Chris Hedges's Blog, page 288

The Only Way White Supremacy Is Defeated

The election of Donald Trump has emboldened white supremacists across the country. Hate crimes have been on the rise for several years now and racism, ingrained in U.S. institutions since the nation’s founding, has become glaringly apparent even to those who had believed the election of a black president had made it a thing of the past.

“Trump’s election has allowed [white supremacists] to completely go buck wild,” scholar and Black Lives Matter co-founder Melina Abdullah tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.”

Abdullah takes the fight for social justice everywhere, from our streets to our courtrooms and classrooms. Not only is she a professor of black studies, an academic discipline that is turning half a century old, but she is also an impassioned activist who is often openly critical of the Los Angeles Police Department and was arrested during a May 2018 protest.

Today’s struggles could cause some to despair at the idea that the hard-won achievements of the civil rights movement have been erased. However, one place in which the legacy of the black and brown movements of the 1960s and ’70s lives on is higher education, according to Abdullah. She attended Howard University, a historically black college, obtained her doctorate at the University of Southern California and is now the head of the Pan-African studies program at Cal State Los Angeles.

“I still think black studies is probably the most enduring victory of the Black Power Movement, right?” says Abdullah. “It’s a part of an institution that never wanted it. And so it means that the struggle is constant, because the institution is always trying to shut us down and kick us out. But it also is kind of a way of taking resources back. An education system that was intended for, you know, the sons and daughters of the wealthy—that scandal that’s plagued the country.”

The intersectionality of Americans’ troubles is not lost on the activist who identifies “gentrification, homelessness, poverty, miseducation” as “interlocking systems” that combine to oppress the most vulnerable members of our society. And despite the fact that so many conditions in communities of color have gotten worse over the past few decades, Abdullah has hope and a recipe for resistance.

As long as we push back “through whatever forms we have—through media, through personal interactions, through our writings … they’re gonna lose,” Abdullah concludes. “Let me say that real clear. The white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative capitalists are going to lose. Because they always lose. The only way they win is when we refuse to fight.”

Listen to the full discussion about the plight of people of color in Trump’s America as well as the damage that was inflicted on black and brown communities by both Democrats and Republicans throughout the recent administrations. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. And in this case, it’s Melina Abdullah, who is one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. She’s here in Los Angeles, became a national movement, but L.A. deserves some credit. And she is the chair of Pan-African studies at Cal State L.A. And this is the 50th year anniversary of the origin of black studies, so that would be a good point to start the discussion. How much progress have we made? You haven’t been around this long, but how much really has all the consciousness about the black movement, black studies, black power, really done to affect things?

Melina Abdullah: I think it’s really important that we recognize that black studies, and all ethnic studies–we’re the only academic discipline that comes out of struggle, right? So it wasn’t that the university decided that they were going to give us black studies; it was the students, the faculty, the community, in really kind of the trenches of the Black Power Movement, demanding educational justice. So you had Black Panthers, you had community members, you had regular students shutting down San Francisco State University for four and a half months, demanding a black studies department.

RS: Strong Latino movement, too. You had the Brown Berets.

MA: Right. You had the Brown Berets, and you had a Third World movement that developed out of it. But the first was black studies, and it opened the way for all of the other ethnic studies departments and programs. And San Francisco State still, to this day, is the only college of ethnic studies in the country. One of the beautiful things, though, is absolutely the Third World solidarity, but also the way in which we understand that when we fight, we win. So when black students are willing to put themselves on the line, when they recognize that their student identity is only a piece, and a temporary piece, of who they are—that really who they are is black community members, and the struggles in black communities shouldn’t be separate from what we engage in on campus—they’re able to win tremendous victories. I still think black studies is probably the most enduring victory of the Black Power Movement, right? It’s a part of an institution that never wanted it. And so it means that the struggle is constant, because the institution is always trying to shut us down and kick us out. But it also is kind of a way of taking resources back. An education system that was intended for, you know, the sons and daughters of the wealthy—that scandal that’s plagued the country. Like it’s groundbreaking, it’s something new, right? We always knew it existed. But it’s taking back kind of education and saying, education is—really should be, at its best—about the liberation of people. So black studies does three things. It seeks to fill in subject area, right? So we know that the system of higher education, just like every institution in this country, is meant for the benefit of white, wealthy, seemingly straight men. And what it says is, we’re not going to tell lies that benefit that system, that benefit white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative capitalism. Instead, we’re going to introduce a model of education that tells the truth. That, you know, Columbus didn’t discover America and Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. And so it’s going to fill in that subject material.

RS: Yeah, let me just cut in there. Because there’s people, they don’t have much of a sense of history. And Benjamin Madley at UCLA wrote an incredible book on California genocide; I’ve had him on this podcast. And you read Madley’s book, incredibly well documented, based on all local newspaper sources of the time, right up through the 19th century. You know, the war on Native Americans, I mean, starting obviously before the creation of the country. Throwing Indian, Native American babies into the fire. I mean, killing children. It was like My Lai in Vietnam, but in this country. And so this task of gaining control of history, to some it seems that oh, they’re just arguing about names or politically correct or what have you—we’re really talking about scholarship. We’re talking about education. And one reason I wanted to have you on here is because you are the chair of Pan-African studies; you’ve been a major force in the community. And I want to talk about an issue related to that, and that question of access to education. And in terms of your own background, you went to Howard University, which played—the black legacy colleges played an incredibly important role in education. Then you got your doctorate here at USC, which is as you allude to, now—we’re broadcasting from USC. We are part of a scandal that affects Yale and Stanford and Georgetown and a number of other schools, where we learned another story about affirmative action, which maybe is just business as usual, where people use their wealth and privilege to game the system. And in this case, probably committed crimes, but again, that’s not particularly new. And now you’re teaching at Cal State, which again, deprived of funds, the state public system, not able to compete on a certain level. So, like, take us through that educational journey.

MA: Well, I’d love to actually go back before that. So I was born in Oakland in the 1970s; that still makes me 29, so don’t let the math fool you, right? But I went to the only high school in the country that had a black studies department; I went to Berkeley High. At Berkeley High, I was really saved. So my neighborhood, like many neighborhoods in the late ’80s, early ’90s, was ravaged by crack cocaine. I’m from East Oakland, and there was a lot happening in our neighborhood, but black studies provided a space where I could kind of contextualize my experiences. And you know, I talked about subject matter and truth-telling, but it also did something else. It also allowed us to bring our experiences into the classroom and see them as valid sources of knowledge, right? And so all of that was seeds that were planted for me, and I always thank my black studies teacher, Mr. Navies, who passed just shortly after I graduated. But even though he planted those seeds, I actually dropped out of high school. So in the 11th grade, I dropped out of high school; I went to independent studies; I was studying for my GED. I only went back to regular high school because I wanted to have a prom. So I didn’t think I was going to get into college. I thought I was going to go to the institute of cosmetology and do hair. And my mom, who was a graduate of Spelman College, also a historically black college, said well, you have to at least apply. So I applied to Howard and thought I wouldn’t get in because I dropped out. But they didn’t know what independent studies was, and so they let me in. And I went from being this person who really struggled, to really being invested in. So I always tell my children—I’m the mother of three children—that they can go to any college they want when they get there. You know, my kids are young still. However, I will pay for them to go to a black college. And the reason I say that is because if they go to a black college, I know that somebody there is going to see my child and love them as their child, and make sure they get through, just like I make sure my students get through. And so Howard was really transformational for me. I went from dropping out of high school to graduating magna cum laude—I’m still mad at my P.E. teacher for not giving me that A that would have made me summa cum laude—and Phi Beta Kappa. And then being groomed by a professor, a couple of professors, to get a PhD. So I applied to grad schools, and actually the reason I came to USC is because they gave me the best fellowship package. There were lots of different universities making me offers for my mind, right? And so I’m grateful that I came to USC. I was mentored by a tremendous man whose legacy is still here; Michael Preston was my mentor, and he brought me here and helped me to get through. But it was a very different experience, one that was rooted in kind of a black tradition of—ah, Michael Dawson writes about this when he talks about linked fate, but also home space: recognizing that African tradition of everyone who is the age of your mother or your father is your mother or father. Alison Rentel talks about that when she talks about cultural relativism. That we have something that’s important, and I think Howard really entrenched it; Berkeley High really entrenched it. But even people at places like USC, which is not rooted in blackness—there are people here who carry that with them so that they can get students like me through.

RS: Yeah, and let me say something in defense of USC. And I can criticize any institution; it’s what I’ve done all my life. But I love our location. Now, some people can say we’re gentrifiers, we expand. But the decision not to engage in kind of the white flight that some others have engaged in—Pepperdine being one of them, and ran away to Malibu or someplace—’SC has to face the reality of a community. The immigration issue is all around us, as is your school in L.A., Cal State L.A. These contradictions force a certain awareness. We know we have to relate to the community in some way. And the real problem that I think we have in this society is we have an idea of fortressed communities, gated communities, out of sight out of mind. We do it with the prison population, 2.3 million people—oh, forget them, throw away the key. And we do that with poor people, put them away. And even with the homeless population, which is something–you can’t live in L.A. and not think about it–most people go through their lives not thinking about it. They just think these are hunks of humanity that happen to be on the street.

MA: And all those things are interlocking, right? Gentrification, homelessness, poverty, miseducation—all of those things are interlocking systems.

RS: So let me ask you, though. I have a feeling we’re regressing on issues of racial equality, opportunity, and what have you. And it has a lot to do with the changes in the employment situation. It has a lot to do with attacks on public education; it costs a lot more money to go to these schools now. And I—I don’t know, maybe just because I am out and about as a reporter a lot, I’m despairing about the deep class and racial divides in America now, and attacks on things like affirmative action. Attacks on any effort to equal the playing field, to be more inclusive, to change the curriculum, to acknowledge reality. The conventional wisdom now is kind of—we did enough, we did too much, and let’s cut it out.

MA: Right. Well, I think it’s also, you know, this idea that movements and people fade from headlines, right? So you have a system of mass media that wants to take groups of people and treat them as news cycles. So the reported story is no longer Black Lives Matter, but we know that black people are still being killed by police. We know that in this county alone, 460 people have been killed by law enforcement units in the last six years, and only one officer has even been charged with a crime. And so it’s important that we refuse to allow that to happen, that we look at those contrasts. If we think about Grechario Mack, who was killed on April 10 of 2018 inside Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall, a black man who had been recently released from Men’s Central Jail. He was accused of holding a steak knife. He wasn’t accused of attacking anybody, threatening anybody. Accused of holding a steak knife and talking to himself. LAPD came in with, quote unquote, every gun blazing. They shot Grechario seven times. Didn’t even bother to evacuate the crowded mall before they did that. Shot out the windows of the T.J. Maxx, shot out the windows of the barrier that keeps people from falling from the second floor. Then after they shot him, they stood over him and shot him again. We know this because we got an independent autopsy. If we contrast that to this weekend, there was an active shooter at Century City mall. What the same police force did is come in and evacuate that mall, and make sure that they treated that person with respect. And we see that time and time again, white mass shooters being treated as if, you know, they’re human beings. And I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be treated as human beings. I’m saying that black people are not. And so to treat black people as a news cycle, as something that’s faded from the headlines, is hugely problematic, and it’s something that we need to challenge. We’re not seeing mass media challenge it, but we need to recognize that the movement hasn’t faded; the coverage of the movement has faded. And so we continue to fight for our freedom, and we continue to fight for equity and equality.

RS: And of course the issues have not been solved.

MA: Absolutely not.

RS: [omission for station break] I want to pick up on what we were just talking about: policing. You’ve gained some attention here; you’ve confronted the local police commission, you’ve actually had charges and things that you’ve dealt with. You’re out there. Now, we live in a center of what is supposed to be liberal enlightenment. [Laughter] We’re in a deep blue state; we have elected officials right across the board who consider themselves progressives, democrats and so forth. And we have a police department that presumably has been racially made more, had more people of color, different colors, different backgrounds. And yet you’re there before this police commission; you just brought up a case of police brutality. So how does this happen?

MA: So let me just kind of address a couple of the things that you said. I think it’s really important that rather than just kind of painting this people of color umbrella, right—using this “people of color” terminology—that we act in solidarity but also get to the specificity of each group. Lani Guinier writes about how black people are the miner’s canary. If we think about what happened—and not that I’m an advocate of diversity in policing; I think, I’m an abolitionist, I think they all need to go.

RS: Well, we should be clear about that, because you have said that. And what you mean, though, is we have to have different forms—

MA: Of public safety.

RS: Yes, of public safety, yeah.

MA: Absolutely. And I think it’s unhealthy for a city like Los Angeles, and every major city does it, to spend 53% of its general fund on LAPD. When we think about the case of Grechario Mack, if he was having a mental health crisis, there should have been a mental health team that responded, right? When we think about questions like houselessness, they have metro division responding to houseless folks when they should provide houseless folks with housing. Right? When you talk about providing youth services, I want trained youth workers working with my kids, not some armed police officer in a park playing basketball with them. And so when I say I’m an abolitionist, I believe in investing our dollars in the things that actually make communities safe, not spending on police who harass, surveil, brutalize, and kill my people.

RS: Let’s go a little further with that. There is a conceit now that somehow—and this is a liberal conceit—we’ve done a lot for people. And taking like the schools, the services and so forth, if you read, Colin Powell wrote an autobiography. And he made a very interesting point; he was still a Republican then. No—a lot more was done for us back in that post-World War II Bronx than are done for kids now. For all the civil rights movement, and all the things, and not just—I mean, I shouldn’t say “not just.” Yes, people of color—but poor people. Whoever happens to be trapped in the cycle of poverty, for whatever reason. And it’s true. We had great after-school programs, we had terrific public schools, we had a college system where you didn’t even have to pay for textbooks through its early period. And there was certainly no idea of tuition. When I went to City College, if someone had said you have to start paying tuition, there would have been riots continuously. So we actually, while many people walk around with the illusion that we have somehow done a lot for people of color, people who are poor—it’s nonsense. We have actually abandoned them. And the thing that used to provide a bridge–and you grew up in Oakland. Well, Oakland, because of the war, wartime production, shipping, the need for longshoremen to actually carry things off rather than cranes, emptying boats and so forth—there was a black middle class—

MA: Absolutely.

RS: ––in Oakland, here in L.A., San Pedro and so forth, with good jobs, very often union jobs, and so forth. We now have a population that is basically abandoned. Abandoned.

MA: Right. Absolutely. And it’s intentional abandonment, right? It’s intentional targeting, it’s an intentional kind of super-exploited class. And the reason that I keep coupling everything with not just class but also race is that it’s important that we understand that, yes, it’s both a classist system that’s built to benefit those who own the means of production, but it’s also a racist system. And we can’t pretend like it’s not. So I think Manning Marable in “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America,” he talks about how these institutions—the policing system, the educational system, the health care system—were intentionally designed to produce these outcomes. And so as those systems take firmer hold, and as people are really kind of pushed out of organizing–when you said we would have been up in riots if they talked about charging us tuition. Well, I teach at Cal State. Cal State L.A. charges, I think it’s $7,000 a year. That’s not nothing! That’s a whole lot of money that drives black people out, and poor people too, but especially black people. If we look at the Cal State system, which is supposed to be the most accessible four-year college system, we are down to 4% black. Cal State L.A., which serves a county that’s 9% black, now has a black student population of 3%. And so it’s an intentional outcome, and these students have a very difficult time rising up, because one, they’re burdened with having to work in order to pay their tuition and in order to buy their textbooks. But also, this is what I meant when I said all these systems are interlocking, is that there’s a price to pay for rising up. It used to be that you could have a protest—you might even get arrested for a protest; we often talk about how Dr. King was arrested 40 times. Well, how long was he imprisoned for? When you think about what we do now, that people are being arrested for minor things like, you know, blocking an intersection, and they’re doing time. We have, one of our organizers is, you know, we’ve been protesting Jackie Lacey, who’s a district attorney here, who refuses to prosecute police. We have a protest at her campaign, re-election campaign kickoff. And one of the protesters got into this public restaurant, and all he was doing was holding up a sign. And he was arrested and is now facing charges as a result. We have another protester who is being charged with a felony for writing with chalk outside her office. And so there’s repercussions.

RS: Yeah. I want to pick up on that point. Because you can’t maintain this charade for long without brutality. Because the fact is, if you ignore the housing issue, then these homeless people become an inconvenience to your development, your life, and so forth, you know. If you ignore what happens to young kids of any color, and you don’t care about the schools, and the schools are overcrowded, and the teachers are underpaid—which is the norm in Oakland and Los Angeles; it’s why we’ve had these teacher strikes and so forth—then you’re going to have the consequence of kids that act up. Well, the answer then becomes not to pay school teachers more, or provide more housing, or better services—no. We destroyed welfare under, by the way, a liberal president, Bill Clinton. But you know, the response then becomes incarceration. It becomes brutality, you know. And people should understand that. And when I say I’m a bit pessimistic, you know, I just look at this situation and I say, you know, it makes me nostalgic for when I was growing up—that’s not progress. You know, I was the child of garment workers. You’re the children of garment workers here in L.A. now, their parents are probably undocumented and afraid of the government right now. You got no rights to organize a union or fight for anything. And that, I want to ask you, because you—you’re supposed to sell out, frankly. You know, they used to say when I was a kid, you know, free, white, and 21, you got it made; you know, they should have added “male.” That was the racist prescription. Well, now you could say, OK, yeah, if you’re black you’re going to be stopped by the police because they—you know, color. But the fact is, you get a doctorate—

MA: You move out the neighborhood, and—yeah.

RS: Yeah, and you can, you know, find your place, and so forth. You haven’t done that.

MA: No.

RS: You’re teaching in probably the place where you’re finding more kids from the community. Tell me why you haven’t sold out.

MA: I’m my mother’s daughter. You know, my mother was one of those community othermothers in the seventies who, she was a public school teacher, single mom. When her car hit the block, all the kids in the neighborhood would run and sit on our porch and yell “time for school!” and she would teach them to read. So I can’t be raised by my mom and sell out. For what? If you sell out, only you benefit, right? And you don’t really benefit. If you can’t bring the whole community with you, it’s a fake success. You said you’re pessimistic; I’ll say this, I’m an organizer, and I can’t be an organizer without being hopeful. That I see two warring factions. I see crazed folks like your Trumps, but also your liberal white supremacists thinking that they have a right to hoard all the resources. But I also see people in my neighborhood, off of Crenshaw, saying you know what? We’re going to take our power back. And they don’t get to kill somebody in a mall. They don’t get to kill a mother of two who’s running away from police. They don’t get to undereducate and miseducate our children. I love what UTLA did, because that strike, that teacher’s strike that we won in Los Angeles, wasn’t just about their salaries and benefits. And they have a right to livable wages, right?

RS: Yeah. For people who don’t know, you’re talking about the teacher’s union.

MA: The teacher’s union, absolutely. What they stayed on strike for, and the reason I was out there, and my children were out there with them—and it felt like all of L.A. was on their side except for the rich ones, right? The Eli Broads and the, you know, the like. We were all out there with them because what they were striking for is quality public education for my kids. For black kids, for brown kids, for poor kids and working-class kids, who deserve to have nurses in schools and librarians and counselors, who deserve to not be packed into a room of 52 students. And so it was beautiful. And so I’m hopeful because we see uprisings like that, which also impact even some of the ones that we think are liberal white supremacists. I wasn’t a big fan of Gavin Newsom, but right now I’m real happy with him for putting the moratorium on the death penalty. For moving in ways that I think the public has demanded.

RS: The governor of California. I want to end this, though, I think we’ve hit a theme here where we began. The whole question of privilege. And I don’t think that, you know, you can solve the problems by just spending a little more money.

MA: Right.

RS: I think, you know, you have to recognize the main test of any civilization is how do you treat the other. And that’s where America has failed, and dramatically so, for the last 40 years of growing income inequality and racial divide and everything else, you know. And what I find crazy-making is this arrogance to think, hey, we did a lot—“we” being people of power and privilege—we did a lot. No, you didn’t! No, you didn’t, you actually made the schools worse. And the proof of it is, if it’s your own child, you’re going to go very far to help them get into a school that’s safe, where they can get an education, and what have you. You’re going to find a magnet school, and you’re going to do all that. And you don’t care about those other kids. It’s as simple a human rights issue as you can find. So here is a society that has this illusion of inclusion, welcoming, and so forth, right? And in fact, if you look at the–and I pick out the last 40 years; we’re not talking ancient history here. And I think the main thing we teach at these universities now is selling out. It’s the opposite of the message that informed that San Francisco—I’m mentioning again, we began by talking about 50 years ago at San Francisco State there was this great protest to make the schools more accountable to the needs of ordinary people and oppressed people in the community. That was basically it.

MA: The founding of black studies and ethnic studies, yes.

RS: Yeah. OK. Now you come 50 years forward, and the job market sucks, the gig economy is there. And I want to ask you, you know, you’re there on the front line of teaching, I guess, a lot of kids from the lower middle class, working class, and so forth. You know, they forget where they came from. So tell me, what is it about you that I can bottle and then distribute?

MA: I mean, I think we just have to stay connected to our communities. We have to—every time the lie, and I would say that when you talked about the people in power as not caring, you know, the rich folks not caring about everybody else—I would say it’s even more than that. A lot of them have disdain and hatred for everybody else, right? They have disdain for black people, for poor people, for brown folks, for immigrants. And we saw that in terms of the mass murderer in New Zealand—it’s, white supremacy is back with a vengeance. Trump’s election has allowed them to completely go buck wild. To blatantly engage in racism, and they call it Islamophobia but I think we need a new word; it’s much bigger than that. When you talk about the targeting of Muslims, most of whom are people of color and in this country the plurality of whom are black, we’re talking about also a racist ideology. I think that it’s not–white supremacy undergirds it. It’s not just a fear of a religion. I think it’s more than not caring; I think it’s hatred. Hatred and the idea that they have a right, when—I think you used the word “entitlement”—they have a right to exploit and benefit, and then step on the necks of our folks. So here’s what I think we can do different. What they do is not just engage in that exploitation and brutality; what they also do is do a number on us to make us think that we should want to be like them. That’s what Trump is all about. Trying to get folks to think he’s OK, because if we could just be like him, then we’d be OK. So I think that what we have to do is tell a counter-narrative. Your show is really important in doing that. That there is no such thing as an individual path to success. That we only move forward as a collective. And then we tell them the truth of history, that that’s always been how we moved forward. So you might think that you’re going to shake yourself free from the oppression that exists, but even if you do, that’s only temporary, and it’s not substantial; it’s not real. Harriet Tubman talks about in her narratives how when she took her own freedom, how the sun felt different once she crossed the line. But she immediately felt a sense of sadness, because she realized all of her people were still enslaved. And so that’s the age-old question for black people, but for everybody else: How can I be free if my people are enslaved? And so I think that what I’m committed to doing is saying my happiness, my joy, my fulfillment in my life is tied to everybody else’s, so I have to engage in that struggle. And so that’s why real education through black studies and ethnic studies is important, but it’s also important that we make sure that we say that constantly, through whatever forms we have, through media, through personal interactions, through our writings, so that we can push back against—they’re gonna lose. Let me say that real clear. The white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative capitalists are going to lose. Because they always lose. The only way they win is when we refuse to fight.

RS: All right. Well—

MA: Yes. Thank you.

RS: —That’s a good point on which to end. I’ve been talking to professor Dr. Abdullah, chair of the Pan-African Studies program at Cal State L.A. and a great leader, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter in the country as well as here in L.A. Our engineers at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. Our producers are Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. And here at USC, Sebastian Grubaugh at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has once again held this show together. Thank you and see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

The IRS Has Never Stood a Chance Against the Ultrawealthy

On June 30, 2016, an auto-parts magnate received the kind of news anyone would dread: The Internal Revenue Service had determined he had engaged in abusive tax maneuvers. He stood accused of masking about $5 billion in income. The IRS wanted over $1.2 billion in back taxes and penalties.

The magnate, Georg Schaeffler, was the billionaire scion of a family-owned German manufacturer and was quietly working as a corporate lawyer in Dallas. Schaeffler had extra reason to fear the IRS, it seemed. He wasn’t in the sights of just any division of the agency but the equivalent of its SEAL Team 6.

In 2009, the IRS had formed a crack team of specialists to unravel the tax dodges of the ultrawealthy. In an age of widening inequality, with a concentration of wealth not seen since the Gilded Age, the rich were evading taxes through ever more sophisticated maneuvers. The IRS commissioner aimed to stanch the country’s losses with what he proclaimed would be “a game-changing strategy.” In short order, Charles Rettig, then a high-powered tax lawyer and today President Donald Trump’s IRS commissioner, warned that the squad was conducting “the audits from hell.” If Trump were being audited, Rettig wrote during the presidential campaign, this is the elite team that would do it.

The wealth team embarked on a contentious audit of Schaeffler in 2012, eventually determining that he owed about $1.2 billion in unpaid taxes and penalties. But after seven years of grinding bureaucratic combat, the IRS abandoned its campaign. The agency informed Schaeffler’s lawyers it was willing to accept just tens of millions, according to a person familiar with the audit.

How did a case that consumed so many years of effort, with a team of its finest experts working on a signature mission, produce such a piddling result for the IRS? The Schaeffler case offers a rare window into just how challenging it is to take on the ultrawealthy. For starters, they can devote seemingly limitless resources to hiring the best legal and accounting talent. Such taxpayers tend not to steamroll tax laws; they employ complex, highly refined strategies that seek to stretch the tax code to their advantage. It can take years for IRS investigators just to understand a transaction and deem it to be a violation.

Once that happens, the IRS team has to contend with battalions of high-priced lawyers and accountants that often outnumber and outgun even the agency’s elite SWAT team. “We are nowhere near a circumstance where the IRS could launch the types of audits we need to tackle sophisticated taxpayers in a complicated world,” said Steven Rosenthal, who used to represent wealthy taxpayers and is now a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

Because the audits are private — IRS officials can go to prison if they divulge taxpayer information — details of the often epic paper battles between the rich and the tax collectors are sparse, with little in the public record. Attorneys are also loath to talk about their clients’ taxes, and most wealthy people strive to keep their financial affairs under wraps. Such disputes almost always settle out of court.

But ProPublica was able to reconstruct the key points in the Schaeffler case. The billionaire’s lawyers and accountants first crafted a transaction of unusual complexity, one so novel that they acknowledged, even as they planned it, that it was likely to be challenged by the IRS. Then Schaeffler deployed teams of professionals to battle the IRS on multiple fronts. They denied that he owed any money, arguing the agency fundamentally misunderstood the tax issues. Schaeffler’s representatives complained to top officials at the agency; they challenged document requests in court. At various times, IRS auditors felt Schaeffler’s side was purposely stalling. But in the end, Schaeffler’s team emerged almost completely victorious.

His experience was telling. The IRS’ new approach to taking on the superwealthy has been stymied. The wealthy’s lobbyists immediately pushed to defang the new team. And soon after the group was formed, Republicans in Congress began slashing the agency’s budget. As a result, the team didn’t receive the resources it was promised. Thousands of IRS employees left from every corner of the agency, especially ones with expertise in complex audits, the kinds of specialists the agency hoped would staff the new elite unit. The agency had planned to assign 242 examiners to the group by 2012, according to a report by the IRS’ inspector general. But by 2014, it had only 96 auditors. By last year, the number had fallen to 58.

The wealth squad never came close to having the impact its proponents envisaged. As Robert Gardner, a 39-year veteran of the IRS who often interacted with the team as a top official at the agency’s tax whistleblower office, put it, “From the minute it went live, it was dead on arrival.”

Most people picture IRS officials as all-knowing and fearsome. But when it comes to understanding how the superwealthy move their money around, IRS auditors historically have been more like high school physics teachers trying to operate the Large Hadron Collider.

That began to change in the early 2000s, after Congress and the agency uncovered widespread use of abusive tax shelters by the rich. The discovery led to criminal charges, and settlements by major accounting firms. By the end of the decade, the IRS had determined that millions of Americans had secret bank accounts abroad. The agency managed to crack open Switzerland’s banking secrecy, and it recouped billions in lost tax revenue.

The IRS came to realize it was not properly auditing the ultrawealthy. Multimillionaires frequently don’t have easily visible income. They often have trusts, foundations, limited liability companies, complex partnerships and overseas operations, all woven together to lower their tax bills. When IRS auditors examined their finances, they typically looked narrowly. They might scrutinize just one return for one entity and examine, say, a year’s gifts or income.

Belatedly attempting to confront improper tax avoidance, the IRS formed what was officially called the Global High Wealth Industry Group in 2009. “The genesis was: If you think of an incredibly wealthy family, their web of entities somehow gives them a remarkably low effective tax rate,” said former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, who was one of those responsible for creating the wealth squad. “We hadn’t really been looking at it all together, and shame on us.”

The IRS located the group within the division that audits the biggest companies in recognition of the fact that the finances of the 1 percent resemble those of multinational corporations more than those of the average rich person.

The vision was clear, as Doug Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee who remained to helm the agency under the Obama administration, explained in a 2009 speech: “We want to better understand the entire economic picture of the enterprise controlled by the wealthy individual.”

It’s particularly important to audit the wealthy well, and not simply because that’s where the money is. That’s where the cheating is, too. Studies show that the wealthiest are more likely to avoid paying taxes. The top 0.5 percent in income account for fully a fifth of all the underreported income, according to a 2010 study by the IRS’ Andrew Johns and the University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $50 billion each year in unpaid taxes.

The plans for the wealth squad seemed like a step forward. In a few years, the group would be staffed with several hundred auditors. A team of examiners would tackle each audit, not just one or two agents, as was more typical in the past. The new group would draw from the IRS’ best of the best.

That was crucial because IRS auditors have a long-standing reputation, at least among the practitioners who represent deep-pocketed taxpayers, as hapless and overmatched. The agents can fritter away years, tax lawyers say, auditing transactions they don’t grasp. “In private practice, we played whack-a-mole,” said Rosenthal, of the Tax Policy Center. “The IRS felt a transaction was suspect but couldn’t figure out why, so it would raise an issue and we’d whack it and they would raise another and we’d whack it. The IRS was ill-equipped.”

The Global High Wealth Group was supposed to change that. Indeed, with all the fanfare at the outset, tax practitioners began to worry on behalf of their clientele. “The impression was it was all going to be specialists in fields, highly trained. The IRS would assemble teams with the exact right expertise to target these issues,” Chicago-based tax attorney Jenny Johnson said.

The new group’s first moves spurred resistance. The team sent wide-ranging requests for information seeking details about their targets’ entire empires. Taxpayers with more than $10 million in income or assets received a dozen pages of initial requests, with the promise of many more to follow. The agency sought years of details on every entity it could tie to the subject of the audits.

In past audits, that initial overture had been limited to one or two pages, with narrowly tailored requests. Here, a typical request sought information on a vast array of issues. One example: a list of any U.S. or foreign entity in which the taxpayer held an “at least a 20 percent” interest, including any “hybrid instruments” that could be turned into a 20 percent or more ownership share. The taxpayer would then have to identify “each and every current and former officer, trustee, and manager” from the entity’s inception.

Taxpayers who received such requests recoiled. Attacking the core idea that Shulman had said would animate the audits, their attorneys and accountants argued the examinations sought too much information, creating an onerous burden. The audits “proceeded into a proctology exam, unearthing every aspect of their lives,” said Mark Allison, a prominent tax attorney for Caplin & Drysdale who has represented taxpayers undergoing Global High Wealth audits. “It was extraordinarily intrusive. Not surprisingly, these people tend to be private and are not used to sharing.”

Tax practitioners took their concerns directly to the agency, at American Bar Association conferences and during the ABA’s regular private meetings with top IRS officials. “Part of our approach was to have private sit-downs to raise issues and concerns,” said Allison, who has served in top roles in the ABA’s tax division for years. We were “telling them this was too much, unwieldy and therefore unfair.” Allison said he told high-ranking IRS officials, “You need to rein in these audit teams.”

For years, politicians have hammered the IRS for its supposed abuse of taxpayers. Congress created a “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” in the mid-1990s. Today, the IRS often refers to its work as “customer service.” One result of constant congressional scrutiny is that senior IRS officials are willing to meet with top tax lawyers and address their concerns. “There was help there. They stuck their necks out for me,” Allison said.

The IRS publicly retreated. Speaking at a Washington, D.C., Bar Association event in February 2013, a top IRS official, James Fee, conceded the demands were too detailed and long, telling the gathering that the agency has “taken strides to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” The Global High Wealth group began to limit its initial document requests.

The lobbying campaign, combined with the lack of funding for the group, took its toll. One report estimated that the wealth team had audited only around a dozen wealthy taxpayers in its first two and a half years. In a September 2015 report, the IRS’ inspector general said the agency had failed to establish the team as a “standalone” group “capable of conducting all of its own examinations.” The group didn’t have steady leadership, with three directors in its first five years. When it did audit the ultrawealthy, more than 40 percent the reviews resulted in no additional taxes.

The inspector general also criticized the IRS broadly — not just its high-wealth team — for not focusing enough on the richest taxpayers. In 2010, the IRS as a whole audited over 32,000 millionaires. By 2018, that number had fallen to just over 16,000, according to data compiled by Syracuse University. Audits of the wealthiestAmericans have collapsed 52 percent since 2011, falling more substantially than audits of the middle class and the poor. Almost half of audits of the wealthy were of taxpayers making $200,000 to $399,000. Those audits brought in $605 per audit hour worked. Exams of those making over $5 million, by contrast, brought in more than $4,500 an hour.

The IRS didn’t even have the resources to pursue millionaires who had been hit with a hefty tax bill and simply stiffed Uncle Sam. It “appeared to no longer emphasize the collection of delinquent accounts of global high wealth taxpayers,” a 2017 inspector general report said.

In recent years, the number of Global High Wealth audits has been higher — it closed 149 audits in the last year — but tax lawyers and former IRS officials say even that improvement is deceptive. A major reason is that the audits are much less ambitious. “They were longer at the beginning and shorter as the process moved on,” Johnson, the tax attorney, said.

Inside the IRS, agents seethed. “The whole organization was very frustrated,” Gardner said. “They were just really not sure what the hell their mission was, what they were supposed to be accomplishing.”

Georg Schaeffler, 54, has flowing salt-and-pepper hair that makes him look like he could’ve been an actor on the 1980s TV show “Dynasty.” The impression is offset by the wire rim glasses he wears and by the bookish disposition of a person who, as a teenager, once asked for a copy of the German Constitution as a present.

As a younger man, Schaeffler tried to escape his legacy. He left Germany and the family company at a young age and lit out for the American West. He was trying to make it on his own “where people don’t know who you are,” as he would tell a reporter for a magazine profile years later. Some might escape to Texas to live a bit wild. Schaeffler became a corporate lawyer.

Schaeffler’s law firm colleagues didn’t know much more than that he spoke with an accent, and certainly not that he was vastly wealthy. That is, until he landed on the Forbes list of global billionaires. Rueful at the loss of his privacy, Schaeffler once declared: “I hate Forbes.”

The family’s riches stemmed from ball bearings and other automobile parts manufactured by the Schaeffler Group, which was founded by Schaeffler’s father and then passed to his mother after his father died. By 2006, Georg (pronounced GAY-org) owned 80 percent of the enterprise and his mother the remaining 20 percent. (As a Texas resident at that time, Schaeffler was required to pay U.S. income taxes.)

He very nearly lost it all. In 2008, Schaeffler Group made a big mistake. It offered to buy Continental AG, a tiremaker, just days before the stock and credit markets experienced their worst crisis since the Great Depression. Even as Continental’s stock price crashed, Schaeffler was legally obligated to go through with its purchase at the much higher pre-crash price.

Schaeffler Group flirted with bankruptcy and pleaded for aid from the German government. The media began to pay closer attention to the private company and the low-profile family that ran it. German press accounts dismissed Schaeffler’s mother as the “billionaire beggar” for seeking a bailout and pilloried her for wearing a fur coat at a ski race while seeking government help.

No German government aid came. The Schaeffler Group teetered, and the family’s fortune plummeted from $9 billion to almost zero. Amid the crisis over Continental, Georg accepted his fate and took up a more prominent role at the company; he’s now the chairman of its supervisory board.

To pay for Continental, Schaeffler Group borrowed about 11 billion euros from a consortium of banks. At the time, Schaeffler’s lenders, including Royal Bank of Scotland, were desperate, too, having suffered enormous losses on home mortgages. They wanted to avoid any more write-downs that might result if the company defaulted on the loans. So in 2009 and 2010, Schaeffler’s lenders restructured the debt in a devilishly complex series of transactions.

By 2012, these maneuvers had caught the eye of the Global High Wealth group. Paul Doerr, an experienced revenue agent, would head the audit. Eventually, the IRS discerned what it came to believe was the transaction’s essence: The banks had effectively forgiven nearly half of Schaeffler’s debt.

To the IRS, that had significant tax implications. In the wealth team’s view, Georg Schaeffler had received billions of dollars of income — on which he owed taxes.

The auditors’ view reflects a core aspect of the U.S. tax system. Under American law, companies and individuals are liable for taxes on the forgiven portion of any loan.

This frequently comes up in the housing market. A homeowner borrows $100,000 from a bank to buy a house. Prices fall and the homeowner, under financial duress, unloads it for $80,000. If the bank forgives the $20,000 still owed on the original mortgage, the owner pays taxes on that amount as if it were ordinary income.

This levy can seem unfair since it often hits borrowers who have run into trouble paying back their debts. The problem was particularly acute during the housing crisis, so in late 2007, Congress passed a bill that protected most homeowners from being hit with a tax bill after foreclosure or otherwise getting a principal reduction from their lender.

Tax experts say the principle of taxing forgiven loans is crucial to preventing chicanery. Without it, people could arrange with their employers to borrow their salaries through the entire year interest-free and then have the employer forgive the loan at the very end. Voila, no taxable income.

The notion that forgiven debt is taxable applies to corporate transactions, too. That means concern about such a tax bill is rarely far from a distressed corporate debtor’s mind. “Any time you have a troubled situation, it’s a typical tax issue you have to address and the banks certainly understand it, too,” said Les Samuels, an attorney who spent decades advising corporations and wealthy individuals on tax matters.

But the efforts to avoid tax, in the case of Schaeffler and his lenders, took a particularly convoluted form. It involved several different instruments, each with multiple moving parts. The refinancing was “complicated and unusual,” said Samuels, who was not involved in the transaction. “If you were sitting in the government’s chair and reading press reports on the situation, your reaction might be that the company was on the verge of being insolvent. And when the refinancing was completed, the government might think that banks didn’t know whether they would be repaid.”

This account of the audit was drawn from conversations with people familiar with it, who were not authorized to speak on the record, as well as court and German securities filings. The IRS declined to comment for this story. Doerr did not respond to repeated calls and emails.

A spokesman for Schaeffler declined to make him available for an interview. “Mr. Schaeffler always strives to comply with the complex U.S. tax code,” the spokesman wrote in a statement, saying “the fact that the refinancing was with six independent, international banks in itself demonstrates that these were arm’s length, commercially driven transactions. The IRS professionally concluded the audit in 2018 without making adjustments to those transactions, and there is no continuing dispute — either administratively or in litigation — related to these matters.”

Schaeffler’s lenders never explicitly canceled the loan. The banks and Schaeffler maintained to the IRS that the loan was real and no debt had been forgiven.

The IRS came not to buy that. After years of trying to unravel the refinancing, the IRS homed in on what the agency contended was a disguise. The banks and Schaeffler “had a mutual interest in maintaining the appearance that the debt hadn’t gone away,” a person familiar with the transaction said. But the IRS believed the debt had, in fact, been canceled.

In the refinancing, the banks and Schaeffler had agreed to split the company’s debt, which had grown to 12 billion euros at that point, into two pieces: A senior loan, to be paid back first, worth about 7 billion euros and a junior piece worth about 5 billion euros.

Schaeffler’s income-producing assets were placed into the entity that held the senior debt. Schaeffler was required to repay the debt according to a schedule and to pay a meaningful interest rate: 4.25 percentage points above the rate his lenders charge each other to borrow money. In short, it appeared to be a relatively straightforward debt transaction.

The junior debt was another matter — and its provisions would raise the hackles of the IRS. To begin with, the entity that held the junior debt did not directly hold income-producing assets. There was no schedule of payments that Schaeffler had to make on the junior debt. He wasn’t obligated to make principal payments until the end of the loan’s term. And it carried a nearly nonexistent annual interest rate of 0.1 percentage points above prevailing interbank lending rates, plus an additional 7 percent per year, which Schaeffler could choose to defer and pay at the end of the term.

The banks attached two other provisions to the refinancing: A “Contingent Remuneration Payment” and a “Contingent Upside Instrument,” according to German securities filings. The two additions called for Schaeffler to make payments to the future performance of the company.

The IRS and Schaeffler’s team fought especially over the Contingent Upside Instrument. Its value was tied to the Schaeffler Group’s future profitability, just like a share of stock would be. The IRS argued that not only was this an equitylike sweetener to the banks, but that it tainted the entire junior portion of the debt. To the IRS, it looked like the banks had a claim on future payments from Schaeffler, but they didn’t know when they’d receive it — or even if they would ever get anything.

To the IRS, these steps all added up to the effective cancellation of about $5 billion worth of debt, for which the banks had received something in return. That something looked and acted very much like equity.

The Schaeffler audit was one of the biggest for the Global High Wealth group. The IRS assigned a larger than normal team to the exam. The agency would send 86 separate document requests to Schaeffler through July 2013.

But there were problems almost from the beginning, according to people familiar with the audit, who provided this account and chronology. The IRS examiners disagreed with one another over strategy. The debates sometimes spilled into the view of Schaeffler’s team. “I remember a tremendous amount of turnover from the exam team and infighting. They were not presenting a coherent message,” a person in the Schaeffler camp said.

By contrast, Schaeffler’s team of lawyers and accountants was large and unified. “These taxpayers aren’t exactly represented by H&R Block,” Gardner, the retired IRS official, said.

Schaeffler’s advisers threw as much as they could back at the agency. Document requests are typically voluntary at the outset. But at one point, an IRS auditor was frustrated at what the team saw as the Schaeffler team’s resistance and delays and demanded, “Would a summons help?” according to a person familiar with the exam. Schaeffler’s team complained about the perceived threat. The IRS scolded its employee, and Doerr, the lead auditor, apologized to the Schaeffler side, according to the person.

In another instance, the IRS could not get information it sought from Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, related to its advice to Schaeffler. So it sued the accounting firm in early 2014. Ernst & Young contended the material was privileged because it was prepared in anticipation of litigation. The IRS won in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, but Ernst & Young appealed.

In early November 2015, with the Ernst & Young appeal unresolved, top IRS officials gave the Schaeffler audit team the permission it was looking for. They allowed the auditors to notify Schaeffler that they believed he’d failed to disclose about $5 billion in income and that he could expect a $1.2 billion tax bill. That included some $200 million in penalties because the agency viewed the transaction as abusive.

Only days later, the IRS was dealt a defeat that would further hamstring its ability to press its case. On Nov. 10, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district judge, slapping down the IRS’ efforts to get the Ernst & Young documents, ruling they were in fact protected by privilege. The IRS had no choice. It would have to proceed without the documents.

The IRS took solace that despite the adverse ruling on the documents, the appeals court appeared to bolster the IRS’ view of the transaction. Describing it as a “complex and novel refinancing,” the court said the consortium of banks “essentially insured” Schaeffler “by extending credit and subordinating its debt.” The opinion found that Schaeffler’s team had known that litigation over the transaction was “virtually inevitable,” underscoring the sense that the billionaire’s lawyers and accountants knew they were pushing legal limits.

The two sides wrangled even over routine procedural matters. The statute of limitations was about to run out. Usually the taxpayer voluntarily agrees to extend the time limit rather than antagonize the agents doing an audit. But Schaeffler’s team raised the prospect of refusing an extension. They ultimately relented, but succeeded in amping up the pressure on the auditors.

Even as the antagonism built between the two sides, the IRS showed deference to the Schaeffler camp. Doerr gave Schaeffler’s attorneys a heads-up that the agency was going to deliver bad news, an action that was viewed as overly solicitous, according to one person. It gave an opening for Schaeffler’s lawyers to raise their concerns with the audit team’s bosses. They expressed how wrongheaded they thought the IRS’ position was and how inappropriate its actions had been.

In June 2016, the IRS sent Schaeffler the official notice that the agency would seek unpaid tax and penalties.

Schaeffler’s attorneys continued to argue, often above the heads of the audit team, that the auditors’ interpretation was incorrect. They held conference calls with top IRS officials, saying the audit team had given the Schaeffler side mixed messages. Some on the team had assured Schaeffler’s attorneys that he would not face a large tax bill or be subject to a penalty. Top officials then met with the Global High Wealth team to discuss the issues. “The pushback is incredible,” one knowledgeable person recalled.

The pushback worked — and here’s where an audit is radically different from a court case. Court cases are typically accompanied by publicly available decisions and rulings that explain them in detail. By contrast, audits are shielded by the secrecy of the IRS’ process. They can end with no scrap of publicly available paper to memorialize key decisions. In August 2016, in Schaeffler’s case, officials several rungs up the IRS hierarchy told the Global High Wealth team to withdraw the penalty from its request.

Even without a penalty portion, Schaeffler would still owe the original $1 billion in taxes if the IRS maintained its contention that the banks had cancelled his debt. Schaeffler’s team then went to work on that, too. It succeeded. By 2017, the IRS had abandoned its assertion that debt had been transformed into equity. After six years on a hard-fought case, the agency had effectively given up.

The IRS had a few stray quibbles, so the agency said it required a payment in the “tens of millions,” according to two people familiar with the audit. There the trail goes dark. Tax experts say Schaeffler’s team would likely have appealed even that offer, which in many instances leads to further reductions in money owed, but ProPublica could not ascertain that that occurred.

Thanks in part to the U.S. government’s bailout of the auto industry and the global economic recovery, the Schaeffler Group’s business rebounded. Despite a recent dip in the car market, things have turned out OK for Georg Schaeffler. Today, Forbes estimates his fortune at over $13 billion.

U.K.’s May Asks the EU to Delay Brexit Until June 30

LONDON — British Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday sought to delay Brexit until June 30 to avoid a chaotic withdrawal from the European Union in one week, but a key leader of the bloc suggested an even longer pause in the difficult divorce proceedings.

The question over timing is vital because Britain is set to leave the EU without a withdrawal deal in place on April 12 unless an agreement is reached at a Brussels summit set to take place two days earlier.

In a letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, May asked for an extension until June 30 and agreed to make contingency plans to take part in European Parliament elections on May 23-26 if necessary.

Tusk proposed a longer time frame. He urged the 27 remaining EU nations to offer the U.K. a flexible extension of up to a year to make sure the nation doesn’t leave the bloc in a chaotic way that could undermine commerce.

Two EU officials said Tusk wants a one-year period, which has been dubbed a “flextension,” and hopes to get it approved at the EU summit on April 10. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to disclose information before it was made public.

Such a move would mean that the U.K. would need to take part in the elections to the European Parliament, something the U.K. prime minister has long argued would not be in either side’s interest.

The elections pose a substantial stumbling block because Britain would be expected to take part, if it is still an EU member, so its people have representation in the European Parliament. Officials worry that the legitimacy of European institutions could be jeopardized if the population of a member state is not involved in the process.

Any extension to the deadline will need unanimous approval from the rest of the EU. French President Emmanuel Macron has thus far seemed cautious about giving Britain more time, saying the bloc cannot be held hostage by Britain’s political deadlock over Brexit.

There are also concerns in Europe that some British politicians who want to provoke a “no-deal” Brexit might try to make trouble from inside the bloc, a course that outspoken Brexit advocate Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested Friday.

He tweeted that “if a long extension leaves us stuck in the EU, we should be as difficult as possible.”

The Conservative Party lawmaker suggested using Britain’s positon to veto any EU budget increases, block the establishment of an EU army, and make it impossible for Macron to push further EU integration.

Brexit backer Nigel Farage, who has long ridiculed Europe’s institutions, also said he would campaign in European Parliament elections.

If any EU nation refuses to back an extension, Britain will be expected to leave as scheduled on April 12.

There are concerns that such an abrupt exit without a deal could lead to economic slowdown and a breakdown in food and medical supplies as border checks and tariffs are added overnight. Massive traffic jams could also be expected on highways leading to major ferry ports.

An earlier British request for a delay until June 30 was rejected, and officials are disappointed May has again sought an extension until that date, said Larissa Brunner, an analyst with European Policy Center.

“The EU has already said ‘no’ once, so I think Theresa May knows that EU is probably not going to grant her that extension,” she said.

She said May could be able to blame the EU for rejecting an extension if Britain leaves the bloc next week without an agreement.

The complex maneuvering comes as Britain’s Parliament considers legislation designed to prevent such a “no-deal” departure.

Britain’s upper House of Lords is set to resume debate on the measure Monday. It was endorsed earlier by the lower House of Commons by just one vote.

Despite the apparent support in Parliament for a new law to prevent a no-deal exit, the decision is in the hands of the EU, not Britain. It is the first country to try to leave the bloc, and the formal “Article 50” exit procedure has never been tested before.

The Europeans would prefer that Britain not take part in the European Parliament elections if it is going to leave. April 12 is the last day for Britain to signal whether it will field candidates.

May said in her letter that Britain is reluctantly ready to begin preparations for the European elections if no Brexit deal is reached in the interim. She said she is making the preparations even though she believes it is not in the interest of either Britain or the EU for her country to participate because it is leaving the bloc.

May said she “accepts” the EU position that if Britain has not left by May 23, it will have a legal obligation to take part in the voting.

She said she hopes to reach a compromise agreement that could take Britain out of the EU before that.

May’s withdrawal plan, reached with the EU over more than two years of negotiations, has been rejected by the U.K. Parliament three times.

She is now seeking a compromise in a series of talks with Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his deputies, with hopes of winning opposition support for a new divorce deal.

If that doesn’t work, May plans a series of votes in Parliament to see if a majority-backed plan can emerge.

Ideas being discussed include keeping Britain in a customs union with the EU after it leaves the bloc, as well as the possibility of a second referendum. There is fierce opposition from Brexit backers in the Conservative Party to these options.

___

Casert reported from Brussels. Associated Press writer Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed.

Elizabeth Warren Signals Willingness to Kill the Filibuster

Calling on the nation to “wake up to the reality of the United States Senate,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren is set to announce Friday that she supports eliminating the filibuster.

The 2020 presidential candidate is expected to endorse the proposal in a speech at the National Action Network Convention in New York Friday morning.

“When Democrats next have power, we should be bold and clear: We’re done with two sets of rules—one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats,” Warren is expected to say. “And that means when Democrats have the White House again, if Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems facing this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster.”

“I’m not running for president just to talk about making real, structural change. I’m serious about getting it done,” the speech reads. “And part of getting it done means waking up to the reality of the United States Senate.”

I’ve watched Republicans abuse the rules when they’re out of power, then turn around and blow off the rules when they’re in power. We just saw it happen again this week when they unilaterally changed the same rules they abused to ram through President Trump’s extreme nominees.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 5, 2019

It’s all happening: 2 days after McConnell changes Senate rules again, Warren admits Senate’s 60-vote threshold has to go for Dems’ big agenda

“If Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama … then we should get rid of the filibuster”https://t.co/I1optqHE9H

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) April 5, 2019

Getting rid of the filibuster—the Senate procedure which allows a minority party to delay a vote by drawing out debate and block legislation from passing by requiring a “supermajority” of 60 senators to approve it—would be a key step toward passing progressive measures, advocates say.

At the NAN Convention, Warren is expected to note that the filibuster has stopped the Senate from passing racial justice legislation for decades, including an anti-lynching bill which was first introduced a century ago but didn’t pass until December 2018.

“It nearly became the law back then. It passed the House in 1922. But it got killed in the Senate—by a filibuster. And then it got killed again. And again. And again,” Warren plans to say. “More than 200 times. An entire century of obstruction because a small group of racists stopped the entire nation from doing what was right.”

Advocates including Warren also say the end of the filibuster would make it easier for the Senate to pass meaningful legislation to combat the climate crisis and to further other progressive causes.

“We can’t sit around for 100 years while the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful and everyone else falls further and further behind,” Warren’s speech reads. “We can’t sit around for 100 years while climate change destroys our planet, while corruption pervades every nook and cranny of Washington, and while too much of a child’s fate in life still rests on the color of their skin. Enough with that.”

Warren joins fellow 2020 Democratic hopefuls Pete Buttigieg and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in endorsing the end of the filibuster. Her speech Friday will represent her latest push for “structural change” that she says would have far-reaching positive effects on the lives of working Americans. Since announcing her candidacy in January she has called for a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans to combat economic inequality and fund progressive programs, a universal childcare plan, and a breakup of powerful tech giants, among other proposals.

Centrist Dems Are Trying to Block a Universal $15 Minimum Wage

A House bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from $7.25 by 2024 passed a key committee vote in March. The move, as NPR.org reported at the time, “is a sign of broader political momentum for the minimum wage issue,” one that is supported by multiple Democratic presidential candidates, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

As the bill heads to a potential floor vote, however, over a dozen centrist Democrats are pushing a new plan, which would permit lower hourly wages in regional areas, with a longer lead time. The competing visions for the minimum wage, Sarah Ferris writes in Politico, are “threatening to broaden the rift between the party’s progressive and moderate members.”

Democratic opponents to $15, led by Rep. Terri Sewell of Alabama, introduced the Paying Hourly Americans Stronger Earnings (PHASE)-in $15 Wage Act, which would create a “regional” minimum wage, which would allow smaller cities and rural areas to base any minimum wage increases on the local cost of living instead of a $15 national floor. The bill, according to a statement from Sewell’s office, would group census-designated Metropolitan Statistical Areas into five tiers, using Regional Price Parities (RPP) data that would determine the minimum wage for the regions’ cost of living.

Supporters of the bill include Lucy McBath of Georgia and Dean Phillips of Minnesota. Phillips is a small-business owner who, despite paying his own employees at least $15 an hour, says it’s not a “one-size-fits-all wage.”

An aide to a House member who supports the regional bill told Ferris that “more than doubling the wage over five years is going to result in lost jobs,” and “A lot of people would prefer to have a $10 wage than no job.”

Thirteen Democrats support Sewell’s plan, which, Ferris explains, “would dramatically slow the wage hikes in hundreds of smaller cities from Cincinnati to St. Louis compared to metropolis areas like San Francisco and New York.”

Opponents of the (PHASE)-in $15 Wage Act argue that the bill betrays the same promises made during the 2018 midterm elections that helped Democrats win a majority in the House. “We want to pass a full $15 minimum wage bill. Not a regional bill. We’re very clear about that,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal told Politico, adding, “Being in Congress means leading, and we need to lead on minimum wage.”

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Bobby Scott, D-Va., author of the $15 minimum wage bill that passed the committee, also objected to the idea of a regional bill, telling Politico, “We don’t have differentiated payments for Social Security.”

According to a statement from the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research organization, the bill “would do little more than lock in low wages for millions of workers in parts of the country where large national employers pay as little as they can get away with.”

The organization estimates that 21% of low-wage workers in regions that would be exempt from a $15 minimum wage would receive just $11.50 per hour by 2024; an additional 22% would get just $12.10 by the same year.

Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are, as Ferris writes, “prepared to wield the power of the 96-member caucus to ensure their full $15-an-hour proposal reaches the floor.”

At least one poll suggests they have public opinion on their side. A January survey from The Hill-HarrisX showed 55% of registered voters support a $15 an hour minimum wage. Even 70% of the Republicans surveyed said the minimum wage should be higher than the current level of $7.25, though just 36% agreed it should go up to $15.

Neither Scott’s nor Sewell’s bills are currently scheduled for a floor vote.

 

Trump’s Disdain for Puerto Rico Should Be His Undoing

Puerto Rico’s death toll of about 3,000 from Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 ought to be the biggest strike against President Donald Trump. The majority of deaths on the island occurred in the days and weeks following the hurricanes, largely due to inadequate health care and the admitted failures of the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA), suggesting that these were preventable deaths. And yet to Trump, Puerto Rico is the recipient of fantastical amounts of undeserved money.

In many ways, Trump sees the U.S. colony as a personification of his usual enemies. Puerto Rico is brown skinned, non-English speaking, foreign, Democratic, and poor—whether or not any or all of these things are entirely true. And therefore, if it does not accept his patronizing gestures with undying gratitude, it deserves nothing but disdain.

That disdain has been apparent right from the start, most notably during Trump’s post-hurricane paper towel-throwing exercise in 2017 and in his denials of the extent of the hurricane-related death toll. It was also on full display earlier this week during his Monday night tweet-storm. In an error-filled statement, Trump tweeted that, “Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess—nothing works.” He also said, “Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before.” Trump—who, like his base, feels his manhood is deeply threatened by strong women of color leaders—called San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, “crazed and incompetent.” He then spoke of himself in the third person, bombastically asserting that “The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump.”

Multiple news outlets exposed his $91 billion figure and claims that Puerto Rico received more money than any other region for a hurricane as flat-out lies. No one is quite sure where Trump conjured up the number, but some have speculated that he confused the total amount of damage suffered by Puerto Rico from the 2017 storms with the amount it has actually received. The Washington Post reported that it “is a combination of $41 billion that’s been set aside for recovery combined with $50 billion expected to be spent over the life of the recovery effort.” Regardless of where he got the figure, the difference between reality and Trump’s fiction ironically encompasses Puerto Rico’s actual need.

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by Sonali Kolhatkar

Trump’s claim that Puerto Rico was given more money than any hurricane-affected region has ever been granted is also erroneous. Federal funds to Louisiana after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina totaled about $120 billion.

The president’s bizarre comments come as the Senate failed to pass two bills on disaster relief this week hinging on expanding Puerto Rico’s food stamp program. Trump has privately told his Republican colleagues that he will not support additional funding going to Puerto Rico, proving that the consequences of his defiant misinformation have a real-world impact. Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA, put it in these terms in an interview: “Puerto Rico has become kind of a bargaining chip to move forward proposals.” He explained that Trump considered “taking aid that was committed for Puerto Rico in order to build or strengthen the border wall.”

What Trump also exposed in his series of tweets was how he has clearly “otherized” Puerto Rico. In his complaints against Senate Democrats for voting down the disaster relief bill for other states that he backed, the president tweeted, “Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any ‘place’ in history.” His use of the quotation marks in referring to Puerto Rico as a “place” is suggestive of his uncomfortable attitude toward the U.S. colony. He also complained about how Puerto Rico’s politicians “only take from USA,” implying that the island was not part of this country, rather an outsider leeching from the federal treasury. It’s not just Trump. White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley twice referred to Puerto Rico as “that country” during an interview this week. LeCompte explained to me that “unfortunately a lot of Americans don’t understand that people who are living in Puerto Rico, people born in Puerto Rico, are U.S. citizens.” It seems as though this ignorance may extend to the White House under Trump.

Trump has also decided that Puerto Rico’s governor does not deserve his attention, and in a manner that can only be described as utterly juvenile, as he has been actively avoiding Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. Rosselló responded by saying such behavior was “below the dignity of a sitting President” and “irresponsible, regrettable and, above all, unjustified.”

The fact that about 3,000 Americans died on Trump’s watch in Puerto Rico should be at least as large a stain on his presidency as Hurricane Katrina was on George W. Bush’s legacy. That 2005 tragedy resulted in 1,833 deaths and was seen as the lowest point of Bush’s domestic record. But amid the endless fallout of Trump’s train wreck of a presidency, there has been very little accountability for Puerto Rico’s hurricane deaths. And now Trump has gone further in trying to rewrite history, making up facts and figures to suit his agenda, and shirking his responsibility to even meet with Puerto Rico’s leaders.

Today, according to LeCompte, there are more Americans of Puerto Rican descent living on the mainland than on the island. Years of manmade and natural disasters have fueled an ongoing exodus. After Hurricane Maria alone, an estimated 200,000 Puerto Ricans resettled on the mainland, many of them making their homes in places like Florida. Republican politicians counting on reelection in states with a sizeable Puerto Rican population have “put distance between themselves and the president,” said LeCompte. And he said they have “been very clear in public statements and social media that they disagree with the president’s statements on Puerto Rico.” For example, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, in a Spanish-language ad last fall, asserted that he “confronted” Trump over his denial of the actual hurricane-related death toll.

Some political scientists have warned that Puerto Rican voters in key presidential election swing states like Florida could undo Trump’s reelection hopes in 2020. “The Puerto Rican diaspora vote is a very important vote,” said LeCompte. In addition to Florida, he cited key states like Texas, Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois where this critical vote could make a difference. Indeed, it would be a delicious irony if Trump’s presidency was to be undone by the very demographic that he has maligned and let suffer.

Watch the interview referenced in Kolhatkar’s piece in the below clip from “Rising Up With Sonali”: 

Robert Reich: America’s Economy Is Unsustainable

The biggest economic story of our times isn’t about supply and demand.  It’s about institutions and politics.  It’s about power.

The median annual earnings of full-time wage and salaried workers in 1979, in today’s dollars, was $43,680. The median earnings in 2018 was $45,708. If from 1979 to 2018, the American economy almost tripled in size, so where did the gains go?  Most went to the top.

Now this is broadly known, but there is less certainty about why.

1. The conventional view.  

Conventional wisdom attributes the widening economic divide to globalization and technological change–the “inevitable” result of the invisible hand of the so-called “free market.”

Simply put, as the American economy merged with the rest of the globe, American workers had to compete with foreign workers willing to toil for a fraction of American wages. And as technology advanced, American workers also had to compete with software and robots that were cheaper to employ than Americans.

So, according to this conventional view, the only realistic way to raise the wages of most Americans is to give them more and better education and job training, so they can become more competitive. They can thereby overcome the so-called “skills gap” that keeps them from taking the jobs of the future–jobs and opportunities generated by new technologies.

2.  A deeper view of the American political economy.

The conventional story isn’t completely wrong, and education and training are important. But the conventional view leaves out some of the largest and most important changes, and therefore overlooks the most important solutions.

To understand what really happened, it’s critical to understand that there is no “free market” in nature. The term “free market” suggests outcomes are objectively fair and that any “intervention” in the free market is somehow “unnatural.” But in reality, markets cannot exist without people constructing them. Markets depend on rules, and rules come out of legislatures, executive agencies, and courts.  The biggest political change over the last four decades is the overwhelming dominance of big money in politics – influencing what those rules are to be.

3. The decline of countervailing power.

Now, go back to the first three decades after World War II – a period that coupled the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen with the creation of the largest middle class the world has ever witnessed. The great economic thinker John Kenneth Galbraith asked at the time: Why is capitalism working so well for so many?

His answer was as surprising as it was obvious: American capitalism contained hidden pools of what he called “countervailing power” that offset the power of large corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy: labor unions, state and local banks, farm cooperatives, and small retail chains, for example. All of these sources of countervailing power had been fostered by the New Deal. They balanced the American economic system.

But since the late 1970s, these sources of countervailing power have been decimated, leading to an unbalanced system and producing widening economic inequality and stagnating wages. The result has become a vicious cycle in which big money–emanating from big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy – determine the rules of the economic game, and those rules generate more money at the top.

Consider, for example, the ever-expanding tax cuts or loopholes for large corporations, the financial sector, and the wealthy. Contrast them with increases in payroll taxes for average workers.

Or look at the bank and corporate bailouts but little or no help for homeowners caught in the downdraft of the Great Recession.

Finally, look at the increasing barriers to labor unions, such as the proliferation of so-called “right-to-work” laws and the simultaneous erosion of antitrust and the emergence of large concentrations of corporate power.

The public knows the game is rigged, which is why almost all the political energy is now anti-establishment. This is a big reason why Trump won the 2016 election. Authoritarian populists through history have used anger and directed it at racial and ethnic minorities and foreigners.

It’s also a big reason why the only alternative to authoritarian populism is progressive populism – countervailing the moneyed interests with a democracy that reorganizes the market to benefit the many rather than a small group at the top.

How do we build a new countervailing power and move toward a new progressive economics?

4. Economics and political power.

The choice isn’t between a free market and government. The question is who has the power to organize the market, and for whom.

Stagnant wages, job insecurity, widening inequality, and mounting wealth at the top are the result of political choices. The system is rigged and must be un-rigged.

Conventional economics posits that the most important goals are efficiency and economic growth. But policies can be “efficient” by making the rich even wealthier as long as no one else is worse off – and that won’t remedy what’s happened. Economic growth is meaningless if the gains from growth keep going to the top and nothing trickles down.

Stop assuming that all that’s needed is better education and job training. Sure, Americans need access to better schools and skills, but the basic problem isn’t simply a “skills gap.” It’s a market that’s organized to push more income and wealth toward the top, rather than distribute it broadly.

Stop aiming to “redistribute” from richer to poorer after the market has distributed income. Instead, change the organization of the market so that a fair pre-distribution occurs inside it.

Stop thinking that the goal is only to create more jobs. America’s real jobs crisis is a scarcity of good jobs.

The American economy cannot generate widespread prosperity without a large and growing middle class whose spending fuels the economy.

5. Building a Multi-Racial, Multi-Ethnic Coalition of the Middle Class, Working Class and Poor.

Don’t let the moneyed interests divide and conquer along racial and gender lines. Racism and sexism are very real issues within our economic system, and they are often exploited to keep us from realizing the power we can have when we stand together. All are disempowered by the moneyed interests, and all have a stake in rebuilding countervailing power.

6. Offering a compelling set of ideas about what should be done with countervailing power.

For example:

— A guaranteed basic income so no one is impoverished,

— A guaranteed job so everyone can get ahead,

— A progressive wealth tax to pay for these and other basics,

— Stronger unions so workers have more bargaining power,

— New forms of corporate organization so workers have more voice,

–  A Green New Deal so workers can get better jobs while fighting climate change.

— Reinvigorated antitrust so concentrations of economic power are broken up,

— Election finance reforms to get big money out of politics and end the revolving door,

— Voting reforms so votes cannot be suppressed.

7. Building the leadership for this new countervailing power.

You can help lead the way. You can be a leader of this movement. How?

For one, you can run for office – in your community, say, city council or school board. Or run for state office. Or even national office.

Don’t be intimidated by politics. We need good people to run. And don’t worry that you’ll be beholden to a handful of rich donors. These days, smaller donors are more active than ever.

So, what’s the secret? Tell it like it is and be yourself. And then, as I’ve said, talk about economics in terms of political power and understand the 7 principles. Build countervailing power through a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition. And offer a compelling set of ideas about what can and should be done.

But you don’t need to hold formal office to be a leader.

You can be a leader by organizing and mobilizing people: Your co-workers – to form a union. Your friends and neighbors – to push for better roads and schools, and fairer local taxes. People at your church or synagogue or mosque – to demand better treatment of the poor, the elderly, children, immigrants. You can link your group up with other groups pursuing similar ends, and create a movement. That’s how we got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. How we got marriage equality. It’s how we get good people elected.

The key to organizing and mobilizing is creating a leadership team, and then reaching out systematically to others, giving them tasks and responsibilities, starting small and gaining a few victories so people can feel their power, and then growing from there.

You’ll need to be patient and steadfast. Keep people together and focused. And be careful not to burn out. Organizing and mobilizing is hard, but once organized and mobilized, there’s no end to what people can accomplish.

You can also be a leader by uncovering critical information, fighting lies, spreading the truth. Core responsibilities of leadership are revealing the facts about widening inequalities of income, wealth, and political power – and uncovering their consequences.

A century ago they were called “muckrakers.” More recently, investigative reporters. I’m talking about courageous journalists who speak truth to power.

But this form of leadership isn’t limited to reporters. It includes whistleblowers, who alert the public to abuses of power. And here courage is also required because when you blow the whistle on the powerful, the powerful sometimes strike back.

This form of leadership also includes researchers, who dig up new sources of data and analyze them in ways that enlighten and motivate.

In other words, there isn’t just one path to leadership. Whether you seek formal authority by running and gaining public office, or you organize and mobilize people into being effective advocates, or you discover and spread the truth – you are creating and developing countervailing power to spread the gains of the economy and strengthen our democracy.

These are worthy and noble objectives. They are worth your time. They can be worth a lifetime.

Rep. Tim Ryan Is Latest Democrat to Seek White House

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan jumped into the 2020 presidential race on Thursday, portraying himself as a candidate who can bridge Democrats’ progressive and working class wings to win the White House.

Ryan, 45, announced his primary bid on ABC’s “The View.” He plans a kickoff rally on Saturday in downtown Youngstown, where a big turnout by organized labor is expected.

The congressman resisted being labeled a political centrist by the talk show’s hosts, who pointed out that he’s a recreational hunter with past backing from the National Rifle Association. In 2015, he reversed his past opposition to abortion in favor of abortion rights.

“I’m a progressive who knows how to talk to working class people, and I know how to get elected in working class districts, because, at the end of the day, the progressive agenda is what’s best for working families,” Ryan said.

During an unsuccessful bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader in 2016, Ryan criticized the party for supporting leadership that represents the U.S. coasts at the expense of the middle of the country.

Ryan represents the district formerly held by the late Democratic Rep. Jim Traficant, for whom he worked. The blue collar area swung strongly for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Bringing those voters back into the fold will be critical in 2020, said Mahoning County Democratic Chairman David Betras. He said that Trump’s victory hinged on 77,000 working class votes in four states and that he had a “news flash” for the Democratic National Committee: “I’m willing to bet we’re going to win California and New York (with our current strategy), but can we win Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio? I’m not so sure,” he said.

The president of the Mahoning-Trumbull AFL-CIO Labor Council, Bill Padisak, said many of the lifelong Democratic voters in the area who defected to vote for Trump, a Republican, would return to the Democratic Party for the right candidate.

“It seemed more like an anti-Hillary vote (in 2016),” he said. “But based on the president’s performance, a lot of people regret it. They’re like, ‘No, this wasn’t what I wanted in a president.’”

Though the Iowa caucuses are still nine months away, Ryan is getting a late start on the grassroots fundraising that is necessary to qualify for the summer debate stages.

The Democratic National Committee is limiting those first two debates to 20 slots. To qualify, candidates must reach 1% support in at least three reputable early state or national polls or collect contributions from at least 65,000 donors, with a minimum of 200 each in 20 states.

Some Democratic donors are contributing to multiple candidates to help them make sure they don’t miss out on the debates. But that threshold is no guarantee in such a wide field. Missing the debate stage — and the opportunity to notch a standout moment or two alongside better-known candidates — would almost certainly doom a longshot candidacy for someone like Ryan.

Ryan has served in Congress since 2003. Before that, he spent two years in the state Senate.

Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Ahrens said Ryan can’t win.

“You can just add him to the long list of liberal candidates demanding government-run health care, and it underscores how radical and out of touch this Democratic field truly is,” he said.

___

AP writer Bill Barrow contributed to this report from Atlanta.

House Votes to End Support for Yemen War, Rebuffing Trump

WASHINGTON—The House on Thursday voted to end American involvement in the Yemen war, rebuffing the Trump administration’s support for the military campaign led by Saudi Arabia.

The bill now heads to President Donald Trump, who is expected to veto it. The White House says the measure raises “serious constitutional concerns,” and Congress lacks the votes to override him.

By a 247-175 vote, Congress for the first time invoked the decades-old War Powers Resolution to try and stop a foreign conflict. The Senate vote was 54-46 on March 13.

“The president will have to face the reality that Congress is no longer going to ignore its constitutional obligations when it comes to foreign policy,” said Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He said the humanitarian crisis in Yemen triggered by the war “demands moral leadership.”

The war in Yemen is in its fifth year. Thousands of people have been killed and millions are on the brink of starvation. The United Nations has called the situation in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The top Republican on the committee, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, acknowledged the dire situation in Yemen for civilians, but spoke out in opposition to the bill, saying it was an abuse of the War Powers Resolution.

“This radical interpretation has implications far beyond Saudi Arabia,” McCaul said. He warned that the measure could “disrupt U.S. security cooperation agreements with more than 100 counties.”

Democrats overcame a GOP attempt to divide the majority party through a procedural motion involving Israel just minutes before the Yemen vote. Republicans wanted to amend the Yemen bill with language condemning the international boycott movement and efforts to delegitimize Israel. Democrats argued the amendment would kill the Yemen resolution, and most of them voted against the Israel measure.

“This is about politics, this is about trying to drive a wedge into this caucus where it does not belong,” said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., said to applause from Democrats. Deutch described the boycott movement as “economic warfare,” but called on lawmakers to vote against the amendment.

“The Jewish community also has a history of standing up against atrocities like the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. My colleagues are trying to block us from standing in support of human rights,” he said.

Opposition to the Saudi-led war in Yemen gathered support last year in the aftermath of the killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Washington Post columnist was killed in October by agents of the kingdom, a close U.S. partner, while he was in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. U.S. intelligence agencies and lawmakers believe that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of Khashoggi, who had written articles critical of the kingdom.

Lawmakers from both parties have scrutinized U.S.-Saudi ties and criticized Trump for not condemning Saudi Arabia strongly enough.

The Forgotten, Anti-Democratic History of NATO

What follows is a conversation between author Yves Engler and Sharmini Peries of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

SHARMINI PERIES: It’s The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 70th anniversary is this week and it was met with anti-NATO protests across the world, including right here in Washington D.C. where the alliance is expected to meet this week with all the foreign ministers. On April 4th 1949, the alliance’s treaty was signed by twelve organizations and today it has grown to 29 members.

NATO PROMOTIONAL VIDEO CLIP: The North Atlantic Alliance was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War in the context of countering the threat posed at the time by the Soviet Union. The treaty sets out the idea of collective defense, meaning that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies. It commits the allies to democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law, as well as to peaceful resolution of disputes. Today, NATO has 29 members who are stronger and safer together.

SHARMINI PERIES: On to discuss the lineage of NATO to the present is Yves Engler. Yves is the author of many books and among them is Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada. Yves, good to have you back.

YVES ENGLER: Thanks for having me.

SHARMINI PERIES: Alright now. NATO’s 70th anniversary is important to remember and that is why you have written a four-part series about its anti-democratic roots. So Yves, tell us about the four that we are publishing on The Real News that one can go and read.

YVES ENGLER: I have four different articles dealing with different elements of NATO and specifically, Canada’s role dealing with the foundation of NATO which was designed to blunt the European Left and then to really bring the world under the U.S. geopolitical umbrella. I also have a piece dealing with how NATO has become more belligerent since the end of the Cold War and how NATO was used within Canada to promote increased military spending. And then the fourth part of the series is dealing with how the Left in Canada has responded to NATO and it’s been an issue that’s been very controversial within the mainstream N.D.P. For a couple decades, the party had an official “get Canada out of NATO” position. So the series is really just trying to unpack what the alliance is in this context of the 70th anniversary.

SHARMINI PERIES: Alright now. In the NATO clip you saw earlier on the NATO website, it boasts the fact that it was really established as an alliance to deal with the Soviet Union at that time. Let’s have a look.

NATO PROMOTIONAL VIDEO CLIP: For its first four decades, the Cold War defined the alliance. Collective defense was NATO’s main role. When that confrontation ended in 1989 and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, some said that NATO had fulfilled its purpose, that it was no longer needed, and yet the alliance is still here today. So why has NATO stood the test of time?

SHARMINI PERIES: Alright, so that’s the question to you, Yves. Why has NATO stood the test of time? Why is it necessary today?

YVES ENGLER: Well it stood the test of time because it was never designed primarily about countering the Soviet Union. From the beginning, even when it may be correct to say it was about countering communism, but that was communism internally. After World War II, the Soviet Union was not a threat to Western Europe, but indigenous, socialist, and communist parties in Italy, in Greece, in France, had a lot of support and they would have won an election in Italy, almost won 30 percent of the vote in France, and would have took power in Greece if it wasn’t for U.S. intervention. And so what NATO was designed to do was to– there were tens of thousands of Canadian-U.S. troops that were stationed in France and Germany and elsewhere in Europe– designed to blunt the European Left and in the words of Canada’s Foreign Minister, “a conquest from within.” That was the objective of NATO, to stop a conquest within (i.e. a socialist or communist taking power internally). The real reason, the secondary reason for the creation of NATO and why it continues to exist today is because NATO was designed to reinforce European colonial power in Africa and Asia and bring it under a U.S.-led geopolitical umbrella and basically to have this alliance that brings the leading capitalist countries together to dominate the world under Washington’s lead. And that’s something that Washington has continued to want to do around the world. The end of the Soviet Union didn’t end Washington’s desire to dominate the world. And so NATO as a tool for that domination has really continued on until today and in fact, become more belligerent since the end of the Cold War.

SHARMINI PERIES: Alright. In reference to what you just said, Yves, about the kind of activities it’s engaged in now, let’s have a clip of this, what they claim the purpose of it today.

NATO PROMOTIONAL VIDEO CLIP: Today, we face a much broader range of threats than in the past. To the east, Russia has become more assertive with the illegal annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine, as well as its military buildup close to NATO’s borders. During the Arab Spring, NATO led an air campaign over Libya to protect civilians being targeted by the Gaddafi dictatorship. NATO and its partners have helped to prevent piracy off the Horn of Africa and are cooperating to fight terrorism in the Mediterranean Sea. NATO has also supported international efforts to stem illegal migration and human trafficking in the Aegean Sea.

SHARMINI PERIES: One cannot ignore the irony in all of that. It talks about Libya and Gaddafi’s attack on civilians, but then they boast that it is fighting terrorism in the Aegean Sea, where in fact what I have witnessed in the Aegean Sea is the NATO ships coasting the Aegean Sea, looking for immigrants that might come over to Europe, and not necessarily protecting any civilians which they are in those boats desperate people trying to come over from Syria and northern Africa escaping all kinds of atrocities often created by NATO countries.

YVES ENGLER: Well and in the case of the 2011 bombing of Libya, not just the bombing; there were Canadian special forces on the ground and there were British and other countries’ special forces on the ground. The effect of the NATO mission was to increase instability, was to increase Libya as a hub of migration in illegal human trafficking. It was also to destabilize not just Libya, but also much of the Sahel region of Africa. And so on one hand NATO engages in belligerent, violent campaigns. On the other hand, it talks about the need to bring security and end problems at sea or instability at sea, while it’s simultaneously creating this violence. But I think we also need to look at, least in the Canadian context, how the NATO alliance is really used to promote destructive— ecologically, socially-— military spending. The alliance in the Canadian context is very much used to put pressure on the Canadian government, on public opinion to say that we have to be spending two percent of our G.D.P. on military spending. That’s an agreement that NATO countries came to in 2006. It’s a totally arbitrary number and it’s used as a sort of militarist stick within public discussion in this country, and I presume in many of the European countries as well, to put pressure on political leaders to increase military spending, which is the last thing we need is more military spending. We need more spending on things to mitigate climate change, on education, on day care, and whatnot. So the alliance really becomes this militarist tool to push our politics and, in my opinion, the wrong direction.

SHARMINI PERIES: Right and also, we saw from the earlier clip that NATO is now boasting 29 members. This now includes countries like Colombia and possibly Brazil. Colombia has a special status now with NATO and Brazil is also positioning itself to be some sort of affiliate. So they’re really expanding their wings as an alliance into Latin America. That has never existed before. So talk about that, as well as Georgia now becoming a member.

YVES ENGLER: Well I think that the expansion to Colombia, which has become a partner country and I think Brazil’s on the cusp of becoming a partner to NATO, is a reflection of the fact that it’s not just about North Atlantic region, but of course it never was. The Korean War in the early 1950s, which began a year after the creation NATO, Canadian and American political leaders justified going to war in Korea partly on the basis of saying that we had this NATO alliance and we had to defend it. And of course Korea is about as far from the North Atlantic area as you can get. So I think that the Colombia example and Brazil example, reflect the fact that it’s really an alliance of world domination, if you like. And I also think that the Colombia example does also speak to the fact that NATO is just one tool of many tools in the foreign policy/military toolkit of the U.S., of Canada, and other leading imperial countries. So historically the U.S. has pursued its domination of Latin America outside of NATO. In fact, they would prefer that NATO was not really involved in Latin America so that Britain or France isn’t really involved. “This is our backyard,” in the words of official U.S. foreign policy. And so NATO had been more focused on Africa and Asia, which were places that were colonized in more recent times at least by European powers. And so what NATO was about was propping up that European power in those countries in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. And so with regards to Latin America, I think that the direction of the U.S. government in bringing Colombia into NATO is somewhat reflective of the fact that there has been a change of balance of power in the region over the past 20 years, even though right now it sort of seemed to have regressed. Latin America has somewhat broken away from some U.S. dominance. And so bringing NATO into Colombia, I think, the U.S. sees that as trying to reassert its power in the region. And with regards to Georgia and Eastern Europe, the agreements with the Soviet Union with regards to the reunification of Germany was that NATO wouldn’t go an inch to the east. But instead what’s happened of course is NATO has expanded onto all these countries on Russia’s border, which of course Russia considers a serious threat. And that, I think, just contributes to this conflict between the U.S. and Russia, which really nobody is benefiting from this except for arms companies. And the belligerence of NATO in moving towards the east, moving to Russia border, and, like I said, Canadian troops in Latvia, that’s just leading to the possibility of this horrible conflict between the two main nuclear powers in the world.

SHARMINI PERIES: All right, Yves. Let’s leave it there for now. I encourage everyone to go on The Real News site and you’ll see a JPEG, which is a link to all of Yves articles on NATO. I thank you so much for joining us today.

YVES ENGLER: Thanks a lot for having me.

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