Chris Hedges's Blog, page 277

U.S. to Allow Lawsuits Over Properties Seized by Castro’s Cuba

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday opened the door for lawsuits against foreign firms operating on properties Cuba seized from Americans after the 1959 revolution.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he won’t renew a bar on litigation that has been in place for two decades, meaning that lawsuits can be filed starting on May 2 when the current suspension expires. The decision could affect dozens of Canadian and European companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in compensation and interests.

“Any person or company doing business in Cuba should heed this announcement,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo said the administration was acting because it recognized the “reality” that the bar on lawsuits, which has been in place since 1996, had not achieved the goal of pressing Cuba to enact democratic reforms or reining in what he called its export of oppression throughout the Western Hemisphere, particularly in Venezuela.

“We see clearly that regime’s repression of its own people and unrepentant exportation of tyranny in the region has only gotten worse because dictators perceive appeasement as weakness, not strength,” he told reporters at the State Department.

Pompeo’s decision gives Americans the right to sue companies that operate out of hotels, tobacco factories, distilleries and other properties Cuba nationalized after Fidel Castro took power. It allows lawsuits by Cubans who became U.S. citizens years after their properties were taken.

“Those citizens’ opportunities for justice have been put out of reach for two decades,” Pompeo said.

There are roughly 6,000 claims that the Justice Department has certified as having merit, according to Kimberly Breier, the top U.S. diplomat for the Americas. Those claims have an estimated value of $8 billion: $2 billion in property and $6 billion in interest, she said. In addition, there are about 200,000 uncertified claims that could run into the tens of billions of dollars, she said.

Breier said there would be no exceptions to the decision, which has already prompted stern responses from Canada and Europe as they have vowed to protect their businesses from lawsuits. She said the only way companies will be safe from litigation would be to ensure that they are not doing business on expropriated properties.

“European companies that are operating in Cuba will have nothing to worry about if they are not operating on properties taken from Americans,” she said.

The decision deals a severe blow to Havana’s efforts to draw foreign investment to the island and comes as President Donald Trump steps up pressure to isolate embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who is holding power with help from other countries, including Cuba, China and Russia.

Spain, which has large investments in hotels and other tourism-related industries on the island, was the first to react. A senior government official told The Associated Press that Madrid would ask the European Union to challenge the U.S. move in the World Trade Organization.

Businesses from Canada, France and Great Britain among other countries also conduct business in properties nationalized after Castro took power.

National security adviser John Bolton is expected to discuss the new policy during a speech in Miami, home to thousands of exiles and immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The speech at the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association is to be delivered on the 58th anniversary of the United States’ failed 1961 invasion of the island, an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.

Johana Tablada, Cuba’s deputy director of U.S. affairs, said on Twitter: “Before they try to euphorically ride a wave of wickedness and lies, they should take a dose of reality. The world has told John Bolton and the U.S. government to eliminate the criminal blockade against Cuba and the Helms-Burton Act.”

The 1996 act gave Americans the right to sue the mostly European companies.

Countries with large investments in Cuba have ferociously protested the law.

“The extraterritorial application of the U.S. embargo is illegal and violates international law,” said Alberto Navarro, the European Union ambassador to Cuba. “I personally consider it immoral. For 60 years the only thing that’s resulted from the embargo is the suffering of the Cuban people.”

U.S. airlines and cruise lines that carry hundreds of thousands of travelers to Cuba each year appear to be exempt from the key provision of the Helms-Burton Act.

Every U.S. president since Bill Clinton has suspended the key clause to avoid those trade clashes and a potential mass of lawsuits that would prevent any future settlement with Cuba over nationalized properties. Cuba has said it is willing to reimburse the owners of confiscated properties, but only if the communist government is also reimbursed for billions of dollars in damages generated by the six-decade U.S. trade embargo.

The announcement comes at a moment of severe economic weakness for Cuba, which is struggling to find enough cash to import basic food and other supplies following a drop in aid from Venezuela and a string of bad years in other key economic sectors.

___

Michael Weissenstein and Andrea Rodriguez in Havana and Aritz Parra in Madrid contributed to this report.

Mike Pompeo Is Setting the Stage for War With Iran

What follows is a conversation between Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Greg Wilpert of the Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

GREG WILPERT: It’s The Real News Network and I’m Greg Wilpert in Baltimore. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested to Congress that the Trump administration would not rule out going to war with Iran, even when there is no explicit authorization from Congress to do so. Pompeo said this in the context of being asked whether the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force, or A.U.M.F., could be used to attack Iran on the basis that Iran supported the 9/11 attacks and is connected to al Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attack. Here is a clip of the exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

RAND PAUL: Do you believe that the 2001 authorization to go to war with those who attacked us on 9/11, applies to Iran or Iran’s Revolutionary Guard?

MIKE POMPEO: I’d prefer to just leave that to lawyers, Senator.

RAND PAUL: You’re unwilling to state unequivocally that the resolution in 2001 to have retribution and stop the people who attacked us, that Iran had something to do with the attacks on 9/11?

MIKE POMPEO: You asked a factual question and a legal question there. The legal question, I will leave to counsel. The factual question, with respect to Iran’s connections to al Qaeda, is very real. They have hosted al Qaeda. They’ve permitted al Qaeda to transit their country. There’s no doubt there is a connection between the Islamic Republic of Iran and al Qaeda.

GREG WILPERT: Then on Monday, the Trump administration’s decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization went into effect. This is the first time that a governmental organization has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Joining me now to discuss these developments with regard to U.S.-Iranian relations is Colonel Larry Wilkerson. He’s a retired U.S. Colonel and former Chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is now a Distinguished Professor at the College of William and Mary. Thanks for joining us again, Larry.

LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks for having me.

GREG WILPERT: What do you think about Pompeo’s claim that Iran is connected to al Qaeda? Is there any basis for this claim, as far as you know?

LARRY WILKERSON: As far as I know and my experience as well as my research over the last 15 years in academia, leads me to believe this is true. There is almost no contact. There have been transits. There have been criminal transits of Iran and Iran generally tries to block those transits. But like the United States and any other country in the world today, it’s impossible to block everyone. There have been times where al Qaeda might have made overtures to the Iranian government or to parts of that government, like the Quds Force or I.R.G.C., but they’ve always been rebuffed. All we had to do is watch Iran’s fierce attacks on the terrorist groups in Syria and understand how Iran itself has been attacked by terrorist groups often supported moneywise by Muhammad bin Salman from Riyadh of course, and others like the Pakistani I.S.I., and so forth how Iran has responded to those attacks, fearing that its entire society will be disrupted by them, let alone the casualties they produced. So Iran has been a receptor, if you will, of terrorist attacks just like the United States, Europe, and other places have been. So Iran is not a sponsor of terrorism. With respect to Hezbollah, we understand why Iran backs and supports Hezbollah. It’s the only weapon that the region offers to counter Israel’s massive modern military arm. Iran doesn’t have an arm like that. Lebanon doesn’t have an arm like that. To say that Iran sponsors terrorism of any sort, let alone al Qaeda, is just preposterous. The greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the region and indeed in the world is Saudi Arabia, our ally.

GREG WILPERT: Now the other notable part of this exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Secretary Pompeo was that Paul tried to get Pompei to talk about the 2001 A.U.M.F. Pompeo, though, only said that he’d leave it up to the lawyers whether applying the A.U.M.F. to Iran is legal, but it’s not really clear whether he means that he would wait for such a determination. That is, a legal determination after an attack on Iran or if it would be made beforehand and perhaps prevent an attack. What do you think? Is the administration getting ready to apply the 2001 A.U.M.F. on Iran?

LARRY WILKERSON: To me this is, as I think it was Yogi Berra who said, “deja vu all over again.” I’m looking at the same kind of trail, as it were, that happened just prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the same characters with a few new additions actually laying that trail down. The designation of the I.R.G.C. and the Quds Force holds solely as a purtenance of Iranian government as a foreign terrorist organization. And now this business of connecting Tehran with al Qaeda, just like George Tenet and John McLaughlin did in the C.I.A. with Colin Powell before he gave his presentation at the U.N., which we now know was a total lie. Up to this, A.U.M.F. provides authorization. All of these are building blocks and I think the A.U.M.F. is the last building block, in setting the stage for a war with Iran, for the use of military force against Iran. This is preposterous. The A.U.M.F. that was issued by the Congress post-9/11 was aimed at those who perpetrated 9/11. Visibly here, laughably here, preposterously here, Saudi Arabia provided fifteen of those terrorists. The U.A.E., the most staunch Saudi ally right now with M.B.Z. in its leadership role, provided two or three of the others. So we’re looking at the main element that attacked the United States on September 11th, 2001, having come from Saudi citizenry, accompanied by U.A.E. citizenry. And now we’re looking at Iran as applicable under this A.U.M.F. This shows how far we have come from the rule of law, from wise thinking, from decent strategy, from doing the kinds of things that the law and our national security interests would demand that we do. We are actually acting now under President Trump and God knows if he knows what’s happening because most of this is being orchestrated by John Bolton, the National Security Adviser. We’re operating in a way that’s inimical to, injurious to U.S. national security interests, and ultimately, to the long-term interests of Israel in the region. To watch this as an academic and to watch it even more so, more profoundly, as a military professional is really jarring. This is truly stupid.

GREG WILPERT: So how serious do you see the preparations? That is, in terms of the likelihood that the U.S. would attack Iran sometime before the 2020 presidential election, given that all of this groundwork is being laid with a terrorism designation for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the claim of connections between Iran and al Qaeda. Wouldn’t something else have to happen in order for an attack to happen, or is this good enough?

LARRY WILKERSON: Not necessarily with this administration. I would have thought the same thing in January of 2003 and then two-three months later, we were at war with Iraq—one of the most catastrophic strategic decisions the United States has ever made. I take your point, though, that maybe there are some people out there and even more so, more importantly, there are people in Congress who realize that this same set of circumstances is unfolding with many of the same players yet again. I have to cross my fingers and hope that what’s happening here, even though I don’t think John Bolton and those like him want this; they actually want force to be used and the regime to be unseated. I think what is happening at least in Trump’s mind, is that— and after all he is the president—is that what we’re doing is bringing maximum leverage on Tehran. So that’s why you have this argument right now between Pompeo and his people on the one hand and Bolton and his people on the other, as to whether or not to tighten the sanctions to the point of zero. That is to say, to keep Iran from selling any oil even under the waivers that Trump has been granting to countries like China and India. Kill those waivers, Bolton and his people say. Kill ’em. Don’t let Iran sell a single barrel of oil. That way, we will choke them. The regime will fall or it will be easy to beat, militarily. On the other hand, Pompeo and his team are saying, don’t do that because we don’t want to take it to that point. So we’ve got that battle going on within the administration, but I think what this shows is that President Trump wants the tension, the pressure on Iran, to bring Iran back to the negotiating table so he can claim just prior to the 2020 elections that he’s done the impossible. He’s brought Iran back to the table and we’re negotiating again and that the deal he will produce will be much better than the deal President Obama produced under the J.C.P.O.A. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that that’s the case and that at the end of the day, none of this happens, that we won’t go to war. But I can’t bet on that because the President has the most mercurial temperament I’ve ever seen of anyone at this level of power and so, anything’s possible.

GREG WILPERT: One last point though. Don’t you think that the role of the Europeans would play a role, would be important here, because after all, they’re opposed to breaking up the J.C.P.O.A., the agreement on the nuclear energy for Iran? When we went up to the Iraq War, they were actually instrumental in participating with the Bush administration at the time, at least some countries were, whereas now it seems like the U.S. has no allies in its effort to oust the Iranian government. So don’t you think that that might still be a factor in holding the U.S. back from war?

LARRY WILKERSON: It should be and normally and naturally, it would be. But remember, even with my administration, George W. Bush, we had a “coalition of the willing,” as Donald Rumsfeld called it and that coalition only included substantially the United Kingdom. Germany was vehemently opposed. Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, the foreign ministers of France, were just as vehemently opposed. So that didn’t stop George Bush and I don’t think this administration, given its policy towards the Europeans to this point which has been just disastrous, and his policy in particular towards the most powerful member of Europe, Germany. I don’t think it will stop this administration for a moment and I know for darn sure it wouldn’t stop John Bolton. John Bolton doesn’t think allies are even necessary, doesn’t want allies. I take your point, but I don’t think that would impede this administration. I still fall back on my original hope that what Trump is after here is the same thing he was after with Kim Jong-un. Call him “Rocket Man.” Threaten him. Tell him that you’re going to destroy him, your button’s bigger than his button, and then all that kind of stuff, and then negotiate with him. I think that’s what Trump wants to do with Iran too. I don’t think it’s going to happen because the Iranians are not going to come back to the negotiating table, but I think that’s what he wants.

GREG WILPERT: Okay. Well, we’re going to leave it there for now. I’m speaking to Colonel Larry Wilkerson, professor at the College of William and Mary. Thanks again, Larry, for having joined us today.

LARRY WILKERSON: Thanks. Take care.

GREG WILPERT:  And thank you for joining The Real News Network.

William Barr Instates ‘Appalling’ New Rule for Asylum Seekers

Attorney General William Barr late Tuesday reversed a previous Justice Department ruling that allowed asylum seekers to be released on bond, a move rights groups said could lead to the indefinite detention of thousands of immigrants.

“Seeking asylum is a human right, not a crime, and families forced to flee for their lives shouldn’t be treated like criminals,” Charanya Krishnaswami, Americas advocacy director for Amnesty International USA, said in a statement.

“This appalling decision could also force parents to decide to either be locked up with their children indefinitely, or relinquish custody of them for the duration of their approval process, which could take months or years,” Krishnaswami added. “This is both a heartless punishment against vulnerable people, and a potential back-door way for the administration to separate families. This decision must be reversed.”

Barr’s ruling comes as President Donald Trump continues to ramp up his attack on the U.S. asylum system and hand more power over immigration policy to his xenophobic senior adviser Stephen Miller.

Prior to Barr’s ruling, Reuters reported, “those who had crossed the border between official entry points and asked for asylum were eligible for bond, once they had proven to asylum officers they had a credible fear of persecution.”

“Barr said such people can be held in immigration detention until their cases conclude, or if the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decides to release them by granting them ‘parole,'” according to Reuters.

Today’s decision seeks to lock up even more people who come here seeking asylum. Why are we imprisoning people who come here for safety? https://t.co/dhNric00An

— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) April 17, 2019

Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the Immigrants Rights’ Project at the ACLU, told  The New York Times that the Trump administration is attempting to “send a message that you will get detained” if you seek refuge in the United States.

“We are talking about people who are fleeing for their lives, seeking safety,” Rabinovitz said. “And our response is just lock them up.”

Barr’s order is set to go into effect in 90 days, and it is expected to face a flood of legal challenges.

On Twitter, the ACLU vowed to sue the administration.

“Attorney General William Barr tonight directed immigration judges to deny bond hearings to asylum seekers,” the group tweeted. “Our Constitution does not allow the government to lock up asylum seekers without basic due process. We’ll see the administration in court. Again.”

What if Rich Liberals Just Hate Bernie Because They’re Rich?

Why does The New York Times take rich liberals at their word that their concern with Bernie Sanders is that he would lose to Trump, rather than the obvious, glaring fact that his election would run counter to their interests?

The New York Times (4/16/19) profiled a network of “wealthy liberal donors” who, shockingly, are not fans of Bernie Sanders, who according to the same report has rejected their big-bundler funding and instead opted for small donations. (The Times reported the same day that 84 percent of Sanders’ donations are less than $200; by contrast, only 37 percent of Kamala Harris’ donations are.)

That a network of multi-millionaire and billionaire donors would dislike a candidate who not only rejects their funding, but is actively trying to tax them at rates not seen since 1960, would surely be enough reason to explain why these wealthy elites would want to “stop” his nomination. But not to the credulous New York Times, which takes at face value rich donors’ claim to oppose Sanders because they believe he simply can’t defeat Trump:

Mainstream Democrats are increasingly worried that their effort to defeat President Trump in 2020 could be complicated by Mr. Sanders….

“Some in the party still harbor anger over the 2016 race, when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and his ongoing resistance to becoming a Democrat. But his critics are chiefly motivated by a fear that nominating an avowed socialist would all but ensure Mr. Trump a second term.”

For the wealthy, ideology simply doesn’t exist. No, they’re just Very Concerned about fielding the Best Candidate.

Because it would be unseemly to suggest a group of super-rich hedge fund managers, Hollywood producers and CEOs would dislike a candidate who has made a career out of promising to expropriate the bulk of their wealth, we get a faux pragmatism argument. But polls show Sanders defeating Trump with numbers comparable to any other declared candidate—a fact The New York Times never bothers to mention, letting the idea go unchallenged that “socialist” (!!) Sanders is an electoral liability. The simpler, less altruistic motive is simply never entertained.

It’s a variation on the Inexplicable Republican Best Friend trope FAIR previously documented (2/26/19): Instead of assuming that lifelong conservatives may just prefer more conservative politicians, progressive-bashing GOP pundits are propped up as neutral observers simply looking out for the Democratic Party. Just the same, super-wealthy Democratic donors can’t oppose Sanders because they simply prefer more centrist, pro-Wall Street candidates; they must have a sincere, pragmatic concern he would lose the general election.

Throughout the article, the Times’ Jonathan Martin bizarrely used “mainstream Democrats” and “Democrats” to refer to what is little more than a clique of wealthy donors. “Mainstream Democrats are increasingly worried” he tells us.  “Stopping Mr. Sanders,” he added, “or at least preventing a contentious convention, could prove difficult for Democrats.”

But why would “Democrats” want to “stop Mr. Sanders”? Sanders has a 78 percent favorability rating among Democrats and leads every poll among declared candidates. Martin is, of course, not talking about “Democrats” or “mainstream Democrats”; he’s talking about rich donors. But because it would be vulgar to mention their obvious class interests, they morph into simply “Democrats” without explanation.

Martin then advances the curious construction that super-wealthy donors blatantly conspiring to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination––and even resorting to undemocratic superdelegates at the Democratic National Convention to do so—“plays into the hands” of Sanders:The idea that the interests of millionaire film producer Rufus Gifford—who’s heavily quoted in the article as a stand-in for “Democrats”—would run counter to those of the average voter is glossed over entirely. Why would guy who made Daddy Day Care and Doctor Dolittle 2 be given a voice by the Times instead of, say, literally any random person picked off the street?

Mr. Gifford, who has gone public in recent days with his dismay over major Democratic fundraisers remaining on the sidelines, said of Mr. Sanders, “I feel like everything we are doing is playing into his hands.”

But doing out in the open the thing Sanders says Democrats do isn’t “playing into his hands”; it’s true that it affirms his core ideological proposition, that the wealthy have too much political power, but what it mainly is is the wealthy using that power against him.

A similar gambit is used when liberal publications hand-wring that Trump and Rubio openly threatening and planning to invade Venezuela “plays into Maduro’s hands,” and that’s why it’s bad. In fact, it’s bad because the things being discussed, invasion and coup-mongering, are bad things—and they’re not “playing into Maduro’s hands,” they’re actual threats to the sovereignty and lives of those in Venezuela.

Trying to distract attention from the sinister thing happening before everyone’s eyes by commenting that it has some meta, second-order effect of increasing left-wing paranoia is an attempt to smear the left for correctly calling the sky blue.

Rich donor broker and Clinton-hatchet man David Brock, in the very last line of the article, attempts this sleight-of-hand again:

“You can see him reading the headlines now,” Mr. Brock mused: “‘Rich people don’t like me.’”

Simply drawing attention to the fact that a bunch of wealthy donors affirms Sanders primary argument for running doesn’t make it go away. It’s a writer’s trick, and one The New York Times passes off without criticism: LOL Isn’t it ironic we’re doing that bad, evil thing Sanders says rich donors do?

Wait, what? No, it’s just bad, in and of itself. The piece is openly floating a conspiracy of wealthy donors seeking to undermine a democratic process, then laughing it off something that could be mistaken for the actual bad thing it is. Meanwhile, the self-evident fact that rich donors dislike Sanders because he runs counter to their interests is ignored in favor of a child-like fantasy that they oppose him simply because they’re looking out for the best interests of the party.

To the Times, the rich have no ideology, no beliefs, no self interest; this is reserved instead for Sanders “embolden[ed],” “fervent supporters,” whose desire to defeat Trump is presented as at best incidental.

Trump Vetoes Move to End U.S. Involvement in Yemen War

WASHINGTON — The Latest on President Donald Trump’s veto of a congressional resolution on U.S. involvement in war in Yemen:

8:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump has vetoed a congressional resolution to end U.S. military assistance in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.

The veto is just the second in Trump’s presidency. It has been expected, and Congress lacks the votes to override it.

Passing the never-before-used war powers resolution has been viewed as a milestone for lawmakers, who have shown a renewed willingness to assert their war-making authority after letting it atrophy for decades under presidents from both parties.

In explaining his veto, Trump calls the resolution “an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities.” He also says it endangers the lives of American citizens and service members.

Congress has grown uneasy with Trump’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia as he tries to further isolate Iran, a regional rival.

___

7:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump has vetoed a congressional resolution passed to end U.S. military assistance in the Saudi Arabia-led war in Yemen.

In a break with the president, Congress voted for the first time to invoke the War Powers Resolution to try and stop U.S. involvement in a foreign conflict.

Trump vetoed the measure Tuesday. Congress lacks the votes to override him.

Congress has grown uneasy with Trump’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia as he tries to further isolate Iran, a regional rival. Many lawmakers also criticized the president for not condemning Saudi Arabia for the killing of a Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, who had been critical of the kingdom.

The Solution to Sweltering City Summers

Tomorrow’s sweltering cities could be tamed, thanks to their trees’ shade. Leafy figs and magnolias, beeches and birches, planes and chestnuts in the sterile tarmac and cement world of the great modern city could deliver canopies that could bring temperatures down by more than 5°C [9 F] in the hottest of the heatwave summers.

And researchers now know this, not because they tested it with computer simulations, and not because they interpreted the radiation signal from satellite studies. They know it because one scientist fitted one bicycle with its own tiny weather station and took the temperature every five metres along 10 rides or transects, each along roughly seven kilometres of highly built-up city infrastructure.

To make sure of her readings, Carly Ziter of the University of Wisconsin-Madison repeated each ride between three and 12 times at different times of the day

And the conclusion: the city streets were hot as sunlight slammed down on the hard, impervious surfaces of street, pavement, flyover and square. But where there was green sward or shade from a tree, the temperature dropped.

In those patches where two or more trees met and two-fifths of the sky was screened by foliage, the temperature dropped by an average of 3.5°C [6.3 F] and sometimes − especially where the number of trees and their proximity delivered ever more shade − by up to 5.7°C [10.26 F].

Trees not only deliver shade, they transpire. That is, they exhale water through the stomata in their leaves and provide a second outdoor air-conditioning mechanism. The difference, too, between shade and sunlight temperatures can set up an air flow.

The results, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “suggest strategies for managing urban land-cover patterns to enhance resilience to cities’ warming.” In other words, trees are good things to plant, anywhere, but especially in the concrete jungle.

Once again, this is no surprise. Researchers have been looking at what might be called the green response to urban warming for years, and found that urban tree cover can add as much as $500 million to the economies of the great cities.

Urban trees don’t just deliver shade, they can soak up atmospheric carbon in ways that match any rainforest giant, and the simple presence of trees in suburban roads can add appreciably to property values as well as simple amenity.

Hotter Cities

And tomorrow’s cities will need help from the trees. More than half of the world’s population is already crammed into cities, and all cities are plagued by what is known as the urban heat island effect: that is, because of lighting, central heating, air conditioning, traffic, tarmac, tiles and slate, metro systems, and light industry, cities can be hotter than the surrounding countryside by 3°C [5.4 F] or more.

With global warming so far on track to reach a global average of 3°C higher than at any time in human history by the century’s end – when cities will be even more crowded as population soars – city planners need a low-cost answer to what promises to be the serious and potentially lethal health hazard of ever more intense and prolonged heatwaves.

And not only do trees deliver cool shade: there is even research to suggest that they do better in the warmer cities. The Madison studies offer fine detail to something most city dwellers know intuitively. Cities need green spaces and tree-lined avenues. The next step is to work out how best to use such findings.

“It’s not really enough to just kind of go out and plant trees, we really need to think about how many we are planting and where we’re planting them. We’re not saying planting one tree does nothing, but you’re going to have a bigger effect if you plant a tree and your neighbour plants a tree and their neighbour plants a tree,” Dr Ziter said.

“The trees we plant now or the areas we pave now are going to be determining the temperatures of our cities in the next century.”

Report: 13% of Americans Still Believe Men Are ‘Better Suited Emotionally’ for Politics

A record number of women are running for president in the 2020 election cycle: six as of April 2019, including Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and Marianne Williamson, a bestselling self-help author and Oprah’s spiritual adviser. There are now more women than ever in Congress.

Despite these recent signs of improvement, a new poll from Georgetown University Center on Education, using data from the General Social Survey, reveals the lingering sexism that pemeates the thinking of American voters, about 13% of whom still believe men are “better suited emotionally” to be in politics.

That number, Benjamin Wermund writes in Politico, “is lower than it’s ever been — and indicates major progress, especially compared with 1975, when nearly 50 percent of Americans held the belief.”

Even 13% however, is high enough, as the report’s authors point out, to “cause candidates to lose elections.”

Even as Hillary Clinton won the popular vote for president in 2016, and more women run for public office, the expectations of women, the report notes, “remain rooted in long-held stereotypes about their roles as caregivers and nurturers,” which, the authors add, “are not necessarily seen as compatible with the responsibilities of the commander in chief.”

The report cites an imbalance in media coverage of male and female candidates, as one of the factors that reinforces those biases:

For example, when Beto O’Rourke announced his candidacy for president, he received media coverage that dwarfed the attention paid to similar announcements by women candidates, even as some of that coverage criticized him for seeming to be unaware of his White male privilege.

Writer Rebecca Traister highlights a similar issue, also involving O’Rourke, in a New York Magazine article comparing the experiences of mothers and fathers on the campaign trail. She observes how O’Rourke’s campaign rollout included a Vanity Fair article that began with his eight-year-old son saying he’d “cry all day” if his father ran for president. O’Rourke also often joked about how his wife, Amy, was caring for their kids “sometimes with my help.”

As Traister writes, “No female candidate who hoped to gain an ounce of public approval could have survived that first sentence in the Vanity Fair story: the plaintive wail of a child whose misery was tied to the political ambitions of his parent.”

Traister contrasts O’Rourke’s 2019 coverage with the 2014 coverage of then-state senator Wendy Davis, who was running for governor of Texas. At the time, a New York Times magazine profile was heavily focused on whether she would be able to balance childcare with campaigning. “There was no way to tell a tale of herself as heroic,” Traister argues, “without the separations from her kids becoming the defining frame—and punishing moral—of the story.”

Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh voiced similar concerns about media imbalance, telling Politico’s Natasha Korecki in March, “Not one woman got that kind of coverage. Not one. Not Kamala. Not Kirsten. Not Elizabeth Warren. Not Amy Klobuchar in a blizzard.”

In addition to media bias, political affiliation was another factor contributing to whether respondents saw women as emotionally suited to politics. The report found that “Strong Republicans are more likely than strong Democrats to believe that men are better suited emotionally for politics than most women.” This was true across genders. The report continues, “Strong Republicans of both sexes were almost three times as likely as strong Democrats to show bias against women in politics.”

Education level, on the other hand, was a mitigating factor against bias. Respondents with higher levels of educational attainment had a more positive view toward women in politics. In fact, the survey found, “Americans with less than a high school diploma are almost twice as likely as those with a bachelor’s degree—and nearly three times as likely as those with a master’s degree or higher—to doubt women’s emotional suitability for politics.”

Read the entire report here.

Joe Biden Unmasked

Let me tell you something about unplugging from the patriarchy.

I don’t know how it happens for others, but I can tell you how it’s happened for me.

It’s taken over 40 years. All the way from the shock and awe and twinges of guilt I felt for reading Ms. magazine, furtively, down by the river in California’s Sonoma County, to openly writing “fuck you” on social media, in all caps, to Joe Biden more than 25 years later. That act, obviously, represents neither the height of decorum nor the pinnacle of my power, but it illustrates the white-hot rage you feel when coming up for air after decades of slowly being drowned, only to have a wealthy white man—or any white man, or any man—put his hand on your head and blithely push you back down.

While laughing.

That’s what Joe Biden did recently when he joked onstage about making women and girls profoundly uncomfortable. He laughed, as he pushed us all right back down.

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Unplugging from the patriarchy takes a very, very long time, because patriarchy is life itself. That’s how deeply it’s embedded in our culture. It is present every second of our days and in every single thing we take for granted. It is behind our love of war and guns and our deep addiction to violence; it fuels the rapes and assaults and catcalls and public masturbation; it is there in the locker room talk, the air-brushed models and the clinics for anorexia and bulimia; it is the reason the Equal Rights Amendment has still not been passed; it powers the gender disparities in health care;  it is behind all our notions of women and how to put them down and in their place; it is never being believed; and it is damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Trust me.

The patriarchy is being told to smile. It is Botox and plastic surgery and our obsession with youth. It is the ubiquity of porn, which is so far from real intimacy and so steeped in pleasing the male gaze and brain. It is the worldwide public health crises we are seeing in teens due to their primary introduction to sex being the fake, vacuous and hardcore porn industry. It is being chronically, relentlessly talked over and ignored. It is becoming invisible and no longer desirable as you age. It is your desires being shamed, your gender being shamed, your body being parsed, parsed, parsed to no end. It is the male gaze fatuously and automatically consuming you alive, as if you are not even human. It is stalkers and peeping Toms and incels and men who never hear “no.” It is physical death in an alleyway, and psychic death on Jeffrey Epstein’s island, and Epstein never doing any real prison time after molesting and sex-trafficking countless young girls.

It is hundred of thousands of rape kits lying untested across our nation because we don’t fund agencies to test them, and it is the guy in law enforcement who actually tried to tell me that “for it to even be considered sexual harassment, the accuser has to say something, and if it happens again, then it’s harassment.”

What?

It’s as if I’ve been living on a different planet. And, well, I have. So has half of the human species.

It’s only sexual harassment, says the cop, if I confront that group of construction workers that catcalls me, mimics fucking me with their hip gyrations, wags their tongues between their fingers as I walk by in a shady part of Los Angeles with few other people around. It would only have counted as sexual harassment if we had said something to the 10 men in the Yucatan who debated whether to gang rape us while we were stuck at the train station for eight hours.

But are we done with #MeToo yet, some ask?

Is it 500, 1,000 or 5,000 times I’ve fended them off, bit my tongue in a gambit to protect my life, crossed streets, left too-dark parking garages, made a point of never parking next to a van, made sure I locked all my doors and windows, checked the whole house before relaxing, witnessed men in meetings talk right over me, been asked to get the men coffee when I was the only female Ph.D student in the room, had to elude followers and stalkers, had to play nice long enough to get away from some guy, talked my would-be rapist out of raping me, had to decide how safe I was calling out the man who grabbed my ass in the bar, gambled on it and then got knocked to the ground for doing it?

Another fucking planet indeed.

Listen, Joe, you men do not get to tell me the difference between affection and sneaky-ass touching and groping.

You do not get to tell me that walking up behind me and grasping me by the shoulders is even remotely OK.

You do not get to tell me that inhaling my body’s scent is normal, rather than intimate, behavior. And you certainly don’t get to tell me how I should feel about the man with whom I am not connected actually doing it.

You do not get to define the nature of my personal space for me.

Get it?

Jesus Christ, this is not hard.

But you make it so.

Why?

Because we don’t want to challenge the patriarchy, do we? “We” being the proverbial we, obviously, because if it were up to me, it would have been dead yesterday. Or 48 years ago. Or how about 5,000 years ago?

You see, Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh all exist on the same continuum. Say that again, say it out loud, and say it until you get it. Until it sticks. Until it finally breaks you down in the nauseating shock of it.

It doesn’t matter that Biden isn’t bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. He just metaphorically pushed my head back down under the water of 5,000 years of patriarchy. He did that, while laughing.

It’s all performance and gratification for him. This powerful, entitled, uber-privileged white man, under the guise of being “affectionate Joe,” touches women and girls without their permission, stroking them, grasping them, smelling them, kissing them, holding them, getting right in their faces, and he thinks nothing of it.

So little does he think of it, in fact, that there’s nothing for which he has to apologize! He doesn’t think he did anything wrong; he’s sorry all those women had a problem with how “nice” he is, so he’s going to gaslight an entire damn nation, because that is his right and privilege as a powerful, rich, white man. Don’t tell him otherwise. He doesn’t have to listen.

And to prove how true that is, after doing a video saying he would be more respectful, he’s going to make a joke out of it!

No matter that one of the women who came forward—one he forced close to him, to touch his forehead to hers, inches away from her mouth—was attending a sexual assault survivor meeting to talk about her attack on a college campus. Nah, that was “nice,” not completely skin-crawly! According to commenters on social media, she is “overreacting” by talking about it, as are all these women. They are “overwrought,” “hysterical,” “political operatives,” “ruining #MeToo” because they didn’t feel great about Joe Biden sniffing and groping and stroking and grabbing them.

I mean, they should be thankful, right? It’s Joe Fucking Biden!

Biden fundamentally considers women and girls second-class citizens. And he has not only been telling us that outright for decades, with his groping and his behavior at Anita Hill’s hearing. In case we weren’t sure, he made it crystal clear recently when he joked about trampling our sovereign personal space, touching our bodies, our hair, our faces, in work settings, in a position of radical power asymmetry, where women and girls can’t say “no” right then and there, and really can’t say “no” later, either.

What is so hard to understand about this?

Women are absolutely damned if we do and damned if we don’t. All you have to do is read the attacks on Biden accuser Lucy Flores—from Democrats, no less, and the thousands of men who reflexively disregard, undermine and attack her—to understand that there is no reward, no incentive, for going through hell to tell the damn truth. Save, perhaps, your sanity, and your dedication to ending a world where men like Biden and Trump and Kavanaugh can reside on the same continuum with absolutely zero accountability for their actions.

How does one unplug from the patriarchy?

It’s a complicated answer, and it requires an insane amount of courage.

It means climbing mountains, ceaselessly.

It means possibly losing your job, or your career, or your academic funding, or your social circle, or your social status, or sometimes even your close relationships.

It means being called “man-hater” and “harpy” and “bitch” and “cunt” and “crazy” and and “ugly” and “unable to get a date.”

It means often feeling lonely as most of the people around you find it easier to not rock the boat and to accept the status quo.

It means having people assuming you’re angry all the time, when, yes, you’re angry, but you’re angry because every cell in your being is dedicated to justice and evolution, and you love men, and love life, but you no longer want to be a second-class citizen.

It means having a whole bunch of liberals try to convince you that Joe Biden is “really a decent guy,” even when the would-be leader of this nation laughs as he pushes women and girls right back under the water. “There’s nothing to see here, nothing to do or change, certainly no hard work or apologies involved, because, well, I want to be president! If I want to stroke the faces and ribs and hair of young girls right in front of their parents onstage, I’m going to do it, and you’d better call it ‘nice.’ ”

Unplugging from the world we’ve made happens painstakingly, and often in long, halting stages.

It actually helps when you’ve had a life that has pushed you to the margins—in my case, becoming chronically ill and getting the chance to see the noxious lies of capitalism, productivity, career, status and power for what they truly are: carefully crafted, deeply embedded, fiercely protected illusions.

When one of the big illusions begins to crumble, its brother can’t help but crack, too.

I went from being an anorexic reading Ms. magazine in my teens to one day transmuting into a woman who doesn’t buy the lies anymore.

My rage is the natural, healthy, authentic response to having the Joe Bidens of the world putting their hands on the heads of me and the women around me and pushing us back down while they laugh. Whether it’s this gentle or violent drowning, whether it’s a boot on the neck, a yoke of debt or an uninvited, unaccountable hand on the small of the back—this kind of power demands that uncountable others be sacrificed.

Fuck you, Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, and any man who insists on being so relentlessly small while effectively pretending otherwise.

We deserve a better world, one so many of us, especially every targeted woman who comes forward, are working toward.

Democrats Raise $75 Million So Far, Signaling a Drawn-Out Fight

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidates raised about $75 million during the first quarter of the 2020 election, a lackluster sum spread out across more than a dozen campaigns that signals a drawn-out battle likely lies ahead.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders led the field by raising $18 million and California Sen. Kamala Harris came in second with $12 million. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke came in third with $9.3 million, followed by South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who capitalized on a flurry of publicity to raise $7 million.

The rest of the field of more than a dozen candidates raised $6 million or less apiece.

Fundraising figures submitted to the Federal Election Commission by Monday’s reporting deadline show Democratic candidates not only lag behind President Donald Trump, who raised $30 million, but took in less than the party did during the same period in the 2008 election. That year eight candidates collectively raised over $80 million despite a maximum donation amount that was hundreds of dollars less than the current $2,800 cap.

Part of the difficulty is many donors are staying on the sidelines, waiting for the field to thin. At the same time, low-dollar contributions from party’s base, a source of money that helped Democrats retake the House last year, haven’t made up the difference.

“There is no question that the numbers are not at the level that they were with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008,” said Tom Nides, a Clinton adviser and longtime fundraiser. “Am I worried? No, I’m not worried. But I’m a little bit concerned.”

The dynamic could change rapidly in the months ahead as Democrats participate in the first presidential debate of the cycle in June. Donors could look to those performances to decide where to direct their money. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s expected White House campaign also could scramble the situation.

“Biden is probably going to run, and he is going to raise a boatload of money. He just will. And then the overall numbers will start to look better,” said Tim Lim, a digital strategist and fundraiser who worked for Obama and Clinton.

Outside of the fundraising front-runners comes Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who raised $6 million, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar with $5.2 million and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who raised $5 million. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand raised $3 million, while Washington Gov. Jay Inslee raised $2.2 million, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper took in about $2 million and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard raised $1.9 million. Former Housing Secretary Julian Castro took in $1.1 million.

A combination of factors has led to the candidates’ cash quandary. Some of the donors who are getting involved in the campaign are cutting checks to multiple candidates but aren’t bundling money by asking their friends, colleagues and acquaintances to give, too.

Despite a large amount of hype surrounding online fundraising, it’s also proven to be unreliable. Networks of online donors take time to build out, and the ability to raise money on the internet often can be tied to a fleeting viral moment that provokes a vivid emotional response from the party’s base.

“People are running slash-and-burn email programs. When you are trying to turn around these donations from your newly added-on activists in two months or less, it’s only going to hurt you because nobody is going to want to deal with that many emails,” Lim said. “To get the most successful (return on investment) you have to engage with your audiences over several months or more, and you can’t make it all about money.”

Then there’s the fierce intraparty debate over the propriety of relying on big-money donors to finance their campaigns. Warren, who has struggled to raise money, tried to force the issue by stating that she would forgo traditional fundraisers, a risky gambit aimed at getting the party’s grassroots engaged.

While Sanders, Buttigieg and O’Rourke raised significant sums on the internet, Warren has lagged, though most of her money came from online donors. Both she and Gillibrand spent nearly as much as they raised, though both have millions in their Senate campaign funds that they can tap to stay afloat.

Some Democrats fear a campaign finance purity test will only hurt the rest of the field.

“What’s happening right now — and I think this is a brilliant political strategy on Bernie’s part — is that no candidate can touch him by raising money the way he raises it,” said Rufus Gifford, Obama’s former finance director. “If this continues, you could see Bernie Sanders as the only candidate with a massive financial advantage. You’ve got to think that gives him a leg up over any other campaign. In my mind, the other campaigns are walking into that trap.”

Tesla’s Brazen Disregard for Workers’ Well-Being Revealed

Inside a medical clinic not far from Tesla’s electric car factory, Yvette Bonnet started noting a troubling pattern. The automaker’s workers’ compensation manager would pressure her boss, Dr. Basil Besh, to make sure Tesla wasn’t on the hook for certain injured workers.

And in her observation, Besh did whatever he could to not jeopardize his chance to run Tesla’s on-site factory clinic.

“He would say, ‘I’m not losing the contract over this – get this case closed,’” said Bonnet, who was operations manager for Besh’s Access Omnicare clinic in Fremont, California, for about a year.

“Besh wanted to make certain that we were doing what Tesla wanted so badly,” she said. “He got the priorities messed up. It’s supposed to be patients first.”

It’s not unusual for employers to be pushy about how they want their workers’ injuries handled, Bonnet said. But the intensity of Tesla’s pressure, she said, combined with Besh’s willingness to let bottom-line concerns influence clinical decisions, made this situation different from any Bonnet had encountered.

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting previously reported that Tesla systemically kept worker injuries off the books, artificially improving its safety record and violating the law on recording workplace injuries. We also showed that Tesla’s medical clinic ignored worker injuries, sending the hurt back to work without proper treatment and helping the company claim publicly that it had improved. Besh said in an interview last year that Tesla doesn’t pressure him to dismiss injuries and that his determinations are “only based on what the patient needs.”

However, interviews with former clinic employees and internal clinic communications show how Tesla and Besh coordinated behind the scenes in an arrangement that financially benefited both the carmaker and the doctor, to the detriment of the injured. Neither Tesla nor Besh responded to questions for this story.

Besh’s clinic had been struggling to make money, according to former employees. They say business dropped off when Tesla, previously Access Omnicare’s top client, opened an on-site factory clinic managed by another company in 2016.

But as Tesla took heat for how often its factory workers were getting injured, Access Omnicare got a chance to win back Tesla’s business, to take over its on-site clinic. In December 2017, Tesla sent a patient, Bill Casillas, to Besh as part of a trial run of sorts.

Casillas, a worker at Tesla’s seat factory, had felt a strong shock when he touched a forklift there. Disoriented, he realized he had urinated on himself. A co-worker in the forklift saw it jolt Casillas back and told Reveal that it “seemed like it was affecting him greatly.” Casillas’ partner said he came home shaken, unlike she had ever seen him before. He was left with relentless pain, numbness and balance problems, he said.

An internal Tesla incident report documented a work injury due to “shock from an electrical forklift” that was then put out of service. Kaiser Permanente doctors who examined him the day after the incident diagnosed him with an industrial “electrocution.” A doctor at Besh’s clinic agreed that it was a work-related electrical injury, prescribing him limited job duties, physical therapy and additional tests, medical records show.

But Tesla didn’t like the diagnosis, Bonnet said. She got an email from Tesla’s workers’ compensation manager, Amir Sharifi. He argued that there wasn’t a work injury at all – just a case of minor static electricity.

Bonnet relayed the message to Besh, who “came stomping over in a huff,” Bonnet recalled. She said he angrily confronted the physician treating Casillas, echoing Sharifi’s static electricity argument. He complained the tests cost too much and told the doctor to discharge Casillas, Bonnet said. Afterward, the doctor told Bonnet that she didn’t agree. Upset with the doctor’s handling of the case, Besh asked Bonnet to stop scheduling her to work at Access Omnicare, Bonnet said.

That’s when another one of Besh’s physicians, Dr. Muhannad Hafi, stepped in and did as Tesla wished. Hafi was in a vulnerable position. He’d been publicly accused of sexually assaulting two female patients at previous jobs. The California Medical Board had moved to take away his license.

“I have spoken again with Mr. Sharifi at Tesla and he informed that the forklift did not have electric current running,” Hafi wrote. “With that said, in my medical opinion, the patient does not have an industrial injury attributed to an electrical current.” He went so far as to say Casillas didn’t have any symptoms of concern.

Casillas’ workers’ comp claim was denied based on Hafi’s January 2018 report, a decision being fought by Casillas’ lawyer, Sue Borg. A doctor conducting an independent medical examination as part of that process wrote in November that it was a “very complex case” and “difficult to determine” whether Casillas was suffering from an electrical injury.

Casillas said he still walks with a cane, is out of work because of the injury and needs government disability benefits to get by. Because of the denial, he said, Tesla stopped paying for his time off work.

“I was just speechless,” he said.

Besh, a prominent hand surgeon who also runs a surgery center and hosts political fundraisers at his home, used the Casillas case in negotiations with Tesla, Bonnet said. She recalled him telling Tesla that if he was in charge of the factory clinic, Casillas’ case wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did.

The week after Hafi discharged Casillas, at the beginning of February 2018, Tesla met with Access Omnicare.

“How was the meeting today?” Amirra Besh, the doctor’s wife and clinic administrator, texted Bonnet.

“GREAT!” Bonnet responded, saying Tesla agreed to start referring all MRI’s and pre-employment physicals to Access Omnicare.

In her reply, Amirra Besh sounded excited for the work ahead. “Excellent!” she texted. “Time to deliver.”

***

The workers’ compensation system involves a fundamental tradeoff: Companies must provide medical treatment and benefits to injured employees, who then can’t sue over the injuries.

Workers’ comp fraud is usually associated with workers faking injuries or clinics billing for sham services. But the law also prohibits employers from fraudulently denying a claim or discouraging a worker from pursuing one. Those caught can face fines and jail time.

Physicians can disagree on what’s necessary to treat an injury. But if they’re being pressured to change a diagnosis to avoid a legitimate workers’ comp claim, “it could be both unethical and illegal on multiple levels,” said Dale Banda, vice president of the Anti-Fraud Alliance and former deputy commissioner of the California Department of Insurance’s enforcement branch.

Many employers have an incentive to keep down workers’ comp claims because it lowers their insurance premiums. Insurance companies pay out the benefits but charge employers based in part on the number of successful claims.

Tesla has even more at stake because it has a form of self-insurance. The company is directly on the hook for paying up to $750,000 of each worker’s claim, records show.

A serious injury easily could cost the company tens of thousands of dollars. In a factory with hundreds of injuries a year – Tesla recorded 947 in 2018 – that could add up to significant damage, especially for a company struggling to be profitable. Tesla recently closed some of its retail stores and laid off employees to control costs.

One way to keep costs down is to avoid having claims in the first place. Multiple former employees said Tesla has at times failed to give injured workers the official form to file a workers’ compensation claim. California law requires employers to provide the form, called a DWC 1, within one day of learning of an injury.

Anna Watson, a physician assistant who worked in the Tesla factory clinic in August, said she wasn’t allowed to give injured workers medical treatment or job restrictions, even when they clearly needed it.

“Everybody leaves this clinic as first aid,” Watson said she was told. Employers don’t need to provide a claim form for injuries that require only first aid.

Laurie Shelby, Tesla’s vice president for environment, health and safety, recently told state officials, “We set up a process to ensure that our employees receive the proper paperwork and care.” But this, too, is contradicted by the accounts of former employees.

In March 2018, Vicki Salvador was at the end of her 12-hour overnight shift in Tesla’s paint department when she tripped on her overly long full-body paint suit.

The fall broke a bone in her hand, she said. Salvador went to the emergency room, where she got a splint. She was told that she should see a specialist but needed to have Tesla handle it from then on because it was a work injury. She still owes $100 for the hospital visit.

Salvador’s supervisor put her on light duty for a few weeks, she said. But even though she asked about workers’ compensation at the time, no one followed up or gave her a claim form, she said.

“At that point, I gave up because I felt like anything I said, I was in jeopardy of losing my job,” said Salvador, echoing a common worry among Tesla workers. She says she was fired in January after tweeting about how many cars were coming through the factory.

Stephon Nelson gave up, too. He suffered a crushing injury in August when the hatchback of a Model X fell on his back. The on-site medical clinic kept sending him back to work full duty, even though he could barely walk.

Eventually, Access Omnicare diagnosed him with intractable back pain and contusions, medical records show. Nelson said he asked for a workers’ comp claim form from his supervisor, the factory clinic and Tesla human resources, but no one gave him one.

“I just knew after the third or fourth time that they weren’t going to do anything about it,” Nelson said. “I was very frustrated. I was upset.’”

Nelson quit Tesla in September. Now he’s on the hook for more than a thousand dollars in hospital visits. He said he doesn’t know how he’ll pay it.

***

When Tesla flagged a case, Dr. Basil Besh jumped on it, Yvette Bonnet said.

In some cases, he ordered his medical staff to reverse course and change diagnoses and job restrictions to make the automaker happy, Bonnet said. In others, he’d take action himself.

One Tesla worker came into the clinic with a skin rash, Bonnet remembered. Amir Sharifi, Tesla’s workers’ compensation manager, told the clinic that it couldn’t have come from a work exposure. Normally, one of Besh’s providers would have seen the patient, but Besh intervened personally. Bonnet said she was there when he confronted the patient, without having examined the worker or reviewed his medical records.

“He went right into the room with that guy, and he said there’s no way this happened at work,” she said. “He had already decided before he went in that he was going to shut this guy down.”

A couple of text messages from Bonnet’s time at the clinic hint at Sharifi’s involvement.

In one, Amirra Besh wrote, “Tesla patient with alleged ‘mold’ exposure, Amir sending an email.” It notes that only a specific doctor, who “has been briefed,” should see the patient. Bonnet said this was a way for Tesla to influence the case.

In the end, Access Omnicare won the Tesla contract.

Besh, in an interview last year, said Tesla pressures him only on “accurate documentation.”

“What they’ll push back on is, ‘Doctor, I need more clarity on this report.’ And we do that for them,” Besh said.

Besh took over the factory clinic in June. Bonnet was fired the next month after clashing with Besh. Dr. Muhannad Hafi, who dismissed the electrical injury, also left Access Omnicare and later lost his medical license as a result of the sexual misconduct accusations.

Shelby, Tesla’s vice president for safety, gushed about the clinic on an earnings call in October, saying it provides “the absolute best care for our associates” and is overseen by “one of California’s leading orthopedic surgeons.”

CEO Elon Musk jumped in to add that Tesla will expand on it at Fremont and at Tesla’s Nevada battery plant, “so that we have really immediate first-class health care available right on the spot when people need it.”

“If you become injured or ill for any reason,” he said, “then there’s health care immediately on-site.”

This story was edited by Andrew Donohue and Matt Thompson and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Will Evans can be reached at  wevans@revealnews.org . Follow him on Twitter:   @willCIR .