Chris Hedges's Blog, page 18

Court Sides With Trump in ‘Sanctuary Cities’ Grant Fight

NEW YORK — The Trump administration can withhold millions of dollars in law enforcement grants to force states to cooperate with U.S. immigration enforcement, a federal appeals court in New York ruled Wednesday in a decision that conflicted with three other federal appeals courts.

The ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan overturned a lower court’s decision ordering the administration to release funding to New York City and seven states — New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, Virginia and Rhode Island.

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The states and city sued the U.S. government after the Justice Department announced in 2017 that it would withhold grant money from cities and states until they gave federal immigration authorities access to jails and provide advance notice when someone in the country illegally is about to be released.

Before the change, cities and states seeking grant money were required only to show they were not preventing local law enforcement from communicating with federal authorities about the immigration status of people who were detained.

At the time, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said: “So-called ‘sanctuary’ policies make all of us less safe because they intentionally undermine our laws and protect illegal aliens who have committed crimes.”

In 2018, the Justice Department imposed additional conditions on the grant money, though challenges to those have not yet reached the appeals court in New York.

The 2nd Circuit said the plain language of relevant laws make clear that the U.S. attorney general can impose conditions on states and municipalities receiving money.

And it noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly observed that the federal government maintains broad power over states when it comes to immigration policies.

In the past two years, federal appeals courts in Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco have ruled against the federal government by upholding lower-court injunctions placed on the enforcement of some or all of the challenged conditions.

“While mindful of the respect owed to our sister circuits, we cannot agree that the federal government must be enjoined from imposing the challenged conditions on the federal grants here at issue,” the 2nd Circuit three-judge panel said in a decision written by Judge Reena Raggi.

“These conditions help the federal government enforce national immigration laws and policies supported by successive Democratic and Republican administrations. But more to the authorization point, they ensure that applicants satisfy particular statutory grant requirements imposed by Congress and subject to Attorney General oversight,” the appeals court said.

The Justice Department praised the decision, issuing a statement calling it a “major victory for Americans” and saying it recognizes that the attorney general has authority to ensure that grant recipients are not thwarting federal law enforcement priorities.

The department added that the ruling’s effect will be limited because other courts have ruled the other way, giving the plaintiffs in the New York case the opportunity to point to those as reasons to ignore the new conditions.

Cody Wofsy, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, called the decision a “real outlier,” saying he believed the 2nd Circuit was the nation’s first court to side with the Trump administration on the issue.

“Over and over, courts have said the Department of Justice doesn’t have authority under governing statutes to impose these conditions,” he said. “These conditions are part of the administration’s attempts to bully, cajole and coerce state and local governments into participating in federal immigration enforcement activities.”

Under the Constitution’s federalism principles and the 10th Amendment, Wofsy said, states and municipalities “are entitled to decline to become part of the administration’s deportation force.”

The appeals rulings pertain to the issuance of the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program.

Created in 2006, it is the vehicle through which Congress annually dispenses over $250 million in federal funding for state and local criminal justice efforts.

The Byrne Program was named for New York City Police Officer Edward Byrne, who at age 22 was shot to death while guarding the home of a Guyanese immigrant cooperating with authorities investigating drug trafficking.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.

Steve Bannon May Have Violated Campaign Finance Law

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Former Donald Trump campaign CEO and chief strategist Steve Bannon used a private jet apparently owned by a wealthy Chinese businessman to fly to events to promote Republican congressional candidates in 2018.

The previously unreported flights could run afoul of a campaign finance law that bars foreign money from U.S. elections, according to campaign finance experts, though it depends on several factors that are not known. One of the unknowns is whether Bannon paid Guo Wengui — the Chinese businessman, who is a vocal critic of the Chinese regime, and with whom he has other reported financial ties — for the use of the jet.

Bannon flew on the jet, a Bombardier Global Express that can seat up to 13 people, to 2018 events supporting Republican candidates in New Mexico and Arizona. He also flew on it to Mexico City and New York, and possibly to other cities. The flights were confirmed by footage taken for “The Brink,” a 2019 documentary about Bannon, and by videos of Guo on the plane, interviews and FAA flight records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

“The foreign-national prohibition is the broadest prohibition in the Federal Election Campaign Act,” said Brett Kappel, a government affairs partner at the Akerman law firm, speaking generally. “It prohibits foreign nationals from making any contribution or donation in connection with any election in the United States. It also precludes foreign nationals from making in-kind contributions, such as paying for campaign-related travel.”

The same law also prohibits receiving such a donation. Bannon’s one-way trip from New York to New Mexico alone would be worth around $35,000, according to public jet charter rates.

Lawyers for Bannon and Guo (who is also known as Miles Kwok) did not dispute that Bannon used the Chinese businessman’s plane for trips. But Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing Bannon’s nonprofit, Citizens of the American Republic, wrote in an email, “The meetings and rallies hosted by COAR in 2018 were to promote the film, Trump\@War, and to encourage Trump supporters to vote in 2018. These were not candidate or campaign rallies.” Guo’s attorney said in a statement that “Mr. Guo has not participated in or supported, directly or indirectly, any political activity or party in the United States or elsewhere. To the contrary, Mr. Guo has consistently emphasized that he has no desire to participate in politics anywhere.”

Nothing about the trips appears to have been disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, either by Bannon or the congressional candidates he traveled to support.

Guo told Vice in 2017 that he owns two private jets. Han Lianchao, a Guo associate, told ProPublica, “I know he allowed Steve to use his private jet from time to time.” Han said he did not know the specifics of their arrangement. A Bannon aide also told Alison Klayman, the filmmaker who made “The Brink” and flew on the jet, that it belonged to Guo, Klayman told ProPublica.

In one scene in the film, Bannon is shown on the plane praising Guo’s analysis of Chinese politics while on a flight from New York to Dallas in October 2018.

Official records don’t identify the ultimate owner of the jet, which bears the tail number T7-GQM. The jet is registered in the tiny Republic of San Marino to Whitecroft Shore Limited. That, in turn, is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, an offshore dominion known for secrecy. There are multiple videos online of Guo that appear to be taken on the plane that match independent photos of the interior and exterior of the jet with the same tail number. Other articles link the jet to Guo.

Bannon left the Trump White House in the summer of 2017 and has spent the past couple of years jetting around the country and the globe to promote right-wing causes, candidates and his own brand. It is a continuing mystery who is supporting his efforts. His use of the Guo plane helps fill out the picture.

The unlikely relationship between Bannon and Guo is one of the defining features of Bannon’s post-White House career. It continues through the present, with Bannon and Guo frequently appearing together on Bannon’s podcast and Guo’s news site commenting on Trump, China and the coronavirus, among other topics.

Guo, who has described himself as a successful real estate developer and investor, left China for the U.S. in 2015 and is reportedly seeking asylum. He is a critic of Chinese leaders, churning out a stream of online videos commenting on the news of the day, from the coronavirus to his “crusade against communism.” The Chinese government has, in turn, sought Guo’s arrest on corruption allegations, which he has denied. Guo frequently appears in videos with Bannon, who has predicted a war between the U.S. and China and says he is currently producing a “takedown” film about Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The New York Times recently reported that Bannon’s relationship with Guo began with a $150,000 loan to Bannon shortly after his 2017 departure from the Trump administration. Axios reported that a company linked to Guo had contracted with Bannon for at least $1 million for “strategic consulting services,” beginning in August 2018. (A Guo spokesman told Axios that the contract was for media investment and other consulting, and that Guo “had no involvement in [Bannon] being retained.”)

In fall 2018, Bannon and his dark money organization, Citizens of the American Republic, were pushing to keep Republican control of Congress during the midterm elections. A Bannon aide told ABC at the time that the group had an election war room focused on “explaining that a vote for any House Republican is a vote to stop the Democrats.”

Bannon made the trips to promote GOP candidates on the Bombardier jet in October 2018, under the aegis of Citizens of the American Republic. (The organization raised a total of $4.5 million in 2018 from a handful of donors, according to its filing with the IRS. But as a “social welfare” nonprofit organized under section 501(c)4 of the Internal Revenue Code, it is not required to reveal its donors.)

One of the trips was to Arizona in support of congressional candidate Wendy Rogers. Bannon told the Arizona Daily Star at the time: “If she can beat [Rep. Tom] O’Halleran, we’ll hold the House. We’ll hold the House by one or two seats. And that’s why it’s so important, and that’s why I wanted to come down here.”

Rogers, who ultimately lost the race, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The trip to Roswell, New Mexico, featured U.S. Senate candidate Mick Rich and a screening of Bannon’s film “Trump\@War.” According to video from the Roswell event viewed by ProPublica, Bannon and Rich strategized about the campaign before Bannon’s public remarks. “Tell me about this race,” Bannon said in the video. “How are we going to win this thing? I’ll come back here as many times as — ” Rich interjected: “Getting you out here is number one.” Rich also asked if Bannon could get President Trump to tweet about the race, and Bannon said he would try.

During the public event, Rich introduced Bannon, who in turn praised the Senate candidate as a “real populist.” Bannon urged the audience members to vote for pro-Trump candidates.

Rich lost the 2018 race and is running again this year. A spokesman told ProPublica in a statement that “Mick and his campaign had no knowledge of Bannon’s transportation to or from the event. Mick and his campaign had no coordination of any kind with Steve Bannon or any Steve Bannon group before, during, or after this event.”

Three years into President Donald Trump’s term, the roster of his cabinet members and top advisers continues to churn at an unprecedented rate.

Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert at Public Citizen, said that the New Mexico event “could well implicate Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui for violating the law that prohibits foreign nationals from paying for campaign activities,” if the Federal Election Commission deemed the event to be an “independent expenditure” by Bannon’s group, or a Rich campaign event.

The FEC doesn’t currently have a quorum and it, along with the IRS, have historically done little to scrutinize political nonprofits like Bannon’s.

Apart from the use of the jet, there’s also the question of whether the event would run afoul of the rules barring an outside group like Bannon’s from coordinating with the candidate, Rich.

Adav Noti of the Campaign Legal Center said political nonprofits are operating in a grey area because of the FEC’s failure to outline rules for what sort of contact they are permitted to have with a candidate. “To any rational person that looks at this, of course it’s a campaign event. But it might be allowed, which is the scandal.”

In a March 2018 filing in an unrelated lawsuit, an attorney for Guo noted the prohibition on Guo making expenditures in connection with U.S. elections. He wrote that “Because Plaintiff Guo is a foreign national, he is prohibited, by 52 U.S.C. 30121, from making any contributions, monetary donations or expenditures in connection with any federal, state or local election in the United States.”

Death Toll Rises to 24 From Delhi Riots During Trump Trip

NEW DELHI — At least 24 people were killed and 189 injured in three days of clashes in New Delhi that coincided with U.S. President Donald Trump’s first state visit to India, with the death toll expected to rise as hospitals continue to take in the wounded, authorities said Wednesday.

Shops, Muslim shrines and public vehicles were left smoldering from violence between Hindu mobs and Muslims protesting a new citizenship law that fast-tracks naturalization for foreign-born religious minorities of all major faiths in South Asia except Islam.

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Twenty-four deaths were reported at two hospitals in New Delhi, officials said.

The clashes were the worst communal riots in the Indian capital in decades. The law’s passage in December earlier spurred massive protests across India that left 23 dead, many of them killed by police.

The dead in this week’s violence included a policeman and an intelligence bureau officer, and the government has banned public assembly in the affected areas.

Police spokesman M.S. Randhawa said 106 people were arrested for alleged involvement in the rioting.

Officials reported no new violence Wednesday as large police reinforcements patrolled the areas, where an uneasy calm prevailed.

National Security Adviser Ajit Doval toured the northeastern neighborhoods of Delhi where the rioting occurred, seeking to assure fear-stricken residents including a female student who complained that police had not protected them from mobs who vandalized the area and set shops and vehicles on fire.

While clashes wracked parts of the capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a lavish reception for Trump, including a rally in his home state of Gujarat attended by more than 100,000 people and the signing of an agreement to purchase more than $3 billion of American military hardware.

On Wednesday, Modi broke his silence on the violence, tweeting that “peace and harmony are central to (India’s) ethos. I appeal to my sisters and brothers of Delhi to maintain peace and brotherhood at all times.”

New Delhi’s top elected official, Chief Minister Arvind Kerjiwal, called for Modi’s home minister, Amit Shah, to send the army to ensure peace.

Police characterized the situation as tense but under control. Schools remained closed.

Sonia Gandhi, a leader of the Congress party, India’s main opposition group, called for Shah to resign. She accused Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party of creating an environment of hatred and its leaders of inciting violence with provocative speeches that sought to paint Muslim protesters against the citizenship law as anti-nationalists funded by Pakistan.

New Delhi’s High Court ordered the police to review videos of hate speeches allegedly made by three leaders of Modi’s party and decide whether to prosecute them, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

The clashes escalated Tuesday, according to Rouf Khan, a resident of Mustafabad, an area in the capital’s northeast.

Khan said mobs with iron rods, bricks and bamboo sticks attacked the homes of Muslims while chanting “Jai Shri Ram,” or “Victory to Lord Ram,” the popular Hindu god of the religious epic “Ramayana.”

As Air Force One flew Trump and his delegation out of New Delhi late Tuesday, Muslim families huddled in a mosque in the city’s northeast, praying that Hindu mobs wouldn’t burn it down.

“After forcing their way inside the homes, they went on a rampage and started beating people and breaking household items,” Khan said of the mobs, adding that he and his family had to run and take shelter inside a mosque that he said was guarded by thousands of Muslim men.

“I don’t know if our house was burned or not, but when we were running away we heard them asking people to pour kerosene and burn everything down,” Khan said.

Some of the dead had bullet wounds, according to Dr. Sunil Kumar, medical director of the Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital.

Others came to the hospital with gunshot and stab wounds and head injuries.

Among them was Mohammad Sameer, 17, who was being treated for a gunshot wound to his chest Wednesday at Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital.

Speaking to The Associated Press after having an operation, Sameer said he was standing on his family’s apartment terrace watching Hindu mobs enter Mustafabad when he was shot in the chest.

“When Sameer was shot, I took him on my shoulders and ran downstairs,” said the boy’s father, Mohammad Akram. “But when the mob saw us, they beat me and my injured son. He was bleeding very badly. While they were beating with sticks, they kept on chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ slogans and threatened to barge inside our homes.”

Akram said he managed to get his son into a vehicle, but they were stopped several times by Hindus demanding they pull their pants down to show whether they were circumcised before they managed to escape from the area and reach the emergency room. Muslims are generally circumcised, while Hindus are not.

In Kardampura, a Muslim-majority area where a youth was shot and killed on Monday, hundreds of police personnel in riot gear patrolled the area and asked people to stay indoors, while residents said they were living in fear.

“We are scared and don’t know where to go,” said one resident, Dr. Jeevan Ali Khan. “If the government wanted, they could have stopped these riots.”

Close by, black smoke still rose on Wednesday afternoon from a market that sold tires and second-hand car parts in Gokalpuri as fireman tried to douse the smoldering fire.

The violence drew sharp reactions from U.S. lawmakers, with Rep. Rashida Talib, a Democrat from Michigan, tweeting, “This week, Trump visited India but the real story should be the communal violence targeting Muslims in Delhi right now.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan condemned the killing of Muslims, saying: “Now 200 million Muslims in India are being targeted. The world community must act now.”

Trump told reporters Tuesday that he had heard about the violence but had not discussed it with Modi. Instead, Trump gloated about his reception in India.

India has been rocked by violence since Parliament approved the citizenship law in December. Opponents have said the country is moving toward a religious citizenship test, but Trump declined to comment on it.

“I don’t want to discuss that. I want to leave that to India and hopefully they’re going to make the right decision for the people,” he said.

It was the worst religiously motivated violence in New Delhi since 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards, triggering a wave of riots that resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 Sikhs in the capital and more than 8,000 nationwide.

In 1992, tens of thousands of Hindu extremists razed a 16th-century mosque in northern India, claiming that it stood on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Nearly 2,000 people were killed across the country in the riots that followed.

The religious polarization that followed saw the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party emerge as the single largest party in India’s Parliament. The Congress party and regional parties courted Muslim votes by portraying themselves as defenders of minority rights.

In 2002, the western Indian state of Gujarat erupted in violence when a train filled with Hindu pilgrims was attacked by a Muslim mob in a small town. A fire erupted — it remains unclear whether it was arson — and 60 Hindus burned to death. In retaliation, more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the state.

Modi was Gujarat’s chief minister at the time. He was accused of tacit support for the rampage against Muslims, but a court ultimately cleared him of wrongdoing. Still, for several years the U.S. included him on a travel ban. Hosting Trump in Gujarat was important symbolically for Modi.

Violent large-scale clashes between Hindus and Muslims last took place in New Delhi in 2014, months after Modi’s party came to power, in a largely poor neighborhood close to where this week’s rioting occurred.

A Muslim-owned shop was set on fire, Hindus pelted a mosque with stones, and dozens of angry Muslim men attacked Hindu homes. About three dozen people were injured.

___

Associated Press journalists Ashok Sharma and Shonal Ganguly in New Delhi, and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.

5 Ways William Barr Is Turning America Into a Dictatorship

William Barr was installed as Attorney General specifically to turn the Department of Justice into an arm of the Trump Coverup. And we’ve seen him do exactly that. Barr has corrupted and politicized the Department of Justice, working hand in hand with Donald Trump to bend federal law enforcement to the president’s will. Here are some of the ways Barr is helping Trump turn our democracy into a dictatorship:

1. He intervened in the sentencing of Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime confidant and advisor, who faced a prison sentence for obstructing Congress and witness tampering in connection with the Russia investigation. The day prosecutors announced they were seeking seven to nine years for Stone’s sentencing, Trump called the sentence “a horrible aberration,” and said that the prosecutors “ought to be ashamed of themselves” and were “an insult to our country.”  A mere 24 hours later, after Trump’s public tantrum, the Department of Justice announced it would change its sentencing recommendation for Stone [CUT TO NEWS CLIP]. Showing more backbone than Barr, four career prosecutors then withdrew from the case, and one resigned.

The incident caused such an uproar that Barr was forced to declare that he wouldn’t be “bullied” and that Trump’s tweets “make it impossible to do my job.” But anyone who has watched Barr repeatedly roll over for Trump saw this as a minimal face-saving gesture. For example:

2. Barr has green-lit an “intake process” for any information that Trump stooge Rudy Giuliani may dig up about Ukraine and the elections. That’s right. Barr has given Trump’s personal lawyer, who is under a Justice Department investigation that has led to charges against two of his associates, a direct line to the Justice Department to funnel dirt about Trump’s political rivals.

3. Barr misled the public about the contents of the Mueller report. Before the report was released, Barr sent a memo to Congress “summarizing” its findings. In his memo, Barr claimed there was insufficient evidence for an obstruction of justice case and supported Trump’s claims of “total exoneration”. Robert Mueller was so infuriated by Barr’s misrepresentation of his findings that he wrote a letter complaining that Barr’s summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s investigation. Barr nonetheless held a press conference reiterating his own claims, bolstering Trump’s narrative of “total exoneration,” and shifting the media coverage of the report.

4. Barr refused to accept the findings of the Inspector General report investigating the origins of the Russia probe. In December, Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report, finding that while the Russia probe was flawed in some aspects, there was no evidence of political bias and it was justified. This, of course, contradicts Trump’s narrative that the Russia probe was launched by deep-state partisan hacks determined to take him down. The day the report was released, Barr called the Russia investigation a “travesty” and claimed that there were “gross abuses …and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI” and that he thought “there was bad faith” in the investigation. It’s unprecedented for the Attorney General to so vehemently disagree with the findings of an impartial Inspector General.

5. Barr buried the whistleblower complaint that kick-started the impeachment inquiry and tried to keep it from reaching Congress. His Justice Department investigated the contents of the complaint within a narrow scope and wrapped up its investigation within a mere three weeks, finding no evidence of wrongdoing. Yet again, Barr was running interference to shield Trump from accountability.

Trump says he has the “legal right” to meddle in cases handled by the Justice Department.

That’s wrong. If a president can punish enemies and reward friends through the administration of justice, there can be no justice. Justice requires impartial and equal treatment under the law. Partiality or inequality in deciding whom to prosecute and how to punish is tyranny. Plain and simple.

A half-century ago I witnessed the near dissolution of justice under President Nixon. I served in the Justice Department when a bipartisan Congress resolved that what had occurred would never happen again. But what occurred under Nixon is happening again. Like Nixon, Trump has usurped the independence of the Department of Justice for his own ends.

But unlike Nixon, Trump won’t resign. He has too many enablers – not just a shameful Attorney General but also shameless congressional Republicans – who place a lower priority on justice than on satisfying the most vindictive and paranoid occupant of the White House in modern American history.

One ABC News interview, conducted only to give the appearance of impartiality, doesn’t make up for the myriad ways Attorney General Bill Barr has corrupted the Justice Department and willfully abetted Trump’s lawlessness. For the sake of our democracy, he must resign immediately.

Most Americans Plan to Participate in Census, Poll Finds

ORLANDO, Fla. — Most Americans say they are likely to participate in the 2020 census, but some doubt that the U.S. Census Bureau will keep their personal information confidential, a new poll shows.

The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds 7 in 10 Americans say it’s extremely or very likely they will participate in the census this year by filling out a questionnaire. Another 2 in 10 say it’s somewhat likely.

That’s higher than what the Census Bureau predicts — a self-response rate of 6 in 10 people. But the bureau’s past research shows that people say they are going to participate in the census at a higher rate than they actually do.

“People respond to a survey question as they think they are expected to behave,” Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director in the Clinton administration, said in an email.

The poll shows that older, white and highly educated adults express greater certainty that they will participate than younger adults, black and Hispanic Americans and those without college degrees.

It also shows that the more partisan people are, the more likely they are to participate. At least 7 in 10 Democrats and Republicans are very likely to answer, compared with about half of Americans who don’t identify with or lean toward either party.

“It might be that they understand the importance of the census in distributing political representation and want to make sure they get their fair share,” John Thompson, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau in the Obama administration, said in an email.

The 2020 census will help determine how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed. It will also determine how many congressional seats each state gets, as well as the makeup of legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.

People can start answering the questions in mid-March, either online, by telephone or by mailing in a paper form.

“I think it’s important. It’s a civic duty,” said Quintin Sharpe, a 21-year-old college student, who’s studying business at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Compared with the share saying they’ll participate, 57%, say it’s highly important to them to be counted in the census. About a quarter say it’s moderately important.

The poll shows about a third of Americans are very or extremely confident that the U.S. Census Bureau will keep their personal information confidential, while roughly the same share say they are moderately confident. About another third have little to no confidence in the agency to keep private information private, even though the bureau is legally required to do so.

About a quarter of Americans report a great deal of confidence in the people running the U.S. Census Bureau, and roughly two-thirds say they have some confidence.

Joe Domas, a 57-year-old carpenter in Paris, Tennessee, said he plans to fill out the census form but won’t answer every question. The questionnaire asks how many people live in a household; whether their home is owned or rented; the age, race and sex of every person living in the home; and how they are related.

“I don’t divulge a lot of personal information. I just give them a head count, pretty much,” Domas said. “I’m not into government intrusion, and the way the internet is, people leak information.”

A majority say they have heard or read about the count of every person living in the U.S., the largest peacetime operation the federal government undertakes, but just 2 in 10 say they know “a lot.” About a third say they have heard or read little or nothing at all.

That will likely change after the Census Bureau expanded its advertising campaign last week. The goal of the $500 million education and outreach effort is to reach 99% of the 140 million U.S. households with messages about the importance of participating in the 2020 census.

Many of those who say they will take the survey this year think they will complete it online. Close to half say that’s their likely format, with another 2 in 10 saying they expect to fill out and mail in a paper questionnaire. Just 4% say they prefer phone, but 30% say they don’t know yet how they will respond. This is the first decennial census in which most participants are being encouraged to fill out the form online.

Gil Parks, a 60-year-old retired financial planner from Stephenville, Texas, said he still hasn’t decided if he will answer questions online or use the paper form. Parks and his wife often drive to a ranch they own an hour south of where they live to keep tabs on building projects and baby calves.

“If we have a paper form, my wife could fill it out while we are driving down there and driving back,” Parks said.

Majorities across racial and ethnic groups say they are highly likely to participate, but about half of white Americans are “extremely” likely, compared with about 3 in 10 black and Hispanic Americans.

About 8 in 10 college-educated Americans, but just about two-thirds of those without a degree, say they are highly likely to participate.

Similarly, roughly 8 in 10 adults older than 45 say they are very likely to complete a census questionnaire, compared with just over half of younger adults.

There’s also a significant age gap in the preferred form of answering the questions. Just about a quarter of adults ages 60 and older who will participate say they will take the survey online, compared with more than half of those who are younger. Older adults are also somewhat more likely than younger adults to express high confidence in the Census Bureau to keep their information private, 37% among those 45 and older and 25% among younger adults.

“Getting accurate data is important,” said Parks, who also is chair of the local Republican Party. “We need to know who is here, and what not.”

___

The AP-NORC poll of 1,074 adults was conducted Feb. 13-16 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.

As World Scrambles, Experts Warn Virus Is Certain to Spread in U.S.

NEW YORK — U.S. health officials warned Tuesday that the burgeoning coronavirus is certain to spread more widely in the country at some point, even as their counterparts in Europe and Asia scrambled to contain new outbreaks of the illness.

“It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen — and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a call with reporters.

The CDC’s call for Americans to be prepared added new urgency to response efforts that, until this week, focused on a disease largely confined to China, where it apparently originated, and neighboring countries.

In other developments Tuesday:

— New clusters of the illness popped up far from China, causing increased concerns for officials in some of the wealthiest nations in Europe and Asia, as well as in countries with far fewer resources. But many remained uncertain about how best to contain it.

The new outbreaks were reported in places as far-flung as Italy and Iran, France and Algeria, and Spain’s Canary Islands. The tiny Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain said it had 17 cases, including a school bus driver who had transported students as recently as Sunday.

In Iran, the head of the country’s virus task force, who just a day earlier had urged the public not to overreact about the spread of the disease, tested positive himself. The official, Iraj Harirchi, posted a new video online, promising authorities would bring the virus under control within weeks.

But a ministry spokesman, Kianoush Jahanpour, said it could take at least until the Persian New Year’s holiday on March 20, or as long as late April, to contain the disease. “We don’t expect a miracle in the short term,” he said.

— Officials in South Korea said they were racing to contain an outbreak that has grown to nearly 1,000 cases.

“It’s a matter of speed and time: We must create a clear turning point within this week,” President Moon Jae-in said. In the largest cluster, in the city of Daegu and nearby towns, many shops remained closed Tuesday and activity in some neighborhoods came to a near standstill.

On a U.S. military base in Daegu, the center of infections in South Korea, officials said a 61-year-old widow of a U.S. service member had also been infected. It was the first known case among people related to the thousands of U.S. troops stationed in the country.

— The virus’ toll continued to mount, even as Chinese officials reported a slowing in the number of new cases. As of Tuesday, the spread of the illness had sickened some 80,000 people worldwide and caused about 2,700 deaths.

The vast majority of those infections remain in China, where 518 new cases were reported Tuesday and another 71 deaths, 68 of them in the central city of Wuhan, where the epidemic was first detected in December. The updates bring mainland China’s totals to 77,780 cases and 2,666 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

WHO said the fatality rate was between 2% and 4% in Wuhan and 0.7% elsewhere in China.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, the WHO envoy who led a team just back from China, told reporters Tuesday the reason for the large discrepancy was partly because the disease hit Wuhan early and fast, when “people didn’t know what we were dealing with, were learning how to treat this.”

At the beginning of the outbreak, “people were finding severe disease, that’s why the alarm bell went off,” Aylward said. But now with more aggressive testing, mild cases are being diagnosed and isolated.

— In Italy’s north, where more than 200 people were sickened, a dozen towns were sealed off and police wearing face masks patrolled. Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza huddled in Rome with counterparts from bordering countries — France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia — as well as with those from Germany and Croatia, two countries whose citizens are among frequent visitors to Italy. Among the shared points of view emerging from the meeting, Speranza told reporters, was this one: “Closing borders is inappropriate” as a response. Italian officials reported 322 cases of the virus, including 11 deaths.

Croatia and Austria reported their first cases of the virus. And an Italian doctor staying at a hotel in the Canary Islands tested positive for the virus, prompting the quarantine of hundreds of guests.

Croatia, Hungary and Ireland advised against traveling to Italy’s affected area, one of a number of government moves seeking to limit further exposure.

— The virus’ spread fueled apprehension in world financial markets. In the U.S., stock indexes piled on a second consecutive day of losses, falling more than 3 percent. Investor fears that the outbreak will slow the world economy drove increased demand for low-risk U.S. government bonds.

“It’s the combination of South Korea, Japan, Italy and even Iran” reporting virus cases, said Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment strategist at BMO Wealth Management. “That really woke up the market, that these four places in different places around the globe can go from low concern to high concern in a matter of days and that we could potentially wake up a week from now and it could be five to 10 additional places.”

European markets also fell. The Euro Stoxx index lost 2.1%. Markets in Asia were mixed.

— Uncertainty remained over how best to stem the spread of the illness. Italy had taken Europe’s most stringent preventative measures against COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and yet became home to the biggest outbreak outside Asia. Experts in Japan, with one of the world’s most sophisticated health systems, acknowledged the country’s handling of the virus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship was flawed and could have allowed the problem to magnify.

Japanese officials said they would urge a change to the country’s deeply ingrained work culture in a bid to stem the illness. The government urged employers to allow workers to telecommute and have more flexible hours, simple moves Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed hope could help control the spread.

___

Kim reported from Seoul, South Korea. Associated Press writers Matt Sedensky in Bangkok, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Lauran Neergaard in Washington, Mike Stobbe and Stan Choe in New York, and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

Disney CEO Bob Iger Steps Down in Surprise Announcement

NEW YORK — Disney CEO Bob Iger, who steered the company’s absorption of Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel and Fox’s entertainment businesses and the launch of a Netflix challenger, is stepping down immediately, the company said in a surprise announcement Tuesday.

The Walt Disney Co. named as his replacement Bob Chapek, most recently chairman of Disney’s parks, experiences and products business.

“Did not see this coming — Wowza,” tweeted LightShed media analyst Rich Greenfield.

Iger will remain executive chairman through the end of his contract on Dec. 31, 2021. Besides leading the board, Iger said he will spend more time on Disney’s creative endeavors, including the ESPN sports network, the newly acquired Fox studios and the Hulu and Disney Plus streaming services. He said he could not do that while running Disney on a day-to-day basis.

“It was not accelerated for any particular reason other than I felt the need was now to make this change,” Iger said on a conference call with reporters and analysts.

Iger’s most recent coup was orchestrating a $71 billion acquisition of Fox’s entertainment assets in March and launching the Disney Plus streaming service in November. That service gained nearly 29 million paid subscribers in less than three months. In a statement, Iger said it was the “optimal time” for a transition.

Pivotal Research Group analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak said Iger had implied he would stay until his contract ended in 2021.

“On the other hand, they just successfully closed the Fox deal and had an unquestionably successful launch of Disney Plus so maybe he felt earlier was better to hand off the reins,” he said.

Colin Gillis, director of research at Chatham Road Partners, said the choice of Chapek seems solid because his parks division has had success.

Chapek said that while he has not led television networks or streaming services, his background in consumer-oriented businesses should help. Chapek and Iger both stressed that Disney would continue to follow the direction it had already been taking.

Disney is facing challenges to its traditional media business as cord-cutting picks up. Its own streaming services require it to forgo money in licensing revenue, although the company is betting that money from subscriptions will eventually make up for that.

In the short term, Disney parks in Hong Kong and Shanghai, China, remain closed because of the coronavirus outbreak. In a CNBC interview, Chapek said the virus outbreak may be a “bump in the road,” but he said the company could weather it. “Affinity for the brand will way outlast any short-term blip we have from the coronavirus,” Chapek said.

Iger told CNBC he had no plans to stay with Disney beyond next year.

Iger’s appointment as CEO in 2005 had been accompanied by controversy and protest from dissident shareholders Roy E. Disney and Stanley Gold. But he has come to be seen as a golden-boy top executive, and even someone who could run for president.

Iger told Vogue in 2018 that he had started seriously exploring a run for president because he is “horrified at the state of politics in America today,” but the Fox deal stopped his plans. Oprah Winfrey told Vogue that she “really, really pushed him to run.”

Iger, a former weatherman, joined ABC in 1974, 22 years before Disney bought the network.

At ABC, Iger developed such successful programs as “Home Improvement,” “The Drew Carey Show,” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and was instrumental in launching the quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” He was also criticized for canceling well-regarded but expensive shows such as “Twin Peaks” and “thirtysomething.”

Before the Fox deal, Iger steered Disney through the successful acquisitions of Lucasfilms, Marvel, Pixar and other brands that became big moneymakers for Disney.

Since Iger became CEO, Disney’s stock price has risen fivefold. Its stock fell more than 2% in extended trading following the announcement.

Iger, 69, was the second-highest paid CEO in 2018, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive data firm. He earned $65.6 million. The top earner was Discovery’s David Zaslav who earned $129.5 million.

Susan Arnold, the independent lead director of the Disney board said succession planning had been ongoing for several years.

Chapek, 60, is only the seventh CEO in Disney history. Chapek was head of the parks, experiences and products division since it was created in 2018. He was previously head of parks and resorts and before that president of consumer products.

Family Separation Is Torture

The Trump administration’s practice of separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border is torture, according to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a nonprofit organization that investigates human rights abuses internationally.

For “You Will Never See Your Child Again: The Persistent Psychological Effects of Family Separation,” psychiatrists from the organization evaluated 26 migrant children and adults who had been separated for an average of 60 to 69 days. Most of the 17 adults and nine children in the study met the criteria for at least one mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. All of the conditions, the report explains, are “consistent with, and likely linked to, the trauma of family separation.”

Physicians for Human Rights also points out that many of the report’s subjects were fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries, and that what happened when the families arrived at the U.S. border was a continuation of the horror they traveled so far to escape. Per the report:

Parents reported that immigration authorities forcibly removed children from their parents’ arms, removed parents while their children slept, or simply “disappeared” the children while their parents were in courtrooms or receiving medical care. Almost all reported that immigration authorities failed to provide any explanation as to why they were being separated, where their family members were being sent, and if or how they would be reunited. In addition, the asylum narratives documented instances of four parents who were taunted and mocked by immigration authorities when asking for the whereabouts of their children.

The report also emphasizes the Trump administration’s actions were targeted and intentional. “U.S. officials intentionally carried out actions causing severe pain and suffering, in order to punish, coerce and intimidate Central American asylum seekers to give up their asylum claims.”

Even the doctors conducting the evaluations were stunned. “As a clinician, nobody was prepared for this to happen on our soil,” Dr. Ranit Mishori, senior medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights and a co-author of the report, told The Guardian. “It is beyond shocking that this could happen in the United States, by Americans, at the instruction and direct intention of U.S. government officials.”

These physicians are joining a growing chorus of groups, including human rights organizations and legal experts, calling family separation torture.

“This is a spectacularly cruel policy, where frightened children are being ripped from their parent’s arms and taken to overflowing detention centers, which are effectively cages,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s Americas director in June of 2018. “This is nothing short of torture.”

Lawyers and other researchers from the Texas Civil Rights Project screened almost 10,000 migrants and asylum seekers for their 2019 report, “The Real National Emergency: Zero Tolerance & the Continuing Horrors of Family Separation at the Border.” Of those thousands, the staff conducted longer interviews with 272 adults. All of them were separated from a child family member;  38 of those interviewed were parents or legal guardians, with a total of 46 separated children. The youngest child was 8.5 months old. “This policy tortured thousands of families,” the authors concluded.

The effects of these policies linger for years. As Mishori explained, “Something like that does not just resolve once you’re reunified with your parents. It’s something you carry with you possibly forever.”

Read the full report here.

Twilight of the Boomers

I was once drinking by myself and watching a hockey game on TV in a little dive bar near my home in Pittsburgh when an older guy in a trucker cap, who had began haranguing the poor bartender with a series of complaints about the nebulous yet omnipresent political powers that be, turned his squint on me and asked, inexplicably and a little aggressively, if I had ever “carried a .50 caliber machine gun.”

I said that no, in fact, I hadn’t. I asked the same of him, and he said, yes, in fact, he had. I asked if he’d been in the service. Yes, he said, I was. I made a guess, based on his apparent age. “Vietnam?” I asked.

He looked me right in the eye for a moment and said, “No, man. The Cold War.” I tried very hard not to let my face move. “Yeah,” he said, turning back to his beer, talking to it as much as me now, “yeah, that Cuban Missile Crisis really fucked me up.”

I thought of this story — to be fair, I often think of this story, but I thought of it in particular — a couple of weeks ago when, after the Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews launched into a bizarre monologue. “I have my own views of the word socialist,” a visibly upset Matthews shouted at a visibly uncomfortable panel of news media personalities:

. . . and I’ll be glad to share them with you in private and they go back to the early 1950s.

I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War. I have an attitude toward [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War, there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering.

The video became a viral hit, and most people seemed inclined to treat it as sad comedy — an “OK Boomer” moment for an aging, former insider unable to process the current moment in politics except through sepia tones of a long-dead and increasingly irrelevant conflict. Castro? The Reds? Really?

Just a week later, though, Matthews perseverated even more spectacularly, reacting to Bernie Sanders’ decisive victory in the Nevada caucuses by comparing it to the Nazis’ triumph over France in World War II. The Vermont senator has family who was exterminated in the Holocaust, and the comment outraged even some of his most committed opponents. (Matthews has since issued a public apology.)

While it’s easy to dismiss an out-of-touch television personality trying with increasing desperation to fill dead air — to come up with something, anything, to say about the horse race — these episodes nonetheless betray the desperation of a party establishment and its media allies to stop a Sanders campaign that is gaining momentum — to use their word — by the day.

“In Cold War travels, Bernie Sanders found much to admire behind enemy lines. Now that’s a problem for his campaign,” declared the Washington Post, although the article provides no evidence that it is, in fact, “a problem for his campaign” in any meaningful, empirical sense. Videos of and anecdotes about Sanders’ visit to the Soviet Union have been circulating since he ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, to little effect.

These stories, and this ineffectual effort to red-bait Sanders and smear his supporters as wannabe Stalinists or violent revolutionaries, are absurd on their face. Sanders isn’t even especially far left: it is only the deranged conservatism of professional politics and the American media class that portrays him that way. In Western Europe — rich, comfortable and largely ruled by neoliberals — he would count as a centrist and might even find a home as an idiosyncratic gadfly on the center right. His supposed admiration for the communist bloc is itself remarkably tame. The Soviets did build great subways and palaces of culture. The Cubans did transform an uneducated, agrarian society into perhaps the most literate country on earth.

But these efforts do reveal a persistent psychological inadequacy that seems to haunt a segment of the Baby Boomer generation — a sense that they’re not getting the credit they deserve for winning their great struggle with the Soviets. Matthews and his ilk look toward the triumphalism of the early 1990s not because it was, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama once put it, “the end of history,” but because they’d won goddammit, defeating tyranny just like their parents had a generation before.

The Sanders campaign, many of whose supporters weren’t even alive for the fall of the Berlin Wall, forces them to acknowledge their moment has receded into the distant past. It may offer some points of historical interest, perhaps even some lessons for present-day politics, but no 30-year-old with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and a four-year gap in health insurance coverage since he got kicked off his parents’ plan cares one bit about some old man’s fantasy of going toe-to-toe with the Russkies. If capitalism triumphed 30 years ago, then it now has no convenient foreign foil with which to distract from its own record of losses and humiliations, violence and repression.

Better dead than red, they used to say. But when you are staring down the cost of insulin or the rising ocean lapping at your door or another wildfire season coming for your home, a little pink feels like a reasonable option after all.

Robert Reich: America Can’t Afford Not to Elect Sanders or Warren

In last Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg charged that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals would cost $50 trillion. Holy Indiana.

Larry Summers, formerly chief White House economic adviser for Barack Obama, puts the price tag at $60 trillion. “We are in a kind of new era of radical proposal,” he told CNN.

Putting aside the accuracy of these cost estimates, they omit the other side of the equation: what, by comparison, is the cost of doing nothing?

A Green New Deal might be expensive, but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more. If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with the consequences of our failure to be bold.

Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s increasingly dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere. A new study in The Lancet estimates that Medicare for All would save $450 billion and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year.

Investing in universal childcare, public higher education and woefully outdated and dilapidated infrastructure will be expensive too, but the cost of not making these investments would be astronomical. American productivity is already suffering and millions of families can’t afford decent childcare, college or housing – whose soaring costs are closely related to inadequate transportation and water systems.

Focusing only on the costs of doing something about these problems without mentioning the costs of doing nothing is misleading, but this asymmetry is widespread.

Journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy continue to rip into Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (whose policies are almost as ambitious) for the costs of their proposals but never ask self-styled moderates like Buttigieg how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or too little.

A related criticism of Sanders and Warren is that they haven’t come up with ways to pay for their proposals. Sanders “only explained $25 trillion worth of revenue, which means the hole in there is bigger than the size of the entire economy of the United States,” charged Mayor Pete.

Sanders’ and Warren’s wealth tax would go a long way toward paying for their plans.

But even if their wealth tax paid a small fraction of the costs of their proposals, so what? As long as every additional dollar of spending reduces by more than a dollar the future costs of climate change, inadequate healthcare and insufficient public investment, it makes sense to spend more.

Republican administrations have doled out gigantic tax cuts to big corporations and the wealthy without announcing specific cuts in public spending or other tax increases because – despite decades of evidence to the contrary – they claim the cuts will generate economic growth that will more than make up for any lost revenue.

Yet when Warren and Sanders propose ambitious plans for reducing empirically verifiable costs of large and growing public problems, they are skewered by fellow Democrats and the press for not having ways to pay for them.

A third line of criticism is that Sanders’ and Warren’s proposals are just too big. It would be safer to move cautiously and incrementally.

This argument might be convincing if the problems Sanders and Warren address were growing slowly. But experts on the environment, health, education and infrastructure are nearly unanimous: these problems are worsening exponentially.

Young people understand this, perhaps because they will bear more of the costs of inaction. An Emerson poll of Iowa found that 44% of Democrats under 50 support Sanders and 10% favor Warren. In New Hampshire, Sanders won more voters under 30 than the other candidates combined, according to CNN exit polls. In Nevada, he captured an astonishing 65 percent of voters under 30.

The reason to support Sanders’ and Warren’s proposals isn’t because they inspire and mobilize voters. It is because they are necessary.

We can no longer pretend that climate change, a wildly dysfunctional healthcare system and a yawning deficit in public investment pose insignificant challenges. Doing nothing or doing too little will make them far worse.

Obsessing about the cost of addressing them without acknowledging the cost of failing to address them is dangerously irresponsible