The World’s Refugee System Is Broken

TOKYO—Rose grew up in an English-speaking region of Cameroon, a Central African country uniquely, and violently, divided by language. When she was young, on the instructions of her father, she handed out fliers for a secessionist group opposed to the Francophone-controlled government. But as a teen, after she was sexually assaulted by security forces looking for her father, she swore off politics and became a teacher.

Two decades passed. On a visit to her home village in 2016, Rose attended a protest demanding resources for Anglophone schools. Teachers and lawyers were the tip of the spear of a burgeoning independence movement centered on language. At the demonstration, officers hit Rose on the head with something powerful enough to knock her out and land her in the hospital for months. Afterward she was repeatedly brought in for questioning by police. Her family name, linked to the secessionist movement, made her more of a target. (For this story, she asked to use a pseudonym.)

As she watched other teachers being hauled off and never heard from again, she decided to leave the country. Over the last three years, the violence in Cameroon has led to more than 3,000 deaths and uprooted half a million people—the fastest-growing displacement crisis in Africa, according to the International Rescue Committee. Asylum seekers from Cameroon often go west, to Europe and the United States. But Rose’s broker, whom she paid nearly $7,000, surprised her with the news that he could get her a visa to Japan, a country she knew almost nothing about. She had little idea of what she would do with her life when she arrived there, and barely 24 hours to decide. Still, she told me, “I just wanted to be in a safe place.”

[Read: What happens when Japan stops looking ‘Japanese’?]

The leaders who created international refugee policy never envisioned people like Rose, a middle-class 39-year-old woman desperate for safety from a conflict the rest of the world isn’t paying attention to. Violent flash points rooted in all kinds of new phenomena—police corruption, climate change, gang warfare—now dot the Earth, creating the conditions for the worst protracted migration crisis since World War II. The pull to more stable corners of the planet is more potent now, too, given social-media postings from cousins and friends abroad who amplify (and often inflate) newfound opportunity. And given relatively affordable airline travel, plus the ubiquity of smartphones—which ease language, navigation, and homesickness challenges—moving is logistically easier now. This has all turned Japan into an unlikely destination for asylum seekers.

The problem is that the refugee system set forth in United Nations documents signed by most of the world’s countries, including Japan and the United States, does not apply to Rose—at least not how it is currently enforced. The 1951 and 1967 agreements were drafted to specifically address European displacement from World War II while more broadly setting rules to protect people from persecution going forward: Anyone who is “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”

But persecution is in the eye of the beholder, with interpretations of “unable or unwilling” varying based on the country of resettlement, the political party in power in that country, and the individual bureaucrat reading the application. To get refugee status and a pathway to permanent residency, asylum seekers generally must prove that they were personally targeted by documenting their persecution with paperwork—ostensibly from the very same authorities they are fleeing from. They are eyed suspiciously as mere economic migrants; poverty and hunger, though defining features of persecution, are not accepted reasons for being granted asylum.

We are in an age of mass displacement. Yet the powerful and stable nations of the world have not figured out a humane way to handle the influx of people claiming persecution while balancing domestic concerns about security and cultural change. Instead, doors are simply closing, with asylum protections rolled back seemingly everywhere. In Italy, where the former interior minister denounced “fake refugees,” boats of Africans have been blocked from docking. The European Union pays handsomely to keep asylum seekers away, while Turkey considers sending Syrian refugees back to their homeland, which is still at war. In the U.S., the indefinite detention of asylum-seeking children prompted the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to say she was appalled. Thousands of asylum seekers are sent from the U.S. to dangerous sections of Mexico and even to countries they’re not from.

Cameroon’s problems may have not attracted international attention, but its people are showing up around the world, including at the U.S.-Mexico border; Rose has a brother in South Korea and a son, who also fled for safety, in Minnesota, living with an uncle. On her layover to Tokyo, someone sent Rose a WhatsApp message with a number for a Cameroonian woman in Japan.

Rose didn’t ask for asylum at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, which would have likely gotten her locked up in a detention center. Hunger strikes in Japan over poor conditions for detainees are common, just like in the U.S. Instead, Rose entered Japan on a tourist visa and was lucky enough to find an English-speaking Japanese man who drove her around until she found a hotel room she could afford. She then connected with her compatriot in Japan, who told her about the Japan Association for Refugees, a nongovernmental organization that assists asylum seekers, where she met with a case worker.

[Read: How technology could revolutionize refugee resettlement ]

“He said, ‘Your case will never be approved,’” Rose recalled. “And I was like, ‘Is this man okay?’” She has a 20-stitch scar stretching from her hairline clear across the side of her skull, and surely Japanese authorities, like the rest of the world, knew about the carnage in Cameroon. “I was shocked. I was speechless. And I was very, very disappointed.”

Japan received 19,629 applications for refugee status in 2017; 20 people were accepted. The following year, just 42 people were admitted. The rate at which Japan accepts such applications is the lowest in the G7. Yuki Tamura, a deputy director at the Japanese Foreign Ministry, said in an interview that the number of resettled refugees preapproved to move to Japan via the UN refugee agency will soon increase, from 30 to 60. (That compares to 30,000 last year in the U.S., though this cap has been lowered to 18,000 for this year.) He also defended the low number of asylum seekers who arrive in Japan without prior permission and then win refugee status, as Rose is trying to do. “Japan’s decision to accept or not accept asylum seekers is not politically inclined. We accept refugees after assessing the situation based on domestic laws,” he told me.

Domestic laws, of course, don’t reflect the kind of refugee the world is creating. Climate change is expected to displace at least 25 million people by 2050, while sexual violence and gang extortion in Central America are forcing migration to the U.S. and even Europe, yet there’s no international standard on how to deal with such victims. The Obama administration granted asylum to credible cases involving gangs, but that was reversed under President Trump. In Europe, Belgium recognizes gang violence as a legitimate refugee claim, but Spain doesn’t.

The irony, says David Slater, an American anthropology professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University who works with asylum seekers in Japan, is that those who appear to have the most straightforward cases of persecution “are the ones who are least likely to have documentation” to prove that it happened. “You don’t stop off at the local police station, especially when the police are part of the people who are persecuting you, to try to get a police report,” he said. (Rose, for example, fled in a rush with two small bags.)

Slater is collecting oral histories from asylum seekers, and he told me he has often wondered, “How can I possibly determine the accuracy or the legitimacy of this claim? It’s not possible.” Governments can no longer distinguish between “an economic migrant seeking to better his or her life and a refugee who is just trying to survive,” he says, because “everybody has a little bit of both in them.”

And yet that’s exactly what asylum and refugee officers are tasked with doing. “I would say that the system is broken,” Slater says. “The amount of conflict in the world and the number of people who are fleeing are so disproportionately larger now. For us to try to use a framework that was designed under a particular set of conditions and under a particular scale is no longer feasible.”

When Rose eventually gets an interview with a refugee officer, inconsistencies in her story—or confusion in the translation—could lead to allegations of fraud and deportation. Rose doesn’t even remember the precise date of the 2016 protest she was involved in, and she hasn’t been able to obtain her hospital records documenting her injuries.

[Read: The mystery of why Japanese people are having so few babies]

Japan’s low birth rate and undermanned workforce indicate a need for immigrants. But assimilation is viewed as a barrier. Just 18 percent of Japanese, the lowest of any country surveyed in a 2016 Ipsos poll, think refugees could successfully integrate into their country. A myth persists that the Japanese are of a single bloodline connected to the emperor, and that view affects refugee policy, according to Osamu Arakaki, a professor at International Christian University in Japan and an expert in Japanese refugee law. He told me that the common blood is seen as “energy for the successful economic development in the 1970s and 1980s,” and therefore homogeneity is necessary in order to “maintain ethnic and economic harmony.”

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned in 2014 that “in countries that have accepted immigration, there has been a lot of friction, a lot of unhappiness both for the newcomers and the people who already lived there.” So Abe’s policy is to instead direct money to the UN refugee agency. Though its contributions have been declining in recent years, Japan remains one of its most generous state donors, supporting the displaced who are temporarily living in refugee camps. Yet that money only goes so far; the agency is 57 percent underfunded overall.

The world’s most neglected displacement crisis, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, is in Cameroon. In 2018, there were 203 applications for asylum from there in Japan and no approvals, according to UN data. Other groups have a similarly hard time: Tokyo has given refugee status to just one person claiming persecution due to sexual orientation, and no Kurds seeking asylum from Turkey, despite thousands of applicants. Syrian refugees have had particular trouble winning asylum, although a handful have been admitted as students.

Rose has been hospitalized in Tokyo due to her head injury, and she faces poverty, eating just rice most days. And like refugees everywhere, she suffers from the trauma of family separation.

Rose longs for her family, her career, her old life. She worries about her chances at refugee status. But she retains a degree of optimism. “The fact that I’m living in a safe country where I’m not afraid of rape at any time, or gunshots, give me some sort of hope, some assurance, that some things will change for me,” she says. “I’ve never been a refugee before now, so I really don’t know how it works. But I just hope it works well for me. I don’t know how, but I hope it works well.”

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This story was supported in part by the Abe Fellowship for Journalists, a reporting grant from the Social Science Research Council and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

DNC Superdelegate Promoting Brokered Convention Is a Significant GOP Donor, Health Care Lobbyist

William Owen, a Tennessee-based Democratic National Committee member backing an effort to use so-called superdelegates to select the party’s presidential nominee — potentially subverting the candidate with the most voter support — is a Republican donor and health care lobbyist.

Owen, who runs a lobbying firm called Asset & Equity Corporations, donated to Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and gave $8,500 to a joint fundraising committee designed to benefit Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky in 2019.

“I am a committed Democrat but as a lobbyist, there are times when I need to have access to both sides and the way to get access quite often is to make campaign contributions,” said Owen, in a brief interview with The Intercept.

“I’m a registered lobbyist and I represent clients and they have interest in front of Congress and I attend the Senator’s Classic, which is a Republican event, each year,” he added.

Owen noted that he understood how his GOP donations could open him up for criticism but stressed that he also gives to Democrats. Federal Election Commission records show Owen has donated to Democrats in previous years, but has not donated to his own party’s congressional candidates this cycle. Owen has not given to any presidential candidates this cycle.

Owen, currently registered as lobbyist for Klox Technologies, a medical product company, was quoted in the New York Times today as one of the party insiders considering an effort to block Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s path to the nomination at the DNC convention in Milwaukee this July.

“I am a committed Democrat but as a lobbyist, there are times when I need to have access to both sides and the way to get access quite often is to make campaign contributions,” Owen told The Intercept.

A former member of the Tennessee state legislature, Owen is currently an executive member of the Tennessee Democratic Party and DNC, making him one of the 771 unpledged delegates, also known as superdelegates, who could play a hand in selecting the presidential nomination. Owens is a supporter of former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and has pushed to use superdelegates to make Biden the nominee.

The Tennessee Democrat worked in 2018 to block a Sanders-backed plan to weaken the role of superdelegates in the nomination process. “If we don’t have a vote, then what good are we?” Owen told Politico at the time.

The push was ultimately defeated. Sanders’s supporters won a key concession from the DNC, changing the rules to only allow superdelegate participation in the nominating process on the second ballot.

The Intercept previously reported on the potential for party insiders — including corporate lobbyists and lawmakers funded by special interests — to cut a backroom deal to block a more populist candidate from the nomination. Several superdelegates are consultants to health care clients lobbying against Medicare for All. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase each employ lobbyists who simultaneously serve as superdelegates.

Chris Dodd, a former Connecticut senator and one of the superdelegates quoted by the Times today, is a lobbyist with the law firm Arnold & Porter, which represents corporate interests such as the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, Lloyd’s of London, and AT&T. Dodd has endorsed Biden for president.

Current polls suggest Sanders will have the most voter and delegate support going into the nomination, but may fall short of the threshold for the nomination on the first ballot.

In recent days, several candidates, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, have embraced the potential for a brokered convention, in which superdelegates could be used to stop Sanders.

Bloomberg, notably, has discussed efforts to poach delegates from other more moderate candidates to bring together an anti-Sanders coalition. In January, his campaign hired Alexandra Rooker, a superdelegate from California, as an adviser. Michael Nutter, the former Philadelphia mayor and DNC superdelegate, is a co-chair of the Bloomberg campaign. FEC disclosures show Nutter has been paid at least $45,000 by the Bloomberg campaign.

Owen told the Times he has been in contact with multiple campaigns. Owen floated the name of Michelle Obama as a potential running mate to bring the party together. Other superdelegates, according to the Times, are floating moderate lawmakers such as Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., or Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., as potential unity candidates to lead the ticket. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, a popular progressive lawmaker, has also been floated as a unity candidate. 

The post DNC Superdelegate Promoting Brokered Convention Is a Significant GOP Donor, Health Care Lobbyist appeared first on The Intercept.

Emails Show Rep. Henry Cuellar Provided Extensive Favors to Border Security Lobbyists

Rep. Henry Cuellar, a conservative Texas Democrat, has used his perch in Congress to push for funds for private prisons, drone surveillance, and increased border security enforcement.

The lawmaker has defended his record as part of his duty as a border lawmaker focused on national security, but emails show Cuellar acting at the behest of well-connected lobbyists for a government contractor.

Perceptics, a company that sells cameras that scan license plates, has frequently tapped Cuellar for favors since at least 2011, including a push to edge out a competing vendor, using its team of lobbyists and campaign contributions to curry favor with his office.

The close relationship with the lawmaker was revealed through emails that were published online last summer after Perceptics was targeted by an anonymous hacker. Colin Strother, a spokesperson for Cuellar, declined to discuss the emails and accused The Intercept of “an agenda and a bias.” Perceptics declined to comment.

The emails show the lawmaker’s name mentioned dozens of times as an ally Perceptics could use to sponsor legislation or write official letters on the company’s behalf. Lobbyists and executives at the firm referenced him as Perceptics’s “friendly congressman” and “our Cuellar firepower.”

Cuellar’s close ties to business interests stand out, even among other conservative House Democrats. Cuellar is the biggest Democratic recipient of campaign donations from the private prison industry, one of the only Democrats vote to delay regulations on payday lending, and has voted in support of the Trump administration’s agenda in Congress a record 75 percent of the time.

The lawmaker’s unusually conservative record has attracted a progressive primary opposition from Jessica Cisneros, an immigration attorney. The Texas primary is on Super Tuesday, March 3. The primary has attracted heavy levels of spending from progressive and business interests, with a political action committee associated with border security lobbyists raising thousands in support of Cuellar.

The relationship began in earnest in early 2011 after Cuellar, who has been in office since 2005, was appointed to the House Homeland Security Committee’s panel overseeing border security. “And here are the D’s….note Cuellar!” wrote Cristina Antelo, a contract lobbyist, passing along a press release announcing the lawmaker’s new committee assignments.

John Dalton, the chief executive of the company, was reminded in a follow-up email from Antelo that she had introduced him to Cuellar “at least twice, once at a fundraiser I hosted for the CHC BOLD PAC,” a reference to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s PAC. Antelo, notably, serves on the board of CHC’s foundation and has routinely hosted CHC BOLD PAC fundraisers over the last decade.

In 2011, Perceptics pushed to initiate an inspector general investigation against Axiompass, a competing firm that had been awarded a contract by the State Department to install vehicle identification technology along the U.S.-Mexico border. Executives at Perceptics believed that they had been unfairly passed over for the lucrative deal.

Cuellar stepped up to the task. The Texas lawmaker contacted State Department Inspector General Steve Linick on March 22, 2012, requesting an investigation over the agency’s procurement process.

One year later, Patricia Inglima, an aide to Cuellar, passed along a letter from the State Department to Perceptics’s team, confirming that her office had successfully encouraged the agency to open an inquiry. “I have just confirmed with OIG that the letter is in reference to the license plate reader technology bid and that the investigation is continuing,” Inglima wrote.

In 2014, the Podesta Group, a now-shuttered lobbying firm that once managed Perceptics’s lobbying efforts, boasted in a client report about overseeing a sophisticated effort to undermine the Axiompass contract. “Together, we successfully recruited allies in Congress who demanded that the State Department launch an investigation,” the report noted, offering further plans for tying funding for the contract to the results of the investigation.

During the following sessions of Congress, Perceptics lobbyists assisted Cuellar in privately urging then-Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, a senior lawmaker on the Appropriations Committee, to increase spending on U.S.-Mexico foreign aid designed to boost border vehicle tracking technology.

The plan was detailed in a document summarizing a call with Perceptics’s lobbying team. “Cristina sent the latest draft of our proposal for the Economic Support Fund for Mexico to a contact on Rep. Cuellar’s staff,” the document noted. The team also discussed a meeting between Mexico’s ambassador to the U.S. and Cuellar, to which “Perceptics would be invited.”

After a series of meetings between Perceptics and the lawmaker, Cuellar wrote a letter to Granger urging her to adopt $135 million in foreign aid into the following budget for the construction of specialized cargo traffic lanes enhanced with nonintrusive automated vehicle identification technology, a system Perceptics sold to the government.

Dennis Thompson, a program manager at Perceptics, emailed his team to note that “Cuellar personally and Cuellar’s staff have said that in conversations with Chair Granger and her office, LPRs were discussed specifically under the category of non-intrusive inspection technologies.”

In 2017, Perceptics lobbyists drafted a letter to be sent under Cuellar’s name to Customs and Border Protection, requesting that officials continue and expand a pilot program at the Laredo Juarez-Lincoln Port of Entry to use state-of-the-art license plate-reading technology. It is unclear if this draft letter was ever sent. A records request sent to the CBP has not yet been formally answered.

The following year, Perceptics lobbyists orchestrated an effort to push the Trump administration to incorporate an upgrade to license plate-reading technology into its border security plan. As The Intercept previously reported, Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, R-Tenn., read talking points provided to him by Perceptics lobbyists as he questioned then-Customs and Border Protection chief Kevin McAleenan.

After Fleischmann spoke, Cuellar, who serves on the same border security committee, also brought up similar issues during the hearing. Lucio Alonzo, a lobbyist to Perceptics, forwarded the hearing video to Dalton, Perceptics’ CEO, to tout the firm’s success on Capitol Hill.

“Most relevant to us, Congressman Fleischmann asked about CBP’s plan to modernize its LPRs as we asked his office to do,” wrote Alonzo. “Later on,” Alonzo added, “Congressman Henry Cuellar asked about pilots going on at Laredo that sound a lot like Perceptics’.”

Throughout the interactions with Cuellar over the years, Perceptics executives and lobbyists continued to donate to Cuellar and sponsor fundraising events for him. The relationship goes back to at least 2009, when Antelo sponsored a breakfast fundraiser for Cuellar with Perceptics executives.

The Podesta Group, in regular updates to its client, reminded Perceptics to give to lawmakers with key oversight roles over immigration and homeland security, including Cuellar. Federal Election Commission disclosures show multiple donations to Cuellar over the years.

Americans for Prosperity Action, a group founded and funded by billionaire Charles Koch, has poured cash into the race to boost Cuellar, the very first time the Koch-backed Super PAC has interjected itself into a race to defend a Democrat.

Corporate trade associations funded with undisclosed business money, including the American Bankers Association, the National Association of Realtors, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which alone has devoted $200,000 to defending Cuellar, are all flooding the district with money to defeat Cisneros. Gilberto Ocañas, a lobbyist with the international law firm Dentons, also launched a new dark-money group, called American Workers for Progress, that has spent at least $720,000 on ads backing Cuellar.

Cisneros has out-raised Cuellar in direct donations, in part through national enthusiasm and endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. But Cuellar has built a deep campaign reserve, in part from his prodigious fundraising from corporate PACs. Cash from the border defense industry could play a pivotal role.

Earlier this month, CHC BOLD PAC, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus group affiliated with Perceptics lobbyists and other corporate lobbyists, transferred $250,000 to a Super PAC supporting Cuellar. On Thursday, CHC BOLD PAC is hosting a last-minute fundraiser in Washington, D.C., in support of Cuellar and asking attendees for as much as $20,000 each to host the event.

The post Emails Show Rep. Henry Cuellar Provided Extensive Favors to Border Security Lobbyists appeared first on The Intercept.

Why America Radicalizes Brits

The United States has a strange power over Britain, radicalizing Brits who spend any time in its embrace—for the British, there’s no other place like it.

Europe, the idea and the reality, has challenged and polarized Britain for half a century, but mainly on practical and constitutional grounds—whether the U.K. should belong to Europe or stand apart from it. With David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on British membership of the European Union, this question became immediate and existential. Distant America is neither. And yet the very idea of it exerts a hold that seems to only grow with experience, radicalizing even the most mild-mannered of Brits who venture there, in a way France, Germany, Italy, or Australia does not.

The idea of America has always been political: the wealth and opportunity as some see it, the injustice and individualism as others prefer. With Brexit this has only become more pronounced. The U.S. has been held up by one side of the argument as an opportunity to grasp, and by the other as the danger of what might become. To ardent leavers, it offers the hope of free trade without constitutional entanglement; to many remainers, it means subservience to a greater power, chlorinated chicken, and privatized health care.

[Read: The economist who would fix the American dream]

This hold that the U.S. has on the British political debate mirrors that which it seems to have on a raft of British politicos who went there and came back radicalized (or indeed simply stayed there, never to return). While I’d like to claim credit for this observation, it is, like most journalistic insights, something someone else noted once upon a time, which I can no longer find. It was a line that stuck and, once lodged, began to chime again and again.

An endless number of influential British figures have been enthralled by their experience across the Atlantic, including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and ex-Labour Party leader Ed Miliband on the left, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the right. Both Brown and Miliband are huge fans of the U.S. because it made them feel free, their friend and former adviser Stewart Wood told me. And yet they both thought individual liberty had been prized too highly over equality, he noted. Tony Blair liked the U.S. preference for private enterprise over public works, Wood said, while Brown loved its “Madisonian constitutionalism.” For Johnson, born and brought up in the U.S. in his early childhood, the country represents liberty and energy, verve and vigor. He may be high European in his cultural tastes—preferring ancient Greek and the classics to Hollywood—but the idea of America stirs him.

Gerard Baker, the British editor at large of The Wall Street Journal, has spoken of his own political evolution from left-wing student to arch capitalist after visiting both the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the 1980s. In 1986, he traveled to Moscow and was struck by its “drab uniformity.” A few months later he went to New York, “with all its colour and diversity.” Baker recalled that “whatever remaining doubts I might have had about the relative virtues of the capitalist system versus the communist system were removed.” Christopher Hitchens is another obvious example, transformed from outspoken Marxist opponent of U.S. foreign policy to iconoclastic supporter of American intervention.

Having spent quite a bit of time in the U.S. over the years, I felt as if I understood intellectually how this might happen. You don’t have to live in the U.S. to know that it is a land of wealth and poverty, opportunity and prejudice, freedom and mass incarceration. If any one of these things happens to be a particular passion, seeing how views might harden is easy. In the U.S., after all, none of these things is very far from the surface—unlike the English class system, endless and subtle in its hold, America wears its complexities for all to see, projecting them to the world in an endless diet of film and music, on Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.

Yet only on a recent trip to the U.S. did I begin to feel America’s peculiar effect, not just understand it. I had no great epiphanies. I did not discover something profound after a week driving through the Midwest and its surround. That the car is king, food is fast, and race is an issue are not observations likely to win me a Pulitzer. But what I did notice on this trip was a feeling in myself that I think explains the U.S.’s radicalizing power: on the one hand, a sense of awe at the country’s energy and positivity, its enduring ability to regenerate itself; and on the other, a sense of abandoned hopelessness that runs very close.

I’d seen rich and poor America before, of course: the endless suburban wealth in places such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Austin, Texas, as well as the deprivation of Clarksdale, Mississippi. But the contrast between deindustrialized Youngstown, Ohio and reimagined Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just an hour apart, told the story of America’s hold on the British imagination better than anywhere I’d been before.

Take Pittsburgh first. Here was a place known as the Steel City: gritty, industrial, blue-collar—and, like most such cities, declining from the 1980s as its heavy industry closed, its companies relocated, and its population fell. The story is wearily similar to that of many cities in the U.K., including Liverpool and Newcastle, Birmingham and Glasgow. Yet, like other American cities (though unlike many in Britain), Pittsburgh has successfully reinvented itself as a tech hub, with booming incomes despite a still-falling population—and is now ranked as one of the most livable cities in the world.

[Annie Lowrey: The great affordability crisis breaking America]

Had any English city so successfully regenerated itself, I wondered? Manchester, perhaps the most successful one outside London, was doing well, but could not be said to boast anywhere near as much wealth, or as diverse an economy, as Pittsburgh. According to official European Union figures, the average GDP per capita in Greater Manchester is £30,500, or about $39,700—10 percent below the EU average. In Pittsburgh, it’s more than £46,000, or $59,000, which is similar to the wealthy “Home Counties” near London.

Pittsburgh is the kind of city that stirs sympathy for America’s embrace of the creative destruction of free markets. Its success asks questions of Britain’s failures to achieve the same kind of economic generation. Put simply: Why aren’t more of our cities like Pittsburgh?

But that’s only one side of the story. The other comes in the hollowed-out city centers of old, deindustrialized Ohio. I went to two, Canton and Youngstown, each shocking in its own way and like nothing I’ve seen in England. In the dilapidation and hopeless poverty of some of their inner-city neighborhoods, both were unmistakably, obviously American—even though within a 10-minute drive of these areas, you would hardly know it.

In England, poverty and discrimination, like the class system, are less obvious, even if they are just as pervasive. The poor pit villages of the northeast wear their economic abandonment better; they kept going through better welfare, more state employment, and higher transfers of central-government income to maintain schools, roads, and other services in an area that has lost its economic reason for existing.

Of course, both small-town Ohio and big-city Pennsylvania are America. Academically, I already knew that, but feeling it is different. The question I Ieft with was whether you can have the creativity without the destruction, or does a country have to accept the abandonment of Youngstown to get the creative boom of Pittsburgh? If you stymie the bust, as in Britain, do you also stymie the boom? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I can see why people—Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Boris Johnson, and countless others—move to America and feel that they do, one way or another.

The Legacy of a Hidden Figure

In 1958, not long after the pivotal launch of Sputnik, American engineers were preoccupied with spaceflight. Every day, engineers at the Langley laboratory, in Virginia, contemplated orbital mechanics, rocket propulsion, and the complicated art of leaving Earth—they needed to catch up with the Soviet Union. Katherine Johnson’s job was to prepare the equations and charts for this work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the room where any of it was discussed.

“Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” Johnson asked the engineers, as Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in the book Hidden Figures.

“Girls don’t go to the meetings,” her male colleagues told her.

“Is there a law against it?” she replied. There had been, in other cases; one prohibited black people from using the same bathroom as white people.

But Johnson already ignored those laws at the office, and she kept asking about the meetings. Eventually the engineers relented, tired of saying no over and over again. She made it into the room, and well beyond that.

Johnson, who died this morning at the age of 101, spent more than 30 years at NASA, where she provided the complex calculations for the country’s most important missions, from the first journey to the edge of space to the triumphant landing on the moon.

Johnson’s talent and contributions are well documented now, but for most of her life, her efforts went unrecognized—until Shetterly published her book in 2016, and the film it inspired became a blockbuster. For the first time, a wider swath of the world learned about Johnson and how she made a place for herself in American spaceflight. The book chronicled the lives of Johnson and the other black female mathematicians who worked as “computers” at the Langley Research Center, using pencils and slide rules to calculate equations for the agency that would become NASA.

[Read: Hidden Figures and the appeal of math in an age of inequality]

The sciences are well known for their infuriating tendency to overlook important figures who aren’t white and male. But the stories of these women in particular had been buried so deep in the archives of history that when Shetterly brought them to light, it felt like a revelation. In her late 90s, Johnson was finally celebrated—widely and loudly—for her contributions to one of the most iconic accomplishments of the 20th century.

She was inundated with press coverage, had buildings renamed in her honor, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The burst of overdue recognition didn’t seem to faze her. “There’s nothing to it—I was just doing my job,” she said in a Washington Post interview in 2017. “They needed information and I had it, and it didn’t matter that I found it. At the time, it was just a question and an answer.”

Johnson was born on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to a schoolteacher and a farmer. She had a sharp mathematical mind as a child, and by the time she was 13 years old, she was taking classes at West Virginia State College, where she later earned her degree. She briefly attended West Virginia University to study for a master’s degree in math, becoming one of the first black students in the program, before leaving to start a family. She was teaching at a black public school in Virginia when a relative told her about job openings with Langley’s cadre of human computers, led by another black mathematician, Dorothy Vaughan.

Johnson arrived at Langley in 1953. At a place like Langley, any woman would have faced sexism in that era; Johnson and her colleagues had to confront the racism of the time, too. A cardboard sign on a cafeteria table, delineating where “colored computers” could sit, had been done away with by the time she got there, but the signage over the bathrooms remained. Johnson focused on her work. “She didn’t close her eyes to the racism that existed,” Shetterly wrote. “But she didn’t feel it in the same way. She wished it away, willed it out of existence inasmuch as her daily life was concerned.”

[Read: The women who contributed to science but were buried in the footnotes]

By 1958, the year NASA was formally established, Johnson was known for her keen eye and precision. As engineers considered what it would take to send the first American beyond the edge of space, she volunteered for work behind the scenes. “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up,” Johnson told her boss. She ended up calculating the trajectory of Alan Shepard’s capsule from the time it lifted off the ground to the moment it splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean in 1961.

Johnson was called on to do the same for John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, the following year. This time, the equations that would control the journey had been programmed into actual computers, and the astronaut was a little nervous about entrusting his life to this newfangled technology. Glenn asked the engineers to tell Johnson to crunch the same numbers by hand and check them before the flight. They were correct. “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go,” he said.

As the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated, Johnson contributed calculations that synchronized the Apollo 11 mission’s lander, which touched down on the lunar surface, and the command module, which remained in orbit around the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored. Without these efforts, the first men on the moon wouldn’t have been able to find their way home.

Shetterly heard these and other stories of black mathematicians from her father, who worked as a scientist at Langley. During her early research for the book, the author shared some information about the women with experts on NASA history. “They encouraged what they viewed as a valuable addition to the body of knowledge, though some question the magnitude of the story. ‘How many women are we talking about? Five or six?’” Shetterly remembers them saying. By the time she finished her book, she had uncovered nearly 50 black women who had worked as computers, mathematicians, engineers, or scientists at the Langley facility from 1943 to 1980, and believed that “20 more names can be shaken loose from the archives with more research.”

While Johnson and her cohort of “computers” didn’t get the recognition they deserved at the height of the space race, their work has become part of the mythos of American spaceflight. But their story is also an object lesson in how history is written—who is included and who is not. The legacy that Johnson leaves behind is not just the equations she worked to help send astronauts safely up into space, all the way to the moon, and back again. Her story also reveals who gets left out of the stories America tells about its accomplishments. If Johnson and her colleagues are remembered, but the next group of “hidden figures” remains hidden, then we have not remembered her well enough.

Ele ganhou uma ação ambiental milionária contra a Chevron. Foi perseguido e perdeu tudo

Em agosto do ano passado, no segundo ano mais quente já registrado, enquanto os incêndios na floresta amazônica ocorriam, o manto de gelo na Groenlândia derretia e Greta Thunberg era recebida por multidões de fãs nos EUA, algo de grande relevância para o movimento climático aconteceu: um advogado que luta contra a Chevron há mais de uma década por devastação ambiental na América do Sul foi colocado em prisão domiciliar.

Poucos meios de comunicação cobriram a detenção de Steven Donziger, que venceu um processo de vários bilhões de dólares no Equador contra a Chevron pela contaminação maciça na região do Lago Agrio e que luta há vários anos por povos e agricultores indígenas. Assim, em 6 de agosto, Donziger deixou um tribunal em Lower Manhattan despercebido e embarcou no trem para casa com um dispositivo de monitoramento eletrônico afixado no tornozelo. Exceto pelas ocasionais reuniões com seu advogado ou outros encontros autorizados pelo tribunal, ele permanece sem sair de casa desde então.

“Eu sou como um prisioneiro político corporativo”, Donziger me disse quando conversamos em sua sala recentemente. O advogado, que tem um metro e noventa de altura, cabelos grisalhos e costumava ser confundido com o prefeito de Nova York, Bill de Blasio, quando ainda podia andar pelas ruas da cidade, estava surpreendentemente estoico e se conformou com sua situação durante minhas duas visitas ao apartamento que ele compartilha com sua esposa e o filho de 13 anos. Mas, nesta quarta-feira em particular, enquanto a luz do sol de inverno diminuía em sua sala e o carregador da bateria de sua tornozeleira brilhava em uma prateleira próxima, seu otimismo sobre sua batalha épica contra uma das maiores empresas de petróleo do mundo parecia estar enfraquecendo. “Eles estão tentando me destruir completamente.”

Donziger não está exagerando. Enquanto o caso contra a Chevron tramitava no Equador em 2009, a empresa disse expressamente que sua estratégia de longo prazo era demonizá-lo. E, desde então, a Chevron continuou seu ataque total a Donziger no que se tornou um dos casos mais implacáveis e prolongados da história do direito ambiental. A Chevron contratou investigadores particulares para rastrear Donziger, criou uma publicação para difamá-lo e reuniu uma equipe jurídica de centenas de advogados de 60 empresas que realizaram com sucesso uma campanha extraordinária contra ele. Como resultado, Donziger perdeu a licença para exercer sua profissão e suas contas bancárias foram congeladas. Ele agora tem uma hipoteca em seu apartamento, enfrenta multas exorbitantes e foi proibido de ganhar dinheiro. Em agosto, um tribunal apreendeu seu passaporte e o colocou em prisão domiciliar. A Chevron, que tem uma capitalização de mercado de 228 bilhões de dólares, tem fundos para continuar alvejando Donziger por quanto tempo quiser.

Em declaração por email, a Chevron escreveu que “qualquer jurisdição que observe o estado de direito deve considerar ilegítimo e inexequível o julgamento fraudulento ocorrido no Equador”. A declaração também dizia que “a Chevron continuará trabalhando para responsabilizar os autores desta fraude por suas ações, incluindo Steven Donziger, que cometeu repetidamente atos corruptos e ilegais relacionados a seu processo fraudulento na justiça equatoriana contra a Chevron”.

Os acontecimentos que levaram ao confinamento de Donziger foram, como grande parte da épica batalha jurídica em que ele está envolvido há décadas, altamente incomuns. O confinamento em casa é seu castigo por recusar um pedido para entregar seu celular e computador, algo que foi solicitado a poucos outros advogados. Para Donziger, que já havia suportado 19 dias de depoimentos e dado à Chevron grande parte dos arquivos de seu processo, o pedido ia além do aceitável, e ele entrou com recurso argumentando que isso exigiria que ele violasse compromissos com seus clientes. Ainda assim, Donziger disse que entregaria os aparelhos se perdesse o recurso. Mas, embora se tratasse de um caso civil, o juiz federal que presidiu o processo entre a Chevron e Donziger desde 2011, Lewis A. Kaplan, elaborou acusações criminais de desacato contra ele.

Em outra peculiaridade legal, em julho, Kaplan designou um escritório particular de advocacia para processar Donziger, depois que o Distrito Sul de Nova York se recusou a fazê-lo – uma medida praticamente sem precedentes. E, como o advogado de Donziger apontou, a empresa que a Kaplan escolheu, Seward & Kissel, provavelmente tem vínculos com a Chevron.

Para tornar o caso ainda mais extraordinário, Kaplan ignorou o processo padrão de atribuição aleatória e escolheu a dedo alguém que ele conhecia bem, a juíza distrital dos EUA Loretta Preska, para supervisionar o caso que estava sendo processado pela empresa que ele escolheu. Foi Preska quem sentenciou Donziger à prisão domiciliar e ordenou a apreensão de seu passaporte, embora Donziger tivesse comparecido no tribunal em centenas de ocasiões anteriores.

O equatoriano Manuel Silva mostra evidências de um derramamento de óleo no Lago Agrio em 14 de dezembro de 1998. Indígenas equatorianos processaram a Texaco, acusando a empresa de transformar as florestas tropicais da região em um “depósito de lixo tóxico” ao buscarem petróleo.

Foto: Dolores Ochoa/AP

Uma testemunha corrompida

Apesar da situação atual de Donziger, o caso contra a Chevron no Equador foi uma vitória espetacular. A saga jurídica começou em 1993, quando Donziger e outros advogados entraram com uma ação coletiva em Nova York contra a Texaco em nome de mais de 30 mil agricultores e indígenas da Amazônia devido à contaminação maciça causada pela perfuração na exploração de petróleo realizada pela empresa na região. A Chevron, que comprou a Texaco em 2001, insistiu que ela havia limpado a área em que operava e que seu antigo parceiro, a companhia estatal de petróleo do Equador, era responsável por qualquer poluição remanescente.

A pedido da Chevron, os procedimentos legais sobre a “Chernobyl Amazônica” foram transferidos para o Equador, onde os tribunais eram “imparciais e justos”, como escreveram os advogados da companhia de petróleo em um documento na época. A mudança para o Equador, onde o sistema jurídico não envolve júris, também pode ter interessado a empresa porque a poupou de um julgamento desse tipo. De qualquer forma, um tribunal equatoriano decidiu contra a Chevron em 2011 e ordenou que a empresa pagasse 18 bilhões de dólares em compensações, valor que posteriormente foi reduzido para 9,5 bilhões. Após anos de luta com as consequências para a saúde e o meio ambiente da extração de petróleo, os requerentes haviam vencido um processo histórico sobre uma das maiores empresas do mundo.

Mas Donziger e seus clientes nunca tiveram tempo para saborear a vitória de Davi sobre Golias. Embora a decisão tenha sido posteriormente confirmada pelo Supremo Tribunal do Equador, a Chevron imediatamente deixou claro que não pagaria o valor determinado pela sentença. Em vez disso, ela mudou seus bens para fora do país, tornando impossível que os equatorianos pudessem cobrá-los.

Naquele ano, a Chevron entrou com uma ação RICO, com base na Lei de Combate a Organizações Corruptas e Influenciadas pelo Crime Organizado, contra Donziger em Nova York. Embora o processo originalmente pedisse cerca de 60 bilhões de dólares em indenizações, e julgamentos civis envolvendo reivindicações monetárias acima de 20 dólares autorizassem um réu a um júri, a Chevron retirou as reivindicações monetárias duas semanas antes do julgamento.

Em sua declaração, a Chevron escreveu que a empresa “focou o caso RICO na obtenção de uma medida cautelar contra o avanço do esquema extorsivo de Donziger contra a empresa”.

Em vez disso, o caso foi decidido apenas por Kaplan, que concluiu em 2014 que o julgamento equatoriano contra a Chevron era inválido porque foi obtido por meio de “fraude ultrajante” e que Donziger era culpado de crime organizado, extorsão, fraude eletrônica, lavagem de dinheiro, obstrução da justiça e manipulação de testemunhas. A decisão dependia do testemunho de um juiz equatoriano chamado Alberto Guerra, que alegou que Donziger o havia subornado durante o julgamento original e que a decisão contra a Chevron havia sido escrita por outra pessoa.

Guerra foi uma testemunha controversa. A Chevron o preparou em mais de 50 ocasiões antes de seu testemunho, pagou-lhe centenas de milhares de dólares e providenciou para que o juiz e seus familiares se mudassem para os Estados Unidos com uma generosa quantia mensal que era 20 vezes o salário que ele recebia no Equador. Em 2015, quando Guerra testemunhou em um processo de arbitragem internacional, ele admitiu que havia mentido e mudou sua história várias vezes. Segundo a Chevron, as imprecisões de Guerra não mudaram o teor de seu testemunho. De sua parte, o juiz Kaplan escreveu que seu tribunal “teria atingido precisamente o mesmo resultado neste caso, mesmo sem o testemunho de Alberto Guerra”. Em comunicado, a Chevron disse que Guerra foi transferido para os EUA por sua segurança e observou que o tribunal considerou que os contatos da empresa com o juiz equatoriano eram “adequados e transparentes”.

Os advogados de Donziger disseram que as mudanças no testemunho de Guerra enfraqueceram completamente suas alegações originais de suborno, que Donziger negou consistentemente. De qualquer forma, essas evidências surgiram após o julgamento, e um tribunal de apelações se recusou a considerar as novas informações e decidiu contra Donziger em 2016.

“Ele foi efetivamente condenado por suborno pela descoberta de um único juiz em um caso em que o suborno nem era a acusação.”

Se Donziger tivesse sido acusado criminalmente de suborno, um júri teria avaliado a credibilidade de Guerra. Em vez disso, no caso RICO, que era civil, a decisão sobre uma testemunha chave se resumiu a uma pessoa – Kaplan – que optou por acreditar nela. Essa escolha preparou o terreno para as perdas legais que Donziger sofreu desde então, segundo observadores do caso Chevron.

“Com base em Kaplan dizendo: ‘Acredito nesta testemunha; Considero Donziger culpado pelo crime de suborno do juiz’ – com base nisso, ele foi destruído. Esse é o elemento máximo de todas as outras alegações contra ele. E se você tirar isso, o resto deles – eles simplesmente não estão lá”, disse Charles Nesson, advogado e professor da Harvard Law School. “Ele foi efetivamente condenado por suborno pela descoberta de um único juiz em um caso em que o suborno nem era a acusação”, disse Nesson sobre Donziger. “Eu ensino sobre evidências, que você tem que provar o que afirma. Mas a prova neste caso é mínima.”

Nesson, que representou Daniel Ellsberg no caso Pentagon Papers e os requerentes no processo da W.R. Grace apresentados no livro e filme “A Qualquer Preço”, ensina o caso de Donziger em seu curso “Fair Trial”, “Julgamento Justo” em português, usando-o como um exemplo de julgamento decididamente injusto. “Donziger simboliza uma pessoa em um processo civil assimétrico, a quem agora pode ser negado um julgamento justo”, explica ele a seus alunos.

Nesson é um dos vários juristas que opinaram que Kaplan tem uma particular afeição pela Chevron, empresa que o juiz descreveu como sendo “de considerável importância para a nossa economia que emprega milhares em todo o mundo, que fornece um grupo de commodities, gasolina, óleo para aquecimento, outros combustíveis e lubrificantes dos quais cada um de nós depende todos os dias”

Por outro lado, o juiz demonstrou antipatia por Donziger, de acordo com seu ex-advogado John Keker, que viu o caso como uma “farsa dickensiana”, na qual “a Chevron está usando seus recursos ilimitados para esmagar réus e vencer esse caso através de poder e não pelo mérito”. Keker retirou-se do caso em 2013 após observar que “a Chevron apresentará qualquer moção, ainda que sem mérito, na esperança de que o tribunal a use para ferir Donziger”.

Donziger exibe a tornozeleira de monitoramento que ele precisa usar.

Foto: Annie Tritt para o Intercept

A proibição atual de Donziger de trabalhar, viajar, ganhar dinheiro e sair de casa mostra o sucesso da estratégia da Chevron. Mas, mesmo com o destino em risco, a importância do caso de Donziger vai além da vida do advogado.

“Deveria ser simplesmente aterrorizante para qualquer ativista que desafie o poder corporativo e a indústria de petróleo nos EUA”, disse Paul Paz y Miño, diretor associado da Amazon Watch, organização dedicada à proteção da floresta tropical e dos povos indígenas da bacia amazônica. “Eles deixaram claro que não há limites para o que se pode gastar neste caso”, disse ele sobre a Chevron. “Eles não vão parar por nada.”

O caso Chevron pode ser ainda mais devastador para os requerentes na Amazônia, que nunca receberam suas compensações, apesar de terem sido deixados com centenas de fossas de lixo sem revestimento e água e solo contaminados com milhões de litros de petróleo derramado e bilhões de litros de lixo tóxico despejado. Tudo o que aconteceu com Donziger “é nada em comparação com o fato de Kaplan ter tornado os danos que a empresa realmente causou como totalmente irrelevantes”, disse Nesson.

Mas as últimas reviravoltas no caso Chevron também podem ser uma notícia particularmente ruim para os ativistas climáticos. Apenas 20 empresas são responsáveis por um terço dos gases de efeito estufa emitidos na era moderna; a Chevron ocupa a segunda posição, atrás apenas da Saudi Aramco. E está cada vez mais claro que enfrentar a crise climática exigirá confrontar esses mega-emissores, cujos recursos para processos judiciais superam os de qualquer indivíduo.

Fazer a Chevron e outras empresas limparem a sujeira criada por sua produção de petróleo acelerará a transição dos combustíveis fósseis, de acordo com Rex Weyler, defensor ambiental que foi um dos fundadores do Greenpeace International e dirigiu a Fundação Greenpeace original. “Se as empresas de hidrocarbonetos forem obrigadas a pagar pelos custos reais de seus produtos, que incluem esses custos ambientais, isso tornará os sistemas de energia alternativa mais competitivos”, disse Weyler.

Consequentemente, Weyler considera que o movimento climático deve se concentrar no caso da Chevron – e na batalha legal de Donziger. “Uma das coisas mais eficazes que os ativistas climáticos podem fazer agora para mudar o sistema seria não deixar a Chevron sair ilesa por poluir nesses países, seja no Equador, na Nigéria ou em qualquer outro lugar”, disse Weyler. Enquanto alguns defensores dos direitos humanos e do meio ambiente tentaram chamar atenção para o caso de Donziger e o assédio da Chevron, Weyler achou que a indignação deveria ser maior.

Após ver o que aconteceu com Donziger e alguns de seus ex-aliados, que a Chevron perseguiu como “co-conspiradores não-partidários”, as pessoas podem ter medo de enfrentar a empresa. O próprio Donziger está vivendo com medo. Não há punição definida quando um juiz entra com processo criminal por desacato ao tribunal, então ele passa os dias se preocupando com o que acontecerá com ele em seguida. “É assustador”, ele me disse. “Eu não sei o que eles estão pensando.”

Mas Weyler observou que a Chevron, que ainda poderia ser forçada a pagar a sentença multibilionária de tribunais de outro país, também tem medo. “Eles têm medo do precedente. Não apenas a Chevron tem medo, mas toda a indústria de extração tem medo do precedente”, disse Weyler. “Eles não querem ser responsabilizados pela poluição de sua indústria.”

The post Ele ganhou uma ação ambiental milionária contra a Chevron. Foi perseguido e perdeu tudo appeared first on The Intercept.

The Sex Scandal That Killed Privacy in France

Until this month, Benjamin Griveaux was a rather lackluster candidate for mayor of Paris, treading water in third place. He’d been the French government spokesman under President Emmanuel Macron and his weak mayoral run seemed faintly emblematic of Macron’s dimming political fortunes. And then, suddenly, came the leaked texts and videos, in which Griveaux tells—and shows!—a woman who’s not his wife just how excited he is to see her.

The repercussions were swift. Griveaux, ashen-faced, withdrew from the race. Jaws dropped across France. Not from the shock that he had apparently cheated on his wife, with whom he has three young children. Or even from the surprise that Griveaux, who is 42, took the risk of filming himself masturbating. But rather because the exchange had been leaked, and had led to something that never happens in France: a politician stepping down because of something in his private life.

[Read: France, where #MeToo becomes #PasMoi]

It seems weirdly fitting that the story begins with the Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky, who leaked Griveaux’s messages on a self-made website called pornopolique.com. Pavlensky, 35, is best known for nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square, a 2013 action he said should be seen as “a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society.” In posting the messages, the artist, who has political-refugee status in France, decried the “hypocrisy” of Griveaux, who had depicted himself as a family man during his campaign. French media have identified the woman with whom Griveaux exchanged the messages in 2018 as Alexandra De Taddeo, a 29-year-old student who subsequently became involved with Pavlensky. (She has confirmed that she was the recipient of the messages, but denies active involvement in publishing them, according to Le Monde. Pavlensky has said that he stole the material from her computer.)

Far more than a titillating local curiosity, or even just France’s version of the Anthony Weiner scandal, #GriveauxGate has brought together not only sex, politics, and morality in the #MeToo era, but also digital surveillance, possible Russia connections, conspiracy theories, a whiff of kompromat, and a cast of characters that’s Quai d’Orsay meets Call My Agent meets Black Mirror. With each passing day, it becomes less clear whether #GriveauxGate reflects the influence of America on French political life, or whether something more sinister is afoot, at a time when privacy is eroding everywhere.

Griveaux is widely seen as a victim of a nasty sting, even by people who condemn his behavior. Politicians and citizens across the political spectrum have denounced what they see as the Americanization of French political life—an apparent intrusion of an irritating puritan morality. How dare this happen here, where private life is sacred! Except this time around, the outrage is combined with the cold shower brought about by the era of social media and Big Data surveillance, in which politicians have discovered that they’re as vulnerable as anyone else to online leaks.

In the weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, Richard Ferrand, the president of the National Assembly and a socialist, warned: “Let’s not confuse transparency and voyeurism, the prelude to a kind of inquisition. At this rate, who will take the risk of public life if it could become the ante-chamber of a permanent lynching?” The columnist Philippe Val declared that “the opacity of private life is the foundation, the primordial motivation of all democratic construction. Without it, liberty is an empty word.” The only two politicians who probably didn’t “have coitus,” Val continued, were Robespierre, “who started the Terror and sent his friends and almost all the intellectuals of his era to the guillotine; and Hitler.” (Yes, believe it or not, this has been the tenor of the debate.)

Other commentators think Griveaux could have been more careful. Anne Roumanoff, also in Le Journal du Dimanche, offered a list of suggestions: “1. You have the right to have extramarital relations. This is France, everyone understands that sometimes you need to reduce the pressure a bit. You don’t have to be irreproachable, but you should be discreet. 2. Avoid showcasing your marriage on the covers of magazines and talking about your family with a loving voice if you’re not irreproachable.”

She advised Griveaux to use a dedicated cellphone that doesn’t display his name. Then: “4. Don’t send sexts, you’re not a teenager.” Rather than writing, “Can’t wait to see you and your magnificent breasts again this evening. Look what a state you’ve got me in this morning”—which is what the leaked texts read—she suggested something like, “See you at 7 p.m. to review the documents. We need to dig deep, the problem is getting harder.”

Griveaux hasn’t verified that it’s him in the video on Pavlensky’s site, which the French government has shut down. But his lawyer, Richard Malka, is suing for illegally publishing private material. (This scandal has expanded my French vocabulary considerably, but the French term for revenge porn turns out to be … revenge porn.)

In the United States, a politician’s private life is generally seen as fair game for public scrutiny. But America has several times elected leaders whose personal lives are not, shall we say, beyond reproach. And France has also previously violated the private lives of its public figures, not least in 2014, when a tabloid published images of then-President François Hollande showing up on a moped to deliver croissants to Julie Gayet, the actress with whom he was having an affair.

[Read: France’s growing pushback against Roman Polanski]

Publishing the photos marked a big change. President François Mitterrand famously kept a second family out of the public eye. (In 2016, Anne Pingeot, the president’s former lover with whom he had a daughter, published a collection of 1,200 of their love letters, some of which are truly beautiful.) It was an open secret in France that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist politician and former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, had a penchant for swingers’ clubs. In 2012, he was arrested on charges of assaulting a hotel maid in New York, charges that were subsequently dropped. In 2015, he was acquitted on charges of soliciting prostitution. (As a young socialist, Griveaux in fact worked with Strauss-Kahn.)

If #GriveauxGate marks a watershed moment in France, it’s not entirely because of the Americanization of French morals. But I doubt that Griveaux would have stepped down before the #MeToo era. Today, things men got away with in the past no longer fly, even in France. A prime example (and far more egregious than the Griveaux case) is Gabriel Matzneff, a French writer of middling reputation who bragged and wrote about engaging in pedophilia and was protected for decades by friends in the French establishment. After a woman published a stunning memoir last month, Consent, about a relationship she had with Matzneff when she was a teenager, French police opened a rape investigation, and invited other potential victims to come forward—also a turning point in France.

But beyond the broader context in which #GriveauxGate has erupted are the facts of the case. Griveaux’s lawyer has said that he doesn’t think Pavlensky acted alone. Without naming names, the French government spokeswoman echoed the suspicion, saying Pavlensky “surely did not act alone.” Did he publish the messages at someone’s behest? The French media are thrumming with speculation. The lack of clarity has fomented an atmosphere of confusion and uncertainties, in which conspiracy theories thrive.

French police detained Pavlensky and charged him with illegally publishing the messages. Cornered by television reporters as he left a courthouse last week, he said that he stood by his actions. Whether he’ll keep his political-refugee status in France is unclear. Police detained and questioned De Taddeo, too, over the leaked exchange. She made the cover of this week’s Paris Match, France’s preeminent weekly tabloid, with the headline “The Trap.”

Pavlensky and De Taddeo were apparently introduced by Juan Branco, a French lawyer who was part of Julian Assange’s defense team and who has been a vocal supporter of the anti-Macron “yellow vest” movement. The story gets weirder. The leaked exchange on an obscure website drew attention when it was tweeted, including by Joachim Son-Forget, a French lawmaker who quit Macron’s party. (Son-Forget’s tweets were subsequently taken down.)

[Read: France, where age of consent is up for debate]

I wonder what Pavlensky’s aim is here, besides anarchic provocation. His performances usually involve self-mutilation—sewing his lips shut, cutting off part of his ear—to make a political point. In 2015, he set fire to the door of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. In Paris in 2017, after receiving refugee status, he set fire to a branch of the Bank of France to protest the power of finance, and wound up spending nearly a year in jail.

Is the leaked Griveaux exchange off-brand for Pavlensky, or a new direction for his art? In both Russia and France, Pavlensky has incorporated his police interrogations into his work. “What I’m doing is turning the tables, drawing the government into the process of making art,” he told The New York Times Magazine in an illuminating profile last year. “The power relations shift, the state enters into the work of art and becomes an object, an actor.” Making Griveaux’s private life public may be Pavlensky’s most daring performance yet. It certainly has found the largest audience. And quite possibly has ended an era in which French public figures were able to keep their private life private.

The Paradox of Rodrigo Duterte

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

MANILA—On a recent afternoon, Antonio Carpio, a retired Filipino supreme court judge, stood before a few hundred students at Manila’s prestigious De La Salle University, charts and maps displayed on screens either side of him, and denounced both China and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for undermining the national interest of the Philippines.

Carpio, seen as a potential presidential candidate in the next election, in 2022, didn’t have to remind his audience that for several years Beijing has occupied the fish- and resource-rich reefs and shoals off the Philippine coast in the South China Sea, defying a ruling three years ago by a United Nations arbitration tribunal. Carpio’s audience was also receptive to his argument that the populist president of the Philippines, now a bit more than halfway through his six-year term, has essentially declined to press his own country’s claims on what international law has affirmed to be its maritime territory. “The Chinese aggression is the gravest external threat to the Philippines since World War II,” Carpio told the students. Looking toward the next presidential election, Carpio said, “We have to ask every candidate, ‘Are you with us in protecting Filipino territorial rights?’”

The students warmly applauded. Though an elite university in the capital is not exactly Duterte’s base of popularity, China is unpopular across the Philippines. Duterte himself has been called “Duterte Duwag”—“Duterte Coward” in Tagalog—on social media because of what Carpio says is his “submission to the will of China.” The local press is full of commentary using the word vassal to describe the way they see the Philippines in its relationship to China under Duterte. Polls show that 87 percent of Filipinos favor a stronger defense of Philippine maritime territory.

[Read: A U.S. ally is turning to China to ‘build, build, build’]

That’s not even the only thing about Duterte that is not widely approved. While a majority of Filipinos support Duterte’s signature “war on drugs” in principle, they do not approve of the extrajudicial killings that have taken place (the government admits to 6,000 such killings since Duterte’s election, whereas human-rights organizations put the figure at more than 20,000). More generally, it’s not hard to find Filipinos, especially among the professional classes—journalists, lawyers, academics—and university students who see Duterte as a grave danger to their country’s democratic traditions and rule of law.

But here’s the paradox: Despite all of that, despite the awkward fact that Duterte is the only elected president on the planet being investigated for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, despite his insulting language about women, his attacks on the press, and his capo di tutti capi style of rule, despite his use of the country’s judicial machinery to prosecute political rivals, he enjoys the highest approval ratings of any Filipino leader at this stage of their term in office in recent history. In many ways, Duterte’s political success illustrates many of the reasons strongman and populist leaders the world over, including Donald Trump, are able to bypass crises or challenges that would torpedo a more typical politician.

“This is a man who admits to killing,” Marites Vitug, a prominent journalist and author, told me, a mixture of wonderment and resignation in her voice, “and yet he’s popular.”

Mahar Mangahas, the founder and head of Social Weather Stations, or SWS, a leading independent polling company in the Philippines, echoed that sentiment. “People don’t like his drug killings. They don’t like his foul mouth. They don’t follow him when he hates the United States and likes China. It’s very curious. Why are the views of him so favorable when he’s such an ugly person?”

Why indeed?

In some ways, understanding Duterte’s popularity involves a general theory of strongman appeal. Both in the Philippines’ neighborhood of Southeast Asia, a sprawling region of 620 million people, and elsewhere in the world, autocrats—elected and not—appear to be gaining momentum.

But even in the company of neo-authoritarian rulers from Brazil to Hungary to Thailand, Duterte is an extraordinary and in many ways inexplicable figure. The Philippines is, after all, the country that 34 years ago, in a movement known as “People Power,” overthrew a dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. Yet Duterte resembles Marcos in many respects. In fact, in a gesture of tremendous symbolic importance early in his presidency, he had Marcos’s remains moved from their obscure burial place and installed, with a military honor guard and a 21-gun salute, at Manila’s national cemetery. The move seemed to say that the days of People Power were in the past, and that strongman rule is the wave of the present.

[Read: The thug appeal of Rodrigo Duterte]

Duterte, moreover, is exceptionally popular even by the standards of other figures with transgressive manners and populist appeal. Trump may enjoy the unshakable loyalty of around 40 percent of the American electorate, but Duterte’s approval rating has been persistently around 80 percent. This political power was on full display in legislative elections last year when every one of the 12 candidates Duterte endorsed for the country’s 24-seat senate was elected. Unlike Trump, there was no midterm setback for Duterte.

What explains this remarkable phenomenon? For one, Duterte resorts to methods that are by now well established in the global strongman’s toolbox: He uses social media to tarnish opponents, deploying an army of internet trolls to pounce on anybody who publicly criticizes him, a move that serves to intimidate those who have not yet spoken out. When Vitug, the journalist, published a book which criticized Duterte’s abandonment of the Philippine territorial claim, not only was she attacked on social media, but the country’s main bookstore chain declined to put the book on sale, apparently out of fear of retaliation from Duterte. He has taken other classically autocratic steps, such as using the judiciary to muzzle the press and political opponents: Last year, Maria Ressa, the editor of the independent investigative news website Rappler, was indicted on charges of tax evasion; meanwhile, Leila de Lima, a sitting member of the senate who, like Ressa, chastised Duterte for extrajudicial killings, recently completed her thousandth day in jail, having been convicted of taking bribes from drug dealers, a charge that is widely viewed as trumped up.

There’s something reminiscent in this of the Marcos years, when the country’s leading opposition figure, Benigno Aquino Jr., was imprisoned for years on manufactured charges of weapons possession and subversion. A few months ago, a mysterious, hooded man who gave his name as “Bikoy” claimed in a YouTube video that he was a former drug-cartel associate in possession of documents showing drug money pouring into the accounts of the Duterte family. The unfolding of events following the video gets complicated, including the arrest of the man claiming to be Bikoy and his retraction of the sensational claim. But the main consequence was that the Duterte government charged some 30 people, including a former three-term senator, Antonio Trillanes, and Duterte’s own vice president, Leni Robredo, with “inciting sedition.” (Robredo was not an ally of Duterte’s; she’s a member of the opposition Liberal Party and was elected on that party’s ticket.) The aim of the accused persons, the charge says, was “to agitate the general population into making mass protest with the possibility of bringing down the president,” hence “inciting sedition.”

At times, Duterte’s public positions seem so outrageous and so contradictory to his country’s sense of pride that it is remarkable he manages to stay in power at all, much less hold on to his sky-high approval rating. Last summer, a few days after a Chinese trawler rammed and sank a Philippine boat operating in traditional Philippine fishing grounds, Duterte echoed China’s statements, calling it “a little maritime incident.” When this sparked calls for his impeachment, he reacted with typical scorn. “Me? Will be impeached? I will jail them all,” he said.

Duterte did shift rhetorical gears for a while, promising to defend his country’s maritime claims, and Beijing helped soothe offended feelings by apologizing for the sinking of the Philippine boat. But when Duterte went to China soon afterward, his fifth visit since becoming president, he committed himself, not to defending his country’s sovereignty but to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Beijing.

In January, in an apparent fit of pique over American human-rights criticism of his regime, Duterte announced that he was ending the Visiting Forces Agreement, which serves as the legal basis for U.S. military cooperation with the Philippines. The move seems likely to be unpopular with many Filipinos, if for no other reason than that it removes yet another obstacle to China’s aggressiveness in the South China Sea.

Duterte himself probably leans toward China for a couple of reasons. Like other regional strongmen, he appreciates that Beijing, unlike Washington (even under Trump), doesn’t criticize him for human rights violations such as the drug-war killings. China is also the emerging Asian powerhouse, so Duterte’s argument—that the Philippines has little capacity to go to war with it over disputed territories and should instead seek a friendly relationship—has a logic, and appears to persuade many in the country.

Yet a deeper reason for Duterte’s popularity is simply the force of his personality. As the sociologist and author Walden Bello, a prominent Duterte critic, put it to me, “The charismatic figure can get away with anything, even murder.” Bello was speaking of the thousands of drug-war dead, about which Duterte has been spectacularly unrepentant. “My God,” the president has been quoted as saying, “I hate drugs, and I have to kill people because I hate drugs.”

[Read: Is this the end of Duterte's drug war?]

“People are very aware of the killings, but at the same time, they feel that Duterte’s eliminated the criminals,” Bello says, speaking specifically of a poor, teeming Manila neighborhood near where he lives, a place that has seen many extrajudicial killings. “The thugs, the street-corner boys, are no longer there. Women can walk the streets safely. I don’t know if their lives are actually better than before, but the perception is that they are. They’re pro-Duterte because they feel he’s cleaned up the place.”

Even if, as Bello and others say, Duterte’s coarse, unconventional way of talking helps him connect with ordinary people, that’s also because these voters, like others around the world susceptible to a populist appeal, have been disconnected with traditional figures of respect, and this may be the ultimate key to Duterte’s success. Bello speaks of a “deep disillusionment with liberal democracy” in the Philippines, which Duterte didn’t create but certainly encourages. “It’s the feeling that the liberal elite was all corrupt do-nothings,” Sam Ramos-Jones, a Yale-educated business consultant here, told me.

It is true that for decades, power in the Philippines has largely been in the hands of a succession of wealthy elites who generation after generation have dominated Philippine politics, enjoying their memberships in the verdant Polo Club and socializing at the opulent Manila Hotel, some of them deeply tainted by financial abuses. Joseph Estrada, the president from 1998 to 2001, was removed from office by what’s called “People Power II,” prompted by claims of vast corruption. His successor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, was imprisoned on corruption charges after she left office. (She was later exonerated by the supreme court and became an ally of Duterte’s.)

Duterte, then, marks a kind of end of the People Power spirit for the simple reason that the spirit never delivered on the expectations that created it in the first place.

“People Power was experienced by Filipinos as a great triumph against dictatorship,” Jayson Lamchek, a former lawyer in the Philippines who is now a researcher at the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy in Australia, told me. “But in terms of corruption, the post–People Power governments became indistinguishable from the Marcos regime. The only difference was the rhetoric of human rights and democracy, which people increasingly perceived as a sham.

“It’s no surprise,” he continued, “in that sense, that so many Filipinos seem willing to squander the spirit of 1986, curse human rights and democracy as useless, and turn instead to a strongman to change things.”