Chris Hedges's Blog, page 160

Ex-Starbucks CEO Schultz Rules Out Independent 2020 Bid

WASHINGTON—Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says he’s no longer considering an independent presidential bid.

Schultz said Friday in a letter posted on his website, “I have concluded that an independent campaign for the White House is not how I can best serve our country at this time.”

Schultz faced intense resistance from Democratic activists who feared an independent run would give President Donald Trump an easier path to reelection. Schultz says not enough people are willing to back an independent because they fear doing so “might lead to reelecting a uniquely dangerous incumbent president.”

Schultz announced in June he was taking a “detour” from a possible independent 2020 bid, citing health concerns. The billionaire businessman said at the time he’d revisit his presidential ambitions after Labor Day.

Joni Ernst Says the Quiet Part Loud

Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, just said out loud what Republican politicians usually only talk about in secret meetings with their billionaire donors: The GOP wants to cut our earned Social Security benefits—and they want to do it behind closed doors so that they don’t have to pay the political price.

At a recent town hall, Ernst stated that Congress needs to “sit down behind closed doors” to “address Social Security.” She vaguely asserted, “A lot of changes need to be made in this system going forward.” But, she complained, if these changes were proposed in public, she would be accused of pushing “granny over a cliff.” It is not hard to figure out what “changes” she has in mind.

There are many “changes” that should be made to strengthen Social Security and make it even better than it already is. But none of those have to be done secretly.

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Congress should address our nation’s looming retirement income crisis by increasing Social Security’s modest benefits. Congress should combat rising income and wealth inequality, by requiring the wealthiest Americans to contribute to Social Security at the same rate as the rest of us.

Congress should enact caregiver credits for those who perform essential but unpaid labor caring for their children, aged parents, and other family members. Those crucial caregivers should receive credit toward future Social Security benefits so they don’t retire into poverty.

In addition, Congress should update the way that Social Security’s benefits are adjusted so that they reflect the high health care and prescription drug costs that beneficiaries experience. The annual cost of living adjustment is intended to keep benefits from eroding, to allow beneficiaries to tread water. But without updating the measure of inflation, those benefits are losing value each year.

Those are just some of the improvements that Congress should make. But those are not the “changes” Ernst has in mind, because none of those changes need to be done behind closed doors. Numerous pieces of legislation proposing those changes have been introduced in Congress—though none by Senator Ernst or her Republican colleagues.

Indeed, 210 House Democrats have co-sponsored the Social Security 2100 Act, which expands Social Security’s modest benefits, while ensuring that all benefits can be paid in full and on time through the year 2100 and beyond. Every Democratic presidential candidate opposes cutting Social Security benefits, and nearly all support expanding them. Meanwhile, neither Donald Trump nor a single Republican member of Congress is sponsoring or cosponsoring any legislation that increases benefits or even ensures that they can be paid in full and on time beyond 2035.

No action is the same as supporting cuts. As Representative John Larson (D-CT), chairman of the House’s Social Security Subcommittee and the author of the Social Security 2100 Act, has explained, “The hard truth of the matter is that Republicans want to cut Social Security, and doing nothing achieves their goal.”

Larson and his Democratic colleagues are calling Republicans’ bluff. Under Democratic control, Congress has held numerous hearings on Social Security and the importance of protecting and expanding it. Larson and his Democratic colleagues are planning to have a recorded, public vote on the Social Security 2100 Act this fall.

The legislation has enough votes to pass the House of Representatives. But don’t expect Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to bring it to a vote in the Senate. And don’t expect Senator Ernst or her other Republican colleagues to urge him to do so.

With respect to Social Security, just as with the issue of legislating background checks and other overwhelmingly popular commonsense legislation to reduce the epidemic of gun violence, Republican politicians will not say what they are for. In the case of gun legislation, they block action. In the case of Social Security, they block action unless Democrats agree to go behind closed doors so the public doesn’t know who pushed the cuts.

We should not let Republican politicians get by with platitudes about “saving” and “fixing” Social Security. And we certainly shouldn’t let them hide behind closed doors and undermine our Social Security.

As polarized as the American people are over many issues, we are not polarized about Social Security. Republicans, Democrats and Independents, of all ages, races and genders, overwhelmingly agree. We understand that Social Security is more important than ever. We overwhelmingly reject any cuts to its modest benefits.

The only group that disagrees is Republican Party donors. As an ideological matter, they hate Social Security because it puts the lie to their assertions that government can’t work. They do not want to pay their fair share. Indeed, they would love to get their hands on the money now flowing to Social Security.

When President George W. Bush proposed destroying Social Security by privatizing it, the American people overwhelmingly rejected his plan. But Republican politicians learned the wrong lesson. As unpopular as Bush’s proposal was, he was at least willing to advocate for it publicly. Rather than recognize the proposal was the problem, Ernst and her fellow Republicans think the problem was being honest with the American people.

Like Bush, they want to enact a Social Security proposal that is deeply unpopular. But unlike Bush, they want to enact it in the dark of night. Fortunately, their Democratic colleagues won’t let them get away with that undemocratic act. Nor should the American people.

All of us who have a stake in Social Security—which is every one of us—should insist that those seeking our vote tell us if they support expanding or cutting Social Security. If they refuse to tell us, if they ramble on about their desire to “save” or “fix” or “strengthen” Social Security in secret, we should draw the obvious inference: They want to cut Social Security. We should use the election to ensure they do not have the power to do that—and certainly not behind closed doors.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Robert Mugabe, Liberator Turned Dictator, Dies at 95

HARARE, Zimbabwe — Former Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, an ex-guerrilla chief who took power when the African country shook off white minority rule and presided for decades while economic turmoil and human rights violations eroded its early promise, has died in Singapore. He was 95.

Mugabe enjoyed strong support among the population and even the West soon after taking over as prime minister and Zimbabwe’s first post-colonial leader. But he was reviled in later years as the economy collapsed and human rights violations increased. His often violent takeover of farms from whites who owned huge tracts of land made him a hated figure in the West and a hero in Africa.

His successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, announced Mugabe’s death in a tweet Friday, mourning him as an “icon of liberation.”

Singapore’s Foreign Ministry later said he died Friday at the Gleneagles Hospital there, saying it was working with Zimbabwe on arrangements for Mugabe’s body to be flown home. Mugabe had received medical treatment at the hospital in recent years.

Mugabe’s popularity began to rise again after Mnangagwa failed to deliver on promises of economic recovery and appeared to take an even harsher and more repressive stance against critics. Many began to publicly say they missed Mugabe.

Forced to resign amid pressure from the military, his party and the public in November 2017, Mugabe was defiant throughout his long life, railing against the West for what he called its neo-colonialist attitude and urging Africans to take control of their resources — a populist message that was often a hit, even as many nations on the continent shed the strongman model and moved toward democracy.

A target of international sanctions over the years, Mugabe nevertheless enjoyed acceptance among peers in Africa who chose not to judge him in the same way as Britain, the United States and other Western detractors.

“They are the ones who say they gave Christianity to Africa,” Mugabe said of the West during a visit to South Africa in 2016. “We say: ‘We came, we saw and we were conquered.’”

Even as old age took its toll and opposition to his rule increased, he refused to step down until the pressure became unbearable in 2017 as his former allies in the ruling party accused him of grooming his wife, Grace, to take over — ahead of long-serving loyalists such as Mnangagwa, who was fired in November 2017 before returning to take over with the help of the military.

Spry in his impeccably tailored suits, Mugabe maintained a schedule of events and international travel during his rule that defied his advancing age, though signs of weariness mounted. He walked with a limp, fell after stepping off a plane in Zimbabwe, read the wrong speech at the opening of parliament, and appeared to be dozing during a news conference in Japan. However, his longevity and frequently dashed rumors of ill health delighted supporters and infuriated opponents who had sardonically predicted he would live forever.

“Do you want me to punch you to the floor to realize I am still there?” Mugabe told an interviewer from state television who asked him in early 2016 about retirement plans.

After the fighting between black guerrillas and the white rulers of Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then known, ended, Mugabe reached out to whites. The self-declared Marxist stressed the need for education and built new schools. Tourism and mining flourished, and Zimbabwe was a regional breadbasket.

However, a brutal military campaign waged against an uprising in western Matabeleland province that ended in 1987 augured a bitter turn in Zimbabwe’s fortunes. As the years went by, Mugabe was widely accused of hanging onto power through violence and vote fraud, notably in a 2008 election that led to a troubled coalition government after regional mediators intervened.

“I have many degrees in violence,” Mugabe once boasted on a campaign trail, raising his fist. “You see this fist, it can smash your face.”

Mugabe was re-elected in 2013 in another ballot marred by alleged irregularities, though he dismissed his critics as sore losers.

Amid the political turmoil, the economy of Zimbabwe, traditionally rich in agriculture and minerals, deteriorated. Factories were closing, unemployment was rising and the country abandoned its currency for the U.S. dollar in 2009 because of hyperinflation.

The economic problems are often traced to the violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms that began around 2000. Land reform was supposed to take much of the country’s most fertile land — owned by about 4,500 white descendants of mainly British and South African colonial-era settlers — and redistribute it to poor blacks. Instead, Mugabe gave prime farms to ruling party leaders, party loyalists, security chiefs, relatives and cronies.

Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader, Nelson Chamisa, said he was “mourning with the rest of Africa” over the death of Mugabe in the African tradition of Ubuntu, or humanity toward others, calling him one of Zimbabwe’s founding fathers and a freedom fighter.

However, Chamisa, who leads the Movement for Democratic Change, also acknowledged the pain over “decades of political disputes” surrounding his governance.

“Memories really go to the deficits of governance, goes to the issue of human rights situation in the country, goes to the collapse of systems,” he said.

He also said Mugabe’s death on foreign soil is a “sad indictment” of the country’s economic situation.

On the streets of Harare, the capital, people gathered in small groups Friday and discussed Mugabe.

“I will not shed a tear, not for that cruel man,” said Tariro Makena, a street vendor. “All these problems, he started them and people now want us to pretend it never happened.”

Others said they missed him.

“Things are worse now. Life was not that good but it was never this bad. These people who removed him from power have no clue whatsoever,” said Silas Marongo, holding an axe and joining men and women cutting a tree for firewood in suburban Harare. They needed the wood to beat severe electricity shortages that underline the worsening economic situation.

Amnesty International said Mugabe left behind “an indelible stain on his country’s human rights record.” Mugabe’s early years as a leader saw “notable achievements” through his heavy investment in health care and education, the human rights group said, but he later eroded his own track record.

“While casting himself as the saviour of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe inflicted lasting damage upon its people and its reputation,” Muleya Mwananyanda, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Southern Africa, said.

Mugabe was born on Feb. 21, 1924, in Zvimba, 60 kilometers (40 miles) west of the capital of Harare. As a child, he tended his grandfather’s cattle and goats, fished for bream in muddy water holes, played football and “boxed a lot,” as he recalled later.

Mugabe lacked the easy charisma of Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader and contemporary who became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 after reconciling with its former white rulers. But he drew admirers in some quarters for taking a hard line with the West, and he could be disarming despite his sometimes harsh demeanor.

“The gift of politicians is never to stop speaking until the people say, ‘Ah, we are tired,’” he said at a 2015 news conference. “You are now tired. I say thank you.”

___

Torchia reported from Johannesburg.

We Are Teetering on the Brink of War With Iran

What follows is a conversation between “The Age of Jihad” author Patrick Cockburn and Greg Wilpert of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

GREG WILPERT: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Greg Wilpert in Baltimore.

Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, stated on Wednesday that the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, also more commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Agreement, can still be temporarily saved if the United States allows Iran to take advantage of a $15 billion credit line from the European Union, as was proposed by France’s President, Emmanuel Macron. In the meantime, Rouhani also said that Iran will engage in a third violation of the JCPOA, which involves restarting nuclear research and development and the production of centrifuges for increased uranium enrichment.

PRESIDENT HASSAN ROUHANI: I announce the third step now. Our atomic energy organization is obliged to immediately start doing whatever technically required in the country in terms of research and development, and to abandon all commitments in terms of research and development under the JCPOA. We will witness development in research and development in the field of centrifuges, various types of new centrifuges, and whatever we need for enrichment, which will be handled by our atomic energy organization. And we will observe promptitude in this regard.

GREG WILPERT: In the last few weeks, Iran has tried to reach out to the US through diplomatic channels. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, even came to the G7 Summit in France last month to try to meet with Trump. He later said, however, that Iran would not negotiate with the US unless sanctions are lifted first. In a related development, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a surprise visit to London on Thursday to meet with Britain’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. According to news reports of the visit, Netanyahu’s purpose was to convince Johnson to reject France’s proposal for a $15 billion credit line to Iran.

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Joining me now to discuss the latest developments with the Iran Nuclear Deal is Patrick Cockburn. He is an award-winning journalist and longtime correspondent for the British newspaper, The Independent. His most recent book is The Age of Jihad. Thanks for joining us again, Patrick.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Thank you.

GREG WILPERT: What do you make of these recent developments, the announcement that Iran will engage in this third step of violating the JCPOA, and the possibility of a $15 billion credit line to ease the US sanctions against Iran? Is there any chance that the Europeans— mainly France, Germany and the UK— could still save the JCPOA nuclear agreement?

PATRICK COCKBURN: I’m a bit doubtful about it. They have done a certain amount, this offer of a $15 billion credit line, to make up for the loss of Iranian oil revenue It was a French idea originally, but they are asking Iran to step right back into the old nuclear deal, but the Iranians are not likely to do that while they’re subject to US sanctions. US sanctions and the sanctioning of European companies or banks that deal with Iran, basically means that Iran is facing an economic siege.

So these are maneuvers. The Iranians want to show they’re being kind of moderate. They want to preserve this deal as they do. At the same time, they don’t want to look as though they’re pushovers, that sanctions are squeezing them to death, and they’ve got no alternative but to give up. This would be to surrender to what Trump calls the policy of maximum pressure. I think we’re a long way from any real agreement on this. It’s still escalating.

GREG WILPERT: Iran also just recently announced that it is releasing seven of the 23 crew members it is holding of a Swedish-owned, but British-registered tanker that Iran had seized last July. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard seized that tanker in retaliation for the British seizing an Iranian tanker near Gibraltar in early July, but the Iranian tanker has now been released. Now, how do you see the situation of these tankers evolving? Could such seizures of oil tankers eventually lead to an escalation and to even war?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Yes, they could. This is sort of a game of chicken. As you said, it started off on the 4th of July when the British rather melodramatically dropped 30 Royal Marine commandos on the deck of this vessel saying, “It was heading for Syria. This had nothing to do with sanctions on Iran, but was a breach of sanctions on Syria imposed by the EU.” This never sounded right because it’s a peculiar moment for Britain to suddenly put such energy into enforcing EU sanctions, when we all know that Britain is trying to leave the EU at the moment. There’s a great political crisis here in Britain about this. This looked as though it was on the initiative of Washington. Then, as was inevitable, the Iranians retaliated against British-flagged vessels in the Gulf. There was an escalation that seems to have died down at the moment.

As I see it, the Iranian policy is to maintain pressure by sort of pinprick attacks. There were some small mines placed on oil tankers of the United Arab Emirates. Then when we had the shooting down of the American drone, a whole series of events to show that they’re not frightened, that they can retaliate, but not bring it up to the level of war. That’s sort of the way the Iranians often react to this sort of thing, with some covert military measures and to create an atmosphere of crisis, but not bring a war about.

Of course, once you start doing this, it could slip over the edge of the cliff at any moment. The Iranians did a sort of mirror image of the British takeover of their tanker when they took over the British tanker crew, which are just being released, as you mentioned. They dropped 30 commandos on the deck. There was a British Naval vessel not so far away, not far enough to stop this, but let’s say that Naval vessel had been closer. Would they have opened fire on a helicopter dropping these 30 Iranian commandos on the boat? That would have brought us – would have been a war, and could have very rapidly escalated. We’re always on, as I said, the edge of the cliff in the Gulf with each side sort of daring the other to go further.

GREG WILPERT: Iran says that the Europeans have two months to save the nuclear agreement, but Iran’s economy and its people are suffering tremendously under the US economic sanctions. The Europeans don’t seem to be able or willing to do all that much to avoid these sanctions, or to help Iran overcome them it seems, despite a barter agreement that they tried to initiate. What happens if the JCPOA completely falls apart? That is, if this two-month deadline that Rouhani had said is missed, basically?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, it’s falling apart by inches, but there’s still quite a long way to go on that. I think the one thing that has emerged is that the US, Trump and Iran, don’t want war. At one time, the US was calling on – some of its senior officials were calling for a regime change. How far do they really believe this? When Trump decided not to retaliate for the drone being shot down, that shows that he wants to rely on sanctions on this sort of very intense economic siege of Iran, but I don’t think the Iranians are going to come running. Once they know there isn’t going to be an all-out war, they’ll try to sustain these sanctions, and the situation isn’t quite as desperate as it looks. Obviously, they’re suffering a lot. On the other hand, they’re not isolated. China and Russia give them a measure of support.

The EU, rather pathetically, says it’s trying to maintain the nuclear deal of 2015, but it’s rather underlining the political and military weakness of the EU that they haven’t been able to do much about it. Big companies are too frightened of US sanctions against them if they have any relations with Iran. So the Europeans aren’t coming well out of it. Obviously, their relations with Trump are pretty frosty. They also probably don’t think it’s worth a really big crisis between the EU, the European states, and America on this issue, but they are looking pretty feeble at the moment.

GREG WILPERT: We’re going to leave it there for now, but as always, we’re going to continue to follow this situation. I was talking to Patrick Cockburn, long time Middle East correspondent with The Independent. Thanks again, Patrick, for having joined us today.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Thank you very much.

GREG WILPERT: Thank you for joining The Real News Network.

U.S. Propaganda Doesn’t Get More Shameless Than ‘Jack Ryan’

A new trailer out Thursday for Amazon’s television series “Jack Ryan” featuring the titular hero racing against time to stop Venezuela from obtaining a nuclear weapon was widely ridiculed for its jingoistic nature and reliance on conspiracist tropes, with critics deriding the plotline of the new season of the nationalist series.

“Stop what you’re doing and watch this, it is jaw-dropping,” tweeted “Chapo Trap House” podcast co-host Will Menaker.

“I would truly like to know more about who wrote and produced this series,” Menaker added.

Stop what you’re doing and watch this, it is jaw-dropping https://t.co/eiUtkJv3FX

— Will

Official: Trump to Challenge California Authority on Mileage

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is moving forward with a proposal to revoke part of California’s authority to set its own automobile gas mileage standards, a government official said Thursday, confronting a state that has repeatedly challenged the administration’s environmental rollbacks.

The Environmental Protection Agency was preparing paperwork for the White House for the move, meant to help the administration set a single, less rigorous mileage standard enforceable nationwide, according to the official, who is familiar with the regulatory process and spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public.

President Donald Trump has pushed for months to weaken Obama-era mileage standards nationwide and has targeted California’s decades-old power to set its own mileage standards as part of that effort.

Administration moves to rescind authority that Congress granted probably would end up in court. When President George W. Bush challenged California’s greenhouse gas emissions and mileage-setting ability, California fought it. The Obama administration subsequently dropped the Bush effort.

The Trump plan would have to be posted in the Federal Register and would be subject to public comment.

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His administration has tried to ease or remove scores of environmental regulations that it regards as unnecessary and burdensome. The tougher mileage standards were a key part of the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce climate-changing fossil fuel emissions.

California has sued the Trump administration 27 times on environmental matters alone, often as part of a group of states. Counting preliminary injunctions, California has won in court 19 times, said Sarah Lovenheim, a spokeswoman for California Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Becerra, a Democrat, made clear his state would battle this move as well. “California will continue its advance toward a cleaner future. We’re prepared to defend the standards that make that promise a reality,” he said in a statement.

EPA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The mileage move would target California’s half-century-old authority under the Clean Air Act to set its own, tough tailpipe emission standards, which are closely linked to fuel efficiency.

California’s long struggles with smog mean the state has been setting its own standards since before the 1970 law was written. Congress allowed California to seek waivers from the national standards for that reason.

About a dozen states have opted to follow California’s pollution and mileage standards.

The waiver has allowed California, the state with the highest population and by far the biggest economy, to steer the rest of the nation toward cutting down on car and truck emissions that pollute the air and alter the climate.

Margo Oge, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality from 1994 to 2012, said the Trump administration is likely to lose in a court challenge of California’s powers.

“There is nothing under the Clean Air Act that allows the EPA to revoke a waiver that was given to the state,” she said. “They cannot do that, in my view, based on 20 years managing the program.”

The Trump administration has proposed freezing gas mileage requirements for automakers at 2021 levels, thus eliminating Obama-era regulations that require them to rise about 5% per year on average for the fleet of new cars sold in the U.S. A final proposal is expected next month.

Trump’s own administration, in documents proposing to freeze the standards, puts the cost of meeting the Obama-era requirements at around $2,700 per vehicle. It claims buyers would save that much by 2025, over standards in place in 2016. But that number is disputed by environmental groups and is more than double the estimates from the Obama administration.

Consumer Reports found that the owner of a 2026 vehicle will pay over $3,300 more for gasoline during the life of a vehicle if the standards are frozen at 2021 levels.

Many in the auto industry don’t like the far tougher Obama-era mileage standards and fear it won’t be able to meet them, as U.S. consumers keep shifting away from sedans to less-efficient trucks and SUVs. Most automakers favor increasing mileage requirements at a lower rate than set under President Barack Obama. They also want one U.S. standard to avoid having to engineer separate vehicles for California and the states that follow its rules.

In July, four automakers — Ford, Honda, BMW and Volkswagen — broke from the rest of the industry and struck a deal with California agreeing to 3.7% increases in mileage per year. That’s less than the 5% annual increase under the Obama-era standards.

The side deal has irked Trump, who has chastised Ford in tweets.

___

Krisher reported from Detroit.

The Pro-Israel Extremist Behind Trump’s Economic War on Iran

This is part one of a two part series on the growing impact of the US economic war on Iran.

Several US citizens have been questioned by the FBI and threatened with arrest for their participation in New Horizon, a public media conference held each year in Iran.

The interrogations and threats are the result of orders apparently delivered by Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Sigal P. Mandelker, a militantly pro-Israel lawyer with longstanding ties to right-wing political networks.

Mandelker was reportedly involved in brokering the infamous Florida deal that allowed the wealthy child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to avoid federal charges.

Since Mandelker’s appointment as Under Secretary of Treasury in 2017, she has been described on pro-Israel news sites as a “former Israeli” and “Israeli-born.”

Asked by The Grayzone if Mandelker currently holds Israeli citizenship, and if so, whether she was given a special exemption that allowed her to obtain a security clearance, the US Department of Treasury did not reply.

Mandelker’s actions against the US citizens who participated in New Horizon represent an under-acknowledged but significant escalation in the Trump administration’s strategy of “maximum pressure” to bring about regime change in Iran. As the Atlantic noted, Mandelker is “the one with her hand on the lever” of Trump’s unilateral sanctions policy against Iran.

Michael Maloof, a former security analyst in the US Department of Defense, was among the New Horizon attendees who has been visited by the FBI. Bureau agents appeared at Maloof’s Virginia home in the early morning last May to inquire about his participation in the conference. Sander Hicks, another participant in New Horizon, claimed that others who joined the conference had been threatened with arrest if they attended again.

“OFAC [the US Office of Financial Sanctions Regulations] is supposed to restrict exchanges of money, but this conference was just an exchange of ideas,” Maloof told The Grayzone. “They’re interpreting the regulations to say that even if you associate with someone who has been sanctioned, you are subject to fines and imprisonment. I haven’t seen anything in the regulations that allows that, but they’ve set the bar so low that anyone can be designated.”

Targeting a public media conference

The New Horizon Conference is an annual event overseen by Iranian TV host and filmmaker named Nader Talebzadeh and his wife, Zeina Mehanna, a Lebanese writer. Both were placed under financial sanctions this year by the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Sanctions Regulations [OFAC] on the grounds that they had organized events where Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps “recruitment and collection efforts were made.”

“We wrote to OFAC challenging them about their accusations, however, they only responded by acknowledging the receipt of our letter. Nothing more!” Mehanna complained to The Grayzone.

She insisted that “we are not in contact with the IRGC nor have we ever been funded by them.”

Negative scrutiny of the New Horizon Conference began in 2014 with a series of reports by the pro-Israel pressure group, the Anti-Defamation League [ADL]. The ADL openly coordinates with local and federal US law enforcement, and escorts law enforcement officials on annual training and lobbying tours of Israel.

According to the ADL, New Horizon was an “anti-Semitic gathering” that “included U.S. and international anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers and anti-war activists.”

There was some truth to the charge: over the years, New Horizon has played host to an array of conspiracy cranks and figures with disturbing records of vehemently anti-Jewish statements.

The event has also featured well-known anti-war activists and former US national security professionals seeking to forge relations with a country that has been under sustained Western economic and military attack for decades.

Peter Van Buren, an author and former diplomat who served in the State Department for 24 years, attended New Horizon this May in the city of Mashhad. He returned with a colorful account for Reuters of life in Iran under escalating US sanctions.

“Outside, in Mashhad city, there were no demonstrations, no flag burnings, and when I visited the central mosque here after Friday prayers more people were interested in a selfie with a foreigner than anything else,” Van Buren reported.

Maloof, too, said his attendance of the conference was motivated by a desire to build diplomatic bridges. “We felt that it was important for dialogue to go [to New Horizon]. And I don’t agree with the US position on Iran,” he explained.  “All we did was went there, talked and met with people, and this is the only way you’re going to have better relations.”

Maloof emphasized, “We’re all still US patriots, but we believe there’s another way to go about things than looking at everything in Iran through the prism of Israel.”

Asked if there was any interaction with IRGC officials or assets at the event, Maloof insisted, “We were not approached by anyone. And those of us who are national security veterans, we’re very attuned to that stuff.”

Under Mandelker’s guidance, the Trump administration designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization this April, provoking Iran to counter by branding all US military personnel in the Middle East as terrorists.

Since then, Mandelker has expanded her target list in Iran and across the region, even sanctioning institutions that collaborate with the US government.

Sanctioning a USAID partner

On August 30, the Treasury Department’s OFAC sanctioned an Iranian oil tanker and its captain after it was freed from detention in Gilbraltar. Mandelker claimed that the vessel was used to “transfer large volumes of oil, which attempt to mask and sell illicitly to fund the regime’s malign activities and propagate terrorism.”

That same day, Treasury sanctioned Jammal Trust Bank in Lebanon, claiming that it and its subsidiaries had been “brazenly enabling Hizballah’s financial activities.”

“Jammal Trust provides support and services to Hizballah’s Executive Council and the Martyrs Foundation, which funnels money to the families of suicide bombers,” Mandelker declared.

But Hezbollah has not employed suicide bombing as a tactic since the 1980’s. And as Asia Times noted, Jammal Trust partnered with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as recently as last year on public initiatives intended to help impoverished communities in Lebanon.

Because Lebanon’s economy is so thoroughly dollarized, the sanctions represent a likely death sentence for Jammal, preventing it from carrying out transactions in the US currency.

Notably, the bank is owned by a Shia businessman with close ties to Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, and one of several who have been targeted under the watch of Mandelker. Berri was reportedly threatened with US sanctions this April by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for his insufficient hostility to Hezbollah.

When New Horizon’s Mehanna was sanctioned, her personal savings account in Lebanon was frozen.

“I got a call that I need to go to the bank and close my account,” Mehanna told The Grayzone. “The teller told me that the bank was informed by US Treasury Department to close my account because it had dollars! They closed my account, gave me a mere $400, and I was told politely to leave.”

She said she was given no documentation that her account had been closed. She recalled, “We just left the bank in total shock and bewilderment.”

It was all in a day’s work for Mandelker, the most militant official to serve in a department overseen by a long line of pro-Israel ideologues.

“That is why we have this massive sanctions regime. Because we know Iran is threatening our great partner, Israel!”

At a gathering of the elite Aspen Security Conference this July, Mandelker put her extreme views on display when she accused former Obama officials of mollycoddling Iran.

Seated beside Wendy Sherman, Obama’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and Jeremy Bash, the CIA’s ex-chief of staff, Mandelker declared that Iran was “posing an incredibly destabilizing presence in the region. They’re threatening our great ally in the region, Israel!”

She went on: “And after the JCPOA [the Iran nuclear deal], what did the Obama administration do to curb that kind of behavior? Nothing!”

“That’s not true,” Sherman protested.

“Bad actors need money to do bad things,” Mandelker continued. “That is why we have this massive sanctions regime. Because we know Iran is threatening our great partner, Israel!”

While media at the event focused on the dust-up between Trump and Obama officials, they ignored the stunning admission by a US official to advancing provocative policies on Israel’s behalf.

But this was the role that Mandelker and her predecessors have played since her position was established during the second Bush administration by her mentor, Stuart Levey.

Like Mandelker, Levey is an unabashedly ultra-Zionist ideologue. His 1985 senior thesis at Harvard University was a paean to the creation of Israel, declaring that the Zionist movement had created a “morally exemplary” state that “would be a light unto other nations.”

As journalist Phil Weiss noted, Levey’s thesis advisor was Martin Peretz, the neoconservative former New Republic publisher who emigrated to Israel after triggering protests with his declaration, “Muslim life is cheap, especially for Muslims.”

At the dawn of the so-called “war on terror,” Levey successfully lobbied Bush’s national security team to turn up the heat on Iran, a country that considered Al Qaeda its mortal enemy. His weapon of choice was sanctions, convincing the Bush administration to blacklist Iran’s Central Bank and sever Tehran’s ties to the global financial system.

“Stuart Levey’s war is like ‘Charlie Wilson’s War,’ ” an unnamed State Department official told the New York Times, referring to a former Texas congressman’s campaign to undermine the Soviet Union by funneling arms to Afghan insurgents. “It’s the most direct and aggressive stuff we’ve got going. It delivers.”

Mandelker learned the ropes in Levey’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, developing an innovative arsenal of financial weapons against the enemies of Israel, a state for which she and her boss clearly felt a passionate attachment.

She came to the job with the conservative movement credentials she gained as a clerk in the office of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and as a card-carrying member of the right-wing Federalist Society.

Mandelker’s husband, Stephen Capozolla, has worked as a spokesman for the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a Washington-based lobbying group, while pumping out columns denying climate change for the right-wing site, Breitbart.com.

In 2008, while Mandelker served in Bush’s Department of Justice, she approved the notorious deal that allowed the wealthy child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to escape federal prosecution.

“I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” Alex Acosta, the former US attorney who brokered the deal, told the Trump administration’s transition team.

When Mandelker returned to government in March 2017, she earned immediate praise from Levey, her former boss, who called her “an asset.” Michael Chertoff, another close colleague, described her as his “eyes and ears” when he was at the Department of Homeland Security.

Pro-Israel websites also buzzed about the appointee, homing in on her alleged Israeli roots.

“Mandelker…isn’t just Jewish, she’s Israeli!”

The right-wing Jewish Press described Mandelker as an “Israeli-born deputy secretary,” while the Israeli security blog, Debka File,  to her as a “former Israeli.” Meanwhile, the Jerusalem-based blogger, Jewlicious, called Mandelker a current Israeli citizen. When asked how he knew she maintained her citizenship, the blogger said he didn’t know, but that “she was born in Israel.”

Not only that, Sigal Mandelker, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, isn’t just Jewish, she’s Israeli! Is she in Jerusalem today? #USEmbassyJerusalem

— (((Jewlicious))) (@jewlicious) May 14, 2018

According to Mandelker’s bio at the Treasury Department, however, she was born in Chicago, Illinois.

The Treasury Department did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about Mandelker’s citizenship status. It would be unusual for a US official to obtain a security clearance while maintaining dual citizenship, however, Mandelker’s former colleague at the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, was reportedly born an Israeli citizen.

Whatever her citizenship status is, Mandelker has made no secret of her desire to advance the geopolitical imperatives of “our great partner, Israel.”

Her sanctions blacklist is broadening by the day, resulting in even former US national security officials being visited by the FBI for their participation in an Iranian media event.

How the sanctioning of that conference came about is the subject of heavy intrigue. According to Mehanna, the co-founder of the New Horizon Organization, she and husband were targeted as the result of a separate US investigation into a former US counter-intelligence officer and her alleged handler, another American citizen.

The latter suspect American was an anchor for Press TV, Iran’s state broadcaster. Known as Mazrieh Hashemi, she was jailed by federal authorities this January when she attempted to return to the US to visit her family.

How Hashemi’s imprisonment was spun by US authorities into the sanctioning of New Horizon will be chronicled in the next installment of this series.

Mike Pompeo Is Refusing to Sign Afghan Peace Deal

The death toll from the ongoing, 18-year war in Afghanistan stood at an estimated 147,124 military personnel and civilians in November 2018, according to an analysis from Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. A 2018 survey from the Pew Charitable Trust found that almost half of Americans believe the U.S. has “mostly failed” in its goals during the war, and Trump was elected on a promise of ending the war.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, however, is so far declining to sign what Time magazine calls a “risky” deal that would wind down, if not end, the conflict.

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Zalmay Khalilzad, special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation at the State Department, spent nine months working with Taliban negotiators in Doha, Qatar, on an agreement. “If Trump approves and a deal is struck,” Kimberley Dozier writes in Time Magazine, “it could begin a withdrawal of some 5,400 U.S. troops, roughly a third of the present force, from five bases within 135 days.”

Most troops would leave by November 2020 if the Taliban agrees to three conditions: “Open negotiations with the U.S.-backed Afghan government; reduce violence near areas U.S. forces control, and keep foreign militants out of the areas they control,” multiple current and former U.S., European and Afghan officials told Time on condition of anonymity.

Time explains that some military and intelligence officials believe the deal has multiple downsides. As Dozier says, the current deal, whose details are still closely guarded, “doesn’t guarantee the continued presence of U.S. counterterrorism forces to battle al Qaeda, the survival of the pro-U.S. government in Kabul, or even an end to the fighting in Afghanistan.”

According to a recent report in The Daily Beast, this could also “demoralize the U.S.-backed regime in Kabul and especially the Afghan military and security forces,” who are largely dependent on U.S. support.

“The price of peace,” officials tell Time, “might include reversing much of the hard-won progress toward building a stable country over nearly two decades of war.” Among those risks include declining civil rights, weakening non-Taliban government institutions regionally and locally and increased corruption, among others.

Other international diplomats expressed skepticism of the Taliban’s motives. “The Taliban have been rather rude with the U.S. throughout the peace process, because they have the impression that a withdrawal deal is a desperate desire of the USA, not the Taliban,” a senior European diplomat in Kabul told The Daily Beast.

Those concerns aside, Time concludes that “the agreement may be the best deal the U.S. and its allies can get to head off a pre-emptive pullout of U.S. troops in time for the 2020 U.S. elections.”

The American military, Dozier continues, “[know] they need to reduce the number of troops to a smaller, cheaper footprint to mollify U.S. policymakers tired of writing checks after 18 years of war, and a U.S. public that doesn’t understand why the troops are still there.”

While Pompeo did not comment pre-publication, after the Time story was released, State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus told Time in an email that there is still a chance that Pompeo could change his mind.

Ortagus wrote: “There is no agreement to sign yet. If and when there is an agreement that is approved by all parties, including President Trump and if the Secretary is the appropriate signatory, he will sign it.”

Of course, much of this outcome depends on the often-mercurial president. “It isn’t over and done until Trump says it is,” a U.S. official with knowledge of the talks explained to The Daily Beast, “and as we know, the president’s thoughts on big deals like this often change at the last minute.”

Your Amazon Order Comes at a Steep Human Price

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

WHEN SHE ADDED GABRIELLE’S NAME to the chart in her kitchen, Judy Kennedy could picture the annual ritual. At birthdays she would ask her newest grandchild to stand up straight, heels against the door frame, so she could mark Gabrielle’s height beside that of her other granddaughter in the Maine house the family has lived in since the 1800s.

But there are no lines for Gabrielle.

In January, the 9-month-old was killed when a driver delivering Amazon.com packages crashed a 26-foot rented box truck into the back of her mother’s Jeep. The baby was strapped into a car seat in the back.

The delivery driver, a subcontractor ferrying pallets of Amazon boxes from suburban Boston to five locations in Maine, said in an interview that he was running late and failed to spot the Jeep in time to avoid the crash.

If Gabrielle’s parents, who have hired lawyers, try to hold Amazon accountable, they will confront a company that shields itself from liability for accidents involving the drivers who deliver its billions of packages a year.

In its relentless push for e-commerce dominance, Amazon has built a huge logistics operation in recent years to get more goods to customers’ homes in less and less time. As it moves to reduce its reliance on legacy carriers like United Parcel Service, the retailer has created a network of contractors across the country that allows the company to expand and shrink the delivery force as needed, while avoiding the costs of taking on permanent employees.

But Amazon’s promise of speedy delivery has come at a price, one largely hidden from public view. An investigation by ProPublica identified more than 60 accidents since June 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious injuries, including 10 deaths. That tally is most likely a fraction of the accidents that have occurred: Many people don’t sue, and those who do can’t always tell when Amazon is involved, court records, police reports and news accounts show.

Even as Amazon argues that it bears no legal responsibility for the human toll, it maintains a tight grip on how the delivery drivers do their jobs.

Their paychecks are signed by hundreds of companies, but often Amazon directs, through an app, the order of the deliveries and the route to each destination. Amazon software tracks drivers’ progress, and a dispatcher in an Amazon warehouse can call them if they fall behind schedule. Amazon requires that 999 out of 1,000 deliveries arrive on time, according to work orders obtained from contractors with drivers in eight states.

Amazon has repeatedly said in court that it is not responsible for the actions of its contractors, citing agreements that require them, as one puts it, to “defend, indemnify and hold harmless Amazon.” Just last week, an operations manager for Amazon testified in Chicago that it signs such agreements with all its “delivery service partners,” who assume the liability and the responsibility for legal costs. The agreements cover “all loss or damage to personal property or bodily harm including death.”

Amazon vigilantly enforces the terms of those agreements. In New Jersey, when a contractor’s insurer failed to pay Amazon’s legal bills in a suit brought by a physician injured in a crash, Amazon sued to force the insurer to pick up the tab. In California, the company sued contractors, telling courts that any damages arising from crashes there should be billed to the delivery companies.

“I think anyone who thinks about Amazon has very conflicted feelings,” said Tim Hauck, whose sister, Stacey Hayes Curry, was killed last year by a driver delivering Amazon packages in a San Diego office park. “It’s sure nice to get something in two days for free. You’re always impressed with that side of it. But this idea that they’ve walled themselves off from responsibility is disturbing.”

“You’ve got this wonderful convenience with this technology,” he added, “but there’s a human cost to it.”

Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, is famously secretive about details of its operations, including the scale of its delivery network. In many of the accidents involving its contractors, drivers were using cars, trucks and cargo vans that bore no hint of Amazon’s corporate logo. The truck involved in Gabrielle Kennedy’s death, for example, was marked only “Penske Truck Rental.”

Amazon declined to answer questions about the demands it places on drivers, the anonymity of delivery vehicles or any requirement that these contractors indemnify Amazon.

The company said that even one serious incident was too many, but would not disclose how many people had been killed or seriously injured by drivers shuttling Amazon packages from warehouses to customers’ homes — the final leg of the journey, which the company calls the last mile.

In a written statement to ProPublica and to BuzzFeed, which published an article last week on Amazon’s delivery practices, Amazon said: “The assertions do not provide an accurate representation of Amazon’s commitment to safety and all the measures we take to ensure millions of packages are delivered to customers without incident.

“Whether it’s state-of-the art telemetrics and advanced safety technology in last-mile vans, driver safety training programs, or continuous improvements within our mapping and routing technology, we have invested tens of millions of dollars in safety mechanisms across our network, and regularly communicate safety best practices to drivers. We are committed to greater investments and management focus to continuously improve our safety performance.”

Among those killed in the Amazon delivery crashes ProPublica examined were a 22-year-old former Temple University student crushed when a contractor turned left into his motorcycle, an 89-year-old former Macy’s Herald Square saleswoman struck as she crossed a New Jersey street and an 89-year-old Pennsylvania grandmother hit in front of an Outback Steakhouse.

Telesfora Escamilla was walking in a Chicago crosswalk three days before Christmas in 2016 when an Amazon delivery contractor turned left and hit her. Escamilla had been preparing to celebrate the holidays and her 85th birthday with her family. Instead, they planned her funeral.

It’s difficult to determine the accident rate and safety records of Amazon’s army of contractors because the company does not disclose that information and much of its delivery operation falls into a regulatory void. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which regulates trucks and collects data on truck collisions, doesn’t track crashes involving the smaller cargo vans that are the workhorses of Amazon’s delivery force.

“Nothing applies,” said Chris Turner, director of crash and data programs at the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, whose members include federal, state and local officials that enforce trucking rules.

The box truck that killed Gabrielle was big enough — more than 10,000 pounds — that the fatal crash would have been included in federal regulators’ records of the subcontractor, if the company hadn’t gone out of business after the accident. But nothing in the current reporting requirements would have connected it to Amazon.

On the day of the crash, Ellen Kennedy was on her way to drop off the baby at her mother’s house before heading to work at a veterinary practice. It was about 6:30 a.m., still dark.

Months later, Kennedy still can’t shake her memory of the delivery truck’s lights in her rearview mirror.

“I can’t eat or sleep because when I close my eyes all I see are the headlights coming at me and all I hear are my sickening screams as I try to open your door to get to you,” she wrote on Facebook. “And I beg God to tell me what I did so wrong that he gave me you, the child I longed for, and then took you away.”

IN THE RUNUP to Christmas 2013, Amazon had a lot to celebrate. That December, in a “60 Minutes” interview, its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, unveiled drones he said eventually would ferry customers their packages 30 minutes after they placed their orders.

“I know this looks like science fiction,” Bezos said as he showed Charlie Rose, the CBS correspondent, a video of a drone picking up a package from a conveyor belt and flying it to a doorstep. “It’s not.”

“Wow!” Rose exclaimed.

Amazon Prime, the loyalty program that had made two-day shipping standard almost a decade earlier, surged in popularity. More than a million customers signed up for Prime memberships in just the third week of December 2013. Sales hit a record high.

But UPS couldn’t keep up. Irate customers spent the holidays railing about missed gifts and disappointed children.

It was clear that if Amazon wanted to grow, it needed something other than dreams of drones.

The next spring, Amazon was testing contract couriers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, according to The Wall Street Journal. And in 2015, Amazon introduced Flex, an app that allows people to sign up for delivery shifts using their own vehicles. (Amazon considers Flex drivers independent contractors, too.)

Amazon won’t say what percentage of packages its contractors deliver, but industry analysts say the share is growing fast. Researchers at Cowen estimate that in 2015, UPS and the United States Postal Service handled 91% of Amazon’s domestic deliveries, while contractors and DHL had less than 3%. Amazon’s network of contractors will handle 23% of its American deliveries this year, Cowen estimates, and 43% by 2024.

Analysts and companies in the logistics industry think Amazon eventually will become a formidable competitor to UPS and to FedEx, which until recently also had a slice of Amazon’s business. Acknowledging the threat, FedEx severed its domestic shipping ties with Amazon last month.

It wasn’t so long ago that most consumers bought their goods at brick-and-mortar stores. Then Bezos figured out a way to make shopping effortless and deliveries fast. When the store travels to the customer, there’s no need to stock up all at once. A steady stream of purchases means many delivery trips.

Amazon is only getting faster in delivering orders, and its competitors are racing to catch up. Last April, after reporting a record $3.6 billion quarterly profit, Amazon’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, told Wall Street analysts that the company was investing $800 million to make free overnight delivery the default for Prime members in the United States.

The next day, Walmart teased on Twitter: “One-day free shipping … without a membership fee. Now THAT would be groundbreaking. Stay tuned.” Walmart began offering free overnight delivery of 220,000 popular items in a few American cities, with a goal of expanding to 40 major metropolitan areas.

The one-upmanship has continued. In June, Amazon said Prime members were eligible for free one-day shipping on 10 million products.

Analysts at Cowen estimate that Amazon shipped 2.3 billion packages last year in the United States. The final leg of that journey, from warehouse to doorstep, has always been the most expensive for online retailers.

Contractors are critical to keeping the cost down. Olsavsky told analysts in January that Amazon’s contractors could make deliveries for the same price as or less than the legacy carriers. And the contractor network is nimbler, allowing Amazon to add or subtract drivers quickly.

Today, Amazon relies on tiers of contractors, ranging from publicly traded logistics businesses to tiny companies providing just a handful of drivers, to the Flex drivers. And during some busy periods, Amazon hires temporary employees as drivers.

Amazon isn’t unique in its outsourcing. Uber and the food startup DoorDash, for example, rely on delivery contractors, as do many publishers, including The New York Times.

THE LAW GOVERNING independent contractors varies by state, but it all boils down to control: Does Amazon control enough aspects of the drivers’ jobs to make it responsible for their actions?

The question of where companies draw the line is a contentious one that has spurred litigation and legislation. FedEx has settled lawsuits in recent years brought by drivers who argued that they functioned as employees, not independent contractors. Last week, Uber and Lyft announced that they would spend $60 million to contest a proposed California law that would force them to treat their contract drivers as employees.

In lawsuits, people injured in crashes and drivers in wage disputes have argued that Amazon retains so much control that it effectively is the drivers’ employer.

To counter that argument, Amazon says the contractors hire and fire their own drivers. Yet work orders and the court testimony of an Amazon manager reveal that Amazon can demand that contractors bar particular drivers from its delivery force. It directs and tracks drivers’ routes. And Amazon is the sole client for many contractors.

The leverage Amazon holds over its delivery contractors was at the heart of bankruptcy proceedings for one such company, Tenet Concepts, last year in Fort Worth, Texas. Tenet formed in 2015 just to serve Amazon. The retailer paid a flat rate for each of Tenet’s delivery routes, which the contractor used to pay 300 employees, records show.

Then some drivers sued, alleging that Tenet had failed to pay them fairly. The drivers also sued Amazon, saying the online retailer was also their employer and that it, too, owed them money.

Tenet filed for bankruptcy protection, saying it couldn’t afford the anticipated $800,000 in legal costs to defend itself and, as required under its contract, Amazon. The bankruptcy judge, Russell Nelms, questioned why Tenet should have to pay for the defense of Amazon, when the critical issue was whether Amazon was the de facto employer.

Regardless of any indemnification provision, the judge said, “I think that’s an issue that Amazon on its own has to step up and defend, doesn’t it?”

“Well, Your Honor, Amazon doesn’t think that,” Laurie Rea, Tenet’s lawyer, responded. Amazon’s position, she said, was that Tenet had to pay defense costs and claims.

She added: “Amazon could cut them off right now, and that would be the end of the business and 300-plus people won’t have jobs. Because Amazon does have the upper hand.”

Ultimately, the court allowed Tenet’s bankruptcy to go forward, with the indemnity agreement in place. When Tenet crafted a plan to emerge from bankruptcy, it set up a monthly schedule to pay Amazon, now both a client and a creditor.

RENE ROMERO HAD WORKED as a truck driver in Honduras for decades, but had been delivering Amazon packages for only about two months before the crash that killed Gabrielle Kennedy, he said.

Romero’s job was to pick up pallets of packages at an Amazon warehouse south of Boston and deliver them to post offices around New England. He was working for DSD Vanomos, a business with just two trucks. It was a subcontractor for XPO Logistics, a large transportation company that handled “postal injection” deliveries for Amazon.

He would get to the warehouse at about midnight, he said, and wait to be assigned a route. His deadline for dropping off the packages was 6 a.m., he said, and the post offices would add them to mail routes.

On Jan. 10, Romero got a late start because there were other drivers ahead of him, he recalled in the interview. XPO said that according to its records, by 6 a.m. Romero had made it to two of the five post offices on his list. Romero said he was running late by the time he drove through Waterboro, Maine. On past trips, he said, he had been pressured by dispatchers.

“They’re calling you and saying: ‘Hey, did you get there yet? When are you going to get there?’” said Romero, 54.

It’s not clear whether those dispatchers worked for XPO or Amazon. XPO said it had a “joint dispatch” arrangement with Amazon, which declined to comment.

Still, he said, he didn’t think he had been speeding on the stretch of the town’s Main Street where Kennedy’s Jeep was stopped in front of him, waiting at an intersection to make a turn. He recalled the speed limit as 55 miles an hour — it’s actually 35 — but said he wasn’t going that fast because it was dark and foggy. He hit his brakes when he was about 10 feet away from the Jeep, he remembered, but couldn’t stop in time.

“Look,” he said, “the truth is I didn’t see the vehicle in front of me.”

He was charged with aggravated driving to endanger, a felony, and jailed.

Romero said he called the owner of DSD Vanomos, Denis Rolando Vasquez, to ask for help, only to be told that XPO had terminated its contract with DSD the day of the crash.

“He said, ‘You’re going to have to figure that out yourself,’” Romero recalled Vasquez saying about the criminal case.

In an interview, Vasquez said the driver hadn’t asked for help getting out of jail. Vasquez said XPO had been an important customer and that, without that work, his two-truck company couldn’t stay in business.

“The accident was something very terrible for all of us — for Rene and his family, and for me and my family, and especially for the child’s family,” Vasquez said. “Everybody lost here.”

XPO declined to comment when asked if it had indemnified Amazon.

An XPO spokesman, Bob Josephson, disputed Romero’s description of his work routine and the events leading up to the crash. Josephson said the driver had arrived at the Amazon warehouse at 1:11 a.m. and started his route at 1:50 a.m. — 10 minutes early. The deadline for dropping off his pallets of packages, Josephson said, had been 8 a.m., not 6.

When asked if XPO conveyed those expectations to Romero in Spanish, the language he spoke, Josephson responded that the instructions were in the “same format as previous days.” He added that just the week before, Romero had completed a delivery at one of the same Maine post offices at 7:26 a.m.

Romero couldn’t afford a lawyer. Delivering Amazon packages paid about $600 a week, and he had only $100 in the bank, according to court records. He qualified for a public defender. He spent seven days in jail before his daughter raised the money to bail him out.

In an interview in May, Romero said he hadn’t heard from his former boss or anyone from Amazon. “They just abandoned me,” he said.

This summer, the prosecutor’s office dropped the felony charge and began pursuing a civil offense — motor vehicle violation resulting in death — punishable with a fine and a suspension of driving privileges. The office did not respond to an inquiry about why it had dropped the felony charge.

IN ASSEMBLING ITS NETWORK of contractors, Amazon has fundamentally altered the career expectations and training of delivery drivers, turning what once was a steady union job with benefits into a transitory job.

“Logistics experience not required,” says an ad on an Amazon website, enticing aspiring entrepreneurs to start their own delivery contracting businesses with Amazon’s help. But the notion that anyone can do this kind of work belies the fact that being a delivery driver is among the deadlier jobs in America, according to data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

UPS trains its drivers in multimillion-dollar facilities where they are put through virtual-reality and obstacle-course hazards to learn to avoid them.

Flex drivers say Amazon trains them primarily through instructional videos they watch on their phones. When printed, Amazon’s delivery driver onboarding course from late 2017 is 39 pages, with less than half of one page devoted to defensive driving. One of the fatalities involving Amazon drivers was a 70-year-old Kansas grandfather on a Flex shift during the 2017 holiday rush.

In five of the 10 fatal crashes, drivers were making left turns. Studies have shown that left turns are more dangerous than right turns: They involve crossing oncoming traffic, and the vehicle pillar between the windshield and the side window can obstruct a driver’s view of pedestrians in crosswalks on the left. UPS says the algorithm that powers turn-by-turn directions for its drivers programs out most left turns.

Amazon has started building that safety feature into the routes of some of its delivery drivers but not others. Amazon contractors use two types of smartphone devices to scan packages: One includes left turns in its directions; the other avoids them, according to several drivers and a contractor who had to buy newer devices. Amazon declined to answer questions about the inconsistency.

While many career mail carriers and UPS drivers follow familiar routes every day, contract drivers for Amazon are often in unfamiliar territory, reliant on Amazon’s directions.

Nicolya Dorton, a former driver for a contractor called Scoobeez, said she often didn’t know where she was going when she delivered Amazon packages from a warehouse in San Leandro, California. Her shift was supposed to end at 6 p.m., she said, but she sometimes drove until 10 p.m. to finish deliveries. “You have to come back with an empty truck,” she said.

She recalled panicking one night in October 2016 when she saw a car coming toward her as she drove up what she thought was a one-way Oakland overpass (the street ran in both directions). She made a sudden U-turn and crashed, leading to a lawsuit filed by an injured driver, records show.

“I thought I was dead,” said Dorton, who stopped delivering for Scoobeez that night. “I think I had five or six packages left. I was way over time and trying to get it done and wound up getting into an accident.”

Other drivers echoed that feeling of pressure. Jeffrey Lines, a Texas driver who sued Tenet Concepts claiming the company had shorted his wages, testified in the bankruptcy case that when he’d delivered Amazon Prime Now packages — which he said had to arrive within an hour or two of the order — he couldn’t stop even to use a restroom.

“You can’t get a break,” said Lines, who stopped working for Tenet in January 2016, and whose wage claim was ultimately rejected. “Because if you take a break, you delay the orders, we get fired.”

GET HIT BY A UPS DRIVER or a mail truck, and it’s obvious who the driver’s employer is.

But many Amazon contractors use plain white vans or rented box trucks that have no visible connection to the e-commerce giant, and Flex drivers sign up for shifts driving their own vehicles. Dorton drove a white Enterprise cargo van; Lines, his own car.

Last September Amazon announced it was arranging for contractors to lease 20,000 cargo vans emblazoned with its logo. At the same time, the company has been fighting to keep other parts of its delivery force anonymous.

When the planning board of the Boston suburb Braintree passed zoning rules requiring that delivery vehicles serving a new Amazon warehouse there be labeled as part of the company’s delivery network, Amazon sued, saying the signage demands were unreasonable.

The lack of labeling can make it difficult for people outside Amazon to know the scope of the harm attributable to collisions, or for those injured to hold Amazon accountable. The driver hurt by Dorton’s sudden U-turn sued only Dorton, Enterprise and Scoobeez. Amazon’s role wasn’t immediately apparent.

Amazon has been a named defendant in 45 lawsuits related to the crashes ProPublica examined. In some instances, plaintiffs or judges ultimately dropped Amazon from the suits; other cases led to confidential settlements, and it is unclear whether the payouts came from Amazon or its contractors. Still other claims are in the early stages. Testimony in one case that went to trial in Chicago recently underscored the challenges of taking on one of the world’s most powerful companies.

When Raul Salinas, 77, was struck in a hit-and-run two years ago by an unlabeled white cargo van, his son suspected right away that the driver was tied to Amazon. Salinas, a pedestrian, was hit in the crosswalk of a street leading to the company’s Chicago warehouse.

The family struggled to get any information about who was behind the wheel, even after filing a negligence lawsuit against the company. The accident left Salinas, a retired trailer repairman, with broken ribs and a fractured arm and knee, and requiring surgery to reconstruct his shoulder. Hospitalized for more than a month, he now walks with a cane and has limited function in the injured arm.

Police surveillance video shows a white van hitting Salinas on the evening of Dec. 8, 2017, then driving around his body and running a stop sign before fleeing. The footage is too blurry to make out the license plate, but a witness told the police he saw an Amazon van. Another witness who testified at the trial last week said the driver was wearing a reflective vest, which many Amazon contractors’ drivers wear.

After paramedics took Salinas to the hospital, his son Stephen and an acquaintance went to the warehouse. Workers there denied any knowledge of the accident and called the police when Stephen Salinas slipped inside the warehouse and started yelling at the shift manager.

According to company records submitted in the court case, the shift manager, Kevin Barbosa, reported to Amazon’s Global Security Command Center that an outsider had entered the warehouse and said “in an aggressive manner” that his father had been hit by an Amazon van. Barbosa told Amazon security officials that the street where the accident occurred was a popular corridor for drivers going to and from the warehouse and that their white delivery vans bore no Amazon logos, the records show.

In response to a question from Salinas’ lawyer, Barbosa said he had wanted to investigate but was told not to by an Amazon supervisor. “I was pretty frustrated,” Barbosa added.

Amazon’s lead investigator, Dusko Tadic, did not go to the warehouse, interview drivers or inspect vans for damage that night, according to his testimony.

That weekend Tadic and another manager reviewed warehouse surveillance video that had captured every vehicle entering and exiting the night of the accident. Tadic said they saw white vans, but none with marks indicating an accident. He took notes, he said, but later threw out his notebook.

The cameras record in a loop, so about every nine days footage is recorded over — unless someone saves it. Tadic preserved the video of Stephen Salinas’ unauthorized entry but not the footage of the vans, according to court records.

He reviewed Amazon’s routing software but did not identify any vans passing through the intersection at the time of the crash.

Amazon’s lawyers argued that many companies use white vans and that there was no admissible evidence that the driver who struck Salinas had been delivering Amazon packages.

On Tuesday, Judge Joan E. Powell of the Cook County Circuit Court ruled in Amazon’s favor, saying that without knowing the driver’s identity and whether the truck was connected to Amazon, there was “too much uncertainty” in the case to send it to the jury.

BEFORE THE MORNING of Jan. 10, Ellen Kennedy, Gabrielle’s mother, felt like she finally had everything she ever wanted.

Her marriage had broken up not long after Gabrielle was born, but she and her ex-husband, Chad Kennedy, had ironed out a routine. She had primary custody. He had shared-parenting rights two days a week. Gabrielle’s grandmothers pitched in to help.

“I literally thought that I was never happier because I had my baby, and I was making it as a single mom,” Kennedy recalled in an interview.

After the crash, she said, she sat on the couch in her trailer watching videos of Gabrielle, crying and drinking.

“I just pushed everybody away,” she recalled.

Her car destroyed, she had no way to get to her job. She fell behind on her bills and lost her trailer home.

On what would have been Gabrielle’s first birthday, Kennedy wrote her a letter and posted it on Facebook. “Not a day, hour, minute or second goes by that I don’t think of you and wish you were here. I wonder how big you’d be now,” she wrote. “I long to see you crawling around and playing with your toys and laughing at the dogs.”

The message went on: “It’s not FAIR but I want you to know I love you so, so much and I wait for the day when I can see you again. ’Til that time, baby, watch over me. I need you. Love, your mama down here.”

Her ex-husband could not bear to see photos or videos of his daughter. He grew depressed and drank heavily, he said. In March, he spent eight days in the hospital being treated for liver problems. Doctors warned his mother, Judy, that he might not survive.

But he pulled through. “Gabrielle wouldn’t want me to die,” he said.

Both he and his ex-wife said they were sober now. He sleeps in a recliner in his parents’ living room. His mother sleeps on the couch so she can watch him and talk him through darker moments.

Ellen and Chad Kennedy have each retained a personal-injury lawyer, but neither has filed suit against the driver, the two contracting companies or Amazon.

Chad Kennedy and his father, Brian, were sitting on the porch one evening last May when the conversation turned to Amazon’s pursuit of speed — and customers’ demand for it.

“So what if the packages take three days instead of two?” Brian Kennedy said. “You know, it ain’t that big a deal to me. But maybe some people, if they don’t get it in two days, they raise Cain.”

His son agreed. “These big powerhouse companies like Amazon should realize what the impact is when they’re speeding up deliveries,” Chad Kennedy said. They should see “the tragic families that have lost somebody or have gotten hurt from somebody’s negligence,” he said, “just because they want a package a day before another service.”

Do you have information about Amazon you’d like to share? Email patricia.callahan@propublica.org. Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

Puerto Rico, Military Schools to Lose Money for Trump’s Border Fencing

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon will cut funding from military projects like schools, target ranges and maintenance facilities to pay for the construction of 175 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, diverting a total $3.6 billion to President Donald Trump’s long-promised barrier.

Projects in 23 states, 19 countries and three U.S. territories would be stalled or killed by the plan, though just $1.1 billion in cuts would strike the continental U.S., according to a list released Wednesday by the Pentagon. Almost $700 million would come from projects in U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico, with another $1.8 billion coming from projects on overseas bases.

Trump’s move would take the biggest step yet in delivering on his promise to build a wall to block immigrants from entering the country illegally. But it may come at the expense of projects that the Pentagon acknowledged may be difficult to fund anew. Capitol Hill Democrats, outraged over Trump’s use of an emergency order for the wall, promised they won’t approve money to revive them.

A senior defense official told reporters the Pentagon is having conversations with members of Congress to urge them to restore the funding. The official agreed that the department has “a lot of work ahead of us,” considering that Congress has given no guarantee it will provide money for the defunded projects. The official was not authorized to discuss the details publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.

In addition, new stretches of fencing proposed along the Rio Grande and through a wildlife refuge in Arizona promise to ignite legal battles that could delay the wall projects as well.

The military base projects facing the chopping block tend to address less urgent needs like new parking at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and a variety of small arms ranges at bases in Wisconsin and Oklahoma. But a “cyber ops facility” in Hampton, Virginia, and the expansion of a missile defense field at Fort Greeley, Alaska, face the ax, too.

Trump has so far succeeded in building replacement barriers within the 654 miles of fencing built during the Obama and Bush administrations. The funding shift will allow for about 115 miles of new pedestrian fencing in areas where there isn’t any now.

“The wall is being built. It’s going up rapidly,” Trump said Wednesday. “And we think by the end of next year, which will be sometime right after the election actually, but we think we’re going to have close to 500 miles of wall, which will be complete.”

New stretches of fencing are sure to spark legal battles with angry landowners and environmentalists. The Pentagon plan also fuels the persistent controversy between the Trump administration and Congress over immigration policies and the funding of the border wall.

“It doesn’t take any input from the local communities. It will take away from the private property rights,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas. “We are going to do everything we can to stop the president.”

Cuellar suggested Democrats will look at a must-pass funding bill this month — required to prevent a government shutdown Oct. 1 — to try to take on Trump. But a more likely venue for the battle could be ongoing House-Senate negotiations over the annual Pentagon policy measure.

Lawmakers who refused earlier this year to approve nearly $6 billion for the wall must now decide if they will restore the projects that are being used to provide the money.

“To pay for his xenophobic border wall boondoggle, President Trump is about to weaken our national security by stealing billions of dollars from our military,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who chairs a key military construction panel. “The House of Representatives will not backfill any projects he steals from today.”

One of the Senate’s most endangered Republicans in the 2020 election, Arizona Sen. Martha McSally, reported that her state is getting nicked for just $30 million from a project that was being delayed anyway. Georgia, where two potentially competitive Senate races loom next year, would be spared entirely, though powerful Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., himself facing re-election, would lose a $63 million middle school at Fort Campbell.

“We need to secure our border and protect our military; we can and should do both,” McSally said. “I went to the mat to fight for Arizona projects and succeeded.”

Elaine McCusker, the Pentagon comptroller, said the now-unfunded projects are not being canceled. Instead, the Pentagon is saying the military projects are being “deferred.”

Congress approved $1.375 billion for wall construction in this year’s budget, same as the previous year and far less than the $5.7 billion that the White House sought. Trump grudgingly accepted the money to end a 35-day government shutdown in February but simultaneously declared a national emergency to take money from other government accounts, identifying up to $8.1 billion for wall construction.

The transferred funds include $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund, $2.5 billion from Defense Department counterdrug activities and now the $3.6 billion pot for military housing construction announced Tuesday.

The Pentagon reviewed the list of military projects and said none that provided housing or critical infrastructure for troops would be affected, in the wake of recent scandals over poor living quarters for service members in several parts of the country. Defense officials also said they would focus on projects set to begin in 2020 and beyond, with the hope that the money could eventually be restored by Congress.

The government will spend the military housing money on 11 wall projects in California, Arizona and Texas, the administration said in a filing Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The most expensive is for 52 miles (84 kilometers) in Laredo, Texas, at a cost of $1.27 billion.

The Laredo project and one in El Centro, California, are on private property, which would require purchase or confiscation, according to the court filing. Two projects in Arizona are on land overseen by the Navy and will be the first to be built, no earlier than Oct. 3. Seven are at least partly on federal land overseen by the Interior Department, including a 31-mile stretch through the Cabezza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona, a major wilderness area.

The 175 miles (282 kilometers) covered by the Pentagon funding represents just a fraction of the 1,954-mile (3,145-kilometer) U.S.-Mexico border.

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Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.