Chris Hedges's Blog, page 241

Mueller: Special Counsel Probe Did Not Exonerate Trump

WASHINGTON—Special counsel Robert Mueller said Wednesday he was barred from charging President Donald Trump with a crime but pointedly emphasized that his Russia report did not exonerate the president. If he could have cleared Trump of obstruction of justice he “would have said so,” Mueller declared.

The special counsel’s remarks, his first in public since being tasked two years ago with investigating Russian interference to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election, stood as a strong rebuttal to Trump’s repeated claims that he was exonerated and that the inquiry was merely a “witch hunt.” They also marked a clear counter to criticism, including by Attorney General William Barr, that he should have reached a determination on whether the president illegally tried to obstruct the probe by taking actions such as firing his FBI director.

Mueller made clear he believed he was restrained from indicting a sitting president — such an action was “not an option” — because of a Justice Department legal opinion. He did not use the word ‘impeachment” but said it was Congress’ job to hold the president accountable for any wrongdoing.

“If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said. “We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.”

Mueller’s statement largely echoed the central points of his 448-page report released last month with some redactions. But his remarks, just under 10 minutes long and delivered from a Justice Department podium, were nonetheless extraordinary given that he had never before discussed or characterized his findings and had stayed mute during two years of feverish public speculation.

Mueller, a former FBI director, said his work was complete and he was resigning to return to private life. For his rare appearance, he wore a black suit, crisp white shirt and blue tie, walking briskly onto the stage gripping a folder containing prepared remarks that he largely adhered to.

His remarks underscored the unsettled resolution, and revelations of behind-the-scenes discontent, that accompanied the end of his investigation. Mueller’s refusal to reach a conclusion on criminal obstruction opened the door for Barr to clear the president, who in turn has cited the attorney general’s finding as proof of his innocence.

Mueller has privately vented to Barr about his handling of the report, while Barr has publicly said he was taken aback by the special counsel’s decision to neither exonerate nor incriminate the president.

Under pressure to testify before Congress, Mueller did not rule it out. But he seemed to warn lawmakers that they would not be pulling more detail out of him. His report is “my testimony,” he said, and he won’t go beyond what is written in it.

“So beyond what I have said here today and what is contained in our written work,” Mueller said, “I do not believe it is appropriate for me to speak further about the investigation or to comment on the actions of the Justice Department or Congress.”

Trump, who has repeatedly and falsely claimed that Mueller’s report cleared him of obstruction of justice, modified that contention somewhat shortly after the special counsel’s remarks. He tweeted, “There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed!”

His personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, said that Mueller’s announcement “puts a period on a two-year investigation that produced no findings of collusion or obstruction by the president.”

Mueller’s comments, one month after the public release of his report on Russian efforts to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, appeared intended to both justify the legitimacy of his investigation against complaints by the president and to explain his decision to not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice.

Indicting Trump, he said firmly, was “not an option” in light of a Justice Department legal opinion that says a sitting president cannot be charged. But, he said, the absence of a conclusion should not be mistaken for exoneration.

“The opinion says the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” Mueller said, referring to the Justice Department legal opinion. That would shift the next move, if any, to Congress, and the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which would investigate further or begin any impeachment effort, commented quickly.

New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler said it falls to Congress to respond to the “crimes, lies and other wrongdoing of President Trump – and we will do so.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has so far discouraged members of her caucus from calling for impeachment, arguing that Democrats need to follow a methodical, step by step approach to investigating the president. But she hasn’t ruled it out.

On the other hand, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Mueller “has decided to move on and let the report speak for itself. Congress should follow his lead.”

Trump has blocked House committees’ subpoenas and other efforts to dig into the Trump-Russia issue, insisting Mueller’s report has settled everything.

That report found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to tip the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor. But it also did not reach a conclusion on whether the president had obstructed justice.

Barr has said he was surprised Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether the president had criminally obstructed justice, though Mueller in his report and again in his public statement Wednesday said that he had no choice. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided on their own that the evidence was not sufficient to support an obstruction charge against Trump.

Barr, who is currently in Alaska for work and was briefed ahead of time on Mueller’s statement, has said he asked Mueller if he would have recommended charging Trump “but for” the legal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, and that Mueller said “no.”

“Under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office,” Mueller said. “That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view that, too, is prohibited.”

Mueller, for his part, complained privately to Barr that he believed a four-page letter from the attorney general summarizing the report’s main conclusions did not adequately represent his findings. Barr has said he considered Mueller’s criticism to be a bit “snitty.”

____

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

The Egregious Disparity Behind Anti-Abortion Laws

In the past few weeks, my Facebook feed has exploded with posts about abortion. If you use Facebook, probably yours has too.

There’s a lot to say about abortion, especially now that Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, and Ohio have passed extremely restrictive laws banning abortions in cases where they previously would be legal. But I think there’s a bigger picture to look at too.

The bigger picture is women’s sexuality. Straight men’s sexuality is treated as more legit than women’s. The differences start at a young age.

How many families teach boys the correct names for their genitals, but do not do the same for little girls? Some families simply do not talk about female genitalia, or they call it something euphemistic (I’ve heard “privates,” “bottom,” and even “front butt”).

Consider the movie Pitch Perfect 2, in which a fictional a cappella group gets in trouble after Rebel Wilson accidentally flashes President Obama. In the film, the incident is reported on the news, but the very name of the body part is portrayed as so taboo that the news bleeps it out.

Little boys talk about their penises openly, and later they discuss masturbation and even porn with one another. While parents might not want their preteen or teen boys consuming porn, they often shrug off boys’ expressions of sexuality because “boys will be boys.”

In sex ed at home and at school, girls learn about avoiding sexual harassment and assault, pregnancy, and diseases. It’s taken for granted that men want and enjoy sex and that they will be the sexual aggressors. Often not discussed? Women’s desire for sex and sexual pleasure.

Science on female sexual pleasure is lacking because funders of science saw it as a frivolous topic to study. Many women experience pain during sex and are often written off by doctors.

How are women supposed to enter safely and healthily into sexual relationships when they are taught from the start that their sex organs are so shameful they are unspeakable? And that their role in sexual relationships is saying “no” until someday, at an appropriate time (once they are married?), they will say yes and then everything will magically fall into place?

Author Linda Kay Klein wrote about how impossible it is for women to simply shut down their sexuality for years and then, once married, instantly turn it back on again.

Men regulating women’s bodies through restrictive abortion laws is the tip of an iceberg in which women’s sexuality is stigmatized, de-legitimized, silenced, controlled, and misunderstood, even by women themselves.

Women and girls try to walk the impossible line between being seen as a prude or a slut, while hookup culture makes young straight women feel they need to give men access to their bodies in hopes that eventually the man may want to start a relationship. Sociologists study the “pleasure gap” in which men are more likely to climax than women in heterosexual sexual encounters.

Banning abortion denies women autonomy over their own bodies and treats women as if they lack the agency to know what is best for themselves. So does this larger picture of how society treats women’s sexuality.

Raising girls who understand and do not feel shame for normal, healthy sexuality — and boys who see women as sexual agents in their own right, not objects for male pleasure — is a first step toward reducing sexual assault and unwanted pregnancy.

And towards raising a generation of young people who will be capable of creating smarter policies around reproductive rights and health.

It’s Now Impossible to Deny Who Caused Climate Change

British scientists have re-asserted an essential reality about global warming: human activity, not slow-acting and so far unidentified natural cycles in the world’s oceans, is its cause.

That activity – including ever-increasing combustion of fossil fuels as well as the devastation of the natural forest – is enough to account for almost all the warming over the last century.

Researchers from the University of Oxford report in the Journal of Climate that they looked at all the available observed land and ocean temperature data since 1850.

They matched this not just with greenhouse gas concentrations but also with records of volcanic eruptions, solar activity and air pollution peaks – all of which affect temperature readings.

“This sounds boring, but sometimes boring results are important”

And their analysis once again confirms a finding first proposed in the 19th century by the Swedish Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius: that greenhouse gases are enough to explain the big picture of a slowly but inexorably heating world. Slow-acting global oceanic cycles would have had little or no influence.

“Our study showed there are no hidden drivers of global mean temperature. The temperature change we observe is due to the drivers we know,” said Friederike Otto of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute.

“This sounds boring, but sometimes boring results are important.”

Studies of this kind are a reminder of why science may, ultimately, be trusted: it takes nothing for granted. Researchers tend to go back and question their own and each other’s published conclusions. In the case of climate research, this has become almost a nervous tic.

Untidy evidence

But it is necessary because climate science in particular remains a work in progress: we live in a crowded, dynamic world and the evidence is always untidy and sometimes confusing, the interpretation of the data potentially subject to bias, and above all each conclusion is bedevilled by the question: is there something – some feedback, some factor, some actor – nobody has yet spotted?

So studies that confirm the big picture are always welcome, especially one that says: we can find no unknown factors. That is why boring results are important. It means that what humans do will change the outcome.

“In this case, it means we will not see any surprises when these drivers – such as gas emissions − change,” said Dr Otto.

“In good news, this means that when greenhouse concentrations go down, temperatures will do so as predicted; the bad news is there is nothing that saves us from temperatures going up as forecasted if we fail drastically to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Israeli Government Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes

We’ll know later today whether prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu will succeed in forming a government. If not, Israel will have snap elections in September. In parliamentary systems, coalitions are often made after the election. In the US, the two big parties have already made their coalitions before the election (the GOP is a combination of wealthy entrepreneurs, prairie farmers, and Evangelicals, which Trump manages to bring together around economic nationalism and hatred of certain ethnic groups, or maybe most of them.) In Israel, they have to put together the coalitions afterward. The Israeli far right, which dominates, has both secular and religious constituencies, and they absolutely despise one another.

Israeli society is, like that of the United States, deeply polarized between the secular-minded and the religious. Some 40% of Israelis report themselves not religious, and 23% say they do not believe in God.

In the 1990s, about a million immigrants came in from Ukraine and Russia (the former Soviet Union). They had been brought up to view religion as sort of like smoking– maybe it won’t kill you immediately but it is bad for you and probably will eventually kill you.

Pew Charitable Trust

At the same time, the Haredim or Ultra-Orthodox have grown from 2% in earlier decades to 8% of the population today. That would mean that they are about 700,000 strong, about the population of Detroit nowadays. Over the next 40 years, Israel’s population will double from nearly 9 million to about 18 million, which would make it a little more populous than the Netherlands. Haredim will then make up 29%, almost a third.

Haredim are a little like the Amish in Pennsylvania. About half of them don’t believe in being on the World Wide Web, and the number would be less if they actually listened to their rabbis. Many of them don’t believe in the legitimacy of the Israeli state, since they believe that only the coming of the Messiah could establish such a state, and therefore don’t like the idea of serving in the Israeli army. About half the men and 25% of the women are unemployed and they suffer from relatively high rates of poverty.

114,000 Ultra-Orthodox men are currently enrolled in religious seminary, or about 17% of the Haredi population (34% of its men).

Here’s the problem. The Russians and Ukrainians who came in the 1990s are often themselves irreligious and they don’t like the style of life of the Haredim. They are typically grouped in the Yisrael Beitenu (Israel is our Home) party. The recent Eastern European immigrants dislike that the Haredim essentially get stipends from the state and subsidized food, and most important, they mostly don’t have to serve in the army. (Some 3,000 a year do sign up for military duty and a minority now is fairly militant nationalists.)

The leader of the Russian-Ukrainian bloc in the Israeli parliament, the Moldovan immigrant Avigdor Lieberman, insists that an already-passed set of laws and regulations aimed at integrating the Haredim into the nation more, including a demand for military service.

With 120 seats in parliament, Netanyahu needs 61 to govern. His Likud Party has 35 seats.

Netanyahu needs the Yisrael Beitnenu seats to get to 61. But he also needs the votes of some small Ultra-Orthodox Parties. They want the government to soften the military service provision.

So far Lieberman is not yielding. (He also wants a war on little Gaza).

And so the divide between the non-religious and the religious is standing in the way of the formation of yet another far right Israeli government.

Ironically, if Netanyahu is ousted over all this, and becomes a civilian, he could be more open to prosecution. Lieberman’s militant secularism could bring him down and put him away.

Ironically, Binyamin Netanyahu played dirty to get another term as prime minister, impelled in part by the corruption charges chasing him, which he had hoped he could get parliament to immunize himself from. He played the racist card against the Palestinian-Israelis, over 20% of the population, and he convinced an allied party to make a coalition with the small far, far Right Otzma Yehudit or Jewish Power bloc, which has been accused of terrorism. Although he disappointed his allies on the far Right by declining to go to all out war against the Palestinians of Gaza, he loosened the rules of engagement to allow the Israeli army to just shoot down unarmed Palestinian protesters on their, the Gaza, side of the border.

This is a war crime, and indeed has been pursued so systematically that it may now rise to a crime against humanity.

But the current crisis is not about Palestine. I suppose it is in part over who will fight for Israel, if 27% of the future population checks out of the army and sees the state as illegitimate.

And, this gridlock in Israel produced by the secular-religious divide? We’ve got that too.

—–

We All Share Julian Assange’s Fate

Editor’s note: This article was first published in The Progressive.

The prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act represents a dangerous turn in President Donald Trump’s war on the First Amendment. Whether you love Assange or loathe him, it is vital to understand the eighteen-count indictment filed against him on May 23 in the context of that wider conflict. In a very real sense, we are all defendants in the case against Assange.

The new charges allege that Assange collaborated with former Army Intelligence Officer Chelsea Manning from 2009 to 2011 to obtain and publish national defense information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. items supplied by Manning included more than 250,000 classified State Department cables as well as several CIA-interrogation videos. Manning also leaked the now-widely viewed video of a 2007 attack staged by U.S. military Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed two Reuters employees and a dozen other people.

The new charges supersede an earlier one-count indictment that was filed secretly under seal in March 2018 and cited Assange for conspiring with Manning to decode a Defense Department computer password. Assange is currently in a London jail, serving a fifty-week sentence for jumping bail in 2012 while facing extradition to Sweden on rape allegations. He now faces extradition to the United States as well.

That would be a horrific outcome, not only for Assange personally, but for anyone concerned with freedom of the press.

Although the prosecution of government leakers like Manning has become more common in recent decades, prosecution of a news entity for publishing leaked information is something new. As the Congressional Research Service noted in a lengthy 2017 analysis:

“While courts have held that the Espionage Act and other relevant statutes allow for convictions for leaks to the press, the government has never prosecuted a traditional news organization for its receipt [and publication] of classified or other protected information.”

Indeed, the prosecution of Assange for alleged violations of the Espionage Act reopens a threat to press freedom that hasn’t been seen in decades.

In the landmark “Pentagon Papers” case (New York Times Company v. United States), the Supreme Court quashed the Nixon Administration’s effort to enjoin the Times and The Washington Post from publishing materials disclosed to them by former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. By a vote of 6-3, the court held that the attempt to place “prior restraints” on the two newspapers ran afoul of the First Amendment.

Similarly, in October 1979, a federal appeals court dismissed a complaint brought against The Progressive magazine on behalf of the Department of Energy to prevent publication of a feature story entitled, “The H-Bomb Secret.” The Progressive published the H-bomb article the following month. (Full disclosure: My review of G. William Domhoff’s book, “The Powers that Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America,” appeared in the same issue.)

The Department of Justice, now run by Attorney General William Barr, no doubt will contend that WikiLeaks is not a legitimate news organization deserving of Constitutional protections. But in fact, Assange and WikiLeaks have been honored over the years with several international journalism awards.

In any event, it is unlikely that the Department of Justice will be able to draw a principled distinction between publishers that merit First Amendment safeguards and those who do not.

Notably, the Obama Administration declined to indict Assange because of what was then described as the “New York Times problem”—that if Assange were charged, the Times, the Post and the Guardian, among others, would also have to be prosecuted for publishing files leaked by Manning.

The Trump Administration now appears ready to evade and, if possible, eradicate the “New York Times” problem, arguing that although the Espionage Act has never been applied to a publisher in the past, there’s a first time for everything. In making that argument, the administration will be able to point to the text of the act, which prohibits both the illegal acquisition and the subsequent publication of classified material.

Nor would the Pentagon Papers or The Progressive cases preclude the prosecution of Assange, as they applied only to prior restraints on publication. Neither case held that news outlets could not be prosecuted post-publication. The Supreme Court explicitly left the question unresolved in the Pentagon Papers case.

Trump has long been fixated with the press, which he has often slandered as “the enemy of the people.” In one of his first campaign speeches on the subject, delivered in Fort Worth, Texas, in February 2016, he promised to take revenge on the media if elected, telling a cheering audience:

“I think the media is among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met. They’re terrible. . . If I become President, oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”

Driven as always by self-interest and opportunism, Trump has now flipped from professing his “love” for WikiLeaks during the campaign to targeting Assange as part of the enemy.

Conveniently, and fully consistent with the President’s opportunism, the current charges lodged against Assange do not involve WikiLeaks’ publication of materials hacked from the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee—an act that clearly benefited Trump.

If Assange is sent to the United States and convicted on all counts, he could be sentenced to 175 years in federal prison. While we are still a long way from that, one thing is certain: Unless and until the prosecution of Assange is dismissed, no publication will be safe from the Trump Administration’s vengeance and overreach.

Google’s Reliance on Temps and Contractors Creates Unfair ‘Caste System’

Endless free meals. On-site gyms. Ample paid time off and regular contributions to 401(k)s. Even routine in-office massages. Google portrays itself as a company that, as Business Insider wrote in 2017, “pulls out all the stops when it comes to attracting top talent.” Behind the carefully crafted image, however, is what New York Times reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi calls a “shadow work force” of temporary employees and contract workers who don’t get access to any of the benefits and now outnumber the full-time employees.

“As of March,” Wakabayashi reports, “Google worked with roughly 121,000 temps and contractors around the world, compared with 102,000 full-time employees, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times.”

These temps, vendors and contractors may seem indistinguishable from full-time employees. They perform multiple jobs, from content moderation to human resources roles to software development, but they’re employed by staffing agencies, not Google.

Among the concerns of the contract workers, according to the ones who spoke with the Times:

Google was the employer in all but name. It decides what jobs they do, dictates where and what hours they work, and often decides if and when to fire them.

Google’s contractors are barred from company events like holiday parties and all-hands meetings. They are not permitted to look at internal job postings or attend company job fairs.

In some instances, email messages about workplace security concerns that went out to full-time staff were not shared with contract workers even though they worked in the same offices.

According to multiple temp employees, many of whom talked to the Times on condition of anonymity (because they had signed nondisclosure agreements), contractors “make less money, have different benefits plans and have no paid vacation time in the United States.”

In response to questions from the Times, Google denied that using temps and contractors was a cost-saving measure. Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of People Operations, told the Times that if a temp or contract worker has a problem, “we provide lots of ways to report complaints or express concerns.” She added, “We investigate, we hold individuals to account and we work to make things right for any person impacted.”

OnContracting, a site that helps people find tech contracting positions, told the Times that it “estimates that a technology company can save $100,000 a year on average per American job by using a contractor instead of a full-time employee.”

Relying on contractors and temporary workers is not unique to Google. As the Times reports, “Contingent labor accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the workers at most technology firms, according to estimates by OnContracting.”

Google is receiving more scrutiny for the practice however, after better treatment of and benefits for contract workers became a focus of an international Google walkout protesting multiple issues, including sexual harassment, that occurred in March.

“It’s creating a caste system inside companies,” Pradeep Chauhan, the head of OnContracting, told the Times.

Read the full article here.

Jumia’s Stock Listing Spotlights African E-Commerce

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

Despite a growing population, a rising middle class and increasing internet and mobile phone use, Africa is one of the world’s least convenient locations for e-commerce. A host of logistic nightmares include still-low internet penetration, a poor road system that hinders deliveries to consumers, and a population that largely does not have bank accounts and therefore has difficulty making online purchases.

So who would be crazy enough to launch an e-commerce business under such conditions? Two Harvard Business School classmates were that crazy, and their daring has paid dividends. In 2012, Nigerian Tunde Kehinde and Ghanaian Raphael Kofi Afaedor started Jumia Technologies in a garage in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria, and last month the e-commerce company became the first African tech startup to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The event is being hailed as a major development for Africa and African commerce.

Although some detractors question the company’s “African-ness” by pointing to its global funding sources, Jumia was purely an African dream. “How often in your lifetime [do] you get to build something that doesn’t exist in your own country?” Kehinde said in a 2015 interview. “We are building the Amazon of Nigeria and in a country that has not had organized retail [during] 50 years of independence.”

“We’ve done two things,” he said. “One is we’ve raised money from very smart investors who can get us access to top-notch talents. We’ve raised money from Rocket Internet, from J.P. Morgan, from Summit Partners, really blue-chip investors. And with them, they don’t only give you money, they also give you contacts. And the second thing we’ve done is we’ve gone around the world to find Nigerians who want to come home. We’ve gone to recruit at Harvard Business School, at MIT, at Oxford, at London Business School. Also locally at GT Bank, at Samsung, at Nokia and also across all the best universities in (Nigeria).”

Within a year, Jumia had 450 employees and a physical presence in six states in sprawling Nigeria, and it had delivered over 50,000 products throughout the country’s 36 states.

By the time Kehinde and Afaedor departed from the company in 2015, they had built the startup into a top Nigerian online retailer, with over $50 million in investments from foreign venture capital.

Amid Jumia’s growing prospects, last month the company announced its listing on the New York Stock Exchange, with shares initially set to begin trading at $14.50 under the ticker symbol JMIA. The listing signaled a breakthrough for African business.

The stock price surged more 75% on the first day of trading, and on May 1 it was at $46.99. On May 9, there was a dramatic, negative development: A company that focuses on short selling—a practice in which investors or speculators make money if a stock drops in price—charged that Jumia was based on “obvious fraud.” The accusation sent the price down sharply, and as of May 28 it was slightly over $23. Jumia has denied the accusation. An analysis by Citigroup Global Markets, an investment bank for Jumia, while finding that some of the specific charges from Citron Research “would seem to merit a response from [Jumia],” said that “none [of the allegations] appear to merit Citron’s description of a ‘smoking gun.’ ”

Before the initial public offering (IPO), Mastercard Europe pre-purchased $50 million in Jumia shares, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents. The IPO was underwritten by some of Wall Street’s best-known banks, including Morgan Stanley and Citigroup.

“We are very excited about Africa because what we saw here today was amazing,” Alex Ibrahim, head of international capital markets at the NYSE, told the News Agency of Nigeria on the spectacular first day of trading. “This company priced extremely well, traded up largest volumes. So, that showed the interests by investors, not only very large institutions but even the retails here in the U.S. … I’m assuming that investors will continue to look into Jumia because they [Jumia] provide the vehicle to tap into the region that is growing.”

Jumia presently operates in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Tunisia, Algeria, Cameroon, Zambia, Malawi, Botswana and Zimbabwe, employing over 5,000 people and providing a trading platform for about 81,000 sellers using the company’s payment, delivery and data-analytics services across the continent.

Its offerings include Jumia Travel, a hotel-booking platform; Jumia Food, a food-delivery platform; Jumia Deals, for classifieds; Jumia Flights, for travel bookings; Jumia One, a bill-paying app; Jumia Pay, a secure payment method for people who use Jumia services; and a lending program that allows its vendors to access business loans.

According to company data, Jumia processed more than 13 million packages in 2018, in part because it adapted its payment methods to the needs of African consumers. According to the World Bank, 65% of Nigerian adults didn’t have a bank account in 2017—and the percentage was lower in several other African countries—so Jumia allows customers to pay in cash to its delivery people. This also instills confidence among consumers, some of whom are wary of making online payments.

However, the pay-on-delivery practice resulted in a tragic case in 2017. A Jumia deliveryman in Port Harcourt, a city in Nigeria’s oil hub, was murdered while delivering two iPhones. Unable to pay for the items they had ordered, the customers killed him and disposed of his body in a septic tank. In addition, a number of robberies of delivery people have been reported.

And the other logistic challenges, too, are formidable. Although internet penetration is on the rise in Africa, it is still at only 28%, compared with a 50% average in most of the rest of the world. The continent’s road system is poor, almost nonexistent in some places. Only an estimated 28% of the roads are paved, and road density (the concentration of roads serving a given area) is the lowest for any major region worldwide. Although the use of banking services in Africa grew from 24% in 2011 to 34% in 2014, that rate lagged behind an increase of 51% to 62% in the rest of the world during the same period.

As it copes with its problems, Jumia has found acceptance among many thousands of Africans eager to make online purchases. One is Akpere Egwolo, a 23-year-old printer who said in an interview via WhatsApp that he had purchased a smartphone through the company. “I found it on Jumia at a discounted rate. … They delivered on schedule, and I paid the delivery agent via mobile transfer when the product was delivered. It was a nice experience. I got a good product. I have used Jumia about five times and I’ve never had any cause to regret using them.”

Those sentiments are echoed by numerous other customers. Mimi Chioma Bumah, an 18-year-old student at the University of Lagos, told this reporter: “I use Jumia because shopping online is definitely less stressful than going to the market in the hot sun or soaking rain, whatever the season is. Add that to the horrendous traffic on Lagos roads and the chaos of Lagos markets and you definitely need an alternative.” Oluwatosin Michael, a 19-year-old University of Lagos student, is another regular Jumia customer. “They deliver on schedule, and I really like the things I’ve bought from them,” she said in an interview via WhatsApp. “I recommend them to people all the time.”

Of course, not all of Jumia’s customers are happy. Many complain about rudeness among its delivery people and the quality of its products and service.

Despite the financial promise that Jumia is displaying, it remains far from being profitable. The company’s IPO prospectus reports a loss of over $195 million (on revenue of $149 million) in 2018, following a loss of about $187 million (on revenue of about $106 million) in 2017. Jumia indicated that it had accumulated losses of roughly $968 million as of Dec. 31, 2018.

The losses appear not to faze Co-CEO Sacha Poignonnec, who said, “Jumia took the example of Alibaba, which existed for 20 years in China but only became profitable after 10 years. They needed to position themselves as a market leader before their sales could surpass their spending.”

After receiving its listing in April, Jumia faced tough questions from Africans and others about why it ignored stock markets on its home continent in favor of the New York Stock Exchange. “The NYSE is the largest stock exchange in the world. There are lots of big tech players there, including Amazon and Google. And investors are quite familiar with the e-commerce business,” explained Ernest Eguasa, Jumia’s chief financial officer. Speaking to journalists in Lagos, he added that “improved perception of the company” allows us to “acquire new customers, new vendors.” Eguasa said Jumia has not ruled out the possibility of a secondary listing in one of the African countries where it operates.

The NYSE listing was a necessary step for Jumia, according to Ayo Olesin, a Nigerian business journalist and editor of the Sunday Mirror newspaper. “NYSE is the home of tech companies, and Jumia needs to play there,” Olesin said in an email.

Ade Ogidan, editor-in-chief of Independent Newspapers in Nigeria, points out the impact of Jumia’s listing on other African companies. “Jumia has blazed the trail with the NYSE listing, which should positively prompt other start-ups to initiate business models that could promote growth and overall interest [in] Africa’s fledging e-commerce industry,” Ogidan said in an email.

Some of the critics who question whether Jumia really is an “African startup” point out that, in addition to having its IPO on the NYSE, the company is incorporated in Germany, is headquartered in Dubai and bases its central technology team in Portugal. In response, Jumia executives said that the company operates exclusively in Africa, is legally registered in Africa and employs thousands of Africans.

The issue was addressed by Iyin Aboyeji, a Nigerian entrepreneur and co-founder of Andela, a software company, in an article on the website Future Africa: “Jumia doesn’t stop being an African company because it has a dab of foreign capital and management. Making iPhones in China doesn’t make Apple a Chinese company, taking money from the SoftBank Vision Fund doesn’t make Uber a Japanese or Saudi Arabian company. Alibaba didn’t magically become a U.S. company because Goldman Sachs invested and then listed it on the same New York Stock Exchange Jumia listed on.”

As the debate—and controversy—about Jumia continues, the corporate leadership sees a glowing future for both the company and Africa, especially given the new NYSE listing. Jumia Nigeria’s CEO, Juliet Anammah, said the company is heavily concerned with developing Africa, bettering African lives and creating opportunities in the global business scene. In an interview with the Nigerian newspaper The Sun, Anammah said: “The NYSE listing shows that innovation is happening in the African continent. It shows an innovative, dynamic and modern Africa.”

Disaster Aid Bill Again Blocked in House by GOP Conservative

WASHINGTON — A second conservative Republican on Tuesday blocked another attempt to pass a long-overdue $19 billion disaster aid bill, delaying again a top priority for some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies on Capitol Hill.

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said that if Democratic leaders like Speaker Nancy Pelosi thought the measure was so important, they should have kept the House in session in Washington late last week to slate an up-or-down roll call vote.

“If the speaker of this House thought that this was must-pass legislation, the speaker … should have called a vote on this bill before sending every member of Congress on recess for 10 days,” Massie said as he blocked the measure.

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“You can’t have bills passed in Congress with nobody voting on them,” Massie said. “That is the definition of the swamp, and that’s what people resent about this place.”

Massie’s move earned swift rebukes from top Democrats. Sanford Bishop of Georgia said that his agricultural district was but one part of the country suffering from hurricane damage and that aid won’t arrive until well after the start of planting season. “Many will not be able to plant this year,” Bishop said. Hurricane Michael struck Georgia in the middle of last fall’s harvest season.

Another conservative, Texas freshman GOP Rep. Chip Roy, had blocked an earlier attempt Friday to pass the measure under fast-track rules, but Democrats tried again Tuesday. Bishop flew to Washington from Georgia to request the House pass the popular measure under fast-track procedures that permitted any individual lawmakers to block the bill.

Rep. Austin Scott, a Republican from Georgia, criticized his GOP colleagues for holding up the disaster bill, calling them “clowns” in a tweet.

Eventual passage of the bill, supported by Trump and top leaders in Congress, is a foregone conclusion. Trying again on Tuesday was a political freebie for Democrats, who went on the attack right after the vote.

“I cannot understand why any member would object to giving relief to so many millions of our citizens who have been badly damaged by natural disasters,” said No. 2 House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland. Hoyer said the bill “will be passed overwhelmingly” when the House returns.

One concern of many House Republicans was a move by House Democrats last week to dump overboard Trump’s request for $4.5 billion to address the crisis of Central American refugees at the southern border.

Trump is a supporter of the measure, which swept through the Senate on Thursday in a rush to exit Washington for Memorial Day. Many Republicans, including southerners facing reelection, are frustrated that the bill has taken so long. After being denied his border money in a fight with House Democrats, Trump still embraced the bill, which directs much of its aid to political strongholds of his such as the Florida Panhandle and rural Georgia and North Carolina.

Passing legislation without any objection from anyone is often trickier to do in the House than the Senate, however.

“I just think a unanimous consent, voice vote, on the way out the door — there’s always, out of 535 (members of Congress), there’s always a few who think maybe that’s not appropriate,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., a conservative who presided over a momentslong pro forma session of the Senate on Tuesday.

Cramer, who moved over to the Senate this year after spending three terms in the House GOP majority, also pointed out that the final disaster bill “actually took out some of the things that the House conservatives wanted,” such as billions of dollars to care for the influx of migrants seeking asylum after crossing the southern border.

There are also newer additions to the measure to help Midwestern areas suffering from springtime floods, along with large chunks of money to rebuild military bases such as Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida that were damaged by a string of disasters dating to last fall’s hurricane season. The measure ordinarily would have passed months ago, but Trump injected himself into the debate, demanding that funding sought by Puerto Rico’s elected officials, Republicans and Democrats both, be kept out.

Democrats held firm in demanding that Puerto Rico, a territory whose 3 million people are U.S. citizens, be helped by the measure. Their confidence was clear from the outset, and GOP resolve on Puerto Rico, never particularly strong to begin with, steadily faded as the impasse dragged on. The bill now contains more money for Puerto Rico, about $1.4 billion, than Democrats originally sought.

Roy said last week that lawmakers ought to go on record either way on the legislation, which is among the few significant bills to make it through the system despite the intense partisanship dominating Washington.

Mike Pence’s West Point Address Should Keep Us Awake at Night

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.

Time was that a stint, or even a career, in the military did not necessarily translate into any serious combat duty. That may seem hard to believe eighteen years after 9/11, but this middle-aged middling major is just old enough to remember such a bygone era. As a cadet at West Point (2001-05), having joined the army just months before the September 11 attacks, most of my professors and tactical officers had never been to war. The colonels had joined in the early 1980s and, at worst, saw limited combat in the petite (and absurd) conflicts in Panama and/or Grenada. The captains and majors commissioned in the early 1990s. As such, most just missed Persian Gulf War 1.0, a few deployed to Somalia or the Balkans, and most hadn’t seen the elephant at all.

Back then, soldiers trained for war but didn’t necessarily expect to fight in one. The Cold War, post-Vietnam army was built as much to contain America’s enemies, and to deter war, as it was to actually engage in combat. Those days seem charmingly quaint from the viewpoint of 2019. Indeed, when I entered the U.S. Military Academy on July 2, 2001, my expectation was to travel the world and maybe do some light peacekeeping in Bosnia or Kosovo, not to fight extended wars. How naive that seems now.

Instead I spent a career training for and deploying to wars across the Greater Middle East. Hell, that’s been the story of my entire generation of soldiers. When I graduated in 2005, this still seemed unique and profound. More than a decade later it’s simply the mundane way of things. So it was, this past week, that Vice President Mike Pence addressed the graduating class at West Point, and reminded them to prepare for ever more war.

The content of this bellicose, and banal, speech should have been remarkable; should have raised Americans’ collective “spidey-sense.” Instead, hardly anyone noticed that Pence, like a Punxsutawney groundhog, was veritably predicting many more years of winter (read: warfare). Still, the vice president’s oratory was disturbing on a number of levels.

First off, he bragged about President Trump’s absurd military budget and explained that the cadets should be honored to join “an Army that’s better equipped, better trained, and better supplied than any United States Army in the history of this country.” Evidence for such an assertion was glaringly absent, and none in the audience had the opportunity to ask why this unsurpassed army hasn’t won a single war in this century. Also absent was any discussion of the tradeoffs inherent in ballooning defense spending, the opportunity costs of such largess, or an explanation as to why the US spends more on its military than the next seven nations combined. And why should he have brought any of this up? Defense spending is politically popular; it’s the one type of public outlay that draws essentially no criticism.

Next, Pence engaged in some genuine truth-telling that revealed the nature of military service in a time of forever war. He informed the cadets that “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life. You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.” This should have been a controversial statement, an alarming prophecy of perpetual war. Only in 2019 that’s the norm for military members and their families. They should expect combat, because almost no mainstream political figures demonstrate the capacity or intent to reign in the American war machine.

Pence went further, though, and actually listed out where these newly minted officers should expect to fight. Sure he listed the usual suspects – “Some of you will join the fight against radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq” – so apparently the war on terror will roar on indefinitely. However, Pence also listed a few other places where the young officers will join “the fight,” including the “Korean peninsula,” the South China Sea, and Europe (against “an aggressive Russia”). Mind you, there are – as of yet – no actual shooting wars in any of these locales, thus labeling them ongoing “fights” is both provocative and irresponsible.

Nevertheless, the true surprise, and most distressing of all, was the VP’s casual assertion that “some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.” This was a clear reference to Venezuela, Washington’s stated policy of regime change there, and to the recent kick off of Cold War 2.0 with what John Bolton labeled the “troika of tyranny” – Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Never mind that not a single one of these tinpot tyrannies presents a significant threat to the US, Pence still gleefully paraded the old ghost, and villain, of “socialism.” It was all so 1980s!

Pence’s retro foreign policy, and outrageously pugnacious rhetoric befit the actions of an empire, not a republic. His casual assumption that today’s young graduates – most of whom were kindergartners on 9/11 – will see combat in both ongoing and future wars reflects life in an increasingly militaristic and unhinged society. That such crazy is so routine is even more problematic.

The normalization of war can be just as detrimental to a republic as war itself. The barbarians are not at the gates, folks. War is not a foregone conclusion or a national necessity. Each successive occupant of the White House only needs you to believe that in order to centralize the power of an increasingly imperial presidency, stifle dissent, and chip away at what remains of civil liberties.

Seen in its proper context, Pence’s speech would have raised alarm bells in a healthy, functioning republic. But America in 2019 is far from that. Instead, the VP’s staggeringly absurd speech registered as barely a blip on the media’s 24-hour news cycle. After eighteen years of perpetual conflict, members of the military, and the populace at large, have grown immune to the inertia of war. As such, the republic’s bleeding is internal, as American Democracy dies a slow, opaque death from the inside out. It may be too late to reverse course, and one wonders if a distracted and apathetic public even notices.

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Supreme Court Signals More Openness to State Abortion Rules

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court signaled Tuesday it is more open to state restrictions on abortion, upholding an Indiana law supported by abortion opponents that regulates the disposal of fetal remains.

At the same time, the justices declined to take on an issue closer to the core of abortion rights, rejecting the state’s appeal of a lower court ruling that blocked a ban on abortion based on gender, race or disability.

Both provisions were contained in a law signed by Vice President Mike Pence in 2016 when he was Indiana’s governor.

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The court’s action keeps it out of an election-year review of the Indiana law amid a flurry of new state laws that go the very heart of abortion rights. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey this month signed a law that would ban virtually all abortions, even in cases of incest and rape, and subject doctors who perform them to criminal prosecution. That law has yet to take effect and is being challenged in court.

Other states have passed laws that would outlaw abortion once a fetal heartbeat has been detected, typically around six weeks of gestation.

The high court is expected to hear at least one abortion-related case in its term that begins in October and ends in June 2020. In February, the justices blocked a Louisiana law that regulates abortion clinics, pending a full review.

On Tuesday, with two liberal justices dissenting, the court allowed Indiana to enforce a requirement that abortion clinics either bury or cremate fetal remains following an abortion, reversing a ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court that had blocked it. The justices said in an unsigned opinion that the case does not involve limits on abortion rights.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. Ginsburg said in a short solo opinion that she believes the issue does implicate a woman’s right to have an abortion “without undue interference from the state.”

And Alyssa Farah, Pence’s spokeswoman, drew a direct link to abortion. Pence commended the court for “upholding a portion of Indiana law that safeguards the sanctity of human life by requiring that remains of aborted babies be treated with respect and dignity,” Farah said in a statement.

Pence also hopes the court will eventually review the other abortion provision at issue Tuesday, she said.

The Chicago-based appeals court had blocked a measure that would have prevented a woman from having an abortion for reasons related to race, gender or disability. While the justices declined to hear the state’s appeal of that blocked provision, they indicated their decision “expresses no view on the merits.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, who supports overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that first declared abortion rights, wrote a 20-page opinion that sought to link birth control and abortion to eugenics, the now-discredited movement to improve the human race through selective reproduction. The Indiana provision promotes “a state’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics,” Thomas wrote.

“Although the court declines to wade into these issues today, we cannot avoid them forever,” he wrote. No other justice joined Thomas’ opinion.

Thomas and Ginsburg also engaged in a brief battle of dueling footnotes in which Thomas said Ginsburg’s dissent “makes little sense.” Ginsburg wrote that Thomas’ footnote “displays more heat than light,” including his calling a woman who has an abortion a mother. “A woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is a not a ‘mother,'” she wrote.

One other noteworthy aspect of the court’s action Tuesday was the silence of liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, who vote regularly to uphold abortion rights. By not joining their liberal colleagues in dissent, Breyer and Kagan helped Roberts in his desire to avoid, where possible, controversial outcomes that split the five conservatives and four liberals. The two also may have preserved their ability to negotiate with, if not influence, Roberts in other cases.

The court upheld the fetal remains provision under the least stringent standard of review that courts employ. The legislation only needed to be rationally related to the state’s interest in the proper disposal of the remains, the court said. Indiana met that burden, it said.

The court said it is leaving open court challenges to similar laws under a higher legal standard.

Both abortion rights supporters and opponents believe the court is more likely to favor all manner of abortion restrictions, now that two appointees of President Donald Trump — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — have joined the court and Justice Anthony Kennedy has retired.