Chris Hedges's Blog, page 27

Shift to Digital Census Raises Fears of Iowa Caucuses-Like Breakdown

ORLANDO, Fla. — The stakes are high when a major civic exercise involves a large population, new technology that has not been thoroughly tested and an entire country waiting on the results.

Just ask the organizers of the Iowa caucuses, which offered a cautionary tale on the technological woes that could befall a big political event. Some observers worry that this year’s census carries the same potential for mayhem — except on an infinitely larger scale.

The U.S. Census Bureau plans to try out a lot of new technology. It’s the first once-a-decade census in which most people are being encouraged to answer questions via the internet. Later in the process, census workers who knock on the doors of homes that have not responded will use smartphones and a new mobile app to relay answers.

A government watchdog agency, the Census Bureau’s inspector general and some lawmakers have grown concerned about whether the systems are ready for prime time. Most U.S. residents can start answering the questionnaire in March.

“I must tell you, the Iowa (caucuses) debacle comes to mind when I think of the census going digital,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, the congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, said this week at a hearing on the census.

Cybersecurity is another worry. Experts consider the census to be an attractive target for anyone seeking to sow chaos and undermine confidence in the U.S. government, as Russia did in the 2016 presidential election.

In a worst-case scenario, vital records could be deleted or polluted with junk data. Even a lesser assault that interfered with online data collection could erode public confidence. In 2016, a denial-of-service attack knocked Australia’s online census offline, flooding it with junk data.

The Census Bureau says it’s ready. The agency promises that responses to the questionnaire will be kept confidential through encryption, and that it’s working with the Department of Homeland Security and private-sector security experts to thwart cyber attacks. To hinder illegitimate responses, the bureau is blocking foreign IP addresses and stopping bots from filling out fake responses, among many other measures.

The bureau says it has developed two secure data-collection systems, so that if one goes down, the other can substitute. Other mechanisms are in place to prevent failure and to back up essential functions.

“All systems are go,” bureau Director Steven Dillingham said.

For the past three years, the Government Accountability Office has placed the census on its list of high-risk programs, mainly because it is relying on technology that has not been used before.

Just last week, census officials decided to use a backup data-collection system for handling the online responses. That step was taken after officials grew concerned that the primary system, developed by a third-party contractor, would not be able to handle excessive traffic. The primary system experienced performance problems when up to 400,000 people were answering questions at the same time.

The backup system, called Primus, was developed in-house and can handle up to 600,000 users at once. But it was never tested during a test-run for the decennial census in Rhode Island two years ago.

“Late design changes such as a shift from one system to another can introduce new risks during a critical moment,” Nick Marinos, the GAO’s director of information technology, testified this week at the congressional hearing. “The bureau needs to quickly ensure that the system is ready and that contingency plans are finalized to reflect this change and fully tested before going live.”

Then there’s the mobile app for census takers who will be sent out to visit the homes of residents who have not filled out the forms by May. Bureau officials are still working to find out why the app sometimes needs to be restarted or reinstalled for it to work properly, according to a GAO report released this week.

In Iowa, a newly developed smartphone app was blamed for delaying the reporting of results from the first-in-the-nation presidential contest.

The Census Bureau has not finalized its backup plans for the online questionnaire system. As of the end of last year, the bureau still had to do 191 corrective actions for cybersecurity that were considered “high risk” or “very high risk,” the GAO said.

Last summer, the bureau’s Office of Inspector General identified several weaknesses in the agency’s backup planning efforts, including the ability to recover data stored in the cloud in the event of a large-scale attack or disaster.

In the same report, the inspector general said the bureau did not securely use commercial cloud services during census preparations and found many security deficiencies that indicated the agency was “behind schedule and rushed to deploy its systems” for the Rhode Island test-run.

The inspector general currently is conducting another audit of the bureau’s information-technology security, but there’s no word on when it will be finished, said Robert Johnston, the agency’s chief of staff.

In Iowa, fewer than 200,000 voters picked a candidate. The census will be conducted on a much grander scale as it attempts to count residents in almost 130 million households with the help of 52 IT systems. The nationwide headcount has been touted as the largest peacetime operation the government undertakes.

An accurate count is crucial for determining how many congressional seats each state gets and the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending. Respondents who do not want to answer the questionnaire online can do so by telephone or by mailing in a paper form.

Dillingham told lawmakers that the concerns raised by the inspector general had been remedied. The Census Bureau is prepared to distribute millions of paper forms in the event a catastrophe prevents people from responding online, bureau officials added.

“We can recover data if we had a breach,” said Albert Fontenot, an associate director at the bureau. “At the worst case, we would send someone out to re-collect that data.”

___

Associated Press Technology Writer Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this report.

New Virus Cases Fall; WHO Says China Bought the World Time

BEIJING — China reported 143 virus deaths and a dip in new cases Saturday while the head of the World Health Organization praised the country’s efforts to contain the new disease, saying they have “bought the world time” and that other nations must make the most of it.

France, meanwhile, reported Europe’s first death from the new virus, a Chinese tourist from Hubei province, where the disease emerged in December. The United States was preparing to fly home American passengers quarantined aboard a cruise ship in Japan.

China reported 2,641 new cases in the 24 hours through midnight Friday, raising its total to 66,492. Mainland China’s death toll rose to 1,523.

The number of new cases was down from the 5,090 in the previous 24-hour period after authorities changed the basis for counting patients. Numbers of new cases have fluctuated, fueling both optimism the disease might be under control and warnings that such hopes are premature.

The U.N. health agency’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged governments to step up their efforts to prepare for the virus, saying “it’s impossible to predict which direction this epidemic will take.”

Tedros told a gathering of international foreign and security policy leaders in Germany on Saturday that WHO is encouraged there has not yet been widespread transmission outside China and that “the steps China has taken to contain the outbreak at its source appear to have bought the world time.”

“We’re encouraged that an international team of experts is now on the ground working closely with Chinese counterparts to understand the outbreak,” Tedros told the Munich Security Conference.

But he said the agency is “concerned by the continued increase in the number of cases in China,” and by reports about the number of health workers who have been infected or died.

“We’re concerned by the lack of urgency in funding the response from the international community,” Tedros said.

“We must use the window of opportunity we have to intensify our preparedness,” he added. “China has bought the world time. We don’t know how much time.”

China’s government suspended most access to Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, on Jan. 23. Restrictions have expanded to cities with a total of 60 million people in the broadest anti-disease measures ever imposed. Restaurants, shops and other businesses nationwide were ordered to close.

The Lunar New Year holiday was extended to keep factories and offices closed, but now officials have been ordered to revive business activity as economic losses mount.

Authorities have announced measures to try to curb new infections as millions of workers crowd into planes, trains and buses to return to densely populated cities.

Under the new measures, people returning to Beijing will have to isolate themselves at home for 14 days, according to a notice published Friday. It said people who fail to comply will face legal consequences but gave no details.

COVID-19, a disease stemming from a new form of coronavirus, has spread to more than two dozen countries.

The 80-year-old Chinese tourist who died in France was hospitalized Jan. 25 with a lung infection, according to Health Minister Agnes Buzyn. His daughter also fell ill but authorities say she is expected to recover.

In Japan, the U.S. Embassy said a chartered aircraft will arrive late Sunday to fly home Americans aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess in Yokohama, near Tokyo. The passengers have been quarantined aboard the ship since Feb. 5, but they will face another two-week quarantine after arriving in the United States.

Those who return to the U.S. will fly to Travis Air Force Base in California and some will fly onward to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, said an embassy statement. It said no one with symptoms would be allowed aboard the flight.

Hong Kong’s government said its residents aboard the cruise ship also will be flown home as soon as possible, and they too would face a second quarantine.

So far, 285 people from the cruise ship have tested positive for the virus. Japan’s Health Ministry allowed 11 passengers to disembark Friday. It said passengers above 80 years of age, those with underlying medical conditions and those who stayed in windowless cabins during the 14-day quarantine could move to a facility onshore.

On Thursday, the number of new cases reported by authorities in Hubei spiked to 15,152, mainly because China has changed the way it is counting. That included 13,332 that were diagnosed with doctors’ analyses and lung imaging instead of the previous standard of laboratory testing. Health authorities said the new method would facilitate earlier treatment.

Nine more temporary hospitals have opened in gymnasiums and other public buildings, with 6,960 beds in Hubei, the National Health Commission announced. It said 5,606 patients with mild symptoms were being treated.

The ruling Communist Party is trying to restore public confidence following complaints leaders in Wuhan suppressed information about the disease. The party faced similar criticism after the 2002-03 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

The party should “strengthen areas of weakness and close up loopholes” after the epidemic exposed “shortcomings and deficiencies,” President Xi Jinping said at a meeting of party leaders Friday, according to state media.

Extended closures of factories and businesses prevented a flood of travel after the Lunar New Year holiday, normally the Chinese industry’s busiest season, officials said at a news conference.

Total volume of daily travelers is down 80% from last year, according to a deputy transportation minister, Liu Xiaoming.

Business losses are so severe that forecasters have cut their outlooks for China’s economic growth.

The state-owned banking industry has provided more than 537 billion yuan ($77 billion) in credit to industries such as retail, catering and tourism that have been hurt most, according to Liang Tao, vice chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission.

This weekend, a team of WHO experts were due to begin a mission in China.

A WHO official, speaking at the conference in Munich, defended China’s handling of the outbreak.

“Some of the rhetoric for me has not been helpful, not been helpful at all. China has a strong public health and health system,” said Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s chief of emergencies. “I think we as the global community need to change our narrative if we’re going to work successfully with China and other countries to stop this disease.”

___

Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Munich, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

Sugar-Coated Pimping

Editor’s note: Some names have been changed to protect interviewees’ identities.

I saw the billboards during a research trip to Los Angeles.

“Happy 18th Birthday! Meet your new Daddy,” read one website advertisement. “Do you have strong oral skills? We’ve got a job for you!” cooed another.

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A message on another billboard directed at the “daddies” was more blunt: “The alternative to escorts. Desperate women will do anything.”

“Sugaring” is an enormously profitable and growing trade. Women are being encouraged to sell sex through so-called sugar baby/sugar daddy arrangements. Online sugar dating sites, such as SeekingArrangement (SA), bypass prostitution and pimping laws by presenting the transaction as “dating with benefits.”

A sugar arrangement is, according to the pimps and entrepreneurs, an exchange of cash, gifts or other financial and material benefits for good company. In fact, it is what is euphemistically known as the “girlfriend experience,” but often on a much longer-term basis.

“I had promoted myself from working in a brothel to going on vacations with rich men, where I was expected to listen to their every word and have sex on demand for two whole weeks,” Charlotte told me, when I spoke to her in Chicago. “Sugaring is way worse. You are expected to be available as and when he wants you to be and get paraded around his fancy friends and business colleagues like a pet poodle.”

As Kenny, a regular sugar daddy, told me via email, “I have money, and the girls have beauty, grace and, more importantly, youth! Why would I want to pay a sex worker, have a maid, and sign up to one of those sites that provide me a date for the evening when I can have it all rolled into one?”

Audrey, a care worker in her late teens, was first sold for sex on the streets of Minneapolis at the age of 15, and eventually found her way into a brothel to escape her pimp. “The first piece of advice I was given by the other girls was to register on SeekingArrangement,” she says. “They told me that it’s way better to date these rich guys who sometimes don’t even ask for sex from one week to the next, especially if they’re married and do lots of business travel, but they pay your rent and bring you gifts.”

For six months, Audrey lived in an apartment rented by Ray, her sugar daddy. He visited her every day for sex, expecting his sexual desires to be met regardless of her mood or feelings. Audrey once refused him because she had food poisoning, but Ray told her she would be homeless that night unless she gave him what he wanted.

“He had my entire life in his hands,” she says. “It was way worse than prostitution, because I could never escape. I was told it was going to be nice dinners and shopping trips, but I was literally his concubine.”

While some women ask their sugar daddy for a monthly allowance, many men are reluctant, preferring a “pay as you go” arrangement. One john and regular user of sugar babies on the SeekingArrangement forum wrote, “I know that there are unscrupulous guys out there that make an entire ‘hobby’ out of ‘trying out’ sugar babies, leading them on with the hook of an allowance, but with no intent of ever providing one. Thus, I find the ‘pay as you go’ approach much more open and honest … but also, it can make some potential sugar babies feel like it is too close to escorting. So, there is that dance to deal with.”

“[Sugaring] is nothing like regular dating,” Judy told me when we met in a coffee bar in central London. “We are just a set of orifices for men to use, and the occasional bit of arm candy.”

Judy learned about SeekingArrangement from her friend at work. “I was earning £5 [$7] an hour in a coffee bar and could not even pay my rent, let alone go out and have fun. I signed up and was immediately inundated with requests to meet, from nice looking men.”

Initially, Judy says she met some “quite nice” men, and was taken for meals and, after sex, was paid between $260 to $650. “It felt like very high-class prostitution, but prostitution nevertheless,” Judy says. For that amount of money there was, of course, a catch. “I was juggling three daddies at once, and I had to be available to see them when they called. It was like that initial payment ‘bought’ me, and they kind of owned me after that.”

SeekingArrangement was founded by Las Vegas tech tycoon Brandon Wade. Wade is apparently worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million. His motto is, “Love is a concept invented by poor people.”

“This is real, I’m living the life,” Wade told a journalist. “I can’t help that I’m attracted to young and beautiful women, like most men are.”

Wade, 48, whose 22-year-old sugar baby Zoe lives with him in Las Vegas, claims sugar daddies help empower young women and advance their lives. “If you are poor and you are constantly hanging out with the poor people, you’re never going to find opportunities in life,” he said.

The SeekingArrangement website shows stock photos of white women, sometimes carrying shopping bags from expensive clothing and cosmetic stores. Many are dressed in formal gowns and diamond jewelry, fawning over white men with business-trip suitcases and carefully groomed five o’clock stubble. It includes a section on “hypergamy,” or what used to be known as “marrying up.”

Nowhere are class and other social dividers starker than in an opulent setting — such as a five-star hotel room — in which one person can easily afford the bill, and the other does not even have a bank account. The average SA member spends $3,000 per month on sugar babies. Sex trade survivor Anya, who signed up as a sugar baby when she was in her teens, tells me that “[johns] make you feel like dirt when they have a posh hotel room that they can buy you in. You’re the dirty whore and they have a load of money and power. At least on the street, you are both [the john and the prostituted woman] looked at as scum, to one degree or another, by the residents and police.”

According to data from July 2016, SeekingArrangement boasts more than 5 million active members. More than 4 million of these were sugar baby accounts — women register for free; men have to pay. The website now advertises that it has “four sugar babies per sugar daddy.”

SeekingArrangement covers 139 countries. Married men account for about 40 percent of the sugar daddies on the site.

SA also markets itself as an antidote to student debt. In the U.S. and elsewhere, college students are enduring financial instability and hardship. Because of rising college fees and rent, and the lack of time available for work during studies, many women are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. “SeekingArrangement.com has helped facilitate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of arrangements that have helped students graduate debt-free,” Wade boasts on the website. Promotional videos show young, beautiful women enrolled in “Sugar Baby University” — in classrooms, holding wads of cash, driving luxury cars, and discussing the pleasure and ease of being a sugar baby.

When signing up for an account, potential sugar babies are told, “Tip: Using a .edu email address earns you a free upgrade!”

A company spokeswoman says that college students using their university emails to log into the site also get their profiles included under a “college student” heading so that sugar daddies intent on “helping” college students can find them more easily.

If a student types keywords such as “tuition help” or “financial aid” into a search engine, strategic pop-ups suggesting she become a sugar baby will often appear on her internet browser.

All men who pay for sex are exercising male power, privilege and financial control over the woman he is paying for. One news release from SeekingArrangement claimed that “sugar baby students receive an average of $3,000 in monthly allowances, earning $20,920 more than a student working full time at the federal minimum wage.” But many of the young women who sign up to meet a charming, rich and handsome older boyfriend find themselves trapped in domestic and sexual servitude.

Cheryl, 19, had just begun university in Toronto when she used the website SugarDaddyMeet. “I was broke, feeling low because my boyfriend had broken up with me, and needed some excitement in my life,” she told me over the phone from her home in Vancouver.

Within days, Cheryl was matched with Paul, an independently wealthy sports fanatic in his 60s. “He was not attractive to me at all,” she says. “And because he didn’t work, he was at me all the time, day and night, for sex, and watching him play tennis — anything he did, he wanted me there to boost his fucking ego.”

The first time Paul had sex with Cheryl (“I hated it,” she says), he gave her $100 and told her, “I can pay your bills if you like, but you are not getting any more cash because we both know you will spend it on yourself.” She agreed to “let him pay my rent because I was desperate, and that was all he was offering.” She gave him her landlord’s contact information.

When Cheryl attempted to break up with Paul, her nightmare began.

“When I told him to stop calling me and dropping round unannounced, he threatened to tell the landlord I was a hooker, and would send him ‘proof.’ ”

Paul had taken photographs of Cheryl during sex, which made her feel “super uncomfortable.” Knowing he had those photos, as well as proof of how they met, Cheryl believed Paul would carry out his threat.

“I lost my apartment, because I could not bear staying there with the threats hanging over me, as well as the fact that he knew where I was,” she says. Cheryl moved back in with her parents and dropped out of university. “I am much worse off now than I was before I signed up to that stupid site.”

Peter Fleming, a professor at the University of Technology of Sydney, is the author of a 2018 book titled “Sugar Daddy Capitalism: The Dark Side of the New Economy.” Fleming says the sugar daddy business model exploits women’s financial desperation.

“For all intents and purposes, this is sex work in disguise, or undercover sex work,” Fleming writes, adding that sugar daddy websites are simply selling a “fantasy” to young women, but the dark side is “economic dependence.”

A typical SA sugar daddy is age 45 or above, and worth more than $2 million. About 18 out of 50 sugar daddies say they are looking for a “no strings attached” and “drama free” relationship. Many tempt young women with the offer of accompanying them on luxury vacations.

About 15 out of 50 sugar daddies mention “kink” and specific sexual fetishes in the “what I am looking for” portion of their profile. Other stand-out descriptions of the type of “girl” the men are searching for include: “Very sexual — extremely sexual, open and enjoys being with a dominant hung male”; “Must like sex, a lot! Physical attraction is paramount, if you can fake that convincingly, you’re my girl! I like hearing the words ‘yes baby, anything you want’ ”; “I am seeking an extremely inclined sub for an ongoing discreet relationship”; and “Looking for a young lady that I could pass off as a niece, or a daughter of a friend.”

The young women advertising as sugar babies are typically age 18 to 30, and almost half mention that they are seeking financial support from their new sugar daddy. Many of their photographs are sexualized — showing cleavage, for example, or lingerie.

Scores of women from around the world register as sugar babies to sell their virginity. Their ages range from just 18 to those in their early 20s.

I spoke to Anna, a 20-year-old student who registered as a sugar baby last year. “I saw on the site that auctioning your virginity can bring in a fortune,” she says. She advertised in her profile: “Auction for my virginity. Highest bid before midnight on New Year’s Eve wins.” Anna sold her virginity to a 45-year-old father of three for $5,000.

An 18-year-old woman from Britain stated in her profile, “I’m offering a triangle with 2 virgins (me and a good friend of mine). Candidate who offers the biggest amount of money will get to be our first romance.”

A third student, age 18, advertised: “I need money as I am a student. I am willing to do anything except sexual intercourse. If I was to do that it would come at a very high cost because I am a virgin.”

In 2018, police in Memphis, Tennessee, charged Mark Giannini, 52, a wealthy businessman, with the statutory rape of a 17-year-old he met on SeekingArrangement.

That same year, a pan-European sugar daddy site, RichMeetBeautiful, placed large posters advertising itself as a “sugar daddy and sugar baby dating site” on trucks outside Belgian universities. The site claimed to offer a “Fifty Shades of Grey” experience to its members, and invited young female students to “improve your style of life [by getting] a sugar daddy.” Université libre de Bruxelles officials complained to the police, who seized the billboards.

Norwegian Sigurd Vedal, chief executive of RichMeetBeautiful, found himself charged in a Brussels court in 2019 with debauchery, public “incitement to debauchery and prostitution,” and violating anti-sexism laws.

Vedal maintained that he and his company were only trying to facilitate unusual dating. He also stated that “[w]e are like a normal dating site, but financial is part of the checklist.”

Vedal received a personal fine of $43,000, and a $260,000 fine for his company. Brussels prosecutors are seeking a six-month suspended prison sentence.

They also want the company’s promotional materials to be seized, claiming that they “reduce students to sexual objects.”

Eric Cusas, Vedal’s defense attorney, said his client was an entrepreneur of 15 years and a libertarian. Cusas claimed that any sexual element was “only in the eye of the observer,” and that Vedal had been made a scapegoat.

Laurent Kennes, a spokesman for the Université libre de Bruxelles, said he had no doubt as to the purpose of the website. “We presumed the existence of a sexual counterpart to the registration on this site. The message is: ‘You’re young, you’re beautiful, go out with a sugar daddy!’ Everyone understands what it’s about.”

The huge billboards, which appeared to be poorly translated, showed a couple cuddling alongside the caption, “Romance, passion, fun & 0, — in study loan? Date a sugar daddy or sugar mama.”

Vedal also is accused of “aggravated pimping” in France over a mobile billboard placed on the Sorbonne University campus. It pictured a man lying on top of a woman, with a similar caption: “Hey students! Romantic, passion and no student loan. Go out with a Sugar Daddy or Sugar Mama!”

Photos of the billboard went viral online, leading Deputy Mayor of Paris Helene Bidard to declare, “This site is an offence against women. Behind these glamorized images there are young people who could end up in prostitution.”

A French student association launched a criminal complaint over the ad, while others have launched a petition calling for such ads to be banned.

The Belgian newspaper De Standaard reported that during his trial in Brussels, Vedal told the court he would not mind if his own daughter registered on the site — “If she wants it and she wants it because she wants to start a real relationship.”

The state prosecutor told the court, “Even if weasel words were used, everyone knew what it was about. There are half-dressed women on the site, there are no photos of couples in a restaurant. Students are reduced to sex objects that must undress for money.”

But Brandon Wade, the businessman behind SeekingArrangement, insists it is not an escort service, and even hosts a disclaimer: “An arrangement is not an escort service. SeekingArrangement in no way, shape or form supports escorts or prostitutes using our website for personal gain. Profiles suspected of this usage will be addressed by the SeekingArrangement Misconduct Team and banned from our website.”

Despite this, when images from SA profiles were put through a search engine, matching photographs were found on escort review websites, such as companionsreviews.com, CAescort.club and exoticpostreviews.com. Ads on backpage.com also host some of these images.

Many human rights activists and feminist campaigners are fully aware that sugar dating is part of the exploitative global sex trade.

I spoke to Rob Spectre, a New York technologist and CEO of Childsafe.ai, who has researched the phenomenon of sugar dating sites. “These sites attempt to emulate dating sites, but in fact they are no different from escort prostitution businesses,” he says. “The number of underage young women advertised is significant. The exploitation is off the scale, and clearly crimes are being committed.”

In 2018, a young female member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), which campaigns to end the global sex trade, attended a sugar industry event undercover. Hosted by Let’s Talk Sugar, a blog in partnership with SeekingArrangement, the event aimed to recruit sugar babies onto the site.

A young woman from Brooklyn, New York, spoke of her first experiences on the site: At the end of her first SA date, the man handed her an envelope containing $600. On her second date with a different man, he placed an envelope filled with $2,000 on the countertop after their lunch date. At that point, she said, she felt obligated to have sex with the man because that is “what’s expected after a $2,000 exchange.”

“I observed confirmation of things we already suspected, such as solicitation of minors and financial coercion, but also learned exactly how the website itself ‘coaches’ users to create the most successful profile—from what kind of photos to use down to the lingo. If you’ve heard survivors of [child sexual abuse] describe how their pimps made them curate ads on Backpage … it sounded like that,” the CATW observer says.

In the tips and Q&A portion of the event, Brook Ulrich, the SA representative, announced, “These guys are rich and they don’t have enough time to craft an eloquent message … they want to get to the point … they want to press a button to say, ‘I am interested, are you interested?’ ” She referred to sharing private photos as a “game,” and recommended a little “reveal” in private photos.

Ulrich told the young women they “shouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed” to have an older man paying for her expenses.

In response to a woman who asked about potential dangers and safety, Ulrich said that women signing up for SA should assume that all the men on the site have “baggage,” and the women should be cautious about who they meet.

It’s advice that Cheryl, who feels she “lost everything” when she was forced to run away from her abusive sugar daddy, finally understands. “I would tell any woman planning on doing it: ‘Don’t even think about it!’ It is prostitution, but it is even worse in some ways, because the john doesn’t walk away after having sex. He sticks around to take your life from you and make it his.”

Michael Avenatti Is Convicted of Trying to Extort Nike

NEW YORK — Michael Avenatti, the combative lawyer who gained fame by representing porn star Stormy Daniels in lawsuits involving President Donald Trump, was convicted Friday of trying to extort sportswear giant Nike.

The verdict was returned by a federal jury in Manhattan following a three-week trial in which prosecutors said Avenatti threatened to use his media access to hurt Nike’s reputation and stock price unless the company paid him up to $25 million.

The convictions for attempted extortion and honest services fraud carry a combined potential penalty of 42 years in prison.

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Avenatti glared at the jurors as the verdict was being announced but said nothing.

Afterward, he shook hands with his lawyers and told them “great job” before he was led back to the cell where he has been held since a judge found he had violated his bail conditions.

His lawyer, Scott Srebnick, said he would appeal the conviction but otherwise declined to comment. A judge set sentencing for June.

The jury agreed with prosecutors who argued that Avenatti misused a client’s information “in an effort to extort tens of millions of dollars” from Nike, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a written statement.

“While the defendant may have tried to hide behind legal terms and a suit and tie, the jury clearly saw the defendant’s scheme for what it was — an old fashioned shakedown,” he said.

At trial, lawyers for Nike used words like “shakedown” and “stickup” to describe what they felt they were subject to when Avenatti threatened to stage a news conference to muddy Nike’s name by linking the company to a college basketball scandal.

Avenatti, 48, became a cable news fixture in 2018 and 2019 as journalists courted him for information about Daniels and her claims of a tryst with Trump before he became president, and a payoff to remain silent about it. At his peak of notoriety, Avenatti used Twitter and TV appearances to relentlessly criticize Trump and even considered running for president himself.

Many of his appearances occurred while he was representing Daniels and after the arrest of Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Cohen is serving a three-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to lying to Congress and campaign finance violations in connection with hush payments to Daniels and another woman who claimed an affair with Trump.

After Avenatti’s conviction, Donald Trump Jr. said in a tweet: “I look forward to Michael’s witty twitter retorts to the jury that just found him guilty in all counts. Though I’m told he is still doing well amongst the Democrat primary contenders.”

The president’s son also sent a tweet with snippets of some of Avanatti’s television appearances and suggested the media loved Avenatti.

Avenatti’s fall was swift. He was arrested as he was about to meet Nike lawyers last March to press his demands for millions of dollars to conduct an internal probe of the Beaverton, Oregon-based apparel maker. Evidence at trial showed Avenatti owed at least $11 million at the time and had been evicted from his law offices for failure to pay rent that totaled roughly $50,000 a month.

Avenatti maintained he was taking the aggressive position at the urging of his client Gary Franklin, who ran a youth basketball league in Los Angeles and was angry that Nike ended a decade-long sponsorship that provided $72,000 annually and free gear. He sought $1.5 million for Franklin, as well.

Franklin testified that two Nike executives forced him to pay money to the mother of an elite high school basketball player and to pass along payments to the handlers of other players while doctoring paperwork to hide the purpose of the funds.

Franklin said he felt betrayed by Avenatti after he learned the lawyer was demanding millions of dollars for himself and another lawyer. He also said he would not have approved of Avenatti threatening to smear Nike’s name, since he wanted to repair his relationship with the company.

“Scared, upset, confused” was how Franklin said he reacted to Avenatti telling him that he was “going to go public” with what he knew about Nike executives.

As Franklin testified, Avenatti showed his displeasure. He laughed, grimaced, looked skyward, smiled and shook his head in reaction to his former client’s testimony.

Avenatti did not testify, but his lawyers said he was following the wishes of Franklin and an entertainment executive who advised him to be aggressive to force Nike to fire corrupt executives and fix its culture.

Besides the extortion trial, Avenatti also faces an April trial in New York on charges that he defrauded Daniels of book proceeds and a May trial in Los Angeles on charges that he defrauded clients and others of millions of dollars.

The judge presiding over the trial over book proceeds died this month. The judge newly assigned to the case has scheduled a conference for Feb. 25.

Avenatti remains held without bail. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles succeeded last month in getting him locked up after saying he violated his $300,000 bail by moving money around illegally after his arrest.

Robert Reich: Bloomberg Wants to Buy Our Democracy

Bad enough that a tyrant is destroying American democracy. Now an oligarch is trying to buy the presidency.

Michael Bloomberg’s net worth is over $60 billion. The yearly return on $60 billion is at least $2 billion – which is what Bloomberg says he’ll pour into buying the highest office in the land.

I’m not saying that great wealth should disqualify you from becoming president. America has had some talented and capable presidents who were enormously wealthy – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, for example.

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The problem lies at the nexus of wealth and power, where those with great wealth use it to gain great power. This is how oligarchy destroys democracy.

So far, Bloomberg spent over $380 million on campaign advertising. That’s more than Hillary Clinton spent on advertising during her entire presidential run. It’s multiples of what all other Democratic candidates have spent, including billionaire Tom Steyer.

Encouraged by the murky outcome from the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries, Bloomberg has doubled his spending on TV commercials in every market where he is currently advertising and is expanding his campaign’s field staff to more than 2,000.

That’s not the only way he’s using his billions to co-opt the election. He’s been endorsed by House Democrats and Democratic mayors who were the beneficiaries of his fortune during their campaigns. He’s also paying social-media “influencers” with large followings to promote his campaign.

His paid staff is already three times as large as Trump’s, five times Joe Biden’s. He’s using his fortune to woo staffers away from other campaigns.

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee is putting Bloomberg onto the debate stage by abandoning the individual-donor threshold that it used for the first eight debates, presumably because Bloomberg – the self-funded billionaire – doesn’t take donations.

To participate in the Feb. 19 debate in Las Vegas, Democratic candidates need to show at least 10 percent support in four national polls. Bloomberg’s wall-to-wall advertising makes that pretty much inevitable. He recently came in third place in a Morning Consult tracking poll, behind just Sanders and Biden. And he’s in the top four in many Super Tuesday states.

Bloomberg has some attractive policy ideas about gun control, the environment, and a more progressive tax.

But he’s also a champion of Wall Street. He fought against the reforms following the near meltdown of the Street in 2008. His personal fortune is every bit as opaque as Trump’s. Through his dozen years as mayor of New York he refused to disclose his federal taxes. Even as a candidate for president, he still hasn’t given a date for their release.

And because he hasn’t taken individual donations, hasn’t appeared on the debate stage, and bases his entire campaign on TV advertising, he isn’t being held accountable for his despicable record on race and criminal justice – the discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy he implemented when he was mayor, or his defense of red-lining.

And, remember, he’s trying to buy the presidency.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.” It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people.

Since 1980, the share of America’s wealth owned by the richest four hundred Americans has quadrupled while the share owned by the entire bottom half of America has declined. 

The richest 130,000 families now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent – 117 million families – combined. The three richest Americans own as much as the bottom half. Michael Bloomberg is the eighth richest.

Big money inevitably engulfs politics, which is why a handful of extremely rich people like Bloomberg have more influence than any comparable group since the robber barons of the early 20th century.

Unlike income or wealth, power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less of it anywhere else. And as power and wealth have moved to the top, everyone else has become dis-empowered. Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

Bloomberg is indubitably part of that oligarchy.

If the only way we can get rid of a sociopathic tyrant named Trump is with an oligarch named Bloomberg, we will be forced to choose the oligarch.

But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Oligarchy is better than tyranny. But neither is as good as democracy.

Virus Cases Rise as Experts Question China’s Numbers

BEIJING  — Infections and deaths from the new virus in China ballooned for a second straight day Friday, on paper at least, as officials near the epicenter of the outbreak struggled to keep up with a backlog of patients’ lab work.

The acceleration in cases was not necessarily an indicator of a surge in the illness known as COVID-19 because the hardest-hit province of Hubei and its capital of Wuhan changed the way it counted cases. But public health experts wrestled with what exactly could be deduced from the numbers given the shift in approach.

“If you change the way you count cases, that obviously confounds our capacity to draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of the quarantine,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University in the United States. “We have to interpret the numbers with great caution.”

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Confirmed cases of the virus rose to 63,851 in mainland China, an increase of 5,090 from a day earlier, according to the National Health Commission. The death toll stood at 1,380, up 121.

Still, the World Health Organization continued to report lower numbers, standing by the way cases were counted before Hubei’s shift. WHO pressed for more details Friday on the change in tabulating cases. Doctors in Hubei are now making diagnoses based on symptoms, patient history and chest X-rays instead of waiting for laboratory confirmation.

“We’re seeking further clarity on how clinical diagnoses are being made to ensure other respiratory illnesses including influenza are not getting mixed into the COVID-19 data,” said WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Meantime, the vulnerability of health workers responding to the epidemic was crystalized with other data emerging from China. More than 1,700 medical workers in China have contracted COVID-19 and six have died, according to the health commission, which said it was “highly concerned” by the infections.

WHO echoed that, with Tedros saying more information was needed on when the workers were infected and under what circumstances. Transmissions to front-line health workers can signal problems in infection control policies and signal that a disease is becoming more easily transmissible.

Schaffner said he was optimistic that China’s unprecedented quarantines — putting 60 million people in its hardest-hit cities under lockdown — would help reduce transmissions. But without consistent numbers, he said, it was hard to draw any such conclusion.

“China and the world community would like to restore a sense of normalcy but in order to do that we need to have confidence in what is going on and we’re not there yet,” Schaffner said.

China has come under intense criticism within the country for its response to the crisis and has been the target of complaints from elsewhere too. But WHO’s chief of emergencies, Dr. Michael Ryan, defended China’s handling of the outbreak and its cooperation with others.

“From our perspective, we have a government that’s cooperating with us, that’s inviting in international experts, that’s shared sequences with the world, that continues to engage with the outside community,” he said.

The vast majority of cases are in China but reverberations from the outbreak were felt around the world, with hundreds of infections reported elsewhere.

More than 580 cases have been confirmed outside mainland China, including the first infection on the African continent, reported Friday in Egypt. Experts and African leaders have expressed concern that should the virus spread there, it might wreak havoc among less developed countries with fewer health resources.

There have been three fatalities, in the Philippines, Hong Kong and Japan.

___

Associated Press writers Matt Sedensky in New York; Maria Cheng in London; Ralph Jennings in Taipei, Taiwan;, and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

Frieze L.A., The Sequel: Revenge of the White Patriarchy

Now in its second year, Frieze Los Angeles has taken over the lot at Paramount Studios. The opening act runs today through Sunday and anchors Frieze Week, a series of events, discussions and gatherings at galleries and art institutions around the city. The fair itself takes place in a tent designed by go-to art world architect Kulapat Yantrasast, a short walk from the special projects section, where commissions went to a cadre of emerging artists who took over the New York-style backlot with installations and other large-scale works.

The curators of special projects for Frieze Los Angeles are Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Rita Gonzalez and the Vincent Price Museum’s Pilar Tompkins Rivas, who were charged with a mandate to embrace diversity. Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors is featured on the program to lead a participatory dance performance, while a look inside the wallets of everyday Brazilians makes Jonathas de Andrade’s video work an intimate and surprising portrait of his homeland. Gary Simmons was tapped to restage his 1993 “Backdrop Project,” taking Polaroids of visitors and offering them a copy.

“We really wanted to focus on the lack of Latino visibility in media, but also in the art world. There are very few commercial art galleries that represent Latinx artists, and that’s something we wanted there to be as a subtext to our selection,” Gonzalez tells Truthdig. “It was very strategic, the artists we were giving this platform to.”

Inside a faux-brownstone apartment, Vincent Ramos’ installation titled “Wolf Songs for the Dead” scrutinizes host Paramount Studios’ legacy of Latinx and Chicano representation in its movies. He mixes his own drawings, photos and personal family items with images scoured from the archives, including those of actors Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Zorro, Lupe Vélez and Ricardo Montalban.

“Whoever is in charge, they don’t think these stories are worthy of being told,” says Ramos, a native Angeleno who lives and works in Venice. “Ask any brown person on the street, and they’ll tell you there are some pretty dynamic narratives from these cultures. Whether it’s the art world or the film world, those voices should be heard, because they are embedded in the history of this country. You can’t tell the history of the Southwest without Mexican Americans.”

That sentiment is echoed by the National Hispanic Media Coalition and the National Latino Media Council, which in 2018 boycotted the studio and staged a protest to emphasize its lack of Latinx representation. But Paramount isn’t the only culprit. Discrimination is industrywide, according to a recent USC Annenberg study, which found that Latinx representation has been cut in half over the last decade — dropping from 6% to 3%. This, when Latinx compose one-fifth of the U.S. population and roughly 25% of moviegoers.

The same problem persists in the art world. In a recent PLOS One study, researchers looked at more than 40,000 artworks in the collections of 18 museums across the U.S. and found that roughly 85% of artists represented are white, while 87% are men; 9% are Asian, 2.8% Latinx, 1.2% African American and 1.5% are listed under the catch-all of “other.” As for art markets, the top 20 most expensive artworks ever purchased were painted by white men. And of the names on Artnet’s 2014 “Most Expensive Artists list”, all but one belonged to whites.

Institutions are trying to change this dynamic, in some cases actually selling off works by white men to acquire works by women and people of color. In 2017, led by the J. Paul Getty Museum, museums across Southern California exhibited Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, highlighting Latinx art in roughly 60 art institutions. The show was a second iteration of the 2011 exhibition, “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980,” celebrating such midcentury practitioners as Ed Ruscha, Billy-Al Bengston and Larry Bell. In the months that followed, prices for their work jumped to new heights. According to Gonzalez, in the months following the 2017 exhibit, Latinx artists saw no such jump.

“It should have had a ripple effect that went everywhere. It’s not happening,” Ramos says. “A lot of us felt that would have told the narrative in a more substantial way. And it did for that moment, but then what’s next?”

Value is driven by the market, which generally consists of white people buying white artists. That means that while art lovers (most of them white) mill around Frieze Los Angeles’ special projects section taking selfies and admiring installations by people of color, when it comes time to make a purchase, they will go inside the main tent and buy works by such blue-chip artists as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Doug Aitken.

“When black, brown, [people of color] faces are allowed into the spaces, it has to be figuration, it has to be  narrative about some trauma. In fact, there’s much more of a demand to justify things that aren’t that,” notes Jibade-Khalil Huffman, whose large-scale “May Day” honors Grace Jones in the role of May Day, the villainous enforcer in the 1985 James Bond film, “A View to A Kill.” Hoisting a white man over her head, she is emblematic of a powerful black woman subverting a symbol of the white patriarchy. It’s an image that doesn’t jibe with mainstream expectations of narratives having to do with slavery and economic subjugation. Such pigeonholing shuts abstract artists of color out of the conversation entirely.

“My most immediate audience is people who look like me. But there are collectors who really do care about the work on its own terms. Not enough, though. We still need to burn the whole thing down and give out capital in different ways,” says Huffman, who currently has a show across town at Anat Ebgi. “But short of giving people access to museums, scholarships for people who can’t afford to go to art school, nothing’s going to change. Because of racism, we’re only going to allow the most obvious figurative art about slavery or some kind of traumatic thing in the door. That, for me, is a big part of it — the racism in that.”

Ramos wonders if museums could lead the markets in the direction of greater equity, especially in cities like Los Angeles, where Latinx far outnumber white people. “[The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art] — hell, man, it’s a stone’s throw from East L.A., and a lot of those people are not represented in that museum,” he says. “To break free of this tokenism at some point would be fantastic, especially in this era of divisiveness. In a perfect world, these larger avenues of culture, film or the art world — they would make an effort to be more inclusive because of everything that’s going on. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, or it’s happening at a snail’s pace.”

Gabriella Sanchez has work both inside the main tent — at Charlie James Gallery’s booth — and on the backlot. Her triptych of vinyl banners titled “Hommes, Homes, Homes” is a play on the homonym using thematically connected imagery. “There are structural issues in the art world that haven’t been reworked or addressed as we become more diverse,” she says. “The art world is a microcosm of the larger world, with all the same issues. There are people who are genuinely interested in embracing diversity. But then I have also seen moments where there are institutions or people who are embracing it because of the moment. Obviously, I wish it was all genuine, but any movement is better than none.”

Post-Impeachment, House Democrats Set Sights on Barr

WASHINGTON — House Democrats frustrated over the Senate’s acquittal of President Donald Trump are pushing their oversight efforts toward the Justice Department and what they call Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to politicize federal law enforcement.

Democrats have demanded more information about Barr’s intervention in the case of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant who was convicted in November of lying to Congress and other charges. Barr this week overruled prosecutors who had recommended that Stone be sentenced to 7 to 9 years in prison.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized Barr on Thursday, calling him one of Trump’s “henchmen.”

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“The attorney general has stooped to such levels,” Pelosi said. “What a sad disappointment. The American people deserve better.”

The sharpened look at Barr’s activities comes at a time when many Democrats appear wary of prolonging the Ukraine inquiry that led to Trump’s impeachment. Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff have put off — but not ruled out — a subpoena for former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who refused to participate in the House impeachment inquiry but later said he would testify in the Senate trial. Bolton is writing a book.

Issuing a subpoena for Bolton could bring dramatic testimony about Trump’s conduct, but also risk a court fight that could take months to resolve. Many Democrats privately say they want to look forward, not backward, and conduct oversight of the Republican president’s actions in real time.

First up will be examining whether Barr inappropriately intervened in the Stone case. Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election.

Trump congratulated the attorney general afterward on Twitter. Meanwhile, the four prosecutors on the case immediately withdrew.

The turmoil within the Justice Department has given Democrats a new way forward for their investigations after the sting of the Senate’s impeachment acquittal. While there is little interest in pursuing another impeachment case, Democrats want to leverage the power of their majority to conduct oversight as they try to defeat Trump at the polls in November.

“The resignation and defection of these prosecutors is a huge alarm bell going off in our system,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of the most vocal Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who pushed for impeachment. “So, that is the immediate emergency.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler announced Wednesday that Barr will testify before the committee March 31 and that lawmakers will ask him about his involvement in the Stone case. People familiar with the committee’s plans said there could be other Judiciary committee hearings before then that examine the politicization of the department. The people requested anonymity because the plans aren’t yet set.

Barr appeared to try and deflect some of the rising criticism Thursday, saying in an interview with ABC News that Trump’s tweets about Justice Department prosecutors and cases “make it impossible for me to do my job.” But he also said the decision to undo the sentencing recommendation was made before Trump tweeted about it, and he said the president had not asked him to intervene in any cases.

That answer won’t be enough for Democrats, who also want to ask Barr about his decision to take information from Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, about Joe Biden and his son. Those same efforts by Giuliani in Ukraine were at the heart of Trump’s impeachment.

“In the past week alone, you have taken steps that raise grave questions about your leadership,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Barr.

The GOP-led Senate has shown less interest in grilling the attorney general. Republicans defended the department’s decision to reduce Stone’s sentence and said they didn’t expect to request Barr’s testimony.

“President Trump, in selecting Bill Barr to be attorney general, has done a great service to the people serving in the Department of Justice and our nation as a whole,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a statement Thursday.

Graham added that Barr has his “complete confidence.”

___

Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Could Corporations Control What’s Taught in Our Public Schools?

The national discussion about the movement to privatize America’s public schools has mostly focused on the issues of charter schools and school voucher schemes. But a growing number of parents, teachers, and public school advocates, as well as experts in academia, are increasingly warning about another form of school privatization.

You don’t hear very much about this form of privatization in national forums and mainstream news outlets, but it’s being talked about in places like Chesterfield County, Virginia, which borders state capital Richmond.

At a public assembly in Chesterfield in September 2019, an audience gathered to view the movie “Backpack Full of Cash,” a feature-length documentary narrated by actor Matt Damon that exposes how charters and vouchers financially endanger public schools and redistribute resources and students in inequitable ways.

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Yet the panel discussion that followed the film quickly veered away from talking about charters and vouchers when one of the panelists, middle school teacher Emma Clark, called the audience’s attention to “a different offshoot of the privatization movement. The privatization we’re seeing here in Chesterfield is through CTE.”

CTE, Career and Technical Education, is a rebranding of what has been traditionally called vocational education or voc-ed, only in the souped-up version, course offerings emphasize science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

But in communities like Chesterfield, STEM-related CTE curriculum is increasingly being created not by educators but by big businesses such as Amazon, Cisco, and Ford.

And Virginia’s embrace of a business-driven CTE goes beyond the rewriting of the curriculum. It’s about sorting children, schools, and whole communities into education destinies that are firmly welded to labor markets determined by industries.

Education or Class Sorting?

Melissa McKenney, a parent who lives in nearby Henrico County, is particularly wary of a new effort to carve up the state into regional labor markets, based on the needs of businesses in specific areas of the state, and align education opportunities in those regions with the needs of employers.

The effort, led by Growth & Opportunity (GO) Virginia, a highly influential business-led economic development initiative, sections the state into nine distinct regions, each with its own set of prioritized economic development clusters based on major employers located in the region.

For instance, Region Seven, where the new Amazon headquarters will be located, has for its “priority industry clusters”: computer services, cybersecurity, consulting services, financial services, engineering services, life sciences, and research organizations. Region One, in the southwestern part of the state, which has a much higher unemployment rate due in large part to the shutdown of coal mines and manufacturing businesses, has for its priority industry clusters advanced manufacturing, agriculture and food and beverage manufacturing, information and emerging technologies, and energy and minerals.

The intent, as McKenney sees it, is to align the public school curriculum in each region to industry priorities and then “track every student into some kind of education program based on the regional specifications,” she said. “So students in coal country, where Dominion Energy is big, will get tracked into energy career pathways” while students in the northern portion of the state are groomed for the IT industry, said McKenney.

Chesterfield parent Kathryn Flinn is concerned that the heavy footprint of business in each region will narrow the options for students. “When Dominion Energy needs line workers, they’ll push for a course on how to be a lineman for Dominion Energy,” she argued. Her preferences are that students have more course options, not fewer, and that people determining curricular offerings should have backgrounds in education, not just in business.

Even if the curriculum is of better quality than what these parents anticipate, the imposition of these labor market zones makes it clear to educators what the objective of their work is, Clark told me in a phone interview. “In a state like Virginia where privilege has long played a role in determining children’s futures, the expectation seems to be to steer students into programs that others have determined they are ‘suited’ for,” she said.

Traditional voc-ed in the U.S. has a notorious history of directing children from low-income households into education courses that are not in the college preparatory curriculum. That practice, known as tracking, has been “repeatedly found to be harmful to students enrolled in lower tracks and to provide no significant advantages for higher-tracked students,” according to a research review by the National Education Policy Center.

Parents I spoke with in Virginia are worried their state is reviving the practice of tracking—only with levels and pathways related to jobs and industry.

“Parents should be worried about having their children tracked for a specific kind of education starting in middle school,” McKenney said. “You could be putting them into a track that in a few years they aren’t interested in anymore.”

“Sure, some students may eventually want to work for Cisco,” said Chesterfield parent Sara Ward about a Cisco-specific networking course offered in her area. “But what if you want to learn about computer networking but don’t want to work for Cisco? Or what happens if you complete the program and get hired by Cisco, but Cisco fires you?”

McKenney also pointed out that children in regions that prioritize CTE programs who either decide not to enter or fail to get into a specific track early in their education could be shut out of opportunities down the road. “Children of color are often the ones not identified for certain tracks or discouraged from entering a track,” she noted.

Indeed, vocational academies in Loudon County that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited in February 2019 have been criticized for underrepresenting black students. And the tech workforce generally is overwhelmingly white and Asian, reports Wired magazine, noting that the racial diversity of Amazon employees is unknown because the company does not report the demographics of its tech workers.

‘One of the Biggest Problems Facing U.S. Education’

Virginians are also concerned about their state’s commitment to invest $1.1 billion into creating a “tech-talent pipeline,” a pledge the state made to seal a deal with Amazon for the company to build its new East Coast headquarters in Arlington. What concerns parents in Chesterfield and elsewhere in the state is not only the massive amount of public money that will be spent on training workers for the tech industry but also the intentions of the architect who is guiding the effort.

The consensus view is that the point person most responsible for the wooing of Amazon’s HQ2 to Virginia was Stephen Moret, the president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, an appointed policy body created by the Virginia General Assembly to support development and expansion of the state’s economy.

When Moret talks about education, he uses the term “talent development” for businesses. He writes in an article for Brookings that “Virginia has taken several big steps toward implementing” a “new learning/earning ecosystem… to better navigate the labor market” for both employers and workers.

A big part of that ecosystem is “aimed at supporting the growth of Amazon’s headquarters operations in Arlington as well as tech companies around Virginia,” reports Virginia Business.

Moret’s own career path may also be a concern to those who are familiar with the type of leadership that has dominated business-friendly education policy for decades.

According to Virginia Business, after attaining a graduate business degree from Harvard, Moret served a stint at McKinsey & Company, known for its profit-first and cost-cutting ethos. In an interview with Development Counsellors International, Moret explained that he also hired McKinsey to help with landing the Amazon HQ.

From McKinsey, Moret went to lead the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce and then to working for the state as secretary of economic development under former Governor Bobby Jindal.

During Jindal’s tenure, Louisiana jumped wholesale into the school privatization agenda, expanding a school voucher program statewide and overseeing a doubling of student enrollments in charter schools.

Moret backed Jindal’s 2012 education budget that expanded school vouchers, and he successfully pushed for a bill that allowed companies that donate real estate or a building to a charter school to become a corporate partner of the school and thereby guarantee their employees’ children enrollment in the school, “saying it could be an important tool to recruit new businesses to Louisiana,” according to the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report.

The marriage of business interests with education policy has been “one of the biggest problems facing U.S. education,” according to Kenneth Saltman, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, who spoke with me in a phone call. He believes business-led efforts to remake schools have resulted in incentives and changes that are damaging and undermining to the purpose of education.

“At the very core of the issues,” he stated, “is the question over what public schools are for. There’s an old debate over the purpose of schools as preparation for work versus the purpose of schools as preparation for children to become adults who are capable of self-governance and full public participation.”

‘A Wall Between Schools and Business’

The problem with aligning business interests too closely with education, said Saltman, is that often the influence of business seeks to take education back to an agenda about teaching the basics rather than about more abstract goals of schooling.

As Clark sees it, the same people pushing the Virginia tech-talent pipeline are the same people who’ve been insisting that schools would improve if they operated more like businesses. “These are the same people who call my students ‘products,’” she told me. “The same people who forget that my students are human and are complicated.”

For these reasons and others, Saltman would prefer there was “a wall between schools and businesses.” Businesses don’t really pay a significant percentage of taxes that support schools, he argued. “They take a lot more out than they put in.”

Tech companies are notorious non-contributors to local schools. Microsoft has for years avoided paying taxes in Washington state, where it is based, by setting up a subsidiary in Reno, Nevada, which has no corporate tax, according to an investigation by Washington-based KNKX. That tax dodge may have shortchanged Washington schools by $8 billion, based on at least one estimate KNKX found.

In its successful bid for the Amazon headquarters, Virginia gave $750 million in tax incentives to the company over the next 15 years. New York was prepared to give the company even more—$1.2 billion in tax incentives. Local public outcry resulted in the New York deal falling through.

From these two cities plus Nashville, where the company also has a new facility, Amazon was standing to gain more than $2.2 billion in tax incentives—money that would be withheld from public coffers that pay for education and other services.

“There’s also a very long history of businesses looking for ways to have free worker training centers,” Saltman added, “and a history of looking at schools as places where the goals of commercialization can be realized, either by selling stuff to schools or making money off what schools provide to businesses.”

Examples of businesses acting more like predators than partners in their relationships with public schools have been numerous and well-publicized.

And Amazon’s relationship with Virginia is already walking a precariously fine line between partner and predator.

At the same time that its HQ deal was going down, Amazon debuted new partnerships with four Virginia school districts to adopt the company’s AWS Educate program. According to a local business news outlet, “participating school districts will incorporate AWS Educate resources into their dual enrollment programs, allowing high school students to enroll for college classes that include the curriculum, as well as provide cloud credentialing for teachers.”

AWS Educate is “Amazon’s global initiative to provide resources for educators and students and build skills in cloud technology,” according to Silicon Angle.

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, which is a product that schools can buy. “The AWS Cloud frees schools and districts from the distractions of managing infrastructure … so they can focus on students,” the company’s marketing pitch goes. “From back-end data management to virtual desktops, AWS offers tools so that every student gets the attention they need to thrive.”

The AWS division “generated $25 billion in sales last year—roughly the size of Starbucks,” according to a 2019 New York Times article, “and is Amazon’s most profitable business” with contracts from huge companies in retail, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, real estate, and other industries.

With Amazon’s ability to use AWS Educate as an entrée into a school district’s curriculum and teacher professional development programs, the company can create a relationship with the schools to sell its lucrative data storage contracts, which are the company’s “main profit driver,” according to Investopedia. Loudoun County, one of the school districts that adopted AWS Educate, has also inked a deal with AWS cloud services to transfer student data to the cloud and virtualize student desktops. “All of the backend infrastructure and computer power is in AWS,” a Loudoun school official says in a blog post announcement on the AWS website.

Saltman and the Virginia parents I spoke with point out that pairing AWS Educate with its cloud services gives Amazon a business model in which, potentially, students and teachers learning how to work in the cloud would generate the data for the company’s for-profit operation. “When students are a captive audience and the curriculum is oriented to producing data… that’s [potentially] a form of child labor,” Saltman said.

Clark sees this development as a “step further” in the predatory relationship between the private sector and public schools. “People who have money and power have been able to manipulate the tax structure, so they don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes to support schools. Now they get to come into struggling schools and take more money out by selling them products.”

Priorities Are Out of Whack

In a state with a history of being fiscally conservative, it’s surprising that so little concern is being expressed by public officials about the costs of the new tech education infrastructure.

While most of that money is to be spent initially on higher education initiatives, the trickle-down effect of more than doubling the number of tech graduates in the state requires huge investments in K-12 as well. Of the $1.1 billion the state is putting into its tech-talent pipeline, $25 million is expected to flow to new K-12 computer science programs.

“Building the tech-talent pipeline starts with a public K-12 system that includes an integrated STEM and computer science curriculum at every grade for every student,” says a statement by NOVA, a public partnership of communities in the northern part of the Commonwealth. NOVA has also partnered with Amazon Web Services to roll out associate and bachelor degree programs in cloud computing in community colleges and universities across the state.

Fairfax County, the largest school district in the state, has already announced its intention to double its tech pipeline in 20 years. According to Virginia Business, the CEO of the county economic development office said, “That effort has to start in pre-K.” And GO Virginia is prepared to match up to $410,000 in funding for what the county can spend to “fill the tech-talent pipeline.”

Grants from GO Virginia totaling $2.4 million have gone to Chesapeake and Loudoun County schools to invest in computer education.

Virginia Is for Learners, another state-sponsored initiative, has put funding into a network of teams from school divisions in Virginia across the state who will work on aligning schools to workforce needs.

State legislators from both political parties have complied by passing tech pipeline-related bills including one that requires the state to develop an online dashboard showing state and regional labor market and workforce statistics and one eliminating the “stigma associated with” CTE. A new bill would allow individuals to use their 529 accounts, tax-free savings set aside for college, to cover the costs of workforce training and credentialing programs. And another new bill will require students in grades six, seven, and eight to complete at least one semester-long or year-long computer science elective course or introduction to technology course.

All this splurging on tech talent has left many Virginians thinking their state has its education priorities way out of whack.

In the Education Law Center’s annual report card on school funding, it gave Virginia a D on funding adequacy (the cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), C on the fairness of the distribution (how funds are spread to districts with high levels of student poverty), and D on the state’s effort in the context of its overall economy (the level of investment in K-12 public education as a percentage of state wealth).

A 2019 analysis by Davis Burroughs for the independent news outlet the Dogwood reported that state funding for Virginia K-12 schools in the 2018–2019 school year is 9.1 percent per student less than it was 10 years before that. Because Virginia schools “receive $430 million less for support staff” than they did 10 years ago, school social workers, custodians, and psychologists have been drastically reduced.

Due to an aging school infrastructure—60 percent of Virginia schools are more than 40 years old—many schools are now in deplorable condition, but the state is short of an estimated $18 billion it would cost to renovate older schools.

A 2018 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that in 2016, Virginia was spending 33 percent less than in 2008 on “school capital” projects, such as building new schools or renovating existing ones.

Chesterfield schools have acute infrastructure needs including deteriorating, unhealthy conditions in some of the district’s schools and overcrowded classrooms that push students into temporary trailers. Five schools have tested positive for the bacteria that can cause Legionnaire’s disease. An outside consultant the district hired to conduct a facilities assessment concluded the school system “had about $50 million in ‘immediate’ major maintenance needs, which he defined as ‘failure is imminent, if it has not failed already.’”

Burroughs quoted findings from an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute that put the state at 48th on the list of most underpaid teachers—behind only Washington and Arizona. “In the last four years, the weekly pay of Virginia teachers has fallen 31 percent behind the pay of other college-educated workers in the state,” he wrote. Consequently, Burroughs continued, the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) found that “the turnover rate for Virginia K-12 educators is higher than 44 states and the District of Columbia.”

A December 2019 report from the Virginia board of education asserted schools were plagued by “teacher shortages, under-funding, and ‘persistent achievement gaps,’” according to a local CBS affiliate. The report counted 900 unfilled teaching positions in the state.

In September 2018, with classes already started, Chesterfield still found itself short 27 teaching positions.

A big problem with funding, LPI’s report found, is that more of the burden for financing schools—51 percent on average—falls on the shoulders of local communities, thereby making it much more difficult for lower-income districts to finance school improvements and address rising costs.

Funding from the state has fallen “8 percent per student for the 2018-2019 school year… compared to 2009-2010” according to the report from the Virginia board of education. Schools have had to do more with less by cutting nearly 379 staff even though about 55,000 more students are enrolled in the system. A greater proportion of those students are also the costliest to educate. In the last 10 years, Virginia schools have added 31 percent more economically disadvantaged students, 23 percent more English learners, 164 percent more students identified with autism, and 34 percent more students with another kind of health impairment.

Virginia parents I spoke with hailed a recent change in the direction of state education funding, especially since the election of Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and a resurgence in Democratic membership in the state assembly. But the state still has a long way to go.

Reinforcing Inequity

When faced with criticism of the expanded role of businesses in education and the culture of fiscal austerity that characterizes school funding, free-market advocates push back by calling the public education system inefficient. They also claim that those who point to inadequate public school funding and problems of educating more kids in poverty as “overwhelming barriers” are making “excuses” for incompetence.

Many free-market advocates point to stagnation in test scores and rising costs as proof that educators are poor managers of the public school enterprise, and they argue for a greater presence in the classroom because they are the “largest… consumer” of the “products” produced by schools—an unfortunate metaphor since the word “consume” literally means to “use up.”

In a manifesto-like document put out by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2011, authors Frederick Hess and Whitney Downs (both of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.) liken school districts to “troubled firm[s],” and they argue that “as business leaders know, if you head into a troubled firm with the attitude that your most important job is to be nice, you may not get very far.”

In testosterone-laden prose—the word “tough” appears 14 times—Hess and Downs advise business leaders, “Working with school districts or policymakers doesn’t mean carrying their water,” and, “Be a partner, not a pawn.” Their framing of the relationship between business and education as a “partnership” and “two-way street” strikes educators as deeply hypocritical. How often do corporate executives invading the education sphere solicit the advice of teachers before pushing their demands on schools?

When educators say, as Clark did during her panel remarks, “Sometimes what’s good for companies and what’s good for kids overlap, but sometimes those things will be at odds,” they should be taken seriously.

And it’s entirely reasonable to suggest, as McKenney told me, that “because money is a strong motivator, it’s alright to frame the conversation about whether business involvement in schools is about profit.”

Not everyone is going to agree with Saltman’s call for a “wall” between business and education. But we should heed his counsel that when considering an education that prepares students for the economy, we should ask, “What kind of economy do we want? We live in a world in which economic inequality and marginalization… [are] getting worse. We don’t want schools that reinforce this. If we want schools that prepare students for work, what kind of work are we talking about? Are we talking about preparing them for whatever jobs businesses want to give to them? Or do we want to prepare them to operate in an economy that’s more democratic?”

And when Amazon announces, as it did in early 2018, that it has invested another $50 million to boost computer science education, taken steps to “grow its footprint in classrooms across all grade levels in America,” and rolled out a new comprehensive program to promote computer science from “kindergarten to career,” we should be wary.

“These are the very same companies that have structured our economy in ways that keep my students in poverty,” Clark explained. “And now they’re going to come into my school and tell me they want to sell me something that will create equal opportunity for my students? I find the whole idea of that disgusting.”

This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and is the second of a two-part series on Career and Technical Education (CTE). Click here to read part one.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Being Joe Biden’s Brother Is Highly Lucrative

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Jim Biden was in a bind. An investor had put up $1 million to help Jim and his nephew Hunter buy a hedge fund. Then it turned out that the fund’s assets were worth less than the Bidens had thought. Now the investor wanted its money back.

It was December 2006, not long before Jim’s older brother and Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator, would announce his second campaign for president.

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Jim and Hunter Biden got a loan from a bank founded by one of Joe’s political backers — William Oldaker, an attorney for the senator’s presidential campaign and Hunter’s partner at a Washington law and lobbying firm.

Oldaker had strong ties to Joe Biden’s political operation, and at the time, the bank, WashingtonFirst, had nearly half a million dollars in deposits from a Joe Biden political committee Oldaker had helped set up.

But WashingtonFirst was less than three years old, and a $1 million loan was large for its size. The bank required that loans be well secured by borrowers’ assets. Jim Biden put up his house in Merion Station, Pennsylvania, as collateral, but he already had $1.5 million in three mortgages against the property, then roughly valued at just over $1.1 million. Hunter offered as security his recently purchased Washington home, for which he had borrowed almost the entire purchase price. Oldaker did not return phone calls, and a source close to Jim and Sara Biden said all of their loans were properly secured.

It was not the first time — or the last — during his long career that Jim Biden turned to Joe’s political network for the kind of assistance that would have been almost unimaginable for someone with a different last name. Campaign donors helped him face a series of financial problems, including a series of IRS liens totaling more than $1 million that made it harder to get bank financing. Jim Biden took out two more loans from WashingtonFirst before its sale in 2018.

These transactions illuminate the well-synchronized tango that the Biden brothers have danced for half a century. They have pursued overlapping careers — one a presidential aspirant with an expansive network of well-heeled Democratic donors; the other an entrepreneur who helped his brother raise political money and cultivated the same network to help finance his own business deals.

Jim Biden, 70, has cycled over the years from nightclub owner to insurance broker to political consultant and fundraiser to startup investor and construction company executive. But the through line of his resume was his bond with his brother, a Democratic Party stalwart in a position to push legislation or make government contracts happen.

“My sense is that Jim really has been trying to peddle himself on the Biden name for some time,” said Curtis Wilkie, who covered the Bidens as a Delaware political reporter.

Key Loans to Jim Biden



Lender
Loan Amount
Loan Made
Loan Repaid




Joel Boyarsky

Donor and fundraiser

Businessman and former Jim Biden employer
Up to $200,000
1997
2000


Leonard Barrack

Donor

Attorney and former Sara Biden employer
$353,000
2000
2004


Thomas Knox

Donor and fundraiser

Businessman
$400,000
2004
2013


WashingtonFirst Bank

William Oldaker, co-founder

Campaign lawyer and lobbyist
$1,000,000
2006
2014


John Hynansky

Donor

Businessman
$500,000
2015
2019


Trustar Bank

William Oldaker, co-founder

Former Biden campaign lawyer

Lobbyist
$250,000
2019
Still Open


Sources: Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, recorder of deeds; clerk of the circuit court, Collier County, Florida

Spokespeople for Jim Biden and Joe’s presidential campaign declined interview requests for the brothers. In response to questions, campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said that Joe Biden had no involvement in Jim Biden’s loans and did not arrange for supporters to help his brother. Bates also said that the former vice president knew “nothing” about his brother’s investments and was unaware that Jim had often been delinquent on his federal taxes or that the IRS had placed liens on his home. Bates said Oldaker is not involved in the 2020 campaign.

“The vice president and his brother have always understood and agreed that James’ business ventures are separate from and independent of Joe Biden’s career in public life,” Bates said.

A source with knowledge of Jim Biden’s finances said that he and his wife, Sara, have sometimes failed to pay their taxes on time because “they are largely self-employed and sometimes have an unclear picture of how their year will end financially,” but that they have always paid in full, including interest and penalties.

Recognizing a potential minefield, Joe has avoided responsibility for or financial involvement in his brother’s ventures, according to longtime advisers. Yet on occasion, as Jim pursued opportunities, Joe met with his potential clients or partners, at Jim’s request.

In 2002, Joe addressed a Washington conference of the National Association of State Treasurers, whom Jim was courting on behalf of lawyers who wanted to represent state pension funds. “Jim offered that his brother,” who usually took the train home to Delaware in the evening, “was just happening to be in town,” said Pamela Taylor, then the group’s executive director. “He said: ‘He’s going to spend the night in D.C. Would you like him?’”

Taylor reached out to Joe, who had previously been invited by Delaware’s state treasurer but hadn’t firmly committed. Joe spoke to the group over breakfast, analyzing the prospects for war in Iraq. “It was perfect,” Taylor recalled.

Jim Biden has been at his older brother’s side at nearly every critical juncture in Joe’s personal and political life. As fundraiser for his brother’s first Senate race in 1972, he helped launch Joe’s political career.

That same year, Jim broke the news to Joe that his wife, Neilia, and baby had died in a car accident, and he then watched over his brother day and night. When Joe was hospitalized with a brain aneurysm more than 15 years later, it was Jim who “was working the phone,” looking worldwide for the best neurosurgeon, according to Richard Ben Cramer’s book, “What It Takes,” which profiled the candidates for president in 1988.

But Jim has also been a political vulnerability. While a plagiarism scandal put pressure on Joe to drop out of the presidential race in 1987, protecting his brother from reporters asking about Jim’s shaky finances was the final impetus for Joe’s withdrawal, according to Cramer. “They were going after Jimmy; it wasn’t just Joe anymore,” Cramer wrote.

In the 2020 campaign, Joe’s family ties have again dogged him. President Donald Trump’s impeachment stemmed from allegations that he sought to damage Joe, a potential reelection opponent, by pushing Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden’s relationship with a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. Joe promised to establish clear boundaries for family business ventures.

On this week’s “Trump, Inc.” podcast, we’re looking at what happened in Ukraine from a different vantage point: not the politics but the finances.

Those close to Joe Biden say his relationship with Jim illustrates his fierce family loyalty. In the 2020 race, one adviser said, Jim “is trying very hard to stay out of the limelight.”

“For all his — let me find a kind word for it — entrepreneurship, Jimmy understands that he needs to keep his business separate from Joe’s career. Whether his relationships with unions, treasurers, law firms are the result of people who want to be nice to Jimmy because he’s Joe’s brother, that’s a thankless position to be in,” the adviser said.

In his 2007 autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” Joe gave a sense of Jim’s priorities. In the 1972 Senate campaign, Joe wrote, he changed his position on a capital gains tax reduction that would benefit potential big donors. Jim, his chief fundraiser, stewed for hours and then warned him, “I sure in hell hope you feel that strongly about capital gains because you just lost the election.” (Joe Biden won the race.)

It wasn’t their only clash. During Joe’s abortive presidential campaign in 2007, a Biden aide said, Jim “raised almost no money. He came in at the end when we were the most desperate.” Asked why, the insider said, “Family tensions.” At the same time, “there were always questions around Jimmy’s business dealings — what kind of blowback would there be for the campaign?”

Their upbringing shaped the brothers differently. Their father, Joseph R. Biden Sr., known as Big Joe, was a Wilmington car salesman. Joe later wrote that “money was so tight … I had to put cardboard in an old shoe until Dad’s next payday.”

Hard times kept the family close. “We could fight among ourselves inside the house, but we were not allowed to say a single syllable against a sibling on the outside,” Joe continued. One family friend said the Bidens’ struggles “rubbed off on how each of the boys were wired. With Joe it translated into, ‘I want respect.’ With Jimmy it translated into, ‘I want money.’”

Joe won a scholarship to the elite Archmere Academy and became a football star and class president. In 1962, he was a pool lifeguard in a predominantly African American Wilmington neighborhood, an  he credits with helping him to understand race relations. He graduated from the University of Delaware and Syracuse University Law School.

Jim, six and a half years younger, went to local public schools. He was “aloof and had, perhaps, a bit of an attitude,” said classmate Steven Bennett. “Good luck in Senior High,” Jim wrote in Bennett’s junior high yearbook. “You’ll need it.” Jim studied at the University of Delaware over four semesters but did not earn a degree there, according to a university spokesperson.

Jim went into the nightclub business soon after Joe’s first Senate victory. With funding from Wilmington’s Farmers Bank, Jim and four partners operated a restaurant-lounge, Seasons Change. Its formula of dance music and Top 40 hits caught on, and when a larger space became available, Jim opened another club called The Other Side.

“They had a helluva run for a couple of years,” recalled Bob Bowersox, a band booker for both clubs who now runs a theater company in Key West, Florida.

Jim reported a net worth of about $10,000, but he and a partner were able to borrow $300,000 from First Pennsylvania Bank of Philadelphia for the expansion. His brother then sat on the Senate Banking Committee.

The Other Side made a splash, but not a profit. “I was a naive kid is what it was,” Jim told the Sunday News Journal in Wilmington in 1977.

Seasons Change folded in 1978 with more than half a million dollars in debts. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which had assumed the Farmers Bank loans, sued Jim and his partners in 1980 for more than $168,000. (ProPublica could find no record of the lawsuit’s resolution.) By then, Jim had left the nightclub business, and Wilmington, for California.

“I remember as a banker thinking, ‘Thank God, I didn’t finance it,’” said Fred Sears, a retired Wilmington banker and Biden family friend. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this going to spill over to Joe?’”

Three former Farmers Bank officers told the Wilmington Morning News in 1977 that they had financed Seasons Change because they believed the Biden name “would help attract a trendy free-spending crowd.”

And Joe Biden had called Farmers chairman to complain about a bank vice president threatening Jim, telling him that failure to pay would embarrass Joe. “They were trying to use me as a bludgeon,” Joe told the newspaper.

William Oldaker was not the only Joe Biden ally to boost Jim’s career or lend him money.

In the mid-1980s, Jim worked for a consulting and actuarial firm for employee pension plans headed by Joel Boyarsky, national finance chairman for Joe’s unsuccessful 1987 presidential bid. He and Jim did fundraising together for Joe.

As a Biden, Jim “gave me credibility,” said Boyarsky, now 81.

Boyarsky not only taught Jim about pensions but also helped him financially when Jim and Sara, a former Government Printing Office general counsel, bought a $650,000 villa outside Philadelphia.

The sellers gave them a full mortgage. And on the 1997 purchase date, Boyarsky also loaned them as much as $200,000, records show. Boyarsky said he may have made the loan but doesn’t remember it.

The next year, the IRS filed its first lien against Jim’s home to recover about $145,000 for two years of his overdue federal taxes.

The Bidens finished repaying Boyarsky in 2000. They borrowed more than $350,000 that year from Leonard Barrack, a Philadelphia lawyer and former DNC finance chairman. Joe Biden, the Senate Judiciary chairman, had named Barrack, a campaign donor, to his honorary council of advisers. A few months after the Barrack loan, Jim paid off the IRS.

Jim and Sara Biden’s relationship with Barrack soon soured. Barrack’s law firm sued the couple in 2004, alleging that it had hired Sara at Jim Biden’s request to court local government and pension fund clients. Jim Biden would also help generate business “through his family name and his resemblance to his brother, United States Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware,” the complaint said.

Instead, the firm alleged, Jim and Sara had used law firm resources to fuel their consulting company, the Lion Hall Group. The law firm said that it had paid Sara nearly $250,000, plus salary, for the couple to travel to Alaska, Hawaii, France and Italy.

Jim and Sara countersued and the parties reached a settlement in 2004, although its terms are unclear. Barrack did not respond to requests for comment.

The loan from Barrack was satisfied in May 2004, records show. A few months later, the couple borrowed $400,000 from businessman Thomas Knox, a Joe Biden donor and fundraiser who ran unsuccessfully for Philadelphia mayor in 2007. Jim Biden, a donor to Knox’s campaign, finished paying the loan in 2013.

Jim “has been a friend of mine for a while,” Knox said, adding that he may have met Joe through Jim. “There is nothing nefarious here.”

Roy Pinto was among those who discovered that Jim’s business ventures, like Joe’s campaigns, were a family affair.

In 2006, Pinto became vice chair of Corrections USA, an advocacy group for public prison guards. One of its members’ needs, he knew, was better insurance coverage. They worked dangerous jobs in buildings that were often antiquated and overcrowded. Disability insurance was limited to job injuries; if a stress-related condition flared up in retirement, they had to pay out of pocket.

So Pinto solicited bidders to supply comprehensive insurance for his then-8,000 members. A little-known brokerage, Biden & Caveney LLC, expressed interest. The firm had been established when Edward Caveney, who had negotiated insurance deals for dozens of Massachusetts cities and towns, hooked up with Jim Biden. They met through Boston connections, including Larry Rasky, a public relations consultant who had been communications director for both of Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns.

“Ed’s the guy with the feet on the street, (Jim) Biden would provide the name and contacts,” said one insurance executive who worked with Caveney.

Part of the brokerage’s strategy was to parlay the Biden name into access to law enforcement unions and organizations that admired Joe’s support for police. At one event, held in a luxury box at Fenway Park during a Boston Red Sox game, Jim courted representatives of police and firefighter organizations, with the help of James Machado, executive director of the Massachusetts Police Association.

Machado said in an interview that he was friendly with Caveney, who had pitched insurance products to law enforcement before. When Caveney asked for help and mentioned the Biden connection, Machado agreed. He had only met Jim once, but he’d known Joe “way back when,” and his police association had honored Joe.

“We provided an entree into some of the police departments for them to try and go in and pitch that product,” Machado recalled. “I was familiar with the Bidens. I felt comfortable with the Bidens.

Caveney also hoped that Jim Biden could help him grow business beyond Massachusetts, where he’d been entangled in a controversy. As insurance broker for Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Caveney let what was known as its “stop loss” coverage for employees’ health care lapse — despite taking almost $300,000 in city money to pay for it.

As a result, the city was exposed to $628,000 in claims. It was a “deep, deep shock,” said its treasurer, David Kiley. In the ensuing furor, Kiley was forced to resign, the mayor decided not to seek reelection and the Massachusetts attorney general launched an investigation into the city’s finances. Caveney reimbursed the $628,000 and half of his fee and was not criminally charged.

Pinto, the Corrections USA vice chair, was unaware of this incident. He was a registered Republican, but he admired Joe Biden’s criminal justice record. In meetings with Corrections USA executives, Jim and his partner offered an attractive package and emphasized their Washington clout. Jim “makes sure he tells you his brother is Joe Biden,” Pinto said. “‘We’re brothers, we’re close.’”

One day in 2007, Pinto recalled, was an all-out Biden blitz. In the morning, he and other Corrections USA executives took Amtrak from Philadelphia to Washington for meetings. When Jim boarded in Delaware, he “brought Joe back to say hello,” Pinto recalled.

On Capitol Hill, Pinto’s group met with the senator, who chaired the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and drugs. Pinto had his photo taken with Joe, and a Biden aide discussed the group’s priorities. That evening, Pinto said, they dined with Hunter Biden, then a lobbyist with Oldaker in Washington.

Biden & Caveney gave a benefits overview at the group’s annual conference.

Then the deal fell apart. Pinto and another association executive said the group balked at Jim’s demand for an unusual arrangement to pay Biden & Caveney’s fees. They had assumed that Corrections USA would pay the fees out of member dues. But Jim insisted that the guards pay all dues — roughly $750,000 a year, deducted automatically from their paychecks — to Biden & Caveney. It would keep its fees of about $120,000 and disburse the rest to Corrections USA.

Spokespeople for Jim Biden and the Biden campaign disputed Pinto’s account of the breakup but did not explain why.

After registering as an insurance agent in at least 10 states, Biden & Caveney dissolved in 2011, records show. Dennis DiMarzio, formerly an insurance executive and Boston’s chief operating officer, who helped Biden & Caveney land government contracts, said that Caveney ended the partnership.

“In spite of the name Biden, I don’t think Jimmy was successful in bringing in contracts, which is surprising, because the name carries a lot of weight,” he said.

Both ex-partners stayed in the benefits business. Caveney established an employee benefits firm in Puerto Rico. Approached at his Massachusetts home, Caveney declined comment. Later, he did not return phone messages.

Jim Biden and his wife are principals of BBS Benefits Solutions in Connecticut, which caters to large employers and labor unions.

Its motto: “When families feel secure about their future, they can have peace of mind for today.”

Ed Caveney had problems in Pittsfield before he hooked up with Jim Biden. Some of Jim’s other associates encountered legal trouble after he worked with them — or while they were discussing potential partnerships.

In August 2007, Jim accompanied Joe to Oxford, Mississippi. The senator was running for president, and his supporters were holding a fundraiser for him at the Oxford University Club.

Among the hosts was plaintiff’s attorney Dickie Scruggs, dubbed “America’s most powerful trial lawyer” in a book by Wilkie, who teaches journalism at the University of Mississippi. Unbeknownst to Joe, Scruggs was then under federal investigation for bribing a local judge. The brother-in-law of former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Scruggs had gained fame — and nearly a billion dollars — by brokering a landmark 1998 settlement with four major tobacco companies, which paid more than $200 billion to 46 states to resolve tobacco-related health care claims.

That deal had come after the companies and state attorneys general first sought to wrap the state cases in a single federal settlement requiring the companies to pay more than $360 billion. As the bill reached the Senate, Scruggs retained Jim and Sara Biden’s Lion Hall Group to lobby for its passage.

In a lawsuit deposition, Scruggs vaguely explained Jim and Sara Biden’s role. “I’m not sure they’re lobbyists, but they are a firm that’s headed up by … the person I deal with in the firm, I don’t know who heads it up, is a gentleman named James or Jim Biden, B-I-D-E-N, who’s the brother of Sen. Joseph Biden,” he said. “And he gave us a great deal of advice about what was going on on Capitol Hill during the tobacco legislative effort.”

The bill, which Joe Biden supported, died in the Senate. Scruggs then crafted the settlement with the states, which did not require congressional approval.

Nine years later, when Jim came to Oxford, his old tobacco connections offered a new business opportunity. Among the other fundraiser hosts were Scruggs associates Steve Patterson and Timothy Balducci. Patterson was a former state auditor who resigned in 1996 and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false affidavit to keep from paying county taxes. A former aide to Mississippi Sen. John C. Stennis, Patterson had raised money for Joe Biden’s 1987 presidential bid.

At the time of the fundraiser, Patterson and Balducci, a lawyer, were looking for a Washington presence for a practice they were setting up in New Albany, Mississippi.

They added Sara Biden to the venture, to be called Patterson Balducci & Biden. But it collapsed as a federal bribery investigation caught Balducci on wiretaps arranging a $40,000 bribe for a local judge.

Balducci pleaded guilty and turned over details of the scheme that drew in Patterson, Scruggs and others. All pleaded guilty.

One of Scruggs’ lawyers early in the case was Joey Langston, who would soon plead guilty in another Scruggs-related judicial bribery case. Langston had hosted fundraisers for Joe Biden and solicited the senator’s legislative help.

Despite Langston’s guilty plea and subsequent disbarment, he and Jim Biden eventually became business associates. Both showed up as managers in Earthcare Trina International, a marketing firm affiliated with a Sacramento, California, health care company called Trina Healthcare.

“Biden was going to have a big bite of the apple,” said Shad Ellison, a corporate dealmaker who was asked to help raise money to open medical clinics that would administer Trina’s new diabetes treatment.

Trina’s “artificial pancreas treatment” was controversial. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had stopped paying for the procedure in 2009, citing evidence that it doesn’t improve health outcomes. The American Diabetes Association agreed. Nevertheless, Trina’s founder, lawyer G. Ford Gilbert, tried to push a bill through the Alabama Legislature requiring private insurers to cover the treatment. He pleaded guilty in January 2019 to federal bribery charges and was sentenced to six months in prison.

Langston did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Jim Biden did not respond to emailed questions about Trina.

In December 2013, Jim and Sara Biden invested $2.5 million in a luxury vacation home on Keewaydin Island near Naples, Florida. The six-bedroom house can only be reached by boat, and Joe Biden vacationed there when he was vice president.

While Jim and Sara Biden racked up renovation debts, the IRS slapped them with another $589,000 lien for unpaid 2013 federal taxes.

The financial obligations led them to another Joe Biden supporter. In May 2015, as first reported by Politico, they got a $500,000 mortgage loan from a corporation recently set up by auto dealer John Hynansky. Hynansky’s corporation at the time already had a mortgage on Jim and Sara Biden’s Pennsylvania house, records show. Hynansky did not return phone calls.

The Bidens paid the back taxes and then unloaded the Florida house for $1.35 million in 2018. Hynansky’s company released its mortgages on both properties.

One of Jim’s old patrons came to his aid as well. Oldaker — whose WashingtonFirst Bank loaned Jim and Hunter $1 milion in 2006 — is now a founder and director at a new bank, Trustar, based in Virginia. Jim Biden got a $250,000 loan from Trustar last December, records show. He secured it with another mortgage on his Pennsylvania house, which is now on the market for just under $2 million.

Kirsten Berg and Doris Burke contributed reporting.