our Lives’ core members have been reevaluating their long-term plans. The kids know that to keep saving lives, they must lead lives of their own. They were burned out, and some of them, such as Kasky, needed to deal with the depression and anxiety they had tried to suppress during the campaign season. “I have to apply for college; I have to get a job,” the shooting survivor and activist Alfonso Calderon tells Cullen. Jaclyn Corin, the group’s chief organizer, hopes to see gun violence eradicated by her 30th birthday: “We want [March for Our Lives] to demolish itself so it doesn’t have to exist. It shouldn’t have had to exist ever.”
In the epilogue of Parkland, Cullen recalls seeing Springsteen on Broadway on the June night when the Boss broke from his script to praise March for Our Lives. Evidently still floating on the moment, Cullen closes the book with some hopeful, if romanticized, Bruce-like lyricism, an imagining of the kids waking up “weary, bleary” one morning on their cross-country Road to Change tour: “Time to stuff their suitcases, board the Bus to Somewhere, recharge each other with road giggles, and exhale that hope and wonder into another American town.”
And yet, in Florida, where the movement began, hope remains tempered by present realities. On January 23, a month after Cullen finished editing his book, in a town 150 miles north of Parkland, a 21-year-old with a 9 mm handgun walked into a bank and murdered five women. Florida’s Republican senators and its newly elected, NRA-endorsed governor offered little more than the usual thoughts and prayers. Less than two weeks later, U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz, a conservative Republican from the state’s Panhandle, tried to expel two Stoneman Douglas fathers from a congressional hearing on gun violence.
The road to change might have gotten shorter in the past year, but even a book as ultimately optimistic as Parkland understands that much asphalt and many obstacles remain.
Imagine going to live on a planet where the sun never moves in the sky. No sunrise, no sunset.
Several years ago, I became obsessed with tidally locked planets. The notion of a world permanently caught between two extremes—with one half always illuminated, the other always in the dark—took hold of my imagination. I realized that planets like these were the surest bet in the search for Earth-like places that our descendants could settle on. Worlds of eternal darkness and never-ending sunlight could be the future of the human race—if we’re serious about living in other solar systems.
Astronomers believe that most of the planets in our galaxy that have Earth-like temperatures are likely to be tidally locked. Because their orbital period is the same as their period of rotation, these planets will always present the same face to their sun—just as we always see the same side of the moon, as it orbits Earth.
And the reason for this glut of tidally locked worlds is pretty simple. Up to three-quarters of suns in our galaxy are red dwarfs, or “M-dwarfs,” smaller and cooler than our sun. Any planet orbiting one of these M-dwarfs would need to be much closer to its star to support human life—as close as Mercury is to our sun. And at that distance, the star’s gravity would pull it into a tidally locked orbit.
For example, astronomers recently discovered seven Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of the TRAPPIST-1 system, all of which are likely to be tidally locked.
[Read: How to draw an exoplanet]
My obsession with these planets led to my new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night. To picture all their strange geological features and weird knock-on effects, I talked to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, as well as other scientists studying them, and I read as much of the latest research as I could. More than anything else, I became captivated by trying to imagine what it would be like for people living on a planet where the sky never changes.
For now, talking about these planets means indulging in speculation—which is the perfect situation for a science-fiction writer. But we are learning enough about the dynamics of tidally locked worlds to start to understand how they would work, and what kind of civilization we could build there.
The first question: Where would humans settle on a tidally locked planet? When I started working on my book, the clearest answer appeared to be the terminator, the strip of twilight between the dayside and the nightside. “That might be the Goldilocks zone,” neither too hot nor too cold, but stuck “between eternal dusk and eternal dawn,” says Daniel Angerhausen, an astrophysicist at the Center for Space and Habitability at Bern University.
In the terminator zone, Angerhausen suggests, humans might be able to generate geothermal energy, using cold water from the nightside and hot water from the dayside in “some kind of thermal reactor.”
To have access to liquid water on a tidally locked world, you need a system to cool down the dayside and heat up the nightside, says Ludmila Carone of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Otherwise, all the liquid might become tied up in ice on the nightside, or worse yet, the atmosphere itself could get frozen in the dark.
“The habitability of these planets hinges very strongly on how well you can transport heat,” Carone says. Her computer models show that a tidally locked planet might have two strong wind jets, one in each hemisphere, that might act a bit like the jet stream here on Earth. But if the planet is too close to the sun, it might have only one wind jet, directly over the part closest to the sun. In that scenario, heat could be trapped on the dayside.
Even a relatively modest temperature differential (say, 50 degrees Fahrenheit) between the two sides could make these planets harder to live on. A comfortably mild climate on the dayside might still leave the nightside cold enough to freeze water, according to Laura Kreidberg, a junior fellow at Harvard University who studies the atmospheres of exoplanets. “Could all the planet’s water freeze out on the nightside? We don’t yet know,” she says. Ocean currents could help transport heat, too, but those effects depend on how much water the planet has to begin with and where the continents are.
One possible scenario for a tidally locked planet is what’s known as the “eyeball Earth” model, in which a planet starts out entirely covered with ice—which then melts on the side facing the sun. To an observer from space, this could look like an eyeball, explains Angerhausen. Or, with an ocean that transports enough heat, you could end up with a lobster-shaped ocean surrounded by ice.
In the most extreme scenarios, the heat on the light side becomes so extreme that water can’t exist. But with enough of a temperature difference, it can re-form on the nightside.
That’s what happens on a tidally locked planet called WASP-103b, a “hot Jupiter”–type world. According to Vivien Parmentier at Aix Marseille University, an author (along with Kreidberg) on a recent study of WASP-103b, water molecules are destroyed on the dayside of the planet, only to drift back to the nightside and recombine into water molecules that form clouds ... and then the process repeats.
Beyond the problems with finding liquid water, a tidally locked world around a red dwarf could have other issues, says Carone. Red dwarfs are “notoriously temperamental” and tend to go through long phases in which they flare up and eject material into space.
[Read: Astronomers have found planets in the habitable zone of a nearby star]
These flare-ups could heat the atmosphere of a planet in the habitable zone, while the star could also eject material that strips away the atmosphere. This happened to Earth early on, when our original atmosphere was torn away from us. Afterward, Earth “sweated out” another atmosphere from trapped carbon dioxide. But on a tidally locked world, a violent-enough solar disruption could get rid of a second atmosphere, too.
Even with an atmosphere, the dayside of the planet could be exposed to deadly radiation, says Parmentier. The light from a red dwarf wouldn’t provide enough of the UV wavelengths needed to make ozone—so this planet, unlike Earth, might not have an ozone layer. (In my novel, direct sunlight isn’t just too hot; it actually causes nasty burns, so people have to stay in the shade.)
Any humans living on the planet would also need to eat and breathe, and the physicists Joseph Gale and Amri Wandel of Hebrew University have been studying whether plant life could survive the flares and radiation exposure. At first, plants might evolve in the ocean to take advantage of the protective layer of water. But eventually, if the star became less violent, the planet could develop an atmosphere thick enough to allow plants to grow on land. Gale and Wandel have also calculated that there would probably be enough light in the visible spectrum to allow normal photosynthesis.
With an atmosphere that could sustain life, though, there would also be air currents strong enough to cool the planet’s dayside. The temperature might end up being about the same as in Earth’s tropical regions. An atmosphere could also help create a layer of cloud that would serve as a permanent sun shade. As scientists such as Carone have been making computer models of tidally locked worlds, they increasingly believe humans could live outside the terminator region.
Adiv Paradise, a Ph.D. student in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto, has a guess at what that could look like: People might live on the dayside, but would need to construct mining and pipeline operations to bring ice over from the nightside. A lot depends on how bad the radiation bombardment on the dayside might be. Paradise also thinks people could learn to live on the frozen nightside: “I’m from Minnesota. People manage to live in all sorts of places astronomers would describe as ‘not habitable.’”
The biggest challenge for humans living in a tidally locked world, says Paradise, could be the very different sky. If they lived on the dayside, they might “lose all knowledge of the universe,” because they would never see the stars. Their perception of the passage of time would also be altered, because “nothing in the sky would ever change.”
Inspired by these concerns, in The City in the Middle of the Night, I created two different human societies with wildly divergent approaches to the problem of circadian rhythms and the passage of time. And my human settlers definitely take advantage of the temperature differentials to create geothermal power, as Angerhausen suggests. Still, my tidally locked world didn’t reflect these more recent computer models and ended up being a little more fanciful in some of the details. There’s always a trade-off between scientific accuracy and storytelling, and in some ways, I may have ended up writing a bit of an exoplanet fable.
But I wanted to help people imagine the strangeness, terror, and splendor of inhabiting a planet that orbits an alien star. I believe that novels about tidally locked worlds will become a fast-growing subgenre as we make more discoveries and gather more observational data. There are so many great stories to be told about visiting these worlds of never-ending sunlight and darkness. And dreaming about life on another planet is a way of thinking about our own place in the universe, as humans, both now and in the millennia to come.
The yearbook photo that appears on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s personal page, featuring a man in blackface and another in a Klan robe, looks to me like a modern update of a familiar image from the Civil War, of a Confederate soldier from the slaveholding class posing with his body servant. The history of the Civil War pairing clarifies the meaning of the Northam scandal.
A photo from Ralph Northam’s yearbook page (Eastern Virginia Medical School)Perhaps the most famous of the soldier-slave photographs depicts Sergeant Andrew Chandler and his uniformed body servant, Silas Chandler. Andrew served in the 44th Mississippi Infantry in the Army of Tennessee from 1861 to 1863. Camp slaves such as Silas were expected to oblige their masters’ every need, including by preparing food, tending to horses, and carrying personal supplies during long marches. Silas likely experienced many of the challenges of military life in camp, on the march, and even, on occasion, the battlefield.
Camp slaves performed essential tasks in an army that was always outnumbered and short on supplies. The historical record makes clear that they were not, on the whole, happy participants in the war effort; they routinely committed acts of disobedience, including running away to join the Union army. But the photograph of Andrew and Silas—likely taken early in the war, when enthusiasm was at its height—reinforced the widely held belief among white Southerners that slaves supported the Cause. The presence of men such as Silas reassured Confederates that invasion, battlefield loss, and even emancipation itself could not sever the strong bonds of fidelity between master and slave.
[Vann R. Newkirk II: Ralph Northam’s mistake]
Indeed, the photographs and stories of camp slaves occupied a central place in how former Confederates reimagined antebellum society following surrender in the spring of 1865. The Silas photo was part of a larger Lost Cause narrative that emphasized Confederate generals as Christian Warriors, a united home front, and especially the loyalty of the black population. Popular lithographs such as Prayer in “Stonewall Jackson’s” Camp, for example, showed the famous general leading a prayer service during the war, his men listening attentively and using their swords as tools of prayer. Alongside Jackson stands his “loyal” slave.
Confederate veterans waxed poetic about their former camp slaves in their memoirs and later in the pages of Confederate Veteran magazine. Carlton McCarthy spoke for many when he wrote, “Never was there fonder admiration that these darkies displayed for their master.”
If slaves were willing to fight alongside their masters, the story went, then the institution of slavery was not brutal, as abolitionists claimed, but an outgrowth of the “natural” power imbalance between whites and blacks. White Northerners, white Southerners told themselves, simply couldn’t understand that white supremacy was both normal and accepted by everyone below the Mason-Dixon Line, including blacks.
The myth of the loyal camp slave took on new importance during the Jim Crow era. Confederate veterans’ reunions often included black men, sometimes dressed in uniforms they had procured during the war. Their participation—which may not have been optional, given the continued power of white landowners over their black employees—reminded a new generation of white Southerners not only of the supposed loyalty of former slaves to their masters, but of the kind of compliant behavior that was expected from African Americans during a period of intense racial unrest.
[Amanda Mull: Ralph Northam’s yearbook page speaks for itself]
Monuments and memorials built during this period provided another way for white Southerners to pass down their stories of loyal slaves to a new generation and to maintain and justify white supremacy at the turn of the 20th century. The Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery, dedicated in 1914, features a bronze tableau of Confederate soldiers marching off to war, including a young black man wearing a uniform and kepi. Colonel Hilary Herbert, who chaired the executive committee of the association responsible for the monument, described this scene as “illustrating the kindly relations that existed all over the South between the master and slave.”
More recently, the myth of loyalty took on a different form: The camp slaves weren’t camp slaves at all, some claimed, but actual soldiers who took up arms against the Union.
In the late 1970s, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), which had long defended antebellum Southern society, found itself on the defensive as ordinary Americans became more aware of the true conditions of slavery. The so-called commander of the organization wrote to the membership to describe a plan of action: “To counteract the drive of NAACP to ban the display of the Confederate Flag, the playing of Dixie, etc. and to counteract such propaganda movies as ‘Roots,’ I have persuaded Compatriot Francis W. Springer, a historian and talented Virginia writers to write a book on the contribution of Negroes in the south to the Confederate war effort.”
Springer did indeed produce such a book, and in newsletters and other self-published works, the SCV pressed the idea that blacks had “contributed” substantially to the war effort. The photo of Silas and Andrew Chandler, and others like it, were circulated as “proof” of this fact, with Silas elevated from camp slave to full-on Confederate soldier.
At first, this distortion was confined to the SCV membership base, but the internet transformed the myth of the black Confederate soldier into a viral sensation. Wartime photographs of camp slaves posing in uniform alongside their masters, including the famous image of Silas and Andrew Chandler, now populate thousands of websites.
[Ibram X. Kendi: A reading list for Ralph Northam]
Unsuspecting visitors to these sites are, of course, never informed that the Confederate government resisted calls to recruit slaves as soldiers until a few weeks before surrender in April 1865. Many Confederates would have agreed with General Howell Cobb, who insisted, “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong but they won’t make soldiers.” Only a small number of men were enlisted into service, but the war ended before they could be deployed.
The real Silas Chandler will never have an opportunity to come forward, his true story obscured in the service of the lie that slaves served their masters willingly, even happily. Doesn’t the Northam yearbook photograph send a similar message, if only subconsciously? The performance of blackface reinforces the belief that blacks smiled through slavery, and later, the post-Reconstruction period of white-supremacist terrorism, on through the indignities of Jim Crow—that these darkest periods of American history were, in fact, not so dark, but joyous times when all people knew their place. The man in blackface stands next to a man in Klan costume, like Silas next to his master, preposterously content in the company of his oppressor.
Updated at 7:20 a.m.
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam—When Kim Jong Un arrives in Vietnam this month for his second face-to-face meeting with President Donald Trump, the North Korean dictator will have a hard time ignoring the myriad signs of American culture and development.
For Trump and his team, that is exactly the point.
Crowds of young Vietnamese have flocked to cinemas to see Aquaman, the latest Hollywood superhero blockbuster. Apple’s iPhones are a status symbol for the growing middle class, and Facebook is widely used. American pop music such as Ariana Grande’s new single, “7 Rings,” fills coffee shops nationwide.
Beyond American culture, the draw of the United States is on display in other ways, too. When then-President Barack Obama visited Hanoi—Vietnam’s capital and the site for the next round of Trump-Kim talks, on February 27 and 28—and Ho Chi Minh City in 2016, thousands lined the streets of both cities to get a glimpse of his motorcade. The table at the Hanoi restaurant where he dined with the late chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain is encased in plastic, the mise en place set as if they’d just left. Photos of the two men sitting at the table line the walls.
The last time Trump and Kim met, in Singapore this past year, the American president showed the North Korean leader a fictional movie trailer to demonstrate, in truly Trumpian fashion, what could be gained by working with the United States. That argument has underpinned the Trump administration’s push in negotiations with Pyongyang: In essence, if the Kim regime were to denuclearize, it could gain access to untold riches and development—without having to loosen its hold on the country’s politics. (The president repeated this argument on Twitter last week.)
[Read: About that movie trailer Donald Trump gave Kim Jong Un]
In locating the next meeting in Vietnam, a country that fought a devastating war against the United States but is now a fast-growing economy and a regional ally, the White House appears to once again be trying to illustrate what is on offer if Kim cooperates.
Both Vietnam and North Korea suffered through ruinous Cold War conflicts involving America, and both are among the world’s few remaining Communist-led nations. That, however, is where the similarities between the two countries end.
“From the U.S. side, we want to show North Korea what it could look like should it denuclearize and stop acting as a rogue nation,” says Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, D.C., who specializes in Southeast Asian political and security issues. “We would like to showcase Vietnam as this model of a reformed socialist state that is part of the community of nations and a thriving part of the global economy.”
In Vietnam’s case, the country emerged in the 1970s from a two-decade war that left millions dead, urban areas impoverished, and huge swaths of the countryside doused with chemical defoliants. A decade of food shortages, economic stagnation, and international isolation followed.
But since initiating economic reforms in 1986, it has become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, lifting millions of people out of poverty along the way. It is a major cog in the global trading network, and an important diplomatic and security partner for the United States in Southeast Asia. Though Vietnam has a pluralistic leadership model that eschews the cult of personality that Kim Jong Un, his father, and his grandfather built around them, it remains a closed political society. The country has a terrible record on human rights, and lacks a free press or any semblance of an opposition, issues that Trump has largely remained silent on and which may well appeal to Kim.
[Read: What to expect from Trump-Kim take two]
North Korea, by contrast, remains a closed economy under brutal dynastic rule, isolated from the global community.
Among the best examples of the transformed relationship between Washington and Hanoi is Thinh Pham, who works for a marketing company in Ho Chi Minh City. Born in the 1990s—like the majority of Vietnam’s 95 million people, he was born after the end of the war—he has no memory of the country’s difficult past. He watches YouTube clips of American late-night hosts such as Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, and is a fan of the comedian Dave Chappelle and TV shows such as Game of Thrones.
“Probably 80 percent of the content I consume comes from the U.S.,” Thinh told me. “Plus, it’s in English, and I need to improve mine.”
Remarkably, given that the two countries’ soldiers were trying to kill one another less than half a century ago, Vietnam’s leaders are also eager to portray themselves as proactive contributors to regional and global security and, crucially, as partners to the United States. Perhaps the most eye-catching sign of this effort came in March 2018, when the USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, paid a four-day visit to Da Nang, the first time such an American ship had anchored in Vietnam since 1975, as the war was ending.
[Read: The beginning of the end of the Korean War]
“Vietnam is keen to play this role,” says Le Hong Hiep, a research fellow at the Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. “I think Vietnam has a lot of lessons to share with North Korea.”
This is the ideal future relationship that some in the Trump administration envisage with North Korea. It is, however, a lofty ambition. The United States technically is still at war with Pyongyang, few are convinced that Kim’s regime will be willing to give up its nuclear ambitions, and the opacity of the country’s politics combined with its extreme lack of development mean a Vietnam-like opening up remains a long way off.
At a minimum, according to Sangsoo Lee, the head of the Stockholm Korea Center at the Institute for Security and Development Policy, in Sweden, Kim will get a firsthand look at a country that recovered from war and developed its economy, all while the ruling Communist Party held on to power. “I think Kim is only interested,” he told me, “in how Vietnam, as a Communist country, maintained their regime.”
In 2014, Steven Soderbergh was ostensibly in retirement. He had emerged as a young pioneer of independent cinema with his 1989 debut sex, lies, and videotape. Since then, he’d worked in every genre and at all levels of the studio system. Soderbergh directed glossy franchise entertainment (Ocean’s Eleven), Oscar-winning successes (Traffic and Erin Brockovich), hard-boiled noirs (Out of Sight and The Limey), and low-budget experiments (Full Frontal, Schizopolis, and The Girlfriend Experience). He’s never been afraid to try something new.
So when Soderbergh declared that he was done making movies and had moved on to TV (directing every episode of Cinemax’s The Knick), it seemed like a fascinating new step in his career. Upon returning to film in 2017 with Logan Lucky, he’s crafted projects that bypass traditional Hollywood production and marketing formulas, targeting his advertising to find the right audience, editing trailers himself, and ignoring the usual branding paradigms. His latest project, High Flying Bird, is about an NBA agent and a rising basketball star who try to do something similar in their own industry. Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney and starring André Holland, the movie was shot using iPhone cameras (like Soderbergh’s last film, the thriller Unsane) and debuted on Netflix.
The Atlantic talked with Soderbergh about shooting movies on cell phones, the future of the theatrical experience, the Netflix production process, and what his ideal Oscars ceremony would look like. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David Sims: How did High Flying Bird come to you? Did you hear about the script or was it more organic than that?
Steven Soderbergh: It was pretty serendipitous. André [Holland] and I had been having conversations during The Knick. We started kicking around a couple ideas for projects about sports, and this one seemed to check off a couple of important boxes. The key being that the scale of it allowed for completely independent financing. They say sometimes, The budget is the aesthetic. My saying that I wanted to be able to do the movie at this [smaller] scale created a clear structure from the get-go. I talked a lot about Sweet Smell of Success and Glengarry Glen Ross—hyperverbal, short time frame, limited locations. I said [to Tarell Alvin McCraney], This is what we’re aiming for, so think in those terms. To Tarell’s credit, he really took that on and understood it.
[Read: Tarell Alvin McCraney channeled athletes’ dissent to write ‘High Flying Bird’]
Sims: Glengarry Glen Ross is a great movie, but people would call it stagey, and obviously it’s based on a play. Whereas High Flying Bird doesn’t feel like it could be a play, even though it’s mostly conversation, mostly in rooms. The locations and how you’re getting us inside places we couldn’t otherwise get inside—I feel like you couldn’t replicate that in another medium.
Soderbergh: I agree. As verbal as High Flying Bird is, I still think its best expression is as a movie, for the reason you cite. I wanted it to have a range of looks, in terms of locations, so that you did feel the breadth of [New York City]. One of my favorite shooting days was—we shoot the opening scene at The Standard hotel. Then we take a break—me and a crew of four or five people, and André—and we start walking downtown. I’m walking and I’ll go, “Okay, stop, we’ll put the camera here.” Shoot that, walk, walk, walk, okay, we’re stopping here. It was really fun. It took us two hours to walk and shoot our way down to the World Trade Center. You could have done it on a normal movie by sending everyone away, but in this case you were able to bring the whole crew.
Sims: Did you always envision using the iPhone for the movie, before the script was ready?
Soderbergh: No; my interest in the iPhone came from two directions. I was starting to shoot a lot of stuff on my own as a kind of experiment. And then I saw [Sean Baker’s film] Tangerine, and I was like, “That works.” Now I’m on the lookout for something that would be best served by this approach. That became Unsane, and High Flying Bird hadn’t come in at that point. When it did come in, I thought I wanted to duplicate the production method with a very different aesthetic.
Sims: Does the size of the iPhone matter to you much, to not really be able to see the camera on set?
Soderbergh: The more things you can eliminate that actors have to ignore, the better. And I certainly never saw any indication that they viewed this capture device as unprofessional, or not worthy of 100 percent effort. My attitude is, if you don’t know where the camera should go, it doesn’t matter what you’re shooting on. I’ve never been someone who has treated the capture device as the starting point for a project.
Steven Soderbergh (left) directing on the set of High Flying Bird with Bill Duke and André Holland (Netflix)Sims: When did it occur to you that Netflix would be interested in the film?
Soderbergh: I had pretty serious conversations with them about Unsane as well. Both projects seemed like potential good fits for their platform. It just turned out that on Unsane, I unexpectedly got an opportunity to [experiment with distributing and marketing the film through my own company, Fingerprint Releasing], and I took it. With High Flying Bird, I felt that I would probably go to Netflix first. I got a couple of calls from other people who are in the theatrical-release business, and we had some conversations. I decided, ultimately, that I’d rather it dropped on Netflix. I felt, for this, that being everywhere at once was the move.
Sims: You tried [a simultaneous in-theaters and home release] with Bubble in 2005, back before anyone thought that was a thing you could do. You tried it with The Girlfriend Experience in 2009. Were you just inventing the wheel before there was a car to put it on? What’s changed in the past 15 years?
Soderbergh: Well, I ran into the problem that all platforms are having, which is that the big chains don’t want to engage with this. I know [the National Association of Theatre Owners president,] John Fithian well, and have had a lot of interaction with NATO, and I am sympathetic to this issue. What I don’t understand is why everyone in this business thinks there is one template that is gonna be the unified field theory of “windowing” [or how long a movie screens in theaters]. The minute that I knew, which is usually around Friday at noon, that Logan Lucky wasn’t going to work and that Unsane was definitely not gonna work—as soon as that happens, the studio should let me drop the movie on a platform the next week. There should be a mechanism for when something dies at the box office like that.
Sims: A backup option of, You know what, if it doesn’t hit this number on opening weekend, then release it online.
Soderbergh: I think in abject failures, they should let you do whatever the hell you want. If Unsane drops and doesn’t perform, who’s harmed exactly by me 10 days later putting this thing on a platform? You can’t prove to me that that’s hurting your business.
Sims: With Netflix, what does an opening weekend look like? Are they going to call you up and say, “We’re happy! Lots of people are watching it!”?
Soderbergh: I think it’s that. I know from working as a producer on [the Netflix show] Godless that they were really happy [with the viewership for that show]. I have enough moles around town who let me know that that performed really well. And I’m like, “Great, that’s all I want.”
Sims: When people talk about the theater experience dying, it feels facile—it’s more that it’s evolving in ways that nobody’s really prepared for.
Soderbergh: I don’t think it’s dying. They have to deal with the fact that there’s a lot of competition for eyeballs now. And the difference between your home experience and your theater experience isn’t as large as it was when I was growing up. It’s still vibrant, and it’s still the No. 1 date destination for people. I don’t think it’s going away. It’s hard for an organization of that size, NATO, to be nimble. When you’re talking about the major chains, everyone’s got veto power. That doesn’t help their situation, the fact that getting them to do something differently can be like turning around an aircraft carrier.
Sims: Whereas Netflix can be like, “Sure, release Roma in theaters three weeks early, let’s give it a shot.” They have that nimbleness.
Soderbergh: There’s a lot to be said for that. Both on that end, and on the creative end before the thing’s even made. Godless existed as a 175-page film script that wasn’t viable. So Scott [Frank, the director] and I thought, Instead of chopping one of its limbs off, why don’t we turn it into a series? We went to a couple places and the response was, “Sounds interesting, let’s do a development deal. Show us what the first episode is going to look like.” Netflix, in the room—with a number that we’d pulled out of our ass, and a start date that we pulled out of our other ass—said, “Go. You’re starting tomorrow.” The ability to move that quickly and that definitively, that’s a big advantage.
Sims: Most of the studio movies you made were in the the mid-budget tier that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. What happened to it?
Soderbergh: Look, I have a lot of crackpot theories about how moviegoing has changed and why.
Sims: I would like to hear your crackpot theories.
Soderbergh: One of the most extreme is, I really feel that why people go to the movies has changed since 9/11. My feeling is that what people want when they go to a movie shifted more toward escapist fare. And as a result, most of the more “serious” adult fare, what I would pejoratively refer to as “Oscar bait,” all gets pushed into October, November, December.
Sims: And people have become conditioned, in the fall, to go and see a couple of serious movies.
Soderbergh: Put on a heavy coat and go see something serious. What that creates is what you see now, which is this weird dichotomy of fantasy spectacle; low-budget genre, whether it’s horror or comedy; and the year-end awards movies. I guess that’s a trichotomy.
Sims: From January to March, you can have some cheap fun, then in March, here we go …
Soderbergh: The big shit’s coming.
Sims: When did Logan Lucky come out? In August? Were you trying to find a spot where that movie could exist?
Soderbergh: It felt like August, historically, was a good time to show up with something of quality. There’s typically a dead zone before Labor Day. The big summer movies have played out, and there are three weeks with some breathing room. You just need a lot of marketing money, more than we had. I was aware it might not work. I learned a lot, and it was absolutely a worthwhile thing to do, to try and create an avenue for projects that don’t fall in any of these tiers or to want to have creative control over everything, with more financial transparency.
Sims: A lot of the movies you made in Hollywood were star-driven, convincing audiences and a studio with a recognizable face. Does that matter much anymore?
Soderbergh: I think it does. There’s a reason the movie business was built on movie stars. Scott Burns’s movie The Report [which I produced] is a perfect example of this. The reason it works is that Annette Bening and Adam Driver are fucking great. You need them. And All the President’s Men is the same way. Without Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, it’s a lot of scenes of people sitting around talking. When it’s them, it’s great. And Annette and Adam fill that necessity. What people are allergic to is when it feels forced, and you’ve got a movie star playing a part that just seems weird.
Sims: I assume you saw that the Academy Awards recently held up your 2001 acceptance speech as the Platonic ideal of an Oscar speech [in part for its shortness]. Did you have a reaction to that at all?
Soderbergh: Shock and dismay. When that popped up and people started texting me about it, I said, “Oh, it’s too bad I’m not there to tell the story of how that took place.”
Sims: Please tell the story!
Soderbergh: Well. I was not sober at the time. And I had nothing prepared because I knew I wasn’t going to win [Best Director for Traffic]. I figured Ridley [Scott], Ang [Lee], or [Stephen] Daldry would win. So I was hitting the bar pretty hard, having a great night, feeling super relaxed because I don’t have to get up there. So the combination of a 0.4 blood alcohol level and lack of preparation resulted in me, in my state of drunkenness crossed with adrenaline surge ... I was coherent enough to know that [if I tried to thank everyone], that way lies destruction. So I went the other way. There were some people who appreciated that, and there were some people who really wanted to hear their names said, and I had to apologize to them.
Sims: How do you feel about the fact that the Oscars are in a panic about their own existence?
Soderbergh: I know people that are on the board of the Academy and all that stuff. There are too many board members. It’s like NATO—you can’t make a move you have to make because eight people will shout it down. The other thing is the proliferation of all the other awards shows and the fatigue that comes in. When people call it “awards season,” I’m like, there’s no season in nature that lasts this long. There’s a reason for that. Because it’s unnatural.
Sims: I was just at Sundance, and that’s where awards season begins now.
Soderbergh: It’s like having a friend that comes up to you every other day and says, “It’s my birthday.” And you’re supposed to act like it is. It’s just kind of numbing. I’ve only been at the Oscars twice, the first time for sex, lies, and videotape for Best Screenplay. [The film lost to Dead Poets Society.] This was in 1989; there wasn’t the craziness there is now. There would be screenings around town and that was it. You didn’t go. We were nominated for three Golden Globes, and nobody even called us and asked if we wanted to go. By the time Traffic and Erin Brockovich rolled around [in 2000], it had gotten pretty intense. I, being the luckiest bastard you’ve ever met, was kind of in this sweet spot. I was shooting Ocean’s Eleven, and I had two films going head-to-head, so I could not appear to be choosing either one. So I did nothing.
Sims: Well it won you an Oscar; more people should try it.
Soderbergh: I had the best version of what you can have. The show itself is clunky and weird sometimes. But the work that the Academy does, in terms of archiving alone, I don’t care what kind of show they’ve gotta put on to make the money to pay for that stuff. The Academy library is one of the most amazing resources in the United States. As a filmmaker, understanding what they’re doing for cinema culture, I’m very sympathetic to their problem, and part of me doesn’t get that worked up about it because I’m like, Look, they’ve gotta put on this show. It pays for all this great stuff. All of my stuff, all the prints, negatives, it’s all there, for nothing. I used to have that shit in a climate-controlled vault in Hollywood. It wasn’t cheap.
Sims: What do you think of the Oscars potentially excluding some categories from being televised live?
Soderbergh: There was some discussion for a minute about the Oscars doing what the Emmys do—having two ceremonies. Everybody shouted that down and said they would be creating two tiers. What I wanted to do was produce that show: We’ll go back to the Roosevelt Hotel, every nominee can bring a plus-one, and that’s it. Super intimate, food, drink, all that, you can get up there and talk all you want. It’s not televised. It’s a private event for the nominees and their significant others. Make it fun and cool. ’Cause here’s the dirty secret: Going to the big thing is not fun. It’s more fun to watch on TV. The trick would be doing something super cool and small.
Sims: And then everyone shouted that down.
Soderbergh: All awards often end up being defined by what they got wrong. But I have no desire to go through that again. I’m giving myself a bit of a pass, having been through it. I was a movie nut as a kid; I grew up watching the Oscars. Having said that, I’m not big on repeating experiences. Where I am in my career, I’d rather have a hit than an award.
Sims: Keep making movies!
Soderbergh: I’m trying. I’m trying to make one every nine months. Look, it’s still the best job in the world, if I’m being honest. I complain, because Homo sapiens complain. This is what we do.
Maria Butina, the gun-toting Russian graduate student who pleaded guilty in late 2018 to conspiracy to act as an illegal foreign agent, creates a media frenzy every time she opens her mouth. Lost in the noise so far, however, is the fact that Butina may be one of many. For years, countries including Russia and China have regarded their citizens who study in the United States as an intelligence-gathering resource.
One thing the public should know about Butina is that she was not a “spy” in the traditional sense, but rather what the intelligence community would call an access agent. (Perhaps this is what she meant when she told The New Republic, in a piece published on Monday, “If I’m a spy, I’m the worst spy you could imagine.”) Her job, if the allegations are true, was to use her wits to gain access to organizations and individuals of particular interest to Moscow and to provide information to the real spies who might leverage that knowledge to promote Russia’s agenda. Another thing to know about her is that, whether by training or accident, she was spectacularly successful. Her handlers could not have imagined that she would be able to establish a working relationship with the National Rifle Association, pose for pictures with prominent politicians, and even ask foreign-policy questions of Donald Trump when he was a presidential candidate.
But as sensational as Butina’s story really is, the fact that she entered the country on a student visa is not at all surprising.
[Read: Maria Butina’s defiant plea and yet another Russian ploy]
In the days immediately after 9/11, when I was the deputy associate director of Central Intelligence for Homeland Security, it came to our attention that the United States had precious little information on foreign students. We were hard-pressed to tell whether those granted student visas showed up for classes, whether they switched majors from music to nuclear physics, or what information they might be sending home along with their graduation photos.
Although the government is now much better at knowing the whereabouts of these students, there is no systematic effort to monitor what intelligence-related information, if any, they ship back home. But there is reason to fear that some number of them assist not only their government’s intelligence services but also, especially in the case of China, multinational corporations actively engaged in industrial espionage.
I don’t mean to encourage some xenophobic reaction; I certainly don’t believe the nation should shun foreign students. On the contrary, the presence of these young people from all around the world makes America stronger. These students are important for our economy and the diversity of our academic communities.
That said, we must adopt a more realistic understanding of the counterintelligence implications of having so many foreign students on our soil. In 2017, an estimated 1.1 million international students were in the United States. China was by far the most common country of origin, with 33 percent of that number. Saudi Arabia has more than 50,000 students in the United States, and Russia slightly more than 5,500.
[John Sipher: Paul Whelan isn’t a spy, and Putin knows it]
In my nearly three decades of service in the CIA—including, at one point, as the deputy chief of the East Asia division in the Directorate of Operations—I came to know that Chinese security officials meet with many of their students before they go abroad to study, and in certain cases debrief them on return. While the Russians may not be quite as meticulous at weaponizing their young scholars, it is clear that a number of these students are amateur talent scouts for the motherland’s intelligence services. I learned not only that foreign students from traditionally hostile countries studying in the United States spot and assess potential intelligence targets, but also that they are given laundry lists of research material and intellectual property that their handlers would like them to funnel back home. In addition, the student visitors are asked to keep an eye on their fellow citizens in the United States, reporting those who appear to have “gone native.”
When I was with the CIA, a Russian graduate student reported to Moscow intelligence that one of his professors had behaved inappropriately on a trip with students. I learned of the story because the professor informed us that he was being extorted.
Access agents in academia are not a trivial problem, and they are not rare, even if most people never hear about them.
It was Butina’s misfortune that her orbit coincided with that of the Trump investigation. Had it not, then all the other work she did, including allegedly connecting Russian officials with NRA executives, would likely have gone undetected.
Many of our politicians, business executives, scientists, and particularly academics are simply naive about the subtle workings of foreign intelligence services. They are shocked by Butina’s story, which sounds, to them, like something out of a spy novel. But the fact is that a number of foreign students and visiting professors have been exploiting our ingenuousness for decades.
As we open these international students’ eyes to all that the United States has to offer, we need to open ours as well. Some of our visitors are not here simply to be informed, but also to influence us in ways many Americans have not imagined.
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