Chris Hedges's Blog, page 128

Critics Warn ‘Consumers Will Pay the Price’ for T-Mobile/Sprint Merger

Consumers advocates called out Republicans on the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday for a party-line vote approving a “blatantly anti-competitive” proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, the third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers in the United States.

S. Derek Turner, research director at the national advocacy group Free Press, took aim at FCC Chair Ajit Pai, an appointee of President Donald Trump and former telecommunications industry lawyer who publicly backed the deal months before commission staffers completed a review of it.

Pai formalized his support for the $26.5 billion merger in August, with a statement that emphasized its supposed benefits but lacked any evidence. Critics warn that allowing two major wireless providers to become one will drive up costs for consumers.

“Despite Chairman Pai’s bogus claims, nothing about this deal would lower prices for customers or lead to faster 5G deployment,” said Turner. “And the loss of competition would disproportionately harm low-income people and communities of color.”

THIS

GM and Union Reach Tentative Deal That Could End Strike

DETROIT — Bargainers for General Motors and the United Auto Workers reached a tentative contract deal on Wednesday that could end a monthlong strike that brought the company’s U.S. factories to a standstill.

The deal, which the union says offers “major gains” for workers, was hammered out after months of bargaining but won’t bring an immediate end to the strike by 49,000 hourly workers. They will likely stay on the picket lines for at least two more days as two union committees vote on the deal, after which the members will have to approve.

Terms of the tentative four-year contract were not released, but it’s likely to include some pay raises, lump sum payments to workers, and requirements that GM build new vehicles in U.S. factories. Early on, GM offered new products in Detroit and Lordstown, Ohio, two of the four U.S. cities where it planned to close factories.

The company offered to build a new electric pickup truck to keep the Detroit-Hamtramck plant open and to build an electric vehicle battery factory in or near Lordstown, Ohio, where GM is closing an assembly plant. The battery factory would employ far fewer workers and pay less money than the assembly plant.

GM and the union have been negotiating at a time of troubling uncertainty for the U.S. auto industry. Driven up by the longest economic expansion in American history, auto sales appear to have peaked and are now heading in the other direction. GM and other carmakers are also struggling to make the transition to electric and autonomous vehicles.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and his tariffs on imported steel and aluminum have raised costs for auto companies. A revamped North American free trade deal is stalled in Congress, raising doubts about the future of America’s trade in autos and auto parts with Canada and Mexico, which last year came to $257 billion.

Amid that uncertainty, GM workers have wanted to lock in as much as they can before things get ugly. They argue that they had given up pay raises and made other concessions to keep GM afloat during its 2009 trip through bankruptcy protection. Now that GM has been nursed back to health — earning $2.42 billion in its latest quarter — they want a bigger share.

If approved, the contract agreement will set the pattern for negotiations at Fiat Chrysler and Ford. It wasn’t clear which company the union would bargain with next, or whether there would be another strike.

The union’s bargainers have voted to recommend the deal to the UAW International Executive Board, which will vote on the agreement. Union leaders from factories nationwide will travel to Detroit for a vote on Thursday. The earliest workers could return would be after that.

In past years, it’s taken a minimum of three or four days and as long as several weeks for the national ratification vote. Workers took almost two weeks to finish voting on their last GM agreement, in October of 2015. Then skilled trades workers rejected it, causing further delays.

“The No. 1 priority of the national negotiation team has been to secure a strong and fair contract that our members deserve,” union Vice President Terry Dittes, the chief bargainer with GM, said in a statement Wednesday. The agreement, he said, has “major gains” for UAW workers.

This time around — with a federal corruption investigation that has implicated the past two UAW presidents and brought convictions of five union officials — many union members don’t trust the leadership and likely won’t want to return to work until they’ve gotten a chance to vote on the deal themselves.

In August, the FBI raided the suburban Detroit home of UAW President Gary Jones. He has not been charged and has not commented on the raid. Earlier this month, Jones’ successor as union regional director in Missouri was charged in a $600,000 embezzlement scheme, and another UAW official pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks from union vendors. Eight other people — including five UAW officials — have been convicted over the past two years of looting a jointly run Fiat Chrysler-UAW training center for blue-collar workers. Another official was charged in September.

There’s also no guarantee that the first contract deal with GM will pass. Some workers on the picket lines have said they may not vote for the first offer.

“We’re not just going to take the first thing that they give us,” worker Tina Black said last month from the picket line at an engine and transmission plant in Romulus, Michigan, near Detroit’s main airport.

But Louis Rocha, president of a UAW local in Orion Township, Michigan, said recently that union bargainers have taken strong positions against the company. “I think we’re going to be OK,” he said of the ratification vote.

The strike had shut down 33 GM manufacturing plants in nine states across the U.S. It was the first national strike by the union since a two-day walkout in 2007 that had little impact on the company.

Never-Before-Seen Trump Tax Documents Show Major Inconsistencies

Stay up to date with email updates about WNYC and ProPublica’s investigations into the president’s business practices.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.

Lenders like to see a rising occupancy level as a sign of what they call “leasing momentum.” Sure enough, the company told a lender that 40 Wall Street had been 58.9% leased on Dec. 31, 2012, and then rose to 95% a few years later. The company told tax officials the building was 81% rented as of Jan. 5, 2013.

A dozen real estate professionals told ProPublica they saw no clear explanation for multiple inconsistencies in the documents. The discrepancies are “versions of fraud,” said Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. “This kind of stuff is not OK.”

New York City’s property tax forms state that the person signing them “affirms the truth of the statements made” and that “false filings are subject to all applicable civil and criminal penalties.”

The punishments for lying to tax officials, or to lenders, can be significant, ranging from fines to criminal fraud charges. Two former Trump associates, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, are serving prison time for offenses that include falsifying tax and bank records, some of them related to real estate.

“Certainly, if I were sitting in a prosecutor’s office, I would want to ask a lot more questions,” said Anne Milgram, a former attorney general for New Jersey who is now a professor at New York University School of Law.

Trump has previously been accused of manipulating numbers on his tax and loan documents, including by his former lawyer, Cohen. But Trump’s business is notoriously opaque, with records rarely surfacing, and up till now there’s been little documentary evidence supporting those claims.

That’s one reason that multiple governmental entities, including two congressional committees and the office of the Manhattan district attorney, have subpoenaed Donald Trump’s tax returns. Trump has resisted, taking his battles to federal courts in Washington and New York. And so the question of whether different parts of the government can see the president’s financial information is now playing out in two appeals courts and seems destined to make it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Add to that a Washington Post account of an IRS whistleblower claiming political interference in the handling of the president’s audit, and the result is what amounts to frenetic interest in one person’s tax returns.

ProPublica obtained the property tax documents using New York’s Freedom of Information Law. The documents were public because Trump appealed his property tax bill for the buildings every year for nine years in a row, the extent of the available records. We compared the tax records with loan records that became public when Trump’s lender, Ladder Capital, sold the debt on his properties as part of mortgage-backed securities.

ProPublica reviewed records for four properties: 40 Wall Street, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, 1290 Avenue of the Americas and Trump Tower. Discrepancies involving two of them — 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower — stood out.

There can be legitimate reasons for numbers to diverge between tax and loan documents, the experts noted, but some of the gaps seemed to have no reasonable justification. “It really feels like there’s two sets of books — it feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University who reviewed the records. “It’s hard to argue numbers. That’s black and white.”

The Trump Organization did not respond on the record to detailed questions provided by ProPublica. Robert Pollack, a lawyer whose firm, Marcus & Pollack, handles Trump’s property tax appeal filings with the city, said he was not authorized to discuss the documents. A spokeswoman for Mazars USA, the accounting firm that signed off on the two properties’ expense and income statements, said the firm does not comment on its work for clients. Executives with Trump’s lender, Ladder Capital, declined to be quoted for the story.

In response to ProPublica’s questions about the disparities, Laura Feyer, deputy press secretary for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, said of the Trump International Hotel and Tower, “The city is looking into this property, and if there has been any underreporting, we will take appropriate action.”

Taxes have long been a third rail for Trump. Long before he famously declined to make his personal returns public, a New York Times investigation concluded, Trump participated in tax schemes that involved “outright fraud,” and that he had formulated “a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns.” Trump’s former partners in Panama claimed in a lawsuit, which is ongoing, that Trump’s hotel management company failed to pay taxes on millions in fees it received. Spokespeople for Trump and his company have denied any tax improprieties in the past.

In February, Cohen told Congress that Trump had adjusted figures up or down, as necessary, to obtain loans and avoid taxes. “It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes,” Cohen testified, “and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”

The two Trump buildings with the most notable discrepancies shared a financial trait: Both were refinanced in 2015 and 2016 while Trump was campaigning for president. The loan for 40 Wall Street — $160 million — was then the Trump Organization’s biggest debt.

The fortunes of 40 Wall Street have risen and fallen repeatedly since it was constructed in 1930. Once briefly in the running to become the world’s tallest skyscraper (before being eclipsed by the Chrysler Building and then others), the 71-story landmark had an illustrious history before falling into disrepair as it changed hands multiple times.

Trump says in his book “Never Give Up” that he took over 40 Wall Street for $1 million during a down market in 1995. Others have reported the price as $10 million. Trump gave the property his signature treatment, decking out the lobby in Italian marble and bronze and christening it “The Trump Building.” Tenants such as American Express moved in.

But the rent rolls suffered when big-name tenants fled to Midtown in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Less blue-chip operations replaced them. In recent years, there were more setbacks. About two years ago, for example, high-end food purveyor Dean & Deluca canceled plans to locate an 18,500-square-foot emporium on the higher-priced first floor. The space remains empty.

The building at 40 Wall was underperforming, charging below-market rents, according to credit-rating agency Moody’s. Its profits were lagging.

Trump’s company, which has sometimes struggled to obtain credit because of his history of bankruptcies and defaults, turned for relief to a financial institution where Donald Trump had a connection: Ladder Capital, which employs Jack Weisselberg, the son of the Trump Organization’s longtime CFO, Allen Weisselberg. Ladder is a publicly traded commercial real estate investment trust that reports more than $6 billion in assets. In 2015, and still today, Jack Weisselberg was an executive director whose job was to make loans.

Trump and Jack Weisselberg had history together. Jack was at UBS, in its loan origination department, in 2006, when the Swiss bank loaned Trump $7 million for his piece of the Trump International Hotel and Tower. Allen Weisselberg had bought a condo from Trump in one of his buildings for a below-market price of $152,500 in 2000. He deeded it to Jack three years later for about $148,000. Jack sold the unit for more than three times as much in 2006. (Jack Weisselberg declined to comment on Ladder’s loans or his relationship with the Trump Organization.)

Even with a sympathetic lender, the struggles at 40 Wall Street would normally raise questions. Trump’s representatives needed to demonstrate signs of the building’s financial health if they wanted a new loan with a lower interest rate.

They had a compelling piece of data, it seemed. Trump’s team told Ladder that occupancy was rebounding after registering a lackluster 58.9% on Dec. 31, 2012. Since then, Trump representatives reported, the building had signed new tenants. Income from them hadn’t fully been realized yet, largely because of free-rent deals, they said. But after 2015, they predicted, revenues would surge.

“That’s a selling point for people in the business,” said Riordan, who was previously the executive director of the Rutgers Center for Real Estate. Borrowers “want to show tremendous leasing momentum.” The steepness of such a rise in occupancy at the Trump building was unusual, Riordan and other experts said.

Documents submitted to city property tax officials show no such run-up. Trump representatives reported to the tax authorities that the building was already 81% leased in 2012.

“What is bizarre is that you have these tax filings that are totally different,” Riordan said. A gap of at least 10 percentage points between the two occupancy reports persisted for the next two years, before the figures in the tax and loan reports synced in January 2016.

The portrayal of a rapid rise in occupancy, and the explanation that income would soon follow, were critical for the refinancing. Indeed, Ladder’s underwriters were predicting that 40 Wall Street’s profits would more than double after 2015. Having reviewed Trump’s financial statements and rent roll, they estimated the building would clear $22.6 million a year in net operating income.

Ladder needed credit ratings agencies like Moody’s and Fitch to endorse its income expectations and give the loan a favorable rating, which would in turn make it easier for the next step of the plan: to package the loan as part of a bond, a so-called commercial mortgage-backed security, and sell it to investors. Without the expected rise in income, Riordan said, the loan size or terms would likely have needed to be renegotiated to satisfy the ratings agencies and investors, which would mean less favorable terms for Trump and Ladder. “There was a story crafted here,” Riordan said. “It’s contradicted by what we see in the tax filings.”

Wallace, the University of California professor, added: “Especially in underwriting loans, you are supposed to truthfully report.” Both the lender and the borrower are required to supply accurate information, she said.

Moody’s and Fitch analysts found the underwriter’s projections slightly too rosy, but Fitch conferred an investment-grade rating on the loan, allowing it to proceed as planned. Trump ultimately received a 10-year loan with a lower interest rate than the building previously had as well as terms that would allow him to defer paying off much of the principal until the end of the loan.

Once granted, the loan to 40 Wall Street ran into trouble: The year after it went through, the loan servicer put it on a “watch list” because of concerns that the building wasn’t making sufficient profit to pay the debt service with enough of a margin. It stayed on the list for three months. (Trump’s company has continued making payments.)

As of 2018, the most recent year available, the building had never met the underwriters’ profit expectations, trailing by more than 8%, according to data from commercial real estate research service Trepp. Experts say that, given the amount of research underwriters do, a property typically meets their expectations fairly quickly.

The 40 Wall Street documents contain discrepancies related to costs as well as to occupancy. Generally, there are “more opportunities to play games on the expense side,” said Ron Shapiro, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School and a former bank senior vice president, “particularly because there are many more kinds of expenses.”

Comparing specific expense items in both sets of records is challenging, because accountants may group categories differently in reports to tax and loan officials. But some differences on 40 Wall Street documents elicit head-scratching.

For example, insurance costs in 2017 were listed as $744,521 in tax documents and $457,414 in loan records.

Then there was the underlying lease. Trump technically doesn’t own 40 Wall Street. He pays the wealthy German family that owns the property for the right to rent the building to tenants. In 2015, both Trump’s report to tax authorities and a key loan disclosure document asserted that Trump’s company paid $1.65 million for these rights that year. But a line-by-line income and expense statement, which Trepp gathered from what the company reported to the loan servicer, reported the company paid about $1.24 million that year.

“I don’t know why that would be off,” said Jason Hoffman, who is chair of the real estate committee for a professional association of certified public accountants in New York state. Like other experts, he said there are legitimate reasons why tax and loan filings might not line up perfectly. But Hoffman said the firm where he works makes sure the numbers match when it prepares both tax and loan documents for a client — or that it can explain why if they don’t.

Financial information for the Trump International Hotel and Tower raises similar questions. Trump owns only a small portion of the building, which is located on Columbus Circle: two commercial spaces, which he rents out to a restaurant and a parking garage. Trump’s company told New York City tax officials it made about $822,000 renting space to commercial tenants there in 2017, records show. The company told loan officials it took in $1.67 million that year — more than twice as much. In eight years of data ProPublica examined for the Columbus Circle property, Trump’s company reported gross income to tax authorities that was typically only about 81% of what it reported to the lender.

Trump appeared to omit from tax documents income his company received from leasing space on the roof for television antennas, a ProPublica review found. The line on tax appeal forms for income from such communications equipment is blank on nine years of tax filings, even as loan documents listed the antennas as major sources of income.

Trump has an easement to lease the roof space; he doesn’t own it. But three tax experts, including Melanie Brock, an appraiser and paralegal who has worked on hundreds of New York City tax cases, told ProPublica that the income should still be reported on the tax appeals forms.

It’s hard to guess what might explain every inconsistency, said David Wilkes, a New York City tax lawyer who is chair of the National Association of Property Tax Attorneys. But, he added, “My gut reaction is it seems like there’s something amiss there.”

Tax records for Trump personally and for his business continue to be subjects of contention in multiple investigations. The Justice Department has intervened in the investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, whose office has sought Trump’s personal tax returns. Congressional lawmakers investigating his business dealings have sought documents from his longtime accountant, Donald Bender, a partner at Mazars. Trump is fighting the subpoenas in court. (Bender did not respond to requests for comment.)

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has said the committee is seeking to determine if Cohen’s testimony about Trump inflating and deflating his assets was accurate. Cummings asked for Mazars’ records related to Trump entities, as well as communications between Bender and Trump or Trump employees since 2009.

Such communications, the subpoena stated, should include any related to potential concerns that information Trump or his representatives provided his accountants was “incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise unsatisfactory.”

Emperor Penguins Are in Mortal Danger Thanks to Us

A species that has come to symbolise Antarctica’s wealth of wildlife now faces mortal danger: climate change is putting emperor penguins in peril.

British scientists say the continent is warming with unparalleled speed, meaning the birds may soon have almost nowhere to breed. Some researchers think the number of emperors could be cut by more than half by 2100.

Philip Trathan, head of conservation biology at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, says: “The current rate of warming in parts of the Antarctic is greater than anything in the recent glaciological record.

“Though emperor penguins have experienced periods of warming and cooling over their evolutionary history, the current rates of warming are unprecedented.

“Currently, we have no idea how the emperors will adjust to the loss of their primary breeding habitat – sea ice. They are not agile, and climbing ashore across steep coastal land forms will be difficult.

Numbers fluctuate

“For breeding, they depend upon sea ice, and in a warming world there is a high probability that this will decrease. Without it, they will have little or no breeding habitat.”

It is not the first time scientists have sounded the alarm for the emperors. This time, though, they are urging potentially far-reaching action.

In a study published in the journal Biological Conservation, an international team of researchers, led by Dr Trathan, recommends new steps to protect and conserve the penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri).

Satellite images in 2012 suggested there were almost 600,000 of the birds in the Antarctic, roughly double the number estimated in 1992. The researchers involved in this latest report reviewed over 150 studies on the species and its environment as well as its behaviour and character in relation to its breeding biology.

“Some colonies of emperor penguins may not survive the coming decades, so we must work to give as much protection as we can to the species”

Current climate change projections indicate that rising temperatures and changing wind patterns will damage the sea ice on which the emperors breed, with some studies showing populations likely to fall by more than 50% over this century.

Before breeding, both males and females must build their body reserves so that females can lay their single egg, and for males to fast while undertaking the entire egg incubation during the Antarctic winter.

Emperors are unique amongst birds because they breed on seasonal Antarctic sea ice which they need while incubating their eggs and raising their chicks.

They also need stable sea ice after they have completed breeding, during the time when they undergo their annual moult. They cannot enter the water then as their feathers are no longer waterproof, leaving them unable to enter the sea.

So the researchers are recommending that the IUCN status for the species be raised from “near-threatened” to “vulnerable” on the IUCN Red List.  They say improvements in climate change forecasting of impacts on Antarctic wildlife would help, and recommend that the emperors should be listed by the Antarctic Treaty as a specially protected species.

Wider appeal

Better protection will let scientists coordinate research into the penguins’ resilience to a range of different threats and stressors.

Dr Peter Fretwell, remote sensing specialist at BAS and a co-author of the study, says: “Some colonies of emperor penguins may not survive the coming decades, so we must work to give as much protection as we can to the species to give them the best chance.”

The UK was one of the countries which notified the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting at its 2019 meeting in July that emperor penguins were threatened by the loss of their breeding habitat and that further protection was needed.

A similar paper has also been submitted to this year’s Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), which meets in the Tasmanian capital, Hobart, later this month.

The Latest Blow to Journalism Comes From an Unexpected Place

Like most politicians, corporate executives never do anything wrong. If anything wrong does “happen,” it’s always someone else’s fault.

That’s been the gutless ploy of Kroger supermarket executives, who recently yanked all local newsweeklies and community papers out of their stores.

When a firestorm of local protests reached all the way to the mega-chain’s Cincinnati headquarters, executives quickly named the villain who banished the papers: the papers themselves! They failed to keep up with the digital age, said Kroger bosses, so shoppers no longer pick up the free papers.

That’s bovine excrement.

While it’s true that many daily newspapers are losing readers, more readers have turned to free local, independent weeklies to fill the print-news gap. In Lansing, Michigan, for example, media audits show that Kroger shoppers alone have nearly tripled the pickup rate of Lansing’s alternative weekly since 2012.

Kroger’s nationwide edict is a case of corporate conceit at its most stupid. It was issued from Kroger headquarters with no warning and no consultation (much less negotiation) with the papers or communities.

It didn’t have to be so inept and ugly — and now Kroger’s executives have gone into hiding, petulantly refusing to meet or even return phone calls to the people they’re hurting, apparently hoping the furor will just go away.

That’s truly stupid. Indeed, a group of independent papers has now launched a national campaign to call out Kroger’s executives, rallying supporters of independent local news to give them our two-cents-worth.

Call toll-free to 1-800-KROGERS (576-4377), then press 3 for “store experience” to speak to a manager — and demand that they restore the free press to all of their stores.

Sanders Blasts 2020 Democrats for Defending Health Insurance Industry

During a portion of Tuesday night’s Democratic debate focused on healthcare, Sen. Bernie Sanders interjected to castigate some of his 2020 primary rivals—namely former vice president Joe Biden and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg—for again repeating right-wing talking points against Medicare for All and defending the primacy of the for-profit insurance industry.

“I get a little bit tired, I must say, of people defending a system which is dysfunctional, which is cruel,” Sanders said, as he cast glances at Biden and Buttigieg. “Eighty-seven million uninsured, thirty-thousand people dying every single year, five-hundred thousand going bankrupt—for what reason?—they came down with cancer.”

“I will tell you what the issue is here,” Sanders continued. “The issue is whether the Democratic Party has the guts to stand up to the healthcare industry which made a $100 billion in profits; whether we have the guts to stand up to the corrupt, price-fixing pharmaceutical industy which is charging us the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. If we don’t have the guts to do that—if all we can do is take their money—we should be ashamed of ourselves.”

Watch:

We are a LITTLE BIT TIRED of people defending a dysfunctional, cruel system!

“The issue is, does the Dem Party have the guts to stand up to the healthcare insurance, the corrupt pharmaceutical industry, if we don’t have the guts to do that, we should be ashamed of ourselves” pic.twitter.com/uAewZCwlrk

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) October 16, 2019

Applause for Sanders’ comment followed, with former labor secretary and economist Robert Reich stating, “No one can match Bernie Sanders for righteous indignation about our screwed-up system.”

In response to Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted:

Thank you! There are too many plans out there that seem more interested in protecting corporate profits than protecting the lives of working Americans.

We need #MedicareForAll, and we need it now. https://t.co/Te8c8g0tJS

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 16, 2019

And the Pod Save America team put it simply: “Bernie Sanders is tired of your shit on healthcare in America.”

Bernie Sanders to Receive Democrats’ Most Coveted Endorsement

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders for president, The Washington Post reported Tuesday night, a political coup for the Vermont senator as he looks to increase his standing in the polls for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“This is big,” said Politico campaign reporter Holly Otterbein after confirming the news with members of the Sanders campaign.

According to the Post:

The endorsement could be a blow for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who, like Sanders, is running on a platform of sweeping liberal change and who has emphasized her role as a female pioneer. Ocasio-Cortez had worked as a volunteer organizer for Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid; she was recruited to run for Congress in 2018 by Justice Democrats, a group that grew out of the Sanders campaign.

[…]

Her backing was a sought-after prize in the Democratic primary, and it was widely assumed that she would endorse either Sanders or Warren, the most liberal figures in the contest.

“This was always to be expected,” The Intercept‘s Medhi Hasan said on Twitter. “He’s the candidate most in line with her values and policies—even more so than Warren.”

Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) will also endorse Sanders, reported CNN‘s Greg Krieg.

“Bernie is leading a working-class movement to defeat Donald Trump that transcends generation, ethnicity and geography,” Omar said in a statement, adding, “it’s why I believe Bernie Sanders is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump in 2020.”

“Ilhan is a leader of strength and courage,” said Sanders. “She will not back down from a fight with billionaires and the world’s most powerful corporations to transform our country so it works for all of us. I’m proud of what we’ve done in Congress, and together we will build a multiracial working-class coalition to win the White House.”

IT’S HAPPENING https://t.co/utmCX8deJH

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) October 16, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar—representing three of the four progressive House freshman known as “the Squad”—are expected to appear alongside Sanders at a rally in New York City Saturday.

“We’re looking forward to Saturday,” Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent told the Post.

New: Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib will also endorse Sanders, according to source. AOC will, as @daveweigel and @WaPoSean first reported, will do the same on Saturday in NYC.

— Greg Krieg (@GregJKrieg) October 16, 2019

The news broke in the waning minutes of a primary debate featuring Sanders and 11 of his rivals for the nomination in which Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) fended off attacks from more right-wing candidates on issues like Medicare for All, Sanders’ signature legislation.

“Between his stellar performance at the debate tonight and AOC’s pending endorsement,” tweeted Al Jazeera journalist Sana Saeed, “this is a huge moment and Sanders cannot, and should not, be ignored any longer by those who continue to erase him, his candidacy, and his supporters.”

Reflecting on the strong performance and the endorsement, Young Turks reporter Emma Vigeland called it “a historic night for the Sanders campaign.”

“These endorsements just fired me up even more,” said activist Linda Sarsour.

Debate Rivals Assail Warren as She Joins Democrats’ Top Rank

Elizabeth Warren repeatedly came under attack during Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate as rivals accused the Massachusetts senator of ducking questions about the cost of Medicare for All and her signature “wealth tax” plan.

The pile-on was the clearest sign yet that Warren has a new status in the crowded Democratic primary: a front-runner in the contest to take on President Donald Trump next year.

The night’s confrontations were mostly fought on familiar terrain for Democrats, who have spent months sparring over the future of health care with moderates pressing for a measured approach while Warren and Bernie Sanders call for a dramatic, government-funded overhaul of the insurance market. But unlike Sanders, Warren refused to say whether she would raise taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for All — a stance that’s increasingly difficult to maintain given her more prominent status.

Her rivals seized on the opportunity to pounce.

“I appreciate Elizabeth’s work but, again, the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something you can actually get done,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, added: “We heard it tonight. A ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question that didn’t get a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.”

Warren insisted that she has “made clear what my principles are here,” arguing that lower premiums would mean that overall costs would go down for most Americans.

Featuring a dozen candidates, the debate sponsored by CNN and The New York Times was the largest in modern history. It was the first time the White House hopefuls gathered in a little more than a month. In that time, the political landscape has changed with Trump facing an impeachment inquiry in the House centered on his quest to get Ukraine to dig up unflattering details about Joe Biden, another front-runner among the Democrats hoping to succeed him.

The debate also served as Sanders’ return to the campaign trail following a heart attack earlier this month. The Vermont senator failed to show the same fire as in previous debates. He got applause when he thanked supporters and rivals for their good wishes and declared, “I’m feeling great.”

The debate touched on foreign policy, too, a subject that has dominated the news in recent weeks as Trump said he was withdrawing most U.S. forces from Syria and then Turkey invaded the northern part of the country to attack Kurdish fighters. The Democratic presidential candidates denounced the president for abandoning Kurdish forces there, who are U.S. allies.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who served in Iraq with the Army, questioned the need for U.S. involvement in “regime change” conflicts in the Middle East. That prompted Buttigieg to respond: “What we are doing or what we were doing in Syria was keeping our word.”

“I would have a hard time today looking an Afghan civilian or soldier in the eye after what just happened over there,” said Buttigieg, who served in Afghanistan. “It is undermining the honor of our soldiers. You take away the honor of our soldiers, you might as well go after their body armor next.”

Biden had spent months facing sharp criticism from the rest of the field during debates, but he saw few candidates engage with him on Tuesday. Still, he struggled to fully explain why his newly promised ethics plan to prevent conflicts of interest involving his relatives wasn’t applied to his son Hunter when he was hired in 2014 as a director for a Ukrainian energy company.

That relationship has become a focal point of Trump’s effort to press for a Ukrainian government probe of the Bidens — an effort that was a major factor leading to the House impeachment inquiry into the president.

On Sunday, Biden had vowed that “no one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in on meetings as if they’re a cabinet member, will in fact have any business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country.”

But CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked, “If it’s not OK for a president’s family to be involved in foreign businesses, why was it OK for your son when you were vice president?”

Biden faltered some before offering, “My son did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong.”

Still, most of the back-and-forth focused on Warren. Taking aim at her proposal to tax the wealthiest Americans, Klobuchar said, “I want to give a reality check here” and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke suggested it was “punitive.”

The senator said that notion shocked her: “I don’t have a beef with billionaires.”

“Look, I understand that this is hard, but I think as Democrats we are going to succeed when we dream big and fight hard, not when we dream small and quit before we get started,” she said.

Also debating were California Sen. Kamala Harris, New York entrepreneur Andrew Yang, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and former Obama housing chief Julián Castro. Making his debate debut was billionaire activist Tom Steyer.

___

Weissert and Superville reported from Washington. Associated Press Writer Thomas Beaumont contributed from Des Moines, Iowa.

Felicity Huffman Starts Serving Prison Time in College Scam

SAN FRANCISCO — “Desperate Housewives” star Felicity Huffman — aka inmate No. 77806-112 — reported Tuesday to a federal prison in California to serve a two-week sentence in a college admissions scandal that underscored the lengths some wealthy parents will go to get their children into top universities.

Huffman’s husband, actor William H. Macy, dropped her off at the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, a low-security prison for women in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to TASC Group, which represents Huffman.

The prison has been described by media as “Club Fed,” making its way onto a Forbes list in 2009 of “America’s 10 Cushiest Prisons.” It has housed well-known inmates in the past, including “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss.

Once inside the prison, Huffman will share a room and open toilet with three other inmates, according to a TASC Group publicist who declined to be named in accordance with company policy. The person said the actress will be subjected to five bed checks a day while having access to a gym, library and TV room.

Sally Swarts, a spokeswoman for the prison, said she could not provide specific information on Huffman but noted that everything in the inmate handbook would apply to the actress.

It says inmates are assigned khaki pants, blouse and brown T-shirt with a nametag that must be displayed all the time. Wakeup on weekdays is 5 a.m., with breakfast at 5:30, and beds must be made by 6. Inmates who have been medically cleared typically work in food service, a maintenance shop or as a unit orderly.

Huffman, 56, “is prepared to serve the term of imprisonment Judge (Indira) Talwani ordered as one part of the punishment she imposed for Ms. Huffman’s actions,” the TASC Group said in a statement that provided no further details.

A federal judge in Boston sentenced Huffman last month to 14 days in prison, a $30,000 fine, 250 hours of community service and a year’s probation after she pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy for paying an admissions consultant $15,000 to have a proctor correct her daughter’s SAT answers.

The Emmy-award winning actress tearfully apologized at her sentencing, saying, “I was frightened. I was stupid, and I was so wrong.”

The judge noted that Huffman took steps “to get one more advantage” for her daughter in a system “already so distorted by money and privilege.”

Huffman was the first parent sentenced in the scandal, which was the biggest college admissions case ever prosecuted by the Justice Department.

A total of 51 people have been charged in the case. Many of the parents are accused of paying William “Rick” Singer, an admissions consultant at the center of the scheme, to bribe exam administrators to allow someone else to take tests for their children or to correct their answers, authorities say. Others are accused of paying Singer to bribe coaches in exchange for helping their children get into schools as fake athletic recruits.

Huffman paid $15,000 to boost her older daughter’s SAT scores. Singer, who has pleaded guilty, was accused of bribing a test proctor to correct the teenager’s answers.

The amount Huffman paid is relatively low compared with other alleged bribes in the scheme. Some parents were accused of paying up to $500,000.

Opioid Crisis Cost $631 Billion to U.S. Economy Over 4 Years, Study Says

The opioid crisis cost the U.S. economy $631 billion from 2015 through last year — and it may keep getting more expensive, according to a study released Tuesday by the Society of Actuaries.

The biggest driver of the cost over the four-year period is unrealized lifetime earnings of those who died from the drugs, followed by health care costs.

While more than 2,000 state and local governments have sued the drug industry over the crisis, the report released Tuesday finds that governments bear less than one-third of the financial costs. The rest of it affects individuals and the private sector.

The federal government is tracking how many lives are lost to the opioid crisis (more than 400,000 Americans since 2000), but pinning down the financial cost is less certain.

A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from found the cost for 2013 at $79 billion. That’s less than half the cost that the latest report has found in more recent years. The crisis also has deepened since 2013, with fentanyl and other strong synthetic opioids contributing to a higher number of deaths. Overall, opioid-related death numbers rose through 2017 before leveling off last year at about 47,000.

A study published in 2017 by the White House Council of Economic Advisers estimated a far higher cost — just over $500 billion a year. The new study notes that the White House one used much higher figures for the value of lives lost to opioids — attempting to quantify their economic value rather than just future income.

The actuaries’ report is intended partly to help the insurance industry figure out how to factor opioid use disorder into policy pricing.

It found that the cost of the opioid crisis this year is likely to be between $171 billion and $214 billion. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the cost would be higher than it was in 2017.

The study was released just ahead of the first federal trial on the opioid crisis, scheduled to start next week in Cleveland where a jury will hear claims from Ohio’s Cuyahoga and Summit counties against six companies. The counties claim the drug industry created a public nuisance and should pay.

The report found that criminal justice and child-welfare system costs have been pushed up by the opioid epidemic.

Most of the added health care costs for dealing with opioid addiction and overdoses were borne by Medicaid, Medicare and other government programs, according to the report. Still, the crisis rang up $18 billion in commercial insurance costs last year. Lost productivity costs added another $27 billion.

Businesses have begun noticing. Last week, a small West Virginia home improvement company, Al Marino Inc., filed a class-action lawsuit against several companies, claiming the opioid crisis was a reason its health insurance costs were skyrocketing.

Still, the biggest cost burden fell on families due to lost earnings of those who died. Those mortality costs alone came to more than $72 billion last year, the report said.

Members of a committee representing unsecured creditors helping guide opioid maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy process have been calling for money in any settlement to go toward to people affected by the crisis and not just governments.