Chris Hedges's Blog, page 141

Court: FCC Can Dump Net Neutrality, but States Can Set Own Rules

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission could dump rules that keep internet providers from favoring some services over others, but couldn’t bar states like California from enacting their own prohibitions, a federal court ruled.

While Tuesday’s ruling handed Trump-appointed regulators a partial victory, consumer advocates and other groups viewed the ruling as a victory for states and local governments seeking to put in their own net neutrality rules.

The FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules had barred internet providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down or charging internet companies to favor some sites or apps over others.

After the FCC repealed the rules, phone and cable companies are permitted to slow down or block services they don’t like or happen to be in competition with. Companies could also charge higher fees of rivals and make them pay for higher transmission speeds.

Such things have happened before. In 2007, for example, The Associated Press found that Comcast was blocking or throttling some file-sharing. And AT&T blocked Skype and other internet calling services on the iPhone until 2009.

The court now says that’s all permissible — as long as companies disclose it.

But in Tuesday’s decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC failed to show legal authority to bar states from imposing any rules that the agency repealed or that are stricter than its own.

“This ruling empowers states to move forward in the absence of a federal approach to consumer protections,” said Lisa Hayes, co-CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology.

States already have come up with their own net neutrality laws, including one in California that was put on hold until Tuesday’s court decision. Congressional Democrats have attempted, unsuccessfully, to reverse the FCC’s repeal.

The federal court directed the FCC to rework its order to include the impact of its repeal on public safety. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said the agency will address the “narrow issues” cited by the court.

“Today’s decision is a victory for consumers, broadband deployment, and the free and open internet,” Pai said in a statement. He maintained that speeds for consumers have increased by 40% since the agency’s 2017 repeal “and millions more Americans have gained access to the internet.”

Net neutrality has evolved from a technical concept into a politically charged issue, the focus of street and online protests and a campaign issue lobbed against Republicans and the Trump administration.

The FCC has long mulled over how to enforce it. The agency had twice lost in court over net-neutrality standards before a Democrat-led commission in 2015 voted in a regime that made internet service a utility, bringing phone and cable companies under stricter oversight. An appeals court sanctioned the 2015 rules.

After the 2016 election, President Donald Trump appointed a more industry-friendly FCC chairman. Pai repealed the net neutrality rules in 2017, saying they had undermined investment in broadband networks.

Hong Kong Protester Shot as China Marks Its 70th Anniversary

HONG KONG — In a fearsome escalation of violence, Hong Kong police shot a protester in the chest at close range Tuesday, leaving the teenager bleeding and howling on the ground. Tens of thousands joined anti-government demonstrations that spread across the semi-autonomous Chinese territory in a challenge to Beijing’s dominance as the Communist Party celebrated 70 years in power.

The officer fired the single pistol shot as protesters swarmed toward him, Police Commissioner Stephen Lo said, hitting the 18-year-old on the left side of his chest. Lo defended the action as “reasonable and lawful,” saying the officer feared for his life and had no other choice.

Hong Kong’s hospital authority said the teen was one of two people in critical condition, with a total of 66 injured as fierce clashes between protesters and police wracked China’s freest and most international city.

While officers have fired warning shots in the air on multiple occasions during months of unrest, this was the first time a protester has been struck by gunfire. The shooting marked a dramatic surge in violence that spread chaos to multiple areas.

Lo said there was no order for police to shoot if they are under threat but they can use appropriate force. He described protesters as “rioters,” saying they have committed widespread criminal acts — from attacking police officers, including 25 who were injured, to destroying public property and vandalizing shops and banks linked to China.

“The officer was under attack, his life was threatened. … He made a very quick decision and shot the assailant. I believe it was his best judgment at the time,” Lo said.

He added that although the officer also had a rifle for rubber bullets, the event unfolded very quickly. He didn’t answer questions on why the officer fired at the teen’s chest and not his limbs.

Apart from the incident in Tsuen Wan, where the teen was shot, he said officers also fired five warning shots in four other areas, although no one was injured. Police arrested more than 180 protesters, he added.

Local TV stations showed two officers with bloodied faces pointing pistols as protesters who sought to spoil the Oct. 1 anniversary of Communist rule fought pitched battles with riot police.

Video that spread quickly on social media appeared to show the officer opening fire as the masked teenager came at him with a metal rod, striking the officer’s shooting arm. Taken by the City University Student Union, it showed a dozen black-clad protesters throwing objects at a group of police and closing in on the lone officer who pointed his gun and opened fire. The protester toppled backward onto the street, bleeding from below his left shoulder.

As another protester rushed in to try to drag away the wounded youth and was tackled by an officer, a gasoline bomb landed in the middle of the group of officers in an explosion of flames.

“Whilst there is no excuse for violence, the use of live ammunition is disproportionate, and only risks inflaming the situation,” U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said of the protests in the former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

Riot police fired tear gas in at least six locations and used water cannons in the business district as usually bustling streets became battlefields. Determined to thumb their noses at Chinese President Xi Jinping, protesters ignored a security clampdown that saw nearly four dozen subway stations closed.

Chanting anti-China slogans and “Freedom for Hong Kong,” the dense crowd dressed in mournful black snaked for over a mile (1.6 kilometers) along a broad thoroughfare downtown in defiance of a police ban. Some carried Chinese flags defaced with a black cross. Organizers said at least 100,000 people marched in the biggest rally Tuesday. Police didn’t give an estimate.

“They are squeezing our necks so we don’t breathe the air of freedom,” said King Chan, a 57-year-old homemaker who marched with her husband.

Demonstrators tossed wads of fake bank notes usually used at funerals into the air. “The leaders who won’t listen to our voice, this is for them,” said marcher Ray Luk.

Thousand others confronted police across the city, the largest number of simultaneous protests since the unrest began in early June over a now-shelved extradition bill that activists say was an example of how Hong Kong’s freedoms and citizen rights are being eroded. The movement has since grown into an anti-Chinese campaign with demands for direct elections for the city’s leaders and police accountability.

The smell of stinging tear gas and smoke from street fires started by protesters engulfed the Wan Chai, Wong Tai Sin, Sha Tin, Tuen Mun, Tsuen Wan and Tsim Sha Tsui areas. Protesters used power tools to fashion bricks into missiles and came armed with gas bombs. Police said protesters used corrosive fluid in Tuen Mun, injuring officers and some reporters.

A water cannon truck sprayed blue water, used to identify protesters, to disperse crowds from advancing to government offices.

“Today we are out to tell the Communist Party that Hong Kong people have nothing to celebrate,” said activist Lee Cheuk-yan as he led the downtown march. “We are mourning that in 70 years of Communist Party rule, the democratic rights of people in Hong Kong and China are being denied. ”

Activists carried banners saying, “End dictatorial rule, return power to the people.”

As protesters hoped, the chaos in Hong Kong contrasted with anniversary festivities in Beijing, which included a muscular parade of military might. Among those attending was Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, whose leadership during the crisis has made her a hate-figure for many protesters.

As the city’s government marked the anniversary with a solemn morning ceremony, police used pepper spray to break up a brief scuffle between Beijing supporters and a small group of pro-democracy protesters.

Hong Kong Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung told hundreds of guests at a reception that the city has become “unrecognizable” due to the violence. Cheung said Beijing fully supports the “one country, two systems” framework that gives Hong Kong freedoms and rights not enjoyed on the mainland.

___

Associated Press writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed.

The Most Harrowing Lesson of ‘Ukrainegate’

Amid the impeachment furor, don’t lose sight of the renewed importance of protecting the integrity of the 2020 election.

The difference between Richard Nixon’s abuse of power (trying to get dirt on political opponents to help with his 1972 reelection, and then covering it up) and Donald Trump’s abuse (trying to get Ukraine’s president to get dirt on a political opponent to help with his 2020 reelection, and then covering it up) isn’t just that Nixon’s involved a botched robbery at the Watergate while Trump’s involves a foreign nation.

It’s that Nixon’s abuse of power was discovered during his second term, after he was reelected. He was still a dangerous crook, but by that time he had no reason to inflict still more damage on American democracy.

Trump’s abuse has been uncovered 14 months before the 2020 election, at a time when he still has every incentive to do whatever he can to win.

If Special Counsel Robert Mueller had found concrete evidence that Trump asked Vladimir Putin for help in digging up dirt on Hillary Clinton in 2016, it would have been the “smoking gun” that could have ended the Trump presidency.

Now that Trump is revealed to have asked Volodymyr Zelensky for dirt on Biden in the 2020 election, who’s to say he isn’t also asking others, including Putin?

The Washington Post reported that Trump told Russian officials, in a 2017 meeting in the Oval Office, that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election (White House officials limited access to these remarks, as they did to his outreach to Zelensky).

American intelligence warns that Russia will continue to try to interfere in our elections. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has agreed to add just $250 million to protect election machinery from cyberattacks, while experts say billions are needed.

Trump is in a better position to make such deals than he was in 2016 because as president he’s got the power and money to make any foreign rulers’ life exceedingly comfortable, or uncomfortable.

As we’ve learned, Trump uses whatever bargaining leverage he can get, for personal gain. That’s the art of the deal.

Who can we count on to protect our election process in 2020?

Certainly not Attorney General William Barr. Trump urged Zelensky to work with Barr to investigate Joe Biden, even telling Zelensky that Barr would follow up with his own phone call.

Barr’s Justice Department decided Trump had not acted illegally and told the acting director of national intelligence to keep the whistle-blower complaint from Congress.

This is the same attorney general who said Mueller’s report cleared the Trump campaign of conspiring with Russia when in fact Mueller had found that the campaign welcomed Russia’s help, and that Mueller absolved Trump of obstructing justice when Mueller specifically declined to decide the matter.

Barr is not working for the American people. He’s working for Trump, just like Rudy Giuliani is working for Trump, as are all the other lapdogs, toadies and sycophants.

Fortunately, some government appointees still understand their responsibilities to America. We’re indebted to the anonymous intelligence officer who complained about Trump’s phone call to Zelensky, and to Michael Atkinson, inspector general of the intelligence community, who deemed the complaint of “urgent concern.”

But if the 2020 election is going to be—and be seen as—legitimate, the nation will need many more whistle-blowers and officials with integrity.

States must upgrade all election machinery and equip them with paper ballots that can be audited. Facebook and YouTube must devote more resources to protecting against malicious foreign trolls and bots.

All of us will need to be vigilant.

Over the last two and a half years, Trump has shown himself willing to trample any aspect of our democracy that gets in his way—attacking the media, using the presidency for personal profit, packing the federal courts, verbally attacking judges, blasting the head of the Federal Reserve, spending money in ways Congress did not authorize, and subverting the separation of powers.

Trump believes he’s invincible. He’s now daring our entire constitutional and political system to stop him.

The real value of the formal impeachment now underway is to put Trump on notice that he can’t necessarily get away with abusing his presidential power to win reelection. He will still try, of course. But at least a line has been drawn. And now everyone is watching.

Regardless of how the impeachment turns out, Trump’s predation can be constrained as long as his presidency can be ended with the 2020 election. If that election is distorted, and if this man is reelected, all bets are off.

Donald Trump Is Finished

I’m not going to bury the lede: Donald John Trump, the 45th president of the United States, is going to be impeached. Not only that, but whether or not the GOP-controlled Senate convicts Trump of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” his presidency is drawing to a close. Unless a political deus ex machina comes to his rescue, he will not serve a second term.

Numerous actions and events have brought us to this impeachment precipice, virtually all of them initiated by Trump himself. He is the architect of his own demise, and there is no turning back.

As of Saturday, some 225 members of the House of Representatives were on record endorsing an impeachment investigation. Their ranks included independent Justin Amash of Michigan and Republican Mark Amodei of Nevada. The last high-profile House Democratic holdout, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, announced her support Friday. The total will only expand in the coming weeks.

Trump, for his part, appears increasingly exhausted, paranoid and incoherent, not unlike Ricard Nixon in the final stages of Watergate. The president has taken to Twitter even more than usual, spewing vitriol and blurting out threats of revenge against his many presumed enemies.

For those who are unfamiliar with the procedure or who could simply use a refresher, impeachment is the constitutional mechanism by which a president, vice president or “civil officer of the United States” can be accused of “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” and removed from office upon conviction.

The specific provisions governing the process can be found in Article 1, Section 2 and Article 2, Sections 3 and 4 of the Constitution, which define the respective powers of the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.

Together, the provisions establish a two-step process. As explained in a 2015 study, “Impeachment and Removal,” prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service: “First, a simple majority of the House impeaches—or formally approves allegations of wrongdoing amounting to an impeachable offense, known as articles of impeachment. The articles of impeachment are then forwarded to the Senate where the second proceeding takes place: an impeachment trial. If the Senate, by vote of a two-thirds majority, convicts the official of the alleged offenses, the result is removal from office. …” [Emphasis in original]

Although scores of federal officials have been the subject of congressional impeachment resolutions since the nation’s founding, the House has referred only 19 individuals to the Senate for impeachment trials—15 federal judges (including Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1805), one senator, one cabinet member and two presidents, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998-99. The Senate has conducted 16 impeachment trials, convicting eight lower-court judges. The rest were acquitted.

Nixon, whose name is most often associated with impeachment, was never formally impeached. Rather than face certain conviction in the Senate, Nixon resigned before the full House could vote on three articles of impeachment passed by the Judiciary Committee in 1974.

As the accusatory body, the House has the authority to decide what constitutes an impeachable offense in any particular instance. The Constitution provides only general guidance, defining the grounds for impeachment as “treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

While treason and bribery are clear enough, to grasp the meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors”—the basis most commonly invoked over the decades and which will surely be cited against Trump—we have to look back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The Founding Fathers debated impeachment and the notion of high crimes and misdemeanors extensively at the convention. James Madison described impeachment as “indispensable . . . for defending the community [against] the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief magistrate.” George Mason argued, “No point is of more importance than that the right of impeachment should be continued. Shall any man be above justice?” Benjamin Franklin quipped dryly that impeachment was preferable to the European method of displacing a king—assassination.

But of all the Founders, Alexander Hamilton is credited with defining the scope of impeachment. In Federalist (Paper) No. 65 (1788), Hamilton described the legal process as embracing not only overt criminal conduct, but also serious violations of the “public trust.”

True to Hamilton’s reasoning, over the course of our history, charges of high crimes and misdemeanors have been alleged for a wide array of wrongdoing, both criminal and noncriminal, including abuse of power, obstruction of justice, corruption, bribery and perjury.

No one, not even Nixon, is more deserving of impeachment than Donald John Trump. In 2015, while Trump was a presidential candidate, I warned of the dangers he posed to immigrants, the First Amendment, and civil rights and liberties in general. Soon after the election, I began writing about his inevitable impeachment.

The principal debate now among mainstream Democrats and progressives is no longer whether Trump should be impeached, but how extensive the articles drafted against him should be. Well before the Ukraine scandal erupted into public view last week courtesy of a whistleblower’s complaint, Trump was liable for a long laundry list of impeachable offenses. Among the many derelictions I have cited, Trump can credibly be accused of:

Committing campaign finance violations by paying hush money to two women with whom he allegedly had extramarital affairs, Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels;
Obstructing justice in connection with the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller;
Defying congressional subpoenas;
Using the presidency for personal economic gain;
Abusing the pardon power to reward political allies;
Attacking the press and the judiciary;
Threatening to prosecute political opponents;
Abusing emergency powers to build his border wall;
Incarcerating undocumented immigrant children in concentration camps;
Attempting to strip millions of Americans of health insurance;
Promoting tax reform to benefit the super-rich;
Gutting environmental regulations and pulling out of the Paris climate accord;
Refusing to enforce the Voting Rights Act; and
Curbing the use of federal consent decrees to counter police misconduct.

The mafia-like shakedown of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky—as reflected in the declassified “Memorandum of Telephone Conversation” (memcon) that details the July 25 conversation between the leaders—only adds fuel to an already raging fire.

As shown by the memcon, which is organized in the form of an edited transcript, the American president promised to release American military assistance to Ukraine in return for a “favor”—that Zelensky use the power of his office to investigate alleged Ukrainian support for the Democrats during the 2016 American presidential campaign, as well as alleged corruption charges involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump urged Zelensky to talk to and “cooperate” with Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s private attorney, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, for both purposes.

This is an abuse of power in black and white, aimed at using a foreign government to bring down a political rival. Arguably, it may also establish the elements of two federal felonies: extortion and bribery.

Since the release of the memcon, the Ukraine scandal has spiraled further out of control. Evoking memories of the Watergate coverup, it has been confirmed that White House lawyers ordered the original verbatim digitized transcript of Trump’s phone call with Zelensky be moved to a highly classified system maintained by the National Security Council, which is accessible only to a small circle of officials. It has also been reported that Trump has similarly restricted access to records of past conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

On Thursday, Trump upped the impeachment ante in a talk at a private event in New York. Comparing information leakers and whistleblowers to traitors deserving of the death penalty: “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Still, the issue of where to draw the line in the articles of impeachment against Trump is tricky. Impeachment is a political process, but it bears similarities to criminal prosecutions. And as any experienced defense attorney can tell you, more than a few strong prosecutions have failed due to overcharging, which can complicate, mar and muddy an otherwise straightforward narrative. (As a young lawyer, for example, I won the reversal of a defendant’s conviction of attempted murder that stemmed from overcharging, according to the published opinion issued by the California Court of Appeal.)

To tell the story of Trump’s malfeasance and corruption, three articles of impeachment, the same number that forced Nixon from the Oval Office, should suffice:

Abuse of power for Ukraine.
Using the presidency for personal gain.
Obstruction of justice for the Mueller investigation and the wholesale defiance of congressional subpoenas.

Democrats have little to fear from a Trump impeachment. The current situation is much more akin to 1974, which saw Nixon’s popularity steadily erode until his resignation, than 1999, which saw Bill Clinton’s popularity climb. A CBS News Poll released Sunday showed a whopping 55% of respondents favor the impeachment inquiry. A Quinnipiac University Poll survey released on Monday went beyond the inquiry, finding respondents evenly split, 47 percent to 47 percent, on whether they support impeaching President Trump and removing him from office, a 10-point swing in favor of impeachment over a five-day period.

As the congressional impeachment hearings move forward, public support can be expected to increase. Even if the Senate refuses to convict, Trump’s reelection prospects will be crippled, as Democrats will be able to target Trump and the GOP in the 2020 elections for betraying the Constitution.

For the progressive left, impeachment presents a rare opportunity to hold a tyrant to account, and to merge the impeachment issue with a broader agenda for genuine social and political change. While some progressives may balk at forging a tactical alliance with mainstream Democrats, the choice should be a no-brainer. The impeachment train has left the station. Either get on board and help steer, stand aside, or get run over.

Facebook Touts Bans While Taking Hate Groups’ Cash

Facebook has made a point of announcing anti-hate speech policies that include the blocking of white nationalist posts and outright bans of people like Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan for their hateful content, However, the social media giant has taken millions in advertising fees from hate groups and their leaders, according to Sludge’s Alex Kotch, who reviewed Facebook advertising data.

Kotch explains that Facebook “hosts and profits from pages, some verified, of numerous organizations identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC], a nonpartisan nonprofit that has been tracking and reporting on extremism since the 1970s.”

Per Sludge:

From May 2018, when Facebook began publishing its archive of political and social advertisements, to September 17, 2019, at least 38 hate groups and hate figures, or their political campaigns, paid Facebook nearly $1.6 million to run 4,921 sponsored ads. Some ads call undocumented immigration an “invasion.” Others claim that LGBTQ people are “evil.”

Among the groups that Sludge found had paid for Facebook ads include the anti-immigrant groups Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR, who spent $910,000) and Californians for Population Stabilization ($20,000), the Islamophobic Clarion Project ($55,000) and at least three anti-LGBTQ groups: Alliance Defending Freedom ($392,000), the Family Research Council ($107,000 total, including ads specifically for their president) and Illinois Family Institute ($33,000).

Examples of statements include “100% OF ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE CRIMINALS,” posted by Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALYPAC). Sometimes the post themselves aren’t specifically racist, but the groups posting them are, as with the Proud Boys, whose founder, Gavin McInnes, has made a number of hateful comments, including, “Muslims have a problem with inbreeding,” during an 2018 speech.

“It reaches a lot of people with some very toxic ideologies,” Keegan Hankes, interim research director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, explained to Sludge. “Obviously, that’s incredibly worrisome, if not a little unsurprising given Facebook’s track record specifically around these ideologies.” Keegan Hankes,

Facebook has been struggling with how to address hate speech for years, and especially so since the 2016 election. In March, when a shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand,  wanted to broadcast his horrific acts, he did so on Facebook. While it was watched 4,000 times on Facebook itself, “it spread rapidly across the internet and was reposted millions of times,” extending its reach widely, as The New York Times pointed out.

The shooter’s plans for the El Paso, Texas, shooting were also mentioned on the site. In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Facebook posts contributed to sectarian, mostly anti-Muslim violence, so much so that Sri Lanka banned the site, preventing citizens from accessing it. As Emily Stewart wrote in Recode in April, the company “is seemingly endlessly behind the curve when it comes to monitoring the content on its platform.”

It took multiple deaths in New Zealand, the United States, Sri Lanka and Myanmar for Facebook to announce the ban on white nationalism content in a post on the company’s newsroom. They did so, the post explained, “because [hate speech posts] creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion and in some cases may promote real-world violence.”

In 2018, Vice’s Motherboard obtained leaked training manuals for Facebook’s content moderators, which stated that while Facebook didn’t support “white supremacy,” the company  does allow “praise, support and representation” of white nationalism and white separation “as an ideology,” according to one of the slides obtained by Motherboard. Facebook’s reasoning reportedly was that the latter “doesn’t seem to be always associated with racism (at least not explicitly).”

That explanation for not taking action on white nationalism is reflective of what the SPLC’s Hankes told Sludge about who the company is willing to go after, and who it is scared of: “Facebook is much more willing to take action against these toxic ideologies when it’s politically expedient”—as in when it will not result in criticism from mainstream conservatives, he explained, adding, “And these are the exact ideologies that have a lot of traction in mainstream conservatism right now.”

In response to Sludge’s reporting, a Facebook spokesperson who requested anonymity said, “We are reviewing the content [Sludge] flagged and taking action against any posts or ads that violate our policies.”

Read Sludge’s full report here.

Trafficking of Females Goes Beyond Sex

Nadja was brought to Germany from Bulgaria almost two years ago, at the age of 19. She told me that before arriving in Germany, she was told she would be working in either a beauty salon or a jewelry shop specializing in watches, that her housing would be paid for, and that her salary would allow her to send money home to support her family. Coming from the EU’s poorest country, where four out of 10 people are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, she was tempted by the promise of free professional training—something she would never have received in Bulgaria.

Once Nadja arrived in Germany, rather than being welcomed by the agent who claimed to represent the jewelry store and beauty salon owners, she was met at the train station by a woman who said that Nadja would work at her and her husband’s home in a rural area of Brandenburg, near Berlin. Initially, Nadja thought nothing of the change—she was happy to have a job.

Nadja soon discovered, however, that her job involved housecleaning and cooking for the family, including four children between the ages of 2 and 12, as well as caring for a sick elderly woman. Nadja was not allowed out of the home for two months, and she was not paid any salary for the first six months. Her employers told her that this was in exchange for her ticket and “training,” even though Nadja received no training and was forced to work 18-hour days. Her employers also kept her passport for the first year, insisting it was security for the money they invested in her.

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When Nadja was finally allowed to go into the nearby town on a half-day off, her female employer went along as chaperone. The woman accompanied her everywhere. After Nadja’s brother had an accident at home, the family returned her passport so that Nadja could travel to Bulgaria for one week. She returned early to Germany so that she could job-hunt before meeting her employers. She was able to find a job in one of Germany’s many vape shops, which, even at minimum wage ($9.75 in 2018), paid her far more than the roughly $2 per hour she was receiving from her 90-hour-a-week domestic forced labor.

When I asked Nadja why she didn’t leave the family for whom she worked, she explained that they effectively held her hostage at their home—she had no friends and knew nobody, and they instilled in her a distrust of other Germans. She was unaware that what the family had done was illegal. Even today, seven months after leaving her exploiters, as she grapples with the trauma of having been trafficked, she fears she might be deported for addressing this issue with German authorities.

Nadja’s story is familiar to anyone who has met refugees with little to no education in Germany. The country is lauded for having some of the most hospitable visa requirements for foreigners from outside the eurozone, but the numbers of women and girls who come to the country, sold a lie about their future employment, are shockingly high. Awareness of how women are trafficked to Germany with false promises of decent-paying jobs is still quite low.

Women involved in various forms of labor exploitation are often not recognized as victims. One reasons for this, according to the German Network and Coordination Office Against Trafficking In Human Beings, is that trafficking is frequently portrayed in the media as uniquely sexual in nature. In reality, the exploitation of females goes far beyond sex: forced begging, slavery or practices akin to slavery; forced criminal activities; forced marriage; adoption; and organ removal. And yet, official statistics in Germany codify only two types of trafficking offenses: those for the purpose of sexual exploitation and those for the purpose of labor exploitation.

On any given day in 2016, there were 167,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in Germany, according to the Global Slavery Index. Elise Gordon, of the Australian philanthropic Minderoo Foundation, told me that her organization estimates that 71 percent of modern slavery victims throughout the world are women and girls. The German government believes the actual number of people in modern-day slavery and forced labor exploitation is higher than official statistics show. It is estimated that 90 percent of women trafficked in Germany are trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation, but this statistic is likely inaccurate. Janina Mitwalli, in her study on this topic, criticizes the European Commission’s “Study on the Gender Dimension of Trafficking in Human Beings,” noting that this report “is reduced to sexual exploitation only. This approach perpetuates and cultivates the public’s associations with trafficking in human beings.”

Mitwalli observes that there is far less media coverage of exploitation of women working in nonsexual industries, such as meat-processing or agriculture. This skewed coverage contributes to the lack of legal protection from nonsexual forms of exploitation.

We know from recent studies in Germany that females are exploited for labor primarily within the agricultural, domestic and entertainment sectors—more specifically, within the fields of cleaning, food service, caretaking, nursing and the meat industry. Most experts agree that the reported 167,000 cases of human slavery in Germany today is just the tip of the iceberg of a far larger exploited group.

According to Behshid Najafi, counselor and co-director of Agisra, a nongovernmental organization that specializes in psychosocial counseling and support in Cologne:

The problem is that women trafficked for the purposes of labor are almost always sequestered within the private sector—they don’t have a work permit, so they are exploited by the families hiring them. They tend to work in the care profession, taking care of the elderly, children, the infirm, and because of this they can’t know about us to contact us and we don’t know where they are to contact them. They are not organized so it makes it very hard to identify these victims. They are also isolated by these families with threats of going to the police.”

Specialist after specialist confirms that there are very few institutions to which people can turn when they are victims of labor exploitation. And if a trafficking victim cannot be identified, there is no way to track or combat this form of exploitation.

Catalina Guia, a counselor from Arbeit und Leben, an NGO in Dusseldorf, explains why the rights of women and girls are easily overlooked within the current German protection legal framework, despite last year’s G20 Strategy against Child Labor and Forced Labor: “Because society is still patriarchal and change is very slow and the law is too permissive in the face of human rights.”

There is some progress. For instance, since 2005, there are now female-specific migration reasons recognized in Germany’s immigration law. According to a provision in Section 60 of the Residence Act, women facing potential genital circumcision, forced marriage or oppression due to their gender can claim a special refugee status. But while these human rights violations are recognized under German law, the governmental agencies adhere to a strict verification process, making it difficult for women to prove their cases. In short, the law exists on paper, but the burden of proof is placed on the victim to such a degree that her claim can often backfire.

One of the more obvious resolutions to this problem is a future where immigrants and all women have universal income, effectively erasing the power of traffickers to take advantage of the most marginalized. Another is to change how laws fiscally treat immigrants far differently than nationals.

Adina Schwartz, of Jadwiga, a German NGO specializing in assisting female victims of human trafficking, says that Germany is a transit and destination country for human trafficking, not a source country. She underscores the importance of prevention in the origin countries, as well as educating Germans about the signs of trafficking. “It is not as easy to prosecute labor exploitation and domestic servitude as it is for sexual exploitation,” Schwartz says. Jadwiga is developing a program in Bulgaria called Forwika, which, in Schwartz’s words, “helps young girls to develop their awareness and not fall into the hands of traffickers.” She says that the top three origin countries for the trafficking of females are Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, although there are human trafficking victims in Germany from other EU member states, as well as from Africa and Asia.

The Bundeskriminalamt, Germany’s federal police office, publishes a yearly report on labor exploitation. Its 2017 study reveals that labor exploitation is clearly underinvestigated, with 180 victims and only 11 investigations. The same report shows that investigations of sexual exploitation registered 489 victims, with 327 investigations.

Not only do many NGOs and even the United Nations view women and girls as primarily victims of sexual exploitation, reflecting this bias in their research. Media efforts on behalf of well-intentioned feminists who focus solely on the sexual nature of female trafficking also have a negative effect. Since the 2000 U.N. Women’s Conference in New York, we have not seen enough attention paid to the labor exploitation of women and girls. In fact, what we have seen since the 1990s is a discourse that recycles the tropes of sexual exploitation of females, further entrenching sexist notions that men are exploited for labor, while women and girls are exploited only for sex.

American Higher Education Is Even More Corrupt Than It Looks

This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and New York magazine.

The unhappy heroine of “The Mistakes Madeline Made,” which premiered Off Broadway in 2006, hates working as one of 15 personal assistants to a financier and his family. The patriarch, she observes, “runs his home the way he runs his hedge fund — using a model to protect his family against the possibility of loss or waste or even just the unexpected.” His “Household System” demands perfection: Even the hunt for a duplicate pair of New Balance sneakers is to be executed with the logistical finesse of a Navy SEAL strike.

The play was written by Elizabeth Meriwether, who would go on to create the sitcom “New Girl” for Fox. Her fictionalized account of her brief stint working for the Wall Street billionaire David E. Shaw never reached a wide audience, but the script became samizdat among the harried members of Shaw staff — as the family’s highly compensated, Ivy-educated, hierarchical cadre is known. Her disgruntled protagonist’s job making sure “nothing bad can ever happen to this family” has felt familiar to some of Meriwether’s successors.

The 68-year-old Shaw made his estimated $7.3 billion fortune by bringing the computing revolution to finance. D.E. Shaw & Co., the legendary hedge fund that bears his name, pairs proprietary trading algorithms with obsessive risk management. Less well publicized, however, are the various ways in which Shaw has applied his fund’s risk-averse, quantitative approach to nearly every aspect of his life. Employees tell stories about Shaw wanting Chinese food or a comfortable mattress, and Shaw staff exhaustively researching and testing the options in advance. It was company lore that before Shaw traveled, an assistant would take the exact same trip — same car service, same airport, same seat on the plane — to eliminate any inefficiencies. Shaw has been said to purchase tickets for several different flights on the same day in case his plans change.

He has even devised a model to protect his family from the possibility of loss or disappointment (what some might call the stuff of life itself) in that most uncertain of contemporary futures markets — namely, the college-admissions process. Like other couples of ample means, Shaw and his wife, financial journalist Beth Kobliner, have sent their three children to an elite prep school, supported them with hyperqualified nannies and tutors, and encouraged their extracurricular interests. But while the typical snowplow parent quietly eliminates potential obstacles by clearing the road ahead, Shaw and Kobliner have seemingly bulldozed an entire mountain. Even though their children were by all accounts excellent students, the Shaws pursued a remarkably elaborate and expensive pattern of philanthropy to seven of the most renowned universities in the country.

Starting in 2011, when the oldest of their three children was about two years away from applying to college, the Shaw Family Endowment Fund donated $1 million annually to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford and at least $500,000 each to Columbia and Brown. The pattern persisted through 2017, the most recent year for which public filings are available, with a bump in giving to Columbia to $1 million a year in 2016 and 2017. The foundation, which lists Kobliner as president and Shaw as treasurer and secretary, has also contributed $200,000 annually to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2013.

The total donations for “general” purposes across seven years and seven elite schools are $37.3 million, which represents 62% of the foundation’s giving over that period. At minimum, experts in higher-education fundraising say, Shaw and Kobliner’s strategy improved their children’s chances of getting into at least one of the country’s top universities. At best, it would allow them to choose whichever blue-chip school they preferred, making selecting a college as easy as ordering from a takeout menu.

Most American tycoons who sweeten their children’s admissions prospects rely on a major donation to a single college, often their alma mater. And yet, from a hedge funder’s perspective, investing in multiple colleges is a classic asymmetric bet — one with minimal risk and massive potential upside. “For someone of his mentality, making a portfolio bet would make a lot of sense,” said one former Ivy League development officer. “I can tell you that within the hedge-fund community and private-equity community, this wouldn’t be unusual. It’s common for people to be giving to two or three or four schools.” (Just how many of these donations are made is hard to know because, while those from foundations like the Shaws’ are typically publicly reported, gifts from individuals are not.)

As Parke Muth, an independent counselor and former associate dean of admissions at the University of Virginia, explained, the very wealthy “are accustomed to diversifying their investments, and they apply that same philosophy to their kids’ choices.”

For his own college education, David Shaw, who grew up in Los Angeles, went to the University of California, San Diego, where he studied math, physics and information science. In 1973, he entered Stanford’s Ph.D. program in computer science. After earning his doctorate, he got a job teaching at Columbia. One former colleague remembers that Shaw arrived in New York driving a Ferrari and had his own public-relations representative, which was unusual for a faculty member. Profiles of Shaw over the years have reported that he left Columbia because Morgan Stanley & Co. made him an offer that was too good to refuse, but that may have been only part of the equation. He was also in his up-or-out year at Columbia, and his promising research project on an experimental supercomputer was perceived to have run into difficulties. “I don’t believe he was going to get tenure,” said Stephen Unger, emeritus professor of computer science. “His clock was running out.” (Through a spokesperson, the Shaw family declined to be interviewed for this story.)

At Morgan Stanley, Shaw realized that computers could do far more than simply help humans gain a financial edge; if programmed correctly, they could replace our faulty intuitions entirely. In 1988, he left Morgan Stanley to found D.E. Shaw & Co., which he conceived of as a research firm that happened to study the intersection of computing and finance. The company’s proprietary algorithms scoured markets across the world for tiny price anomalies. Shaw “pursued numerical precision with a zealous intensity,” Sebastian Mallaby writes in his 2010 book on hedge-fund giants, “More Money Than God.” “It was no good telling him that a programming task might take three to eight weeks; you had to say that it would take 5.25 but with an error of two weeks.”

The conventional wisdom in the hedge-fund world is to bet big. DESCO, as Shaw’s firm is known internally, did things differently. Its philosophy, explained one former trader at the firm, is to “bet small and bet many, many times.” Traders are advised never to make a bet that could cripple the firm. “They definitely practice what I would call extreme diversification,” the trader added. “It permeates the culture.”

To fill its storied ranks, D.E. Shaw & Co. depended on the same criteria elite colleges use in their own admissions processes. No matter one’s age or status, every applicant — from secretarial workers to traders lured from top mathematics and physics departments — had to submit their SAT scores. “It was incredibly insulting to recruit professors from MIT and ask them for their SAT scores and high school GPA,” a recruiter recalls. “They would be like, ‘I’m a tenured professor, why are you asking?’” When former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers applied for a job at the firm in 2006, he was required to solve brainteasers.

Housed in a glass skyscraper near Times Square, D.E. Shaw & Co. ranks as one of the five highest-grossing hedge funds of all time. The company employs around 1,200 people, including 87 Ph.D.s and 25 International Math Olympiad medalists. At one point in the aughts, of the five employees in the D.E. Shaw mailroom, three had degrees from Columbia and one was a concert pianist from Carnegie Mellon, according to a former worker. Among its alums are John Overdeck and David Siegel, who left to form their own legendary quant firm, Two Sigma, as well as Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, MacKenzie Tuttle. Eric Schmidt, the former Google chairman, owns a 20% stake in the firm, which he has said “feels like Silicon Valley in Manhattan.” Shaw owns almost all of the rest.

Although Shaw left the day-to-day management of the hedge fund nearly two decades ago, he’s still the chairman, and it remains molded in his image: decidedly elitist, tight-lipped and risk-averse. The firm has always operated in stealth mode, keen to protect its secret formulas. “Shaw mostly prohibited us from talking to colleagues in other groups — or sometimes even our own office mates — about what we were doing,” Cathy O’Neil, who worked at DESCO as a quant from 2007 to 2009, wrote in her 2016 book, “Weapons of Math Destruction.” (As soon as most applicants arrived at their first interview, they signed nondisclosure agreements. If hired, they signed more, which may be why former employees spoke with us anonymously.)

This secrecy and vigilance extended to the company’s extreme caution on legal and compliance issues. One of Shaw’s common sayings, repeated at an annual training session by a compliance officer, was that it was important to avoid risks and legal trouble because Shaw wanted to make sure that his kids could go to college. “He used to say that semifacetiously, as a way of saying, ‘I’m depending on this firm for my future income,’” one former employee recalled. The management of the Shaw family’s foundation reflects this prudence. At the end of 2017, more than 90% of its investments were in short-term Treasury bills.

Shaw left the hedge fund in 2001 to found D.E. Shaw Research, which applied computer simulations to the arduous process of drug development. At both places, former employees said Shaw cared about saving time almost as much as he cared about minimizing risk. “The one thing you can’t get back is his time,” a former employee who worked at the hedge fund recalled. “So you spend as much of your time to get him back his time. My bosses would tell me that if my spending eight hours on something would save David five minutes, it would absolutely be a good use of my time.”

Shaw, who often dressed in cargo shorts, a T-shirt and New Balance sneakers, wanted to make sure that wherever he went, he could stroll in and begin working. Desks and computers were set up to his liking. His guidelines for visitors to his office were equally specific. In the early 1990s, he became frustrated that people who came by when he was busy would walk away before he could see who they were and what they wanted. In a two-and-a-half-page interoffice memo titled “Stopping by David’s Office,” he detailed his solution: hand signals. To indicate that Shaw should return a visit, he wrote, “the visitor points back over his or her shoulder.” To indicate the opposite, “the visitor makes the ‘don’t bother’ or ‘no thanks’ sign, moving his or her hand back and forth, with palm showing, as if cleaning a window, while possibly shaking his or her head and/or wrinkling his or her nose.”

Shaw’s hand signals were parodied in an advice column in the company’s internal newsletter. Columnist “MarySue” explained to “Frustrated in Finop” how to interpret Shaw’s gestures. “You saw a basic left-right combination, which means ‘I’m on the phone with Bill Clinton (left shoulder point) and the Dalai Lama (right ear pull) right now.’”

Shaw and Kobliner, then a staff writer for Money magazine, were married in New York in 1993. Two years later, they had their first child, Rebecca, now 23, followed by Adam, 21, and Jacob, a high school sophomore. In orchestrating his family life, Shaw borrowed the methods of his hedge fund, much as “The Mistakes Madeline Made” describes. Many of the personal assistants on Shaw staff had impressive credentials. “It felt like getting into college all over again to get a job there,” a former staffer recalled. “It felt like a huge accomplishment.”

Hiring for Shaw staff was done separately from that of the firm but was comparably rigorous. Recruiters would sometimes swap out mathematical brainteasers for hypothetical problems that might arise for the family: If David is concerned about ticks, how would you prevent them from invading his property? David doesn’t like fluoride: How would you figure out the bottled-water brands that have the least? If money were not an issue, how would you design a safety helmet for a child?

Once hired, Shaw staff soon learned that many of these questions were far from hypothetical. One staffer remembered being told to find a rug for a child’s bedroom that was both cost-effective and “the best.” “Everything was like that,” the staffer said. Shaw also instructed his staff to protect the family’s 38,000-square-foot Hastings-on-Hudson estate from Lyme disease. One proposal supposedly involved building a moat — dry and lined with sheer glass — that would prevent tick-carrying squirrels and deer from entering the property.

As in the corporate world, responsibilities for different tasks and specialties, such as medical research, travel and child care, were divvied up among various Shaw staff; some assisted other assistants. “Devoted professional couple with three wonderful, school-aged children,” read one ad the family posted in 2011, “seeks highly intelligent, amiable, responsible individual to serve as part-time personal assistant helping with child care, educational enrichment, and certain other activities at various times during afternoons, evenings, and weekends.” The ad went on to explain that the assistant would have a private room on a different floor from the family’s apartment and that “an aptitude for math and science is a plus, though not required.”

The existence of this fleet-footed band of assistants — armed with advanced degrees and six-figure salaries and fighting an ever-losing battle against contingency — appears to have been a well-kept secret. Even the children’s friends who visited the Shaws’ apartment on the Upper West Side were not aware that the family owned other apartments in the building brimming with personal staff.

Shaw staffers confirmed that the standard was as Meriwether depicted it: perfection. Those who didn’t measure up suffered the consequences. Meriwether, who joined Shaw staff as a 22-year-old Yale graduate, was fired after forgetting to put snacks — bottled water and Asian pears sliced a quarter of an inch thick — into the car that picked the children up from school, according to two people familiar with the incident.

While Shaw was shifting his focus to medical research, Kobliner was expanding her personal-finance franchise. In books like “Make Your Kid a Money Genius (Even If You’re Not)” and “Get a Financial Life,” she fashioned herself as a self-help guru for the financially dazed and dispossessed. Kobliner has described her “mission” in life as encouraging people to have “open, honest conversations about money.” She advises parents who give charitably to include their children in those decisions and warns that “giving shouldn’t mean taking from others.”

One of her areas of expertise is how to pay for college. In her writing, media interviews and YouTube videos, she cautions parents not to “follow the herd with your donating dollars” or pin their hopes for their children on getting into brand-name colleges. “Don’t believe the hype,” she tells them. “You might find yourself obsessing over those annual college rankings. Don’t take them too seriously.” The sensible solution, she argues, is for families to “pick a few financial safety schools” — public universities close to home. A degree from an elite college, she reminds readers, may not translate into higher earnings in later life. “The Ivy League isn’t necessarily the gravy train.”

This is not quite the message imparted by Horace Mann, the exclusive prep school where the Shaws sent their children. At Horace Mann, the need to battle for slots at the nation’s most prestigious colleges is ingrained in students from an early age. Peers of the Shaw children remember classmates talking about where they wanted to go to college — and understanding that they might very well not go there — as early as the sixth grade. “It is difficult to dodge the school’s reputation as a ‘pressure cooker,’ college-obsessed school when, for example, a seventh-grade class has divided into teams named after the eight Ivy League institutions,” noted an editorial in the school’s newspaper, The Record, in a 2014 issue printed shortly before Rebecca Shaw’s graduation.

Conversations around choosing classes and clubs were tied to which would be most useful for college applications. Among her extracurriculars, Rebecca founded the Anti-Bullying Leadership Network. The summer before applying to college, she organized a conference on bullying at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center auditorium, where she spoke alongside leading academics and experts. “The speakers seemed like something that came to be through Rebecca’s parents’ connections,” one former classmate said. Over the years, some of their institutions had been recipients of the Shaws’ giving. Speakers included Lisa S. Coico, president of City College (the Shaw foundation has donated $3 million to the school to endow a chair in Kobliner’s father’s name); Thomas Kelly, the head of Horace Mann (to which the family has donated at least $3.9 million); and Sarah Hurwitz, special assistant to then-President Barack Obama. Shaw is one of the country’s top donors to the Democratic Party. Both he and Kobliner served on presidential advisory committees, and Rebecca later authored a guest post about the Anti-Bullying Leadership Network on an Obama White House blog.

By the time Rebecca applied to college, the family foundation had been donating millions to premier universities for at least two years. Large giving to multiple colleges isn’t as redundant as it may sound. “People sometimes feel, A million dollars should give me a lot of clout,” said Ron Brown, former director of gift planning at Princeton. “In the scheme of things, not so much. … A million-dollar gift doesn’t have the impact it used to have 20 years ago.”

At the same time, prestigious colleges have become even harder to get into. In 2015, for example, more than 8,000 students with perfect grade-point averages applied to Harvard, which admits about 2,000 candidates each year. “It’s quite a rarefied pool,” William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, later observed. Harvard admitted only 4.5% of applicants this year, half of its acceptance rate a decade ago. Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Brown all accepted fewer than 7% of applicants in 2019. Since certain groups, including alumni children and recruited athletes, are admitted at considerably higher rates, the odds against other applicants who don’t enjoy any such preference are even longer.

It was these anxieties that the independent college counselor Rick Singer infamously exploited in his wealthy clientele. Singer told his clients they could no longer rely on a major gift to one university — what he called the “back door” to college admissions. Instead, he sold them on the “side door” of fraud, persuading dozens of rich families to pay him a total of more than $25 million to secure spots at schools like USC, Georgetown, Yale and Stanford through inflating test scores and bribing college coaches. At least 52 people, including 35 parents, have been charged in the scheme, nicknamed “Varsity Blues” by the FBI. Fifteen parents have pleaded guilty, including actress Felicity Huffman, who was sentenced in September to 14 days in prison for paying $15,000 to inflate her daughter’s SAT score.

Shaw and Kobliner’s giving strategy was a lawful — if exceedingly more expensive — response to the same upper-class angst. In essence, they created multiple back doors. At a time of renewed debate about whether colleges are vehicles of social mobility or a means of reproducing class privilege, such a philanthropic adaptation suggests that the ultrarich won’t easily surrender their advantages. It “looks like a clever plan, but not illegal,” said William Zabel, a New York attorney who spent two decades as the head of Princeton’s planned-giving advisory committee.

Others questioned whether Shaw’s donations were intended to gain an edge for his children. Mark Lipton, a professor of management at the New School who has worked with the hedge fund, said that while Shaw cares deeply about his family, “he’s a real meritocracy fan. My hunch is that he invests in his kids from Day One so they can get in at these schools on their own. What’s so self-evident, whether it’s for his own kids or not, is the extraordinary importance he puts on the best higher education.”

Spokespeople for the universities enriched by the Shaws’ family foundation said they too are meritocracy fans and seek “applicants of exceptional ability and character,” as Harvard’s Rachael Dane put it. Yale, said spokesperson Karen Peart, “takes great care in its admissions process, and we stand behind the merit of all of our students.” Ernest Miranda of Stanford said “a donation does not purchase a place” there. “Stanford does not accept gifts if it knows a gift is being made with the intention of influencing the admissions process.”

Nevertheless, the Shaws’ pattern of giving has several signs that experts associate with parental campaigns to boost their children’s chances. Neither Shaw nor Kobliner graduated from Harvard, Yale or Princeton, three of the four universities to which the foundation has made annual seven-figure gifts.

Their favoring of institutions they didn’t attend runs counter to the traditional practice of wealthy Americans. When donors have no previous ties to a university, explained Brown, the former director of gift planning at Princeton, gifts are usually restricted to a specific academic purpose, such as funding a research program in their field of interest or a friend’s faculty chair. The Shaw family foundation has made dozens of smaller, targeted gifts to medical or computer-science research at schools over the years, yet its largest annual donations to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Brown, Columbia and MIT have been unrestricted.

Such general-purpose gifts, which are especially prized by universities, tend to be relatively small. In 2018, only 3% of total giving to Stanford and 4% to Yale was unrestricted, according to Ann Kaplan, who oversees a fundraising survey at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. In other words, a major unrestricted donation to a school, especially from someone who had no connection with it, would stand out. “It would be a flag,” Brown said. “Someone would ask him: ‘We’re very grateful for these gifts, but tell me why. Why now? What do you hope to accomplish?’”

Brown and Baker said development offices at elite universities generally won’t discuss a large gift with a prospective donor who has a child applying or about to apply, because admitting the student would look like a quid pro quo. When Shaw began giving, his daughter was just outside that window. More than likely, each university’s development office would have notified its admissions counterparts of applicants whose parents, like the Shaws, had become major donors.

“It’s obvious he picked the four schools he’d rather get into with a million dollars a year and the lesser schools with half a million a year,” said Zabel, the former head of Princeton’s planned-giving advisory committee. “If it didn’t help at Yale, he wouldn’t mind if it helped at Princeton. It’s pretty clear he’s hedging his bets.” Zabel now specializes in setting up private foundations for wealthy clients, some of whom have donated to two or three colleges to help their children get in but never as many as six or seven. Muth, the former University of Virginia admissions dean, said he knew of several Asian billionaires who gave millions to multiple elite universities to which their children were applying in recent years. Dismayed by their efforts to buy acceptances, Muth declined to work with them.

Well-heeled parents ply universities with donations even when their children, like Rebecca and Adam, are high achievers. “Friends of mine who wield a lot of influence, I tell them, ‘Just don’t do it,’ but they find it irresistible,” explained the former Ivy League development officer. “It’s a tragedy, actually. People will tell you that it’s a prisoner’s dilemma and that you just have to play by the rules of a perverted system.”

Rebecca and Adam excelled academically at Horace Mann, no small feat given its notoriously challenging curriculum. They were National Merit finalists, scoring in the top 1% on the sophomore-year PSAT test. Both belonged to the Cum Laude Society, ranking in the top 20% of their class. Adam received honors in computing and communications, English, Japanese, mathematics and science; Rebecca received honors in English, mathematics and psychology. In her senior year, Rebecca won the school’s community-service award and co-wrote and co-directed “Upper West Side Story,” a high school-themed musical that parodied the school’s culture.

Jacob, the Shaws’ youngest child, goes to Horace Mann and attended Stanford’s summer jazz program for teens. Kobliner and Jacob co-authored a children’s book, “Jacob’s Eye Patch,” in 2013, the year he turned 9. Editorial guidance and illustrations were provided by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer. (“They live in a large, makes-you-want-to-kill apartment, it’s so spacious and gorgeous,” said the 90-year-old Feiffer. “They offered me real money, and I was in the market for real money.”)

In the fall of her senior year, Rebecca was accepted early at Yale. In 2016, Adam — who classmates say was also accepted at Stanford and Harvard — joined her in New Haven. Adam has served as president of the Yale chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, an honor society for history students. Rebecca majored in psychology. At Yale’s graduation ceremony in 2018, she and her boyfriend performed a comedy skit titled “Moving On,” in which she pretended to break up with him. It went viral on YouTube with over 4 million views, and this year she was hired as a writer on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

Yale’s acceptance of Adam and Rebecca gratified Kobliner, who had applied there herself and been rejected. “I walk around Yale and tell all their friends that I didn’t get in,” Kobliner, who attended Brown instead, said in a 2018 radio interview. In her columns, she has advised readers on how to handle such rejections with equanimity. “Getting into your ninth-choice school might not feel as good as opening an envelope — or a DM — from the exclusive private college of your fantasies,” she wrote on her blog in March. “But no matter where your kid goes, she’ll have experiences, make friends, and learn things that will change her life. And that makes for an amazing picture, even if it’s not one you can post on the ’gram.”

ProPublica research reporter Doris Burke contributed to this story.

Corporate Media Will Defend Trump to the Bitter End

Here’s a Doonesbury cartoon by Garry Trudeau from 1974:

Doonesbury (7/23/74)

Things never change, do they—or do they? In 1974, of course, there was an expectation that if Richard Nixon were impeached and put on trial in the Senate, there was a chance that at least some Republicans would vote to remove him from office—which is why Nixon resigned when it looked like impeachment and a Senate trial were a certainty.

In 2019, of course, few see any likelihood at all that a Republican-dominated Senate would ever vote Trump out of office, regardless of what charges the House might impeach him with—even if he knocked over a bank, say, or shot the proverbial “somebody on Fifth Avenue.”

What’s changed between 1974 and 2019? The biggest transformation was the realization of the longstanding Republican dream—perhaps first articulated in a memo drafted by Roger Ailes for the Nixon White House (Gawker, 6/30/11)—of a right-wing media network that would do an end-run around what was seen as a media establishment hostile to the GOP: “It avoids the censorship, the priorities and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators,” Ailes’ GOP TV proposal promised.

The idea that the media establishment was inherently hostile to Republicans was largely a delusion; newspapers endorsed Nixon over Democratic challenger George McGovern 753 to 56, after all. But merely not having the selling of conservative policies as their primary motivation made corporate media an obstacle and therefore an enemy—and Ailes worked tirelessly to create a parallel media system that would deliver the news as the right wing wants it to be seen—”The Way Things Ought to Be,” as the title of a book by Ailes protege Rush Limbaugh put it.

The main value of Fox News, the cable behemoth launched by Ailes on behalf of right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is that it teaches conservative viewers that no facts or logic can force them to believe anything they don’t want to believe. Much as the tobacco and fossil fuel industries created their own realms of pseudo-scholarship where smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer and greenhouse gasses don’t warm the planet, Fox creates a parallel universe where conservatives are always victims, never villains, and any evidence to the contrary is simply—as the shopworn saying goes—”fake news.”

The corporate media establishment is devoted to the peculiar notion of “objectivity” (FAIR.org, 7/20/12)—which, somewhat counterintuitively, rejects the idea that there is an objective reality that journalists can meaningfully describe, and instead limits reporters’ role to repeating claims made about reality by various sources. On matters of national importance, these sources mostly consist of powerful government officials, including representatives of the major opposition party. This system allows reality as described in the most prestigious media outlets to be defined by the leadership of the two-party establishment—which turned out to be a good recipe for a stable, self-sustaining political class (one whose policy proposals could be counted on not to threaten the profits of media owners or sponsors).

Stable, that is, until one party figures out that the system allows them to say whatever they want. The rise of the right-wing media machine allowed Republicans to create their own self-serving fantasy world—and the rules of the centrist establishment meant that that bizarro version had to be incorporated into the consensus media reality. When the president is accused of a crime, he need not disprove the allegations, but merely needs to  put forward a version of events in which he is the one fighting crime, and his accuser a traitor working on behalf of a shadowy cabal. This becomes the unquestioned reality of the right-wing parallel universe—and an on-the-other-hand option offered by the centrist press.

California to Let College Athletes Sign Endorsement Deals

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Defying the NCAA, California’s governor signed a first-in-the-nation law Monday that will let college athletes hire agents and make money from endorsements — a move that could upend amateur sports in the U.S. and trigger a legal challenge.

Under the law, which takes effect in 2023, students at public and private universities in the state will be allowed to sign deals with sneaker companies, soft drink makers or other advertisers and profit from their names and likenesses, just like the pros.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and others cast the law as an attempt to bring more fairness to big-money college sports and let athletes share in the wealth they create for their schools.

“Other college students with a talent, whether it be literature, music, or technological innovation, can monetize their skill and hard work,” he said. “Student athletes, however, are prohibited from being compensated while their respective colleges and universities make millions, often at great risk to athletes’ health, academics and professional careers.”

Newsom tweeted a video showing him signing the law during a special episode of HBO’s “The Shop: Uninterrupted” alongside NBA superstar LeBron James and other athletes.

He predicted other states will introduce similar legislation. Two lawmakers in South Carolina have already announced plans to do so.

The new law applies to all sports, though the big money to be made is in football and basketball. It bars schools from kicking athletes off the team if they get paid. It does not apply to community colleges and prohibits athletes from accepting endorsement deals that conflict with their schools’ existing contracts.

The NCAA, which had asked Newsom to veto the bill, responded by saying it will consider its “next steps” while also moving forward with “efforts to make adjustments to NCAA name, image and likeness rules that are both realistic in modern society and tied to higher education.”

The NCAA, which has 1,100 member schools and claims nearly a half-million athletes, said that changes are needed but must be done at a national level through the athletic association, not through a patchwork of state laws.

Before the governor signed the bill, the NCAA cautioned that the law would give California universities an unfair recruiting advantage, which could prompt the association to bar them from competition.

Powerhouses like the University of Southern California, UCLA, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, could find themselves banned.

But while the NCAA is the top governing body for college sports, membership is voluntary. If the California schools are forced out, they could form a new governing body.

The law represents another instance of California jumping out in front of other states and positioning itself in the vanguard of change. The movement to allow college athletes to profit from their hard work on the court or the playing field has been cast as a matter of civil rights and economic fairness.

Professional athletes have endorsed the law, including James, whose 14-year-old son is a closely watched basketball prospect in Los Angeles and will be 18 when the measure takes effect.

On Instagram, James exulted over the signing of the measure, saying it will “change the lives for countless athletes who deserve it!”

He added: “NCAA, you got the next move. We can solve this for everyone!”

Democratic state Sen. Nancy Skinner, the bill’s author, said it corrects a longtime wrong: “For decades, college sports has generated billions for all involved except the very people most responsible for creating the wealth. That’s wrong.”

The new law does not go so far as to allow colleges and universities to pay athletes directly for their play.

The NCAA has steadfastly refused to pay players in most cases. But a committee led by Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith and Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman is studying other ways players could make money. Its report is expected in October.

The NCAA does let some athletes accept money in some instances. Tennis players can accept up to $10,000 in prize money per year, and Olympians can accept winnings from their competitions.

Also, many schools pay players yearly cost-of-living stipends of $2,000 to $4,000.

The NCAA reported $1.1 billion in revenue in 2017.

Donald Trump’s Repugnant New Attack on the Homeless

JACQUELINE LUQMAN:  This is Jacqueline Luqman with The Real News Network. The president is driving the discussion about rising homelessness in this country and he’s targeting California in particular.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Nearly half of all the homeless people living in the streets in America happen to live in the state of California. What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country. It’s a shame. The world is looking at it. Look at Los Angeles with the tents and the horrible, horrible, disgusting condition.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Now, of course, his rhetoric is callous and he doesn’t focus on the human toll of homelessness at all. But what he also does not address are the causes of homelessness. Which if he did, if we did as a nation, could inform the solutions to the issue. That is if we really cared to address them at all. So maybe if we look at one of the groups of people who are hit the hardest by the homeless crisis, we might be able to formulate some solutions to this problem, if that’s really what we want to do.

Here to talk with me about this community in LA County and how they are particularly hard hit by this crisis is Gale Holland. Gale covers homelessness and poverty for The Los Angeles Times. Gale, thank you so much for joining me today.

GALE HOLLAND: Thank you for having me, Jacqueline.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: And I want to thank you for writing the piece on the Pacoima community that was recently published in the LA Times. That was an incredible and shocking piece that was published. But before we get into it, I want to address a part of what Trump said because I want us to put the homeless issue in California in some context. Let’s talk about some real numbers. Homelessness is a growing issue in California, right?

GALE HOLLAND: Correct.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: And it is an issue that has grown exponentially because homelessness has risen in California steadily since 2011 reaching almost 60,000 people that were documented as homeless this year, right?

GALE HOLLAND: Absolutely.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Now to your article about the community in Pacoima, California. That’s a particularly interesting and unique community because this group of people that you highlighted in your article were basically the children of a middle-class, working-class African American community in Pacoima, California. Pacoima is unique and noteworthy because it was one of the few places in Los Angeles County where African Americans could buy homes before the 1960 Fair Housing laws, right?

GALE HOLLAND: Particularly suburban places. There were other neighborhoods in urban Los Angeles that didn’t have racial covenants to keep black people and other people of color out. But in the suburbs, and particularly in the San Fernando Valley, home of the Valley girl, the covenants were pretty ubiquitous across most of the communities other than Pacoima. And so in Pacoima, the people who settled there were – it was a range like there always is everywhere. But basically, this was the doctors, the teachers, the judges. As well as the factory workers, the ice-cream salesmen, the retailers, the insurance salesmen because there was a possibility of home ownership that wasn’t available and in a suburban setting with yards or a bit more space than in the inner city.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So this was a thriving working-class, middle-class, but even professional-class black community in the ’60s. And then in the ’70s, the Fair Housing laws were implemented and some black people with a little more money, with a little higher education, moved out of that community, moved farther out into the suburbs where housing was more open to them. But you still had a thriving working-class, black community because manufacturing jobs were still in existence in the area.

GALE HOLLAND: Yeah. And a lot of people don’t think of LA as a manufacturing hub, but it was. And we had a major General Motors factory plant that produced the Camaro. I think a lot of people remember the Camaro. And there was a Pfister office, you know, kitchen fixtures plant and a few other plants. So they were line jobs, there were administrative jobs. And then like I said, there were the kinds of professional jobs that those people would have probably perhaps wanted to do somewhere else but weren’t able to because of these racial covenants restricting them from going elsewhere in the Valley. And the Valley at that time was fairly developed.

One irony that I found out in my reporting is basically, again, it’s not as well-known as like Chicago or even maybe – no, not Baltimore, but some of the other cities that are known for the Great Migration of African Americans from the South. Just kind of like a mini little place for the Great Migration. And when a lot of the founding families arrived, people were absolutely living in tents and now their ancestors are back to living in tents. So I mean, I’m sorry, their descendants, are back to living in tents. So it’s just a very cruel irony of history and [inaudible].

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So let’s talk about the factors that contributed to the descendants of those original African American people who migrated to this area, to that area in the country, lived in tents until they could achieve their “American dream” and buy a house. And now their descendants are living in tents again because we’re talking about the collapse of US manufacturing that hit that area particularly hard, right?

GALE HOLLAND: Right. Because the other than jobs that were available for people who were in the aerospace industry. And of course, after World War II, the aerospace industry had really pioneered in Southern California and specifically in that part of the Valley. So it was also the decline of the aerospace industry. And I think people didn’t realize it till later that this is what really—People think of LA as Hollywood and Hollywood being where the money is in LA, but in actuality, the aerospace industry and some of its offshoots like the auto industry are feeder industries to the big planes – is where a lot of the wealth of LA was created right after World War II. And this is where these people, their families had jobs.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: And then after you have the erosion of the economic base, the elimination of jobs so people could afford their homes, then you had the introduction of crack cocaine, the proliferation of crack cocaine in an already economically devastated and racially segregated community, where you did not see the proliferation of that drug in many other communities that were not predominantly poor and predominantly black. And then on the tail end of that or during that proliferation, you also had mass incarceration that went along with that. So this community of a former thriving middle-class black community, many of those residents are now, as you said earlier, on the streets, living in tents again.

GALE HOLLAND: Right. I think it actually isn’t many. It just feels like many because of course there should be none. But there should be no people living on the street, but there are. And in this one camp which had been driven over the years, they’ve been out there in various configurations for three to five years, some of them have been driven from neighborhood to neighborhood. And finally, according to them, the LAPD told them to go under this freeway overpass because they would not be impacting homes and schools as much. And so the homeless services provider that’s trying to help them find housing says that there’s 50 people out there. And even in Los Angeles, whereas some of the pictures you are showing show there are block after block of tents, it doesn’t stop being shocking. But 50 people in one place in the middle of the suburb, I think was very shocking to a lot of people and it was certainly shocking to me.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Yes, certainly. And when you consider that many of those people are from the same community. And then when you look at this issue—

GALE HOLLAND: Not a lot of them are from the same community, but many of them are related. It’s only my former, you know, brother-in-law’s second wife. They know each other. And so they may be on the sidewalk, but they’re still part of the community. [crosstalk] all the time to help them. The reason I bring this up is that a lot of times people ask me, why don’t their families take care of them? Well, in many cases, their families are trying to still take care of them. They’re out there in the streets trying to help them.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So then when we look at this issue from a macro view, not just for Pacoima in the neighborhood of Pacoima, we look at LA County as a whole that has an African American population of only about 9%, but has a 40% of the homeless population is African American. So then we begin to ask why that is. And now we look at more data where a recent study outlines that it’s the systemic racial issues that you raised in your article as well as the economic issues of manufacturing, job loss, and housing issues that also contribute to a disproportionate number of African Americans being represented among the homeless community. But these issues also contribute to homelessness in general. So can you give more insight into this study?

GALE HOLLAND: Well, I think that just looking at Pacoima in terms of people arrived from the South with no wealth and they were able to buy these houses and build this very nice community. But when the tide came up, industrial disinvestment at that time, the community was extremely stigmatized as a place where there was a lot of drug trafficking and other crime. So their houses were worth nothing. So there was no wealth for them to pass on to their children to sustain themselves as they entered adulthood and tried to move on having their own families and this kind of thing.

And then at the same time, I don’t know how big a factor this was, but some of the people I talked to talked about within own families, because their parents no longer were able to work very close to Pacoima, they had to drive up to the High Desert communities where the aerospace industry and other industrial jobs that hadn’t fled overseas had gone to these very low-price areas in the High Desert here. The drive, there would be long commutes, family life was disrupted. And so they lost out on those counts as well.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So when we hear this president, and Ben Carson and others in this administration propose to use the police to clear away homeless encampments even more than what is being done now to criminalize homelessness and to put homeless people in federal facilities, which are basically prisons and detention centers. That’s clearly horrible for all people, for all homeless people. But what does it mean in particular for this group of people who have already been stigmatized, as you said, and discriminated against and have already faced so much victimization? What does it mean for people who truly have been victimized by the collapse of this American economy?

GALE HOLLAND: Well, I think one thing that you see immediately if you talk to these people is there’s so much trauma. There’s people who watched their children get killed in front of them. There’s people who lost their parents for lack of healthcare or the hospitalization, they weren’t able to get there on time. And so it’s not as simple as just get them an apartment. There’s a lot of healing that has to go on for a lot of these people. And it just compounds for the people who, like Mr. Trump and Ben Carson, who are angered by seeing tents in the street, the amount of time that they’ve been left there, both the circumstances that occurred in their neighborhood as they growing were up and also the direct racism they experience, and then some of the things that have gone on since then, they need a lot of services like mental health services.

I think there’s many people out there that need mental health services and drug addiction or abuse services. And one thing that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that, and I think the research is still out on this, but there’s a lot of people that believe that the prevalence of drug abuse in the streets, it’s not that these were drug abusers who therefore landed in the streets. There are certainly those people who weren’t able to keep up the job or whatever, but there’s an awful lot of people that started using drugs in the street to self-medicate or for mental health problems that may have led to them being in the street. So I also think that one thing I’ve learned from reporting on this for five years is that it’s one thing to say you’re going to take a criminalization approach to homelessness, but one would need to ask oneself, how many police do we really have?

If there’s 59,000 people, there’s 10,000 officers in the city of Los Angeles. Of course, homelessness is a 24/7 thing. If you think you’re going to police those people around the clock, year-round, with 10,000 officers and have every other law enforcement issue to deal with the same time, I’m not sure how serious those calls for that as a solution are because there just aren’t the resources. There aren’t the resources to impose the kind of orders that they want. And then the same problem with incarceration. There are plenty of people that clinicians here in Los Angeles would like to see enter mental health facilities and could benefit from it, and they aren’t able to. The resources have not been dedicated to that. And even the sheriff a long time ago said he would not take low-level drug dealers into the jail because he would be overrun by them. So—

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So, Gale, let me ask you this final question. The rhetoric coming from this administration is very similar to the “build the wall” rhetoric where there is demonization of a particular group of people, blaming those people who are marginalized and victimized for all of the problems of this country. Do you think that the administration taking this type of approach, further demonizing homeless people and particularly vulnerable groups of homeless people, is that going to exacerbate the problem in your opinion?

GALE HOLLAND: Well, I think that political analysts and our political reporters feel that he’s using it as a wedge issue to rile up his base and hoping that that will help him with his reelection effort. Again, he came out of here, he spent a few days here. The only order he made was something about water quality being affected by having street camps. I think California is perhaps among the top states in dealing with its water quality, it’s air quality. We have problems because we’re very overcrowded as a state. I just don’t know how serious he is about it. So it leads one to believe that actually, it’s more of an electioneer stunt, as the Democrats say.

Particularly as the cities that he’s attacking are Democratic-led cities and cities with people of color where the politicians have been critical of the language that he’s used about immigrants. And of course, for us in Los Angeles where Latinos are not a minority, not even close, it’s beyond the pale to have that particular group demonized as people who haven’t given to our society or our country because it’s so much of our city. And they make the city go around. Every group does. But—

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: Yeah. It sounds like all of the things you mentioned, of course, housing, of course, an end to a racial discrimination, just acknowledging racial discrimination that has contributed significantly to homelessness for so many people of color. And certainly substance abuse, mental health abuse, which, of course, ties into Medicare for All and other social programs that could address this issue and mitigate it for hundreds of thousands of people across this country. But that’s not where we are. And it looks as though we have much more work to do in this arena of addressing and relieving homelessness in this country. But Gale Holland, thank you so much for joining me today and bringing us this story of the Pacoima community, and what it means in the larger context of addressing homelessness in this country.

GALE HOLLAND: Well, thank you for the opportunity.

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: And thank you for watching. This is Jacqueline Luqman with The Real News Network in Baltimore.