Chris Hedges's Blog, page 236

The Media Are Legitimizing a Century-Old Nazi Trope

When Norwegian right-winger Anders Breivik invoked “cultural Marxism” as the reason for his 77-person killing spree in 2011, many observers placed the notion in the same category as the killer—the fringe. But since the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the rise and re-election of other far-right governments around the globe, “cultural Marxism” has become a well-known nationalist buzzword, alongside “globalism”: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro denounces it, and the media empire of former White House advisor Steve Bannon revolved around fighting it.

The phrase is seeping into mainstream media discourse, a far cry from its former days as an extremist catch phrase, and it’s creating a dangerous situation with an ominous historical context.

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David Brooks (New York Times, 11/26/19) explains the “generation gap” by invoking a buzzword ultimately derived from Nazi propaganda.

Doing his usual shtick of a more refined version of Abe Simpson, columnist David Brooks (New York Times, 11/26/19) lamented that today’s youths “tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy,” giving them a “clash of oppressed and oppressor groups” worldview. Also in the Times, contributor Molly Worthen (4/20/19) quoted the phrase “cultural Marxism”—not approvingly, but not explaining what it meant, either, just offering it as an example of what “conservatives” were complaining about. A Times story in 2017 (8/11/17) about a former White House aide reported that the aide believed “globalists” would “impose cultural Marxism in the United States”—again, without defining for the layperson what that might mean.

The Washington Post (like other newspapers) invoked the phrase in its reports on Bolsonaro’s rise to power last year, and even on the hipster styles of the new wave of American white nationalists: In November 2016, the Post (11/30/16) reported that the style of shaved sides with long hair combed back is “worn by men who feel their whiteness has been infringed upon by the ‘cultural Marxism’ of the Americas.” And opinion-haver Andrew Sullivan took to New York (2/9/18) to denounce “cultural Marxists” for inspiring social justice movements on campuses.

What does cultural Marxism mean for the far right? In the modern iteration, in spaces like Breitbart or Infowars, it is the belief that a failure by communists to topple capitalism through worker revolt has led to a “Plan B” to destroy Western society from the inside. By tearing down the gender binary, de-centering Christianity values, championing the weak over the privileged and creating a multicultural society, revolutionaries have unanchored traditional Western order. Everything from gay rights to Muslim immigration is, in the language of the far right, part of a plot to finish the job that radical worker organizing could not.

Suffice it to say, this is a most paranoid fantasy. Most Marxists don’t speak in these terms, and people who do advocate for immigration, multiculturalism or secularism do so out of a certain regard for human and civil rights. But the far right still obsesses that this is a historical cultural struggle.

Like others on the right, the National Review (8/9/18) saw proof of the plot in the Frankfurt School, which

was born out of a psychological need to explain why communism had failed to take root, initially in Germany but more broadly in the West. The answer that Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and others settled on—after borrowing some ideas from Freud and Nietzsche—was that the structure of capitalist society (which they perversely and ludicrously equated with fascism) was even more totalitarian than they had realized. In other words, communism couldn’t take root because fascism already had.

It’s far from a cultural grappling with the Frankfurt School’s actual ideas, which live mostly in academia. As Spencer Sunshine, an associate fellow at Political Research Associates, points out, the focus on the Frankfurt School by the right serves to highlight its inherent Jewishness. “A piece stands in for the whole,” he said.

This isn’t one of those “yeah, it could be interpreted as antisemitic” things—it’s straight from Nazi ideology, with just enough cosmetic changes to make it acceptable for the modern right.  “Cultural Bolshevism” was the term used by Nazi critics of modernist art, which they believed to be rooted in Jewish decadence and thereby, according to Nazi logic, connected to the communist specter. As Dominic Green (Spectator USA, 3/28/19) wrote in a conservative critique of conservatives’ complaints about “cultural Marxism”: “For the Nazis, the Frankfurter School and its vaguely Jewish exponents fell under the rubric of Kulturbolshewismus, ‘Cultural Bolshevism.’”

William Lind meeting with Donald Trump (American Conservative, 10/17/16).

It came into the American sector through paleoconservative writers William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich, who in a series of articles recraftedthe Nazi idea of “cultural Marxism” as a scare tactic for the American right. “These guys were all Jewish,” Lind told a Holocaust denial conference in 2002; Lind would be later be cited as a prominent influence on Trump’s nationalist agenda.

As Sunshine noted:

It is deeply disturbing that it is used by mainstream conservatives when it’s clearly antisemitic…. They attribute it to all these things, anything from Black Bloc to Hillary Clinton, any kind of social liberalism.

It’s not too surprising that the nationalistic right still clings onto such fascist anachronisms; it’s clearly helping them at the voting booth, from the United States to Europe to Brazil.  It’s an important mobilizing call for the far right, depicting things like immigration and secularism not simply as liberal values, but as far-left revolutionary tools.

What should be shocking is the cavalier way some traditional media, like the Times and the Post, are allowing it to live on their pages. Brooks rebrands cultural Marxism as mere political correctness, giving the Nazi-inspired phrase legitimacy for the American right. It is dropped in or quoted in other stories—some of them lighthearted, like the fashion cues of the alt-right—without describing how fringe this notion is. It’s akin to letting conspiracy theories about chem trails or vaccines get unearned space in mainstream press.

And it’s not as if the Times doesn’t know this. In 2018, Columbia University historian Samuel Moyn wrote in a Times blog post (11/13/18):

That “cultural Marxism” is a crude slander, referring to something that does not exist, unfortunately does not mean actual people are not being set up to pay the price, as scapegoats to appease a rising sense of anger and anxiety. And for that reason, “cultural Marxism” is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances, but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.

Newspapers should be responsible with such phrases, and it’s easy to do that. It is common—and good practice—for mainstream journalists to avoid imprecise phrases like “pro-life,” and instead call the position “anti-abortion.” Reuters has tight rules for using the word “terrorist,” because the label is too often thrown around. For those with strong feelings about terrorism, it might have seemed insensitive, but for the sake of straight reporting, it was necessary. Brooks shouldn’t have used “cultural Marxism,” not because he should be censored, but because what he meant was “political correctness” and not (we hope) a century-old antisemitic trope.

It would be sensible, when the term is invoked by far-right extremists, to provide readers with a definition of the phrase and its origin. And unless it is invoked in a quote, writers like Brooks should be encouraged not to use it all. “They should define it as an antisemitic conspiracy theory with no basis in fact,” Sunshine said of mainstream news editors.

Failure to do that, as places like the Times and Post are guilty of, has bitter consequences. “It is legitimizing the use of that framework, and therefore it’s coded antisemitism,” Sunshine said.

The Real Russian Menace Is Just Hypercapitalism

In the years leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics, Russia spent something on the order of $50 billion to turn the sleepy Black Sea vacation town of Sochi into a glittering destination resort full of high-end amenities, luxury housing, international cuisine, palm trees and promenades. A giant ski resort bloomed across the slopes of the nearby western Caucasus mountains. Western journalists who arrived weeks before the games delighted in posting examples of incompetent (and, by implication, corrupt) building and construction, although many of these—such as a notorious photo of a bathroom stall with two toilets and a single toilet-paper dispenser—were later debunked.

Sochi and the 2014 Olympics became a byword for Russia’s notorious public graft, its estimated costs exceeding even those of the famously elaborate and expensive 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. And Sochi itself has become, in the American press, a go-to metonym for the autocratic governing regime of Vladimir Putin.

“President Trump has Mar-a-Lago and all the Trumpian gilded splendor behind the club gates,” reads a recent Washington Post report, whereas, “Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Games, is all about Russian President Vladimir Putin—a place to host foreign envoys and indulge in some Putin-style diversions.

“Sochi, in many ways, offers a distilled image of the country [Putin] wants Russia to be,” the Post continues. “Multibillion-dollar construction projects by Putin’s friends and oligarchs have created some of Russia’s best—and most expensive—infrastructure.”

This is a common formulation in coverage of Russia, a sort of half-baked orientalism in which the omnipresent hand of a half-divine potentate directs the activities of an entire society. And to be fair, Russia is a highly centralized state with a uniquely powerful president. But in raising the specter of Donald Trump’s tacky, expensive Mar-a-Lago, the implication is that Trump—with his own anti-democratic impulses and at-least-incidental connections to both the Russian state and its powerful “oligarchs”—is in some sense steering the U.S. toward a version of this Russian caricature: corrupt, dictatorial, designed and directed toward the whims of its maximum leader.

We do not have oligarchs in America—our press reserves that title for devious foreigners—but we do have developers. I can’t read about Sochi, where “the Spanish gourmet food shop in the former Olympic Village serves fresh-cut jamón until midnight,” where, “[f]rom behind your rustic board of cheese and ham, you can now gaze across a concrete expanse toward the Olympic stadiums and building facades bathed in elaborate, shifting lights,” without thinking of New York City’s recently completed Hudson Yards—a $25 billion development on the West Side of Manhattan whose “cross-cultural alchemy” produces, in the words of Eater, a “blood-red product sporting the dense chew of a firm steak, the fire of hot wings, and the complex, nutty porkiness of Spanish Iberico.” All of this amid a towering array of overpriced glass towers and within walking distance of “The Vessel,” an “intriguing bronze-shawarma-Eiffel-Tower-thingy” at the center of a megablock.

Hudson Yards was developed by two opaque private firms, Oxford Properties, a Canadian company, and The Related Companies, LP, a firm founded by former tax attorney and New York real estate mogul Stephen Ross. It was built on public land and incentivized with $6 billion in tax breaks.

The development incorporates a massive arts complex named “The Shed,” which has been inexplicably hailed by critics as the one decent piece of architecture in the whole development, even though it looks like the sort of oversized ice cube you’ll find in a bar serving “craft cocktails.” It will be run by Alex Poots, a peripatetic arts impresario who previously ran the Manchester International Festival and Park Avenue Armory.

Well, Sochi has Hans-Joachim Frey, the former director of the Semperoper in Dresden, Germany, and per the Post, “the artistic director of the Sirius Foundation, which converted many of the facilities in the Olympic Park to the center for gifted kids from across Russia.” Culture-washing, shameless, commercial real-estate development is part of the universal language of capitalism.

This, I think, is the critical point. There is much to dislike about contemporary Russia, but it’s absurd to pretend that its hypercapitalist development, its overinvestment in a few glittering cities at the expense of a decaying and struggling hinterland, represent anything other than the typical pattern in most advanced countries today. It is perhaps where Russia most resembles the so-called West.

Over the last several years, as the baroque tale of Russian election interference and Trump family connections to Russian money unspooled in elaborate and conspiratorial fashion, the American “resistance,” and much of mainstream American journalism, grew increasingly unhinged regarding all things Russian. Magazine graphic design shops bizarrely confused St. Basil’s Cathedral with the Kremlin, while internet “resistance” types began popularizing Trump-Russia images featuring the hammer and sickle of the long-collapsed Soviet Union. Perhaps you’ve seen the graphic emblazoned on a T-shirt.

Either way, it’s a strange fantasy. Since the fall of the USSR and the America-led social catastrophe of economic shock therapy, Russia has emerged as one of the most unfettered capitalist economies in the world, a Wild West of unregulated markets with a yawning gap between the very, very rich and everyone else. Sochi is less Mar-a-Lago than it is Billionaire’s Row—or half of Brooklyn, or waterfront Miami. The end of history, it turns out, is the same luxury condominium complex overgrowing the whole world.

Migrant Children Waiting for Reunification Were Held in Vans Up to 39 Hours

Last July, 37 migrant children between the ages of 5 and 12 boarded vans in Harlingen, Texas, for what was supposed to be a short drive to a nearby detention center, where they would be reunited with their parents, who had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead, as NBC News reported Monday, they waited, spending an average of 23 hours in the vans.

Emails obtained by NBC between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Health and Human Services and the nonprofit responsible for transporting the children show that the government did not have a clear plan for reunification—despite the Trump administration’s claims of the existence of a central database. As an HHS official explained in one email published by NBC, “We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children.”

“The children were initially taken into the facility, but were then returned to the van as the facility was still working on paperwork,” Andrew Carter, regional director of BCFS Health and Human Services, the nonprofit contractor responsible for the children, told NBC. “The children were brought back in later in the evening, but returned to the vans because it was too cold in the facility and they were still not ready to be processed in.”

Emails and phone calls between BCFS, ICE and HHS continued all night, as those responsible attempted to figure out how to reunify the families. According to NBC, HHS sent ICE staff at the detention center two notifications that the children would be coming, and that they were expecting to be reunited with their families.

Despite this, ICE staff worked their regular schedules, leaving the center before the children arrived. As NBC reports, “There was no one present to greet the arriving children and they were not equipped to process them in a parking lot.” A former HHS official with knowledge of the situation described the scene to NBC News as “hurried chaos.”

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Because the detention center was deemed too cold for the children, BCFS had to fetch new vans, blankets and food from the children’s initial shelter in Harlington. “DHS was clearly not ready to deal with the separations and did not take steps necessary to ensure a speedy reunification with their parents,” the official told NBC, adding, “Had DHS acted differently, the process would have been much smoother and the impact on the kids would have been much less.”

It took 39 hours for the last child to be reunited with family members.

An ICE spokesperson called the situation “unusual,” emphasizing to NBC News that “since then, no child has spent more than a few hours waiting to be reunited with their parents.”

Under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, nearly 3,000 migrant children were separated from their families before a federal judge in San Diego barred the practice in 2018 and ordered that children be reunited with their families within 30 days.

In May, almost a year later, “as many as 55 children separated last year under zero tolerance are still in Health and Human Services (HHS) custody at shelters around the country,” NBC News reported. And those 55 children were separated before the practice was barred. As USA Today reported last month, despite the court order, at least 389 families have been separated since July 2018, according to an official government count; immigration rights advocates believe the figure may be higher.

 

Who’s Behind the Iran Disinformation Campaign?

What follows is a conversation between Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

SHARMINI PERIES It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. The US State Department has the very responsibility of communicating US foreign policy objectives to the American public. Now, under the Trump administration, briefings by the State Department has been occasional, therefore, reneging on that responsibility to keep us informed. But this month, it appears that they have somehow resumed some of these briefings and these briefings are important to have so that we as journalists have an opportunity to question the policy that they’re engaged in. Now, with me to address some of what comes out of these briefings is Lawrence Wilkerson. He’s the former Chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell under the Bush administration, and now a Distinguished Adjunct Professor at the College of William and Mary, who was very involved in the State Department briefings when he was at the service of Colin Powell. Larry, good to have you here.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON Good to be with you, Sharmini.

SHARMINI PERIES Why are these State Department briefings so important for us?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON I’m sure that they’re important for the wide array of Americans who are apathetic, ignorant, [laughs] whatever, all across this country that I have contact with all the time as I travel throughout the country. But they are important for what I call the national security elite and that group of people who report on the national security elite— journalists, reporters, media personnel, and so forth— and in that respect, they are important because they get the information out with regard to American foreign policy. They should be conducted on a routine basis and they should probably be conducted in conjunction with events, whether it’s the Secretary of State traveling to a particular series of foreign countries, or whether it’s a policy announcement, or whether it’s just a general information briefing with the journalist table. Usually, these journalists are not just—And this is hard to say in today’s world because journalists are about an inch deep today. There are no Ernie Pyles, Hanson Baldwin, Drew Peterson, Walter Lippmanns, or anyone like that today. They all pretty much just go from subject to subject and don’t really know their brief very well, which is a shame.

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But usually, the diplomatic reporters, if you will, are a cut above some of the others, and they know how to interpret diplomatic talk. They know how to interpret the information coming out of the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, or the official spokesperson, or even the Secretary of State, or the Deputy Secretary of State. They’re important because they give the national security elite some idea of just what American foreign policy is supposed to consist of. And I would say this too—Generally speaking, in the past, State Department briefings have been the least full of lies or obfuscation, or other manner of hiding the truth. Generally speaking, the diplomatic briefings are fairly accurate in terms of what US foreign policy is. I’d even say that in comparison to DOD public affairs briefings, which I have a lot of experience with too. Of late, however, I would say the government is of a single mind in that and this 29th of May briefing by Ortagus substantiates this. It’s of the mind of delivering either pablum, or even from the State Department briefers, either pablum or information that just makes your mind boggle when it’s delivered, and this latest briefing was no exception.

SHARMINI PERIES Occasionally, there are some very interesting nuggets that are let out. Let’s listen to one of these by Morgan Ortagus, who is a spokesperson for the State Department. This is a briefing she conducted on May 29th when she was asked about Iran. Here’s what she said.

MORGAN ORTAGUS Our maximum pressure campaign on Iran is designed to deny the Iranian regime, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, the means to conduct its destructive foreign policy. Our campaign is working. The campaign is starving Iran’s proxies of the funds they rely on to operate on behalf of the regime. For the first time ever, Hezbollah, Iran’s top beneficiary, has been forced to publicly appeal for financial support. The Washington Post reported this month that our sanctions have forced Hezbollah to make draconian spending cuts.

SHARMINI PERIES All right. Now, this may have seemed routine at the time, but this has actually set off a series of other questions, incurred inquiries and coverage about their plan for Iran. Larry, tell us more about that.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON I was listening to that as she was speaking. I’d read it in transcript form, but as she was speaking, it’s a little easier to interpret just how intimate she is with the details of what she’s saying. She’s reading, either reading it in her mind because she’s virtually memorized it, or she’s actually reading it from a script. Richard Boucher, our spokesperson for most of the time when Powell and I were in the State, was quite a different sort of individual. He put a lot of human emphasis into things and was very convincing. That’s about as convincing as anybody else— from Pompeo to Trump, to whomever— saying those lies. Those are lies. They’re outright lies. When you look at, for example, Hezbollah. Hezbollah raises money all the time. If you look at what Hezbollah has done and chronicled by someone like Ali Soufan and his new group, the Soufan Group—Ali, having been the FBI’s probably most talented counterterrorism officer, broke the case in Yemen against the Al-Qaeda people who attacked the USS Cole in Port Aden, Yemen; broke the case against the first World Trade Center bombers. Ali is probably the best and Ali published a report recently that showed what the so-called terrorists that Iran sponsors— prominent amongst them Hezbollah— have done in the last few years and you might be surprised.

Most Americans would be surprised, given what she just said, given what Mike Pompeo says, given what Donald Trump says. Hezbollah has not conducted a terrorist attack against a US or a US-allied asset in the entirety of 2018 and 2019. This is this formidable terrorist group that Iran sponsors. Of course, the group is sponsored because Israel has the most sophisticated army, air force, navy in the region. Not only that. Israel is backed by the United States of America, whom we keep hearing has the greatest armed forces on the face of the earth. So, what do the people who are opposed to Israel in any way, fashion, or form have to do? They have to go to other means. They have to go to asymmetric means. In this case, we choose to call those means terrorism, and Iran happens to sponsor Hezbollah and, oh yes, they sponsor Hamas too.

If you’ll take a look at what Hamas has been doing in the last 18 to 24 months, it’s not been too formidable either. On the other hand, and here’s where Ortagus and Pompeo and Trump and all the rest of them, lie through their teeth. On the other hand, those Sunni groups sponsored by Saudi Arabia and other people of means in the Middle East, have wreaked havoc— from the Philippines to Indonesia, to the very volatile region around Kashmir between India and Pakistan, to Pakistan itself, to Afghanistan, to inside Syria. I mean, these are groups like Al-Qaeda. These are groups that get money from Saudi Arabians and other Sunnis who are sponsoring them, and we are allied with these groups. This is just—You listen to these people, and you just, you despair of ever hearing the truth again from any official government agency.

SHARMINI PERIES Larry, just recently, a story broke at a number of different news outlets about the money that the State Department has been giving this organization called the Iran Disinformation [Project]. Tell us about that and how this story broke, and what you’ve learned about it so far.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON As I understand it, and I think it’s pretty firm right now because the State has actually, at least informally, made its apologies and said they’re going to correct the situation. Back up just a minute. The law, essentially, dictates that no tax dollars, no US tax dollars, no appropriated dollars, can be used by the State Department or for that matter, any other public information agency within the US government, to propagandize or to attack the US taxpayer, the American people. That makes sense, I think, that you don’t want your government using taxpayer dollars to actually try to influence its own people. You know, that happens through politics and PACs and everything else, but you don’t want taxpayer dollars going through the appropriated process, being disseminated to a government agency, and then having that government agency use those taxpayer dollars back on Americans. Well, that’s what they were doing.

They were using this campaign, and they were funding it from State Department public diplomacy monies, as I understand it. They were using this campaign to attack Americans who supported the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement with Iran, and to attack those Americans who now and tomorrow too, will be against war with Iran. So, they’ve had to apologize, egg all over their face. On top of all that, it looks like one of the instrumentalities in doing this and making this happen, was the Foundation for Defense of Israel. Oh, I’m sorry—The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, FTD. So this is really a nefarious bunch of people, and it is another earmark. It is another flag of the Donald Trump way of doing business. This administration will do anything, with anybody’s money, with anybody’s assets, to achieve the nefarious purposes it is set upon to do. And anyone who thinks that there aren’t high crimes and misdemeanors in this presidency already, it’s just, they’re smoking some really low-grade stuff.

SHARMINI PERIES The State actually came out and apologized, saying they didn’t know that this is how the money was being used. How honest is that?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON I don’t doubt that there were people in Public Diplomacy, in ECA, in wherever it was in the State Department, that channeled these monies down to these sources. I don’t doubt that there weren’t people in there who believed that they were handing the money over to legitimate causes. For example, they were handing it over to people who were going to bring a, sort of, black campaign or disinformation campaign against Iran, or against some other entity aiding Iran like Hezbollah or whatever, but it turned out to be that they were not just using it for that. They were also using it to propagandize Americans, to make Americans look bad who weren’t supporting their policy positions. There were people who probably didn’t know that, but I dare say there were two or three, or maybe a few more than that, people in this process who might have even been working directly for Mike Pompeo or some of his minions, and who knew all about it because it didn’t just happen.

SHARMINI PERIES So, we’ll leave it there for today, but I look forward to having you back. This is a wonderful conversation from once an insider. I thank you for joining us today.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON Take care, Sharmini.

SHARMINI PERIES And thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.

Have Democrats Abandoned Ohio Auto Workers to Trump?

The vacant Lordstown General Motors facility is a frightening sight—6.2 million square feet of modern industrial might spread over 900 acres doing absolutely nothing except depressing the regional economy and the spirits of northeast Ohio. Just a few months ago it produced the Chevy Cruze and provided thousands of good paying industrial jobs with excellent benefits. Now it’s gone, and unless the Democrats have something meaningful to say about it, they too may be gone.

Lordstown is the poster child for modern financialized capitalism and runaway inequality. It symbolizes the kind of system in which the super-rich reap the rewards and the rest of us pay the price.

This new version of capitalism burst onto the scene when Wall Street deregulation took hold in the early 1980s, but it really came into full view when Wall Street’s insatiable greed took down the economy in 2007. The financial crash put GM on life support, and it quickly became crystal clear that textbook capitalism was a fiction.

Under the supposed rules of free-markets, the corporations that cannot compete successfully should perish—what Schumpeter called creative destruction. In 2007, most of Wall Street’s big banks—as well as GM—would have gone down, but their size and the centrality of these mammoth institutions meant that their rapid demise (without government intervention) would crater the entire economy. They were, instead, the beneficiaries of taxpayer bailouts.

The mythical capitalism of creative destruction is long gone. There are new rules for financialized capitalism. One demands that we the taxpayers must bailout both the biggest Wall Street banks and the largest corporations, like GM, because they are far too big to fail. It’s the ultimate blackmail. Either we pay or we are all economically devastated.

A second new rule of the new capitalism dictates that not only must we bail them out, but we are not permitted to ask for anything substantial in return.

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Unlike private investors who provide capital to distressed companies, we taxpayers do not get any ownership rights with our investment, nor do we get a high rate of return on our money. We also do not have a say in how the bailout enterprises do business, nor are we able to remove the predatory executives (and jail the ones who broke the law.) In exchange for our financial guarantees, we are not permitted to demand that a corporation like GM must keep its jobs in the U.S., nor may we insist that they refrain from giving future revenues via stock buybacks to their super-rich investors (who would have earned nothing without our largess). Instead these bailed-out entities are returned to their private owners as soon as possible so that they can again be run by and for the wealthy.

What Did GM Do After We Bailed Them Out?

As soon as GM could amass a sizable profit, it engineered a $5 billion stock buyback to enrich their top officers and hedge fund investors. The pressure for the stock buybacks came from none other than Harry J. Wilson, a former member of the Obama bailout team. On our dime he learned all there was to know about GM, which he then put to work to enrich himself. He formed an investment group of hedge funds to buy up GM shares and when they had sufficient control, demanded the massive stock buyback. He prevailed and walked off with tens of millions of dollars. The financial strip-mining of GM workers and the communities so dependent on the company could then proceed in earnest.

Today, GM is a private enterprise constrained only by its union contracts. Its primary goal is to generate as much cash flow as possible in order to dole out more stock buybacks to enrich super-wealthy elites and its top officers who are paid through stock incentives. That cash comes from slashing U.S. jobs and outsourcing as much production as possible to low wage areas around the world.

These corporate executives made a cold-blooded decision that the Chevy Cruze, although profitable, would not generate as much profit as SUVs and trucks. So they shut down Lordstown entirely, along with several other U.S. facilities.

There was an alternative. They could have put the new Chevy Blazer into these idle facilities. But instead they decided that more cash for stock buybacks could be generated by assembling the Blazer in Mexico.

What Is the Democratic Party’s Response?

For nearly a generation, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party has aided and abetted this financial strip-mining. Starting with Bill Clinton they have led the charge to deregulate Wall Street and promote trade deals that make it easier and easier to shift production abroad. They poured and drank the Wall Street Kool-Aid, which claimed the rise of financialized capitalism would bring riches to us all. Instead, manufacturing collapsed, the average worker wage stalled and the CEO/worker wage gap rose from 45 to 1 in 1970 to an obscene 800 to 1 today.

Some liberal Democrats just throw up their hands and say there’s nothing much that can be done about all of this. Globalization is here to stay and automation is killing these jobs anyway. So the best we can do is provide retraining and cash subsidies for those who have been left behind.

Other liberals seem worry that if we try to keep these jobs in the U.S. we would be taking jobs away from poorer workers in less developed nations. In effect they seem to believe that financialized capitalism is some kind of philanthropic organization designed to uplift the poor, rather than a machine designed to enrich elites.

Still others argue that we should not cater at all to these manufacturing workers who are largely white males (but, actually less so each year). Instead they argue that Democrats should worry about women, people of color and the LGBTQ communities who will never work in the declining manufacturing sector.

Warning: Any candidate arguing anything like the above positions should stay clear of Lordstown.

The Fatalistic Fallacy

What unites these positions is an erroneous dogma. The decline of manufacturing in the U.S. is not an inevitable product of the global economy, no matter how often that false narrative is repeated by politicians and pundits. Germany, for example, is far more dependent on global trade than the U.S. and it has as least as much automation. Nevertheless, manufacturing in Germany is nearly twice as large as a percentage of their economy—20.66 percent as of 2016 compared to only 11.6 percent for the U.S economy. And German workers earn more. The total compensation for a German manufacturing worker is $43.18 per hour versus $39.03 in the U.S.

Manufacturing jobs declined in the U.S. because both political parties joined hands in facilitating Wall Street deregulation, tax cuts on corporate and financial elites, and anti-worker trade deals that make it easier and easier to ship jobs abroad.

Do Progressive Democrats Have a Plan?

It’s not easy to come up with a fix for Lordstown, Carrier and thousands of other profitable facilities that have been shuttered. To do so requires changing the most fundamental rules of financialized capitalism, something that only Bernie Sanders has so far addressed. Let’s think back to how it might work in the case of GM.

It’s 2007 and GM is on life support. The government offers a $50 billion bailout. In exchange, however, “We the People” then set terms for this bailout:

No stock buybacks, period.
No profitable facility shall be shut down, ever.
As long as GM is viable, the current number of workers must be maintained in the U.S. or GM will lose any current and future government contracts, tax credits and state/local subsidies.
CEO salaries can be no higher than 12 times that of its average employee.
Unions, the government and community stakeholders shall have seats on the board of directors (as in Germany)

In effect this would be saying that any too-big-to-fail corporation that is bailed out becomes a joint enterprise among key stakeholders. In the case of banks, they would become public banks like the Bank of North Dakota.

That would have stopped the closing of Lordstown and many other GM facilities. Writ large it would dramatically increase the production of decent paying jobs all over the U.S and reduce some of the financial strip-mining that produces runaway inequality.

Anything short of this—like praying another company will take over these mammoth facilities—will seem hollow to those who have been crushed by this process.

The choice is clear: Either we have the courage to interfere with financialized capitalism or we will once again abandon these workers to demagogues like Trump.

Joe Biden’s Climate Plan Falls Woefully Short

Progressive groups on Tuesday welcomed a new 22-page policy proposal to deal with the climate crisis from former Vice President and current 2020 Democratic presidential primary contender Joe Biden, but said that the plan still wasn’t enough.

Biden’s proposal comes after the former vice president endured sustained pressure from grassroots organizations demanding he provide a clear path forward for solving the ongoing environmental catastrophe.

Biden climate plan:

— $1.7 trillion in new spending, paid for by reversing GOP tax cuts

— Target of net-zero emissions by 2050

— Embraces Green New Deal “framework”

— End to fossil fuel subsidies

— Ban on oil/gas permits on public lands on “Day One”https://t.co/Xf2uYJSQqJ

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) June 4, 2019

The Biden campaign, in a statement announcing the plan, said that the policies would have positive effects for the U.S. economy.

“If executed strategically, our response to climate change can create more than 10 million well-paying jobs in the United States that will grow a stronger, more inclusive middle class enjoyed by communities across the country, not just in cities along the coasts,” the campaign said.

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Joe Biden Unmasked



by Tangerine Bolen

The proposal represents a recognition on the part of Biden’s campaign that the party’s base is not willing to accept a tepid response to the crisis from candidates, said Jim Manley, a former aide to former Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

“Biden has been trying to take somewhat of a centrist tack,” Manley told the Post, “but he has to appease the core of the base if he’s going to win the primary.”

On Monday, as Common Dreams reported, the climate group Sunrise Movement criticized Biden for not producing concrete solutions to environmental disaster after Biden was one of four Democratic primary contenders who declined to answer a Washington Post survey on climate policy.

In a statement, Sunrise welcomed Biden’s about-face.

“The pressure worked,” said Sunrise executive director Varshini Prakash. “We forced them to backtrack and today, he put out a comprehensive climate plan that cites the Green New Deal and names climate change as the greatest challenge facing America and the world.”

However, Prakash said, the policy proposal isn’t enough.

“We need even more ambition from candidates if we’re serious about saving millions of people from death before entire nations sink into the sea,” said Prakash.

Oil Change U.S. strategic communications director David Turnbull pointed to Biden’s proposal as evidence that the grassroots effort to push candidates on climate was working.

“Today’s climate plan from Joe Biden is the latest recognition that climate change is the defining issue of the 2020 election,” said Turnbull.

While Turnbull welcomed the former vice president’s proposals, the plan has some glaring blind spots.

“Biden’s plan remains problematic in several ways, and we hope he will listen to concerns from communities and scientists in the days and weeks ahead,” said Turnbull. “Reliance on unproven techno-unicorns like carbon capture and storage promotes the interests of the incumbent fossil fuel industry, while forestalling critical action needed to swiftly move away from fossil fuels completely.”

Other groups also critiqued the Biden plan on the merits and for its perceived lack of ambition.

Greenpeace USA senior climate campaigner John Noël, in a statement, said that Biden’s proposal “does not do nearly enough.”

“For someone who continues to call the climate crisis an ‘existential threat’—and whose competitors are delivering with visionary climate plans with the potential to transform our democracy and economy—we hope to see more out of Biden,” Noël said.

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth Action, was more direct in his criticism.

“This plan embraces dangerous nuclear power, environmentally-harmful biofuels, and foolish dreams of carbon capture and sequestration that will lock in our continued dependence on fossil fuels,” said Pica. “Like most candidate climate plans, it barely addresses agriculture and the U.S.’s international obligations as the world’s largest historic emitter.”

Perhaps the strongest rejection of the Biden policy proposal came from Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Action.

“Joe Biden’s climate plan is a cobbled-together assortment of weak emissions targets and unproven technological schemes that fail to adequately address the depth and urgency of the climate crisis we face,” said Hunter. :This plan cannot be considered a serious proposal to tackle climate change.”

Biden leads polling in the 2020 primary, with a double digit lead in support over his closest two rivals, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

The Democratic field will meet for its first two debates on June 26 and 27 on MSNBC.

Blacks, Latinos at Risk of Undercount in 2020 Census

ORLANDO, Fla. — Emily Bonilla is worried her district in metro Orlando will be undercounted during next spring’s once-in-a-decade head count of everybody in the United States because of who lives there: new arrivals, immigrants, the poor, renters and rural residents who sometimes regard government with suspicion.

“We’re growing so fast that I know we have more people in the area than the data is stating. This area already is undercounted,” said Bonilla, a county commissioner in one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S.

With the 2020 census count less than a year away, a new report says undercounting certain populations will be likely, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Census Bureau, nonprofits and state and local officials to encourage participation.

Nationwide, the decennial census could fail to count anywhere from 900,000 to 4 million people, with blacks, Hispanics and children younger than 5 most vulnerable to being overlooked, according to estimates released Tuesday by the Urban Institute.

Florida, California, Georgia, New York, Nevada, Texas and New Mexico have the highest risk for undercounting, according to the Urban Institute, a think tank that conducts social and economic research.

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Republican Plot to Entrench White Power Revealed



by

Undercounting could diminish power and money in those areas for the next decade. The 2020 census determines the allocation of more than $675 billion in federal spending on schools, transportation and health care, as well which states gain or lose U.S. congressional seats.

“A child at age 3, if they’re missed, these decisions matter for the next 10 years. That child is then 13 and their school has missed out on their fair share of funding because of that miscount,” said Diana Elliott, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute.

The Urban Institute report said that even if the 2020 census count has the same participation rate as the 2010 count, which was considered successful, communities across the country could still be undercounted because the United States has grown more diverse in the past decade and has more renters.

Also increasing the risk are budget shortfalls that limited tests for the count and the fact that the Census Bureau for the first time is encouraging residents to answer questions online. Adding a question about citizenship could further dampen the response among some populations.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule later this month on whether the form will have a question about whether respondents are citizens. The U.S. Justice Department claims it’s needed to protect the voting rights of minorities who are citizens, but opponents say it will suppress the count of immigrants who fear law enforcement will get the information. States with large Hispanic populations also will be undercounted, opponents say.

Hard-to-count populations are less likely to respond via the Internet than groups that have been overcounted in the past, such as homeowners and whites, according to the Urban Institute report. Previous studies “suggest that while the Internet-first approach will be efficient and save costs to the Census Bureau, it won’t necessarily find those people who are hard to count,” Elliott said.

Wealthy populations may be overcounted because some families own a second home and could be counted twice, according to the Urban Institute and other research groups that study the census count

In Orlando, Bonilla, the county commissioner, said all the residents in her district need to be represented correctly because so much is at stake.

“We need the data to be accurate and as up-to-date as possible, and we can only do that if everybody is counted,” Bonilla said.

Trump Companies Accused of Tax Evasion in Panama

The owners of a 70-story Panama City hotel tower formerly managed by President Donald Trump’s companies are accusing them of stiffing the Panamanian government.

In a legal filing Monday in an ongoing lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, private equity manager Orestes Fintiklis and the company he leads, Ithaca Capital Partners, claimed that two Trump companies failed to pay Panamanian taxes equal to 12.5% of the management fees they drew from the hotel.

The Trump entities were allegedly supposed to withhold those fees in advance and pay them to the government regardless of whether the property was profitable or not. Instead, the Trump companies simply kept the money, the suit claims, “thus intentionally evading taxes.” That and other financial irregularities exposed Fintiklis and the companies he represents “to millions of dollars in liability,” according to the suit, which also claims Trump companies sought to cover up their actions. The filing does not say whether a tax penalty has been levied by Panamanian authorities.

Fintiklis declined to comment.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In prior legal pleadings, the Trump entities have denied wrongdoing. The Trump Organization also countersued last year, accusing Fintiklis and Ithaca of a “fraudulent scheme” that breached Trump’s 20-year management contract.

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White House for Sale: Emoluments, Corruption and Donald Trump



by Amy Goodman

The dust-up is the latest fallout from Trump’s foreign business entanglements. Trump projects in Canada, Mexico, India, Azerbaijan and elsewhere have also come under scrutiny. And he has spent nearly his entire presidential tenure seeking to dismiss or downplay his dealings with Russians related to a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. His former lawyer Michael Cohen is serving a prison term in part for lying to investigators about that project.

In recent years, Trump has typically licensed his name to other players — selling the right to put his name on the building but not investing his own money. He often also seeks to manage the building once it’s built. Like many other projects, the Panama development is a hotel-condo arrangement, where buyers purchase hotel rooms that are then rented out by the management company.

Ithaca Capital’s suit, filed originally in January last year and amended Monday, is seeking at least $17 million in damages, alleging that Trump companies mismanaged the hotel and let it fall into disrepair. The suit claimed that the hotel sat “virtually empty,” with portions going uncleaned for years.

Led by Cypriot businessman Fintiklis, Ithaca Capital bought 202 of the 369 hotel-condo units at what was then called the Trump Ocean Club in 2017. The next year, Ithaca evicted Trump Organization employees from the sail-shaped waterfront structure, which also houses a casino and shops. Trump employees and security personnel tried to block the effort, resulting in shoving matches that attracted international headlines.

Trump’s company tried unsuccessfully to convince Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela to intervene on Trump’s behalf. When Fintiklis’ group eventually took control, it found walls had been hastily built to obstruct access to certain areas — one was in the middle of a hallway, another in front of an elevator bank — including inner offices. Trump employees also shredded hotel documents, Fintiklis’ group alleged.

Trump’s name was scraped from a stone wall in front of the tower, which is now the JW Marriott Panama. It was one of several properties that have removed Trump’s name in recent years.

In its complaint, Ithaca Capital also claims Trump’s son Eric and employees misled Ithaca when it was performing due diligence before buying into the hotel. The claims echo similar complaints made in other projects involving Trump businesses. ProPublica in October detailed how Trump and his children engaged in deceptive practices — including in Panama — while promoting at least a dozen development projects in the U.S. and abroad.

At an August 2016 meeting, Eric Trump allegedly told Fintiklis and two other Ithaca board members that the hotel was outperforming the market in Panama, a claim the suit asserts was false. After the meeting, Trump companies sent Ithaca two brochures that reiterated his statements about the hotel “maintaining a leading market share” in Panama.

Trump representatives repeated the statements to Ithaca in early 2017, the new legal filings say. At a February 2017 Trump Tower meeting that included Donald Trump Jr., Trump employees again said the hotel was outperforming the market. Ithaca Capital leaders relied on these statements when deciding to make the purchase, the suit said, adding that “these representations were false and designed to mislead Ithaca into believing that the Hotel was performing better than its peers.”

The suit said the false representations were made to other owners, too. In a December 2017 letter to hotel owners other than Ithaca, it said, Eric Trump wrote, “Over the last three years, the hotel has outperformed the market by a wide margin — as much as 20 percent — by virtually every measure.”

Trump companies also “artificially deflated” the hotel’s expenses and underreported Trump’s management fees in financial statements presented to Ithaca, the suit alleged, leading the hotel to appear to be in a better financial position than it was.

The suit alleged other improper financial behavior, saying that instead of making the necessary distributions to hotel room owners, “Trump hoarded their cash.” It said Trump companies failed to make appropriate financial disclosures and drained reserve accounts to pay operational costs, “all the while Trump lined its pockets with ill-gotten management fees.”

The suit said Ithaca wouldn’t have bought the hotel if it had known about the tax and social security problems and other financial irregularities.

An earlier suit filed by Trump Ocean Club condo owners also objected to the Trumps’ management practices. The plaintiffs accused Trump employees of overspending and taking excessive bonuses, as well as mishandling the building’s finances. Owners said they saw a steep increase in fees. Trump responded by suing those owners, too, demanding $75 million for wrongful termination. That litigation was settled in 2016.

Russia Demands Tinder Give User Data to Secret Services

MOSCOW — Russia is requiring dating app Tinder to hand over data on its users — including messages — to the national intelligence agencies, part of the country’s widening crackdown on internet freedoms.

The communications regulator said Monday that Tinder was included on a list of online services operating in Russia that are required to provide user data on demand to Russian authorities, including the FSB security agency.

Tinder, an app where people looking for dates swipe left or right on the profiles of other users to reject or accept them, will have to cooperate with Russian authorities or face being completely blocked in the country. The rule would apply to any user’s data that goes through Russian servers, including messages to other people on the app.

Tinder, which is based in West Hollywood, California, said Monday that it has registered to be compliant with Russian authorities but added that it has “not handed over any data to their government.” But the company did not say whether it plans to do so in the future.

Russia adopted a flurry of legislation in recent years tightening control over online activity. Among other things, internet companies are required to store six months’ worth of user data and be ready to hand them over to authorities.

Russian authorities last year issued an order to ban messaging app Telegram after it refused to hand over user data. Some top Russian officials, including the FSB chief, attacked Telegram, claiming “extremists” used the platform to plot terrorist attacks.

Despite authorities’ attempt to block Telegram, it is still available in Russia.

Social network LinkedIn has also tried to resist but has been less fortunate. It refused to comply with requirements that personal data on Russian citizens be stored on servers within Russia. In 2016, a court ordered that LinkedIn be blocked.

A total of 175 online services are on the list requiring them to hand over user data to Russian authorities. Most are small websites in Russian regions.

Popular messaging services such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger are not on the list. Russian authorities say that is because law enforcement agencies have not approached them for data from those particular apps, but it is widely understood that blocking Facebook and its popular apps like WhatsApp or Instagram would be a big step for regulators.

One of the recent victims of the watchdog’s list was Zello, a voice messaging app popular with Russian truck drivers. Zello was an important tool to mobilize truck drivers protesting against a new toll system in 2015.

After nearly a year of attempts to block the app, Zello became unavailable in Russia last year.

__

AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this story from San Francisco.

Will the Police Behind Ferguson’s ‘Debtors Prison’ Ever Face Justice?

In January 2014, Tonya DeBerry was driving through an unincorporated area of St. Louis County, Missouri, when a police officer pulled her over for having expired license plates.

After discovering that DeBerry, 51, had several outstanding traffic tickets from three jurisdictions, the officer handcuffed her and took her to jail.

To be released, she was told, she would have to pay hundreds of dollars in fines she owed the county, according to her account in a federal lawsuit. But after her family came up with the money, DeBerry wasn’t released from custody. Instead, she was handed over to the municipalities of Ferguson and Jennings, and in each city, she was told she would be released only after she paid a portion of the fines she owed them, according to the lawsuit.

It was as if she were being held for “ransom,” her lawyer would later say.

The Supreme Court ruled almost 50 years ago that a person can’t be jailed for not being able to pay a fine. But like so many people in Missouri, DeBerry had ended up cycling through a succession of jails for that very reason, caught up in what critics have called modern-day “debtors prisons,” used by towns to keep fines flowing into municipal coffers.

“It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” said her daughter, Allison Nelson, who has also spent time in jail for not being able to pay traffic fines.

If DeBerry and her family were exasperated by the heavy-handed collection efforts, they would learn how hard it would be to hold the authorities accountable, especially in Ferguson, even after the killing of Michael Brown later that year drew national attention to the city’s troubled criminal justice system.

The city slowly stopped jailing people for not being able to pay fines as the news media showed the victims were primarily black and the Justice Department made clear that what Ferguson had been doing was wrong. But four years after a federal class-action suit was filed against the city on behalf of thousands of people who claimed they were jailed for their inability to pay fines, the plaintiffs are still waiting for redress.

The city has sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, filing a succession of motions, arguing among other reasons that instead of suing the city, the plaintiffs should be suing the municipal division of the state court. All three of the motions have been denied by the judge, Audrey G. Fleissig, of the U.S. District Court in St. Louis, though one of the rulings was appealed and that took about a year to resolve.

One issue has proved to be particularly frustrating to the plaintiffs: whether the city of Ferguson is even insured for a class action.

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In March 2016, the lawyer representing Ferguson sent an email to a representative of the city’s insurer, saying that the scope of the lawsuit had expanded, and that concern about the case “grew” after a similar suit was settled for what was believed to be a “substantial amount of money.”

The five-sentence email concluded with the lawyer, Peter Dunne, of the St. Louis firm Pitzer Snodgrass, saying that legal action may be necessary to resolve the question of whether the city was covered for a class action.

“We believe a DJ [declaratory judgment] suit to determine coverage may be necessary,” Dunne wrote.

Three months later, the insurance trust filed a declaratory judgement suit against Ferguson in St. Louis County Circuit Court, asking a judge to find that the city did not have insurance coverage for class actions.

Dunne’s role was not publicly known until September, when St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger reported Ferguson’s allegation that Dunne had violated his duty to the city. The email documenting Dunne’s discussion of a lawsuit with the insurer was first obtained by ProPublica. Dunne, one of the firm’s principals, did not respond to requests for comment. The other principals did not respond to emails or to a call to the firm’s office.

Suggesting legal action involving his own client was a breach of legal ethics, some experts said, and the revelation has only deepened the sense among the plaintiffs and their supporters that the deck is stacked.

“No matter where the citizens of Ferguson go in the legal system, justice is really hard for them to obtain,” said Vincent Southerland, executive director of New York University School of Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law. “It’s another example that we have a legal system that was not built to protect and vindicate the rights of the most vulnerable among us.”

The killing of Brown by a police officer in August 2014 and the unrest that followed thrust Ferguson into the middle of a growing national debate over race and law enforcement. But for black people in Ferguson and the surrounding North County region, racial discrimination had long defined their relationship with the local police and courts.

Even as the rest of the country moved on from Ferguson, the people seeking a judgment against the city found themselves mired in the machinations of an insular legal system and an overburdened insurance carrier.

Ferguson, a city of about 21,000 people, was insured through a cooperative of 25 municipalities called the St. Louis Area Insurance Trust, commonly referred to as SLAIT.

The trust has operated largely out of the public eye. It took the persistence of Messenger, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his columns on “debtors prisons” in rural Missouri, to make the trust comply with open government laws.

Messenger said the rural courts ensnared whites, while in Ferguson and elsewhere in North County, it was blacks who were victimized. “But it’s the same concept,” he said. “It’s policing on the poor, it’s jurisdictions that don’t have a tax base anymore looking to the judicial system as a fundraising tool and judges allowing themselves to be tax collectors rather than purveyors of justice.”

The trust hired Dunne to provide Ferguson’s defense of the class-action lawsuit. But his firm, Pitzer Snodgrass, was also providing the trust with legal advice on insurance coverage issues, according to a court filing by Ferguson. That set up what Ferguson said in the filing was a conflict that the city had not been made aware of.

Even if city officials wanted to settle the case, the trust claims in court filings there isn’t coverage and it won’t pay out. The insurance trust’s lawsuit will determine whether there is coverage.

Michael Downey, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on legal ethics, said that unless Dunne had Ferguson’s permission, Dunne should not have talked to the insurer about the possibility of a lawsuit over coverage.

“A breach of the duty of confidentiality basically to encourage a party to take action against your client is a pretty serious violation of the rules,” Downey said.

Even if Dunne thought he was conveying something that the insurer already knew, the exchange was still concerning, Downey said.

The trust, through its lawyer, declined to comment.

Michael Frisch, Georgetown University Law Center’s ethics counsel, said that, were the bar to pursue an investigation, any punishment would not be severe. A reprimand — at most, he said.

“It’s the kind of a thing that would not draw that much of a response from the bar,” Frisch said. “Lawyers tend not to get suspended for things like this.”

New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, who specializes in legal ethics, said that regardless of any punishment, Dunn’s actions are significant.

“It’s a big deal, because clients are entitled to loyalty,” he said. “If you can’t be equally loyal to both clients, then you have a conflict and you have to withdraw entirely or from one or the other client.”

For lawyers hired by insurance companies to represent policyholders, the question of who is the client was for many years unsettled ethical terrain, experts say.

Lawyers can feel a sense of obligation to the insurance companies that hire them — and that can provide a steady stream of business — said William Barker, co-author of “Professional Responsibilities of Insurance Defense Counsel.”

Barker, a Chicago lawyer with the firm Dentons, said that until the 1970s, lawyers hired by insurance companies to represent a policyholder typically thought of the company as their chief client. But a series of court decisions since then established that the lawyer owes undivided loyalty to the policyholder, and that is why the lawyer’s actions in the Ferguson case appear to be troubling, Barker said. “That’s something that the defense lawyer ought not to be doing,” he said. “The lawyer who is handling the defense ought not to be involved, certainly in advising the insurance company on coverage issues.”

Michael-John Voss, a lawyer for the ArchCity Defenders, the civil rights group that brought the lawsuit against Ferguson, expects to case to drag into 2020.

“The relief and the remedy has been a long time coming, and there’s no clear end in sight,” he said. “And it reemphasized to me the way that these larger structures are put in place to avoid accountability and to perpetuate a system of social control.”

ProPublica asked the insurance trust if it had instructed Dunne to act as he did, but the trust’s lawyer said the organization would not answer any of ProPublica’s questions because of the ongoing lawsuits.

The insurance cooperative was created in the 1980s to help small St. Louis-area municipalities share the cost of liability insurance and health care. The arrangement worked for the occasional slip-and-fall claim and other routine municipal litigation. But it has not held up well in the face of payouts to cops injured on duty and for actions by the police and the courts.

Most notably, the trust paid $1.5 million to Brown’s family in 2017 to settle a wrongful death claim against Ferguson. But that was hardly the only big hit in recent years. In 2016, a jury awarded $3 million to the family of Jason Moore, an unarmed 31-year-old man, who died after a Ferguson police officer delivered several shots from a Taser.

A state audit released in February showed the organization’s fund balance dropped to $3.8 million in 2018 from $12.2 million in 2016. Like many insurers, the trust also has its own coverage, known as reinsurance, and it turned to those carriers to help with the Moore verdict. But the companies have told the trust that they won’t cover the judgment in the Moore case because the companies allege the trust improperly notified them of the claim. The trust is suing the companies.

Dunne and his firm are no longer working on the Ferguson case. The firm was disqualified by the judge after it hired a lawyer from the ArchCity Defenders who represented one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs in court.

De’carlon Seewood, who stepped down in March after three and a half years as Ferguson’s city manager, said resolving the lawsuit will help the community move beyond the abuses and the notoriety that came with them.

“It is important to kind of move forward and show that new face, that better face,” Seewood said this year, before he left Ferguson to become the city manager in Fairburn, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Jeffrey Blume, Ferguson’s interim city manager, directed questions to the city’s attorney, who declined to answer.

Seewood said the city had hoped the insurance trust would take care of the settlement the way the insurer for the city of Jennings had. But Jennings was in a very different position. Its insurer was Travelers, the country’s sixth-largest property and casualty insurer. By contrast, the insurance trust is a small cooperative with dwindling funds.

“The insurance [trust] looked at the enormity of what’s being asked and they said that’s it’s outside their [coverage] of the city, and so the city finds itself fighting with its insurance company about [coverage],” Seewood said.

According to a memo written by the trust’s claims administrator, the plaintiffs originally asked for $27.5 million but during mediation in April 2016 reduced the demand to $9.5 million. That amount is what the plaintiffs believe, based on the policies, is the total coverage limit of Ferguson’s insurance.

Alexandra Lahav, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law and an expert in civil litigation, said a case like this typically would be resolved in about two years and said the insurance dispute was slowing the process.

“This really shouldn’t be a very complicated class action,” Lahav said.

Lisa Soronen, executive director for the State and Local Legal Center, a Washington organization that supports states and local governments in legal disputes that rise to the U.S. Supreme Court, said the dispute between the trust and Ferguson didn’t leave the city with many sound options other than fighting the case mightily.

“As a practical matter, Ferguson’s a really small city that has no money,” she said. “If there’s no insurance coverage and there’s a huge judgement, I don’t know how it would pay.”

John Rappaport, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who has studied the impact insurance can have on police practices and policies, said insurance trusts have a reputation for being less likely than commercial insurers to settle case involving police officers.

“The risk pools or the trusts, they see themselves as extensions of the cities themselves,” he said. “Their reluctance to settle litigation against the police would seem [to be] a kind of loyalty to their members — their cities.”

Rappaport said commercial insurers often see the issues as purely a matter of dollars and cents.

“Whereas if the city either is in a risk pool or the city represents itself, they see it as more of like a moral issue, like we have to stand up for our officers,” he said.

Even after the Ferguson suit is resolved, litigation in Missouri over “debtors prison” practices won’t be. ArchCity Defenders has lawsuits pending in six other cities, with more in the pipeline stretching beyond North County.

DeBerry, the Ferguson woman who was a named plaintiff in the Ferguson class action, was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit against neighboring Jennings, which settled for $4.8 million less than a year and a half after the suit was filed.

But the suit in Ferguson has dragged on longer than DeBerry could wait.

She died in April 2018.

“And now she will never even get a piece of this justice because she’s no longer here,” said Nelson, her daughter. “That’s sad, that’s really sad. It’s actually pathetic because it should have never come to that. It hurts.”