Chris Hedges's Blog, page 132

Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Hit to Homeowners

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This story was co-published with Fortune.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has been talking about plans for, as he put it, a “very substantial tax cut for middle income folks who work so hard.” But before Congress embarks on a new tax measure, people should consider one of the largely unexamined effects of the last tax bill, which Trump promised would help the middle class: Would you believe it has inflicted a trillion dollars of damage on homeowners — many of them middle class — throughout the country?

That massive number is the reduction in home values caused by the 2017 tax law that capped federal deductions for state and local real estate and income taxes at $10,000 a year and also eliminated some mortgage interest deductions. The impact varies widely across different areas. Counties with high home prices and high real estate taxes and where homeowners have big mortgages are suffering the biggest hit, as you’d expect, given the larger value of the lost tax deductions. But as we’ll see, homeowners all over the country are feeling the effects.

I’m basing my analysis on numbers from two well-respected people: Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics; and Hugh Lamle, the retired president of M.D. Sass, a Wall Street investment management company.

Zandi’s numbers are broad — macro-math, as it were. Lamle (pronounced LAM-lee) is a master of micro-math. It was Lamle who first got me thinking about home value losses by sending me an economic model that he created to show the damage inflicted on high-end, high-bracket taxpayers in high-tax areas who paid seven digits or more for their homes.

Lamle starts with the premise that homebuyers have typically figured out how much house they can afford by calculating how much they can spend on a down payment and monthly mortgage payment, adjusting the latter by the amount they’d save via the tax deduction for mortgage interest and real estate taxes. His model figures out how much prices would have to drop for the same monthly payment to cover a given house now that this notional buyer can’t take advantage of the real estate tax deduction and might not be able to take full advantage of the mortgage interest deduction.

After I showed Lamle’s model to my ProPublica research partner, Doris Burke, she steered me to Zandi’s research, which I realized could be used to calculate national value-loss numbers.

Ready? Here we go. The broad picture first, then the specific. This gets a little complicated, so please bear with me.

Zandi says that because of the 2017 tax law, U.S. house prices overall are about 4% lower than they’d otherwise be. The next question is how many dollars of lost home value that 4% translates into. That isn’t so hard to figure out if you get your hands on the right numbers.

Let me show you.

The Federal Reserve Board says that as of March 31, U.S. home values totaled about $26.1 trillion. Apply Zandi’s 4% number to that, and you end up with a $1.04 trillion setback for the nation’s home owners. That’s right — a trillion, with a T.

Please note that Zandi isn’t saying that house prices have fallen by an average of 4%. That hasn’t happened. What he’s saying is that on average, house prices are about 4% lower than they’d otherwise be.

Given that the Fed statistics show that homeowners’ equity was $15.76 trillion as of March 31, Zandi’s numbers imply that homeowners’ equity is down about 6.6% from where it would otherwise be. (That’s the $1.04 trillion value loss divided by the $15.76 trillion of equity.)

This is a very big deal to families whose biggest financial asset is the equity they have in their homes. And there are untold millions of families in that situation.

While Zandi and I were having the first of several phone conversations, he sent me a county-by-county list of the estimated home-price damage done to about 3,000 counties throughout the country. I was fascinated — and appalled — to see that the biggest estimated value loss in percentage terms, 11.3%, was in Essex County, New Jersey, the New York City suburb where I live.

In case you’re interested — or just snoopy — the four other counties that make up the five biggest-losers list are: Westchester County, New York, suburban New York City, 11.1%; Union County, New Jersey, which is adjacent to Essex County, 11.0%; New York County, the New York City borough of Manhattan, 10.4%; and Lake County, Illinois, suburban Chicago, 9.9%.

You can find Zandi’s county-by-county list in our Data Store. Eyeball the list, and you’ll see that counties throughout the country have home values lower than they would otherwise be.

Here’s how it works. Zandi took what financial techies call the “present value” of the property tax and mortgage interest deductions that homeowners will lose over seven years (the average duration of a mortgage) because of changes in the tax law and subtracted it from the value of the typical house. That results in a 3% decline in national home values below what they would otherwise be.

The remaining one percentage point of value shrinkage, Zandi says, comes from the higher interest rates that he says will result from the higher federal budget deficits caused by the tax bill. He estimates that rates on 10-year Treasury notes, a key benchmark for mortgage rates, will be 0.2% higher than they would otherwise be, which in turn will make mortgage rates 0.2% higher.

Even though interest rates on 10-year Treasury notes are at or near record lows as I write this, they would be even lower if the Treasury were borrowing less than it’s currently borrowing to cover the higher federal budget deficits caused by Trump’s tax bill.

If Zandi’s interest-rate take is correct — it’s true by definition, if you believe in the law of supply and demand — even homeowners who aren’t affected by the inability to deduct all their real estate taxes and mortgage interest costs are affected by the tax bill.

How so? Because higher interest rates for buyers translate into lower prices for sellers and therefore produce lower values for owners.

You can argue, as some people do, that real estate taxes should never have been deductible because allowing that deduction is bad economic policy that inflated home prices and favored higher-income people over lower-income people.

But even if you believe that, there’s no question that eliminating the deduction for millions of homeowners inflicted serious financial damage on homeowners who had no warning that a major tax deduction that they were used to getting would be wiped out.

As a result, homebuyers who had taken the value of the real estate tax deduction into account when buying their homes had their home values and finances whacked without warning. Interest deductions on mortgage borrowings exceeding $750,000 were cut back, compared with interest deductions on up to $1 million under the old law — but that doesn’t affect anywhere near as many people as the cap on real estate tax deductions does.

(A brief aside: Among the modest winners here are first-time buyers who purchased their homes after the tax law took effect and benefited by paying less than they would have paid under the old tax rules.)

Now, to the micro-math.

Lamle’s model isn’t applicable to most people because it works only for taxpayers with a household income of at least $200,000 a year who paid at least $1 million for their homes. But the principle underlying Lamle’s model applies to everyone who owns a home or is interested in owning one. To wit: You calculate the tax-law-caused loss of value by figuring out how much a house’s price needs to fall for buyers’ or owners’ after-tax costs to be the same now as they were before the tax law changed.

“People buying large-ticket items typically focus on after-tax costs of ownership,” Lamle told me. “The amount that many buyers can afford is affected by limits on their financial resources. Therefore, as their tax costs increase substantially because of the loss of tax deductions, they have less money available to pay for homes and to take on mortgage debt.”

At the suggestion of one of my editors, I asked Lamle to use a modified version of his economic model to estimate the tax law’s impact on the value of a theoretical house in the New York City suburb of West Orange, New Jersey, purchased for $800,000 in 2017 by a theoretical family with a $250,000 annual income. Those home value and income numbers are very high by national standards — but middle class by the standards of large parts of suburban Essex County.

Real estate tax on that theoretical house would run about $28,900 a year, according to statistics from the New Jersey state treasurer’s office. That tax used to be fully deductible for federal tax purposes. Now, it’s not deductible at all if you assume that the house’s owners are taking the standard deduction on their federal returns. Or that even if they’re itemizing deductions, they’re paying at least $10,000 of state income taxes, which means they don’t get any benefit from deducting property taxes.

According to Lamle’s calculations, this inability to deduct real estate tax has reduced the home’s value by $138,720, assuming a 5% mortgage rate. At a 4% rate, the value loss is $173,400. (For the math and assumptions underlying these numbers, see his methodology below.) So if the family put up $200,000 — 25% of the purchase price — to buy the house, more than half of that investment has been wiped out.

Obviously, it’s impossible to prove that Zandi and Lamle are right about the impact they say the tax law is having (and will continue to have) on home prices, because there’s no way to gauge the accuracy of their numbers. But the logic is compelling.

The loss in home values is crucial because it turns out that lots more people have bigger financial stakes in their houses than in their stock portfolios, which have thrived as the Trump tax law turbocharged corporate earnings and stock prices.

In fact, 73.5% of households that own homes, stocks or both had bigger stakes in the home market than in the stock market, according to David Rosnick, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who parsed Federal Reserve data at my request.

Now, let’s put things in perspective, set aside home value losses for a minute and talk about the cash that people are getting from Trump’s 2017 tax law. It isn’t all that much for most families. Households’ average federal income tax has fallen by $1,260 a year, according to the Tax Policy Center. That average is skewed by big savings realized by people with big incomes; the median family’s tax cut is only about half as much as the average cut, by the Tax Policy Center’s math.

This means that means that — for taxpayers of higher income and more modest income — the income tax savings are likely small beer compared with the hidden loss inflicted on many of them by lower house values.

Back to the main event. And some final — but important — numbers.

According to the Tax Policy Center, the Treasury will get $620 billion of additional revenue over a 10-year period because people can’t deduct their full state and local taxes.

That, in turn, covers most of the 10-year, $680 billion cost of the income tax break that corporations are getting. So you can make a case that my friends and neighbors and co-workers in New York and New Jersey — and many of you all over the country — are paying more federal income tax in order to help corporations pay less federal income tax.

That, my friends, is the bottom line.

Dinged by the 2017 Tax Bill

Applying the formula devised by economist Mark Zandi, which estimates the effect of the tax bill on house values, the 30 counties below saw the biggest percentage declines. To see results for all counties and county-equivalents, visit our Data Store.



County
State
% Change




Essex
NJ
-11.3%


Westchester
NY
-11.1%


Union
NJ
-11.0%


New York
NY
-10.4%


Lake
IL
-9.9%


Bergen
NJ
-9.9%


Passaic
NJ
-9.8%


Somerset
NJ
-9.8%


Mercer
NJ
-9.6%


Hunterdon
NJ
-9.6%


Gloucester
NJ
-9.5%


Nassau
NY
-9.4%


Fairfield
CT
-9.4%


Camden
NJ
-9.2%


Morris
NJ
-9.0%


Hudson
NJ
-9.0%


Rockland
NY
-8.7%


Putnam
NY
-8.7%


Kendall
IL
-8.7%


McHenry
IL
-8.4%


Burlington
NJ
-8.3%


Sussex
NJ
-8.2%


Middlesex
NJ
-8.0%


Hartford
CT
-7.6%


Will
IL
-7.5%


DuPage
IL
-7.4%


Monmouth
NJ
-7.3%


Orange
NY
-7.3%


Montgomery
TX
-7.2%


Warren
NJ
-7.1%

Source: Mark Zandi/Moody’s Analytics

California Adopts Broadest U.S. Rules for Seizing Guns

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday signed a law that will make the state the first to allow employers, co-workers and teachers to seek gun violence restraining orders against other people.

The bill was vetoed twice by former governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and goes beyond a measure that he signed allowing only law enforcement officers and immediate family members to ask judges to temporarily take away peoples’ guns when they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.

Newsom is also a Democrat and signed a companion bill allowing the gun violence restraining orders to last one and five years, although the gun owners could petition to end those restrictions earlier.

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The new laws are were among 15 gun-related laws that has Newsom approved as the state strengthens what the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence calls the nation’s toughest restrictions.

“California has outperformed the rest of the nation, because of our gun safety laws, in reducing the gun murder rate substantially compared to the national reduction,” Newsom said as he signed the measures surrounded by state lawmakers. “No state does it as well or comprehensively as the state of California, and we still have a long way to go.”

Between 1993 and 2017, the latest available, there was a 62% decline in the gun murder rate in California, nearly double the 34% nationally, he said.

Brady Campaign spokeswoman Amanda Wilcox, who lost her 19-year-old daughter to gun violence in 2001, said that California’s laws are already so strict that the latest bills amount to “tweaks to policies already in place, ways to improve implementation” of existing limits.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have laws similar to California’s current restraining order law, but the new law that takes effect on Jan. 1 will be broader.

“With school and workplace shootings on the rise, it’s common sense to give the people we see every day the power to intervene and prevent tragedies,” said the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting of San Francisco. The existing law has mostly been used by police officers, but Ting said the expansion should allow more awareness and more opportunity for others to act.

Hawaii allows the restraining order petitions by medical professionals, co-workers, and educators but not employers, Ting’s office said. It cited information from the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.

Maryland allows the restraining order petitions by health care providers and Washington, D.C., allows mental health providers to petition, while New York allows them from school administrators.

The California law will require co-workers requesting the orders to have “substantial and regular interactions” with gun owners to seek the orders and co-workers and school employees must get approval from their employers or school administrators before seeking them. People seeking the orders will have to file sworn statements specifying their reasons for doing so.

The measure was opposed by gun owners’ rights groups and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU said the bill “poses a significant threat to civil liberties” because orders can be sought before gun owners have an opportunity to contest the requests.

Those allowed to request orders under the new law may “lack the relationship or skills required to make an appropriate assessment,” the ACLU said.

Ting cited a recent study finding that gun restraining order laws may have helped prevent 21 mass shootings, though the University of California, Davis, researchers cautioned that “it is impossible to know whether violence would have occurred.”

The companion bill was authored by Democratic Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin of Thousand Oaks, who cited last year’s slaying of a dozen people at the Borderline Bar and Grill in her Southern California community of Thousand Oaks.

Aside from extending the restraining orders to a maximum of five years, her bill allows judges to issue search warrants at the same time as they grant the orders. The warrants can be used immediately if the gun owners are served with the relinquishment orders but fail to turn over the firearms or ammunition.

Irwin also authored related legislation requiring law enforcement agencies to develop written policies and standards for seeking gun violence restraining orders.

Ting also has a companion bill that would allow gun owners starting next September who are the subjects of restraining order requests to file a form with the court saying they won’t contest the requests and are surrendering their firearms. Under current law, even those who agree to give up their guns must go through a court hearing, which Ting says wastes time and resources.

A final related bill by Democratic Assemblywoman Sabrina Cervantes of Riverside makes people subject to restraining orders in other states to the same restrictions in California.

Hurricanes Wreak Greater Havoc as Temperatures Soar

The worst things that can happen could be about to get even worse. While the economic cost of the average flood, drought, windstorm, landslide or forest fire has crept up over the decades, the price exacted by the most extreme events – such as hurricanes Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and Dorian over the Bahamas this year – has increased drastically.

Weather-related disasters have been steadily increasing for decades, driven by rising atmospheric temperatures as a consequence of profligate use of fossil fuels and other human actions.

Although better information, advance warning systems and community preparedness have in many ways reduced or contained the loss of life, the economic costs have risen, on average.

The average count is not the only one that matters, though. According to European and US researchers, the top 5% of all disasters are proving radically more expensive.

Extreme disasters

“When we get to the top 1%, damages increased approximately twentyfold between 1970 and 2010,” says Francesa Chiaromonte, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University in the US.

“This may be due to the fact that extreme disasters are now hitting temperate areas, as well as the fact that these areas are less prepared to deal with extreme disasters compared to tropical regions.”

The most powerful hurricanes, which would have caused $500 million in losses in 1970, are now costing $10 billion.

Chiaromonte and colleagues from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they deployed statistical wizardry to tease out the unexpected patterns from a mountain of data on decades of natural disaster.

The data was compiled by international agencies and governments, and also by insurance giants that last year paid out $80 billion in insured losses. Total disaster damage was perhaps twice that figure.

Human numbers have multiplied and economies have grown, so disaster damage will anyway have become more costly. But one of the earliest predictions from climate research was that, in a hotter world, the extremes of heat, drought, rainfall, tornado, wildfire, hurricane and tropical cyclone would become more intense, or more frequent, or both – with devastating consequences.

“We observed an increasing polarisation between poor and rich areas of the world for casualties caused by storms”

Concerted international and national action, orchestrated over the decades by what is now called the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, has softened some of the impact, and has reduced loss of life in many cases.

Extreme droughts, the report’s authors say, have become less fatal. “So have extreme floods, but only in rich countries,” the report points out. “We observed an increasing polarisation between poor and rich areas of the world also for casualties caused by storms.

“Finally, and concerningly, extreme temperature events have become more deadly in poor and rich countries alike.”

In a deadpan conclusion, the authors point out that if the increase in the frequency and strength of natural disasters is in part due to climate change, then “mitigation is a logical instrument to reduce trends in damages”.

Actually, Rudy Giuliani Has Always Been Like This

“I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero…. Anything I did should be praised.”

These are the words of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, speaking of the government operative who leaked information about the president’s conversations with the Ukrainian president that has led to impeachment proceedings. Out of context, they appear to be narcissistic ravings. In context, they are just another installment of the constant refrain Americans are used to hearing from the president’s lead defender. No matter how unhinged Giuliani sounds in one interview, the cameras go back to him again and again.

The regular media meltdowns have almost become a real-time comedy for US news consumers, although it has all taken a serious turn. He’s now the focus of the impeachment probes as well; two of his associates were recently arrested.

US media are asking: How could this happen? How did a two-term mayor of a major city, previously a famous federal prosecutor, and someone thought to be a future president, once lauded for reducing crime in New York City and serving as a rallying figure after the World Trade Center attacks, turn into such a primetime clown of the Trump era? How could a crime fighter become the center of criminal intrigue?

In the New York Times (10/7/19), a former Giuliani mayoral campaign operative asked “what happened” to the former mayor, recalling a brave man who took on a powerful Democratic Party and a broken city, citing his successes in “reducing crime, improving the quality of life and reforming welfare as mayor.”

The New York Daily News editorial board (9/28/19) sharply posed several questions to Giuliani as Trump’s personal lawyer, but not before lauding him:

What’s really impossible is recognizing this Rudy as the man we once admired, first as a US attorney who dismantled the mob, then as a mayor who drove down crime, rescued a suffering city from decline and led us through our darkest days on 9/11 and its aftermath.

Max Boot (Washington Post, 5/4/18) claimed that “Giuliani, more than any other individual, made New York what it is today: one of the safest, richest and most dynamic cities in the world.”

Even before the election of Donald Trump, Bloomberg columnist Albert Hunt (10/4/16) lamented that the ex-mayor’s sycophancy for Trump overshadowed how “he once captivated Americans with his take-charge leadership after the terrorist attacks of September 11.” Hardcore neoconservative and “never Trump” Republican Max Boot, in the Washington Post (5/4/18) last year, listed Giuliani as one of the comrades he had “admired and respected” who had “failed the Trump test.”

It seems like so much of the media cannot square the Giuliani of today with the towering figure of the 1980s and ’90s. But Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker (9/3/18) pulled it together:

As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked “squeegee men” off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along. Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” In Giuliani, the president has found him.

For New York City reporters who covered Giuliani’s operatic mayoralty, the Giuliani who famously claimed in defense of Trump that “truth isn’t truth” hasn’t changed so much.

Robert Polner—who covered the mayor for Newsday and edited a book on Giuliani, America’s Mayor, America’s President?—told FAIR that “you’re seeing a more extreme version of what he was doing as mayor,” a politician who was obsessed with being the center of the media’s attention and who stoked racial tension for political advantage.

To show just how petulant and petty Giuliani could be as mayor, consider this: He attempted to force the Grammy Award ceremony out of New York City due to a dispute with its organizers over whether he’d be the one to read a list of the nominees. In 2000, he announced at a press conference that he was leaving his wife, Donna Hanover, before telling her of his divorce plans. Giuliani pushed out his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, not because he was failing to implement the mayor’s anti-crime agenda, but because Bratton was stealing the media spotlight from Giuliani. Noted Polner:

There was always a side of Rudy that was overreaching, hyperbolic, throwing punches in order to control the media narrative of that day or that work or out of pettiness, or as he would say, rein in the liberal city.

Giuliani was famously gruff with the media during press conferences, painting them as part of the effete liberal class he was fighting against, foreshadowing Trump’s current campaign against the press.

But it isn’t just mere theatrics that unite Trump and Giuliani; it’s also political substance. While many Republicans ally themselves with the president for political expedience, the president and the former mayor share an obsession with “law and order,” a focus on militarized policing as the solution to racialized fears of crime, and a tendency toward a more fascistic section of the right than the rest of the Republican Party.

Some saw that early on. The late Jimmy Breslin likened Giuliani to Benito Mussolini, calling him “a small man in search of a balcony.” The Daily Show’s first host, Craig Kilborn, routinely called him “Benito Giuliani.”

Polner pointed to another connection between the former mayor and the current president:

Giuliani was really focused on his base, and he never got beyond that. He could have reached out the black community, but never did, and used them to appeal to the base of white ethnics. He alienated blacks, he alienated Haitians, he alienated Latinos.

Giuliani’s fierce “anti-crime” agenda resulted in what many consider to be a reign of anti-black police terror, marked by the wrongful deaths of black men like Patrick Dorismond and Amadou Diallo, and the brutal beating and violation of Abner Louima by police officers.

Polner also questioned Giuliani should be credited with other victories, like reducing homelessness or reforming welfare, as pieces like the Times op-ed (10/7/19) did. These reforms resulted in things like homeless people being arrested. On welfare reform, while Giuliani cut the city’s welfare rolls in half, welfare advocates argued that this forced the next mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to inherit a ballooning poverty increase.

“It was done without too much thought to the human impact,” he said.

The racial animus Trump has for Latino immigrants, for example, echoes Giuliani’s racist politics, in which he consistently dismissed black anger over police violence. “The patronizing talk is similar,” Polner said. “He had no black support, and he didn’t seem to care.”

A great deal of this gets forgotten, since Giuliani was heralded as a hero when the United States was desperately looking for one after the WTC attacks—despite the fact that his actions on the day of the attacks contributed to the deaths of emergency responders, and his insistence that the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe without filtration no doubt led to the deaths of many more (Extra!, 11–12/06, 5–6/07). He was also credited with a drop in crime, which allowed capital to return to the city—though the decline in the city’s crime began in 1990, three years before Giuliani took office, and paralleled similar declines in violence in other large cities (FAIR.org, 8/20/13, 12/3/14). Both these myths helped establish his image nationally.

“Giuliani’s behavior now reminds people of his divisiveness,” Polner said. But “New Yorkers cast a knowing eye on his antics on Fox…. They know how vicious he can be.”

Authorities Order 100,000 Evacuated in California Wildfire

LOS ANGELES — A wildfire raged out of control along the northern edge of Los Angeles early Friday, forcing thousands of people from their homes as firefighters battled flames from the air and on the ground.

Police Chief Michel Moore said mandatory evacuations encompassed about 100,000 people in over 20,000 homes.

Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas said the fire had grown to more than 7 square miles (18 square kilometers) and at least 25 homes had been damaged. A middle-aged man who was near where the fire was burning went into cardiac arrest and died, the chief said, but he did not have details.

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The blaze erupted around 9 p.m. Thursday along the northern tier of the San Fernando Valley as powerful Santa Ana winds swept through Southern California. Smoke streamed across the city and out to sea.

Terrazas said there were sustained winds of 20-25 mph (32-40 kph) with gusts over 50 mph (80 kph) and relative humidity levels had fallen as low as 3%.

“As you can imagine the embers from the wind have been traveling a significant distance which causes another fire to start,” Terrazas said.

The fire erupted in Sylmar, the northernmost portion of the valley, and spread westward at a rate of 800 acres (324 hectares) an hour into Granada Hills and Porter Ranch, part of a so-called urban-wildland interface where subdivisions crowd against the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains. The cause wasn’t immediately known.

Porter Ranch, an upper middle-class suburb that was the backdrop for the 1982 movie “E.T.” is no stranger to evacuations. Four years ago, a blowout at an underground natural gas well operated by Southern California Gas Co. in the neighboring Aliso Canyon storage facility drove 8,000 families from their homes.

In Northern California, the lights were back on Friday for more than half of the 2 million residents who lost electricity after the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. utility switched it off on Wednesday to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires during dry, windy weather.

PG&E restored the power after workers inspected power lines to make sure it was safe to do so. The winds had increased the possibility of transmission lines toppling to the ground and starting wildfires.

Helicopters made repeated water drops as crews in Los Angeles attacked flames in and around homes. Water- and retardant-dropping airplanes joined the battle after daybreak. About 1,000 firefighters were on the lines.

Edwin Bernard, 73, said he and his wife were forced to leave their four cats behind as they fled their Sylmar home.

Bernard, standing outside the evacuation center at the Sylmar Recreation Center on Friday, said they were only able to grab their three dogs. During a previous wildfire, they’d had time to find their passports and photo albums, but not Thursday night.

“The fireman said, ‘go, go, go!'” Bernard said. “It was a whole curtain of fire,” he said. “There was fire on all sides. We had to leave.”

Evacuations were also still in effect in the inland region east of Los Angeles where a fire erupted Thursday and raged through a mobile home park in the Calimesa area of Riverside County.

Seventy-four buildings were destroyed, others were damaged and Riverside County authorities were trying to determine if anyone was missing.

One person who couldn’t be immediately located was Don Turner’s 89-year-old mother.

Lois Arvickson called her son from her cellphone to say she was evacuating shortly after the blaze was reported in the small city of Calimesa, Turner said while with relatives at an evacuation center.

“She said she’s getting her purse and she’s getting out, and the line went dead,” he said.

Arvickson’s neighbors saw her in her garage as flames approached, according to Turner. A short time later the neighbors saw the garage on fire, but they don’t know if she’d managed to escape, he said.

Melissa Brown said she moved to the mobile home complex earlier this year from Arizona, in part to help take care of her mother who has since died. Brown said she now also faces the loss of her home.

“The hardest part is my mom’s remains are in there,” she said Friday morning, choking back tears.

Fire danger is high throughout Southern California after the typically dry summer and early fall, and the notorious Santa Ana winds — linked to the spread of many wildfires — bring a dangerous mix of witheringly low humidity levels and powerful gusts.

The Calimesa fire erupted when the driver of a commercial trash truck dumped a smoldering load to prevent the vehicle from catching fire.

Dry grass quickly ignited and winds gusting to 50 mph (80 kph) blew the fire into the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park about 75 miles (120 kilometers) east of downtown Los Angeles. The park has 110 home sites and was built in 1958, according to its website. Fire officials were investigating what caused the trash in the truck to catch fire in Calimesa.

__

Dazio reported from Los Angeles and Calimesa. Christopher Weber and writer John Antczak reported from Los Angeles.

Former Ambassador to Ukraine Says Trump Pushed to Oust Her

WASHINGTON — Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told lawmakers Friday that President Donald Trump pressured the State Department to oust her from her position.

Yovanovitch said in an opening statement obtained by The Associated Press that she was “abruptly” recalled in May and told the president had lost confidence in her. She said she was told by an official that there was a “concerted campaign against me” and that Trump had pressured officials to remove her for almost a year.

“Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” Yovanovitch wrote in the statement.

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Yovanovitch appeared on Capitol Hill Friday for a deposition in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, accepting lawmakers’ invitation to testify despite Trump’s declaration that no one in his administration would cooperate with the probe. The Democrats are investigating Trump’s dealings with the Ukrainian president.

Yovanovitch is now a State Department fellow at Georgetown University. Trump said earlier this week that he would block all officials from testifying, saying the probe was unfair and “illegitimate.” It was unclear if Yovanovitch’s appearance signaled a shift in that strategy or if she was breaking with White House orders.

Democrats are investigating Trump’s pleas to Ukrainian officials to launch investigations of political rival Joe Biden and his family and to probe Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election. Yovanovitch was recalled from Kyiv as Rudy Giuliani — who is Trump’s personal attorney and has no official role in the U.S. government — pushed Ukrainian officials to investigate baseless corruption allegations against the Bidens.

Yovanovitch was removed from her post after insisting that Giuliani’s requests to Ukrainian officials for investigations be relayed through official channels, according to a former diplomat who has spoken with her.

In a July 25 phone call, Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Yovanovitch was “bad news,” according to a partial transcript released by the White House. Neither Giuliani nor Trump has publicly specified their objections to Yovanovitch.

Businessmen with ties to Giuliani lobbied a U.S. congressman in 2018 for help ousting Yovanovitch, according to an indictment made public Thursday following the men’s arrest. It alleges that the men leveraged a flurry of GOP political donations to force Yovanovitch’s removal, an effort prosecutors say was aided by laundered foreign money.

The former diplomat who spoke with Yovanovitch said the ambassador refused to do “all this offline, personal, informal stuff” and made clear that the U.S. government had formal ways to request foreign governments’ help with investigations. The former diplomat insisted on anonymity to disclose the private conversation.

The State Department traditionally relies on mutual legal assistance treaties, under which U.S. and foreign officials agree to exchange evidence and information in criminal investigations.

Yovanovitch was speaking to the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight and Reform committees behind closed doors Friday. The committees are scheduled to talk to several other U.S. diplomats next week, as well.

On Monday, Fiona Hill, a former White House adviser who focused on Russia, is expected to testify. Three current State Department officials also are tentatively scheduled next week — Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, and Ulrich Brechbuhl, a State Department counselor.

Sondland was originally scheduled for a deposition this past Tuesday but did not show up. Trump tweeted immediately afterward that he couldn’t let Sondland testify because the Democratic-led probe was “compromised.”

The committees subpoenaed Sondland hours later for a deposition next week, and his attorneys said Friday he would testify on Oct. 17, despite the administration’s position.

“Notwithstanding the State Department’s current direction to not testify, Ambassador Sondland will honor the Committees’ subpoena, and he looks forward to testifying on Thursday,” said a statement from attorneys Robert Luskin and Kwame Manley. “Ambassador Sondland has at all times acted with integrity and in the interests of the United States. He has no agenda apart from answering the Committees’ questions fully and truthfully.”

The statement said, however, that Sondland would not be able to product documents “concerning his official responsibilities,” as they were controlled by the State Department.

Democrats want to ask him about text messages released last week that show him and two other U.S. diplomats acting as intermediaries as Trump urged Ukraine to investigate Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. election and Hunter Biden’s involvement with a gas company there.

Earlier this week, the White House sent Congress a letter outlining its opposition to the impeachment probe and refusing to cooperate with requests for information, including interviews with administration officials. The House committees have moved to subpoena officials instead.

On Thursday, 10 Democratic senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanding an explanation for Yovanovitch’s removal before the end of her three-year assignment.

“In particular, her early recall raises questions about whether you put the personal interests of the President above the Department’s career personnel or U.S. foreign policy,” they wrote.

Even before the testimony, the attention on Yovanovitch was renewed Thursday after U.S. prosecutors arrested two Florida businessmen tied to Giuliani, charging them with campaign finance violations. An indictment filed in the case alleged that the men, who were raising campaign funds for a U.S. congressman, asked him for help in removing Yovanovitch, at least partly at the request of Ukrainian government officials.

Yovanovitch has led U.S. embassies in Kyrgyzstan and Armenia and is now a State Department fellow at Georgetown University. The director of the Georgetown program, Barbara Bodine, said the former envoy is declining all requests for interviews.

Former colleagues of Yovanovitch said Trump allies’ characterizations of her as politically motivated are off-base.

She is “a top-notch diplomat, careful, meticulous, whip smart,” and unlikely to have badmouthed Trump, either to Ukrainian officials or her colleagues, said John Herbst, a predecessor as ambassador in Ukraine who worked alongside Yovanovitch there in the early 2000s.

Yovanovitch has always known that the role of diplomat “wasn’t about her” but about “serving American national interests and supporting the people around her,” said Nancy McEldowney, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria who now directs a Foreign Service program at Georgetown.

___

Associated Press Writers Matthew Lee and Jocelyn Noveck contributed to this report.

California Utility Faces Gripes Over Deliberate Blackouts

LOS ANGELES — Even as the winds gusted dangerously as forecast, California’s biggest utility faced hostility and second-guessing Thursday for shutting off electricity to millions of people to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires.

Gov. Gavin Newsom criticized Pacific Gas & Electric, and ordinary customers complained about the inconveniences caused by the unprecedented blackouts that began Wednesday, with many wondering: Did PG&E go too far in its attempt to ward off more deadly fires? Could the utility have been more targeted in deciding whose electricity was turned off and when?

PG&E, though, suggested it was already seeing the wisdom of its decision borne out. Gusts topping 75 mph (121 kph) raked the San Francisco Bay Area, and relatively small fires broke out around the state amid a bout of dry, windy weather.

“We have had some preliminary reports of damage to our lines. So we’ll have to repair those damages before we can safely energize the line,” spokesman Paul Doherty said.

Because of the dangerous weather in the forecast, PG&E cut power Wednesday to an estimated 2 million people in an area that spanned the San Francisco Bay Area, the wine country north of San Francisco, the agricultural Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills. By Thursday, the number of people in the dark was down to about 1.5 million.

PG&E cast the blackouts as a matter of public safety, aimed at preventing the kind of blazes that have killed scores of people over the past couple of years, destroyed thousands of homes, and run up tens of billions of dollars in claims that drove the company into bankruptcy.

The fire danger spread to Southern California on Thursday as raging winds moved down the state. Southern California Edison shut off electricity to about 12,000 people just outside Los Angeles, with wider blackouts possible.

A blaze ripped through a trailer park in Calimesa, a city about 65 miles (104 kilometers) east of Los Angeles, destroying more than a dozen homes. The cause of the fire was not known, but it was not in an area where power had been cut.

Many of those affected by the outages, which could last as long as five days, were not so sure about the move.

Sergio Vergara, owner of Stinson Beach Market, situated on scenic Highway 1, on the Pacific Coast just north of San Francisco, operated the store with a propane generator so his customers could have coffee, milk, meat and frozen meals.

“I’m telling you as a plain human being, there is no wind, there is no heat,” he said. “We never saw something like this where they just decide to shut off the power, but on the other side — preventing is a good thing, but it’s creating a lot of frustration.”

But in powered-down Oakland, Tianna Pasche said: “If it saves a life, I’m not going to complain about it.”

Faced with customer anger, PG&E put up barricades around its San Francisco headquarters. A customer threw eggs at a PG&E office in Oroville. And a PG&E truck was hit by a bullet, though authorities could not immediately say whether it was targeted.

Sumeet Singh, PG&E’s vice president of community wildfire safety, urged people to be kind to workers out in the field, saying the employees and contractors “have families that live in your communities.”

“Let’s just ensure their safety as well, as they are doing this work in the interest of your safety,” Singh said.

Newsom said PG&E should have been working on making its power system sturdier and more weatherproof. “They’re in bankruptcy due to their terrible management going back decades,” he said. “They’ve created these conditions. It was unnecessary.”

Experts say the big shut-off will yield important lessons for the next time.

Deliberate blackouts are likely to become less disruptive as PG&E gets experience managing them and rebuilds sections of the grid so that outages can be more targeted, said Michael Wara, a researcher on energy and climate policy at Stanford University.

Grids are built and operators are trained to keep the power on at all times, so the company and its employees have little experience with intentionally turning the electricity off in response to rapidly changing weather, he said.

“That’s a skill that has to be learned, and PG&E is learning it at a mass scale right now,” Wara said.

After a June shut-off in the Sierra foothills, PG&E workers reported repairing numerous areas of wind damage, including power lines hit by tree branches.

“That was worth it,” Wara said of the deliberate blackout. “That could have prevented a catastrophe.”

___

Cooper reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writers Terry Chea, Haven Daley, Janie Har, Daisy Nguyen and Olga R. Rodriguez in San Francisco and John Antczak in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

Defiant Protesters in Ecuador Parade Captive Police Officers

QUITO, Ecuador — Anti-government protesters paraded captive police officers on a stage Thursday, defying Ecuadorian authorities who are seeking dialogue with opponents, particularly indigenous groups, after more than a week of deadly unrest.

The brazen act occurred in the capital of Quito at a cultural center where indigenous protesters are based as they press demands, including an end to fuel price hikes.

The government’s removal of fuel subsidies last week plunged Ecuador into upheaval, triggering protests, looting, vandalism, clashes with security forces, the blocking of highways and the suspension of parts of its vital oil industry.

An indigenous leader and four other people have died in the violence, according to the public defender’s office. The president’s office said two people died.

At the cultural center, one captive officer was forced to drape a national flag around his shoulders and don a hat of a style worn by some indigenous people. The lone female officer in the group was seen wiping away tears.

All were forced to remove their boots in front of hundreds of demonstrators, some holding white roses in tribute to people who have been killed in the unrest. The police officers appeared to be unharmed, and were checked by medics.

More than 20 journalists were also inside the cultural center, barred from leaving by protesters.

“With the blood of our brothers, we won’t negotiate,” indigenous leader Jaime Vargas declared in a speech to the crowd. He accused the government, which has floated agricultural aid and other incentives for indigenous groups as a way to resolve the crisis, of deceiving and neglecting Ecuador’s poor.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty about what might happen” in Ecuador, said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a U.S.-based research group. He compared the tenure of President Lenín Moreno, who is cutting subsidies in an attempt to reduce Ecuador’s big debt, to the policies of his leftist predecessor and former ally, Rafael Correa.

“The big lesson is that it’s very difficult to go from populism to a more orthodox economic policy,” Shifter said. He speculated that Moreno was not fully prepared for the ferocity of the reaction to the fuel price increases.

Ecuador’s cuts in fuel subsidies were among measures announced as part of a $4.2 billion funding plan with the International Monetary Fund, which says the funds will strengthen the economy and generate jobs.

Indigenous groups condemn the deal with the IMF, saying austerity measures will deepen economic inequality.

Indigenous protesters are playing a key role in the opposition to the government, as they have done in the past due to their traditional grievances as a minority.

The announcement by the public defender’s office that one of those killed was an indigenous leader seemed certain to inflame tensions. The leader was identified by the office, which monitors human rights, as Inocencio Tucumbi of Ecuador’s Cotopaxi region.

Some 266 people have been injured and 864 were detained, though 80 percent of detainees have been released for lack of evidence, the public defender’s office said.

Moreno’s office said the number of deaths was lower. It said two people had died in accidents linked to the violence across the country.

One person was hit and killed by a car, and another person suffered fatal injuries after a fall during protests in Quito, said José Briones, secretary general of the president’s office.

There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy in the reports on the death toll.

Protesters temporarily blocked roads in several parts of Quito on Thursday, but traffic was flowing in many areas following a day of clashes around the capital’s historical center.

The government headquarters is in the old area, but Moreno moved its operations to the port city of Guayaquil because of security concerns.

___

Associated Press writers Christopher Torchia in Rio de Janeiro and Luis Alonso in Washington contributed to this report.

Iraqi Blood Is on All of Our Hands

In a rather macabre instance of déjà vu, Iraq is again coming apart at the seams. Iraqi security forces have killed more than 100 mostly peaceful protestors over the last few weeks, wounding thousands more. And that’s just what the military acknowledges. In daily demonstrations across Baghdad and southern Iraq, protesters have railed against unemployment, poor social services, and government graft and corruption—specifically the theft of hundreds of millions in tax dollars and national oil wealth. At the moment, it’s unclear whether the prime minister will resign, the security forces will double-down on their brutality, or, as some people have begun to demand, a new military ruler will take charge. Whatever the future brings, things are unlikely to end well.

Few Americans have noticed, of course, what with the media circus surrounding Donald Trump’s impeachment and a spate of recent leaks airing his “dirty laundry.” News treated as entertainment by design serves to distract, breeds apathy and engenders consent. This system works in the interests of the elites, enabling an unelected national security state to design foreign policy—and initiate wars—as it pleases. But it also obviates Washington, and we the people, of any responsibility or remorse for the destruction of distant societies. The browner and more Islamic the population of such societies, the less we can be bothered. American racism paired with lethargy and ignorance dooms foreigners the world over.

As a veteran of the second Iraq war serving during the bad old days of 2006-07 in Baghdad, and as an avid student of Iraqi history, I vaguely sense what so few Americans do: that I’ve seen this movie before. Though few policy analysts, or even historians, frame it as such, the United States has treated Iraq like an old-school colony for going on 40 years now, characterized by varying degrees of treachery, betrayal, invasion and violent demolition. The results have been remarkably cyclical. Seen in this light, the latest crackdown on protesters aligns almost perfectly with the harrowing legacy of American interventionism in Mesopotamia.

Washington didn’t care much for Iraq until the Iranian Revolution of 1979 resulted in the overthrow of the venal, U.S.-backed Shah. Iraq had previously experienced coups, dictatorships and the fascist rule of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. All of that was fine with Washington as long as the country didn’t dabble in Islamism or veer too far into the Soviets’ orbit. President Ronald Reagan backed Saddam’s brutal dictatorship and sanctioned his aggressive invasion of Iran, the eight-year war that followed resulting in the deaths of half a million Iraqis. Reagan even sold supplies to Iraq and helped Saddam pick out targets—first Iranian troops and then his own Kurdish minority—to bomb with poison gas. Thousands died horrendous deaths.

Then, when the inevitable “blowback” blew, and Saddam threatened Western oil supplies by invading neighboring Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush instantly turned on Iraq. U.S. air and armored power decimated an outmatched Iraqi Army, then American planes bombarded fleeing Iraqi troops on what became known as the “Highway of Death” after the conflict’s outcome already had been decided. One U.S. commander labeled the routed Iraqis “sitting ducks,” and thousands were slaughtered. Some American pilots even felt a pang of conscience during the bombing, with one opining that “One side of me says, ‘That’s right, it’s like shooting ducks in a pond.’ Does that make me uncomfortable? Not necessarily. Except there is a side of me that says, ‘What are they dying for? For a madman’s cause? And is that fair?’ Well, we’re at war; it’s the tragedy of war, but we do our jobs.”

After a ceasefire was negotiated, the top American commander in the region made the unauthorized decision to allow Saddam to keep flying his Soviet-supplied attack helicopters.  Soon after, Bush I encouraged oppressed Iraqi Shia and Kurds—Saddam’s regime was majority Sunni—to rebel and overthrow the dictator.  They tried, naively expecting American military support. Washington sold them out; tens of thousands were mowed down, many by those same helicopters. Perhaps, then, it should have come as little surprise that not all Iraqis, Shia included, welcomed the illegal, ill-advised and immoral 2003 invasion with the “flowers and smiles” the Bush II administration had promised.

The U.S. military and its incompetent neoconservative masters destroyed Iraqi society within months. Saddam’s military was disbanded, putting some half million people out of work. Tens of thousands of nominal Baath Party members lost their government jobs (and pensions), and libertarian capitalist experimentation—a “shock therapy” of sorts—bankrupted the already shaky Iraqi economy. This led to a bloody anti-American insurgency and then a horrific sectarian civil war, shattering what little remained of Iraqi society. Somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 civilians died. Who had the time to accurately count?

Even though top generals and the secretary of defense lied to Iraqis, U.S. troops and the American public when they falsely claimed there was no civil war—it took Chelsea Manning’s heroic Wikileaks revelations to blow the lid on that—they (and we soldiers) knew the score.  So in order to proclaim victory and exit stage left, Bush announced a new troop “surge” to tamp down the violence.

The whole charade was billed as a temporary escalation to create the space for an Iraqi political settlement among different sects and ethnicities. That never happened, of course. Trust me, I was there. What did happen was an “enlightened” Gen. David Petraeus sold Congress and the public the lie that his walling off of neighborhoods and pay offing of former insurgents in a new Sunni militia—both temporary and short-sighted measures—was some kind of triumph.

When Obama assumed office, he accepted that myth despite previously opposing the surge and eventually withdrew U.S. forces. Left behind was a corrupt, sectarian and largely illegitimate Shia government. In a disturbing prelude to today’s demonstrations, Sunnis and other desperate Iraqis protested the Baghdad regime; U.S.-trained security forces gunned them down by the hundreds. Veterans of that protest movement and the by-then-unpaid Petraeus militiamen soon joined forces with a reemerging Al Qaeda offshoot that eventually billed itself as the Islamic State.

The rest is blood-splattered history. ISIS conquered most of northern and western Iraq, the nation’s army collapsed and thousands more died in the latest manifestation of its rolling civil war. Soon enough, the U.S. military and its plethora of aircraft were back in Iraq, bombing and shelling their way to a new “victory” over the Islamic State. In the penultimate battle for Iraq’s second city, Mosul, American commanders downplayed civilian casualties, but outside sources estimated deaths neared 9,000—10 times what the U.S. military would recognize. American troops are still there in modest numbers, while the current Iraqi government has failed to address the corruption and graft that helped fuel ISIS in the first place. Washington, meanwhile, remains mostly silent.

That’s just a brief telling of modern Iraqi history and the nefarious role of the U.S. in this great national cataclysm. Nonetheless, when viewing the protests and the suppression in Iraq today, that context ought to be instructive. No matter how much average Americans wish it were so, none of today’s violence unfolds in a vacuum; and it is America’s problem.

Permit me a gloomy prediction. When Iraqi civil society once again collapses—and it will—the legacy of Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003) and Uncle Sam’s military adventurism will continue to haunt America. Nevertheless, as long as significant numbers of U.S. troops aren’t dying on the streets of Baghdad or Baquba, corporate media will ignore the story and precious few citizens will connect the dots.  No, America isn’t solely responsible for Iraqi misgovernment or suffering—the locals have troubled agency all their own—but it sure has stirred the historical pot and set many of the conditions for state collapse.

Americans bear many sins in this country’s crusading wars for the Greater Middle East.  Still, in its degree of horror and lasting legacy, the destruction of Iraq must rank as the gold standard of Neo-imperial iniquity. The blood of more than 100 recent protesters, hundreds of thousands of earlier civil war victims and who knows how many future martyrs, are on all of our hands

————

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army major and a regular contributor to Truthdig. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The L.A. Times, The Nation, Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post, and The Hill. He served 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.” He co-hosts the progressive veterans’ podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”  Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

2 Nobel Literature Prize Winners Expose Europe’s Fault Lines

STOCKHOLM — Nobel Prizes for literature were awarded Thursday to two writers enmeshed in Europe’s social and political fault lines: a liberal Pole who has irked her country’s conservative government and an Austrian accused by many liberals of being an apologist for Serbian war crimes.

The rare double announcement — with the 2018 prize going to Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and the 2019 award to Austria’s Peter Handke — came after no literature prize was awarded last year due to sex abuse allegations that rocked the Swedish Academy, which awards the literature prize.

Yet if prize organizers hoped to get through this year’s awards without controversy, they will likely be disappointed.

The Swedish Academy called Handke “one of the most influential writers in Europe” and praised his work for exploring “the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

But the 76-year-old author has long faced criticism for his vigorous defense of the Serbs during the 1990s wars that devastated the Balkans as Yugoslavia disintegrated. He spoke at the 2006 funeral of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who at the time was facing war crimes charges, calling him “a rather tragic man.”

Handke — who once called for the Nobel Prize to be abolished — said he was “astonished” to receive the literature award.

“I never thought they would choose me,” Handke told reporters outside his home in suburban Paris.

“It was very courageous by the Swedish academy, this kind of decision,” he added. “These are good people.”

If Handke’s victory caused uncomfortable ripples, the choice of Tokarczuk was welcomed by liberal-minded authors and readers in her native Poland and beyond.

The 57-year-old novelist, known for her humanist themes and playful, subversive streak, has often irked Poland’s populists and conservatives. The academy said she was chosen for works that explore the “crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

Already a major cultural figure in Poland, Tokarczuk has a growing international profile, especially since she won the Booker International prize in 2018 for the novel “Flights.”

She told Polish broadcaster TVN on Thursday that she was “terribly happy and proud” that her novels, which describe events in small towns in Poland “can be read as universal and can be important for people around the world.”

Handke has been a big name in European literature for decades, crafting works — starting with his first novel, “The Hornets,” in 1966 — that combine introspection and a provocative streak. One early play was called “Offending the Audience” and featured actors insulting theatergoers.

He has written screenplays, several of them for German director Wim Wenders, who also filmed Handke’s 1970 novel, “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.”

He was praised by the Swedish Academy for writing powerfully about catastrophe, notably in “A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,” his 1972 autobiographical novel about his mother’s suicide.

But his staunch support of the Serbs during the 1990s Balkans wars has set him at odds with many other Western intellectuals.

In a 1996 essay, “Justice for Serbia,” Handke accused Western news media of always depicting Serbs as aggressors. He denied that genocide was committed when Bosnian Serb troops massacred some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica in 1995, and was an opponent of NATO’s airstrikes against Serbia for that country’s violent crackdown in Kosovo in the late 1990s. In an interview with Serbia’s state TV earlier this year, Handke said those behind the bombing “don’t belong to Europe and the planet Earth.”

Handke’s views led novelist Salman Rushdie in 1999 to call him a contender for “International Moron of the Year.” Rushdie’s publicist at Penguin Random House said Thursday that Rushdie stood by what he wrote in 1999.

Novelist Jennifer Egan, president of PEN America, said the writers’ group deeply regretted the choice of Handke.

“We are dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth and offer public succor to perpetrators of genocide,” she said. “At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this.”

In 2006, Handke turned down the Heinrich Heine award from the German city of Duesseldorf after his selection sparked a row among the city’s politicians. His selection as winner of the International Ibsen Award for drama in 2014 also prompted protests from human rights groups.

That same year, he told the Austrian Press Agency that the Nobel Prize should be abolished because of its “false canonization” of literature.

Serbian officials and media hailed Handke on Thursday as a “great friend of Serbia,” but Kosovans reacted angrily to his Nobel Prize. Vlora Citaku, Kosovo’s ambassador to the United States, tweeted that “In a world full of brilliant writers, the Nobel committee chooses to reward a propagator of ethnic hatred & violence. Something has gone terribly wrong!”

Albanian Foreign Minister Gent Cakaj, who was born in Kosovo, tweeted that the award was “an ignoble & shameful act.”

In contrast, the win by Tokarczuk — Poland’s fifth Nobel literature laureate — was greeted with praise even by her erstwhile critics.

Tokarcuzk has been attacked by Polish conservatives — and received death threats — for criticizing aspects of the country’s past, including its episodes of anti-Semitism. She is also a strong critic of Poland’s current right-wing government.

Her 2014 novel “The Books of Jacob” tackles the forced conversion of Polish Jews to Catholicism in the 18th century. Her book “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” is a crime thriller with feminist and animal-rights themes that offers a sometimes unflattering depiction of small-town Polish life.

Culture Minister Piotr Glinski, who said earlier this week that he has not finished any of Tokarczuk’s books, tweeted his congratulations and said he now felt obliged to go back and read her books all the way through.

Polish President Andrzej Duda called it a “great day for Polish literature.”

Tokarczuk is only the 15th woman to win the Nobel literature prize in more than a century. Of the 11 Nobels awarded so far this week, all the other laureates have been men.

Both literature winners will receive a full cash prize, valued this year at 9 million kronor ($918,000), a gold medal and a diploma at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

The literature prize was canceled last year after an exodus of members from the exclusive Swedish Academy following sex abuse allegations. Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of a former academy member, was convicted last year of two rapes in 2011.

The Nobel Foundation had warned that another group would award the literature prize if the academy didn’t improve its tarnished image, but said in March it was satisfied the Swedish Academy had revamped itself and restored trust.

The 2018 and 2019 awards were chosen by the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee, a new body made up of four academy members and five “external specialists.” Nobel organizers say the committee suggests two names that then must be approved by the Swedish Academy. It’s unclear whether academy members simply rubber-stamped the experts’ choice.

The literature awards follow Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine handed out earlier this week. The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday and the economics award on Monday.

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Lawless reported from London. Associated Press writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Monika Scislowska and Vanessa Gera in Warsaw; Geir Moulson in Berlin; Hillel Italie in New York and Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade contributed to this report.