Chris Hedges's Blog, page 155

The Koch Brothers Are Even Worse Than You Think

The phrase “The Koch Brothers” has become a shorthand for the insidious spread of radical right-wing power in America. But even those of us who devoured Jane Mayer’s book “Dark Money,” as well as the work of other journalists who illuminated the reach of billionaires Charles and the recently deceased David Koch, including their massive network of conservative and libertarian Political Action Committees and the lobbying efforts of those PACs, might have only a glimmer of an idea of the size and scope of Koch Industries. The business is headed by Charles (David was a shareholder, but not involved in day-to-day affairs), and it’s what gave the brothers their money and influence.

If you’ve eaten produce grown in America, pumped gasoline, or dried your hands on paper towels from an office building bathroom, you’ve used a product that is at least tangentially, if not fully, produced by Koch Industries. It’s a company so valuable, that as journalist Christopher Leonard, author of “Kochland,” said of the company in a phone interview, “Koch’s annual sales are bigger than those of Facebook, Goldman Sachs and U.S. Steel combined.”

The exact number however, remains a tightly guarded secret. As Leonard so meticulously details in his deeply researched and deeply revealing new book, Koch Industries is a privately held company, not beholden to shareholders, whose profits are continually reinvested in the business—to fund new projects, take over other companies, work the employees of those companies to the bone in the name of profits, and broaden and deepen their influence in multiple industries in order to broaden and deepen their influence on American politics and culture.

To understand how the Koch family, and Charles in particular, came to have that power, you must examine their business. That’s no easy task when the company in question is unburdened by such obstacles as quarterly reports, public shareholders and transparency requirements. Leonard, however (he spent seven years pouring over reams of documents, interviewing Koch employees, employees of the companies they bought, the government officials who investigated Koch, and the unions that tried to fight Koch), does a remarkable job of making a corporate history as compulsively readable as a thriller, if considerably more infuriating.

Leonard spoke with Truthdig’s Ilana Novick by phone about the business of Koch Industries, how the company is a microcosm of larger economic forces in America, and how the company uses its business interests to dictate public policy.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Ilana Novick: Your book details Koch Industries’ remarkable ability to keep their activities, their corporate structure, even the products they make, secret. How did you first learn about the company and its reach across so many different companies and areas of the American economy?

Christopher Leonard: I’ve been a business reporter since 1999-ish, always based in the Midwest. As a business reporter for all those years in this kind of tight orbit around Kansas City, I would encounter Koch frequently, more than I think a lot of people normally would, for example, if you lived in Portland, Ore., or New York City.

In late 2011, I had this “aha” moment that, if I wrote about this one company, it would let me write about so much going on in the American economy. This is a massive corporation. It specializes in the kinds of businesses that underpin civilization, the kind of stuff everybody uses every day: fuel, fertilizer, building material, sensors in your phone, clothing material. Koch is there under the surface making all the machinery work.

When you write about this corporation, you’re writing about blue-collar manufacturing workers. You’re writing about labor unions. You’re writing about high finance, because they’re so deeply involved in derivatives trading and commodities trading. You’re writing about corporate lobbyists. It’s like the whole system is encapsulated in this one corporation. They really prize not just confidentiality, but secrecy. They don’t want other people to know what they’re doing, and that’s a strategic asset for them.

IN: You mentioned in a previous interview that Koch Industries is “impossible to boycott.” What did you mean by that, and what does that say about the company?

CL: First of all, Koch, unbeknownst to most people, is the third largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer in the world. Nobody thinks they buy nitrogen fertilizer, but nitrogen fertilizer is literally the foundation of the modern food system. Every single farmer who grows the big staple crops, corn and soybeans, has to apply nitrogen fertilizer to their fields almost every year. Without nitrogen fertilizer, it is no exaggeration to say you don’t have food. And this business is stunningly profitable. Believe it or not, it’s processing natural gas into these chemicals that are fertilizers, like anhydrous ammonia. Koch is super expert at processing fossil fuels like natural gas. And the profit margins are stunning, because natural gas prices are so low and demand for food is so high.

So Koch is processing this gas cheap, it’s selling this fertilizer at a very high price and reaping billions of dollars in profits. Again, this is a business that’s buried down at the root level of our economic system. The profits are stunning. And to boycott nitrogen fertilizer, I’m not kidding, you’d have to not eat. And that’s not an option. That’s why I say this business is un-boycott-able. Gasoline is a great example. Yes, you can boycott Koch, but it means you can’t drive most cars, or you have to be able to afford an electric car. They trade global oil supplies. This is a product that, by and large, most people simply can’t function without.

IN: You write about how when Charles Koch inherited Koch Industries from his father, it was a mid-size energy company. It was extremely profitable, but not what it is today. How did he do that?

CL: Charles Koch operates with a very long-term, strategic view. He is extraordinarily patient, and extraordinarily adaptable to volatile circumstances. And he’s got this theory of plowing profits back into the system. He doesn’t take on a lot of debt for the company itself but has cash on hand to buy up other firms. I mean, there’s a lot of deep data work to know more about the world than anybody else so that they can make really smart acquisitions. So there’s deep analysis, deep data-gathering that’s going on inside this corporation. All of that is admirable, but there are, without question, these practices over the years that I think would be objectionable to a lot of people.

IN: What are examples of the more objectionable actions that Koch took, that makes the company a villain for so many people?

CL: Koch was found guilty of criminal conduct in many cases. One of the chapters in the book shows how oil refinery managers intentionally dumped polluted water into nearby wetlands to evade regulatory problems. And that was illegal. The company for years (at least) essentially stole oil from the people who ran oil wells, the oil-producers. Koch would go gather oil and always take more oil than it paid for.

There are also bigger-picture things, too, that reflect a lot of what’s going on in the American economy. Koch is an expert of the so-called “private equity” form of capitalism, whereby Koch will go out and buy smaller companies. There will be job cuts. The workers who are left behind have to do more work on their shifts. I’ve interviewed people at Georgia Pacific who have to work 30 days in a row with no day off, and a whistleblower inside Koch’s Georgia Pacific division gave me 10 years’ worth of data that shows that workplace accidents are on the rise. The workplace is becoming more dangerous under this constant pressure to produce profits.

And we haven’t even talked about politics yet. The billions of dollars in profits that are generated from these businesses have been seared into affecting our public policy in a way that a lot of people might disagree with.

IN: The government has forced Koch Industries to pay for its activities, particularly, as you describe, in the 1990s, when they were found guilty of dumping harmful chemicals in and around their Pine Bend oil refinery, stealing oil from Native American reservations, and even being responsible for the death of two teenagers near one of their oil pipelines. But they faced very small fines, barely any accountability, for their involvement in the deaths of workers at Georgia Pacific plants. Why? Was it a result of their increased lobbying power, political donations and influence since the 1990s?

CL: Charles Koch completely loathes government. He dismisses the effect of government. He says government only causes more problems than it solves. But the company, Koch Industries, is really a good advertisement for government intervention in the sense that it was found guilty of a lot of criminal conduct in the 1990s. It faced a series of record-breaking fines and criminal charges for some of its conduct, and that changed Koch’s behavior. The book talks about how, in the year 2000, Charles Koch is holding a series of emergency meetings with his top leaders, and they totally restructure the company. Charles Koch says, “I don’t want these federal regulators on my property anymore. Change this. Don’t make this happen anymore.”

And they made a very good-faith effort, I think, to tighten the ship [obey regulations]. Now fast forward to the year 2019. This is a different story in some ways today. Let’s look at the problem of the growing injury rate at Koch’s major division of Georgia Pacific. The injury rate, depending on which injury rate you use, [rose] by more than 50% since 2010, and workers are getting killed on the job. Workers are losing limbs on the job. Workers are being burned, electrocuted—you name it—at higher levels than they were about eight years ago.

Now, I looked at a series of six worker deaths in the year 2014, which was a particularly bad year, and the regulatory agency over this issue was OSHA, and the fines for a worker getting killed on the job are to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. The fines for these worker deaths didn’t break $100,000 in most cases. That is literally a totally inconsequential financial number to Koch Industries.

And by contrast, when Koch was found polluting the area around its oil refinery in Minnesota that we just talked about a while ago, it was fined I think like $9 million. Still small, but a big enough fine to get national headlines. With these tiny little OSHA fines happening today, there’s virtually zero outside pressure for Koch to change its practices. And there’s ample evidence that Koch really hasn’t effectively changed its practices. So I think you can say that the lack of regulatory pressure seems almost to have certainly played a role in that.

IN: Koch Industries, through its corporate lobbying and Charles and David Koch, through their philanthropic and personal lobbying activities, are known for their hard-right libertarian views, and their attempts to shape American politics to reflect their views. Why are they so successful? And how are the corporate interests of Koch Industries related to the political interests of the Koch family?

CL: Since the 1970s, Charles Koch has been trying to reshape American society, and he’s funded Libertarian think tanks, which put out a lot of Libertarian papers. He funded university chairs to promote Libertarian ideas. But it was really only in the ’90s when Koch faced this massive legal threat that the company really started building this network of political pressure groups, hired more lobbyists, tried to essentially pressure the umpire and the government. And it’s only continued up through today.

IN: So is the company’s lack of accountability for their business practices, including workplace fatalities in recent years, related to an increase in political donations, lobbying and overall influence?

 CL: There’s no question about it. I mean, in 1988, the United States Senate investigated Koch’s oil-gathering practices, and the United States Senate uncovered the systematic oil theft that we were talking about. The Senate held hearings. The Senate released a blistering report accusing Koch of theft, and the matter was referred to federal prosecutors in Oklahoma, where a lot of this theft had happened. And that moment is when Koch really ramped up its political influence system.

The political system under Koch, its political influence machine, dramatically expanded in 2008. And the reason why is because climate change regulation was looking almost like a certainty at that time. In ’08, John McCain and Barack Obama, Republican and Democrat, voiced the need to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on the campaign trail. It is not coincidental. I have interviewed several former senior Koch Industries lobbyists and political operatives who explained to me how vital the issue of greenhouse gas emission law is to Koch.

So in ’08 and ’09, you see the size of the political network once again explode in size, and that’s when Koch really heavily invested in what I call this boots-on-the-ground activist network called Americans for Prosperity. That group explodes in ’08 and ’09, a lot of it to make sure the federal government never puts a price on emitting greenhouse gases.

IN: The parts of the book about the cap-and-trade fight at the beginning of the Obama presidency, the rise of the Tea Party and the influence of Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity were surprising to me, because I had associated that period and those groups with the fight over the Affordable Care Act. But your book shows that perhaps the more impactful fight was over carbon emissions and climate change.

CL: It’s totally true. Barack Obama comes into office posing an enormous threat, specifically to Koch Industries, the company, but also to Charles Koch’s worldview. Charles Koch views government intervention, like the New Deal programs that were passed back in the 1930s as a response to the Depression, Charles Koch thinks that was a huge mistake and detests New Deal-style programs. And Obama came in with this promise of basically a whole new New Deal, if you will.

And so what that threatened was a whole new era of government interventions in markets, which Charles Koch disagrees with philosophically but that also would have increased the regulatory burden on the massive industrial conglomerate he owns. Okay. So you’re right that the first fight Obama picked was over health care, and this was early in the administration, and there was a boiling anger at Obama across the country. And it wasn’t just Obama; it was the entire political system. And this anger boils over in the form of the tea party movement, which in the beginning really was driven by average people who were super upset at the direction they saw the country going.

IN: So how did the cap-and-trade fight intersect with the development of the Tea Party?

CL: Koch didn’t create the Tea Party, but it would charter buses to carry tea party activists to Washington. It opened Facebook groups to help tea party activists know where town hall meetings were, for example, and to meet up. This is the kind of really expensive backroom organizations that most movements have to work decades to develop. Koch kind of gave it to the Tea Party right of the box.

But strategically, at the core, what Koch really cared about was carbon and the greenhouse gas issue. And you can see the very beginning, there’s a scene in the book that the Americans for Prosperity [the Koch-sponsored conservative activist group] organized one of the very first Tea Party rallies in New Jersey, of all places, July 4, 2009. So you see Koch facilitating the Tea Party, but when the Americans for Prosperity get up on stage, what do they talk about? They talk about this cap-and-trade program, which would have regulated greenhouse gas emissions, not a central concern of tea party activists. Koch made it a concern.

They portrayed cap and trade as government tyranny, and they helped use the tea party momentum to destroy the cap-and-trade bill.

IN: So why didn’t fights over environmental policy get as much attention in the early Obama years, as the fight over health care?

CL: [Cap-and-trade] was a very complex, archaic bill based on Republican ideas that would have put a price on greenhouse gas pollution. To me, this is a very Koch-ian political dispute in the sense that all the action happened after the election. This is stuff happening inside the halls of Congress. The nitty-gritty, complex business of governing that doesn’t get as much attention, but that’s really vital to our lives. So Koch fought against regulating greenhouse gas emissions in the territory where it had the biggest advantage, which is away from the public eye.

IN: I also wanted to ask about Charles Koch in the Trump era. I think when Charles Koch didn’t endorse Trump it seemed like that may have hurt Trump’s election chances. But as your book shows, that’s not necessarily true, that much like a lot of different situations that Koch Industries has had to deal with, they found a way to exploit Trump for their purposes. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how they do that.

CL: Totally. Koch is riding public passion. It’s seizing on a public opportunity to play a bigger chess game. So here’s the chess game: Koch doesn’t like Trump, in essence. Trump is ideologically inconsistent. Charles Koch believes government ought to be tiny, government ought not intervene in markets. Trump has this America First, nationalist point of view, which embraces government intervention in some cases, like tariffs and tearing up trade deals. And, at least in his rhetoric, Trump supports entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, which Charles Koch does not.

The Koch network does not want to see Trump’s America First agenda take over the Republican Party. And once again, just as they did in the Obama era, the Trump network is fighting on the terrain where it has an advantage: the stuff that happens the day after the election, the complex governing administrative state of America.

Koch [seeks] to block the stuff out of the Trump administration it doesn’t like but support the stuff it does like, like dismantling EPA. And so the Koch network is trying to patiently contain the threat of Trumpism while getting out of Trump what it wants, basically.

John Bolton’s Living Obituary

“I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.” —John Bolton, in his Yale University 25th reunion book 

Fitting words from the gold standard in Washington “chicken hawks.” For John Bolton has made a career of sending other people’s sons, daughters, husbands and wives to fight and die in wars just as ill-advised, immoral and unwinnable as the Vietnam conflict he consciously avoided by joining the Maryland National Guard. That the man has done so, with a straight, mustachioed face, for decades now is a testament to his truly remarkable lack of self-awareness, empathy or shame. It’s almost impressive.

Like a bad penny, Bolton has weaved in and out of public life, either as an insider in Republican administrations since Reagan’s or waiting in the wings, voicing opposition to Democratic executives. For now, though, Bolton is out, fired this week by Donald Trump just after the president foolishly spiked seemingly promising peace talks with the Taliban. On this issue and most others, Bolton was the leading administration opponent of anything that resembled peace or military withdrawal from America’s countless, 9/11 vengeance-seeking forever wars. As such, his departure must cautiously be celebrated, though one fears whomever Trump may appoint to replace Bolton as national security adviser. Odds are it won’t be Sen. Rand Paul or Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, no matter how hard we anti-interventionists wish and dream.

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Bolton lives on, of course, and expect to see his ubiquitous face back on Fox News, keynoting paid events hosted by the bizarre Iranian terrorist cult, the People’s Mujahedin, and shuffling through the halls of one of Washington’s many neoconservative think tanks. So it seems appropriate to review highlights in the life and work of the man who never met a regime he didn’t want to change. Indeed, his personal trail of failure and policy disaster befits the times and illustrates the absurdity of U.S. military operations worldwide. Consider it a living obituary to a true hawk’s hawk.

During the Reagan and Bush I years, a younger Bolton bounced between the State and Justice departments and got his first taste of dabbling with proxy war, interventionism and regime change operations in Central America. He was even caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan team secretly and illegally sold arms to the Iranians, laundered the windfall through Israel and funded Contra death squads in Nicaragua. More than 100,000 people died at the hands of various U.S.-backed, right-wing militias in Central America during the 1980s, though hardly anyone remembers this now that the U.S. war machine has moved on to bigger and better things in the Greater Middle East.

Wallowing in opposition during the Clinton years, Bolton was once again plucked into government during the disastrous Bush II administration. First, as undersecretary of state for arms control, he helped derail nuclear negotiations with North Korea and helped sell the Iraq invasion on the basis of flawed, frankly dishonest, assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The death count in Iraq since 2003, though uncertain, easily has topped 280,000.

Furthermore, unsatisfied with his technical position, Bolton stepped out of his lane to argue, in a speech responding to Bush’s “Axis of Evil” address, that the U.S. should add Cuba, Libya and Syria to the Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis on Uncle Sam’s regime-change checklist. He even publicized the totally unsubstantiated claim that Cuba had a WMD program of its own. Ultimately, he got his wish in Iraq and Libya; Bolton was still working on toppling the governments of Syria and Iran before his firing.

Next, he briefly served as ambassador to the United Nations, though Bush had to use a recess appointment due to expected opposition to Bolton in the Senate. This was an odd—though fitting for the Bush team—position for a man long opposed to the very concept of the U.N. or collective diplomacy in general. Indeed, in 1994, Bolton had said, “There is no United Nations. There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that’s the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along.”

Finally, and most recently, Bolton—the worst possible choice for the position—served as perhaps the most hawkish national security adviser in history. Throughout his tenure, he called for and worked toward instigating war with and regime change of the governments of Iran and, in a Cold War throwback move, Venezuela. Bolton’s obsession with Iran was particularly noteworthy—he’d previously written a New York Times op-ed unsubtly titled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran”—and helped push Trump and the U.S. right to the brink of war with the Islamic Republic this year. To his credit, Trump seemed to stare over the cliff into the abyss, then flinched and inched backwards, deciding—for now—against a military strike and overruling Bolton’s pugnacious advice.

Most recently, Bolton—along, it must be said, with a bipartisan array of Trump advisers, congressional representatives and media pundits—opposed any attempt to negotiate peace with the Taliban, the only near-term hope for extracting U.S. troops from an endless, failed war in Afghanistan. This was Bolton’s last victory, as Trump caved to his and the entire establishment’s pressure and canceled the talks, labeling them “dead.” But this was perhaps the last straw for The Donald, whose “instincts” have long been to pull out and who fancies himself an epic dealmaker, as he lost an opportunity for a grand but necessary diplomatic dog and pony show at Camp David.

On the Afghan peace talks, Bolton seems to have won the battle; still, with his firing, let us collectively hope he may yet lose the war. With Bolton gone, one major (though far from the last) roadblock to ending the war in Afghanistan has been removed. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should be the next to go, and Trump should clean house and craft a new national security team that agrees with the vast majority of the American people, and, according to recent polls, two-thirds of U.S. veterans: that it’s time to end our nation’s disastrous and bloody forever wars. That may be unlikely, but it’s not impossible. Trump is just erratic enough, just unprincipled enough, to turn on a dime and resurrect the “dead” Taliban talks within days or weeks, sending Bolton rolling in his living grave.

So, yes, Bolton is out of government—for now—but have no fear, he’ll be just fine. In the year prior to his appointment as national security adviser, Bolton reportedly earned some $2.2 million in speaking fees and Fox News appearances. Apparently, drumming up war with, well, anyone and everyone is a profitable venture. Meanwhile, America’s wars, so to speak, must go on, in what must be termed the “Age of Bolton.”

Administration to Drop Obama-Era Water Protection Rule

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — The Trump administration on Thursday revoked an Obama-era regulation that shielded many U.S. wetlands and streams from pollution but was opposed by developers and farmers who said it hurt economic development and infringed on property rights.

Environmental groups criticized the administration’s action, the latest in a series of moves to roll back environmental protections put into place under President Barack Obama.

The 2015 Waters of the United States rule defined the waterways subject to federal regulation. Scrapping it “puts an end to an egregious power grab, eliminates an ongoing patchwork of clean water regulations and restores a longstanding and familiar regulatory framework,” Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

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Wheeler and R.D. James, assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, signed a document overturning the rule and temporarily restoring an earlier regulatory system that emerged after a 2006 ruling from a sharply divided Supreme Court.

The agencies plan to adopt a new rule by the end of the year that is expected to define protected waterways more narrowly than the Obama policy.

The Clean Water Act requires landowners to obtain federal permits before developing or polluting navigable waterways such as rivers and lakes. But disputes have long persisted over what other waters are subject to regulation — particularly wetlands that don’t have a direct connection to those larger waters, plus small headwater streams and channels that flow only during and after rainfall.

Environmentalists contend many of those smaller, seemingly isolated waters are tributaries of the larger waterways and can have a significant effect on their quality. Denying them federal protection would leave millions of Americans with less safe drinking water and allow damage of wetlands that prevent flooding, filter pollutants and provide habitat for a multitude of fish, waterfowl and other wildlife, they said.

“By repealing the Clean Water Rule, this administration is opening our iconic waterways to a flood of pollution,” said Bart Johnsen-Harris of Environment America. “The EPA is abdicating its mission to protect our environment and our health.”

Wheeler said regulators had gone far beyond the intent of Congress under the 1972 clean water law.

“The 2015 rule meant that more businesses and landowners across the U.S. would need to obtain a federal permit to exercise control over their own property, a process that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months or even years to complete,” he said. “It also put more local land-use decisions in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. Many Americans balked at this idea, and rightfully so.”

President Donald Trump had ordered the EPA and Army Corps to develop a replacement policy that has a more restrictive definition of protected wetlands and streams.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said the administration’s action would be challenged in court.

“The Clean Water Rule represented solid science and smart public policy,” the group said in a statement. “Where it has been enforced, it has protected important waterways and wetlands, providing certainty to all stakeholders.”

Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the 2015 rule had generated a greater sense of urgency among its membership than any other issue.

“When you take the private property rights from a man that’s worked all his life … to grow the food and fiber for all of us to sit down and enjoy three times a day, it’s something he just can’t stand,” Duvall said.

But Laura DeYoung, who runs a small sheep farm near Peninsula, Ohio, said she favored federal oversight to protect Lake Erie, where agricultural phosphorus runoff is blamed for large algae blooms.

“Nothing in the Obama regulations that came out prevented me from farming the way I was previously farming,” she said.

The question of which waters are covered under the Clean Water Act has inspired decades of lawsuits and numerous bills in Congress.

The Supreme Court in 2006 produced three differing opinions, leading the Obama administration to craft its rule. It provided federal oversight to upstream tributaries and headwaters, including wetlands, ponds, lakes and streams that can affect the quality of navigable waters.

The regulation drew quick legal challenges from 31 states and court rulings blocking its implementation in some. It was effective in 22 states, Washington, D.C., and U.S. territories before Thursday’s action.

Betsy Southerland, who was director of science and technology in EPA’s Office of Water during the Obama administration, said revoking its policy would create further regulatory confusion.

“This repeal is a victory for land developers, oil and gas drillers and miners who will exploit that ambiguity to dredge and fill small streams and wetlands that were protected from destruction by the 2015 rule because of their critical impact on national water quality,” Southerland said.

Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, applauded the Trump administration move, saying the Obama rule “would have put backyard ponds, puddles and prairie potholes under Washington’s control.”

Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan, where two disputes over federal wetlands permits led to the 2006 Supreme Court case, said Trump “has decided to weaken protections for our water and reward corporate polluters.”

Supreme Court Ruling Carries Dire Implications for Asylum-Seekers

The right-wing Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s near-total ban on Central American asylum-seekers can take effect as it faces legal challenges, a move immigrant rights groups decried as cruel, unlawful, and potentially deadly.

The high court’s unsigned order overturned a federal court injunction from July that stopped implementation of the restrictions, which the ACLU and other organizations have said are clearly illegal.

“The Supreme Court has stayed the lower court injunction of asylum ban 2.0, a slapdash, ill-conceived, patently illegal policy that will essentially put asylum out of reach for all but Mexican nationals,” Charanya Krishnaswami, Americas advocacy director at Amnesty International USA, said on Wednesday. “Lives will be lost while the case churns through the courts.”

As the New York Times reported, the Supreme Court’s ruling will allow the Trump administration to “enforce new rules that generally forbid asylum applications from migrants who have traveled through another country on their way to the United States without being denied asylum in that country.”

“The court’s order was a major victory for the administration,” the Times noted, “allowing it to enforce a policy that will achieve one of its central goals: effectively barring most migration across the nation’s southwestern border by Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and others.”

The Supreme Court is giving a green light to this Administration to continue its inhumane treatment of vulnerable people. https://t.co/6Hd6UKZXRp

— Raul M. Grijalva (@RepRaulGrijalva) September 12, 2019

SCOTUS allowed Trump’s cruel and unlawful asylum ban to proceed. This means:

Everyone at our border, except Mexican nationals, will be barred from safety.

Families, children, and vulnerable individuals will be sent back to danger.

The border will become an asylum-free zone. https://t.co/yRAzO5Tp7T

— Amnesty International (@amnestyusa) September 12, 2019

While no vote was recorded on the asylum ruling, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg voiced opposition to the decision.

“Once again the executive branch has issued a rule that seeks to upend longstanding practices regarding refugees who seek shelter from persecution,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Although this nation has long kept its doors open to refugees—and although the stakes for asylum seekers could not be higher—the government implemented its rule without first providing the public notice and inviting the public input generally required by law.”

Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the ACLU, which is challenging the Trump administration’s asylum ban, said the Supreme Court’s ruling “is just a temporary step” and expressed hope that “we’ll prevail at the end of the day.”

“The lives of thousands of families are at stake,” said Gelernt.

House Votes to Bar Arctic Drilling; Senate Action Unlikely

WASHINGTON — The Democratic-controlled House on Thursday voted to reinstate a decades-long ban on oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — a largely symbolic move aimed at reversing a plan by President Donald Trump to drill in the pristine refuge.

The 225-193 vote comes as the Trump administration has begun planning to sell oil and gas leases in the remote refuge, home to polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other species. An environmental impact analysis could be released soon.

The drilling was authorized under a 2017 tax cut approved by the Republican-controlled Congress, an action the House vote attempts to undo. The bill now goes to the GOP-controlled Senate, where action is unlikely. Trump has vowed to veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

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The bill’s Democratic sponsor, Rep. Jared Huffman of California, said there are “some places too wild, too important, too special to be spoiled by oil and gas development. The Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain is one of those special places.”

But Republicans, including all three members of Alaska’s congressional delegation, said drilling can be done safely with modern techniques and would decrease U.S. dependence on foreign oil and create jobs for Alaskans.

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, said Huffman “certainly takes a great interest in how we Alaskans operate. I would suggest he pay more attention to the issues in his own back yard and let me handle mine.”

Young called the Democratic bill “a sham” and said, “Despite the Democrats’ ongoing efforts, this is not a wilderness area. Let me say again: the (area set aside for drilling) is designated for development.”

Alaskans, including Alaska natives, overwhelmingly want to see the refuge opened to development, Young said. “Alaskans know and have repeatedly shown that responsible development and environmental stewardship can go together.”

Huffman and other bill supporters noted that the 19.6 million acre refuge is home to more than 200 different wildlife species, including bird species that migrate to states and districts across the country.

“You don’t have to have visited the refuge to be impacted and impressed by its ecological beauty,” Huffman said. The Porcupine caribou herd is a vital source of subsistence for the indigenous Gwich’in people and the herd’s survival will be imperiled by oil and gas development, he said.

Republicans and Democrats have fought over Arctic drilling for nearly four decades. Former President Bill Clinton vetoed a GOP plan to allow drilling in the refuge in 1995, and Democrats led by Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell defeated a similar plan in 2005.

The plan to allow drilling was included in the 2017 tax bill after lawmakers were unable to get a stand-alone measure approved.

The vote on Alaska drilling comes after the House approved two bills Wednesday that would permanently bar drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and extend a moratorium on drilling off Florida’s west coast.

Coastal lawmakers from both parties said the bills would protect U.S. coasts from drilling that can pollute crucial waters — and lead to disasters such as the 2010 BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Opponents, mostly Republicans, said the bills undercut domestic energy security and limit thousands of job opportunities.

The Senate is not expected to vote on either of the offshore bills, which Trump has vowed to veto.

Democratic Debate: Top 2020 Contenders Finally on Same Stage

HOUSTON — Despite the miles traveled, the tens of millions of dollars raised and the ceaseless churn of policy papers, the Democratic primary has been remarkably static for months with Joe Biden leading in polls and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders vying to be the progressive alternative. That stability is under threat on Thursday.

All of the top presidential candidates will share a debate stage, a setting that could make it harder to avoid skirmishes among the early front-runners. The other seven candidates, meanwhile, are under growing pressure to prove they’re still in the race to take on President Donald Trump next November.

The debate in Houston comes at a pivotal point as many voters move past their summer vacations and start to pay closer attention to the campaign. With the audience getting bigger, the ranks of candidates shrinking and first votes approaching in five months, the stakes are rising.

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“For a complete junkie or someone in the business, you already have an impression of everyone,” said Howard Dean, who ran for president in 2004 and later chaired the Democratic National Committee. “But now you are going to see increasing scrutiny with other people coming in to take a closer look.”

The ABC News debate is the first confined to one night after several candidates dropped out and others failed to meet new qualification standards.

If nothing else, viewers will see the diversity of the modern Democratic Party. The debate, held on the campus of historically black Texas Southern University, features several women, people of color and a gay man, a striking contrast from the increasingly white and male Republican Party. It will unfold in a rapidly changing state that Democrats hope to eventually bring into their column.

Perhaps the biggest question is how directly the candidates will attack one another. Some fights that were predicted in previous debates failed to materialize with candidates like Sanders and Warren in July joining forces to take on their rivals.

The White House hopefuls and their campaigns are sending mixed messages about how eager they are to make frontal attacks on anyone other than Trump.

That could mean the first meeting between Warren, the rising progressive calling for “big, structural change,” and Biden, the more cautious but still ambitious establishmentarian, doesn’t define the night. Or that Kamala Harris, the California senator, and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, look to reclaim lost momentum not by punching upward but by reemphasizing their own visions for America.

Underscoring his establishment roots, Biden released a new ad hours before the debate aimed at deflecting further criticism of President Barack Obama’s administration. At the Detroit debate this summer, Biden said he was “a little surprised” at the flak he took from fellow Democrats about Obama’s legacy.

“He was a president our children could and did look up to,” Biden says in the new ad. “I was proud to serve as his vice president, but never more proud than the day we passed health care.”

Biden, who has led most national and early state polls since he joined the field in April, is downplaying the prospects of a titanic clash with Warren, despite their well-established policy differences on health care, taxes and financial regulation.

For her part, Warren says consistently that she has no interest in going after Democratic opponents.

Yet both campaigns are also clear that they don’t consider it a personal attack to draw sharp policy contrasts. Warren, who as a Harvard law professor once challenged then-Sen. Biden in a Capitol Hill hearing on bankruptcy law, has noted repeatedly that they have sharply diverging viewpoints. Her standard campaign pitch doesn’t mention Biden but is built around a plea that the “time for small ideas is over,” an implicit criticism of more moderate Democrats who want, for example, a public option health care plan instead of single-payer or who want to repeal Trump’s 2017 tax cuts but not necessarily raise taxes further.

Biden, likewise, doesn’t often mention Warren or Sanders. But he regularly contrasts the price tag of his public option insurance proposal to the single-payer system that Warren and Sanders back.

Ahead of the debate, the Biden campaign emphasized that he’s released more than two decades of tax returns, in contrast to the president. That’s a longer period than Warren, and it could reach back into part of her pre-Senate career when she did legal work that included some corporate law.

Biden’s campaign won’t say that he’d initiate any look that far back into Warren’s past, but in July, Biden was ready throughout the debate with specific counters for rivals who brought up weak spots in his record.

There are indirect avenues to chipping away at Biden’s advantages, said Democratic consultant Karen Finney, who advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. Finney noted Biden’s consistent polling advantages on the question of which Democrat can defeat Trump.

A Washington Post-ABC poll this week found that among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, Biden garnered 29% support overall. Meanwhile, 45% thought he had the best chance to beat Trump, even though just 24% identified him as the “best president for the country” among the primary field.

“That puts pressure on the others to explain how they can beat Trump,” Finney said.

Voters, Finney said, “want to see presidents on that stage,” and Biden, as a known quantity, already reaches the threshold. “If you’re going to beat him, you have to make your case.”

Some candidates say that’s their preferred path.

Harris, said spokesman Ian Sams, will “make the connection between (Trump’s) hatred and division and our inability to get things done for the country.”

Buttigieg, meanwhile, will have an opportunity to use his argument for generational change as an indirect attack on the top tier. The mayor is 37. Biden, Sanders and Warren are 76, 78 and 70, respectively — hardly a contrast to the 73-year-old Trump.

There’s also potential home state drama with two Texans in the race. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former Obama housing secretary Julian Castro clashed in an earlier debate over immigration. Castro has led the left flank on the issue with a proposal to decriminalize border crossings.

For O’Rourke, it will be the first debate since a massacre in his hometown of El Paso prompted him to overhaul his campaign into a forceful call for sweeping gun restrictions, complete with regular use of the F-word in cable television interviews.

O’Rourke has given no indication of whether he’ll bring the rhetorical flourish to broadcast television.

The Mainstream Media’s Appetite for War is Insatiable

On the 18th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the illegal US occupation of Afghanistan continues as the longest overseas war in American history. Although President Donald Trump recently declared that peace negotiations over the withdrawal of US troops with the Taliban are “dead,” reportedly because of the death of a US soldier from a suicide bomb attack in Kabul last week, the status of future negotiations is still unclear.

The Costs of War Project has found that about 147,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan War since 2001, more than 38,000 of them civilians. However, corporate media continued to defend the “forever war” in Afghanistan by concern-trolling over an “overly hasty” withdrawal before the recent collapse in negotiations (FAIR.org, 1/31/19).

If signed, the deal would have had the US withdraw 5,400 of its 14,000 troops in Afghanistan within 135 days—bringing it down to about the same level of troops stationed there at the start of the Trump administration—with additional phased withdrawals contingent upon the Taliban’s promise to prevent Afghanistan from being a launching pad for international terrorist attacks, and progress on a political agreement between them and the Afghan government.

The Washington Post editorial board’s “Trump Risks Turning a Chance for Success in Afghanistan Into a Shameful Failure” (8/19/19) dismissed the deal as “weak” and a “flimsy accord,” and argued that there’s “little reason to abandon the country in haste.” The Post argued that Obama’s reduction of troops in Iraq was a “mistake” and cautioned that Trump should avoid repeating Obama’s mistake of “committing to troop pullouts from conflict zones without first ensuring that the result is not a political and military disaster,” citing the potential danger of a Taliban takeover and a strengthening of extremist groups. The editorial did not weigh the potential human rights abuses by a future Taliban government against the tens of thousands of civilians actually killed by the ongoing conflict; the only deaths the paper mentioned were those of US troops.

The Los Angeles Times (8/14/19) painted an especially ludicrous picture of the US as a benevolent savior in Afghanistan, after warning that an “overly hasty downsizing” of US military and civilian presence could risk “some of the progress made in human rights and development,” expressing concern that a reduction in “thousands of people” working at the US embassy and civilian aid programs would be “premature.” The LA Times said this despite massive USAID programs already having been criticized as “a failure and a waste of taxpayers’ money” by government watchdog groups, and functioning primarily as a pipeline of public funds into investors’ pockets (CounterPunch, 12/5/12).

When not editorializing against the Afghanistan negotiations in their coverage, corporate media went out of their way to grant anonymity and a platform to “critics” who characterized full US military withdrawal after almost 18 years of occupation as “premature” (New York Times, 9/7/19; USA Today, 9/8/19) and worried about the US “giving up its leverage” (NBC News, 9/9/19).

The New York Times (8/2/19) gave a platform to retired generals Jack Keane and David Petraeus to lobby for keeping thousands of “Special Operations forces” in Afghanistan:

“US troops in Afghanistan have prevented another catastrophic attack on our homeland for 18 years,” General Keane said in an interview. “Expecting the Taliban to provide that guarantee in the future by withdrawing all US troops makes no sense.”

The Times might have pointed out that the September 11 attacks were carried out by militants based in the United States and recruited in Germany.

CNN’s  “Trump Meets Security Officials on Afghanistan as Concerns Mount About US Withdrawal” (8/16/19) featured anonymous “critics” who found that the “US/Taliban peace plan” could “end America’s longest-running war,” but “could also trigger a surrender for the US and a betrayal of the Afghan government.”

The Wall Street Journal (8/16/19) reported:

Critics of a prospective deal said any agreement with the Taliban amounts to defeat for the US-led effort, saying the Taliban seek to reclaim control of the country, not battle extremists or work with the Afghan government as the US had hoped.

The Washington Post (8/16/19) found that:

Some critics have expressed concern that the United States could be giving away much of its leverage by announcing a troop withdrawal up front, before progress in inter-Afghan negotiations has been achieved.

NBC News’ “US Withdrawal From Afghanistan Could Trigger ‘Catastrophic’ Civil War, Ex-US Diplomats Warn” (9/3/19), was based on an Atlantic Council commentary by nine former diplomats:

“A major troop withdrawal must be contingent on a final peace,” the former diplomats wrote. “The initial US drawdown should not go so far or so fast that the Taliban believe that they can achieve military victory.”

Who are these “critics,” and how come journalists don’t go out of their way to tap other kinds of sources for their reports? While there was no shortage of sources critical of US withdrawal efforts in these reports, corporate media hosted a narrow spectrum of debate by leaving no room for sources critical of the war’s moral and legal legitimacy who advocated a complete withdrawal.

The discussion also left out those who were critical of the “peace talks” for reasons that differ from those of hawkish government and military officials. Legal scholar Marjorie Cohn and the Costs of War Project have criticized the US/Taliban peace talks, arguing that they wouldn’t have led to real peace because they ignored the role of regional Afghan militias, funded and directed by the CIA, in subverting peace (Intercept, 8/21/19). These CIA-backed forces have violated laws of war designed to protect civilians by engaging in torture and killings with near impunity, pushing people toward the Taliban. Central to the US/NATO coalition’s security strategy, these militias carry out approximately seven times as many offensive operations against the Taliban as the regular Afghan forces (New York Times, 12/31/18, 8/12/19).

Not only do corporate media credulously assume that the US has always been interested in peace, conveniently forgetting that the US rejected offers from the Taliban to hand Osama bin Laden over and surrender soon after the invasion (Intercept, 8/22/17), they also erroneously presume that the US possesses the legal and moral prerogative to enforce a deal to determine the future of Afghanistan.

While it’s certainly true that things could get worse if the US withdraws, these reports conveniently omit that the US military’s very presence is a major obstacle to peace in Afghanistan. Political scientist Robert Pape studied every  suicide bomb attack in the world since 1980, like the one ostensibly responsible for scuttling the peace talks. His finding: 95 percent of all suicide bombings are a response to military intervention, and often occupation (Nation, 12/2/15). The Taliban have long held that a complete withdrawal of foreign troops and an end to the occupation is a necessary precondition for any political settlement with the Afghan government.

Although the Afghan government and the international coalition—primarily the US—have caused most of the civilian deaths during the first six months of 2019, media scholar and FAIR contributor Greg Shupak is correct to point out (In These Times, 8/1/18):

The United States and its partners also share blame for Afghan civilian deaths caused by anti-government forces. According to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg conducted after World War II, a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” What this means is that whoever starts a war is responsible for all the atrocities that occur in that war. The 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan was a war of aggression. The attack was not authorized by the United Nations, which means it was illegal.

FAIR has documented that corporate media have often covered for the US government’s role in cultivating Muslim extremists (Extra!, 1/02), and for its effective cooperation with Osama bin Laden’s explicit strategy of bogging the US down in expensive, bloody wars in Muslim countries (Extra!, 7/11).

The Afghans are one of the least happy populations ever recorded (Gallup, 10/26/18). Yet corporate media’s propagandistic coverage discourages the US from doing the one thing that might help change that: get out.

Tentative Opioids Settlement Falls Short of a Nationwide Deal

HARTFORD, Conn.—A tentative settlement announced Wednesday over the role Purdue Pharma played in the nation’s opioid addiction crisis falls short of the far-reaching national settlement the OxyContin maker had been seeking for months, with litigation sure to continue against the company and the family that owns it.

The agreement with about half the states and attorneys representing roughly 2,000 local governments would have Purdue file for a structured bankruptcy and pay as much as $12 billion over time, with about $3 billion coming from the Sackler family. That number involves future profits and the value of drugs currently in development.

In addition, the family would have to give up its ownership of the company and contribute another $1.5 billion by selling another of its pharmaceutical companies, Mundipharma.

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Several attorneys general said the agreement was a better way to ensure compensation from Purdue and the Sacklers than taking their chances if Purdue files for bankruptcy on its own.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said the deal “was the quickest and surest way to get immediate relief for Arizona and for the communities that have been harmed by the opioid crisis and the actions of the Sackler family.”

But even advocates of the deal cautioned that it’s not yet complete.

“I don’t think there’s a settlement,” said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost whose state was among those supporting it. “There is a proposal that’s been accepted by a majority of attorneys general, but there are quite a few significant states that have not joined at this point.”

“There’s still a lot of telephone calls going on. I think we see the outlines of a thing that might be, but it’s not yet,” Yost said in an interview.

Opioid addiction has contributed to the deaths of some 400,000 Americans over the past two decades, hitting many rural communities particularly hard.

The lawsuits against Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue paint it as a particular villain in the crisis. They say the company’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin downplayed addiction risks and led to more widespread opioid prescribing, even though only a sliver of the opioid painkillers sold in the U.S. were its products.

The tentative agreement and expected bankruptcy filing would remove Purdue from the first federal trial over the opioids epidemic, scheduled to begin next month in Ohio.

In a statement after Wednesday’s announcement, the company said that it “continues to work with all plaintiffs on reaching a comprehensive resolution to its opioid litigation that will deliver billions of dollars and vital opioid overdose rescue medicines to communities across the country impacted by the opioid crisis.”

Even with Wednesday’s development, many states have not signed on. Several state attorneys general vowed to continue their legal battles against the Sacklers and the company in bankruptcy court. Roughly 20 states have sued members of the Sackler family in state courts.

Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin were among the states saying they were not part of the agreement.

“Our position remains firm and unchanged and nothing for us has changed today,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement.

“The scope and scale of the pain, death and destruction that Purdue and the Sacklers have caused far exceeds anything that has been offered thus far,” Tong said. “Connecticut’s focus is on the victims and their families, and holding Purdue and the Sacklers accountable for the crisis they have caused.”

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro called the tentative deal “a slap in the face to everyone who has had to bury a loved one due to this family’s destruction and greed.”

He said he intends to continue fighting the Sacklers, who he said did not have to acknowledge any wrongdoing in their agreement.

“This is far from over,” he said.

Ryan Hampton, a Los Angeles-based advocate for people in recovery from opioid addiction, said he was launching “a massive effort” among victims’ families and others impacted by the crisis to urge state attorneys general not to accept the deal.

“The amount of money that’s being offered in this settlement doesn’t even scratch the surface for what’s needed,” Hampton said. “We want to see Purdue have their day in court. We know more money will come if this case goes to trial.”

Wednesday’s announcement came just days after a group of attorneys general negotiating directly with Purdue and the Sacklers said they had reached an impasse in talks. At the time, several attorneys general said they were not confident Purdue would pay the amount promised and wanted more assurance that the money would come through.

In the latest settlement agreement, New York Attorney General Letitia James accused the Sacklers of “attempting to evade responsibility and lowball the millions of victims of the opioid crisis.”

On Wednesday, the Sackler family said in a statement that it “supports working toward a global resolution that directs resources to the patients, families and communities across the country who are suffering and need assistance.”

“This is the most effective way to address the urgency of the current public health crisis, and to fund real solutions, not endless litigation,” it said.

Some 2,000 lawsuits brought by local governments, Native American tribes, unions and hospitals have been consolidated under a federal judge in Cleveland, who has been encouraging the parties to settle. U.S. District Court Judge Dan Polster invited state attorneys general, who had filed their own lawsuits, to lead the negotiations.

How any money from the settlement would be divided among all the entities is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, attorneys representing the local governments issued a statement saying they recommended the governments agree to the deal as a way to bring relief to their communities.

In March, Purdue and members of the Sackler family reached a $270 million settlement with Oklahoma to avoid a trial on the toll of opioids there.

A court filing made public in Massachusetts this year asserts that members of the Sackler family were paid more than $4 billion by Purdue from 2007 to 2018. Much of the family’s fortune is believed to be held outside the U.S., which could complicate lawsuits against the family over opioids.

The Sacklers have given money to cultural institutions around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Tate Modern.

___

Mulvihill reported from New Jersey. Associated Press writers Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix, Carla K. Johnson in Seattle and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio contributed to this report.

The Real Charles Manson

The 50th anniversary of the Manson family slayings have inspired a rash of new essays and retrospectives, and almost ubiquitous among them is the same basic premise: that the seven murders committed by Charles Manson’s cultists in August 1969 marked not just the “death of the ’60s” but the indefinite deferral of the dream they contained. From the very titles of the works exploring the family’s crimes to a new summer blockbuster starring Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, this notion continues to dominate the public imagination.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion writes in her seminal essay, “The White Album,” imposing “a narrative line upon disparate images” so as to adduce some clear moral or lesson from our experiences. In Didion’s recollection of the ’60s, memory may be kaleidoscopic, and events cannot be put in a linear order.

What is clear for Didion is that the gruesome violence of the Tate-LaBianca tragedy denoted the end point of the decade, the wages of a strange, unhinged time. Her recounting of the era centers upon the Manson slayings as the grim culmination of all that messy campus activism, dissolute rock musicians, black nationalism and strange new communes popping up like dandelions. In Didion’s telling, “no one was surprised” that five people had been slaughtered in Roman Polanski’s Benedict Canyon mansion—a curious note to strike about a crime that continues to shock to this day.

In the decades since its publication, the basic thesis of “The White Album” has become consensus. Manson, who died in prison in 2017, lives on as an Antichrist come to Los Angeles—the ultimate boogeyman to warn against the freak lifestyle of his time and place.

But this narrative doesn’t merely do a grave disservice to the Manson family’s victims by minimizing their suffering as the mere collateral of history. Conflating the likes of Tex Watson and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme with the wider cultural revolutions of the era is itself a highly pernicious and dubious proposition, serving a largely reactionary interpretation of the crimes. Such a view not only does little to advance a meaningful understanding of the murders but validates a widespread hostility, then and now, toward the counterculture, as though it was the exclusive domain of a single, nightmarish guru.

This transformation of Manson, a barely literate career criminal, into the malevolent force responsible for ending an epoch, rests on a curious contradiction. In this version of events, Manson is a uniquely evil, ultraviolent force whose exploitation of the counterculture’s naivete ultimately destroyed a time of peaceful idealism and brotherly love. This is the case made in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which revels in the innocence those murders allegedly destroyed.

Tarantino’s film prompts the question: Just how innocent was the age that preceded the Tate-LaBianca murders? Even the most cursory examination of the decade indicates that it was incredibly, unceasingly violent. For an essay purportedly about the ’60s, Didion’s “The White Album” ignores the most murderous Californian of the time, Richard Nixon. There is no mention of the Vietnam War and the wider savagery visited upon Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, she portrays the campus activists of the era as faintly ridiculous dead-enders engaged in  “industrious self-delusion,” their ultimate motives seemingly unworthy of exploration.

Race riots, horrific carpet-bombing, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King  and the Kennedys—these are just the period’s most recognizable acts of carnage. Brutality was the status quo, and most of it originated not from the panoply of militant activists associated with the ’60s but from a mainstream acting in the name of law and order. Police and security service action against the counterculture was endemic; from spying to dirty tricks to assaults on such activists as Abbie Hoffman, such efforts involved prominent, powerful reactionaries, including those in the White House.

Dark conspiracies were afoot. As journalist Tom O’Neill reveals in his new book, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,” FBI COINTELPRO agents had successfully engineered the murders of two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus in 1969, using informants to prod a rival black nationalist group into the crimes. In May of that year, the California Highway Patrol, operating under then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, fired shotguns at dozens of students at the University of California at Berkeley, killing one and blinding another. That December, Black Panther leaders Mark Clark and Fred Hampton were killed in a Chicago police raid, with a wealth of evidence pointing to their extrajudicial murder.

By making the Manson family murders the fulcrum of her essay, Didion didn’t merely depoliticize the era; she recast history, however eloquently, to conform with her cultural beliefs as a stalwart Barry Goldwater voter. So if the popular understanding of the California cult has often been a cynical one, deployed selectively to sully the ’60s counterculture as inherently sinister, what can we learn from the tragedy? And what is the best way of understanding the seemingly incomprehensible events of August 1969?

The answers likely hold crucial lessons for 2019. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s description of Manson as a “right-wing hippie” in his best-selling account of the case, “Helter Skelter,” is largely accurate. Manson, a grifting former pimp, had no political ethos beyond perhaps his white supremacism, which only grew more pronounced after he was incarcerated. Indeed, the entire hippie phenomenon of 1969 was hardly as political as popular memory leads us to believe. As Hunter S. Thompson reported in his 1967 essay on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, hippies were not the student activists who had roiled campuses around the country in the years before; they were apolitical waifs who retreated from the kind of confrontation the activism of the day entailed.

Manson once called himself “The Gardener” because he collected flower children. The nickname was unfortunately apt, as he largely preyed on teenage girls, some as much as 15 years younger than himself. More than the savage violence for which it’s remembered, this was perhaps the defining feature of the Manson family. Its cult leader systematically exploited the psychological vulnerabilities of extremely young women, already alienated from their middle-class families of origin, and “love-bombed” them to make them feel special, valued and unique.

Reading the accounts of his manipulation, Manson emerges not as a mysterious Svengali with a unique gift for mind control but as a more conventional domestic abuser, alternating between threats and inducements. On Spahn Ranch, his disciples were completely isolated from all external influences. They weren’t even allowed to own wristwatches.

Tragically for Manson’s first victims, the desires he exploited to such disastrous effect were pervasive to women of the era. “I seemed to want more out of life than what was expected of young girls at that time,” recounted convicted killer Leslie Van Houten during an interview from prison with Diane Sawyer in 1993. “Drugs, sex. Y’know, breaking away from the norm.”

Van Houten was hardly alone. By 1969, countless women were peacefully raising their children on communal estates like the Hog Farm, away from mainstream society. Yet it was Van Houten who helped stab Rosemary LaBianca to death.

The crimes of the Manson family were singularly horrific, but it is equal parts dangerous and irresponsible to paint them as the inevitable result of an alternative lifestyle. Indeed, the greed, racism and fame-seeking, which defined and animated Manson, remain as common to American life today as they were then. It is the misogyny of his crimes—embodied most awfully with the death of an eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant Sharon Tate—that seems most striking now.

Perhaps the least-explored horror of the Manson family murders was the way they reflected, through the broken glass of one struggling songwriter, mainstream American desires. We have a duty to remember this, no matter how comforting it would be to consign such beasts to the shadows. The killer, to echo the famous short story, was calling from inside the house.

Supreme Court OKs Enforcement of Trump Asylum Limits

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court is allowing nationwide enforcement of a new Trump administration rule that prevents most Central American immigrants from seeking asylum in the United States.

The justices’ order late Wednesday temporarily undoes a lower-court ruling that had blocked the new asylum policy in some states along the southern border. The policy is meant to deny asylum to anyone who passes through another country on the way to the U.S. without seeking protection there.

Most people crossing the southern border are Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty. They are largely ineligible under the new rule, as are asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and South America who arrive regularly at the southern border.

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The shift reverses decades of U.S. policy. The administration has said that it wants to close the gap between an initial asylum screening that most people pass and a final decision on asylum that most people do not win.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the high-court’s order. “Once again, the Executive Branch has issued a rule that seeks to upend longstanding practices regarding refugees who seek shelter from persecution,” Sotomayor wrote.

The legal challenge to the new policy has a brief but somewhat convoluted history. U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco blocked the new policy from taking effect in late July. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed Tigar’s order so that it applied only in Arizona and California, states that are within the 9th Circuit.

That left the administration free to enforce the policy on asylum seekers arriving in New Mexico and Texas. Tigar issued a new order on Monday that reimposed a nationwide hold on asylum policy. The 9th Circuit again narrowed his order on Tuesday.

The high-court action leaves the administration free to impose the new policy everywhere while the court case against it continues.