Chris Hedges's Blog, page 204

Trump Abandons Bid to Include Citizenship Question on Census

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump abandoned his controversial bid to inject a citizenship question into next year’s census Thursday, instead directing federal agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases.

He insisted he was “not backing down,” declaring in a Rose Garden announcement that the goal was simple and reasonable: “a clear breakdown of the number of citizens and non-citizens that make up the United States population.”

But the decision was clearly a reversal, after the Supreme Court blocked his effort by disputing his administration’s rationale for demanding that census respondents declare whether or not they were citizens. Trump had said last week that he was “very seriously” considering an executive order to try to force the question. But the government has already begun the lengthy and expensive process of printing the census questionnaire without it, and such a move would surely have drawn an immediate legal challenge.

Instead, Trump said Thursday that he would be signing an executive order directing every federal department and agency to provide the Commerce Department with all records pertaining to the number of citizens and noncitizens in the country.

Trump’s efforts to add the question on the decennial census had drawn fury and backlash from critics who complained that it was political, meant to discourage participation, not only by people living in the country illegally but also by citizens who fear that participating would expose noncitizen family members to repercussions.

Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, and the lawyer who argued the Supreme Court case, celebrated Thursday’s announcement by the president, saying: “Trump’s attempt to weaponize the census ends not with a bang but a whimper.”

Trump said his order would apply to every agency, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. The Census Bureau already has access to Social Security, food stamp and federal prison records, all of which contain citizenship information.

Trump, citing Census Bureau projections, predicted that using previously available records, the administration could determine the citizenship of 90 percent of the population “or more.”

“Ultimately this will allow us to have a more complete count of citizens than through asking the single question alone,” he contended.

But it is still unclear what Trump intends to do with the citizenship information. Federal law prohibits the use of census information to identify individuals, though that restriction has been breached in the past.

At one point, Trump suggested it could help states that “may want to draw state and local legislative districts based upon the voter-eligible population.” That would mark a change from how districts are drawn currently, based on the entire population, and could increase Republican political power.

Civil rights groups said the president’s efforts had already sown fear and discord in vulnerable communities, making the task of an accurate count even harder.

“The damage has already been done,” said Lizette Escobedo of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.

The Census Bureau had stressed repeatedly that it could produce better citizenship data without adding the question.

In fact, the bureau had recommended combining information from the annual American Community Survey with records held by other federal agencies that already include citizenship records.

“This would result in higher quality data produced at lower cost,” deputy Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin had written in a December 2017 email to a Justice Department official.

But Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, ultimately rejected that approach and ordered the citizenship question be added to the census.

The American Community Survey, which polls 3.5 million U.S. households every year, already includes questions about respondents’ citizenship.

“It’s a retreat back to what he should have done from the beginning,” said Kenneth Prewitt, a former Census Bureau director.

Trump’s administration had faced numerous roadblocks to adding the question, beginning with the ruling by the Supreme Court temporarily barring its inclusion on the grounds that the government’s justification was insufficient. Two federal judges also rejected the Justice Department’s plan to replace the legal team fighting for inclusion.

But Trump insisted his administration was pushing forward anyway, publicly contradicting government lawyers and his commerce secretary, who had previously conceded the case was closed, as well as the Census Bureau, which had started the process of printing the 2020 questionnaire without the controversial query after the Supreme Court decision.

As he has many times before, Trump exploded the situation with a tweet, calling reports that the fight was over “FAKE!”

A week of speculation about the administration’s plans and renewed court battles ensued as Trump threw out ideas, including suggesting last week that officials might be able to add an addendum to the questionnaire with the question after it was printed. And he toyed with the idea of halting the constitutionally mandated survey entirely while the court battle played out.

Attorney General William Barr, however, said that the government had no interest in delaying the count and that, while he was confident the census question would have eventually survived legal review, the process would have taken too long to work its way through the courts.

Trump had offered multiple explanations for why he believed the question was necessary to include in the once-a-decade population count that determines the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives for the next 10 years and the distribution of some $675 billion in federal spending.

“You need it for Congress, for districting. You need it for appropriations. Where are the funds going? How many people are there? Are they citizens? Are they not citizens? You need it for many reasons,” he told reporters last week, despite the fact that congressional districts are based on total population, regardless of residents’ national origin or immigration status.

If immigrants are undercounted, Democrats fear that would pull money and political power away from Democratic-led cities where immigrants tend to cluster, and shift it to whiter, rural areas where Republicans do well.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday accused Trump of pushing the question “to intimidate minorities, particularly Latinos, from answering the census so that it undercounts those communities and Republicans can redraw congressional districts to their advantage.”

He later called Trump’s move a “retreat” that “was long overdue and is a significant victory for democracy and fair representation.”

___

Associated Press writers Darlene Superville, Matthew Daly, Kevin Freking and Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.

Bernie Sanders Backs Abolishing the Electoral College

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday expressed support for abolishing the Electoral College, arguing it is difficult to justify a system that allows a candidate to become president after losing the popular vote by a large margin.

“It is hard to defend a system in which we have a president who lost the popular vote by three million votes,” Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said during a town hall hosted by the League of United Latin American Citizens. “So the answer is yes.”

Today @BernieSanders announced he supports abolishing the electoral college pic.twitter.com/TVF5QaCVtD

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) July 12, 2019

Two out of the last three American presidents—Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump—lost the popular vote, prompting growing support among lawmakers for scrapping the arcane and undemocratic system that made their election victories possible.

By backing growing calls to eliminate the Electoral College, Sanders joined several of his 2020 presidential rivals, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

“My view is that every vote matters,” Warren said during a CNN town hall in March, “and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College, and every vote counts.”

According to recent polling data, most Americans support replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote system.

A Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey published last July found that, “By roughly a two-to-one margin, Americans say they would prefer if presidential elections were decided by the national popular vote as opposed to the Electoral College.”

“Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of Americans believe that presidential elections should be decided based on the national popular vote,” PRRI’s poll showed, “while about one-third (32 percent) believe they should be decided through the Electoral College.”

Glenn Greenwald Becomes Focus of Brazil Press Freedom Debate

RIO DE JANEIRO—Several weeks after publishing explosive reports about a key member of Brazil’s far-right government, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald was called before a congressional committee to face hostile questions.

“Who should be judged, convicted and in prison is the journalist!” shouted congresswoman Katia Sastre, an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro.

And by some accounts that wasn’t an empty threat: A conservative website reported that federal police had requested that financial regulators investigate Greenwald’s finances. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and his Brazilian husband also say they have been receiving detailed death threats, calls for his deportation and homophobic comments in an increasingly hostile political environment.

Greenwald, an attorney-turned-journalist who has long been a free-speech advocate, has found himself at the center of the first major test of press freedom under Bolsonaro, who took office on Jan. 1 and has openly expressed nostalgia for Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship — a period when newspapers were censored and some journalists tortured.

“It’s a very concerning moment for press freedom in Brazil, especially those covering something so divisive as politics. We’ve seen an administration that vocally criticizes journalists with an open anti-press rhetoric,” said Natalie Southwick, the Central and South American program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Greenwald’s The Intercept news website last month published text messages purportedly showing then-judge and now Justice Minister Sergio Moro had improperly advised prosecutors in the corruption trial that jailed former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Intercept also alleged political bias by Moro and prosecutors in a sweeping corruption investigation that brought down many of the country’s business and political elite and turned Moro into a hero to many. The website said it got the leaked messages from an anonymous source and that it has “vast archive” of information it has not released.

Moro has dismissed its reports as sensationalist and said a “criminal group” was aiming to invalidate convictions handed down when he was a crusading anti-corruption judge. He later tweeted that The Intercept was “a site aligned with criminal hackers.”

The reports infuriated Bolsonaro’s backers.

During the June 25 hearing at the chamber’s Human Rights and Minorities Commission, lawmaker Carla Zambelli told Greenwald: “If you don’t prove this information, it is fake and you’re a liar. If it’s true, then you’re a criminal because you hacked someone’s phone.”

Greenwald responded: “The government’s party evidently has a lot of confusion about the journalism we did.”

Bolsonaro has repeatedly lashed out at the news media as untruthful, biased toward the left and for publishing “fake news,” though he has sometimes said he believes in a free press.

When the Supreme Court tried to censor a critical story about one of its justices, Bolsonaro conceded to reporters, “It’s better to have a press that’s sometimes flawed than to not have a press at all. … To the Brazilian press: We’re in this together.”

A special target of Bolsonaro’s ire has been the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. He sent a video message a week before the election saying that if he won, Brazil would be “without lies, without fake news and without the Folha de S.Paulo.”

He has also referred to Globo, Brazil’s largest media company, as “the enemy” in WhatsApp messages that were leaked to the press.

As for The Intercept’s reporting, Bolsonaro has defended his justice minister, saying what Moro did for Brazil as an anti-corruption judge was “priceless.”

“We don’t know … how far they’re willing to go to fulfill this authoritarian vision that Bolsonaro has spent the last 30 years advocating,” Greenwald told The Associated Press, referring the president’s record in congress.

“They were elected based on a promise to change Brazil in multiple ways, including eroding core freedoms that a democracy requires in order to survive — and one of those is a free press,” said Greenwald.

While provincial journalists sometimes face grave dangers in Brazil — two owners of local media outlets were recently shot and killed in a coastal town outside Rio de Janeiro — the federal government in recent decades has rarely tried to stifle reporters. One exception was when then-President da Silva briefly tried to deport New York Times correspondent Larry Rohter in 2004 after a report that suggested he drank heavily.

Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, is now accompanied by private security guards and says he and other staff at The Intercept have received sophisticated, detailed death threats that sometimes include private personal information.

Being the center of controversy is nothing new for Greenwald, who was part of a team at The Guardian newspaper that won a Pulitzer for reports about government surveillance programs based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden.

At recent nationwide demonstrations, backers of Bolsonaro and Moro repeatedly denounced Greenwald — often by focusing on his sexuality and his husband, leftist Brazilian congressman David Miranda. Bolsonaro himself has famously said that he would rather have a dead son than a gay son.

“GlennGreenwald, get out of Brazil! You are disgusting,” read one sign. An online campaign with the hashtag #DeportGlennGreenwald was popular on Brazilian Twitter.

Pro-Bolsonaro members of Brazil’s congress have called for Greenwald’s imprisonment and deportation.

“I’m a good villain for this right-wing campaign,” Greenwald said. “I’m not a Brazilian citizen and therefore can be called a foreigner. I’m also a gay man in a country where anti-gay has become an important part of the political climate, and my husband is member of the socialist party … so it kind of checks off every box.”

When the website O Antagonista reported that police were asking financial regulators to investigate Greenwald’s finances, a Brazilian court ordered the regulators and the ministry that oversees them to clarify. The official responses left unclear whether there was an investigation.

Southwick said such a probe would be “an escalation of the attempts to delegitimize and undermine the Brazilian press.”

“At the very least it’s designed to intimidate, to create climate of tension and fear so that not just me and the journalists I’m working with, but all journalists think that if they report on powerful political officials they can be targeted by law enforcement and suffer retribution,” Greenwald said.

Ivana Bentes, a communications professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the Bolsonaro camp is zeroing in on Greenwald, trying to put him into “the gallery of public enemies of Bolsonaro. They’re treating him as a political enemy when he is a journalist, which is very serious. They want to criminalize a journalistic investigation.”

Greenwald says he’s not sure when he’ll feel safe to go out in public in Brazil without security guards, if ever.

“Bolsonaro ran against the media, he talked about the Brazilian media as being agents of communism,” he said. “I think they see this as a very important test case to create a precedent and environment and climate that sends a strong signal that whoever opposes them through journalism or activism will suffer serious consequences.”

Race Becomes New Flashpoint With Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez

WASHINGTON—The debate between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other House Democrats over migrant children in detention at the border was wrenching enough. Then it became about race.

First, the freshman’s chief of staff compared more centrist Democrats to 1940s segregationists. Then Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., accused Speaker Nancy Pelosi of “singling out” her and fellow newcomers, all women of color.

By Thursday, the rhetoric escalated, overshadowing the agenda and pushing House Democrats way off message with the most divisive upheaval since they took control of the chamber this year. Longtime lawmakers were stunned.

“How dare they try to play the race card at this point,” said Rep. William Lacy Clay, an African-American Democrat from Missouri who faces a primary challenge backed by allies of Ocasio-Cortez. He called those making the claims “ignorant” of racial history. “It shows the weakness of their argument. It’s damaging to this party and the internal workings of the Democratic party.”

Rep. John Lewis, the Civil Rights icon, shared his view.

Lewis said it was “a little too far” for the staff member to compare lawmakers to segregationists.

“We all must work together, pull together for the country’s good,” the Georgia Democrat said in an interview. “The great majority of the caucus membership tends to work together and get along. We need to go forward, not backward.”

The problems have been developing for weeks, mounting as Congress struggled to pass a border funding package, but now may force a reckoning among Democrats that spills beyond Capitol Hill and into the 2020 campaigns.

Late last month, tensions grew between liberals, including Ocasio-Cortez and the “squad” of three other freshmen, and centrists from the Problem Solvers, Blue Dog and New Democratic caucuses over protections for migrant children and families in detention. With time ticking before funding ran out — and lawmakers set to leave town for the July 4th holiday — centrists revolted, forcing Pelosi to drop liberal demands and approve a more modest Senate version of the bill.

And then the fallout began.

“Didn’t realize this needed to be said, but: you can be someone who does not personally harbor ill will towards a race, but through your actions still enable a racist system. And a lot of New Democrats and Blue Dogs did that today,” tweeted Saikat Chakrabarti, the chief of staff for Ocasio-Cortez. It was an extraordinary attack by a staff member on elected officials.

“This is in reference to my comparing Blue Dogs and New Democrats to 1940s Southern Democrats,” he wrote in another. “Southern Democrats enabled a racist system too. I have no idea how personally racist they all were. And we’re seeing the same dynamic play out now.”

That weekend, in trying to tamp down the divisions, Pelosi dismissed the influence Ocasio-Cortez and the squad — Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. — in a Sunday newspaper column. But it seems to have only enhanced their stature.

Allies of the foursome swiftly came to their defense, suggesting Pelosi was marginalizing the women of color who are the new face of the party. Chakrabarti tweeted his own critique of Pelosi.

Ocasio-Cortez told The Washington Post on Wednesday that “the persistent singling out … it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful … the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.”

In a fundraising email Thursday, Justice Democrats, the progressive group that recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for office, criticized Pelosi for “singling out four new leaders who are progressive women of color.” The group is backing a handful of primary challengers to congressional Democrats, aiming for 25.

On Capitol Hill, the centrists got to work. Aides were quick to point out the co-chairwoman of the Blue Dog Coalition, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, is a refugee and the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress. Two members of the coalition are African American lawmakers who lived through segregation. One of the members of the New Democratic Coalition, Rep. Terri Sewell, who is African-American, represents her hometown, Selma, Ala., as well as Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, and had reached out multiple times to Ocasio-Cortez after the tweets, to no response.

“I personally experienced Dixiecrats’ bigoted policies growing up,” Sewell said in a statement. “So, to even insinuate that I, or any other member of the New Dems, would promote policies that are racist and hateful or ones that would negatively impact communities of color is deeply offensive and couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., another co-chairman of the Blue Dogs and member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he has warned his staff off such actions. “It’s sad, it’s very sad.”

One freshman, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who won what had been a Republican-held seat in New Jersey, said the centrist lawmakers “work really hard to build broad coalitions. When people in the progressive wing of the party disagree, I do feel like they’re not kind of lining up their sights on the right target.”

Progressives and those allied with the Ocasio-Cortez and the squad wanted to shift the debate.

“Can we just talk about the issues we’re dealing with? We have kids in cages,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who said she was frustrated by the ongoing situation. “It’s not about AOC. … It’s about progressives and our relationship to the Democratic caucus and our priorities.”

Pelosi said she had been unaware of the tweet it until lawmakers brought it to her attention “some almost crying, some very upset and angry.”

She spoke at length on the turmoil during a private meeting of House Democrats this week and on Thursday said she was done talking about her relations with Ocasio-Cortez and the others.

“They took offense because I addressed, at the bequest of my members, an offensive tweet,” she said.

“How they’re interpreting and carrying it to another place is up to them, but I’m not going to be discussing it any further.”

___

Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.

Labor Secretary Acosta Resigns Amid Epstein Deal Scrutiny

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta said Friday he is resigning following renewed scrutiny of his handling of a 2008 secret plea deal with wealthy financier Jeffrey Esptein, who is accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls.

President Donald Trump, with Acosta at his side, made the announcement as he left the White House for a trip to Wisconsin and Ohio. The president said Acosta had been a “great” labor secretary.

“I hate to see this happen,” Trump said. He said he did not ask Acosta to leave the Cabinet.

Acosta said his resignation would be effective in seven days. Acosta said he didn’t think it was right for his handling of Epstein’s case to distract from his work as secretary of labor.

“My point here today is we have an amazing economy and the focus needs to be on the economy job creation,” Acosta said.

Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami when he oversaw a 2008 non-prosecution agreement Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein avoided federal charges, plead guilty to state charges and served 13 months in jail. Similar charges recently filed against Epstein by federal prosecutors in New York had put Acosta’s role in the 2008 deal under renewed scrutiny.

Top Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates had demanded that Acosta resign over his handling of the agreement, which a federal judge has said violated federal law because Acosta did not notify Epstein’s victims of the arrangement. The Justice Department has been investigating.

Trump had initially defended Acosta but said he’d look “very closely” his handling of the 2008 agreement.

The deal came under scrutiny earlier this year following reporting by the Miami Herald.

Epstein, 66, reached the deal to secretly end a federal sex abuse investigation involving at least 40 teenage girls that could have landed him behind bars for life. He instead pleaded guilty to state charges, spent 13 months in jail, paid settlements to victims and is a registered sex offender.

Acosta had attempted to clear his name, and held a news conference – encouraged by Trump – to defend his actions. In a 50-plus-minute lawyerly rebuttal, Acosta argued his office had secured the best deal it could at the time and was working in the victims’ best interests.

“We did what we did because we wanted to see Epstein go to jail,” he said, refusing to apologize for his actions. “We believe that we proceeded appropriately.”

Pressed on whether he had any regrets, Acosta repeatedly suggested that circumstances had changed since then.

“We now have 12 years of knowledge and hindsight and we live in a very different world,” he said. “Today’s world treats victims very, very differently,” he said.

After federal attorneys in New York announced the new charges against Epstein this week, Acosta tweeted that he was “pleased” by their decision.

“The crimes committed by Epstein are horrific,” Acosta tweeted. “With the evidence available more than a decade ago, federal prosecutors insisted that Epstein go to jail, register as a sex offender and put the world on notice that he was a sexual predator.”

“Now that new evidence and additional testimony is available, the NY prosecution offers an important opportunity to more fully bring him to justice,” he said.

Acosta, the nation’s 27th labor secretary, took on the role officially in early 2017, leading a sprawling agency that enforces more than 180 federal laws covering about 10 million employers and 125 million workers. He was confirmed in the Senate 60-38.

But Acosta had frustrated some conservatives who had been pushing for his ouster long before the Epstein uproar. Among their frustrations were Acosta’s decisions to proceed with several employment discrimination lawsuits and to allow certain Obama holdovers to remain on the job.

Acosta is a former federal prosecutor and civil rights chief. Before joining the administration he was dean of the Florida International University law school.

Are We Underestimating Trump Yet Again?

Although the 2020 presidential election is more than a year away, Donald Trump appears a better prepared and far more formidable candidate than he did in 2016—or compared to many of his current rivals. Those who are appalled by the daily shredding of the Constitution and by the degradation of basic standards of human decency may find it inconceivable that a president such as Trump could win a second term. But in truth, he is leaving no stone unturned in his relentless quest to remain in power for four more years—and we ignore his proximity to victory at our peril.

Trump has made no attempt to adhere to ethical boundaries on separating his office from his reelection campaign. Last week’s Fourth of July spectacle was a perfect example, as he spent millions of taxpayer dollars to display military tanks and flyovers in Washington, D.C., in order to impress his political donors and reward them with free VIP tickets. Donations have been pouring into Trump’s reelection coffers, with $30 million raised in the first quarter of this year alone. His goal for the entire campaign is the unimaginably large figure of $1 billion.

Trump has also maintained a single-minded focus on hammering on the one issue that appears to motivate his voting base the most: immigration. His determination to place a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census sends a strong message to his supporters that he will not even let a Supreme Court ruling get in the way of undermining immigrant rights. The fear his actions are likely inspiring in vulnerable communities—regardless of the final outcome of the census question—is a victory for the Republican Party. The GOP is aiming to weaken, using the census strategy, Democrats’ Congressional representation in districts that typically vote blue. And so, through his pursuit of the citizenship question, Trump rewards both his voters and his party.

Trump is taking no chances, understanding that even with high turnout among his supporters he may not have enough votes to win reelection. That explains his bizarre 45-minute speech on “America’s Environmental Leadership” last Monday. The New York Times explained that “While the numbers showed that Mr. Trump was ‘never going to get’ the type of voter who feels passionately about tackling climate change, a senior administration official who reviewed the polling said there were moderate voters who liked the president’s economic policies and ‘just want to know that he’s being responsible’ on environmental issues.”

Of course, Trump made up facts from whole cloth, as he is wont to do. He took credit for some of President Obama’s achievements and claimed that he was in favor of stringent regulations to keep our air and water clean. Trump has successfully shown time and again that reality seems to matter little to his base. All that matters is that people believe what he wants them to believe, and his lie-filled speech on the environment may be all that Trump needs to convince his voters that he is an environmental leader.

Most terrifying for those who cannot fathom another four years of this nightmarish presidency ought to be Trump’s advertising and fundraising strategy. His campaign has been incredibly adept at creating a sense of urgency, using lies, exaggeration and propaganda to marshal support and raise immense amounts of money, especially on social media platforms. The investigative outlet Axios found that Trump is spending 44% of his Facebook advertising campaign on voters 65 and older, specifically using polarizing language on the issue of immigration. An election expert told Axios, “The one thing the Trump campaign has proven time and again is that they follow the results and optimize for outcomes and not the general consensus.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, is a master digital marketer and has been boasting about how “The president could beat anybody. … The momentum behind this president right now is like nothing that history has ever seen.” Vice media showcased one example of Parscale’s plan. In June, Trump’s reelection campaign launched targeted ads commemorating the president’s birthday and encouraged supporters to sign birthday cards to him using a sense of urgency to draw them in. “HURRY! President Trump’s birthday is TOMORROW!” said one Facebook ad. Social media users were told, “He’ll read the name of every supporter who signs his card when we present it to him on his birthday. Will he see your name?” Vice explained that those who “signed” the cards had “offered gobs of contact information to help the president’s re-election effort build out voter lists that will be crucial to raising money.”

Additionally, Vice noted, “Imposing an arbitrary deadline for supporters to act, the birthday ads have been essential to a digitally savvy Trump campaign that strategists say has built out a sizable early lead over Democrats in collecting voter data.”

Using the president’s birthday as a data-gathering tool for voter outreach was so successful that several Trump family birthdays were deployed for the cause. Melania Trump’s birthday was the focus of a similar ad campaign specifically designed to draw in women, which the watchdog group Media Matters for America claims violated Facebook’s own policies.

Parscale explained that his strategy also includes getting Trump supporters to donate money to the campaign early via social media. That act of donating, in turn, allows the campaign to track in great detail who the donors are and how to mobilize them at election time. Pascarele said on Fox News, “Nothing is stronger for President Trump than to know it’s a voter than a donation today. …We model off that data, and then we find them later.  That’s very helpful to have all these donations so early.”

Trump is not acting alone. The Guardian recently reported that right-wing forces including media outlets are using “untraceable ads” on Facebook to help reelect Trump in 2020 and promote a right-wing political agenda. The ads—like many similar efforts from these sources—rely heavily on exaggeration, fearmongering and sometimes outright lies. It is not clear who exactly is using this method to herald Trump, but because it is untraceable and easy, virtually anyone can have a large impact for a modest sum of money.

Trump’s reelection campaign is also adeptly training an “army of volunteers” to be his surrogates all around the country in preparation for November 2020. Thousands of training sessions are being organized and held nationwide by the Republican National Committee and Trump’s campaign. The major difference between 2016 and 2020, as per NPR’s report on the topic, is that “In 2016, the Trump campaign didn’t gain access to the RNC’s data and volunteer operations until after he secured the nomination midway through 2016. While it had been an uncomfortable marriage then, this time around, the Republican party and the Trump campaign are essentially one and the same and they are working to build an army of volunteers.”

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll found Trump at an 44% approval rating—his highest since his tenure began. This is likely because people feel optimistic about the state of the economy—possibly because Trump constantly claims in the face of counterevidence that the U.S. has never had a stronger economy. Despite the fact that 65% of respondents do not consider Trump “presidential,” some predict that this poll indicates a clear path to reelection victory for the president.

Regardless of who is pushing for Trump’s reelection or how, progressives and liberals have to accept the ugly fact that a sizable portion of America’s population is susceptible to his propaganda because they back the president’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant, racist, sexist, homophobic, corporatist, war-mongering agenda—even if they don’t publicly articulate it.

Trump won in 2016 because of a variety of factors, not the least of which being that many of us deeply underestimated him and the support he garners. If Trump wins in 2020 it may well be the worst sort of déjà vu.

Setbacks for Trump’s Drive to Lower Prescription Drug Costs

WASHINGTON — After two setbacks this week, President Donald Trump is now focusing his drive to curb drug costs on congressional efforts aimed at helping people on Medicare and younger generations covered by workplace plans.

The White House on Thursday yanked its own regulation to ease the financial bite of costly medications for those on Medicare by letting them receive rebates that drugmakers now pay to insurers and middlemen. A congressional agency’s estimate that the plan would have cost taxpayers $177 billion over 10 years seemed to seal its fate.

Earlier a federal judge ruled that the administration lacked the legal authority to require drugmakers to disclose list prices in their TV ads. The ruling Monday blocked a highly visible change expected to have started this week.

Both price disclosure and the rebate idea were part of a strategy on drug costs that Trump announced at the White House with much fanfare last year.

Related Articles











Congress Makes Bipartisan Push to Cut Health Care Costs



by

“This is a big setback,” said Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The rebate rule “was not good policy (since) it would have increased spending on prescription drugs even if it mildly reduced out-of-pocket costs in some cases. But nevertheless this was a cornerstone of the blueprint.”

White House spokesman Judd Deere said the rebate proposal was withdrawn “based on careful analysis and thorough consideration.”

Deere said Trump is not backing away from his promise to lower drug prices, and the administration is setting its sights on bipartisan legislation. One idea would cap drug copays for people with Medicare, which would produce savings for seniors taking costly drugs. That’s another way to achieve a similar goal as the rebate plan.

“The Trump administration is encouraged by continuing bipartisan conversations about legislation to reduce outrageous drug costs imposed on the American people, and President Trump will consider using any and all tools to ensure that prescription drug costs will continue to decline,” Deere said in a statement.

While agreeing it’s a setback for Trump, John Rother of the National Coalition on Health Care said that if legislation could be worked out, “that might actually lead to a better outcome.” His organization is an umbrella group that represents a cross section of business and consumer groups.

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Charles Grassley of Iowa, and the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, are trying for a compromise centered on lowering drug costs for government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Top administration officials this week participated in a closed-door meeting between Grassley and Republican senators on his committee.

Grassley said in a statement that he had concerns about the administration’s rebate rule, but was confident about the prospects for legislation. “While the final details are still being negotiated, we’re on track to report a bill out of committee very soon,” he said.

Separately, Grassley and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the chamber’s second-ranking Democrat, are pushing legislation that would grant the government the power to require drug companies to disclose their prices in consumer advertising.

House committees are also working on legislation and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., remains in contact with the White House on a drug cost compromise. Changes to Medicare often have an impact on employer insurance, but the main dividend for working families could come from legislation to promote pharmaceutical competition.

The rebate plan was crafted by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar but ran into opposition from White House budget officials. That pushback stiffened after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the plan would have little effect on manufacturer prices and would cost Medicare $177 billion over 10 years by leading to higher premiums subsidized by taxpayers.

Trump’s reversal on rebates was a win for insurers and middlemen called “pharmacy benefit managers” who administer prescription drug plans for large blocks of insured patients.

It was a defeat for the pharmaceutical industry, which had lobbied to promote rebates. Drugmakers prefer that to other approaches lawmakers are considering. Those include “inflation rebates” that drugmakers would pay directly to Medicare if they raise prices beyond a yet-to-be-determined measure.

“The administration has abandoned one of the only policy solutions that would have truly lowered what patients are forced to pay out of pocket for the medicines they need,” Jim Greenwood, head of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, said in a statement.

Shares of pharmaceutical companies dropped Thursday but drug store chains and insurers gained. Drugmaker Merck & Co. dropped 4.5% while UnitedHealth climbed 5.5% and CVS Health gained 4.7%.

Rebates are a largely unseen part of the complex world of drug pricing.

Under the administration’s plan, drugmaker rebates now paid to insurance companies and their middlemen would have gone directly to seniors in Medicare’s Part D program when they filled their prescriptions.

But congressional analysts concluded that drug companies were unlikely to lower list prices across the board in response to the plan. Meanwhile, insurers would raise premiums to compensate for the loss of rebates.

Labor Department data indicate that changes may be afoot with drug prices.

Overall prescription drug inflation seems to have stabilized, with more monthly declines than increases recently. The White House credits Trump for that change, but independent experts say the trend isn’t totally clear yet.

The administration’s rebate reversal was first reported by Axios.

___

AP Health Writer Tom Murphy in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

Trump’s Cruel Deportation Machine Set to Begin Raids

President Trump announced on June 22 via Twitter that he was postponing planned nationwide Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids to arrest and deport undocumented immigrant families. The delay was an attempt to pressure congressional Democrats into making changes to asylum laws. Despite Congress passing a bill that will send $4.5 billion to the agencies that oversee immigration, as the Trump administration also wanted, the raids are back on and set to start Sunday, The New York Times reported Thursday.

In June, ICE agents had planned the raids in ten cities across the country, targeting 2,000 families, in what the Times described as “a show of force intended to demonstrate their strict enforcement of immigration laws.”

Trump tweeted in June that ultimately, millions of people could be impacted, which spread panic through immigrant communities. As The Washington Post reported, many migrants were staying inside and out of sight as much as possible, “avoiding large crowds and minimizing going out at night and even attending church.” One woman in Maryland told the Post, “If I drive, the police can stop me for any small reason, and they’ll see I don’t have documents and they’ll arrest me.” She added, “Thank God the school year is over for my oldest son, because now I don’t have to go out so much.”

This time, ICE still plans to target approximately 2,000 families, and agents will conduct what they call “collateral” deportations, which means, as ICE officials told the Times, they “might detain immigrants who [happen] to be on the scene, even though they were not targets of the raids.”

There’s no guarantee that families will stay together or even that detention centers will have room for them. As Times writers Caitlin Dickerson and Zolan Kanno-Youngs explain, “When possible, family members who are arrested together will be held in family detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania. But because of space limitations, some might end up staying in hotel rooms until their travel documents can be prepared. ICE’s goal is to deport the families as quickly as possible.”

In addition to backlash from immigration activists and elected officials, President Trump faced opposition to the planned raids from his own Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees ICE. As Dickerson and Kanno-Youngs write, “agents have expressed apprehensions about arresting babies and young children.” Plus, because word of the raids have already spread, migrants may already have made arrangements to be somewhere other than the address ICE has for them. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have also educated immigrants on their right not to open the door or answer questions unless the agents have warrants signed by a judge.

Kevin McAleenan, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, was also concerned about the logistics of housing families until their deportation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the raids “heartless,” in a statement after Trump’s announcement, but also lashed out at the four progressive members of her own caucus, Reps. Ayana Presley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, all of whom voted against a bill that increased funding to Homeland Security, ICE and Customs and Border Protection. In an interview with The New York Times on Sunday, she said, “all these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they didn’t have any following.”

In a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi said she was planning to reach out to religious leaders to help convince Trump to stop the raids. “Hopefully the president will think again about it or these groups will weigh in. Once again, families belong together,” she said.

The Times points out that the planned raids will likely receive legal challenges. The Senate is also working on a bill, led by Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that would ban family separations, and provide more legal funding for asylum seekers, among other provisions. There’s no guarantee however, that the challengers could win in time, or the Senate could pass a bill quickly enough to prevent the raids from starting Sunday.

Border Patrol Refuses to Come Clean on Secret Facebook Group

Long known for its insular culture and tendency toward secrecy, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency is saying little in the aftermath of news reports exposing a vulgar and hateful Facebook group for current and retired Border Patrol agents, including supervisors.

While CBP officials have publicly condemned the offensive social media posts, they’ve disclosed few details about the steps the agency has taken to identify employees who behaved inappropriately online and hold them accountable.

The agency, which is responsible for policing the nation’s borders and official ports of entry, declined to say how many employees CBP has disciplined or how many remain under investigation.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a CBP spokesperson would only say that “several” employees had been placed on restricted duty as a result of postings in the three-year-old Facebook group, and that so far no one had been suspended from the patrol, a more serious disciplinary action. The agency would not say whether the agents now on restricted duty are allowed to have contact with the public, and it refused to answer questions about specific agents who appear to have made posts celebrating sexual violence and demeaning migrants and women.

The “majority of employees who have been positively identified” as being active in the Facebook group have been issued letters instructing them stop posting objectionable material, said the spokesperson, who declined to specify how many people had received the letters, described as “cease and desist” notices.

“This secrecy is unacceptable,” said Joaquin Castro, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and representative for San Antonio. “This secrecy is dangerous to human life. CBP is perhaps the least transparent law enforcement agency in the country.”

ProPublica last week revealed the existence of the secret 9,500-member Facebook group, called “I’m 10-15,” a reference to the Border Patrol code for “alien in custody.” In the private group, current and former Border Patrol agents, including supervisors, mocked dead migrants, called congresswomen “scum buckets,” and uploaded misogynistic images, including an illustration of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a harsh critic of CBP, engaged in oral sex with a migrant in a detention facility. A later story by The Intercept published additional graphic posts from the group and information about its members.

CBP policies bar employees from making “abusive, derisive, profane, or harassing statements or gestures” about any person or group on private or public social media.

Among those who apparently made egregious posts is Thomas Hendricks, a 20-year veteran of the Border Patrol who serves as a supervisor of the Calexico station, a desert outpost in Southern California’s Imperial County. Hendricks — or someone using his Facebook account — uploaded a photo illustration of President Donald Trump forcing the head of Ocasio-Cortez toward his crotch. The image was accompanied by a cryptic message that appeared to refer to prior issues within the patrol: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won. I have returned.”

Hendricks did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica.

An agent at the Alamogordo station in New Mexico, Mario Marcus Ponce, apparently described Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Veronica Escobar of El Paso, Texas, both Democrats, as “hoes” in a discussion in the Facebook group. Ponce did not answer calls and text messages from ProPublica.

CBP would not discuss the current status of Hendricks and Ponce or two other agents identified by ProPublica. “We cannot comment on individual cases,” the CBP spokesperson said.

Unlike many big city police departments, the Border Patrol generally divulges little information about agents found to have engaged in misconduct or those involved in shooting incidents. At times, the agency has refused even to reveal the names of agents facing trial on criminal corruption charges.

“They are not used to being questioned. They are not used to be scrutinized,” said Josiah Heyman, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who has been studying the border since 1982.

The Facebook group, he said, is “an indicator of broader problems” within the Border Patrol. “There is an attitude within CBP and Border Patrol that everybody crossing the border is invading the United States and coming to do bad things,” he said.

While Heyman noted that there is little solid statistical data on the views held by Border Patrol agents, he pointed to a survey of approximately 1,100 migrants who’d been deported to Mexico. Nearly a quarter of the respondents said they’d been verbally abused by U.S. government employees, primarily Border Patrol. “It is an enormous number,” said Heyman, director of the school’s Center for Inter-American and Border Studies.

In a statement issued last week, Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost said the Facebook images and comments aren’t representative of the patrol as a whole. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see—and expect—from our agents day in and day out,” she said. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”

At least two oversight bodies are now looking into the conduct of Border Patrol agents on social media. One inquiry is being led by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility, essentially an internal affairs unit staffed with professional investigators.

In Congress, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, led by Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings has opened an investigation and committee staffers are currently gathering facts. Cummings has requested that Kevin McAleenan, the acting chief of the Department of Homeland Security — CBP’s parent organization — testify before the committee this week about “racist, sexist, and xenophobic posts by Border Patrol agents,”as well as reports of inhumane conditions and severe overcrowding at CBP detention facilities.

The congressman has also instructed Facebook to turn over digital evidence related to the group. “The Committee requests that you preserve all documents, communications, and other data related to the ‘I’m 10-15’ group. This includes log files and metadata,” Cummings wrote in a letter to Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg.

At the House Homeland Security Committee, chair Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, has called on the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security to mount an investigation into the Facebook group.

The inspector general’s office would not comment on whether it has opened an inquiry.

For his part, Castro said he intends to ask some questions of his own. “I am going to set up a call with Secretary McAleenan to have a conversation about the discipline and accountability process within DHS,” Castro, a Democrat, said. “I don’t know if there is any accountability. I don’t know if there is any discipline.”

If you have any information about the Border Patrol you’d like to share, please email us at borderpatrol@propublica.org. For more secure ways to send us information, please see our instructions.

Bernie Sanders Unveils ‘Anti-Endorsement’ List of Billionaires

Asking the American public to judge his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign by both its supporters and its powerful enemies, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday unveiled an “anti-endorsement” list consisting of prominent billionaires, Wall Street bankers, and corporate CEOs who have attacked his candidacy and policies.

“You can tell who is truly fighting for working families by the enemies they make, and we’ve made a lot of enemies,” Sanders said in a statement. “We understand that nothing will fundamentally change for working Americans unless we have the guts to take on the most powerful corporate interests in this country.”

“Therefore it should come as no surprise that corporate CEOs and billionaires have united against our movement,” Sanders added. “These people have a vested interest in preserving the status quo so they can keep their grip on power so they can continue to exploit working people across America. We welcome their hatred.”

The Sanders campaign lists the Vermont senator’s anti-endorsements on a new webpage. The page includes billionaire Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban, who attacked Sanders as a “disaster zone” in an interview published Wednesday.

The rest of the list consists of:

Billionaire Home Depot co-founder Kenneth Langone;
Former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder;
Former Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam;
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon;
Disney CEO Bob Iger;
Former General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt;
Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein;
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan;
Centrist think-tank Third Way;
Former Goldman Sachs partner Leon Cooperman;
Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus; and
Billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller.

“As we fight for an agenda that guarantees basic human rights for all Americans, we will be opposed by the most powerful forces in America,” Sanders wrote on his website. “I am proud to announce the modern-day oligarchs who oppose our movement. In the words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: ‘They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.'”

“We will overcome their greed,” said Sanders, “and create an economy and a government that works for all, not just the one percent.