Chris Hedges's Blog, page 172

Noam Chomsky: Democrats Are Failing the Test of Our Time

As the Amazon rainforest burns and glaciers melt historically fast, to many Americans, Democrats are failing to rise to the occasion, particularly when they focus on such topics as the Russia investigation, according to Noam Chomsky. “It was obvious from the beginning that they were not going to find very much,” the linguist and activist tells writer David Barsamian in a wide-ranging interview published Wednesday in Truthout.

“Trump’s a crook,” he says. “We knew that already—but they’re not going to find any real collusion with the Russians, and [Mueller] didn’t.” This “laserlike focus on Robert Mueller,” as Chomsky describes it, is consuming too much of Democrats’ airtime, campaigning energy and overall electoral strategy.

He believes they should be focused on Trump’s policies, especially his environmental plans, because “Trump’s climate policy may literally be a virtual death knell for the species,” he points out. “We’ve got a couple of years to try to deal somehow with the environmental crisis. It can be controlled. It’s not easy, but it can be done. If you waste a couple of years by trying to escalate the crisis, you might just push us over the edge.”

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Some Inconvenient Truths for 2020 Democrats



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Democrats Must Give Up ‘Center Is Better’ Myth



by Ilana Novick

Chomsky’s evidence includes the fourth National Climate Assessment by the Transportation Security Administration, produced in 2018, which, he explains, revealed that “by the end of this century, global temperatures will have risen 4 degrees centigrade [7.2 F]. That’s way beyond what the scientific consensus says will make life unlivable.”

As journalist Umair Irfan explained in Vox when the report was released last November, “Global warming could cause more harm to the US economy by 2100 than even the Great Recession did”—if humans are around to bear the impact, that is.

Instead of heeding the advice of its own scientists, the Trump administration practically buried the report, releasing it the Friday after Thanksgiving. Worse, Chomsky notes, rather than use the terrifying information as the impetus to take action, the administration used the report as a reason to not limit car emissions. He says its attitude seemed to be: “Look, we’re going off the cliff anyway, and car emissions don’t make that much of a difference. So who cares?”

Democrats have done little to fight back. The day after Chomsky’s interview was posted, the Democratic National Committee voted 17-18 against hosting a climate change debate Thursday afternoon. According to HuffPost, the DNC believes that having a debate on the topic “would open the gate to a flood of requests for single-issue debates on abortion rights, health care and other hot-button issues.”

HuffPost sources believe other forces were at play as well. Alexander Kaufman and Chris D’Angelo report that some feel that “the DNC was mostly worried that a debate that incentivized the eventual nominee to declare war on the fossil fuel industry risked ceding gas-producing states like Pennsylvania to Trump in 2020.”

Read the entire Chomsky interview here.

Is a Widely Adopted New Voting System Ready for 2020?

A new precinct-based voting system being widely acquired by states and counties before 2020 that relies on printed bar codes to record votes, not handmade ink marks, may pose problems for independent efforts seeking to double-check election results.

The Express Vote, from the nation’s largest voting system vendor, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), is a ballot-marking device. It asks voters to touch a computer screen instead of using a pen to mark a paper ballot. After voters make their choices, it prints a ballot summary card with bar codes at the top and text underneath listing their votes.

Election integrity activists have criticized this approach for redefining what constitutes a paper ballot by replacing a hand-marked record with a computer-marked record. They say that moves away from direct evidence of voter intent and creates a target for hackers.

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America Refuses to Fix Its Broken Election System



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Just How Secure Are the 2020 Elections?



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However, there’s another step in this process that has drawn little scrutiny, but could pose difficulties in independently verifying the results. Once the voter is finished, the summary card goes into a second machine, a scanner, which reads the bar codes to tabulate votes.

Currently, it appears that only one large jurisdiction, the state of Maryland, has tried to double-check this system’s accuracy. In a suburban county last year, where thousands of people used Express Vote after paper ballots ran out, the state’s third-party auditor found that 3 percent of the bar codes recorded by the system’s scanner, ES&S’s DS200 model, were unreadable. (The audit firm used the text below to assign those ballots’ votes.)

The audit firm, Boston’s Clear Ballot, is a competitor with ES&S. But its technology includes what are arguably the country’s most advanced tools to analyze digital images of ballots, such as those created by ES&S’s scan of its Express Vote ballot summary cards. Its ex-CEO cited the unreadable bar code rate, which Maryland officials confirmed.

When ES&S was asked how this gap was possible and to comment, its spokeswoman Katina Granger replied, by email, asking what the source of the 3 percent figure was. After this reporter recounted the 2018 experience from Maryland’s use of Express Votes and the DS200, she replied that ES&S was “still researching your question.”

“We have no immediate information at hand on this, so we are reaching out to the customer for information,” she said. “As a side note, ExpressVote paper ballots are always 100% auditable, and it’s the human text that is audited.”

That last point is debatable. Voters using the Express Vote are asked to verify the text on the summary card before turning them in. But, as ES&S’s website explains—“How are Ballots Read?”—their system reads bar codes to count votes, not text seen (and sometimes verified) by voters.

An apparent 3 percent discrepancy in official tabulation records—even among one part of the ballot data chain—is significant. Three percent is larger than the margin automatically triggering recounts in 19 states and the District of Columbia. It is also larger than margins in 23 other states that allow recounts under other circumstances. Partisans who challenge election results typically cite any inconsistency if it helps their side to win.

Currently, the number of jurisdictions acquiring the Express Vote ballot-marking device is much smaller than the 1,200 jurisdictions nationwide that use DS200 scanners, whose models date back a decade. (A higher-speed ES&S scanner, the DS850, is often found in these same jurisdictions for processing absentee ballots—those arriving by mail.)

In recent weeks, election officials have bought Express Votes in Tennessee (Nashville), New Jersey (a few counties), South Carolina (statewide), Delaware (statewide), Texas (a few counties), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Washington, D.C., and Ohio (including urban counties), according to PRNewswire and ES&S’s Facebook page. On August 23, North Carolina officials may reapprove the precinct voting system. Several weeks ago, the statewide election board modified its standards for ballot-marking devices.

However, with the lone exception of Maryland’s effort, there’s an absence of independent assessments on whether there may be audit problems with ES&S’s new precinct system, technology that may be used for years. The difficulties observed by Maryland’s auditor might be an isolated incident. Or they may point to new issues, namely, that unreadable bar code records will grow as Express Votes, paired with ES&S scanners, come online. (A similar concern could apply to other vendors’ ballot-marking devices and scanners.)

Maryland’s experience poses two big questions: Why did this happen, and do states and counties know what they are acquiring when it comes to verifying future results?

“How is it possible that 3 percent of the bar codes are unreadable?” said David Jefferson, a retired computer scientist who has worked on voting technology issues for more than two decades and is a board member of Verified Voting, a national advocacy group. “Where in this pipeline of information transfer did information get corrupted, so it was corrupted at the end [as the bar code image file]? Was it a [ballot-marking device] printer? A file copy? The scanner? Interpretive software?”

“To me, this says there is a quality issue somewhere, and until that quality issue is identified, all bets are off,” said Harri Hursti, a respected cybersecurity expert who has hacked into widely used voting systems—starting a dozen years ago. “Because, right now, it is unknown if the problem is in the Clear Ballot [auditing] side, or is this a first manifestation of a fundamental flaw in the Express Vote-DS200 architecture and how they are paired.”

A Mystery Deepens With Wide Consequences

Efforts to find an explanation from an authority not associated with any of the parties in Maryland’s independent audit raised more questions than answers.

At Maryland’s State Board of Elections, a top official confirmed that “the image itself was the problem,” referring to the bar code recorded by ES&S’s scanner. But they did not know whether the problem originated with the ballot-marking device’s initial printout, or with the later scan of the ballot summary card. (Unlike its audits elsewhere, Clear Ballot did not rescan the original paper ballots. It analyzed images created by ES&S’s scanner. If bar codes were unreadable, it used the printed text below to assign votes.)

Larry Moore, Clear Ballot’s ex-CEO, who is now working on voting by smartphone, said that the unreadable bar codes were not “when ES&S attempts to read an Express Vote card with their own equipment,” as he could not speak to their process. Rather, it was “the percent of unreadable images Clear Ballot experienced when its software tried to read a monochrome (i.e., black and white) image of bar codes on Express Vote ballots rendered at, I believe, a 200 DPI resolution.”

Moore speculated that the unreadable bar codes came from ES&S’s scanner saving the images as lower-resolution files, possibly to use less computer memory and to speed the processing time. ES&S was likely using higher-definition settings to tabulate the vote, he said, saying that scanners could use different settings for different applications.

Deploying a mix of different data-quality standards—some better, some worse—made sense to technologists who have scrutinized ES&S before, saying they have seen ES&S “cut corners” in the past, whether using cheaper commercially available parts or engineering features to resist independent efforts to probe or utilize their tools.

“That would be consistent with what we have seen,” said Margaret MacAlpine, founding partner of Nordic Innovation Labs, which advises clients against hacking and organized the “Voting Village” exhibit at this month’s Def Con hackers’ conference, where one takeaway was how voting machines frequently were built from older components.

But MacAlpine, like others asked to comment, was quick to say there could be deeper systemic issues. But she could only speculate.

“The 3 percent loss rate might just be a symptom of a deeper problem, for example, is it dumping data when it gets overwhelmed? Are these crappy memory chips?” she said. “The part that is causing this problem might not be what appears on the surface. That’s why I’d call for a closer security review of these images and not just let these be an acceptable 3 percent loss that we somehow work with. That’s ridiculous, because elections often are decided by 3 percent or less, constantly.”

Stepping back, it’s important to emphasize that Maryland’s independent audit, for all of the questions and eyebrows that it raises, has gone further than any other state with trying to double-check the accuracy of ES&S’s new balloting and tabulation process. Most election officials do not attempt to completely double-check election night results before certifying winners.

Still, election technologist-critics like Hursti said Maryland’s findings are troubling.

“There needs to be an investigation,” he said. “No one has ever investigated either the Express Vote or the DS200 independently. As a result, there is no independent study that we can refer to. The only study which has been done privately, and the result has been in circulation, about DS200, was horrible. The people who did that were not professionals, and still they found the whole system to be extremely vulnerable.”

Meanwhile, ES&S Sales Are Soaring

Another unanswered question is whether the rise of ballot-marking devices will lead to a rise in problematic ballot records and auditing problems. Yet that issue does not appear to be a concern to many election officials as they are now updating their voting systems.

For example, in North Carolina’s Wake County—home to the city of Raleigh and 13 other municipalities—election officials earlier this year bought new DS200 precinct scanners and DS850 scanners. That may position the county to acquire the Express Vote in the future, said Lynn Bernstein, a local election integrity activist and aerospace engineer. She raised that scenario last spring, she recounted, saying that election board officials essentially replied, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

On August 23, the North Carolina State Board of Elections will consider an amendment that may restrict ballot-marking device (BMD) systems—or ballot summary cards that contain bar codes, like the Express Vote, as opposed to hand-marked paper ballots. Regardless of what the BOE decides—there has been fierce lobbying for weeks—Bernstein said the state board’s members are not steeped in the technical intricacies of the newest voting systems that they are poised to approve.

She noted that North Carolina requires voting system vendors to report performance issues, but she suspects that state officials have not heard about Maryland’s discovery that 3 percent of its digital bar code images were unreadable. What this means is some North Carolina counties, like other jurisdictions across the country, might be buying new systems that will bring unanticipated problems, including difficulties auditing future races.

“The story is once again we are rushing out and buying equipment and we don’t know whether or not it can even be verified, which is what happened with the DREs [Direct-Recording Electronic equipment],” said Chris Sautter, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer specializing in post-Election Day recounts.

DREs are the generation of paperless voting machines bought after computer punch card malfunctions in Florida’s 2000 presidential election. They remain in use in 14 states, but most are due to be replaced before 2020—primarily for security concerns. But whether their replacements can easily be double-checked—or audited—is another question.

Maryland’s lessons, with its discovery of unreadable bar code ballot records, are hard to assess in a larger context because, among other things, no other large jurisdiction has even tried to verify the accuracy of this system.

“They’re pushing these new machines because they want to make money. That’s the bottom line,” said Sautter, referring to the rush among election officials and vendors to upgrade voting systems as a part of a response to Russian hacking in 2016’s presidential election. “They’re pushing them over hand-marked paper ballots, which address all of the security and transparency issues that everybody is worried about.”

This article was produced by Voting Booth , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

New Poll Reflects Trump’s Widespread Unpopularity

NEW YORK — About 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of President Donald Trump’s overall job performance, according to a new poll released Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which finds some support for the president’s handling of the U.S. economy but gives him weak marks on other major issues.

Just 36% of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president; 62% disapprove.

The numbers may be ugly for a first-term president facing reelection in 14 months, but they are remarkably consistent. Trump’s approval rating has never dipped below 32% or risen above 42% in AP-NORC polls since he took office.

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Are We Underestimating Trump Yet Again?



by Sonali Kolhatkar

















Has the Ruling Class Finally Had Enough of Trump?



by Paul Street

No other president has stayed within so narrow a band. Since Gallup began measuring presidential approval, Trump is the only president whose rating has never been above 50%. Still, several — Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — logged ratings worse than Trump’s lowest rating so far at some point during their time in office.

Trump’s poor grades in the AP-NORC poll extend to his handling of several key issues: immigration, health care, foreign policy and guns. Views of the Republican president’s handling of the economy remain a relative bright spot despite fears of a potential recession, but at least 60% of Americans disapprove of his performance on other issues. The consistency suggests the president’s weak standing with the American people is calcified after two years of near-constant political crises and divisive rhetoric at the White House.

The new survey was conducted shortly after back-to-back mass shootings in Texas and Ohio left dozens dead and renewed calls from Americans for answers from their elected officials. Trump pledged immediate action in the immediate aftermath of the attacks but has since shifted back and forth on whether to push for stronger background checks on people seeking to buy guns.

“He does whatever’s politically expedient. He’s awful,” said 60-year-old Robert Saunders, a retired police officer from New Jersey who’s not registered with either major political party and vowed not to vote for Trump in 2020.

According to the poll, 36% approve of Trump on gun policy, while 61% disapprove, numbers that mirror his broader approval rating.

In response to the shootings, Trump said that he would pursue policy options with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and that he would like to see “very meaningful background checks.” Earlier this week, however, Trump said the U.S. already has significantly strict background checks in place and that many of his supporters are gun owners. On Wednesday, however, he again backed tighter background checks while speaking to reporters at the White House.

Seven in 10 Republicans express approval of Trump’s handling of gun policy in the new poll, among his lowest ratings from the GOP. Self-identified moderate and liberal Republicans were slightly less likely than conservative ones to express approval, 64% versus 74%.

Beyond guns, Trump remains overwhelmingly popular within his own party.

Nearly 8 in 10 Republicans approve of Trump’s overall job performance, while 20% disapprove. As has been the case for his entire presidency, Democrats overwhelmingly oppose his leadership: 94% of Democrats disapprove in the new survey.

Independents remain decidedly low on Trump as well, with about two-thirds disapproving of Trump’s performance.

Significantly more Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, although even on that issue he remains slightly underwater: 46% approve and 51% disapprove of his performance.

Trump’s current economic rating represents a 5 percentage point drop from the same time last year, but for a president who has struggled to win over a majority of American voters on any issue, the economy represents a relative strength.

Even some Democrats approve: Just 5% of Democrats approve of his job performance overall, but 16% approve of his handling of the economy. Independents are closely divided — 44% approve and 47% disapprove — while 86% of Republicans approve of his economic leadership.

“He’s kind of a bully, but I’ve seen some improvement,” said Mandi Mitchell, a 38-year-old registered Democrat from North Carolina. “Our unemployment rate has definitely dropped.”

Mitchell, who is studying for her doctoral degree, said she didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 but might in 2020.

“I’m not going to be too hard on him,” she said. “I just think he doesn’t address America properly.”

Amid regular distractions from the president’s social media feed, Trump’s team has worked to highlight rising retail sales and the solid labor market with its 3.7% unemployment rate as sources of strength. The U.S. economy appears to be showing vulnerabilities after more than 10 years of growth, however. Factory output has fallen and consumer confidence has waned as Trump has ramped up his trade fight with China.

Trump rattled the stock and bond markets this month when he announced plans to put a 10% tax on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports. The market reaction suggested a recession might be on the horizon and led Trump to delay some of the tariffs that were scheduled to begin in September, though many others remain.

“The economy is doing OK, but he’s doing a horrible job for the country,” said 67-year-old John Sollenberger, of Philadelphia.

He said he left the Republican Party after Trump’s rise and is now a registered independent.

“To me, it’s the vitriol that comes out of him,” Sollenberger explained. “He’s obviously a racist. He’s anti-immigrant. He foments discontent with so many people it doesn’t matter what the economy’s doing really.”

Those who remain in the Republican Party do not share the negative assessment.

Greg Traylor, a 53-year-old small businessman from North Canton, Ohio, acknowledged that Trump is “rough around the edges,” but he praised his work on immigration and his support for Israel. On the economy, Traylor cheered Trump’s hard-line stance with China, while acknowledging it may cause some short-term pain.

“He’s got balls of steel,” Traylor said.

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,058 adults was conducted Aug. 15-19 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.

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Fingerhut reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

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Online:

AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/

Planned Parenthood Feels Squeeze After Quitting Federal Program

SALT LAKE CITY—Planned Parenthood clinics in several states are charging new fees, tapping financial reserves, intensifying fundraising and warning of more unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases after its decision to quit a $260 million federal family planning program in an abortion dispute with the Trump administration.

The fallout is especially intense in Utah, where Planned Parenthood has been the only provider participating in the nearly 50-year-old Title X family planning program and will now lose about $2 million yearly in federal funds that helped 39,000 mostly low-income, uninsured people. It plans to maintain its services — which include contraception, STD testing and cancer screening — but is considering charging a small copay for patients who used to get care for free.

Planned Parenthood in Minnesota is in a similar situation, serving about 90% of the state’s Title X patients, and plans to start charging fees due to the loss of $2.6 million in annual funding.

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Trump's Abortion Lies Are Going to Get Somebody Killed



by Sonali Kolhatkar

















America's Reproductive Slaves



by Chris Hedges

The organization is concerned about the spread of unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

“We believe there will be a public health crisis created by this denial of care,” said Sarah Stoesz, the Minnesota-based president of Planned Parenthood North Central States. “It’s a very sad day for the country.”

Planned Parenthood and several other providers withdrew from the program earlier this week rather than comply with a newly implemented rule prohibiting participating clinics from referring women for abortions.

Anti-abortion activists who form a key part of President Donald Trump’s base have been campaigning to “defund Planned Parenthood.” Among its varied services it is a major abortion provider, and the activists viewed the grants as an indirect subsidy.

About 4 million women are served nationwide by the Title X program, which makes up a much bigger portion of Planned Parenthood’s patients than abortion. But the organization said it could not abide by the abortion-referral rules because it says they would make it impossible for doctors to do their jobs.

Misty Dotson, a single mother in Utah, started going to Planned Parenthood as doctors’ bills for treating recurring yeast infections mounted. The services became even more important when she gave up her employer-sponsored health insurance because she couldn’t afford the $500 monthly bill.

She is unsure what she’d do if the family planning services she gets stop.

“It would put me in a very dangerous position,” said Dotson, who works as an executive assistant for an accounting and consulting firm. “It covers so many things: STD testing, emergency contraception, birth control, lifesaving cancer screenings … you name it, they have treated me for it.”

Planned Parenthood said it’s dedicated to maintaining its current services in Utah, but CEO Karrie Galloway acknowledged it won’t be easy and could cause some “pain on all sides.”

She said the organization plans to lean heavily on donors to make up the funding gap while staff members assess how they’ll cope. Among the possibilities are instituting copays of $10-$15 per visit, shortening hours and trimming spending. She doesn’t plan to lay off staff, but said she may not be able to fill jobs when people leave or retire.

Minnesota is planning fees as well.

“We’ll continue to offer all services, and keep clinic doors open, but we’ll be charging patients on a sliding scale who we didn’t charge before,” Stoesz said. “Vulnerable people who previously were able to access birth control and STD testing for free will no longer be able to do so.”

Elsewhere, the impact of Planned Parenthood’s withdrawal will vary from state to state.

In the Deep South there will be little impact because Planned Parenthood did not provide Title X services in most of the region’s states. Governments in some Democratic-controlled states, including Hawaii, Illinois, New York and Vermont, say they will try to replace at least some of the lost federal funding.

In Washington state, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee — fresh from quitting the presidential campaign — vowed to join that group of states. His administration is pulling Washington out of Title X because of the new rule and will ask the Legislature to make up for the $4 million in federal funding that will be lost.

“We will not comply with their dangerous, unconstitutional, illegal rules,” Inslee said Thursday. “We will make sure this health care continues.”

The chief operating officer for Planned Parenthood of the Greater Northwest and Hawaiian Islands, Rebecca Gibron, said Southern Idaho could be hit hard by the changes, with other health care providers in the area saying they can’t fill the gap if the roughly 1,000 low-income women served by Planned Parenthood in Twin Falls are no longer able to receive care.

“This was not money that can simply be made up by raising dollars from donors,” Gibron said. “We have rent to pay, we have staff salaries … there are limits to what we are able to do in terms of providing free care without the Title X program.”

Among other providers withdrawing from Title X is Maine Family Planning, which oversees a network that serves about 23,000 patients per year and will be losing $1.8 million in annual funding. Its CEO, George Hill, said the organization will rely on reserves and intensify fundraising efforts to bridge the gap while seeking more aid from the state.

In anticipation of the changes, Democrats in neighboring New Hampshire added about $3.2 million in the state budget they passed earlier this year to make up for the federal funding. But that’s on hold after Republican Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed the budget in June for other reasons.

Planned Parenthood will continue to participate in Medicaid, the federal health-coverage program for low-income Americans. That’s Planned Parenthood’s biggest source of government funding — about $400 million or more annually in recent years. The Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas, Iowa and Missouri have taken steps to block that flow of funds in their states.

Maryann Martindale, executive director of the Utah Academy of Family Physicians, said most Title X clients earn slightly too much money to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford employer-based or private health insurance.

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Crary reported from New York. Associated Press writers Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City; Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine; Holly Ramer in Concord, New Hampshire; and Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.

Trump’s Science Record Is Already Worse Than Bush’s

On July 19, President Trump hosted Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and their families, along with the family of their deceased colleague Neil Armstrong, at a White House event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon.

“Tomorrow will represent 50 years from the time we planted a beautiful American flag on the moon,” Trump said. “And that was an achievement, possibly one of the great, considered one of the great achievements ever.”

Trump’s fractured syntax notwithstanding, the Apollo program was indeed a stunning triumph of federal science, involving more than 34,000 National Aeronautics and Space Administration employees and 375,000 industry and university contractors. It was one of many spectacular achievements by federal and federally funded scientists over the last half-century, such as the creation of the internet, fiber optics and magnetic resonance imaging technology, not to mention the role those scientists played in providing the technical underpinning for health and environmental standards that save lives and protect critical ecosystems and wildlife habitats.

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Trump Dramatically Ramps Up War on Climate Science



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The Amazon Is Burning, and the Entire Planet Is at Risk



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Trump’s lauding of the Apollo 11 mission rang a particularly discordant note given the lengths to which his administration has gone to destroy federal science by censoring scientific findings, gagging agency scientists and fostering a hostile working environment. Since taking office, the administration has launched more than 100 attacks on science, according to my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists—more than the George W. Bush administration amassed over its two four-year terms.

Sidelining Science

Just a day before Trump’s Apollo photo op, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it would rejectscientific evidence and the recommendation of its own staff scientists by not banning chlorpyrifos, the widely used agricultural pesticide shown to hamper childhood brain development. It was the agency’s second scientifically indefensible chemical-related decision of the year. In April, it overruled the advice of its own scientists who urged the agency to follow the example of 55 other countries in completely banning asbestos, a known carcinogen.

Today’s EPA offers a stark example of the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle science-based agencies. Nearly 1,600 employees left the EPA during the first year and a half of the EPA administration, while only 400 were hired, according to data obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request. Of 1,600 employees who left, at least 260 were scientists, 185 were “environmental protection specialists” and 106 were engineers. The total number of employees at the agency today—14,172—is the lowest in 30 years.

Besides chopping staff, the EPA has dramatically reduced the role of outside science advisers. Last fall, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, disbanded a 20-member scientific advisory committee on particulate matter, failed to convene a similar panel on ozone, and packed a seven-member advisory committee on air quality standards with industry-friendly participants.

The EPA is not the only agency pushing scientists out the door. The same day the EPA made its chlorpyrifos announcement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that nearly two-thirds of 395 Washington, D.C.-based employees in its Economic Research Service, which provides analyses on a range of issues, and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which oversees $1.7 billion in scientific funding, will quit rather than relocate to Kansas City.

The department’s dubious rationale for moving the Research Service and National Institute is placing researchers closer to farmers and cutting costs, but its ulterior motive is to hollow out their staffs, hindering their ability to carry out their missions. Mick Mulvaney, acting White House chief of staff, acknowledged as much during a speech he gave at an August 2 Republican fundraiser in South Carolina.

“You’ve heard about ‘drain the swamp.’ What you probably haven’t heard is what we are actually doing,” he said. “I don’t know if you saw the news the other day, but the USDA just tried to move, or did move, two offices out of Washington, D.C…. Guess what happened? More than half the people quit…. What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government, and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”

Capitol Hill Science Defenders

Some members of Congress are fighting back. Late last month, for example, the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress—a temporary committee with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans—unanimously approved a recommendation to resurrect the Office of Technology Assessment, a congressional watchdog agency that then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich killed in the mid-1990s.

The select committee’s recommendation comes on the heels of a draft House spending bill for the 2020 fiscal year that includes $6 million to jumpstart the agency, which provided Congress with analyses on a range of topics, from acid rain to climate change to renewable energy, from 1972 to 1995.

Meanwhile, House Democrats and Republicans alike voiced their support for protecting federal science during a recent Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on scientific integrity. Two dozen federal agencies have adopted scientific integrity policies since 2010, but they are inconsistent and difficult to enforce, so some members of Congress want to codify protections in a law.

“Allowing political power or special interests to manipulate or suppress federal science hurts, and hurts all of us,” said New York Rep. Paul Tonko at the July 17 hearing. “It leads to dirtier air, unsafe water, toxic products on our shelves, and chemicals in our homes and environment. And it has driven federal inaction in response to the growing climate crisis.”

Earlier this year, Tonko introduced the Scientific Integrity Act, which would guarantee federal scientists the right to share their findings with the public, ensure the accuracy of government science-related communications, and protect scientific research from political interference.

Federal science has taken an unprecedented beating during the Trump administration and remains a long way from its glory days half a century ago when it landed men on the moon. Tonko recognizes that protecting scientific integrity is a critical first step to rebuilding American scientific enterprise and that it deserves bipartisan support.

“Scientific integrity is a longstanding concern that transcends any one party or political administration,” Tonko said. “The abuses directed by this president and his top officials have brought a new urgency to the issue, but the fact remains whether a Democrat or Republican sits in the [House] speaker’s chair or the Oval Office, we need strong scientific integrity policies.”

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

We’re Listening to the Wrong Voices on Syria

Once upon a time, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Syria and met with the strongman President Bashar Assad. She considered her willingness to engage all sides of the country’s bloody civil war to be an important step toward peace. For this bold action, she was widely pilloried at the time and considered by some an authoritarian apologist or outright traitor. The claim was repeated again recently by the ever-so-mainstream California Sen. Kamala Harris, a fellow Democratic presidential hopeful. The attacks on Gabbard’s Syria record have been quite regular among Washington insiders, who considered the congresswoman foolish. But was she? More than two years later, given events in Syria, one must conclude that she certainly was not. Indeed, Gabbard was right all along.

Recently, Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has squeezed the anti-regime rebels in their last major stronghold of Idlib, in the country’s northwest. Thus, the latest phase of Syria’s civil war is nearly over. And Assad, along with his Russian and Iranian backers, have won. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Un-American blasphemy, right? Hardly.

For years, the West and its Gulf State theocratic partners decried the admittedly brutal Assad and sold their populations the fantasy that there were “moderate,” non-Islamist rebels. The reality is that the rebels were infused with, and quickly dominated by, various jihadist fighters from the very start. Yes, Assad is a veritable monster; but what of the Nusra Front (an al-Qaida franchise) and the even more extreme Islamic State—are they not equally deplorable, and, frankly, more of a transnational threat to the U.S.? Of course they are. Assad, at least, posed no serious threat to the United States (neither did his neighbor, Saddam Hussein, by the way) and both suppressed Sunni jihadism and protected Syria’s plethora of Christian, Allawi and other minority populations.

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Yet, as journalist Max Blumenthal made clear in two illuminating chapters of his latest book, “The Management of Savagery,” the U.S. and its European and Arab “partners” spent most of the brutal civil war backing the very Islamists that most threatened America. As such, the Western-Gulf alliance enabled, even caused, the “Talibanization” of huge swaths of Syria, especially in the oil-rich east.

It worked like this: The CIA set up shop across the border in Turkey and Barack Obama authorized $500 million in military aid—including anti-armor TOW missiles—which ended up in the hands of the Nusra Front and an array of other Islamist groups. At the peak of the mission, $1 in every $15 the CIA spent went to the Syria assistance mission. The blowback, so to speak, was the resurrection of al-Qaida, the empowerment of Islamic State, and the turning of much of Syria into a jihadi stronghold.

It all bore disturbing similarity to Operation Cyclone, the failed, 9/11-catalyzing, CIA assistance mission to the equally theocratic Afghan mujahedeen in its battle against the Soviets from 1979 to 1988. In this tragic counterproductive redux, Turkey stood in as Pakistan, once the way station for arms and cash to the mujahedeen. The U.S., Western Europe and the Gulf States performed an encore as the largest backers of rebels, and all the blowback was essentially the same—if no worse—in the Syria reprise.

This time around, Israel counterintuitively lent a hand to empower the Nusra Front and even Islamic State. It bombed Syrian targets over the years and funded some Islamists along its Golan Heights border. Indeed, one right-wing, Netanyahu-allied scholar published an op-ed titled, “The Destruction of the Islamic State Is a Mistake.” What’s more, as a former Israeli defense minister emphatically stated in 2016, “In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.” This was all patently ridiculous, since Islamic State’s ideology poses an enormous threat to Israel’s future, whereas Iran is a boxed-in, sanctions-riddled, non-nuclear power. Yet it reflects exactly the prevailing Israeli—and, by extension, American and Gulf State—strategic dogma in the region.

U.S. policymakers, furthermore, had ample evidence early in the civil war that the rebels were infused with and rapidly dominated by Islamists. Even hyperconservative Defense Intelligence Agency head (and later Trump national security adviser) Michael Flynn reported this, as did the United Nations. It all pointed to the massive empowerment of Islamists, including Islamic State.

Gabbard knew this—saw it, even—from the start. Anyone with a willingness to study recent history should have, though most didn’t. She wasn’t exactly alone, of course. Reliably antiwar Dennis Kucinich, a former Ohio representative, once flippantly, but astutely, asked whether U.S. aid to rebels and strikes on Assad didn’t essentially turn the U.S. into “al-Qaida’s Air Force.” More surprisingly, in what was, at the time, considered one his notorious gaffes, then-Vice President Joe Biden admitted that “[t]he problem is our allies [the Gulf States and Turkey] … they poured in [money and weapons] … and the people who were being supplied were Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.” For this nugget of truth, Uncle Joe was sent on an “apology tour” around the region.

If Gabbard and Kucinich were right, it’s clear who was very, very wrong: the late and now canonized John McCain. The wildly hawkish Arizona senator visited rebel groups a number of times. During one visit, he exclaimed, “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar and for our Qatari friends.” Bandar, conveniently, was the very same Saudi official who had spearheaded support for the mujahedeen, and later the Taliban, in Afghanistan. On another trip, McCain was photographed with a small group of rebel fighters. It was a nice, touching scene. Problem was, two of the rebels posing beside him were Islamists previously implicated in the kidnapping of Shiite pilgrims. McCain never apologized or disavowed his firm support for the rebels, even after he knew full well that Islamists had gotten their hands on most of the U.S. aid and arms. And, of course, he was never attacked as traitorous, the way Gabbard was—and is.

All in all, Gabbard was pilloried precisely because she was uncomfortably and rationally correct about the rebels and the course of the war in Syria. Gabbard is no doubt imperfect, but she is remarkably consistent—even when it is politically unpalatable—in her anti-interventionist stances. In this, she’s all but alone in the bloated Democratic primary field; that’s exactly why she’s the most intriguing presidential hopeful. It’s also partly why she’s unlikely to last much longer in the race to the top.

An alliance of beltway insiders, interventionist think-tankers, corporate arms dealers and mainstream Democratic Party stalwarts feel they have to sink her campaign. It must be stillborn, in fact, because they fear her and all she stands for. She seemed to know that while Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s ayatollahs aren’t exactly America’s friends, they did, and do, possess goals in common with the U.S. The Assad-backing coalition also fights terrorists, both native Syrian and transnational. Furthermore, though the generals and admirals will never admit it, the SAA and Russian air force acted as a veritable anvil to the U.S. and Kurdish hammer that rolled back Islamic State in its eastern Syrian stronghold.

To further disturb reflexively liberal friends, Donald Trump—though he did meaninglessly bomb a Syrian runway, leading CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria to declare The Donald presidential—seems to also partly recognize the real score in Syria. Though 2,000 U.S. troops foolishly remain in place in the country, he hasn’t escalated conflict with Russia per se and appears to understand the common goals between the otherwise implacable opponents.

Nevertheless, the situation on the ground in Syria is dangerous as all hell. Through its counterproductive policies, Washington ended up with the worst of all worlds: a costly war with an empowered Islamic State, a hair-trigger standoff with Russia and Iran along the Euphrates River, and another perilous military footprint in an unstable Mideast quagmire. Bravo, America!

In a wildly byzantine and absurdly self-defeating redux of the 2003 Iraq War folly and the 1980s anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the U.S. again fueled Islamism in the region before subsequently turning on the Frankenstein’s monster of Sunni jihadism to justify “forever war” anew. In retrospect, it was almost as if Washington wanted Syria to collapse, for the war to rage on indefinitely, and for a new, bigger, Islamist boogeyman to rise like the mythical phoenix (though I loathe how conspiratorial that sounds).

All told, at present, Islamic State is hardly gone and is again gaining strength; Russia, Assad and Iran hold all the high cards in the civil war; U.S. troops remain enmeshed in the East; and the Kurdish question has yet to be solved (and could even lead to a war with Turkey). Moreover, an entire people, and a region, are once more shattered.

That, as recent history demonstrates, makes America less safe and has led to hundreds of thousands of dead brown bodies, for which the U.S. public hardly cares. Which means Tulsi Gabbard, almost alone, was right from the start. And that’s precisely why America’s perpetual warfare state must destroy her.

The Pentagon Belongs to Silicon Valley Now

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.

This article was co-published with Fortune.

On Aug. 8, 2017, Roma Laster, a Pentagon employee responsible for policing conflicts of interest, emailed an urgent warning to the chief of staff of then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Several department employees had arranged for Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, to be sworn into an influential Pentagon advisory board despite the fact that, in the year since he’d been nominated, Bezos had never completed a required background check to obtain a security clearance.

Mattis was about to fly to the West Coast, where he would personally swear Bezos in at Amazon’s headquarters before moving on to meetings with executives from Google and Apple. Soon phone calls and emails began bouncing around the Pentagon. Security clearances are no trivial matter to defense officials; they exist to ensure that people with access to sensitive information aren’t, say, vulnerable to blackmail and don’t have conflicts of interest. Laster also contended that it was a “noteworthy exception” for Mattis to perform the ceremony. Secretaries of defense, she wrote, don’t hold swearing-in events.

Laster’s alarms triggered fear among Pentagon brass that Mattis would be seen as doing a special favor for Bezos, which could put him in hot water with President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly proclaimed his antipathy to Bezos, mainly because of his ownership of The Washington Post. The swearing-in was canceled only hours before it was scheduled to occur. (This episode, never previously reported, is based on interviews with six people familiar with the matter. An Amazon spokesperson said the company was told that Bezos did not need a security clearance and that the company provided all requested information.)

Despite the cancellation, Bezos met with Mattis that day. They talked about leadership and military history, then moved on to Amazon’s sales pitch on why the Defense Department should make a radical shift in its computing. Amazon wanted the department to abandon its hodgepodge of 2,215 data centers, located in various Pentagon facilities and run using different systems by an array of different companies, and let Amazon replace that with cloud service: computing power provided over the internet, all of it running on Amazon’s servers.

That vision is now well on its way to becoming a reality. The Pentagon is preparing to award a $10 billion, 10-year contract to move its information technology systems to the cloud. Amazon’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is the biggest provider of cloud services in the country and also the company’s profit engine: It accounted for 58.7% of Amazon’s operating income last year. AWS has been the favorite to emerge with the Pentagon contract.

Known as JEDI, for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, the project has been the subject of accusations of favoritism. Two spurned bidders have launched unsuccessful bid protests and one of them, Oracle, filed and lost a lawsuit. Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

The DOD defends JEDI. The agency’s decision-makers have “always placed the interests of the warfighter first and have acted without bias, prejudice, or self-interest,” DOD spokesperson Elissa Smith said in a statement. “The same cannot be said of all parties to the debate over JEDI.”

What’s happened at the Pentagon extends past the JEDI contract. It’s a story of how some of America’s biggest tech companies used a little-known advisory board, some aggressive advocacy by a few billionaires and some unofficial lobbying to open a backdoor into the Pentagon. And so, no matter who wins the JEDI contract, one winner is already clear: Silicon Valley. The question is no longer whether a technology giant will emerge with the $10 billion prize, but rather which technology giant (or giants) will.

There are certainly benefits. The Pentagon’s technological infrastructure does indeed need to be modernized. But there may also be costs. Silicon Valley has pushed for the Pentagon to adopt its technology and its move-fast-and-break-things ethos. The result, according to interviews with more than three dozen current and former DOD officials and tech executives, has been internal clashes and a tortured process that has combined the hype of tech with the ethical morass of the Washington industry-government revolving door.

Laster did her best to enforce the rules. She would challenge the Pentagon’s cozy relationship not only with Bezos, but with Google’s Eric Schmidt, the chairman of the defense board that Bezos sought to join. The ultimate resolution? Laster was shunted aside. She was removed from the innovation board in November 2017 (but remains at the Defense Department). “Roma was removed because she insisted on them following the rules,” said a former DOD official knowledgeable about her situation.

Laster filed a grievance, which was denied. “I’ve been betrayed by an organization I joined when I was 17 years old,” said Laster, who is 54. “This is an organization built on loyalty, dedication and patriotism. Unfortunately, it is kind of one-way.”

Other criticism, from Amazon’s rivals and the press, has centered on the actions of several DOD workers who had previously worked directly or indirectly for Amazon and have since returned to the private sector. The most important of those employees, Sally Donnelly — a former outside strategist for Amazon who had become one of Mattis’ top aides — helped give Amazon officials access to Mattis in intimate settings, an opportunity that most defense contractors don’t enjoy. Donnelly organized a private dinner, never reported before, for Mattis, Bezos, herself and Amazon’s top government-sales executive at a Washington restaurant, DBGB, on Jan. 17, 2018. The dinner occurred just as the DOD was finalizing draft bid specifications for JEDI. (Asked about the dinner and several others like it, the DOD’s Smith said: “One of the department’s priorities is to reform the way DOD does business. As part of this reform, leaders are expected to engage with industry — in a full and open manner within legal boundaries — to find ways to reform our business practices and build a more lethal force.” A spokesperson for AWS said the dinner “had nothing to do with the JEDI procurement, and those implying otherwise either are misinformed or disappointed competitors trying to distract with innuendo vs competing fairly with their technical capabilities.”)

Such meetings aren’t illegal, but they undermine public trust in defense contracting, said Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and one of the nation’s leading experts on government-contracting law. “This is a particularly serious example of the revolving door among Pentagon officials and defense contractors, which has been problematic in recent years and is getting worse under the Trump administration,” he said.

In July, Trump expressed concerns about the process and whether it was skewed in Amazon’s favor. Early this month, his new defense secretary, Mark Esper, announced a fresh review, which will delay the selection of a winner. The judge in the JEDI-related case ruled in favor of the government but nonetheless summed up the process as containing conflict-of-interest allegations that were “certainly sufficient to raise eyebrows” and a “constant gravitational pull on agency employees by technology behemoths.”

The board that Bezos almost joined — called the Defense Innovation Board — was launched in 2016 by Ashton Carter, the last defense secretary in the Obama administration. Carter worried that the Pentagon’s information technology was falling behind. He recruited a collection of tech luminaries, including Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, by appealing to their patriotism and enticing them with the proposition that the DOD needed the insight and culture of Silicon Valley. Of course, the Pentagon also has an annual infotech budget of $38 billion, and what tech CEO could resist offering products and services to solve the department’s problems?

Schmidt, the chairman of the innovation board, embraced the mission. In the spring and summer of 2016, he embarked, with fellow board members, on a series of visits to Pentagon operations around the world. Schmidt visited a submarine base in San Diego, an aircraft carrier off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and Creech Air Force Base, located deep in the Nevada desert near Area 51.

Inside the drone operations center at Creech, according to three people familiar with the trip, Schmidt observed video as a truck in a contested zone somewhere was surveilled by a Predator drone and annihilated. It was a mesmerizing display of the U.S. military’s lethal reach.

Yet as Schmidt and his colleagues studied the control panels and displays, they felt like they were witnessing technology frozen in the 1970s. He began asking questions about the challenges of controlling drones thousands of miles away. One operator complained that he had to use his joystick to toggle quickly between systems and screens, turning off one feed to use another. He had to do all of this while simultaneously flying the drone and trying to keep his attention on a target that was frequently in motion.

A little later, on the operations floor, Schmidt watched as dozens of people monitored video feeds from drones around the globe. One of the visitors noted that computers using recognition software and machine learning could much more efficiently and accurately perform the majority of these tasks.

A little more than a year after Schmidt’s visit, Google won a $17 million subcontract in a project called Maven to help the military use image recognition software to identify drone targets — exactly the kind of function that Schmidt witnessed at Creech. (Schmidt declined to be interviewed. A person close to the innovation board said he was unaware of his company’s involvement in Maven. Google, which has funded ProPublica projects on voting and video journalism in recent years, declined to comment on the record.)

Schmidt’s influence, already strong under Carter, only grew when Mattis arrived as defense secretary. Schmidt’s travel privileges at the DOD, which required painstaking approval from the agency’s chief of staff for each stop of every trip, were suddenly unfettered after Schmidt requested carte blanche, according to three sources knowledgeable about the matter. Mattis granted him and the board permission to travel anywhere they wanted and to talk to anyone at the DOD on all but the most secret programs.

Such access is unheard-of for executives or directors of companies that sell to the government, say three current and former DOD officials, both to prevent opportunities for bribery or improper influence and to ensure that one company does not get advantages over others. “Mattis changed the rules of engagement and the muscularity of the innovation board went from zero to 60,” said a person who has served on Pentagon advisory boards. “There’s a lot of opportunity for mischief.”

In a written statement, the DOD denied that Mattis extended Schmidt’s privileges, characterizing them as “no more and no less” than when Carter was defense secretary. As for Mattis, his former press secretary, Dana White, speaking on his behalf, said: “In order to do their job, all members of the Defense Innovation Board had full access to the department and its entities. Secretary Mattis insisted on it. He fully leveraged their unique experience to ensure DOD adapted and gained maximum advantage over the rising threats of near-peer competitors.”

Over the next months, Schmidt and two other board members with Google ties would continue flying all over the country, visiting Pentagon installations and meeting with DOD officials, sessions that no other company could attend. It’s hard to reconstruct what occurred in many of those meetings, since they were private. On one occasion, Schmidt quizzed a briefer about which cloud service provider was being used for a data project, according to a memo that Laster prepared after the briefing. When the briefer told him that Amazon handled the business, Schmidt asked if they’d considered other cloud providers. Laster’s memo flagged Schmidt’s inquiry as a “point of concern,” given that he was the chairman of a major cloud provider.

The DOD became unusually deferential to Schmidt. He preferred to travel on his personal jet, and he would ferry fellow board members with him. But that created a problem for his handlers: DOD employees are not permitted to ride on private planes. Still, the staff at the board didn’t want to inconvenience Schmidt by making him wait for his department support team to arrive on commercial flights. So, according to a source knowledgeable about the board’s spending, on at least one occasion the department requisitioned military aircraft at a cost of $25,000 an hour to transport its employees to meet Schmidt on his tour. (The DOD’s spokesperson said employees did this because “there were no commercial flights available.”)

The fact that such unusual access was granted to a board member who was a DOD vendor raised alarm, according to current and former Pentagon employees. As she had in the Bezos episode, Laster took action. She was a former Marine who’d been a military police officer in the U.S. force in Somalia in the 1990s. Her official title was designated federal officer for the Defense Innovation Board. Laster’s job was to make sure that members’ conduct was ethical and in accordance with laws, regulations and rules. Blunt and direct, she was hardly a pushover. But Laster had never encountered tech billionaires before, much less ones empowered by the head of her agency.

The trouble started after Laster sought a clarification of how to carry out Mattis’ sweeping travel directive. She was concerned that it could expose the department to accusations of giving vendors an unfair edge. Three members of the board worked directly or indirectly for Google and two for United Technologies, a major defense contractor.

Schmidt responded by threatening to go over her head to Mattis, according to her grievance. She was told to stand down and never again speak to Schmidt. According to the grievance, her boss told her, “Mr. Schmidt was a billionaire and would never accept pushback, warnings or limits.”

The Schmidt episode captured the tension that had emerged inside the department. To one Silicon Valley supporter, it was a “textbook example of the bureaucracy trying to slow down progress and change using rules, rules, rules.” To Michael Bayer, the former chairman of another Pentagon advisory board, where he had worked with Laster, she was a person of “extraordinary character” who was working hard to make sure the board “did the right thing.”

It would be hard to find a purer embodiment of the proverbial revolving door — or a stealth influencer — than Sally Donnelly. For the past dozen years she has shuttled between the DOD and consulting firms, including at least once with Amazon as a client, that seek to influence the department. During her most recent government stint, Donnelly, 59, came to be viewed as the “fairy godmother” of the Big Tech advocates in the department, as one Pentagon official put it to ProPublica.

Donnelly is known as a superb crafter of narratives, a person who can present ideas in persuasive ways. She honed those skills in her first career, as a reporter at Time magazine, where, among other things, she covered the Pentagon and wrote glowingly of Mattis. Donnelly spent 20 years at the newsweekly before moving to the DOD for the first time in 2007. She worked for the then-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, then later for Mattis, including while he oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of Central Command.

In 2012, Donnelly departed and opened her own consulting firm, SBD Advisors. “Our team offers guidance and stealth strategies,” its website boasted, according to a 2014 article in Politico, “ensuring that clients benefit from the results of our campaigns while outwardly they are under-the-radar.” SBD’s clients included Amazon, Uber, Bloomberg, Palantir and others.

Donnelly was a master at quietly cultivating a network, one that straddled the permeable line between government and industry. Carter rented an office at the firm before he became Obama’s defense secretary, and a Politico story listed him as a SBD adviser. (During Carter’s tenure as secretary, Donnelly worked as a DOD consultant.) SBD’s other high-profile generals and defense-connected figures included Mullen, former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair and Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief and national security adviser who has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

By 2015, Donnelly’s business had announced a new focus. SBD now specialized in “bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC,” its website declared, by “facilitating engagements between the technology and defense sectors.” The next year her firm started advising Amazon Web Services on how to land DOD contracts.

In January 2017, Donnelly rejoined the department after successfully shepherding Mattis through the Senate confirmation process. Her title, senior adviser, understated her influence. She emerged as one of the most powerful people in the leadership of the Pentagon, according to numerous DOD staffers. She guided Mattis on politics (which was relatively new terrain for him), relations with the White House and dealing with the press.

Donnelly also helped the defense secretary connect with outside companies. She helped arrange not only the January 2018 dinner between Bezos and Mattis, but also a previously reported private dinner with Mattis and Teresa Carlson, the head of the AWS division that sells services to governments, in March 2017 in London. (A host of that gathering told The Wall Street Journal that cloud computing was not discussed and that the purpose of the dinner was to talk about a charity involving wounded veterans.) The same year, at Donnelly’s behest, AWS’ Carlson met with several of Mattis’ top aides. People familiar with the matter say they discussed a possible job for Carlson at the Pentagon. No offer was made. (A source close to Carlson said such a job “would not have been of interest.”)

A lawyer for Donnelly, Michael Levy, said she “always adhered to all ethical and legal obligations and acted in the best interest of the national security of the United States.” He added that she played no role in the JEDI contract. “To suggest otherwise … reflects an absence of even the most rudimentary understanding of the government contracting process.”

A veteran Marine general, Mattis was initially perceived as skeptical of what Silicon Valley was selling. He knew the flesh-and-blood realities of war and believed in giving autonomy to commanders on the ground. In his mind, anything that reinforced Pentagon leaders’ desire to micromanage events halfway across the globe was problematic. Technology, he believed, could make matters worse.

But Schmidt was an effective advocate for the power of big data, which he argued had become as important a strategic resource as oil. And he emphasized that the need for technological improvement was urgent: China was rapidly improving. In June 2017, at a private lunch in a Pentagon conference room, Schmidt told him Google’s lead over China in artificial intelligence technology had shrunk from five years to six months. “Mr. Secretary, they’re at your heels,” Schmidt said, according to three people familiar with the lunch. “You need to take decisive action now.”

Schmidt wanted the department to adopt a Silicon Valley philosophy that emphasized innovation, taking risks and moving fast. Among his recommendations: embrace cloud computing. In the summer of 2017, Mattis decided to investigate firsthand. He departed on a tour that would include visits to Amazon and Google headquarters and a one-on-one with Apple CEO Tim Cook.

At Amazon, despite the tempest about Bezos joining the innovation board, Mattis and the CEO hit it off. The two talked together for about an hour. Mattis gave a pithy sweep of lessons from military history and expressed his view on the perils of overreliance on technology. He noted how the British Navy, once famous for its derring-do, nearly lost the World War I battle of Jutland when ship captains hesitated, waiting for flag signals from their fleet commander.

After the meeting, Bezos and Mattis walked to another conference room, where AWS executives made their case that the company’s cloud products offer better security than traditional data centers, according to three people who attended. As evidence, they noted that the Central Intelligence Agency had embarked on a $600 million, 10-year cloud contract with Amazon in 2013 and, they said, it was working.

To ensure that Mattis could visualize the impact Amazon’s technology could have on an actual battlefield, staffers placed on the conference room table a “Snowball Edge,” a suitcase-sized device with lots of storage that allowed soldiers in remote environments to quickly process information.

One of Mattis’ last meetings on the trip seemed to tip him into the camp of the cloud advocates. He met with venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen, an influential Silicon Valley figure who first made his name as the creator of the Netscape browser a quarter-century ago. Andreessen was a booster of Amazon. “You need to get to the cloud,” he told Mattis. “You’d be stupid not to.”

Something seemed to click inside Mattis. He told his staff to begin preparing a memo laying out how the DOD would shift its computing to the cloud.

The Pentagon’s cloud initiative ultimately ended up being led by Chris Lynch, the head of Defense Digital Service. DDS was no ordinary unit; it was a corps of software engineers hired from Google, Amazon and other tech companies to “challenge the status quo, burdensome policies and established bureaucracies in an effort to streamline DOD’s ability to introduce modern software development, tools and practices,” according to a department spokesperson. And Lynch himself was no ordinary government employee. As a teenager, he had been arrested and expelled from his Ohio high school after he and some friends called in a bomb threat as a joke. But he grew up, earned his high school degree, worked at Microsoft and then ran a series of startups. At 43, he wore hoodies to an office dominated by starched white shirts and still considered himself an insurgent, a point he conveyed by posting a sign reading “The Rebel Alliance” outside the entrance to his group’s office; the name also reflected his obsession with Star Wars. (His team came up with the acronym JEDI for the cloud project.)

Lynch had a vision of how the Pentagon’s cloud initiative should work: a single DOD-wide cloud run by one provider that would allow the agency to shutter all but the most secret of its data centers. Having one cloud would be ultra-efficient, he said. It would allow programmers to deliver instant software fixes to the entire department, rather than multiple divisions needing to wait weeks for an outside contractor to come by in person.

Lynch also believed the department lacked the expertise to manage multiple vendors, each with its own idiosyncrasies. Better to give the entire agency one provider. And as he saw it, only three cloud companies in the U.S. were capable of that mission: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some in the Pentagon believed that Lynch’s plan presented its own risk. They thought that putting all of the agency’s data in one company’s system made it more vulnerable, not less, than having it stored with multiple vendors. They also worried such an approach would stifle competition and create a huge monopoly.

But Lynch had an advantage in the fight: Donnelly. She obtained full access to the Pentagon front office for Lynch and secured a “letter of marque” for him, a written statement of support from Mattis that put the weight of the agency’s chief behind him.

Amazon often seemed to have allies close at hand. For example, the deputy defense secretary sometimes used his chief of staff, Tony DeMartino, as a point man to the key committee on JEDI. DeMartino had been managing director of Donnelly’s consulting firm, where he’d had Amazon as a client. He was warned to be “vigilant and consult” with ethics lawyers before involving himself in matters related to Amazon. But even after the warning, DeMartino repeatedly participated in the cloud-related matters, according to emails submitted by Oracle in its lawsuit against the government, as well as emails obtained by ProPublica and interviews with current and former Pentagon officials. For example, one November 2017 email reviewed by ProPublica, which was copied to Donnelly, shows DeMartino suggested a “huddle” with the new head of the Pentagon’s cloud executive steering group to discuss the man’s responsibilities. Later, after DeMartino was no longer serving the deputy secretary, he asked to remain “linked into” the cloud initiative. A contracting officer who examined DeMartino’s role concluded that his actions hadn’t affected the JEDI process since DeMartino’s role was “ministerial and perfunctory.” (A person in DeMartino’s camp insists that his only activity on JEDI was blocking a “stupid acronym” — C3PO — from being inserted in a larger memo.)

A second former Amazon employee would spark more controversy. Deap Ubhi, a former AWS employee who worked for Lynch, was tasked with gathering marketing information to make the case for a single cloud inside the DOD. Around the same time that he started working on JEDI, Ubhi began talking with AWS about rejoining the company. As his work on JEDI deepened, so did his job negotiations. Six days after he received a formal offer from Amazon, Ubhi recused himself from JEDI, fabricating a story that Amazon had expressed an interest in buying a startup company he owned. A contracting officer who investigated found enough evidence that Ubhi’s conduct violated conflict of interest rules to refer the matter to the inspector general, but concluded that his conduct did not corrupt the process. (Ubhi, who now works in AWS’ commercial division, declined comment through a company spokesperson.)

Ubhi worsened the impression by making ill-advised public statements while still employed by the DOD. In a tweet, he described himself as “once an Amazonian, always an Amazonian.”

By the time the draft JEDI bid was formally unveiled in March 2018, rumors had begun surfacing in trade publications that the specifications had been written with Amazon in mind. For example, the bid required that the JEDI contract could not account for more than half of the provider’s cloud data load. And it required that the provider have at least three physical data centers, each separated by more than 150 miles. Only a tiny handful of companies could fulfill those mandates.

Many tech companies were furious. Indeed, the only major cloud computing company that defended JEDI was Amazon. The harshest reaction came from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, which would form the nucleus of a coalition that would work to stop JEDI. “This one-size-fits-all idea is, I think, limited to JEDI and promoted by Amazon, because it fits Amazon’s needs,” said Ken Glueck, Oracle’s top Washington executive.

The DOD’s spokesperson said, “The requirements were not designed around any one provider.” An Amazon spokesperson said that “from day one, we’ve competed for JEDI on the breadth and depth of our services, and their corresponding security and operational performance.”

Oracle responded by using its own access. As first reported by Bloomberg, Oracle arranged for its co-CEO, Safra Catz, to attend a private dinner in April 2018 with Trump and Peter Thiel, a founder of defense firm Palantir and a Trump ally. Catz told Trump she thought the JEDI specifications had been written so that only Amazon could win, according to a person familiar with the conversation and Bloomberg.

Only four companies submitted bids for JEDI. Google had already withdrawn from the bidding, citing its belief that the project should be split among multiple providers. The decision came after its own employees protested the company’s participation in Maven, expressing opposition to the idea that their technology would be used to help kill people. Two bidders — IBM and Oracle — were eliminated after they failed to meet the bid requirements. That has left only Amazon and Microsoft still standing in the JEDI competition.

Both IBM and Oracle filed protests. IBM’s protest was dismissed and Oracle’s was denied by the Government Accountability Office. Oracle sued the government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, asserting JEDI had been tainted by conflicts of interest. The judge in the case ruled against Oracle. He agreed with the contracting officer that Oracle lost the bid on the merits and that any “errors and omissions” were “not significant and did not give AWS a competitive advantage.”

Oracle did not give up. The company hired former members of the Trump administration and made its case to allies on key congressional committees. Largely as a result, the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee blocked the DOD from spending money on JEDI until it demonstrated it was using multiple cloud vendors.

Then, in July, Trump himself got involved, saying he was considering intervening in JEDI. Soon after, the new secretary of defense, Mark Esper (a former chief lobbyist for Raytheon), requested another review.

Much of the information that has surfaced in the press about JEDI is the product of investigations performed by Oracle and its lawyers. Meanwhile, PowerPoint presentations and investigative reports containing allegations of all sorts of byzantine chicanery by Amazon began circulating last year. By the spring of 2019, multiple corporate interests had deployed private teams to investigate their rivals and DOD officials.

The Pentagon’s inspector general continues to investigate, according to a spokesperson, including “whether current or former DOD officials committed misconduct relating to the JEDI acquisition, such as whether any had any conflicts of interest related to their involvement in the acquisition process.”

The claims and investigations have left JEDI shrouded in uncertainty. The project might not survive in its current form, according to people knowledgeable about the DOD, but there’s little doubt that the agency will move its computing to the cloud in one form or another.

As for Donnelly, she left government again last year. A going-away party was thrown for her at the Pentagon. Jared Kushner and former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn attended. Today, Cohn is the chairman of the advisory board of a new firm that Donnelly has opened, Pallas Advisors, which she founded along with Tony DeMartino, the former DOD political appointee and ex-strategy consultant for SBD.

Pallas describes itself as a “strategic advisory firm” that provides “insight into how governments think and operate.” According to a person familiar with the matter, one of Pallas’ staffers, Robert Daigle — who had previously worked on the JEDI project at the DOD — turned up in early August in the offices of at least one U.S. senator. Daigle was accompanied by Chris Lynch, who has left the DOD and founded a company, Rebellion Defense, that is seeking defense contracts relating to artificial intelligence. (Rebellion’s board members include Eric Schmidt.)

Lynch and Daigle were pushing a familiar agenda from a new vantage point: They wanted to explain why a single-cloud makes sense for the Defense Department. And if their own companies got some new opportunities as a result, it went without saying, that would be just fine with them.

Claire Perlman contributed to this story.

The Amazon Is Burning, and the Entire Planet Is at Risk

What follows is a conversation between Amazon Watch’s Christian Poirier and Dharna Noor of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

DHARNA NOOR: It’s The Real News. I’m Dharna Noor.

The Amazon Rainforest is burning at a record rate. The fires are so big that you can see the smoke from NASA space satellites. On Monday, the sky turned black over the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil and meteorologists found that the smoke filling the sky there was from fires thousands of kilometers away. Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research has documented almost 73,000 forest fires this year already. That’s an 84% uptick from what they saw in the same period last year. This comes amid a spike in deforestation in Brazil under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. He took office in January. But on Wednesday, Bolsonaro said that NGO’s are to blame for this uptake in fires. Now joining me to talk about this is Christian Poirier, who directs Amazon Watch’s Brazil program. Thank you so much for being here today, Christian.

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CHRISTIAN POIRIER: Thanks for having me.

DHARNA NOOR: So, of course, a number of factors can contribute to these wildfires— increased dry periods because of climate change, increased logging, some fires are even created intentionally to clear land for agribusiness. Talk about all of those factors and why we’re seeing this huge spike in fires in the Amazon.

CHRISTIAN POIRIER: Under President Jair Bolsonaro, who is now in the eighth month of his tenure, we have seen an explosion in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Almost all of this deforestation is considered illegal. One report said 95% of deforestation we’re seeing today should be considered irregular or illegal and this is due to the rhetoric of Jair Bolsonaro, and indeed his policies, which are entirely anti-environmental and antagonistic to human rights as well, especially to the rights of Indigenous peoples who occupy the Amazon, 22% of which is indigenous territories. So the giant spike in deforestation we’re seeing today, a 67% spike since last year, and the signals that Bolsonaro is sending to rural actors, farmers, and also illegal actors, militias and mafia’s that are operating with wanton impunity under his reign, is driving a process of illegal invasions of protected areas like Indigenous territories and other protected forests.

The intentional setting of fires, the 73,000 fires we are seeing today, almost all of these were set intentionally because in Brazil this is considered the burning season. This is not unusual, but what is unusual is the 84% spike since last year. This is a humongous growth in forest fire setting and the scale of these forest fires are unprecedented. What we see as well is Bolsonaro trying to shift the blame from his own real responsibility for the massive destruction of the Amazon and the attack on Indigenous and other traditional peoples who live there by shifting the blame to nonprofits, NGOs that are doing very good work to try to protect the Amazon and it’s peoples. This is a pathological denial of the truth that we all are quite aware with or quite familiar with here in the United States under Donald Trump. Fake news is a motto of these leaders.

It’s also a denial of the science. The stats you cited earlier, the 72,843 fires we witnessed today, are from Brazil Space Research Center, INPE. INPE’s director was sacked just a couple of weeks ago for telling the truth, for doing his job, for showing that deforestation’s on the rise. And Jair Bolsonaro went on record saying that this is fake news, that INPE is trying to smear Brazil’s reputation, when in fact it’s doing its job. It’s doing his job showing Brazilians and showing the world about the environmental catastrophe that is befalling the Amazon today.

DHARNA NOOR: Now, deforestation was on the rise even before Bolsonaro was elected. The National Space Research Institute that you just cited says that it’s been increasing since 2012, so how much worse has it gotten since Bolsonaro was elected and why? Who is he responding to? Why is he enacting all these policies allowing more logging, more deforestation in general?

CHRISTIAN POIRIER: Deforestation has indeed been rising since 2012 as you say, but the spike we’re witnessing today is of enormous concern. It’s incredibly alarming, and what Bolsonaro is doing is he’s responding to the calls of Brazil’s agribusiness sector, the people who actually brought him to power, to open up protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon to extractive industry and agribusiness and to infrastructure development. He is answering the call of this sector and doing their bidding.

Basically, Brazil’s agribusiness sector is running the show in Brazil today, alongside mining, and what we see is that these actors, who have long sought to open up protected areas, protected forests, Indigenous territories to their activities, are acting with impunity. They’re acting with incredible lawlessness and they’re seeing this complete absence of the state. The government has gutted the ability of the environmental agency IBAMA, to monitor and enforce environmental law in the Amazon. The signal that this sends is that these actors can go ahead and set fires to the forest, attack, invade, and terrorize, in fact even kill Indigenous peoples who live there with impunity. So this is of enormous concern. It’s not something we witnessed previously. This is very much what Bolsonaro has brought to the table as president.

DHARNA NOOR: You’ve mentioned the impact on the Indigenous folks still living in the Amazon, and of course, these fires there have a global impact, but could we talk a little bit about how they’re effecting the folks who are actually there? Some 1 million people are still living in the Amazon. You recently visited the Amazonian state of Para, where the Munduruku people live, I believe. What do these fires and these policies either contribute to them due to these populations, and then what kind of resistance is mounting amongst those populations too?

CHRISTIAN POIRIER: Well, Indigenous peoples are really on the front lines today of the most brutal attack on their rights and on the forest in 30 years. We’re seeing the rollback of 30 years of progress on human rights and environmental protections in Brazil today. Indeed, harkening back to Brazil’s military dictatorship, the times that Jair Bolsonaro eulogizes, that he calls back to all the time, and what he’d like to see is a regime installed that have a similar agenda of wanton destruction of the forest for so-called environmental progress. Indigenous people, as I mentioned, are suffering the brunt of this attack today. I was recently on the river Tapajos, in the state of Para. Para is burning today and I was with the Munduruku people. The Munduruku people have been resisting for centuries the incursions of outsiders, be them the Portuguese, a variety of other of other actors, including now today the Brazilian state who want to build dams on their river, who want to allow wanton destruction of their territories by way of logging and mining, and who are absolutely absent in their constitutional duty to title and defend Munduruku territories.

Just after I left Munduruku territory, the territory called Sawre Muybu, the Munduruku carried out what’s called an auto-demarcation activity because the state has not demarcated this territory, leaving it open to a variety of threats, acute threats that I witnessed—diamond and gold mining rampant in the region, polluting waterways, destroying forests. Then we have also illegal loggers acting completely in open impunity, and we see as well the Munduruku needing to resist and defend their territories on their own without any federal support. They went onto their territories and drove illegal loggers off of their land and did so on their own at great peril because these are armed militias we’re seeing them go up against today. The murder of the Wayampi leader in the Northern state of Amapa shows that stakes are rising for Indigenous peoples. The Munduruku and others are really on the front lines of these struggles and need to be supported.

DHARNA NOOR: Yeah, absolutely. But the stakes are rising for the rest of the world as well. A report from the Brazilian Research Center Imazon, showed that some 20% of the Amazon was destroyed in the 20th century. Then last month on The Real News, we spoke with Alexander Zaitchik who found in a report for The Intercept actually that if we lose another 20% of the Amazon— and that could happen in less than three years— it could trigger what scientists call this dieback loop, where the forest could start to dry out and burn on its own until it was completely obliterated. Of course, the Amazon stores carbon, so it slows global warming. It’s supplies 20% of the world’s oxygen. It’s also responsible for 10% of the world’s biodiversity. What happens if we lose the Amazon? What happens to the whole – the global population if we lose this incredible resource?

CHRISTIAN POIRIER: The Amazon is indeed approaching what specialist scientists have been calling a tipping point for some time. The moment it crosses that tipping point, it will no longer be able to create its own climate, its own rainfall, and sustain itself as the life-giving rainforest that we all need to act as a buffer against runaway climate change. The Amazon creates wet weather patterns around the world. It also creates rainfall for Brazil and for Brazil’s agribusiness sector, so it should be seen as an incredible shot in the foot for the sector to be sponsoring this wholesale destruction of the forest today. But if we see the Amazon lost, we will go with it. The Amazon is essential to our survival. It’s essential to the stability of our climate and we all have a responsibility to see that it’s protected.

DHARNA NOOR: What needs to happen to end this crisis? Who needs to be held accountable, and how do we do that?

CHRISTIAN POIRIER: Well, first and foremost, we need to hold the Bolsonaro regime accountable for its responsibility in driving this crisis today. But Bolsonaro has cut off ties with all forms of resistance to his government or even attempts to dialogue with his government from the social-environmental justice movements in Brazil, including Brazil’s national Indigenous movement. So what we’re seeing is that these movements are taking their movements, their struggles, to a global level, and they’re calling for accountability from international buyers of Brazilian commodities. Brazilian markets are very dependent on export commodities like soy and beef, timber and other commodities that are vulnerable to market pressures and political pressure abroad, especially in Europe, which is the second largest importer of Brazilian commodities. We need to see Europe take leadership at this critical moment to push back and say it will not be buying commodities from Brazil that are linked to illegal deforestation and rights abuses.

We need to see European politicians, the European Parliament – do not ratify the EU-Mercosur trade agreement under these conditions. We need to see that these trade blocks do not allow for open free trade under these conditions. We need to see much better standards put into supply chain management and the protection of forests and human rights foremost over trade. This needs to be conditions that are installed over any sort of trade regime to protect the Amazon because this is one language the Bolsonaro government will understand. International boycotts of conflict commodities, the closing of markets, this is the language they’ll understand. They’re not going to understand the language of dignity, of responsibility, of human rights, of environmental protection. Everything we expect from our leaders – they’re not going to hear this. So we have a responsibility internationally— in the North, in North America, in Europe, in Asia— to make a stand against this destruction because it’s all of our responsibility. It really implicates all of us.

DHARNA NOOR: Okay, well, as you at Amazon Watch continue to mount this disruption, continue to fight this, and document the struggle and the fights of Indigenous populations in Brazil and elsewhere, we’d love to hear from you again. Christian Poirier, the Director of Amazon Watch’s Brazil program. Thank you so much for being on The Real News Network today.

CHRISTIAN POIRIER: Thanks so much for having me.

DHARNA NOOR: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Epstein May Have Gamed the System From Beyond the Grave

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—The will that Jeffrey Epstein signed just two days before his jailhouse suicide puts more than $577 million in assets into a trust fund that could make it more difficult for his dozens of accusers to collect damages.

Estate lawyers and other experts say prying open the trust and dividing up the financier’s riches is not going to be easy and could take years.

“This is the last act of Epstein’s manipulation of the system, even in death,” said attorney Jennifer Freeman, who represents child sex abuse victims.

Epstein, 66, killed himself Aug. 10 in New York while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. The discovery of the will with its newly created 1953 Trust, named after the year of his birth, instantly raised suspicions he did it to hide money from the many women who say he sexually abused them when they were teenagers.

By putting his fortune in a trust, he shrouded from public view the identities of the beneficiaries, whether they be individuals, organizations or other entities. For the women trying to collect from his estate, the first order of business will be persuading a judge to pierce that veil and release the details.

From there, the women will have to follow the course they would have had to pursue even if Epstein had not created a trust: convince the judge that they are entitled to compensation as victims of sex crimes. The judge would have to decide how much they should get and whether to reduce the amounts given to Epstein’s named beneficiaries, who would also be given their say in court.

“Wealthy people typically attempt to hide assets in trusts or other legal schemes. I believe the court and his administrators will want to do right by Epstein’s victims, and if not, we will fight for the justice that is long overdue to them,” attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents several Epstein accusers, said in an email.

She said attorneys for the women will go after Epstein’s estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the will was filed and where he owned two islands.

Bloom said it was “gross negligence” on the part of Epstein’s lawyers and jail personnel to allow him to sign a new will, given that he had apparently attempted suicide a short time before. Bloom called a will “a classic sign of impending suicide for a prisoner.”

The lawyers who handled the will have not returned calls for comment.

The assets listed in the 20-page document include more than $56 million in cash; properties in New York, Florida, Paris, New Mexico and the Virgin Islands; $18.5 million in vehicles, aircraft and boats; and art and collectibles that will have to be appraised.

Typically in any case, trust or not, there is a pecking order of entities that line up to get a share of an estate, said Stephen K. Urice, a law professor at the University of Miami. First in line would be the government — in Epstein’s case, several governments — which will collect any taxes owed on his properties and on his estate itself.

Next would be any other creditor to whom Epstein owed money, such as a bank or mortgage company.

Lawsuits against the estate by victims would come into play somewhere after that.

Epstein’s only known relative is a brother, Mark Epstein, who has not responded to requests for comment. It is unclear whether he was named a beneficiary.

One other possibility is that the U.S. government will seek civil forfeiture of Epstein’s properties or other assets on the grounds that they were used for criminal purposes. Government lawyers would have to produce strong evidence of that at a trial-like proceeding.

If they prevailed, they would be able to seize the properties, sell them and distribute the proceeds to victims.

“The fact that there is a will should not stop them,” said Cheryl Bader, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law.

Federal prosecutors declined to comment on the possibility of a forfeiture action.

____

Associated Press writer Jim Mustian in New York contributed to this story.

Bernie Sanders Unveils ‘Game-Changing’ New Climate Plan

Calling the global climate crisis both the greatest threat facing the United States and the greatest opportunity for transformative change, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday unveiled a comprehensive Green New Deal proposal that would transition the U.S. economy to 100 percent renewable energy and create 20 million well-paying union jobs over a decade.

“This is a pivotal moment in the history of America—and really, in the history of humanity,” Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said in a statement.

“When we are in the White House,” said the Vermont senator, “we will launch the decade of the Green New Deal, a 10-year mobilization to avert climate catastrophe during which climate change, justice, and equity will be factored into virtually every area of policy, from immigration to trade to foreign policy and beyond.”

Sanders’ plan for an aggressive 10-year mobilization to combat the climate emergency comes amid warnings from the international scientific community that global greenhouse gas emissions must be slashed in half by 2030 to avert planetary catastrophe.

Across the world, Sanders noted on his website, there is an overwhelming abundance of evidence testifying to the severity of the climate crisis and the urgent need for bold action.

“The Amazon rainforest is burning, Greenland’s ice shelf is melting, and the Arctic is on fire,” Sanders wrote. “People across the country and the world are already experiencing the deadly consequences of our climate crisis, as extreme weather events like heat waves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and hurricanes upend entire communities, ecosystems, economies, and ways of life, as well as endanger millions of lives.”

To confront the emergency, Sanders’ Green New Deal plan would:

Reach “100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by at least 2050”;
Invest $16.3 trillion in creating 20 million jobs, developing sustainable infrastructure, and supporting vulnerable frontline communities;
Assist international efforts to reduce carbon emissions by providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund and rejoining the Paris climate accord;
Ban fracking, mountaintop removal coal mining, and imports and exports of fossil fuels;
“Prosecute and sue the fossil fuel industry for the damage it has caused”; and
Ensure a fair and just transition for workers currently employed by the fossil fuel industry.

According to the Sanders campaign, the senator’s plan would “pay for itself over 15 years” by forcing the fossil fuel industry to “pay for their pollution,” eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, slashing military spending that is dedicated to “maintaining global oil dependence,” raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and more.

Read the full text of the campaign’s Green New Deal plan here.

“Bernie promises to go further than any other presidential candidate in history to end the fossil fuel industry’s greed, including by making the industry pay for its pollution and prosecuting it for the damage it has caused,” reads the campaign’s website.

“And most importantly,” the website continues, “we must build an unprecedented grassroots movement that is powerful enough to take them on, and win. Young people, advocates, tribes, cities and states all over this country have already begun this important work, and we will continue to follow their lead.”

Jack Shapiro, senior climate campaigner with Greenpeace USA, said, “If fossil fuel executives and lobbyists reading Sanders’ plan are scared, they should be.”

“Sanders has talked the talk on climate change from day one of his campaign. This plan shows he’s ready to walk the walk, as well,” Shapiro said in a statement. “At this point in the race, speeches and half-measures don’t cut it.”

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Action, applauded Sanders’ proposal as a “game-changer.”

“With this aggressive and inspired plan, Senator Sanders has set a clear benchmark for meaningful climate and energy policy in the presidential race and beyond,” said Hauter. “This plan includes the bold action and rapid timelines required to adequately address the magnitude of the climate crisis we face.”

“Most importantly,” Hauter added, “this plan would ban fracking, the toxic, polluting drilling method responsible for almost all oil and gas production in America today. Any serious plan to address climate chaos must start with a ban on fracking and a halt to all new fossil fuel development. Senator Sanders understands this, and he has set the bar for worthwhile climate policy discussion, here and abroad.”