Chris Hedges's Blog, page 249

The Creepy New Addition to McDonald’s Menu

The great thing about corporate giants is that they’re such amazing business innovators. For example, in the category of “wheel-spinning” innovation — i.e., trying to change a corporation’s course without actually changing anything — it’s hard to top McDonald’s.

For several years, the fast-food chain has been losing customers to younger chains with healthier, more stylish offerings. So CEO Steve Easterbrook has tried to recoup the losses with PR tricks, such as calling the menu “healthy” and “fresh.” But McNuggets and fries are still what they are, so people haven’t bitten the PR bait.

Now, though, he’s hit on an innovation that’ll surely cause hungry eaters to flock to the Golden Arches: artificial intelligence.

Yes, exclaimed Steve the Innovator, consumers need a robotic order-taker to advise them on what to order — based on AI’s ability to digest unlimited data about the weather, traffic, time of day, and what other people are ordering.

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CEOs Can't Wait to Replace Workers With Robots



by Jim Hightower /

America’s Reproductive Slaves

On Wednesday, the day it was announced that the U.S. birthrate fell for the fourth straight year, signaling the lowest number of births in 32 years, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the most draconian anti-abortion law in the country. That the two developments came at the same time could not have been more revelatory.

The ruling elites are acutely aware that the steadily declining American birthrate is the result of a de facto “birth strike” by women who, unable to afford adequate health insurance and exorbitant medical bills and denied access to paid parental leave, child care and job protection, find it financially punitive to have children. Not since 1971 have births in the United States been at replacement levels, considered to be 2,100 births per 1,000 women over their lifetimes, a ratio needed for a generation to replace itself. Current births number 1,728 per 1,000 women, a decline of 2% from 2017. Without a steady infusion of immigrants, the U.S. population would be plummeting.

“The effort to block birth control and abortion is not about religion nor about politicians pandering to a right-wing base, nor is it a result of prudery, nor is it to punish women for having sex,” Jenny Brown writes in her book “Birth Strike: Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work.” “It is about the labor of bearing and rearing children: who will do it and who will pay for it.”

Raising children is not a lifestyle choice. It is labor-intensive work that demands of parents, and especially women, huge physical, emotional, financial and time commitments. The wider society reaps the benefits of this work. It has a social and moral responsibility to compensate and assist those who raise children.

The birthrate decline is an indicator of the despair and hopelessness that define the lives of tens of millions of young Americans who struggle financially and see little hope for the future. Only by addressing this financial insecurity and desperation, by integrating back into society those who have been pushed aside, can the nation’s death spiral be reversed.

In Sweden, parents are entitled to 480 days of paid leave upon the birth or adoption of a child; the government-funded subsidy is 80 percent of the parent’s job pay for the first 390 days and a reduced amount for the remaining 90 days. Employers in Sweden pay a tax on salaries to fund parental leave. The unemployed are granted a parental stipend. Parents can split the leave between the two of them. Men take nearly a quarter of parental leave in Sweden, which has one of the highest birthrates in Europe.

America’s corporate state has no intention of funding programs and building institutions to ease the burden of rearing and nurturing children. Yes, the corporate state needs young bodies as fodder for the bloated military and endless foreign wars. Yes, it needs workers, especially a surplus of workers, to toil in menial, poorly compensated labor. Yes, it needs consumers to buy its products. But the corporate state, Brown argues, intends to achieve these goals “with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women’s work.” If women refuse to produce children at levels desired by economic planners, Brown says, then abortion and contraception will be banned or made difficult to obtain. Social Security and pensions will be abolished so the only financial protection from abject poverty for an elderly parent will be children willing to keep their mother or father fed and housed. Eight states dramatically restrict access to abortion, and legislatures in a number of other states are considering legislation to do so. Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia have only one abortion clinic.

The falling birthrate is the real reason women are being forced to become reproductive slaves. As long as wages are kept artificially low (nearly four in 10 middle-aged Americans have no emergency savings, and a third have less than $25,000 invested for retirement), as long as pensions are denied, children become, as in the developing world, the only form of retirement insurance. Policymakers assume that these assaults, coupled with the privatization and destruction of Social Security, will force women to up the birthrate. Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court makes likely the overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Indeed, the Alabama law, which makes no exception for victims of rape or incest, is designed to be legally challenged and brought before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The outlawing of abortion will not affect the elites. I saw this in communist Romania, where abortion and contraception were generally illegal from 1966 to 1990 under an unsuccessful effort to boost the country’s population from 23 million to 30 million by 2000.

As was the case in Romania, wives, girlfriends, mistresses, sisters and daughters of the elites in the U.S. will have easy access to safe abortions while other women die from procedures done in squalid backrooms at the hands of quacks charging exorbitant fees. Worldwide, almost 23,000 women each year do not survive unsafe abortions, primarily in countries where abortion is illegal or inaccessible. The death toll among Romanian women from unsafe abortions during the 1965-1989 reign of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who took harsh steps to raise the country’s birthrate, was estimated at 10,000.

I spent two years with the Christian right in the U.S., often with members of the so-called “pro-life” movement, in doing research for my book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” These Christian fascists, whose heretical version of Christianity is the primary ideology used to justify the outlawing of abortion, have little regard for the sanctity of life. They enthusiastically bless the military and the dropping of iron fragmentation bombs on Muslim families and villages in the Middle East, fervently support the death penalty and absolve militarized police who gun down unarmed people of color trapped in our urban internal colonies. Their bizarre apocalyptic fantasies revel in the mutilation and suffering of nonbelievers, including Jews who do not convert to Christianity and those they dismiss as “nominal Christians.” Once out of the womb, poor children are seen as not deserving of help, and 12 million of them go to bed hungry every night in this country.

The crusade for the unborn fires up Christian zealots and anti-abortion fanatics with righteous indignation that can lead to violence. It fosters a self-adulatory and repugnant moral absolutism. But its ultimate goal is to strip women of control of their bodies to reverse the decline in births, especially white births, as well as reinstate a tyrannical patriarchy.

The ruling elites use code words such as “dependency ratio” and “entitlement crisis” to express their fear about declining fertility rates. To indoctrinate the public, they employ mass culture to disseminate propaganda, including that which drives the “right to life” movement. These fake moral crusades, always a part of the mass propaganda used to justify war, are covers to perpetuate and consolidate the interests of the elites.

The architecture of the corporate state is designed to disempower women. Most wages are not sufficient for one worker to support a family. This means that both the father and the mother must have income-producing jobs. If a parent takes time off to raise a child, the family income declines, usually by half, and there often is also a loss of health benefits, leaving the parent raising the child dependent on the spouse. This economic dependency makes it harder for a woman to leave an abusive or failed relationship, perpetuating the powerlessness of women that is at the heart of the system. By forcing poor couples to stay together, it frees the state from providing even minimal benefits. If each parent, for example, earns $15,000 a year, a couple often is priced out of social programs such as welfare.

“There are several programs within the welfare system that pushes parents to get married,” Brown said when I interviewed her in April for my television show, “On Contact.”  “They have unimpeachable names like ‘Healthy Families.’ What they’re really trying to do is get people off of welfare by combining these incomes. But that doesn’t solve the problem for that couple, which still doesn’t have access to childcare. They still don’t have access to decent wages. They still aren’t going to be able to take any time off when they get sick. All of these things, [guaranteed] by law in most European countries, we don’t have here.”

Social Security is not a retirement savings account. It is a pay-as-you-go system to support retired workers. If wages remain low and the numbers of workers decline, payments into Social Security will go down and the program will go into crisis.

“My paycheck this week is paying my mom’s Social Security next week,” Brown said. “If the age structure of society changes, it changes how many people are going to be paying into the system. The problem is the wage structure. This is the issue for Social Security. The intense worrying about demographic shifts is about employers worrying about having to put in more for retirement if we continue with this system. They don’t want to do that.”

Families of color, meanwhile, are penalized for having children. African Americans have 2.5 times the infant mortality rate of non-Hispanic whites. African American infants have over twice the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) mortality rate as non-Hispanic whites. Such children are twice as likely to have asthma, 56% more likely to be obese and 61% more likely to attempt suicide during their high school years. Children of color are often taken from their families and placed in foster care, a system that provides money to foster-care parents but not the biological parents, who are often living below the poverty line.

These poverty-stricken Americans are demonized in mass culture as bad parents who should not be having as many children. Seventy percent of money owed by “deadbeat dads” are owed by those who make less than $10,000 a year. These men are obliged to pay on average 83% of their income for child support. They lose their driver’s licenses or are jailed when they cannot make the payments. Walter Scott, an African American father, had been arrested and jailed, initially because of a clerical error, three times on charges of failure to pay child support. His jail sentences saw him lose his jobs. When stopped by a policeman for a faulty brake light in 2015 he ran from his car, fearing that another arrest for failure to pay child support would again leave him unemployed. He ended up being fatally shot in the back by the police officer.

Ignore the religious rhetoric and moral posturing about abortion. This debate is not about the sanctity of life. It is about corporate capitalists who desperately need more bodies and intend to coerce women to produce them.

Mideast Tensions Escalate, Rocket Explodes in Baghdad Green Zone

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—Saudi Arabia does not want war but will not hesitate to defend itself against Iran, a top Saudi diplomat said Sunday after the kingdom’s energy sector was targeted this past week amid heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, warned Iran that it will face destruction if it seeks a fight, while Iranian officials said their country isn’t looking for war. Trump spoke after a rocket hit near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, spoke a week after four oil tankers— two of them Saudi — were targeted in an alleged act of sabotage off the coast of the United Arab Emirates and days after Iran-allied Yemeni rebels claimed a drone attack on a Saudi oil pipeline.

“The kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not want war in the region and does not strive for that… but at the same time, if the other side chooses war, the kingdom will fight this with all force and determination and it will defend itself, its citizens and its interests,” al-Jubeir told reporters.

On Sunday night, the U.S. military command that oversees the Mideast confirmed an explosion outside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad and said there were no U.S. or coalition casualties.

A State Department spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that “a low-grade rocket did land within the International Zone near the U.S. Embassy.” The spokesman said that “attacks on U.S. personnel and facilities will not be tolerated and will be responded to in a decisive manner” and added that the U.S. will hold “Iran responsible if any such attacks are conducted by its proxy militia forces or elements of such forces.”

Earlier, after initial reports of the attack, Trump tweeted a warning to Iranian leaders: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” Trump tweeted.

A senior Iranian military commander was quoted as saying his country is not looking for war, in comments published in Iranian media on Sunday.

Fears of armed conflict were already running high after the White House ordered warships and bombers to the region earlier this month to counter an alleged, unexplained threat from Iran. The U.S. also has ordered nonessential staff out of its diplomatic posts in Iraq.

Trump had appeared to soften his tone in recent days, saying he expected Iran to seek negotiations with his administration. Asked on Thursday if the U.S. might be on a path to war with Iran, the president answered, “I hope not.”

Sunday night’s apparent rocket attack was the first such incident since September, when three mortar shells landed in an abandoned lot inside the Green Zone.

Iraqi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasoul told The Associated Press that a Katyusha rocket fell near the statue of the Unknown Soldier, less than a mile from the U.S. Embassy. He said that the military was investigating the cause but that the rocket was believed to have been fired from east Baghdad. The area is home to Iran-backed Shiite militias.

As tensions escalate between the U.S. and Iran, there have been concerns that Baghdad could once again get caught in the middle , just as it is on the path to recovery. The country hosts more than 5,000 U.S. troops, and is home to powerful Iranian-backed militias, some of whom want those U.S. forces to leave.

The U.S. Navy said Sunday it had conducted exercises in the Arabian Sea with the aircraft carrier strike group ordered to the region to counter the unspecified threat from Iran. The Navy said the exercises and training were conducted Friday and Saturday with the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group in coordination with the U.S. Marine Corps, highlighting U.S. “lethality and agility to respond to threat,” as well as to deter conflict and preserve U.S. strategic interests.

The current tensions are rooted in Trump’s decision last year to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and world powers and impose wide-reaching sanctions, including on Iranian oil exports that are crucial to its economy.

Iran has said it would resume enriching uranium at higher levels if a new nuclear deal is not reached by July 7. That would potentially bring it closer to being able to develop a nuclear weapon, something Iran insists it has never sought.

Energy ministers from OPEC and its allies, including major producers Saudi Arabia and Russia, are meeting in Saudi Arabia on Sunday to discuss energy prices and production cuts. Iran’s oil exports are expected to shrink further in the coming months after the U.S. stopped renewing waivers that allowed it to continue selling to some countries.

OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers have production cuts in place, but the group of exporters is not expected to make its decision on output until late June, when they meet again in Vienna.

The United Arab Emirates’ energy minister Suhail al-Mazrouei told reporters at the meeting he does not think relaxing the oil production cuts in place is the right measure. His comments suggest there’s support within OPEC and other oil-producing nations, like Russia, to continue propping up oil prices after a sharp fall last year. Oil is now trading above $70 a barrel and closer to what’s needed to balance state budgets among Persian Gulf producers.

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, meanwhile, has called for a meeting of Arab heads of state on May 30 in Mecca to discuss the latest developments, including the oil pipeline attack.

The kingdom has blamed the pipeline attack on Iran, accusing Tehran of arming the rebel Houthis, which a Saudi-led coalition has been at war with in Yemen since 2015. Iran denies arming or training the rebels, who control much of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa.

“We want peace and stability in the region, but we won’t stand with our hands bound as the Iranians continuously attack. Iran has to understand that,” al-Jubeir said. “The ball is in Iran’s court.”

Al-Jubeir also noted that an investigation, led by the UAE, into the tanker incident is underway.

The state-run Saudi news agency reported Sunday that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to discuss regional developments. There was no immediate statement by the State Department about the call.

An English-language Saudi newspaper close to the palace recently published an editorial calling for surgical U.S. airstrikes in retaliation for Iran’s alleged involvement in targeting Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure.

The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Hossein Salami, was quoted Sunday as saying Iran is not looking for war. But he said the U.S. is going to fail in the near future “because they are frustrated and hopeless” and are looking for a way out of the current escalation. His comments, given to other Guard commanders, were carried by Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency.

The USS Abraham Lincoln has yet to reach the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a third of all oil traded at sea passes.

__

Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, and Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Bassem Mroue in Bahgdad contributed to this report.

The Shocking Exploitation of America’s Caregivers

She alights from a black Ferrari convertible, her Christian Louboutin stilettos glinting in the sunlight. The lid of her black lacquer grand piano is propped open in the living room of her plush Beverly Hills home on the aptly named Clear View Drive, overlooking a stunning panorama.

“I own a chain of elderly care facilities,” she says into the camera on Bravo’s reality television show “The Millionaire Matchmaker.”

“My net worth is $3 to $4 million, probably.”

Stephanie Costa was 30 and rich by most standards yet believed it was time to fetch a man of means.

“You don’t want to date down,” the show’s host says to her. “You want to date 200 grand and above who treats you like a princess.”

Costa nods. “Before I know it, I’m alone in the nursing home … in my own nursing home.”

Costa’s lifestyle was supported in part by six board-and-care homes she owned in California’s Central Valley that now operate under the names Clear View Retirement Group and Copper River Retirement Group.

About half of Costa’s net worth was threatened when she and her company initially were cited for about $1.6 million for labor violations, including wage theft – not paying 11 employees for working much of 24 hours a day, six days a week. They later would settle for pennies on the dollar.

Costa, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is a rare public face of a burgeoning multibillion-dollar elder care industry that is enabling operators to become wealthy by treating workers as indentured servants. Across the country, legions of these caregivers earn a pittance to tend to the elderly in residential houses refurbished as care facilities, according to an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

The profit margins can be huge and, for violators of labor laws, hinge on the widespread exploitation of thousands of caretakers, many of them poor immigrants effectively earning $2 to $3.50 an hour to work around the clock. The federal hourly minimum wage is $7.25.

Reveal interviewed more than 80 workers, care-home operators and government regulators and reviewed hundreds of wage theft cases handled by California and federal labor regulators, workers and local district attorneys. The investigation found rampant wage theft has pushed a vast majority of these caregivers into poverty.

Workers are left feeling desperate and trapped. Many caregivers say they rise before daybreak to cook meals, shower residents and scrub toilets. At night, they are deprived of sufficient sleep because they have to wake to change adult diapers, dispense painkillers, return wandering dementia residents to their beds and shift the bedridden every two hours to thwart bedsores.

Workers describe sleeping in hallways and garages, on couches and the floor. Some care homes deduct $25 a day from caregivers’ paychecks for “lodging.”

Exploited caregivers rarely are allowed a day off; even then, they often must pay their substitutes. Two caregivers recounted having miscarriages after their bosses refused to allow them time off or to stop lifting heavy residents.

Because these workers often live where they work, they are under the watchful eye of their bosses. They are bullied into not cooperating with investigators. In some cases, care-home operators have threatened to report undocumented workers to authorities.

Human trafficking – in which workers, particularly Filipinos, are coerced, manipulated and exploited – also is not uncommon, according to prosecutors and attorneys. For example, several family members were charged last year with human trafficking and labor abuse in a case involving caregivers in San Mateo County, California, south of San Francisco.

“It’s a classic tale of human greed,” said Tia Koonse, legal and policy research manager at the UCLA Labor Center. “Their entire business model is predicated on not making payroll. It relies on people being willing to work for 24 hours a day for less than a dollar an hour. Only trafficked people will put up with that.”

***

The growth of board-and-care homes in neighborhoods across the United States is tied to medical advances, enabling aging baby boomers to live longer despite debilitating illnesses. This has resulted in an increasing number of gravely ill people or their family members seeking an alternative to costly nursing home care. There were about 29,000 residential care communities nationwide and about 300,000 full-time caregivers in 2016, according to the most recent federal figures available. About two-thirds are smaller facilities with four to 25 residents, many with dementia. California leads the nation with more than 7,300 residential care facilities licensed by the state.

Stephanie Costa provides a case study in exploiting workers, getting caught breaking labor laws and circumventing full punishment.

In 2013, 11 workers brought wage theft claims after providing around-the-clock care in the care homes Costa owned. They changed adults’ diapers, comforted the dying and hoisted infirm residents into bed. They worked six days a week and subsisted on meager wages, according to interviews and court documents.

The workers said they risked being fired if they left the facilities and had no off-duty rest breaks during the day. Costa’s care homes promoted 24/7 care for frail clients.

“We knew we were being underpaid,” said Juliet Delos Reyes, 60, a former caregiver employed by Costa. “But we were helpless. We didn’t know our rights. How could we leave?”

Reyes said she was not allowed to leave the home without permission when clients were present.

In many cases, workers in the industry fall into jobs that become increasingly abusive. A substantial number are working in the U.S. without authorization or applying to remain legally in the country. They are paid less than they’re promised, isolated and restricted to the facilities.

Residents in these care homes typically are more than 60 years old. The annual national median cost for each resident is about $48,000. Dementia residents often pay more. Some owners tack on extra charges for those who are incontinent or desire more than two showers a week.

Over the last decade, care-home operators across the nation broke minimum wage, overtime or record-keeping laws in at least 1,400 cases, federal data shows. About 35 percent of them were in California. Data obtained by Reveal through a California Public Records Act request shows senior care facilities in the state have pending wage theft claims against them or have been ordered to pay back wages and penalties in more than 110 additional cases.

Three months after Costa’s star turn on Bravo in 2013, the state labor commissioner’s office ordered Costa and her company, Bedford Care Group, to pay about $1.6 million for unpaid wages and penalties. That’s when she changed tactics.

Papers were then filed with the state to create two new residential care-home companies called Clear View Retirement Group LLC and Copper River Retirement Group LLC. Costa’s mother, Alice Hayes, is secretary, one of two officers, of these companies, according to licensing records. Hayes declined to comment.

These new companies then received licenses from the state to run the six former Bedford care homes. But the structure and administrative staff in the care homes? Hayes assured residents that they would remain the same. In December 2014, following an appeal, the amount owed for the labor violations was reduced to $665,000. But around the same time, Costa’s Bedford Care Group filed for bankruptcy, a legal maneuver that allowed her to effectively slash the amount she owed workers by settling the case for about $200,000, which she paid.

Three weeks after Costa’s care-home business filed for bankruptcy, her father registered a new company with the state called Property Investment Housing LLC. The company then took over as the new owner of Costa’s six care homes. Her father did not return a call seeking comment. Stephanie Costa is the company’s chief executive, records show.

***

A neighborhood in Antioch, Calif. Glenda and Rommel Publico operated a number of senior board-and-care homes in Antioch. (James Tensuan / Reveal)

Stephanie Costa represents a rare case in which an operator paid up, if only a partial amount of the original fine. Residential care facilities for the elderly receive among the largest wage theft judgments of any industry. Yet Reveal found that some facility owners caught cheating their workers are able to evade fines and judgments.

Many companies play shell games by not keeping money or real estate holdings in the name of the company against which judgments or fines are entered. They simply abandon their company names – and the judgments against those named entities – rendering the penalties and wage theft judgments meaningless.

Across the country, states are charged with regulating board-and-care facilities. In California, the state labor commissioner’s office and U.S. Department of Labor, in addition to some local governments, are charged with investigating wage theft. State and federal regulators say privately that they need many more investigators and lawyers to chase down scofflaws and force them to pay.

The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division declined to make top officials available for an interview. But in a written statement, a Labor Department spokesman said: “Last year the division recovered a record-setting $304 million in back wages for workers and conducted a record-setting 3,600 outreach events to provide information to employers, employees, and other stakeholders about the requirements of the law.”

The agency noted that in California, it has conducted investigations and “extensive outreach” to care-home operators “ensuring that they pay their workers the wages they have legally earned.”

At least 20 companies providing care for the elderly, disabled and mentally ill in California continue to operate illegally – many of them under their original names – after ignoring judgments for back wages and penalties totaling more than $1.4 million, Reveal found. A 2016 law barred companies with outstanding wage theft judgments from conducting business in the state. But the state Department of Social Services’ Community Care Licensing Division, which is in charge of licensing facilities for the elderly and disabled, has not followed through.

Pat Leary, acting director of the Department of Social Services, declined through spokesman Michael Weston to be interviewed. But in an email, Weston wrote that while the law allows his agency to deny a new license or not renew an existing one, the agency can take these steps only if it finds residents’ health and safety have been threatened.

For her part, Costa’s former employee Juliet Delos Reyes desperately needed the total back pay she was owed before the bankruptcy of Costa’s company. She now cares for her husband, who is on dialysis. His medical bills are crushing.

“We didn’t save anything. It affected us badly,” Reyes said through tears. “I just hope that someday the government will look at how caregivers are treated.”

In mid-2016, the California Social Services Department banned Costa from the assisted living business for life after finding multiple health and safety violations. Among the violations: caregivers working without required criminal background checks; caregivers lacking the proper skills to test the glucose of a diabetic resident whose hands had been amputated; taking in hospice patients without the state’s permission; and arguing with the friend of a resident who was sent to the hospital, prompting staff there to ask her to leave.

Costa ignored the ban and continued to hire and fire workers at the care homes. So state licensing officials in April 2017 had Costa’s mother sign a declaration promising Costa would not be involved in “any capacity” with the companies – Copper River Retirement Group and Clear View Retirement Group – that operate the care homes she once ran.

But even after that meeting, records show, Costa listed herself as a managing member of Clear View Retirement Group. Costa’s name has since been removed from the most recent business filings received by the state.

A representative for the care-home industry readily acknowledged wrongdoing but blamed thin profit margins for necessitating the practice of underpaying workers.

“Are there problems? There are lots of problems,” said Ronald Simpson, a founding director of 6Beds Inc., a lobbying and advocacy organization that represents more than 1,000 operators of small residential care facilities for seniors in California. “Elderly people aren’t able to pay what they’d need to pay for these homes to be compliant.”

Still, for workers earning anemic pay, “it’s possible they’re happy, too,” he added.

Simpson then lashed out at Reveal for investigating wage theft in the industry.

“What you’re doing is not a service to the industry,” he said. “It makes the whole industry look like they’re getting rich and ripping people off.”

As he spoke, Simpson was busy organizing one of the group’s all-day workshops for care-home operators on labor laws, which the 6Beds website promised would give them a key bit of advice: how to “minimize labor costs.”

***

Sonia Deza worked for years as a caregiver in Antioch, Calif., earning about $2 an hour from Glenda and Rommel Publico. Deza says she was given two checks totaling more than $17,700 in back wages, but Rommel Publico demanded it all back – except for a $1,000 “bonus” – claiming it was his. Deza says she was frightened he would fire her if she refused. (James Tensuan / Reveal)

For four years, Sonia Deza rose every morning at 5 a.m. to cook, clean, and wash and medicate her charges at Scienn Hail Home Care IV in Antioch, California, a city of about 100,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area. She could not sit down again to rest until 10 p.m., after she tucked residents into bed and organized their prescriptions for the next day.

A long night still lay ahead; some wandering dementia residents needed help back to bed, and others had to be shifted every two hours. Deza rarely took a day off, as she would need to pay her substitute. She earned about $2 an hour. She worried she would be fired if she complained.

Rommel and Glenda Publico arrive at the Contra Costa Superior Court in Pittsburg, Calif., for a hearing Sept. 20, 2018. They are accused of multiple felonies including grand theft and tax fraud. (Paul Kuroda / Reveal)

Then in 2013, federal regulators ordered Deza’s bosses, Glenda and Rommel Publico, to pay Deza and 21 other workers more than $133,000 in back wages for violating federal minimum wage and overtime laws.

The Publicos wrote Deza two checks totaling more than $17,700 in back wages. But instead of letting her deposit the checks, Rommel Publico demanded the money back, claiming it was his, Deza said in an interview. She said she was frightened he would fire her if she refused. So she served her residents lunch and then took a rare break on two afternoons in July 2013. Rommel Publico picked her up from work and drove her to two different banks.

“I took the checks into the banks, then returned to the car and gave him the cash,” said Deza, 66. “Oh my goodness, that’s my money. I worked so hard for it. I really needed that money. It’s big money for me.”

Publico let her keep $1,000. He called it a bonus, she said.

Three of Deza’s co-workers said in interviews that they also were forced to return the back wages. According to federal Labor Department records, the Publicos submitted false documents to labor investigators purporting to show they’d paid the back wages. Still other workers never received a check in the first place. They still are waiting.

Prosecutors from the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office have charged the Publicos with multiple felonies, including grand theft and tax fraud. The case is pending.

In a phone interview, Rommel Publico defended the treatment of his caregivers and said the charges against him “hurt my feelings.”

“When we ran the business, we were like a family,” Publico said through tears. “My caregivers, I treat them like my mom. I’ve never been like, ‘I’m the boss.’

“Every time I turn around, I have problems,” he said of the pending case against him. “It breaks my heart. I cry.”

Normita Lim, who now lives in Las Vegas, did not receive back wages from her former employers, Glenda and Rommel Publico. In 2013, federal regulators ordered the Publicos to pay 22 workers more than $133,000 in back wages for violating federal minimum wage and overtime laws. (James Tensuan / Reveal)

Another Publico employee who was not paid back wages is Normita Lim. She worked around the clock as a caregiver in one of their care homes for nearly a decade, earning about $2 an hour. Rarely allowed a day off, she kept working, afraid she would be fired if she complained. On Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays, her three children visited her in the cramped room she lived in down the hall from the residents.

“I’m still struggling,” said Lim, 75. “I needed that money for my medications and food, but he got away with murder by not having to pay. I’m angry, but what can we do?”

In late 2017, the Publicos sold the care home where Lim worked. She said she stayed on as a caregiver for just a month under the new owner. She earned about $600 that month to work around the clock, seven days a week, for less than a dollar an hour. A man at the care home said the facility is now called Elizabeth Care Homes 2. But the property still is licensed to Glenda Publico, records show.

“I thought, ‘This is worse,’ so I quit,” Lim said.

***

Julie Riduta is shown at the home where she works as a caregiver in Berkeley, Calif. At a previous job in 2014, Riduta says she had a miscarriage after her boss would not allow her to take time off. The cause was unknown. (James Tensuan / Reveal)

Workers often fear reporting their mistreatment to authorities. They routinely are harassed and fired if they report abysmal pay or overtime violations, according to interviews and court documents. Reveal found 90 caregivers in California who said their bosses intimidated them, threatened to report them to immigration authorities or blacklist them in the industry.

In 2014, federal investigators caught Lake Alhambra Center in Antioch cheating its workers – for a second time. When an investigator visited, an employee put him on the phone with Mehrangiz Sarkeshik, who owned the home with her husband.

She excoriated the investigator for the intrusion: “You didn’t tell me you were coming. Leave right now!”

Then the investigator overheard Sarkeshik shout at the worker over the phone: “You need to get him out of there or you will be fired!” She called the police and upon arriving at the home, she again threatened to fire any workers who cooperated with the investigator, according to a court document. When the investigator tried to follow up, workers told him that they were too scared to talk. Soon afterward, the facility changed hands and now operates under a different name. No wage theft fines have been issued to this operator to date.

Precilla San Miguel, an owner of San Miguel Homes for the Elderly, which operates three facilities in Union City, near Silicon Valley, kept timesheets that showed caregivers worked eight hours a day, even though their employment manual required them to be available 24 hours per day, seven days a week to seniors.

She went as far as fabricating evidence to cover up her wage theft, court documents show. Workers said she offered them bribes to falsify timesheets and required them to sign agreements not to sue her. She also installed surveillance cameras in her care homes to monitor caregivers, workers said. The court ordered the defendants to pay $425,000 in back wages and damages.

Last year, members of a family were charged with various felonies, including human trafficking and labor abuse, in San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. State prosecutors say Gamos family members preyed on Filipino immigrants and “enslaved” some in their Rainbow Bright facilities. Family members forced some to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and some caregivers had their passports withheld, prosecutors say.

In court filings, prosecutors allege that some workers slept on mattresses on the floor and in garages and were prohibited from leaving the facilities, where they cared for children, the disabled and some seniors. Some workers who were injured on the job were told to lie to emergency room doctors about how they were maimed. They also were forced to pay their medical bills, according to the court documents.

Even as his family cheated workers out of more than $9 million in wages from 2009 through 2018, Joshua Gamos, one of the facilities’ owners, collected a fleet of cars, including a Lamborghini and a Ferrari, prosecutors allege in court documents. Gamos also is charged with raping a caregiver. She was 21 when she began working for the facilities shortly after arriving from the Philippines. Joshua, Noel and Carlina Gamos are in jail awaiting trial. A fourth defendant, Gerlen Gamos, pleaded guilty to two felony charges, including wage theft, and is awaiting sentencing. Her attorney declined to comment.

Attorneys for Joshua and Carlina Gamos said no workers were forced to work at the facilities. An attorney for Noel Gamos did not return calls seeking comment.

“Those allegations are false,” said David Cohen, an attorney for Joshua Gamos. “People wanted to work because they wanted the money. It is true that these charges have been brought, but when you actually look at the evidence and the statements that were made, it’s a completely different story.”

Meanwhile, Reveal learned of cases in which workers suffered abuse with devastating consequences. Two caregivers reported having miscarriages after lifting heavy residents and being denied time off.

One of them was Julie Riduta, 45, of Concord. More than a decade ago, she arrived from the Philippines to work as a caregiver in a care home in Contra Costa County. She earned $2 an hour to work 24 hours a day.

The work was grueling, but she needed the pay to educate her daughter, left behind in the Philippines, from the age of 8. For the first three years, Riduta slept on a thin piece of foam on the floor next to the residents. When they needed help, she said they kicked her awake.

“I told my daughter I struggled so much,” Riduta recalled. “I feel abused.”

Then one day in the summer of 2014, she found out she was pregnant. Overjoyed, she and the baby’s father, a co-worker with whom she is in a relationship, posted the news on Facebook.

She also was overcome with morning sickness and was concerned about having to lift heavy residents. But when she begged her boss for two days off, Riduta said she refused.

“Go to the mirror and look at yourself,” Riduta recalled her boss saying. “Ask if you’re allowed to complain.”

Riduta had a miscarriage two weeks later. The cause was unknown. The fetus was nine weeks old.

“I was crying all night,” Riduta said. “I still have this dream that there’s a baby crying all the time. They treated us like animals.”

***

While some are unsure how to pay their workers properly, care-home owners are certain about one thing: There is money to be made.

Entrepreneurs on YouTube urge people to jump into the real estate end of the business by buying single-family homes and converting them into care facilities. One man explains how “to turn a single-family home into a cash flow machine.” Another calls care homes “America’s untapped business opportunity. … This business is very profitable.”

Jesse Quezada used to flip houses with his wife. When the market cooled, he said, they looked into opening a care home after a friend told them they could make thousands a month.

“Coming from our background, we thought, ‘$3,500 a month? Wow. Would people actually pay that?’ But the demand is there. People are living longer and they’re sicker.”

Quezada and his wife enrolled in a course required by California to run a home. In just two long weekends, they were qualified. They now operate several care homes.

“When you have multiple homes, you can literally make $20,000 profit a month,” he said.

Training requirements for care-home administrators and staff in California are feeble. Administrators must undergo an initial 80-hour program and pass an open-book exam comprising 100 questions. Those overseeing small facilities with 15 or fewer residents must be 21 and have a high school diploma or the equivalent. Staff in assisted living facilities need not be nurses or have any medical expertise. In fact, manicurists in California require more training.

Quezada was among more than 200 care-home owners, many of whom arrived in BMWs and Teslas, for a daylong seminar at a Southern California community hall last October. Among the presenters were labor regulators and attorneys who took questions from the crowd.

Attendees sought advice on proper pay practices and other labor issues and were advised by the presenters to follow the law.

Then George Kutnerian, senior vice president of public policy and legislation for the 6Beds group, took the stage as one of the last speakers. Operators should slash costs by leveraging labor laws to their advantage, Kutnerian urged them.

For example, owners do not need to hire two caregivers when they could get away with one, Kutnerian said.

“There is no staffing ratio. A lot of people think, ‘I can’t have one caregiver alone.’ That’s not true,” he advised.

“You gotta learn how to use one caregiver,” he said. Plus, there’s a “nice exception” in state law, Kutnerian continued. Care homes with just one caregiver on duty can require that worker to stay for rest and meal breaks, he noted, adding: “If you have two caregivers there, they have to be able to leave. It’s more efficient, OK?

“What this is getting you out of is the penalty,” Kutnerian boomed over the microphone. “That’s the trick. How do you keep them on the premises for rest and meal breaks?”

For owners who treat their workers properly, the market pressure is intense. While there are operators who comply with the law and turn a profit, some care homes charge less to attract residents searching for affordable care.

“It’s frustrating to be undercut,” said Jose Umana, who runs Premiere Cottages, which operates several care homes in Long Beach and Huntington Beach. “It’s hard to stay in the market when you’re competing with other homes that have lower rates. The caregivers are bearing the brunt.”

William Murphy, a prosecutor with the Alameda County district attorney’s office in the San Francisco Bay Area who has handled a dozen wage theft cases involving care homes in the last five years, says the business model depends on squeezing workers. He summed it up in two brief sentences:

“It’s extreme greed by the owners. The workers are treated horribly.”

Data reporter Melissa Lewis contributed to this story. It was edited by Narda Zacchino, Matt Thompson, Ziva Branstetter and Robert Salladay and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Jennifer Gollan can be reached at jgollan@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @jennifergollan.

A New Way to Slash CO2 Emissions

Soil health improvement, a technique known as carbon farming, could cut the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere by more than one-sixth, a US business group says.

It says a concerted effort by the world’s farmers to restore and protect soil health could reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by as much as 65 parts per million (ppm) from its current level of more than 415 ppm.

It made the announcement at a webinar on carbon farming which it hosted here in April. A full report of the webinar appears on the website of the The Energy Mix.

The group, the US-based Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), describes itself as “a national, nonpartisan group of business leaders, investors, and professionals from every sector of the economy who advocate … smart policies that are good for the economy and good for the environment”

World leaders … said that regenerative agriculture to naturally conserve and protect topsoil and support its fertility and resilience were “a huge carbon capture opportunity”

The total saving of 65 ppm represents the estimated amount of carbon that human activity has removed from the soil since the dawn of industrial agriculture.

But, E2 says, even if its eventual contribution to climate stabilisation falls well short of this figure, drawing attention to soil carbon sequestration could still concentrate minds on a climate solution often neglected in comparison with more complex and often riskier options for emission cuts.

E2 says a critical step in advancing climate-friendly soil health in the US is the ground-breaking Soil Health Demonstration Trial, a carbon farming pilot project that a coalition of farmers, agricultural technology entrepreneurs and environmentalists managed to persuade a deeply divided US Congress to accept in the December 2018 farm bill, the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018.

The idea for the carbon farming pilot emerged in the wake of the UN’s 2016 annual climate conference, known as COP23, held in the German city of Bonn. World leaders there said that regenerative agriculture to naturally conserve and protect topsoil and support its fertility and resilience were “a huge carbon capture opportunity”.

Microbial key

Carbon farming depends on the activity of microbes in the soil, says E2. Through photosynthesis, plants remove vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it into sugars. They use as much as 30% of these sugars to “recruit and nurture” huge, diverse populations of microbes around their root systems.

The microbes help the plants take up nutrients, retain water and tolerate stress, functioning as a key part of the process by which plants produce the roots and leaves that end up as carbon in the soil. When they die, they deposit huge amounts of carbon in the soil.

Scientists have developed a new microbial soil additive that substantially increased soil carbon sequestration in trial applications to California grapes and citrus fruit in Florida.

In the citrus trial, after scientists treated one acre of land three to four times over the course of a year, soil carbon increased by 32%, to 4.3 tons. Soil greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 2.33 tons, reckoned to be the rough equivalent of the CO2 produced by driving a car with an internal combustion engine for a whole year.

Depositing four tons of carbon per acre in just 10% of California’s agricultural land, it is estimated, would be the equivalent of taking 4.3 million cars off the road. 

A Crack Appears in the Republican Wall Protecting Trump

WASHINGTON—A Republican congressman from Michigan on Saturday became the first member of President Donald Trump’s party on Capitol Hill to accuse him of engaging in “impeachable conduct” stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s lengthy investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

But Rep. Justin Amash stopped short of calling on Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, which many Democrats have been agitating for.

Often a lone GOP voice in Congress, Amash sent a series of tweets Saturday faulting both Trump and Attorney General William Barr over Mueller’s report. Mueller wrapped the investigation and submitted his report to Barr in late March. Barr then released a summary of Mueller’s “principal conclusions” and released a redacted version of the report in April.

Mueller found no criminal conspiracy between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, but left open the question of whether Trump acted in ways that were meant to obstruct the investigation. Barr later said there was insufficient evidence to bring obstruction charges against Trump.

Trump, who has compared the investigation to a “witch hunt,” claimed complete exoneration from Mueller’s report.

Amash said he reached four conclusions after carefully reading the redacted version of Mueller’s report, including that “President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.”

“Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” the congressman tweeted. He said the report “identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.”

The Justice Department, which Barr leads, operates under guidelines that discourage the indictment of a sitting president.

A representative for Amash did not immediately respond to an email request to speak with the congressman.

Trump and Republican lawmakers generally view the matter as “case closed,” as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., recently declared on the floor of the Senate.

On the other hand, Democrats who control the House are locked in a bitter standoff with the White House as it ignores lawmakers’ requests for the more complete version of Mueller’s report, the underlying evidence and witness testimony. Some Democrats wants the House to open impeachment hearings, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has resisted, saying impeachment must be bipartisan.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., a freshman who opened her term by profanely calling for Trump to be impeached, applauded Amash.

“You are putting country first, and that is to be commended,” Tlaib tweeted. Tlaib is seeking support for a resolution she’s circulating calling on the House to start impeachment proceedings.

End of an Era: Bethlehem Steel’s World HQ Demolished

BETHLEHEM, Pa.—Sixteen thousand tons of Bethlehem Steel collapsed in a matter of seconds Sunday as a demolition crew imploded Martin Tower, the defunct steelmaker’s former world headquarters.

Crowds gathered to watch the demolition of the area’s tallest building, a 21-story monolith that opened at the height of Bethlehem Steel’s power and profitability but had stood vacant for a dozen years after America’s second-largest steelmaker went out of business.

Explosives took out Martin Tower’s steel supports and crumpled the 47-year-old building, which had earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places despite its relatively young age. The implosion, which took 16 seconds, created a thick plume of dust that lingered for several minutes.

Tyler Kent, whose father worked at Bethlehem Steel for 46 years and raised 11 children, said his “heart stopped” as he watched the building fall. His father and other relatives took pride in working at the industrial behemoth that armed the U.S. military and helped shape skylines across the country,

“To see it come down brought a tear to my eye. I didn’t think it was going to affect me emotionally like it did, but I just can’t imagine it’s gone. It’s so sad,” said Kent, who could see the tower from his house.

Martin Tower’s current owners spent years trying to redevelop the 332-foot (101-meter) structure — the tallest in a heavily populated region of Pennsylvania that includes the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton — but ultimately concluded it made more economic sense to knock it down and start over. Plans call for a $200 million development with medical offices, retail stores, a restaurant, a convenience store, a hotel and 528 apartments.

Bethlehem Steel was a major supplier of ships and armaments to the U.S. military during World War II, and its steel is found in the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge and many other landmarks.

The company moved into its new corporate headquarters in 1972, shortly before the U.S. steel industry plunged into a severe recession. Bethlehem Steel, which employed more than 120,000 people when Martin Tower opened, declared bankruptcy in 2001 and closed for good two years later.

To some, the tower — built in a cruciform shape to maximize the number of corner offices — symbolized corporate excess.

“This is where the money went that the workers never got,” said Fran Maiatico, whose father worked at Bethlehem Steel. She was among hundreds of people who gathered several blocks away from the building Sunday to watch it come down.

Leonard Gentilcore, 88, a retired Bethlehem Steel structural draftsman who worked on Martin Tower, said he didn’t care that it was gone. He said he associated the building with out-of-touch company executives who helped drive Bethlehem Steel into the ground.

But his son, 49-year-old Mike Gentilcore, a former Bethlehem Steel metals researcher, said “it breaks my heart” that an important piece of the company’s history is no more. He recalled looking out the tower’s windows as a child, and later worked there himself.

“It’s the end of an era and I’m going to miss seeing it there,” he said.

The company’s flagship Bethlehem mill, less than 2 miles (3 kilometers) from Martin Tower, was redeveloped into a casino and entertainment destination 10 years ago.

The American Militarization of Outer Space

Another day, another opportunity for our perpetually “behind” and “vulnerable” military/industrial/media complex to assert the need for yet another military upgrade–this time in outer space!

Jim Sciutto (Wall Street Journal, 5/10/19) fear-mongered the vulnerabilities of US space presence, warning that Russia and China “are developing new weapons that can attack crucial American satellites.”

The Wall Street Journal (5/10/19) published an excerpt from an upcoming book by CNN’s chief national security correspondent, Jim Sciutto, which claims that despite a “Star Wars–like space service” being an “easy comic target,” “US commanders” are “deadly serious” about confronting “new threats in space.” These “commanders” were mostly anonymous—but such sources are often involved in a profitable revolving door relationship with military contractors.

CNN (2/11/19) warned us of Russia and China’s “new” anti-satellite laser capacities, with breathless statements by government officials claiming that the two countries are “surpassing us” in space capabilities. NBC (2/11/19) claimed that both countries were “preparing to use space as a battlefield.” The Daily Beast (4/10/19) cautioned that although the US currently operates around 850 public and private satellites, compared with China’s 280 and Russia’s 150, Washington’s plans to launch 1,300 additional satellites to help the US “survive a sneak attack by China and Russia” might still be insufficient.

While these alarmist reports about an endangered and inadequate military lagging behind its ambitious and innovative “adversaries” are nothing new (FAIR.org, 12/20/18), Sciutto’s excerpt is exceptional in its credulity towards official sources, and in how badly it misleads readers regarding the militarization of space and the “threats” posed by Russia and China.

Going over several apocalyptic scenarios—“the internet would stop altogether,” financial markets would be “paralyzed” and the US might lose its indispensable capacity to “target anyplace on the planet, anytime, anywhere, any weather”—Sciutto warned  that one thing is clear: “War is coming to space, and the US must prepare for it.”

Sciutto relied on mostly anonymous government and military official sources for his claims of the US “losing ground” and potentially suffering an “outright military defeat at the hands of our foes”—unless, of course, the US commits to a “more robust Space Force.”

The Journal’s previous reporting (6/18/18) featured official sources claiming that the US must maintain its “competitive advantage,” since space is now a “warfighting domain,” and statements by President Donald Trump on the US’s commitment to space hegemony:

When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.

US Space Command’s 1997  Vision for 2020

This is not just Trumpian bluster, but US military doctrine going back decades—as outlined by the US Space Command’s 1997 Vision for 2020, which outlines the pursuit of “full spectrum dominance” to maintain overwhelming military superiority in land, air, sea and space.

Although Sciutto included the question of whether space-faring countries will negotiate a “peace treaty for space” in his list of “pressing policy questions about how to fight in space,” he doesn’t mention that the two countries he’s fearmongering about, Russia and China, have been at the forefront of proposing arms control treaties in outer space for years (Newsweek, 3/20/19).

One of the peace agreements the US refuses to negotiate, due to its missile defense advantages and edge in potential space weaponry, is the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) treaty, which has had near unanimous support from the international community—including Russia and China—for over 30 years. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (12/11/18) reported that the US rejected all four resolutions of the UN General Assembly’s First Committee meeting in 2018 dealing with disarmament and prevention of the weaponization of space.

Sciutto also never explains why Russia and China might want to develop the “kidnapper” and “kamikaze” satellites he terrifies his readers with. Despite the misnomer, it’s common knowledge among nuclear strategists that “missile defense systems” are actually offensive weapons, designed to secure a nuclear first-strike advantage by neutralizing retaliatory strikes, and serve as a “Trojan Horse” for the weaponization of space, because they depend on satellites to track missiles (Roll Call, 11/21/16). That might explain why Russia and China are seeking to upgrade their military space capabilities as the US deploys missile defense systems near their borders (Slate, 5/13/16; Washington Post, 3/7/17).

Noam Chomsky once explained that American news coverage operates on the premise that the US “owns the world,” but it’s clear that outer space belongs to the US as well, since corporate media frame any nation failing to treat space as Washington’s private property as enemy trespassers (RT, 2/13/19). It’s not enough to be No. 1 in the space race, because every other nation could “gain ground” on the US, driving a vicious circle of never-ending military buildups. As the global space economy is expected to multiply several times over the next few decades—with lucrative deals for military contractors—we can expect more alarmist reports from corporate media about the “threats” posed by countries seeking a peace treaty with the US in outer space.

Will China Save Iran From U.S. Sanctions?

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said at a news conference on Saturday that China opposes US unilateral sanctions on Iran and appreciates Iran’s continued commitment to the 2015 nuclear deal with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, despite the breach of it by the Trump administration.

This, amid evidence that China has resumed importing oil from Iran despite the Trump administration’s opposition.

Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is in Beijing on a diplomatic mission to shore up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal, as a result of which Iran had been promised sanctions relief that it never received. Indeed, US sanctions on Iran are so harsh today that they far outstrip those imposed before 2015, despite Iran’s adherence to the terms of the deal.

China also has been angered by Trump’s abrupt imposition on its goods of a 25% tariff last week.

Yi, in a telephone call with US secretary of state Mike Pompeo also on Saturday, complained about the tariffs. With regard to heightened tensions between the Trump administration and Iran, he urged restraint.

This May, the Trump administration ceased issuing waivers to countries that buy Iranian petroleum, causing Iran’s oil exports to plunge to only 500,000 barrels a day in March, from a high of 2.5 million barrels a day before Trump imposition of severe sanctions in 2017.

Reuters is reporting that a tanker just offloaded 130,000 barrels of Iranian crude at the Chinese port of Zhoushan. Iran has ceased reporting transparently on its exports and appears to be exporting petroleum on shadowy tankers with false destinations on their manifests, as a way of evading US Treasury Department sanctions. Zhoushan officials deny the report, saying they have brought in no Iranian oil for four years. Since Reuters is depending on anonymous leakers, this allegation would not stand up in a court, and US Treasury might not be able to do anything about it.

It is also being alleged by Bourse and Bazaar that a Chinese government-owned tanker, Pacific Bravo, just picked up two million barrels of petroleum from Iran and is now heading back toward China. Its stated destination is Indonesia, but that may be a cover. The tanker is owned by Kunlun Bank, which is in turn owned by the China National Petroleum Corporation, which is in turn owned by the Chinese government. For the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control successfully to sanction a Chinese government-owned entity would require Chinese cooperation, which will not be forthcoming. China may figure that if they are going essentially to be fined via Trump tariffs (which China does not pay but which will reduce US consumer demand for Chinese goods), that it doesn’t matter if Treasury piles on. Moreover, there is the question of proving that China did import. Trump severe sanctions are reducing the transparency of such transactions.

 

The Real Climate Change Culprits Have Never Been Punished

Years ago, tobacco companies discovered the link between their products and lung cancer. Did they warn their customers? No — they denied the link entirely, misleading the public for decades while killing their customers.

Similarly, ExxonMobil scientists made startlingly accurate predictions about climate change as early as 1982 — and then spent millions of dollars on a misinformation campaign to sow public doubt about climate change.

They didn’t need to convince the public that the climate crisis wasn’t happening. They just had to muddy the waters enough to prevent us from doing anything.

They provoked uncertainty: Maybe the climate crisis isn’t happening. And even if it is, maybe it’s not caused by humans burning fossil fuels. (Of course, it is happening and it is caused by humans.)

The result was inaction.

If we aren’t even sure that a human-caused climate crisis is afoot, why should we wean ourselves off of fossil fuels? It would be highly inconvenient and very expensive to go to all of that trouble unless we’re absolutely certain that we need to.

After all, the argument went, “only” 97 percent of scientists believe that human are causing a climate crisis.

I’m a scientist. Let me tell you, when 97 percent of scientists agree on anything, the evidence must be overwhelming.

Scientists are trained to critique and argue with one another. We make our careers by pulling apart other scientists’ theories and exposing the flaws in them and then supplanting them with better theories of our own.

You couldn’t get 97 percent of scientists to agree that puppies are cute or chocolate is delicious.

What about other 3 percent? You can always find one or two nutty so-called scientists with inaccurate, fringy theories out there. There’s probably a scientist somewhere attempting to publish a study asserting that Bigfoot exists — or that climate change isn’t happening.

Science is a community endeavor in which we try to collectively discover and advance the truth. The goal is that the community as a whole achieves a consensus or near-consensus that is as accurate as possible.

If 97 out of 100 scientists agree that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, that’s a consensus.

The difference between lying about the deadliness of tobacco and lying about the deadliness of fossil fuels is who gets harmed by those lies.

Tobacco is deadly — I’ve lost two grandparents to its ill effects — but tobacco is most harmful to those who use it. The climate crisis is deadly to everyone, whether they are responsible for causing it or not. It will continue to hurt people for generations, even after humans stop polluting at such alarming levels as they do now.

The Exxon Mobil executives who’ve profited from fossil fuels did so while knowing that they were trading a few decades of profits for the entire future of the planet and all of the species on it.

We’re beyond the point where we tell ourselves that changing our light bulbs can help. The fix for the climate crisis must come from the highest levels. It requires large-scale systemic changes and not a few insufficient individual actions.

And it could start with consequences for the industry that caused the crisis on purpose.