Chris Hedges's Blog, page 110

End PG&E’s Reign of Error With a Hostile Takeover

Power companies have two jobs: Keep the lights on and don’t kill your customers. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. of Northern California flunks on both counts.

So how can California put an end to PG&E’s reign of error?

The answer: Make this so-called “public utility” into a true public system—a customer-owned power cooperative, a plan proposed by the city of San Jose. Currently, the only things “public” about PG&E are the bills the public pays and the charred homes and bodies this bankrupt beast leaves behind.

But how can the public take ownership without busting government coffers?

The way Gordon Gekko did it in “Wall Street”: through a hostile takeover bid for PG&E’s stock—now bouncing on the floor at about $4 per share.

It’s been done before, in New York.

For decades, Long Island Lighting Co., LILCO, like PG&E, left millions of its customers in the dark, endangered their safety and emptied their pockets with monstrously high electric bills. Then, in 1998, the customers seized ownership of the renegade utility—at low cost, below its book value.

In 1981, as executive director of the state legislature’s Science and Technology Commission, I was tasked with drafting a law that would allow customers to buy out this dangerous power company cheaply.

Our solution was inventive. LILCO’s stock, like PG&E’s, was in the toilet, trading at a fraction of its book value—that is, way less than the cost of its lines and equipment. If corporate raiders can take over companies cheap to reap giant profits, why couldn’t the state do a hostile takeover to keep the public safe and reduce electric bills?

My agency drafted, and the legislature passed, a law permitting the state to make a hostile tender offer for LILCO’s stock.

To keep the utility’s stock from soaring on the takeover offer, I also drafted civil racketeering (RICO) charges that were filed by the state and local government. The complaint cited years of the company extracting billions from its captive customers on false claims.

A jury awarded Long Island’s beleaguered customers $4 billion in damages. The company, now effectively bankrupted like PG&E, ultimately sold to the state’s newly created Long Island Power Authority at a cost low enough to cut power rates and rebuild the system.

The result: The new publicly owned system rapidly improved reliability and safety, boosted green energy programs, reduced electric bills and even shut down and dismantled a dangerous nuclear plant.

Likewise, California has a good cause to take legal action against PG&E on behalf of its customers. The still-blazing Kincade fire was, the company all but admits, caused by failure on a transmission line the company had promised for two years to fix by this April. It didn’t.

When California Got Ken Lay’d

In olden days, before “deregulation,” your local gas and electric company was not allowed to burn down your house, blow it up, cut off your oxygen tank and then bill you for it.

So what happened?

PG&E’s transformation from a public utility into an Academy for Accidental Arsonists began 30 years ago with Ken Lay, chief executive of Enron. Enron, a criminal enterprise parading as a power company, convinced California to lead the nation in “deregulating” its power markets.

Until then, utilities were dull things, controlled like government agencies with highly detailed budgets for operation and maintenance that, when approved by regulators, had to be spent on … maintenance and operations. If they failed to use the money as promised, regulators punished the company with a severe hit to profits already tightly capped by law.

Then, deregulation allowed utilities to pocket unspent money as an efficiency incentive. In practice, deregulation became decriminalization of skimming on safety and reliability.

I can only imagine what Robert “Bat” Batinovich would have done to the company for the deadly delay which likely resulted in the Kincade fire. Batinovich, appointed chairman of the California Public Utilities Commission by Young Governor Jerry Brown, was known as the toughest regulator in America.

Decades later, the Elderly Governor Brown filled the PUC with louche industry buddies dedicated to defending the company except when the TV cameras are on.

What did PG&E do with the maintenance fund embedded in the bills of its captive customers?  While those with lives and homes burnt are obvious victims of PG&E’s cost-shaving devil-may-care operations, all of those who pay the monthly bill deserve their day in court.

As we did in New York, the state and local governments should file legal action on behalf of every customer. And that will, justly, cut the price of a takeover.

The Vulture Swoops In

The only thing more dangerous than leaving PG&E in the hands of its current mis-managers is the proposal to give control of PG&E to the financier known as “The Vulture,” Paul Elliott Singer of Elliott Management.

Singer has bought up a hunk of PG&E‘s debt cheaply, and he’s looking to the bankruptcy court to adopt a re-organization plan that would give him a giant payday at ratepayers’ expense.

I’ve been tracking Singer for BBC Television for 12 years.

Here’s how Singer operates. In 2009, Singer and his vulture colleagues bought control of Delphi Corp., which was once General Motors’ auto parts division. Singer’s team threatened to cut off delivery of parts to GM unless the U.S. Treasury paid him billions of dollars. President Barack Obama’s auto bailout chief, Steve Rattner, called it “extortion.”

Obama had no choice but to give in because the parts cut-off would have forced GM’s liquidation, costing half a million jobs. Singer got his billion-dollar payoff, then Delphi shifted almost every union job overseas.

If Singer does a “Delphi“ on PG&E, investment will be cut to the bone to hike profits.

Of special concern to Californians is whether PG&E under Singer’s management would continue to fund its program to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Singer is the chairman of the Manhattan Institute, the far-right, climate-change-denying think tank behind the fake trope that the Green New Deal would cost $1 trillion and destroy the economy.

Democracy Is the Solution

There is an alternative for managing PG&E other than the current busload of befuddled bozos or financial vultures.

San Jose has the right idea: consumer cooperative ownership.

Electricity socialism is not so radical: There are 900 power co-ops in the U.S. serving 47 million Americans. And here in Los Angeles, my computer is powered by the city-owned Department of Water and Power, which, while not a stellar enterprise, limits blackouts and tends not to kill its customers—because the mayor must personally answer for the DWP’s failings.

Simply put: Democracy keeps the lights on.

But to keep the cost low and move quickly, local and state governments should take advantage of PG&E’s bargain-basement stock price and the discount on the trading price of its bonds. That, combined with legal action to seek compensation for financially abused ratepayers, should force this un-public utility into the public’s hands at a fair, low price.

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Before turning to journalism, Greg Palast was a forensic economist, specializing in the investigation of power industry fraud for governments worldwide. He is principal author of the United Nations guide for utility regulators based on his lectures at the Cambridge University department of applied economics. 

 

First Public Trump Impeachment Hearings Set for Next Week

WASHINGTON — Democrats announced Wednesday they will launch public impeachment hearings next week, intending to bring to life weeks of closed-door testimony and lay out a convincing narrative of presidential misconduct by Donald Trump.

First to testify will be William Taylor, the top diplomat in Ukraine, who has relayed in private his understanding that there was a blatant quid pro quo with Trump holding up military aid to a U.S. ally facing threats from its giant neighbor Russia.

That aid, at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, is alleged to have been held hostage until Ukraine agreed to investigate political foe Joe Biden and the idea, out of the mainstream of U.S. intelligence findings, that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

The testimony of Taylor a career envoy and war veteran with 50 years of service to the U.S., is what Democrats want Americans to hear first.

Taylor has told investigators about an “irregular channel” that the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, set up for Ukraine diplomacy, and how the White House was holding up the military aid, according to a transcript of his closed-door interview released Wednesday.

“That was my clear understanding, security assistance money would not come until the president committed to pursue the investigation,” Taylor said.

He was asked if he was aware that “quid pro quo” meant “this for that.”

“I am,” he replied.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and Republicans largely dismiss the impeachment inquiry, now into its second month, as a sham.

But Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee leading the probe, said that with two days of hearings next week Americans will have a chance to decide for themselves.

“The most important facts are largely not contested,” the California Democrat said. “Those open hearings will be an opportunity for the American people to evaluate the witnesses for themselves, to make their own determinations about the credibility of the witnesses, but also to learn firsthand about the facts of the president’s misconduct.”

Along with Taylor, the public will hear from former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump fired after what she and others say was a smear campaign against her, and career State Department official George Kent. Taylor and Kent will appear Wednesday, Yovanovitch on Friday.

To prepare for what’s ahead, the White House is beefing up its communications operations.

Trump ally Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, and Tony Sayegh, a former Treasury Department spokesman, are expected to join the White House team to work on “proactive impeachment messaging,” a senior administration official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal staffing.

The Trump administration has ordered officials not to participate in the House inquiry. But lawmakers have spent weeks hearing from current and former government witnesses, largely from the State Department, as one official after another has relayed his or her understanding of events.

The testimony from Taylor further connected Trump, Giuliani and the administration to a quid-pro-quo agreement that came to light after a government whistleblower’s complaint about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Even before that call, Taylor said, he and other diplomats involved in Ukraine policy started having concerns about a shadow foreign policy being run by Trump and his private attorney.

Taylor testified that the concerns reached high levels at the White House. In a July 10 meeting with Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland raised the idea of Ukrainian investigations.

That “triggered Ambassador Bolton’s antenna, political antenna, and he said ‘we don’t do politics here,'” Taylor testified, noting that Bolton ended the meeting.

Bolton, who resigned from the administration later, has been asked to appear before the House investigators for a closed-door interview this week. His lawyer said he would not come without a subpoena.

All three of those scheduled to appear in public hearings next week have already testified behind closed doors, and investigators in recent days started releasing hundreds of pages of transcripts from their interviews.

Yovanovitch, who was ousted in May at Trump’s direction, testified that she had been told to “watch my back” and that people were “looking to hurt” her. Kent and Taylor testified about their concerns about her dismissal at the same time Giuliani was taking a leading role on Ukraine policy.

The spark for the inquiry was the July phone call from Trump to the new Ukrainian president. According to a rough transcript, released by the White House, Trump asked Zelenskiy to probe Biden and his family and interference in the 2016 election.

Taylor, who testified in October, had repeatedly conveyed concerns about the “irregular channel” that Giuliani had set up at Trump’s instruction to bypass the embassy and the State Department.

“The security assistance got blocked by this second channel,” he said.

In his appearance last month, Taylor told lawmakers that it was the “unanimous opinion of every level of interagency discussion” that the military aid should be resumed without delay.

Republicans, signaling a line of attack they may pursue during the open hearings, argued that he received none of the information firsthand.

In the final stretch of questioning, Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., grilled him on whether he had primary knowledge that Trump was demanding that Ukraine investigate the Bidens. Taylor said he had not spoken directly to Trump or Giuliani. Zeldin says that information was “secondhand or thirdhand.”

Trump allies also have argued that there couldn’t have been an inappropriate arrangement because Ukraine didn’t even know the aid was being held up. But Taylor said the new government under Zelenskiy recognized it had to commit to investigations to get the aid or a promised meeting with Trump at the White House.

He said the Ukrainians worried that opening the investigations, in particular of the gas company Burisma, which had Biden’s son on its board, would have involved them in the 2020 election campaign in the U.S.

They didn’t want to do that, he said.

Taylor said he had specifically raised his concerns with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and told him he would resign if strong U.S. support for Ukraine somehow evaporated.

“This would have been throwing Ukraine under the bus,” he said. “And I told the secretary: ‘If that happens, I’ll come home. You don’t want me out there, because I’m not going to defend it, you know. I would say bad things about it.”

Taylor told investigators that the “Russians are paying attention to how much support the Americans are going to provide the Ukrainians.”

He said, “So the Russians are loving, would love, the humiliation of Zelenskiy at the hand of the Americans, and would give the Russians a freer hand, and I would quit.”

At one point, Taylor said he was hearing from colleagues in Washington that it was difficult for them to arrange a meeting with Trump to try to persuade him to release the aid.

Why? It was around the time the president was interested in buying Greenland from Denmark, he said, and that “took up a lot of energy” at the National Security Council.

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Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Ben Fox, Laurie Kellman, Michael Balsamo, Matthew Lee and Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

The First Step to Averting Climate Catastrophe

Here we are, a full three decades after NASA scientist James Hansen raised the specter of a looming climate crisis with Congress, looking at the first generation of severely impacted youth and telling them they’re right: We have completely squandered their future. For too long, our dominant culture has practiced unsustainable growth and consumption, ushering in the end of a habitable planet and with it civilization as we know it. Those most impacted are the communities who have contributed the least to climate change, a direct extension of the settler colonization project that has unfolded across the globe over hundreds of years.

Jane Fonda and her Fire Drill Fridays are linking social movements across issues, eyeing the connections between the myriad problems we see causing climate chaos, many of them rooted in capitalist consumer culture. From the need to tease apart incarceration from profit to outrage at our treatment of asylum-seekers at our southern border, we’ve witnessed rapid wins in the movement to divest public dollars from the private prison industry after years of hard work behind the scenes. The same asylum-seekers who are fleeing nations ravaged by wars and conflicts—many driven directly by U.S. policy—and the impacts of climate crisis are being held in appalling conditions in concentration camps and prisons, many of them run by the private prison industry. We are encouraged by intersectional organizing, and thrilled that Jane is connecting the dots that link militarism, weapons corporations, migration, and the climate crisis. We are clear on the impact: the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, but the nationwide call for a Green New Deal has not yet given attention to our military spending as either a massive driver of the climate crisis that cannot be ignored, nor as a source of much-needed funding for a project as massive as the Green New Deal.

Movements to divest from the military and movements to divest from fossil fuels often face the same bad actors. Recent actions targeting the massive asset manager BlackRock are drawing attention to their investments in companies behind Amazon deforestation. Investing in these companies undermines our ability to maintain a livable planet, namely by destroying the forests that are the lungs of the earth in the Amazon basin. Here at CODEPINK, we have also given considerable attention to BlackRock because they are the world’s top investor in weapons manufacturers, but even this more explicitly anti-war action connects to the climate crisis. The same weapons that are used in wars and conflicts all over the world are a crucial component of the war machine that makes up a significant portion of the Pentagon’s fossil fuel use—the U.S. military has released 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases since the start of the global war on terror in 2001. Moreover, those same weapons are a major factor in conflicts that lead to migration by asylum-seekers—weapons that are in turn produced by corporations that are propped up by our public dollars, to the detriment of our communities. When our public institutions invest public money in weapons corporations like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman, they are underpinning the war machine that draws public dollars away from projects benefiting our communities and puts them into an already bloated defense budget. There is a clear thread running from the Pentagon budget to weapons corporations to our impoverished communities to migrants fleeing wars and drought to greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. Imagine a snake consuming its own body: that is the war machine’s connection to climate breakdown. We must begin rapidly removing our public dollars from the war machine if we are to save humanity and the planet—which, like the climate crisis and the war machine, cannot be separated.

The time has arrived to build the next big divestment movement made up of people coming together across the planet to divest from the war machine—by withdrawing our public dollars from weapons corporations and putting them into local needs, including local green new deals, housing, health care, and education. The path to divestment has been laid by successful movements before ours; it is paved with the South African Apartheid regime, with coal and gas extraction companies, with gun manufacturers and tobacco companies, and with the private prison industry. The opportunities for divestment from the war machine abound. Cities, public pension funds, and university endowments invest public dollars in private corporations that often include weapons corporations, and elected public servants often accept campaign contributions from weapons-makers. Together we can demand that they divest because it is morally unacceptable to build our communities on top of global conflicts. At the same time, we must demand that we instead invest our public resources in projects that positively impact our communities, starting first with a rapid response to the climate crisis that is exacerbated by endless wars.

Join Jane Fonda Thursday night, November 7, for her teach-in on the connections between war and climate chaos. On Friday, I will bring this message to the Fire Drill Friday rally on the east lawn of the U.S. Capitol to call on all of us to engage to Divest from War. We will then march to the White House to call out the current resident who just took steps to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Join in person or on the Fire Drill Friday livestream.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Jodie Evans is an activist and co-founder of CODEPINK.

Who Owns Silicon Valley?

Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States. While it’s known that a handful of tech companies are huge employers, what’s less obvious is that these firms are also some of the Valley’s biggest landowners. We spent nearly a year looking at half a million property records to figure out – Who Owns Silicon Valley? This series was produced by  KQED ,  The Mercury News ,  NBC Bay Area ,  Renaissance Journalism  and  Telemundo 48 Área de la Bahía . It is part of Reveal’s Local Labs initiative, which supports lasting, sustainable investigative collaborations across the country.

IN A REGION where real estate equals influence, prestige and prosperity, just 10 power brokers — a mix of technology behemoths, commercial and residential developers and one private university — own about $59.2 billion in taxable property, making them the largest landowners in Silicon Valley.

Their concentrated wealth provides a window into how tech and real estate companies — and the university, Stanford — have shaped the valley into an economic powerhouse but also helped create the housing crisis now threatening Silicon Valley’s money-making engine, straining its middle class and displacing people who have lived here their whole lives.

These findings come from an analysis by a collaboration of local and national media, including this news organization, of more than half a million property records from the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office during a year-long reporting project. Much of the property is owned by a web of corporations and trusts, requiring deeper reporting into thousands of records to reveal the true ownership.

As both large players and smaller buyers bid up the price of land and consolidated their holdings over the last decade, who can afford to buy — and who can’t — has become perhaps the region’s most critical dynamic. The 10 largest owners alone control more than 11 percent of all the taxable property in the county.

“The increase in land values have almost single-handedly caused the increase in property values and then everything that goes with that in terms of rent (and) cost of housing,” said Larry Stone, Santa Clara County’s assessor. It’s also impacted commercial development, pushing out land-hungry manufacturing even as businesses propelled by the power of their ideas establish bigger and grander offices.

The county’s largest property owner is Stanford University, birthplace of some of the valley’s best-known tech companies. The university owns roughly $19.7 billion worth of taxable property, according to the analysis of records for fiscal year 2018.

Four tech companies join Stanford in the top 10: Apple owns about $9.0 billion in assessed property and Google has $7.5 billion, primarily in their office campuses in Cupertino and Mountain View, respectively. Google also has recently purchased large swaths of downtown San Jose for a campus expected to include offices, housing and retail. Cisco Systems owns $3.4 billion while Intel’s total is $2.5 billion.

Those companies trace the evolution of tech in the valley, from industry veteran Intel, the most important of the chip manufacturers that put the silicon in Silicon Valley; to Cisco and Apple, middle-aged firms that build the computers, smart devices and networking infrastructure we rely on every day; to Google, just two decades old and one of the leading companies born of the internet.

The other five top owners are real estate development companies, all but one with decades-old ties to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. They are San Francisco-based Jay Paul Company and Mountain View-based Sobrato, both of which specialize in commercial real estate; and Prometheus Real Estate Group and Essex Property Trust, both founded in San Mateo, each owning more than a billion dollars worth of apartment buildings, although Prometheus also owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of office and research properties.

The only outlier is The Irvine Company, a relative newcomer to this region best known for master-planning the city of Irvine in Orange County. Spotting opportunity in the valley’s boom, the privately-owned company has amassed $5.9 billion in apartments, offices, research and even some manufacturing buildings in Santa Clara County, much of it in the past six years.

Those developers tell another part of the valley’s history, as the focus in commercial development passed from speculative tilt-ups to build-to-suit, and residential construction went from tract homes to apartments and condominiums, sometimes in high-rise towers. John A. Sobrato spent the first 13 years of his career, starting in 1960, on single-family homes before becoming one of the largest commercial developers in the region. His company has since diversified into some multifamily housing. Besides the apartment builder Essex, George Marcus has created companies including SummerHill Homes, a single-family developer that recently has expanded into apartments.

Officials for Jay Paul, Prometheus, Essex and The Irvine Company either declined or did not respond to requests for interviews for this story.

The figures used in these rankings are based on the assessed valuation of county properties in fiscal year 2018 and include the value of land, buildings and other taxable property such as heavy machinery or tech equipment. But those numbers don’t fully reflect what holdings are worth: California’s Proposition 13 limits the increase in assessed values of land and buildings to no more than 2 percent each year unless property is sold. For players such as Stanford and Intel, which have owned certain properties for decades, their lands have assessments well below their current market value.

Real estate ownership and development is not without significant risk. But for those companies that have survived in Silicon Valley since the 1960s and 1970s — Sobrato, Prometheus, Essex and Jay Paul were all founded between 1965 and 1979 — the meteoric rise in property prices has been wildly profitable.

“I don’t think developers, any developer, realized what was happening here and how beneficial and financially successful they were becoming because of this,” Stone said.

When Stone was first elected assessor in 1995, all the taxable land in the county had a total assessed value of $115 billion. In 2019, it was $516 billion — a 350 percent increase in 24 years.

“That tells you the story of Silicon Valley,” he said. “At least from a real estate standpoint.”

The Sobrato family, whose organization often is ranked as one of the most philanthropic in the Bay Area, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $6.7 billion. Jay Paul has a net worth estimated at $3.5 billion.

Prometheus founder Sanford Diller, who died in 2018, and Marcus, whose companies include Essex and Marcus & Millichap, both had estimated net worths of at least $1.5 billion.

Those developers have mined their fortunes from the industry’s explosive growth and hiring boom. Sobrato helped build Apple’s old Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino, and Jay Paul’s corporate tenants include Google and Microsoft.

Residential developers, meanwhile, erected the homes and apartments to house those highly-paid programmers and engineers. But their business is now challenged. Today high-end apartments, renting out at $3,000 or more a month, are the only ones profitable enough for developers to build here without government assistance, according to Michael Lane, deputy director of the housing advocacy nonprofit SV@Home.

“Particularly in the Silicon Valley but this is true in the Bay Area and beyond, the only projects that really pencil are high end projects that can really get those higher rents,” Lane said. “But they need rents to increase on an ongoing basis over time. That’s just the business model to be able to pay back the loans and the expenses.”

That model is driven in large part by land values — the average listing price per square foot in Santa Clara was $685 in September, nearly double what it was in September 2010, according to Zillow.

And there’s no looking back, said Sobrato, founder of The Sobrato Organization. Land is too scarce, and demand is too high.

“It’s always going to be a very expensive place to live,” Sobrato said. “We’re not going to be able to reduce the price of housing down to where it’s going to be affordable for the majority of middle income people.”

Instead, the skyrocketing cost of housing is driving an exodus from the region — with some ex-pats choosing two-hour commutes from Tracy or Vallejo for better rent or the chance to own and others giving up and abandoning California for Texas or Idaho. The neighborhoods they leave end up generally wealthier — and with fewer African American and Latino residents. Some that remain are increasingly moving into vans and RVs, lining neighborhood streets and leading some cities to ban them; the estimated 9,706 residents in the county without a home is the most in over a decade.

There was, though, a time when property in the valley was cheap and plentiful, spurring an East Coast company to come here to build an expansive manufacturing plant. What happened on its South San Jose campus over the following six decades is a tale of Silicon Valley in miniature, as rising prices and shifting owners drove sweeping changes in land use, in ways that have been repeated across the region.

Khrushchev and Palo Alto homes

The year was 1955, when New York-based technology powerhouse IBM purchased 425 acres of mostly orchard land to build a new type of research and manufacturing campus off Cottle Road.

The company had been drawn to the region by the talented young graduates coming out of Stanford and other Bay Area universities, who were reluctant to leave the picturesque setting and near-perfect weather of the so-called Valley of the Heart’s Delight, according to Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum.

“IBM felt it was losing out on the technical talent of West Coast engineers,” Spicer said. “That became the genesis of IBM’s entire presence on the West Coast.”

Just a few years earlier, the company had invented the world’s first hard-disk drive, revolutionizing computing as it obsoleted punch-card programming. Taking advantage of the vast orchard land, IBM built a manufacturing and research plant for the new drives on Cottle Road, featuring open space, modernist art and a punch-card inspired facade.

At its peak, the campus was home to more than 13,000 workers (and almost certainly would have made IBM one of the top ten landowners in Santa Clara County, had a list been compiled then). It was even one of the stops in Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the U.S. The communist leader was unimpressed with the hard drives but raved about the cafeteria, according to Fast Company, later encouraging factories in the USSR to adopt a similar model.

To house those workers, along with the growing workforces of Hewlett-Packard, the recently founded Fairchild Semiconductor, and defense giants like Lockheed and United Technologies Corp., developers were building a valley to match the American dream: affordable single-family homes outside of urban centers and suburban industrial parks where middle-class workers would drive easily to their jobs.

“For the first 13 years of my career, I was a real estate, single-family home broker in Palo Alto, (with a) company called Midtown Realty that I started in 1960,” Sobrato said. “We used to sell homes for $20,000, 10 percent down. It was easy for people to buy a home, very easy. And nobody had to commute two hours to, you know, Tracy.”

Sobrato noted that Palo Alto didn’t get its first condominium until 1963 — his company had the listing for it.

As time passed, the valley minted more and more cutting-edge companies — Intel came along in 1968, and the moniker Silicon Valley was coined, as best can be determined, around 1971.

The increasing power of silicon chips and the growing capacity of hard drives led to personal computing, then networking, and that too boomed right here: Apple started up in 1976, and Cisco in 1984. The tech industry paid its engineers extraordinarily well but — although it wouldn’t be obvious for years — the region had headed down an unsustainable path.

Consider: In 1960, a house in Santa Clara County cost about $145,000 in 2018 dollars, roughly 2.3 times the median annual income for a household in the region. By 2000, that had grown to $651,000 and six times the median household income. In 2018, a home in the valley cost an average of $1.1 million, 8.8 times the median household income that year.

If Sobrato or SummerHill homes had perfect foresight, would they have realized single-family houses could never accommodate the almost 1.2 million jobs that would eventually be based in Santa Clara County? And if they had, could they have built — and convinced those tech workers to buy — something different?

“I don’t think developers have as much vision as to what’s going to occur in the future,” Stone, who spent years himself in development before becoming assessor, said. “They’ll build whatever’s popular to build. They’ll build whatever sells.”

Building up the valley

Eventually, rising land costs began to force the decline of manufacturing in the valley, as defense and technology companies sought cheaper locales for the lower-paid workforce that sustains that sector.

Apple shuttered a computer factory in Fremont in 1992, less than a decade after it opened, and a model factory run by Flextronics for Cisco closed in 2003, part of the manufacturer’s 3,000 layoffs that year, according to the book “From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen,” which looked at how Silicon Valley moved many manufacturing facilities to China in the 2000s.

And in 2002, IBM bailed on local manufacturing altogether, selling its hard-drive division to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, or HGST, a subsidiary of the Japan-based Hitachi, and with it, the now 332-acre Cottle Road campus. (The company earlier had divested portions of the campus to developers who built a Lowe’s with a punch-card-like shell that mimicked IBM’s old corporate building.)

But IBM, like many of the valley’s technology stalwarts, didn’t disappear from the region. The company’s hilltop Almaden campus has an assessed value of $205.8 million — its market value in 2019 is far higher — and has 73.6 million square feet of usable space. That campus is used for one of the few things it’s still profitable to manufacture in the valley: ideas, embodied in human form as R&D and in digital form as software. The IBM research center is working on artificial intelligence and quantum computing, among other areas.

“Now, that manufacturing simply doesn’t exist here, and land values, again, caused that to go somewhere else,” Stone said. But “the brain trust still is here and the high tech engineering still is here because this is where the people are.”

And the land is worth far more as something else. Stone pointed at a research and development facility AMD opened in 1990 in Sunnyvale, the city he had served as mayor. A few years ago The Irvine Company purchased AMD’s campus space, which the chip manufacturer had leased for 47 years. In 2017, the developer announced plans to build 1,076 housing units on the 34-acre site.

For its part, soon after it acquired the IBM property, HGST began working on plans to sell off some of its new holdings. In 2005, San Jose approved a new master plan that would allow for 2,930 homes and 460,000 square feet of retail and commercial.

Developers, including Miami-based Lennar, Cupertino-based Hunter Properties and San Francisco-based Pacific Coast Capital Partners, began building townhomes, apartment buildings and retail space on the old IBM land, including a Target and a Safeway.

One of the developers was ROEM, which in 2018 owned about $680 million worth of land, buildings and taxable property in Santa Clara County, making it the valley’s largest developer primarily focused on affordable housing, according to the media collaborative analysis. In 2015 and 2016 the company developed three apartment buildings on the campus. Lexington Luxury Apartments, with 387 market-rate units, has a gym, saltwater pool and outdoor BBQ space. The company sold that building, where rent for a studio starts at $2,255 a month.

The two other apartments, Oak Grove Apartments and Charlotte Park Apartments, have a combined 334 units rented to families earning 60 percent or less of the area’s median income. That housing is helping to fill a gap that threatens the region’s economy, according to Stephen Emami, vice president at ROEM.

“Not everyone is working at a tech company. We have a lot of people that just are in part of the workforce, even firemen, police officers, teachers, people that work here, they can’t” afford the rents, Emami said.

Median rent in the county has increased from $797 in 1960 in 2018 dollars to $2,305 last year, according to census data. Even well-paid workers are having trouble finding affordable housing, spurring Google to launch a $1 billion plan to build housing in the Bay Area, including some 15,000 units on land it already owns. ROEM has struggled with its own workers being unable to afford housing.

“As a business owner or a company, we can’t afford to have all of our employees coming in two hours away,” Emami said. “It just won’t last.”

ROEM’s Oak Grove units were a lifeline for Dana Mancha and her family, which includes her husband, three kids, two dogs and a baby on the way. She estimates that she signed up for 81 waiting lists for affordable housing units before finally scoring a home. For about three years they lived in a studio apartment in San Jose, cooking in a crock pot because there was no kitchen.

Mancha is studying full-time to be a dental assistant, and her husband is an auto technician. She said the income range for affordable housing is much higher than people expect — up to almost $94,860 in annual household income for a family of five. Rent at an affordable apartment like hers is capped at $1,976.

“When you hear low income, a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, $50,000 and under,’ ” she said. “But that’s not the case at all.”

Mancha’s second child was born while they were still living in the studio and was a toddler when they moved into their new two-bedroom apartment.

“When we walked in the door, we recorded the whole thing, and she was so shocked,” Mancha said. “She didn’t know where to go because it was so big. She grew up in, like, literally a box, and then to this it was like, ‘wow.’ “

Where the valley goes next

The future is never foreseeable, but Santa Clara County property records offer their own set of clues.

The companies that own the biggest chunks of valley land — and particularly those that can afford to expand, such as Google and Apple — are those that make profits at a level beyond most of American industry. Only those companies can afford what a developer such as Sobrato must charge to support his own real estate costs.

“Because of the productivity level from those average employees in Silicon Valley, you know, they earn about $500,000, $600,000 a year for the average company,” Sobrato said. “So a corporation can afford to pay these extremely, extremely high rents.”

Development, too, is a high-end game, mostly restricted to players such as Irvine and Jay Paul and Sobrato, and only government subsidies allow an affordable housing builder like ROEM to do business.

Lately, the costs are squeezing even the mega-owners. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (whose company’s headquarters is just north of Santa Clara County in Menlo Park) said in a recent employee meeting, streamed online, that the social media giant plans to expand mostly outside of the valley from now on because the local infrastructure — housing and transportation — can’t support its growth here.

Big Players By Category

Here are the top ten landowners, ranked by the total assessed value of their holdings, in single-family residential, multi-family residential, and commercial property.

Source: Analysis of Santa Clara County Assessor’s data for FY 2018

In the residential development sector, Sobrato notes that he and his peers are mostly sidelined, as a recent slowdown in rent growth — though welcomed by residents who struggle to afford the current level — is taking the anticipated profit out of construction.

“This year we’re not seeing the big increases we did in the past,” he said. “So there are many, many projects that could start that are stalled on the apartment side.”

Longer term, he pointed at everything from increased construction costs — building offices used to cost $8 a square foot in 1960 compared to $400 today, he said — to the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, as barriers to building that could ease the housing shortage. Another culprit: cities that resist new housing, affordable or otherwise.

Those developments that are profitable enough to build, on the high end of the market, are less likely to help alleviate the housing crisis for middle and lower income families, according to Corianne Scally, a principal research associate with the national think tank Urban Institute.

“I definitely think it’s helpful to build,” she said. “But I don’t think that it’s helpful to only build at one end of the market.”

When ROEM gets something built, it’s usually filled almost immediately. A recently-opened affordable housing complex with 116 apartments the company built in Mountain View opened on a Friday and was fully leased by Monday.

Moving forward almost certainly requires entirely new approaches. Sobrato suggested building housing for teachers and municipal workers on existing government-owned land as a way to address at least one part of the affordability crisis.

“These schools have a lot of green space, soccer fields, football fields, you name it, and some of these areas could be repurposed into dense housing,” he said. “But if the school district decides to do that, the neighbors usually come out in force objecting.”

Another way, in the minds of some, is for big landowners such as Stanford and Google to take on new responsibility for housing their own employees. Stanford is encountering those demands from Santa Clara County officials as it seeks permission to expand academic space; even Google’s $1 billion plan is not enough for housing advocates and labor leaders in San Jose, who are insisting that the search giant construct more affordable housing as the price for its downtown aspirations.

Lane, with SV@Home, suggests an approach that doesn’t rely on multi-billion dollar developers. For example, a few properties in a street of mostly single-family homes might become duplexes or triplexes, and homeowners could be encouraged to add backyard housing units that can maximize existing space.

“We have to revamp all of the approaches now,” Lane said. “We need to rethink how we do development.”

Whatever the future of development in Silicon Valley looks like, Mancha and her family are happy with their present — they received an offer from another affordable housing complex recently for a bigger place, but she doesn’t think they’ll accept.

“We really don’t want to move from here,” she said. “The community’s great. We have access to all the stores.”

From her window, she can see what remains of the old IBM complex — the dilapidated and boarded up cafeteria building. Trees have started growing out of the building’s roof, and two kittens — one golden and the other black — peek out of a hole in the back entrance. Parts of a modernist statue that once was a focal point of the corporate campus sit in a parking lot across the street, and neighborhood kids sometimes sneak into the old building.

It’s a vision of the valley’s past that — if looked at in a particular way — might offer a cautionary tale of things to come.

Judge Rejects Trump Moral-Objection Rule for Health Care

NEW YORK — A federal judge on Wednesday struck down a new rule, not yet in effect, that allowed health care providers to refuse participation in abortions and other services on moral or religious grounds.

U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer in New York said he was tossing out the rule in its entirety.

The decision came after 19 states, the District of Columbia, three local governments, health organizations and others sued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The rule let clinicians object to providing abortions and other services that conflict with their moral and religious beliefs.

Engelmayer said his ruling came in three consolidated lawsuits.

Health and Human Services and the Justice Department are reviewing the ruling but “will not comment on the pending litigation at this time,” said Caitlin Oakley, a Health and Human Services spokeswoman.

Plaintiffs had argued that the rule was unconstitutional because it would be discriminatory and stall access to health care for populations nationwide.

“The court heard clear and compelling arguments about the harm communities face when our health care system is distorted to the point in which a patient’s health care needs are not paramount,” said Clare Coleman, president of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, one of the plaintiffs.

New York Attorney General Letitia James said the state sued in part because the rule “was an unlawful attempt to allow health care providers to openly discriminate and refuse to provide necessary health care to patients based on providers’ ‘religious beliefs or moral objections.'”

The rule emerged after President Donald Trump in May 2017 signed an executive order instructing the attorney general to issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in federal law.

In May, the Department of Health and Human Services published a rule applying more than 30 “Conscience Provisions” that must be complied with for an entity to receive federal funding.

Lawsuits challenging the rule argued that the department exceeded its authority in establishing the rule, violated the Constitution and acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner in creating it.

Engelmayer, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, wrote that existing laws already define the duties of employers with respect to religious objections.

The 2019 rule, which had been set to take effect late this month, would effectively supersede existing law in the health care field, he said.

The judge rejected arguments that the rule was “mere housekeeping.” Rather, he said, it relocates “the who, what, when, where, and how — of conscience protection under federal law.”

The Department of Health and Human Services lacked authority to create major portions of its rule, including to terminate an entity’s federal health funding if it violates one of the provisions.

At the time the rule was issued, Engelmayer noted, the president said it conferred “new protections.”

The rule, for the first time, put limits on an employer’s ability to inquire about conscience objections, the judge said.

“These limits have clear potential to inhibit the employer’s ability to organize workplace arrangements to avoid inefficiencies and dislocations,” he said.

___

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in Washington and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.

Kansas City Votes to Remove King’s Name From Historic Street

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved removing Dr. Martin Luther King’s name from one of the city’s most historic boulevards, less than a year after the City Council decided to rename The Paseo for the civil rights icon.

Unofficial results showed the proposal to remove King’s name received nearly 70% of the vote, with just over 30% voting to retain King’s name.

The debate over the name of the 10-mile (16.1 kilometer) boulevard on the city’s mostly black east side began shortly after the council’s decision in January to rename The Paseo for King. Civil rights leaders who pushed for the change celebrated when the street signs went up, believing they had finally won a decades-long battle to honor King, which appeared to end Kansas City’s reputation as one of the largest U.S. cities in the country without a street named for him.

But a group of residents intent on keeping The Paseo name began collecting petitions to put the name change on the ballot and achieved that goal in April.

The campaign has been divisive, with supporters of King’s name accusing opponents of being racist, while supporters of The Paseo name say city leaders pushed the name change through without following proper procedures and ignored The Paseo’s historic value.

Emotions reached a peak Sunday, when members of the “Save the Paseo” group staged a silent protest at a get-out-the-vote rally at a black church for people wanting to keep the King name. They walked into the Paseo Baptist Church and stood along its two aisles. The protesters stood silently and did not react to several speakers that accused them of being disrespectful in a church but they also refused requests from preachers to sit down.

The Save the Paseo group collected 2,857 signatures in April — far more than the 1,700 needed — to have the name change put to a public vote.

Many supporters of the Martin Luther King name suggested the opponents are racist, saying Save the Paseo is a mostly white group and that many of its members don’t live on the street, which runs north to south through a largely black area of the city. They said removing the name would send a negative image of Kansas City to the rest of the world, and could hurt business and tourism.

Supporters of the Paseo name rejected the allegations of racism, noting that many black residents backed their efforts and saying they have respect for King and want the city to find a way to honor him. They opposed the name change because they say the City Council did not follow city charter procedures when making the change and didn’t notify most residents on the street about the proposal. Former council member Alissa Canady, who is black, was among those who said the process disenfranchised the mostly black residents of the boulevard.

Supporters of the Paseo name said it is a historic name for the city’s first boulevard, which was completed in 1899. The north end of the boulevard is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The City Council voted in January to rename the boulevard for King, responding to a yearslong effort from the city’s black leaders and pressure from the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization that King helped start.

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a minister and former Kansas City mayor who has pushed the city to rename a street for King for years, was at Sunday’s rally. He said the protesters were welcome, but he asked them to consider the damage that would be done if Kansas City removed King’s name.

“I am standing here simply begging you to sit down. This is not appropriate in a church of Jesus Christ,” Cleaver told the group.

Tim Smith, who organized the protest, said it was designed to force the black Christian leaders who had mischaracterized the Save the Paseo group as racist to “say it to our faces.”

“If tonight, someone wants to characterize what we did as hostile, violent, or uncivil, it’s a mischaracterization of what happened,” Smith said. “We didn’t say anything, we didn’t do anything, we just stood.”

The Rev. Vernon Howard, president of the Kansas City chapter of the SCLU, told The Associated Press that the King street sign is a powerful symbol for everyone but particularly for black children.

“I think that only if you are a black child growing up in the inner city lacking the kind of resources, lacking the kinds of images and models for mentoring, modeling, vocation and career, can you actually understand what that name on that sign can mean to a child in this community,” Howard said.

If the sign were taken down, “the reverse will be true,” he said.

“What people will wonder in their minds and hearts is why and how something so good, uplifting and edifying, how can something like that be taken away?” he said.

But Diane Euston, a leader of the Save the Paseo group, said that The Paseo “doesn’t just mean something to one community in Kansas City.”

“It means something to everyone in Kansas City,” she said. “It holds kind of a special place in so many people’s hearts and memories. It’s not just historical on paper, it’s historical in people’s memory. It’s very important to Kansas City.”

Robert Reich: The Founding Fathers Would Have Impeached Trump

Trump has asked a foreign power to dig up dirt on a major political rival. This is an impeachable offense.

Come back in time with me. In late May 1787, when 55 delegates gathered in Philadelphia to begin debate over a new Constitution, everyone knew the first person to be president would be the man who presided over that gathering: George Washington. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “The first man put at the helm will be a good one,” but “nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.”

Initially, some of the delegates didn’t want to include impeachment in the Constitution, arguing that if a president was bad he’d be voted out at the next election. But what if the president was so bad that the country couldn’t wait until the next election? Which is why Franklin half-joked that anyone who wished to be president should support an impeachment clause because the alternative was assassination.

So they agreed that Congress should have the power to impeach a president—but on what grounds? The initial impeachment clause borrowed from established concepts in English law and state constitutions, allowing impeachment for “maladministration”—basically incompetence, akin to a vote of no confidence.

That would be the end of democracy as we know it. James Madison and others argued this was too vague a standard. They changed it to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

But what did this mean?

One of the biggest fears of the founding fathers was that the new nation might fall under the sway of foreign powers. That’s what had happened in Europe over the years, where one nation or another had fallen prey to bribes, treaties and ill-advised royal marriages from other nations.

So those who gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution included a number of provisions to guard against foreign intrusion in American democracy. One was the emoluments clause, barring international payments or gifts to a president or other federal elected official. The framers of the Constitution worried that without this provision, a president might be bribed by a foreign power to betray America.

The delegates to the convention were also concerned that a foreign power might influence the outcome of an election.

They wanted to protect the new United States from what Alexander Hamilton called the “desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.“ Or as Madison put it, protect the new country from a president who’d “betray his trust to foreign powers.” Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who initially had opposed including an impeachment clause, agreed to include it in order to avoid “the danger of seeing the first Magistrate in foreign pay.”

During the Virginia ratifying convention, Edmund Randolph explicitly connected impeachment to foreign money, saying that a president “may be impeached” if discovered “receiving emoluments [help] from foreign powers.” George Washington, in his farewell address, warned of “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.”

You don’t have to be a so-called “originalist,” interpreting the Constitution according to what the founders were trying to do at the time, in order to see how dangerous it is to allow a president to seek help in an election from a foreign power.

If a president can invite a foreign power to influence the outcome of an election, there’s no limit to how far foreign powers might go to curry favor with a president by helping to take down his rivals. That would be the end of democracy as we know it.

Now, fast forward 232 years from that Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to Donald Trump.

It’s not just the official summary of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which after telling Zelensky how good America has been to Ukraine, Trump asks for “a favor, though” and then explicitly asks Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, one of Trump’s most likely opponents in the 2020 election.

Trump’s entire presidency has been shadowed by questions of foreign interference favoring him. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation documented extensive contacts between Trump’s associates and Russian figures—concluding that the Kremlin sought specifically to help Trump get elected, and that Trump’s campaign welcomed Russia’s help.

Trump at one point in the 2016 election campaign even publicly called on Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, and within hours Russian agents sought to do just that by trying to break into her computer servers.

More recently, he openly called on China’s help, saying before cameras, “China should start an investigation into the Bidens.”

This is an impeachable offense, according to the framers of the Constitution. Trump did it.

Case closed.

Chile and Bolivia Reports Expose Western Media’s Rank Hypocrisy

Chile’s anti-neoliberal rebellion is entering its third week, and the brutal crackdown continues. Hard-right President Sebastian Piñera and his generals have effectively decreed the country’s oligarch-dominated democracy out of existence by sending soldiers into the streets to kill, maim and torture their own people.

And, for the most part, the Western corporate media blackout persists unabated.

October 25’s historic 1.2 million–person march in Santiago—the largest since the end of the dictatorship—has forced some outlets to begin to acknowledge state violence. But corporate journalists continue to largely overlook the Piñera government’s mounting atrocities.

As I examined recently for FAIR (10/23/19), this behavior contrasts remarkably with the corporate media’s unanimous backing of regime change in Venezuela, endorsing insurrectionary protests and vilifying Nicolas Maduro as a “dictator” (FAIR.org, 4/11/19).

This media bias in favor of Piñera’s hardline neoliberal administration must also be juxtaposed with the unfolding coverage of anti-government protests in Bolivia. In yet another case of self-serving hypocrisy, US corporate media have moved to revoke left-wing President Evo Morales’ democratic credentials after his recent re-election.

Lies of Omission 

By October 21, the news had broken in the Chilean press that Ecuadorian national Romario Veloz, 26, had been shot dead by state security forces while taking part in a protest in northern Chile the previous evening.

Over half a dozen people had already been killed since the protests began on October 16, and at least 1,420 detained at the time, according to Chile’s National Human Rights Institute (known in Spanish as INDH). Graphic videos of abhorrent state repression were already circulating widely on social media.

One might expect such glaring atrocities to spark attention from supposedly reputable international news outlets like the New York Times. It hasn’t.

What you don’t need to know about the Chilean unrest, according to the New York Times (10/21/19), is how Chile’s government has violated human rights to suppress it.

A Times article published on October 21, headlined “What You Need to Know About the Unrest in Chile,” made no mention whatsoever of the mounting allegations of egregious human rights violations.

The article’s author, Times Southern Cone chief Ernesto Londoño, was quite busy that evening tweeting about anti-government protests—not in Chile, but in a country he does not technically cover, Bolivia, whose protests had yet to cause any reported deaths.

Bolivia’s US-backed opposition had just taken to the streets, crying fraud after the October 20 presidential elections that saw Morales win by the necessary ten-point margin to avoid a run-off. The controversy centers on a 24-hour delay in the quick count reporting of results by Bolivia’s electoral tribunal, but according to CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot (10/22/19), preliminary analysis of publicly available data from over 34,000 voting tables “shows no evidence of irregularity.”

Londoño tweeted a graphic video of a bloodied university president “reportedly struck by tear gas” during a protest—something he has yet to do in the case of Chile, despite the abundance of appalling footage.

In an article on the results (New York Times, 10/21/19), the reporter repeats the “damning” allegations of possible fraud by the OAS observer mission, which, he said, “raised the prospect that a victory by Mr. Morales would be regarded by the international community as illegitimate.”

Londoño failed to note that the OAS has presented no hard evidence—statistical or otherwise—to justify its “deep concern” over the supposedly “inexplicable” reversal in the preliminary results that gave Morales the needed edge. Nor did he make mention of the OAS’s ignominious track record of politicized electoral interference, or of the fact that the regional body is currently headed by a conspiracy theorist who has claimed in CIA fashion that Venezuela and Cuba are fomenting mass anti-neoliberal protests in Ecuador, Chile and Colombia. Notwithstanding this blatant bias, Morales has authorized the OAS to carry out an audit of the election results, which the opposition has revealingly opted to boycott.

The Times reporter crucially omits the fact that Morales has long enjoyed overwhelming support in the countryside, where vote tallies are generally delayed, with rural citizens frequently traveling significant distances to cast their ballots.  In fact, of the 106,925 new votes counted in Cochabamba by October 22, Morales won by 52.2 percent to his rival’s 35.4 percent.

Lacking a smoking gun, Londoño instead turns to public perceptions to substantiate the fraud allegations. “The accusations of fraud created a widespread sense that the president or his allies had worked behind the scenes to rig the vote,” he notes.

It would appear that the New York Times is only concerned about popular opinion when it happens to coincide with Western establishment wisdom. Londoño cited no such “widespread sense” in Chilean society that President Piñera is a Pinochet-style butcher whom a majority thinks should resign and call early elections.

This kind of shoddy reporting is anything but accidental, given that Evo Morales, unlike Sebastian Piñera, is no friend of Washington. As the US’s local allies have repeatedly tried to overthrow Bolivia’s indigenous president, Londoño is therefore permitted to slander Morales’ democratic record with impunity.

“Critics say [Morales] has become increasingly authoritarian, accusing him of abusing his influence over the judicial system to intimidate or sideline political rivals,” he writes, declining to cite any actual critics, in a thinly veiled enunciation of his paper’s editorial line.

This nakedly biased journalism, demonizing Washington’s foes and covering for its clients, is very much par for the course.

Venezuela Redux

The evidence-free fraud allegations against Evo Morales form part of a now familiar script employed repeatedly against Venezuela.

Last year, the Trump administration and its hard-right opposition proxies preemptively refused to recognize the results of Venezuela’s presidential election, despite opposition candidate Henri Falcon reaching an agreement on electoral guarantees with the government. Falcon, at the time the highest-polling opposition figure, according to widely cited anti-government pollster Datanalisis, was reportedly threatened with sanctions by Washington for daring to defy the US-backed boycott.

On election day, Maduro won an overwhelming victory over a divided opposition whose main parties opted to abstain rather than risk losing to a diminished but still highly mobilized Chavista bloc.

The opposition cried fraud—as they had done in virtually every election they lost over the past two decades—without proffering any proof of vote rigging. Under Venezuela’s automated electoral system, witnesses from all political parties must sign off on vote tallies in each polling center, which are randomly subject to a hot audit the same day, rendering fraud immediately evident.

The BBC (10/24/19) claims there’s a whole lot of claiming going on in Bolivia.

The corporate media dutifully played its part, going on to recite the baseless fraud claims ad nauseam up through the present, effectively delegitimizing the election and paving the way for the current coup effort (FAIR.org, 5/23/18).

In Bolivia, Lisa Farthing has reported for NACLA (10/24/19) that opposition candidate Carlos Mesa’s Citizen’s Community alliance likewise began predicting fraud even before the voting began.

Meanwhile, the US State Department, which has refrained from making any statement on the brutal crackdown in Chile, was quick to weigh in, accusing the electoral tribunal of attempting to “subvert Bolivia’s democracy.”

Like clockwork, the Western media began pumping out headlines casting the elections as illegitimate. “Bolivia Polls: Morales Claims Victory Amid Fraud Claims,” reported the BBC (10/24/19), while CNN (10/23/19) wrote, “Tensions Boil Over in Bolivia as Protesters Claim Presidential Election Was Rigged.” “Shadow Hangs Over Bolivian Elections as Morales Scores First-Round Win,” announced Reuters (10/24/19).

Unlike in Chile, where mass demonstrations against military rule have been portrayed as irrationally “violent” (Financial Times, 10/28/19; CBC, 10/25/19; NPR, 10/22/19), Bolivia’s right-wing protests are presented as justifiable “anger” (CBS, 10/25/19; BBC, 10/22/19; New York Times, 10/25/19) at an “authoritarian” government (Reuters, 10/27/19, Miami Herald, 10/25/19, Washington Post, 10/22/19).

Such coverage would be unthinkable in a Western country, where one would hope that a political opposition that refused to recognize election results and proceeded to torch ruling-party offices would be condemned across the media spectrum.

Staying the Criminal Course

The scale and staying power of Chile’s anti-neoliberal rebellion has nevertheless forced some corporate outlets to make amendments to their narrative portraying the Piñera government as “inept” or “incompetent” (FAIR.org, 10/23/19) rather than illegitimate or criminal.

Bloomberg (10/30/19) and the Guardian (10/27/19) were among the few to report on the 160 people who have suffered eye injuries, including at least 26 blinded in one eye, due to authorities firing of 9-millimeter rubber-coated lead bullets at demonstrators’ heads.

Similarly, Bloomberg (10/30/19) and AP (published in Time, 10/29/19) were rare outlets that referred to the savage repression as a “crackdown.” Bloomberg (10/30/19) went as far as to compare the mass protests to the “1988 plebiscite that ended the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.”

This AP story’s headline (Time, 10/29/19) framed “protests and looting” as things that “rock Chile.”

That AP article is typical of the recent corporate media backpedaling. While acknowledging in the 12th paragraph that the military is engaging in a “crackdown” that has left “dozens partially blinded,” the authors spent the first four paragraphs describing the “looting” and “attacks” allegedly carried out by protesters, implicitly rationalizing the state’s repression.

AP joins the vast majority of Western media in ignoring the INDH’s appalling statistics concerning the widespread criminality of Chilean state security forces. According to the body, as of November 4, 1,659 people have been hospitalized for injuries, including 40 shot with live ammunition, 473 wounded by buckshot and 305 by unidentified firearms.

The INDH has filed 181 lawsuits against state bodies so far, among them 133 for torture and 19 for sexual violence, including two cases of alleged rape.

For the most part, the op-ed pages of major Western newspapers continue to ignore or whitewash the crimes of the Piñera government.

A rare exception is a hard-hitting Washington Post op-ed (10/29/19) by Rodrigo Espinoza Troncoso and Michael Wilson Becerril, denouncing the state’s “brutal repression” and pointing to Chile’s anti-democratic, Pinochet-crafted constitution as the problem.

Most outlets have churned out a steady stream of “think pieces” blaming “inequality” for the protests, and calling on Piñera to address it (New York Times, 10/25/19; Washington Post, 10/29/19; Guardian, 10/30/19; Financial Times, 10/28/19). Others dispute that inequality is even a structural problem, chiding Chilean protesters for not appreciating the “success” of Chile’s neoliberal model (Bloomberg, 10/30/19; Miami Herald, 10/23/19).

To date, no corporate outlets have referred to Piñera as “authoritarian” or a “dictator,” as they have done repeatedly in the case of Venezuela’s Maduro (FAIR.org, 4/11/19) and increasingly Bolivia’s Morales. No Western newspaper has published an editorial demanding their government pressure Piñera to end the military crackdown and relinquish power.

The coverage of Chile’s uprising proves once again that criminality on the part of Western states and their clients is perfectly palatable to corporate journalists whose atrocity, Michael Parenti observes, is always “against the truth.”

Democrats Are Becoming the Party of Permanent War

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com.

“People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. … All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

~Hermann Goering, Nazi field marshal and Hitler henchman

Somehow I’m always a “traitor.” At least according to my critics. It’s a rather odd thing, however. See, I’ve been penning antiwar screeds for over five years, much of it done while still on active duty. During just under three of those years,  Barack Obama was president. Back then, when I criticized George W. Bush’s old wars and Obama’s new ones, my ubiquitous hate mail—“love it or leave it,” “you’re a communist,” “you’re a disgrace to the uniform”—came from the hawkish right. That much I expected.

Then my universe inverted. The moment Donald Trump was elected, if ever I dared cheer his anti-interventionist rhetoric (though rarely his deeds), my “friends” on the left attacked me with even more intensity than the neocons. But the language was mostly the same. I was still a “traitor,” still “anti-American,” only now I was also a “Trump apologist,” even a “Putin puppet.” Once purportedly antiwar liberals were horrified that I hoped, and sought to encourage, that Trump might end even a couple of the hopeless American conflicts. Born-again hawks, these folks now rose like a mythical phoenix to support the wars Trump theoretically opposed. As a tiny band played “The World Turned Upside Down” on repeat in my head, it occurred to me that this turn of events represented something profound: liberal thought policing, consensus disciplining and the limits of Democrats’ anti-war activism.

Look, I’m a lefty, for the most part. My academic specialty is in African American civil rights history. Eugene Debs is one of my heroes. The morning after the 2016 election, I said unspeakable, hateful things—the sort you can’t really take back—to my Trump-voting father. In my last year in the army, I was even under a serious, pension-threatening investigation according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice for the crime of publishing language “contemptuous” of President Trump.

The editors here at Antiwar.com accept my “progressive” sins because we’re in the end-the-endless-war trenches together. But of course, my libertarian friends enjoy treating me to a good ribbing. So you can understand why it seems so odd, so preposterous, this recent spate of attacks leveled against me as a “Trump apologist,” even a “Trump supporter.” I mean I’m not. Still, the fact that my ostensible compatriots—at least the mainstream liberals—are the ones directing these attacks is instructive. Their hysterical critiques define these alarmist times. Consider it “Red Scare 2.0: Russia Strikes Back.”

On some level, this is nothing new. The left has a long history of eating its own, especially in times of war. During America’s foolish crusade in World War I, most progressives—as they then (as now) styled themselves—promptly ditched their past dovish positions and jumped on the war, and hyper-patriotic, bandwagon. The minority that held true to anti-war sentiments were smeared with particular virulence, branded un-American, even treasonous. Careers and reputations were ruined; more radical peace activists were sometimes jailed. And why not? The “war president,” Woodrow Wilson, was a Democrat too (though there were then some progressives among Republicans), and the party faithful quickly fell in line with their commander in chief.

The cycle repeated when “Saint” Obama was president. Liberals who had loudly opposed Bush’s wars hardly blanched when their president promptly escalated wars in Afghanistan and West Africa, entered new ones in Libya and Syria, and exponentially increased region-wide drone strikes. We were treated to the sound of crickets for eight long years, as if anti-war Democrats had gone into hibernation.

However, today, these attacks on me—and many others—as neo-Trumpsters or “Russian assets,” has a flavor all its own. A Republican, at least in name, is president. Liberals hate him with even more ferocity than Baby Bush. Reflexive anti-Trumpism—though often warranted—is now so instinctual and unthinking that it borders on anti-intellectual hysteria. So yes, MSNBC liberals certainly hate Trump … but not his wars. This is curious, unique and unlike the Bush-era opposition. Why? I’d submit that the variable is Trump himself.

See, on the campaign trail, over the White House Twitter account, and in a few recent speeches, Trump has expressed—though rarely acted upon—some sensible, even profound, anti-war sentiments. He’s long said his “instincts” are to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and last month he made a show (really a reshuffling) of clumsily pulling the troops out of Syria. At least rhetorically, Trump opposes endless war in the Middle East. And, well, in these tribal times, if Trump’s against something, most Dems are for it! Even wars they once opposed, for years.

Take MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. She was wildly opposed to Bush’s wars—even wrote an excellent book decrying American military interventionism—then kept silent during Obama’s wars, and now cheerleads Trump’s wars. But they’re all the same wars! Maddow, intelligent as she undoubtedly is, thus exposed her intellectual dishonesty. And she’s taken much of the liberal establishment with her. It’s legitimately scary.

Silly me, I thought the “left” was supposed to be against endless war in the greater Middle East. We now know, once and for all, that they never really were. Rather than anti-war, they were ultimately just anti-Bush, and now anti-Trump. It’s about politics, not patriotism. Party first, country second. Need proof? Not a single Democrat in the House supported Trump’s gesture toward ending the Syria debacle. Not one. On the other hand, every voting Democrat had recently voted for ending U.S. support for the Saudi terror war in Yemen. Well sure, Trump likes that war, so the Dems hate it.

What of the populace at large? That’s an even stranger matter. In today’s upside-down world, Republicans are more opposed to endless conflict than Democrats. In a recent poll, 57% of Republicans favored ending the military mission in Syria; 76% of Democrats opposed it. Most combat veterans—not a traditionally progressive lot—are also against America’s ongoing wars, if anyone cares to know. Other polls are even more alarming and portend poorly for the future.

Large majorities of all Americans, but especially Democrats, seem eminently persuadable to support a new war, this time with Iran. Just as 42% of the public believed—even after the invasion of Iraq—that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and 55% thought he directly supported al-Qaida (neither was even remotely true), so too are the citizens of today misinformed about Iran. In a poll conducted late last month, 84% of Americans said they were concerned that Iran was developing nuclear weapons (it is not), including 89% of Democrats. Say what?

Lastly, there’s the, perhaps even more dangerous, liberal establishment’s policing of foreign policy thought, which narrows the range of “acceptable” discourse and threatens (small d) democracy. That’s where the attacks on my writing, my character and my “Americanism” come in. But it isn’t just me. Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, and the CNN-MSNBC duo’s absurd slander that Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard—an anti-war long-shot presidential contender and serving major in the US Army—is a “Russian asset,” being “groomed,” perhaps by the Republicans, for a third-party run, personifies the current fit of national delirium. Gabbard’s combat tours (what branch did Clinton or Maddow serve in?) couldn’t save her from accusations of treason—a crime punishable by death for a serving soldier—and my 18 odd years in uniform won’t protect me from the new breed of Democratic neo-McCarthyism.

Mind you, the establishment liberal thought police have not, and will not, provide a shred of evidence that I, Tulsi and our like-minded brothers and sisters are “un-American” “traitors.” They don’t have to. Even muted praise for Trump’s few sensible pronouncements, or the use of “Putin talking points” like ending regime change wars, is today a sin punishable by libel, by professional and intellectual exile. Proof, evidence, truth—these concepts no longer matter. As a Bush official pronounced back in the Iraq War days, “We’re an empire now.” And as the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy so presciently wrote, “When it comes to Empire, facts don’t matter.”

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com . His work has a ppeared in the L.A. Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig and TomDispatch, among other publications. He ser ved combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “ Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge .” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet .

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Mike Pence’s Meddling in Foreign Aid Is Probably Unconstitutional

Last November, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a candid email to colleagues about pressure from the White House to reroute Middle East aid to religious minorities, particularly Christian groups.

“Sometimes this decision will be made for us by the White House (see… Iraq! And, increasingly, Syria),” said Hallam Ferguson, a senior official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, in an email seen by ProPublica. “We need to stay ahead of this curve everywhere lest our interventions be dictated to us.”

The email underscored what had become a stark reality under the Trump White House. Decisions about U.S. aid are often no longer being governed by career professionals applying a rigorous review of applicants and their capabilities. Over the last two years, political pressure, particularly from the office of Vice President Mike Pence, had seeped into aid deliberations and convinced key decision-makers that unless they fell in line, their jobs could be at stake.

Five months before Ferguson sent the email, his former boss had been ousted following a mandate from Pence’s chief of staff. Pence had grown displeased with USAID’s work in Iraq after Christian groups were turned down for aid.

ProPublica viewed internal emails and conducted interviews with nearly 40 current and former U.S. officials and aid professionals that shed new light on the success of Pence and his allies in influencing the government’s long-standing process for awarding foreign aid. Most people spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration’s efforts to influence USAID funding sparked concern from career officials, who worried the agency risked violating constitutional prohibitions on favoring one religion over another. They also were concerned that being perceived as favoring Christians could worsen Iraq’s sectarian divides.

“There are very deliberate procurement guidelines that have developed over a number of years to guard precisely against this kind of behavior,” said Steven Feldstein, a former State Department and USAID official during the Obama administration. When politics intrude on the grant-making process, “you’re diluting the very nature of what development programs ought to accomplish.”

USAID regulations state that awards “must be free from political interference or even the appearance of such interference and must be made on the basis of merit, not on the basis of the religious affiliation of a recipient organization, or lack thereof.”

Last month, USAID announced two grants to Iraqi organizations that career officials had previously rejected. Political appointees significantly impacted the latest awards, according to interviews with officials and other people aware of the process. Typically, such appointees have little to no involvement in USAID grants, to avoid perceptions of undue political influence on procurement.

One of the groups selected for the newest awards has no full-time paid staff, no experience with government grants and a financial tie that would typically raise questions in an intense competition for limited funds. The second organization received its first USAID direct grant after extensive public comments by its leader and allies highlighting what they described as a lack of U.S. assistance to Christians. The two groups — a charity that primarily serves Christian Iraqis and a Catholic university — were not originally listed as front-runners, according to a document seen by ProPublica.

The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed have previously reported Pence’s interest in increasing foreign aid to Christians and his displeasure with USAID’s activities in Iraq.

Pence’s spokeswoman, Katie Waldman, did not respond to questions. A USAID spokeswoman did not respond to specific questions, including about Ferguson’s email, but said the latest grants were appropriate.

“The Trump Administration has made responding to the genocide committed by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against religious and ethnic minorities a top priority,” said the spokeswoman, Pooja Jhunjhunwala. “Assistance to religious and ethnic communities targeted by ISIS is not a departure from the norm, but rather a continuation of USAID’s rich history of promoting inclusive development and defending human dignity and religious freedom in our partner countries.”

Approximately 97% of Iraq’s population is Muslim, according to the most recent U.S. figures available. Religious minorities — including Christians, Yazidis and others — make up around 2% to 3% of Iraq’s total population.

The Trump administration’s efforts to steer funding to these minorities in Iraq stand in stark contrast to its overall approach to foreign aid. It has repeatedly proposed cutting U.S. diplomatic and foreign assistance budgets by billions of dollars. In August, as the White House was considering cuts to an array of foreign aid programs, it shielded funding for religious minorities abroad, according to newsaccounts.

As Trump mounts a 2020 reelection effort, he is taking steps to solidify his conservative Christian base, including his decision last week to install his spiritual adviser, Florida televangelist Paula White, in a White House position. Increasing aid to Christians abroad is a core value for his supporters.

In a speech last month at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, a major gathering of the religious right, Trump touted his administration’s work on behalf of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

“Other presidents would not be doing that,” he said. “They’d be spending a lot more money, but they’d be spending it on things that would not make you very happy.”

Late in the Obama administration, USAID’s activities in Iraq focused on an effort by the United Nations to restore basic services as soon as cities had been liberated from Islamic State rule.

By the end of 2016, the United States had contributed over $115 million to the effort through USAID, and other countries had contributed hundreds of millions of dollars more. U.S. officials credit the U.N.’s work with enabling millions of Iraqis to return to their homes soon after the fighting was done instead of languishing in refugee camps.

“Here’s another example of when the U.N. and the United States work together, really good things can happen,” said John Allen, the former special presidential envoy to the global coalition formed to defeat ISIS, at an event at the Brookings Institution in September.

Robust U.S. support for the U.N.’s work initially carried over into the Trump administration. In July 2017, the administration announced that USAID would provide an additional $150 million to the U.N. Development Program’s Iraq stabilization fund, bringing the total U.S. contribution to more than $265 million since 2015.

But by then, U.S. officials in Iraq were sensing dissatisfaction among some Iraqi Christians and American religious groups with the U.S. strategy and the U.N.’s work. Trying to head off problems, U.S. officials urged the U.N. in the summer of 2017 to pay special attention to the Nineveh Plains, an ethnically and religiously diverse region of northern Iraq where many of the country’s Christians live.

U.N. officials were reluctant, arguing their assistance could go further in dense urban areas like Mosul, as opposed to the Nineveh Plains, a stretch of farmland dotted by small towns and villages.

“They were going for the biggest bang for the buck,” one former U.S. foreign service officer said.

Dylan Lowthian, a UNDP spokesman, said the agency worked closely with local Christian leaders in 2017 to encourage more people to return to the Nineveh Plains.

“UNDP is one of the largest supporters of minority communities in Iraq in terms of volume of projects, impact, and funding,” Lowthian said.

But the pressure from Washington built. Influential religious groups like the Knights of Columbus and current and former Republican members of Congress advocated throughout 2017 for direct U.S. aid to religious minorities, including Christians and Yazidis. They said that the groups merited special attention because they had been targeted for genocide by Islamic State and that local churches had proven track records of delivering aid quickly and reliably. Furthermore, Christians — who fled the country in droves after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq — were at risk of disappearing from Iraq altogether if they didn’t receive help, they argued.

Bashar Warda, a powerful archbishop based in Erbil, Iraq, was a key figure in this effort. “The Christians of Iraq desperately need American government humanitarian aid now, and we need it to be delivered in a manner to ensure it actually reaches us and does not get absorbed and redirected in the existing aid structures,” he said in a 2017 interview withCrux, a Catholic- focused publication. “While the U.S. has donated generously to the overall humanitarian aid effort in Iraq, almost none of this aid reached the Christians.”

Warda met with Pence in late 2017 and stood beside Trump in the Oval Office in 2018 as he signed a bill authorizing the State Department and USAID to provide relief to victims of Islamic State, particularly religious minorities. Warda had advocated for the bill’s passage.

Warda’s and others’ argument on the flow of aid resonated with the Trump administration’s distrust of multilateral organizations, especially the U.N., and a desire to help Christians worldwide.

Many career officials at the State Department and USAID supported the broader scope of the U.N.’s work. They acknowledged it wasn’t perfect — it could be slow, and the U.N. was not adept at communicating with local communities — but said the rebuilding had benefited wide swaths of territory that included both Muslims and minority groups.

Privately, some officials felt that Warda’s and his allies’ lobbying efforts in Washington were downplaying how the U.N. projects benefited their communities. And serving Iraq’s Sunni Muslims, they said, was essential to ensuring that Islamic State, which drew its ranks from Sunnis, did not make a resurgence.

“We were focused on the overriding policy priority of making sure that areas where young men with guns and other weapons were wandering around got the vast majority of the funding,” one current U.S. official said in an interview.

As of July, USAID and the State Department had announced nearly $373 million in funding for “persecuted ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq” since 2017. Jhunjhunwala, the USAID spokeswoman, said the U.S. government had provided over $1.5 billion in assistance to Iraq in 2017 and 2018, “the vast majority in areas inhabited by Sunni and Shia Muslims.” The Obama administration did not publicize its spending on Iraqi religious groups in the same way, making an exact comparison difficult.

Stephen Rasche, who works closely with Warda and serves as his spokesman, told ProPublica that U.N. reports detailing its rebuilding work in 2016 and 2017 “were highly misleading and could not be substantiated as they applied to assistance in the Christian towns.”

“In all our interactions with State/AID they were relying almost exclusively on the U.N. reports rather than making their own, first-hand inspections,” he said in an emailed statement. “Our position was that we were there on the ground and could not find evidence of the work that the U.N. said was being done.”

Lowthian said that all UNDP projects are tracked by a “rigorous and robust” monitoring effort, and that project details are shared regularly with partner countries.

Career officials also expressed concerns at the time that targeting federal funds toward particular minority groups on the basis of religion could be unconstitutional. USAID rules bar providing funding for explicitly religious activities such as worship or proselytizing. But faith-based groups can still receive U.S. funding, as long as they are inclusive and do not use the funds for religious programming.

USAID regulations mirror the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause, which broadly prohibits government actions that favor one religion over another. Over time, Trump appointees have grown exasperated at pushback that mentioned the clause, one official said.

“They find it very constraining,” this person said. “They get frustrated that we can’t just do direct support.” Still, several officials said, career attorneys at USAID painstakingly review its programming in Iraq to ensure it is legal.

And USAID and State Department officials questioned whether Christian groups were significantly needier than the broader Iraqi population victimized by Islamic State, including Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

“There was a pushback, a feeling like we shouldn’t be doing this, first of all because of our own policies and regulations, and secondly because they’re not worse off than the others,” a former USAID official said.

Initially, Pence’s office and political appointees at USAID were focused on helping Christians, with little attention to Yazidis, a small, ancient sect that was targeted in an especially cruel manner by Islamic State militants, said a current official and a former foreign service officer. Over time, career officials “helped educate” political appointees on the extent of the Yazidis’ suffering, in hopes of getting their support for directing some aid at non-Christian groups, the former foreign service officer said.

“There was a very ideological focus on Christians, and most of the questions were about Christians,” this person said. “We were trying to get them to focus on others in the minority communities that might need assistance.”

Some also felt that if the U.S. were perceived as openly favoring particular groups, it could lead to further tensions in a country with deep and complicated sectarian divisions. Even some Christian Iraqis, several current or former U.S. officials said, did not want to be singled out by USAID for help, because they feared that preferential treatment would only add to instability.

But Trump appointees at USAID in favor of sending more aid to Christians — including Middle East bureau official Hallam Ferguson and Bill Steiger, the agency’s chief of staff — discounted career officers’ concerns, arguing that they had heard differently from the Christian groups focused on Iraq with whom they were in touch, one former USAID official said. Trump appointees “seemed convinced that an imbalance did exist” in how Christians were being treated, a U.S. official said.

Steiger, who served at the Department of Health and Human Services during the George W. Bush administration, has been a key conduit through which Pence’s office has exerted pressure on USAID, several officials said.

Trump appointees in Washington pressed officials to frequently visit the areas where Christians lived, seemingly unaware of the weeks of preparation and security logistics needed to make even one such visit happen, one current U.S. official and the former foreign service officer said.

By September 2017, Steiger was holding meetings with USAID officials to discuss how to help religious minorities in Iraq. And by early October, USAID’s leadership had decided to try to satisfy Pence’s preferences through new grants focusing on northern Iraq.

While the grant process was being worked out at USAID, Pence blindsided officials in October 2017 when he declared to an influential Christian group in Washington that Trump had ordered diplomats to no longer fund “ineffective” U.N. programs. USAID would now directly help persecuted communities, he said.

“It sent us scrambling the next day,” one U.S. official working on Iraq at the time said. “That seemed to me, in retrospect, a turning point in saying, ‘We’ve got a real interest in doing more to help minorities, especially Christians,’ to, ‘OK, now we’re really going to shift some funds.’”

The $150 million that USAID had pledged to the U.N. effort in Iraq in July 2017 had been divided into two tranches of $75 million each. After Pence’s comments, USAID renegotiated its agreement with the U.N. so that the majority of the first payment, $55 million, would still go to the U.N. but would be earmarked for religious and ethnic minorities in Nineveh Province.

For new grants, which were separate from the U.N. funding, USAID hosted 33 organizations at a two-day March 2018 Baghdad workshop. They included large, established faith-based groups like Samaritan’s Purse and Catholic Relief Services, as well as smaller, little-known Iraqi organizations, according to a list of attendees obtained by ProPublica through a public records request.

The attendees included two Pence aides: Sarah Makin-Acciani and Steve Pinkos. Before joining Pence’s team, Makin-Acciani worked for Republican lawmakers, as a lobbyist for the U.S. Consumer Coalition and for the Trump campaign. Pinkos had worked for a lobbying firm, as an aide to Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy and in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Neither of them appear to have expertise in development or foreign aid issues. Neither Makin-Acciani nor Pinkos responded to messages requesting comment.

Their presence at the Baghdad meeting, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, unsettled participants, according to four people who attended the event or were briefed on it. White House officials rarely, if ever, are so deeply involved in agency grant-making.

People “assumed they were there for a political reason or to put pressure on the process,” said one participant.

After introductory remarks by then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq Doug Silliman, attendees split into smaller groups to discuss possible collaborations. Makin-Acciani and Pinkos mostly observed and asked questions, several people who attended the meeting said. But at one point, the pair objected to a programming idea, saying it would take too long and not be valuable, two people who witnessed the interaction said.

“They were looking for quick fixes,” said one of the people.

Back in Washington, Mark Green, the head of USAID, expressed discomfort to a colleague about potential interference by Pence into the grant process, one former U.S. official said.

Ultimately, later that spring, career officials made the final grant decisions and gave millions of dollars in funding to large, established organizations: Catholic Relief Services, Heartland Alliance and others. Awards were structured as umbrella grants that included sub-awards to small Iraqi organizations. USAID rejected some bids by smaller, untested groups with no prior experience with the agency.

“We still try to stick to our principles, that you gotta have a good proposal and you gotta have your qualifications there and so on, and they didn’t meet the standards,” a former USAID official said.

One rejected application was a bid by the Catholic University in Erbil and the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee, a coalition of three major Christian denominations in Iraq. Warda, head of the Chaldean Catholic archdiocese in Erbil, also heads the board of trustees at the university. (Chaldean Catholics, an Eastern Rite of the Roman Catholic Church, make up about two-thirds of Iraq’s Christians.)

Rasche, who is a vice chancellor at the Catholic University in Erbil, was formerly president of Nineveh Reconstruction Committee-USA, a now-defunct nonprofit formed to further NRC’s aims by winning U.S. government grants. Rasche said he and Warda were in Washington when their proposal was rejected and promptly told their “friends and partners” of their denial.

Before USAID had itself announced the awards, Fox News published a detailed account criticizing USAID’s activities in Iraq. “We are worse off now than we were two years ago,” Warda said to Fox.

Two days later, former Reagan administration national security adviser Robert McFarlane and New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith co-authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing USAID’s decision to reject the two Christian organizations. They said it showed career USAID officials were ignoring Pence’s preferences. The title of the op-ed: “Iraqi Christians Are Still Waiting, Mr. Pence.”

Smith’s spokesman and McFarlane did not respond to interview requests.

On June 8, 2018, a day after the op-ed was published, Pence’s spokeswoman issued a terse statement, saying he “will not tolerate bureaucratic delays in implementing the Administration’s vision.” Pence also directed Green to travel to Iraq and report back on how to resolve delays.

That same day, Pence’s then-chief of staff, Nick Ayers, called Steiger to demand somebody at the agency be punished for the failure to provide aid to Christian groups quickly enough, according to several people familiar with the conversation. Ayers did not respond to requests for comment.

Green’s reaction was to remove Maria Longi, a career civil servant and a top official in USAID’s Middle East bureau. Though still on USAID’s payroll, she now teaches national security strategy at the National War College.

Longi’s dismissal and Pence’s displeasure with USAID had been reported by BuzzFeed and The Wall Street Journal, though the extent of Pence’s role in her reassignment had not been. Longi declined to answer questions.

The move reverberated among career officials, who traded text messages and emails expressing shock. USAID insiders coined a term for what had happened to her: Longi had been “Penced.”

Concern spread even among Trump appointees that their jobs might be threatened. “What it did instill in the Middle East bureau was fear among the political appointees that they could be thrown out at any time,” a former USAID official said.

Last month, USAID announced $4 million in new grants to six Iraqi organizations as part of an effort in Iraq and other countries to work with small, local groups that have done little prior work with the agency. Two of the winning groups were the Shlama Foundation, a small charity, and the Catholic University in Erbil.

Two USAID political appointees were involved in awarding those grants: Ferguson, the second-highest-ranking official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, and Samah Norquist, the agency’s adviser on religious pluralism in the Middle East and wife of conservative tax activist Grover Norquist.

Ferguson and Samah Norquist were included in the selection process for the newest grants, and one official said Ferguson oversaw the final determinations.

A former USAID official said Norquist was “really involved in the details” of the grants but seemed to have little awareness of standard USAID practice when meeting with grantees.

“She was swimming in the dark, and it was really quite clear that she didn’t know the first thing about grant-making,” such as what information was proper to share and how to ensure an open award process rather than one targeting specific groups, the former official said.

Norquist expressed support for Trump’s 2020 reelection at a State Department forum in July, a statement that experts said likely violated a law forbidding government officials from engaging in political activities on the job. The incident sparked complaints to an independent agency, which determined in October that Norquist’s comments did not violate the law.

A third political appointee at USAID, Max Primorac, the agency’s envoy in Erbil for minority assistance programs, tweeted praise for the Shlama Foundation months before USAID announced the final grant winners. The group replied with thanks, tagging Pence’s Twitter account. Shortly after the award announcement, Primorac met with a Shlama Foundation board member during a visit to Michigan.

Primorac is known among U.S. officials for his close working relationship with Pence’s office. Prior to joining USAID, Primorac served with Rasche at NRC-USA, as secretary and treasurer of the nonprofit. The two submitted an unsolicited $22.5 million bid to rehabilitate Christian towns to USAID in 2017, which was not awarded.

Asked if any Shlama Foundation officials were in touch with Primorac, Norquist or Ferguson prior to its award being announced, board member Ranna Abro declined to answer specifically.

“USAID was familiar with our organization as it is well-known by the local community in the Nineveh Plains,” she said. “We have met USAID several times along with all other organizations serving the same area.”

Rasche said Norquist ran a workshop in Erbil for organizations interested in applying for the new grants, which staff members of the Catholic University in Erbil attended. Rasche also spoke with Ferguson two to three times about the grant dates and funding cycles, he said.

Five current or former U.S. officials said involvement in grant decisions by political appointees — particularly by someone as senior as Ferguson — is highly unusual. USAID grants are typically decided by a review committee and a contracting officer, all of whom are career officials.

“USAID procurement rules with technical review panels are strict, as they should be, to avoid any political interference on the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars,” said Paige Alexander, a former senior USAID official who served during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

Jhunjhunwala, the USAID spokeswoman, said the award process is rigorous “and follows all federal regulations.” Ferguson, Norquist and Primorac were not on the committees that made the recommendations, she said.

The new grants have “empowered local organizations to solve problems not adequately addressed by other USAID investments and that directly respond to the grassroots needs of conflict-affected communities,” she said.

Like the Catholic University in Erbil, the Shlama Foundation had previously applied and been rejected for the 2018 grants. Shlama had complained about the rejection via Twitter, and Abro confirmed the tweet referred to the same grant for which the Catholic University in Erbil was also rejected.

For the newest awards, a document seen by ProPublica shows that neither the Shlama Foundation nor the university were originally included in a list of leading applicants that circulated within USAID.

The Shlama Foundation will receive $1 million over two years for a project focusing on solar energy, a pittance in the overall U.S. foreign assistance budget. But the money is three times what the nonprofit has taken in from charitable donations since 2014, according to its website. It has never before received government grants, Abro said.

“The Shlama Foundation, USAID and our vendor partners are certainly experienced and capable of implementing this solar program for a greener future,” Abro said.

Aside from its small size and lack of federal grant experience, Shlama was an unconventional choice for another reason. Last year it received $10,000 in donations from the Clarion Project, a nonprofit organization which researchers at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative said “advances anti-Muslim content through its web-based and video production platforms.”

A Shlama Foundation board member also appeared in Clarion’s 2017 documentary “Faithkeepers,” about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. The film focuses on atrocities committed by Islamic State, but also depicts Islam overall as a religion that seeks to subjugate minorities. Zach Sicherman, an associate producer for the film, declined to respond to questions.

Clarion also did not respond to questions. It describes itself as a “non-profit organization that educates the public about the dangers of radical Islam and other extremist ideologies.”

Abro said that Shlama did not solicit the Clarion donation, and that it appeared in the documentary because “we value transparency and are open to participate in interviews from all sides.” The film’s website includes a donation page that benefits Shlama.

Foreign aid experts said USAID typically examines an organization’s major donors to protect the agency from perceptions that it is benefiting biased groups, but they disagreed over whether the link to Clarion should have disqualified Shlama for U.S. funding.

The Catholic University in Erbil’s new grant from USAID is its first direct agency award. The award, $700,000 over one year, will support courses for “widows, victims of abuse, and former captives of ISIS,” according to a USAID press release.

The newest grant “has come very late in the day, and our award is comparatively quite small,” Rasche said. He attributed the award not to Warda’s public statements but rather to the passage of the 2018 bill.

USAID’s inspector general is investigating some of the agency’s activities in Iraq, the watchdog said, though it is unclear what sparked the probe.

USAID is now expanding its emphasis on religious minorities far beyond Iraq. In December, a month after his email about White House pressure, Ferguson told USAID mission directors in the Middle East that agency leadership had identified up to $50 million it planned to use in 2019 for “urgent religious freedom and religious persecution challenges,” according to a second email seen by ProPublica. He asked mission directors to submit programming ideas.

In a follow-up email in June, also seen by ProPublica, Ferguson wrote that in addition to Iraq, religious and ethnic minority programming was planned for Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia.