Chris Hedges's Blog, page 329

How Health Insurers Use Cash and Gifts to Manipulate Employers

This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.

The pitches to the health insurance brokers are tantalizing.

“Set sail for Bermuda,” says insurance giant Cigna, offering top-selling brokers five days at one of the island’s luxury resorts.

Health Net of California’s pitch is not subtle: A smiling woman in a business suit rides a giant $100 bill like it’s a surfboard. “Sell more, enroll more, get paid more!” In some cases, its ad says, a broker can “power up” the bonus to $150,000 per employer group.

Not to be outdone, New York’s EmblemHealth promises top-selling brokers “the chance of a lifetime”: going to bat against the retired legendary New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera. In another offer, the company, which bills itself as the state’s largest nonprofit plan, focuses on cash: “The more subscribers you enroll … the bigger the payout.” Bonuses, it says, top out at $100,000 per group, and “there’s no limit to the number of bonuses you can earn.

Such incentives sound like typical business tactics, until you understand who ends up paying for them: the employers who sign up with the insurers — and, of course, their employees.

Human resource directors often rely on independent health insurance brokers to guide them through the thicket of costly and confusing benefit options offered by insurance companies. But what many don’t fully realize is how the health insurance industry steers the process through lucrative financial incentives and commissions. Those enticements, critics say, don’t reward brokers for finding their clients the most cost-effective options.

Here’s how it typically works: Insurers pay brokers a commission for the employers they sign up. That fee is usually a healthy 3 to 6 percent of the total premium. That could be about $50,000 a year on the premiums of a company with 100 people, payable for as long as the plan is in place. That’s $50,000 a year for a single client. And as the client pays more in premiums, the broker’s commission increases.

Commissions can be even higher, up to 40 or 50 percent of the premium, on supplemental plans that employers can buy to cover employees’ dental costs, cancer care or long-term hospitalization.

Those commissions come from the insurers. But the cost is built into the premiums the employer and employees pay for the benefit plan.

Now, layer on top of that the additional bonuses that brokers can earn from some insurers. The offers, some marked “confidential,” are easy to find on the websites of insurance companies and broker agencies. But many brokers say the bonuses are not disclosed to employers unless they ask. These bonuses, too, are indirectly included in the overall cost of health plans.

These industry payments can’t help but influence which plans brokers highlight for employers, said Eric Campbell, director of research at the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities.

“It’s a classic conflict of interest,” Campbell said.

There’s “a large body of virtually irrefutable evidence,” Campbell said, that shows drug company payments to doctors influence the way they prescribe. “Denying this effect is like denying that gravity exists.” And there’s no reason, he said, to think brokers are any different.

Critics say the setup is akin to a single real estate agent representing both the buyer and seller in a home sale. A buyer would not expect the seller’s agent to negotiate the lowest price or highlight all the clauses and fine print that add unnecessary costs.

“If you want to draw a straight conclusion: It has been in the best interest of a broker, from a financial point of view, to keep that premium moving up,” said Jeffrey Hogan, a regional manager in Connecticut for a national insurance brokerage and one of a band of outliers in the industry pushing for changes in the way brokers are paid.

As the average cost of employer-sponsored health insurance premiums has tripled in the past two decades, to almost $20,000 for a family of four, a small, but growing, contingent of brokers are questioning their role in the rise in costs. They’ve started negotiating flat fees paid directly by the employers. The fee may be a similar amount to the commission they could have earned, but since it doesn’t come from the insurer, Hogan said, it “eliminates the conflict of interest” and frees brokers to consider unorthodox plans tailored to individual employers’ needs. Any bonuses could also be paid directly by the employer.

Brokers provide a variety of services to employers. They present them with benefits options, enroll them in plans and help them with claims and payment issues. Insurance industry payments to brokers are not illegal and have been accepted as a cost of doing business for generations. When brokers are paid directly by employers, the results can be mutually beneficial.

In 2017, David Contorno, the broker for Palmer Johnson Power Systems, a heavy-equipment distribution company in Madison, Wisconsin, saved the firm so much money while also improving coverage that Palmer Johnson took all 120 employees on an all-expenses paid trip to Vail, Colorado, where they rode four-wheelers and went whitewater rafting. In 2018, the company saved money again and rewarded each employee with a health care “dividend” of about $700.

Contorno is not being altruistic. He earned a flat fee, plus a bonus based on how much the plan saved, with the total equal to roughly what would have made otherwise.

Craig Parsons, who owns Palmer Johnson, said the new payment arrangement puts pressure on the broker to prevent overspending. His previous broker, he said, didn’t have any real incentive to help him reduce costs. “We didn’t have an advocate,” he said. “We didn’t have someone truly watching out for our best interests.” (The former broker acknowledged there were some issues, but said it had provided a valuable service.)

Working for Employers, Not Insurers

Contorno is part of a group called the Health Rosetta, which certifies brokers who agree to follow certain best practices related to health benefits, including eliminating any hidden agreements that raise the cost of employee benefits. To be certified, brokers (who refer to themselves as “benefits advisers”) must disclose all their direct and indirect sources of income — bonuses, commissions, consulting fees, for example — and who pays them to the employers they advise.

Dave Chase, a Washington businessman, created Rosetta in 2016 after working with tech health startups and launching Microsoft’s services to the health industry. He said he saw an opportunity to transform the health care industry by changing the way employers buy benefits. He said brokers have the most underestimated role in the health care system. “The good ones are worth their weight in gold,” Chase said. “But most of the benefit brokers are pitching themselves as buyer’s agents, but they are paid like a seller’s agent.”

There are only 110 Rosetta certified brokers in an industry of more than 100,000, although others who follow a similar philosophy consider themselves part of the movement.

From the employer’s point of view, one big advantage of working with brokers like those certified by Rosetta, is transparency. Currently, there’s no industry standard for how brokers must disclose their payments from insurance companies, so many employers may have no idea how much brokers are making from their business, said Marcy Buckner, vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Health Underwriters, the trade group for health benefits brokers. And thus, she said, employers have no clear sense of the conflicts of interest that may color their broker’s advice to them.

Buckner’s group encourages brokers to bill employers for their commissions directly to eliminate any conflict of interest, but, she said, it’s challenging to shift the culture. Nevertheless, Buckner said she doesn’t think payments from insurers undermine the work done by brokers, who must act in their clients’ best interests or risk losing them. “They want to have these clients for a really long term,” Buckner said.

Industrywide, transparency is not the standard. ProPublica sent a list of questions to 10 of the largest broker agencies, some worth $1 billion or more, including Marsh & McLennan, Aon and Willis Towers Watson, asking if they took bonuses and commissions from insurance companies, and whether they disclosed them to their clients. Four firms declined to answer; the others never responded despite repeated requests.

Insurers also don’t seem to have a problem with the payments. In 2017, Health Care Service Corporation, which oversees Blue Cross Blue Shield plans serving 15 million members in five states, disclosed in its corporate filings that it spent $816 million on broker bonuses and commissions, about 3 percent of its revenue that year. A company spokeswoman acknowledged in an email that employers are actually the ones who pay those fees; the money is just passed through the insurer. “We do not believe there is a conflict of interest,” she said.

In one email to a broker reviewed by ProPublica, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina called the bonuses it offered — up to $110,000 for bringing in a group of more than 1,000 — the “cherry on top.” The company told ProPublica that such bonuses are standard and that it always encourages brokers to “match their clients with the best product for them.”

Cathryn Donaldson, spokeswoman for the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in an email that brokers are incentivized “above all else” to serve their clients. “Guiding employees to a plan that offers quality, affordable care will help establish their business and reputation in the industry,” she said.

Some insurer’s pitches, however, clearly reward brokers’ devotion to them, not necessarily their clients. “To thank you for your loyalty to Humana, we want to extend our thanks with a bonus,” says one brochure pitched to brokers online. Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey offered brokers a bonus as “a way to express our appreciation for your support.” Empire Blue Cross told brokers it would deliver new bonuses “for bringing in large group business … and for keeping it with us.”

Delta Dental of California’s pitches appears to go one step further, rewarding brokers as “key members of our Small Business Program team.”

ProPublica reached out to all the insurers named in this story, and many didn’t respond. Cigna said in a statement that it offers affordable, high-quality benefit plans and doesn’t see a problem with providing incentives to brokers. Delta Dental emphasized in an email it follows applicable laws and regulations. And Horizon Blue Cross said its gives employers the option of how to pay brokers and discloses all compensation.

The effect of such financial incentives is troubling, said Michael Thompson, president of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, which represents groups of employers who provide benefits. He said brokers don’t typically undermine their clients in a blatant way, but their own financial interests can create a “cozy relationship” that may make them wary of “stirring the pot.”

Employers should know how their brokers are paid, but health care is complex, so they are often not even aware of what they should ask, Thompson said. Employers rely on brokers to be a “trusted adviser,” he added. “Sometimes that trust is warranted and sometimes it’s not.”

Bad Faith Tactics

When officials in Morris County, New Jersey, sought a new broker to manage the county’s benefits, they specified that applicants could not take insurance company payouts related to their business. Instead, the county would pay the broker directly to ensure an unbiased search for the best benefits. The county hired Frenkel Benefits, a New York City broker, in February 2015.

Now, the county is suing the firm in Superior Court of New Jersey, accusing it of double-dipping. In addition to the fees from the county, the broker is accused of collecting a $235,000 commission in 2016 from the insurance giant Cigna. The broker got an additional $19,206 the next year, the lawsuit claims. To get the commission, one of the agency’s brokers allegedly certified, falsely, that the county would be told about the payment, the suit said. The county claims it was never notified and never approved the commission.

The suit also alleges the broker “purposefully concealed” the costs of switching the county’s health coverage to Cigna, which included administrative fees of $800,000.

In an interview, John Bowens, the county’s attorney, said the county had tried to guard against the broker being swayed by a large commission from an insurer. The brokers at Frenkel did not respond to requests for comment. The firm has not filed a response to the claims in the lawsuit. Steven Weisman, one of attorneys representing Frenkel, declined to comment.

Sometimes employers don’t find out their broker didn’t get them the best deal until they switch to another broker.

Josh Butler, a broker in Amarillo, Texas, who is also certified by Rosetta, recently took on a company of about 200 employees that had been signed up for a plan that had high out-of-pocket costs. The previous broker had enrolled the company in a supplemental plan that paid workers $1,000 if they were admitted to the hospital to help pay for uncovered costs. But Butler said the premiums for this coverage cost about $100,000 a year, and only nine employees had used it. That would make it much cheaper to pay for the benefit without insurance.

Butler suspects the previous broker encouraged the hospital benefits because they came with a sizable commission. He sells the same type of policies for the same insurer, so he knows the plan came with a 40 percent commission in the first year. That means about $40,000 of the employer’s premium went into the broker’s pocket.

Butler and other brokers said the insurance companies offer huge commissions to promote lucrative supplemental plans like dental, vision and disability. The total commissions on a supplemental cancer plan one insurer offered come to 57 percent, Butler said.

These massive year-one commissions lead some unscrupulous brokers to “churn” their supplemental benefits, Butler said, convincing employers to jump between insurers every year for the same type of benefits. The insurers don’t mind, Butler said, because the employers end up paying the tab. Brokers may also “product dump,” Butler said, which means pushing employers to sign employees up for multiple types of voluntary supplemental coverage, which brings them a hefty commission on each product.

Carl Schuessler, a broker in Atlanta who is certified by the Rosetta group, said he likes to help employers find out how much profit insurers are making on their premiums. Some states require insurers to provide the information, so when he took over the account for The Gasparilla Inn, an island resort on the Gulf Coast of Florida, he obtained the report for the company’s recent three years of coverage with UnitedHealthcare. He learned that the insurer had only paid out in claims about 65 percent of what the Inn had paid in premiums.

But in those same years the insurer had increased the Inn’s premiums, said Glenn Price, its chief financial officer. “It’s tough to swallow” increases to our premium when the insurer is making healthy profits, Price said. UnitedHealthcare declined to comment.

Schuessler, who is paid by the Inn, helped it transition to a self-funded plan, meaning the company bears the cost of the health care bills. Price said the Inn went from spending about $1 million a year to about $700,000, with lower costs and better benefits for employees, and no increases in three years.

A Need for Regulation

Despite the important function of brokers as middlemen, there’s been scant examination of their role in the marketplace.

Don Reiman, head of a Boise, Idaho, broker agency and a financial planner, said the federal government should require health benefit brokers to adhere to the same regulation he sees in the finance arena. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act, better known as ERISA, requires retirement plan advisers to disclose to employers all compensation that’s related to their plans, exposing potential conflicts.

The Department of Labor requires certain employers that provide health benefits to file documents every year about their plans, including payments to brokers. The department posts the information on its website.

But the data is notoriously messy. After a 2012 report found 23 percent of the forms contained errors, there was a proposal to revamp the data collection in 2016. It is unclear if that work was done, but ProPublica tried to analyze the data and found it incomplete or inaccurate. The data shortcomings mean employers have no real ability to compare payments to brokers.

About five years ago, Contorno, one of the leaders in the Rosetta movement, was blithely happy with the status quo: He had his favored insurers and could usually find traditional plans that appeared to fit his clients’ needs.

Today, he regrets his role in driving up employers’ health costs. One of his LinkedIn posts compares the industry’s acceptance of control by insurance companies to Stockholm Syndrome, the feelings of trust a hostage would have toward a captor.

Contorno began advising Palmer Johnson in 2016. When he took over, the company had a self-funded plan and its claims were reviewed by an administrator owned by its broker, Iowa-based Cottingham & Butler. Contorno brought in an independent claims administrator who closely scrutinized the claims and provided detailed cost information. The switch led to significant savings, said Parsons, the company owner. “It opened our eyes to what a good claims review process can mean to us,” he said.

Brad Plummer, senior vice president for employee benefits for Cottingham & Butler, acknowledged “things didn’t go swimmingly” with the claims company. But overall his company provided valuable service to Palmer Johnson, he said.

Contorno also provided resources to help Palmer Johnson employees find high-quality, low-cost providers, and the company waived any out-of-pocket expense as an incentive to get employees to see those medical providers. If a patient needed an out-of-network procedure, the price was negotiated up front to avoid massive surprise bills to the plan or the patient. The company also contracted with a vendor for drug coverage that does not use the secret rebates and hidden pricing schemes that are common in the industry. Palmer Johnson’s yearly health care costs per employee dropped by more than 25 percent, from about $11,252 in 2015 to $8,288 in 2018. That’s lower than they’d been in 2011, Contorno said.

“Now that my compensation is fully tied to meeting the clients’ goals, that is my sole objective,” he said. “Your broker works for whoever is cutting them the check.”

ProPublica data fellow Sophie Chou contributed to this story.

America’s Hostile Venezuela Policy Is Slowly Strangling Haiti

Last year, in October, Haitians followed two Twitter hashtags that went viral—#PetrocaribeChallenge and #KotKobPetwoKaribea. If you are not Haitian and do not follow Haitian politics carefully, you can be forgiven for not noticing this development. The complaint on Twitter—and soon on the streets—was simple: what has happened to the billions of U.S. dollars that was in the Venezuelan-financed Petrocaribe program?

In 2005, when oil prices began to creep upwards and when the Bolivarian socialists led by Hugo Chávez were at their peak, 14 countries from the Caribbean met in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, to launch the Petrocaribe scheme. The idea was elegant. Venezuela, with one of the world’s largest oil reserves, would sell oil to the struggling Caribbean islands through a very lucrative deal. Part of the oil price was paid up front, and the rest was to be paid back over the years at a ridiculously low interest rate (1 percent).

Island nations of the Caribbean, who had struggled with debt and high import prices for energy, now found relief. Haiti and Nicaragua, which were not part of the 14 original members, joined Petrocaribe in 2007. “The Caribbean shouldn’t have problem this century and beyond,” said a buoyant Chávez.

Venezuela Had a Debt to Haiti

An economics of solidarity defined the Bolivarian socialist approach to the Caribbean. If the Caribbean countries thrived, then Venezuela would prosper in turn. The test of this generosity came in 2010, when Venezuela decided not only to write off Haiti’s debt after the earthquake but provided funds in addition for reconstruction. “It was not Haiti that had a debt with Venezuela,” Chávez said then, “but Venezuela had a debt to Haiti.” Since 2007, Venezuela had provided $4 billion in oil through Petrocaribe.

The debt that Venezuela had, in the long-term thinking of Chávez, was because of something that happened in 1815. The first president of the Republic of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, gave Simón Bolivar sanctuary and armed him to return and liberate Gran Colombia (the vast northern lands of South America). Bolivar had promised Pétion that he would emancipate the enslaved Africans in Gran Colombia. This is what he did. Without Pétion’s demand and Bolivar’s victory, Chávez—whose ancestors had been enslaved—said on a visit to Haiti in 2007, “I would not be here.”

Haiti’s Debt to the West

No such generosity has come from the West. In fact, from the first fires of Haiti’s revolution, Western powers—from France to the United States—have attempted to destroy the Haitian republic. In 1804, France forced Haiti to agree to pay it $21 billion for the “theft” of enslaved Africans and others. It took Haiti till 1947 to pay off this odious, disgusting debt. France has never apologized for it. Nor has Citibank, which made billions off the payments. Neither France nor Citibank has considered replaying the inhumane plunder.

Venezuela’s generosity was not matched by any Western country or financial institution. Instead, the West piled on debt upon debt onto Haiti. Even the “assistance” given during the 2010 earthquake made Western companies money. “These guys are like vultures coming to grab the loot over this disaster,” said Haiti’s former minister of defense Patrick Elie. The amount of money stolen from the disaster relief and the increase to Haiti’s debt is as yet uncalculated. Millions of dollars were raised—such as by the American Red Cross—but very little of it was spent to lift up the burdens of the Haitian people.

IMF vs. Venezuela

Last February, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said it would provide Haiti with $96 million in low-interest loans and grants. But it demanded that the Haitian government cut its crucial fuel subsidy. This subsidy has been a part of Petrocaribe’s program. Protests broke out across Haiti, which led to the resignation of Haiti’s prime minister Guy Lafontant in July (for an assessment of those protests, please read Dossier 8 from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research).

The IMF demand for cuts in fuel subsidy came after revelations that Haiti’s elite had pilfered the funds from Petrocaribe. In 2017, Lafontant’s government released a 600-page Senate report on Petrocaribe’s previous decade. The investigation found that Haiti’s ruling class had stolen enormous amounts of these key funds. No one was called to account—not any of those who stole the money nor the banks that enabled them to do so. Noises about letting the Superior Court of Accounts and Administrative Litigation take hold of the report seemed to drift into nowhere.

In the midst of this scandal, the IMF policy directive was insincere. The IMF said that the Haitian poor, who had not stolen the money from Petrocaribe, should pay higher fuel prices to help set Haiti’s finances in order. No reparations from France or Citibank, no accountability for the theft of the Petrocaribe funds—none of that. Instead, Haitians—almost 60 percent of whom live below the poverty line—must pay high fuel premiums for the IMF’s paltry loans.

End of Solidarity

Protests broke out a week ago across Haiti. What motivated the streets to be on fire this time was the rise in prices of fuel and the position taken by Haiti against the government of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.

In the midst of the economic war against it, Venezuela has not been able to provide Haiti with subsidized fuel. Haiti’s people had to now go to the U.S. oil companies and pay U.S. prices for fuel. This has created bottlenecks in the supply of fuel and frustration at the rising prices. Novum Energy—of the United States—kept ships sitting in Port-au-Prince harbor, waiting for the cash-strapped Haitian government to pay up before unloading 164,000 barrels of petrol and 205,000 barrels of kerosene. There is no solidarity pricing here (in fact, Haiti has to pay $20,000 per day to each ship that is sitting in the harbor as a penalty). These firms want cash, and they want full price.

To add insult to injury, Haiti’s government decided to join with the United States in the vote at the Organization of American States (OAS) against Venezuela. As recently as 2017, Haiti’s representative to the OAS—Harvel Jean-Baptiste—had voted against a similar anti-Maduro resolution. But this time, Haiti’s Léon Charles voted with the United States. It was a vote that provoked anger in the streets of Haiti. The one country—Venezuela—that had come to Haiti’s aid was here being betrayed. That is the mood.

Anachronistic Monroe Doctrine

Meanwhile, other Caribbean countries stood firm. The Caricom (Caribbean Community) group of 15 states from Antigua and Barbuda to Trinidad and Tobago drafted a strong statement to defend the sovereignty of Venezuela. They have worked to create the atmosphere for dialogue, which resulted in the joint Uruguay and Mexico sponsored meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay, on February 7.

These small island states know the great peril of allowing the anachronistic Monroe Doctrine (1823) to be fully revived. The idea that the American hemisphere is the “backyard” of the United States is not only humiliating, but it is also against the spirit and letter of the UN Charter.

It is this humiliation that motivates the people of Haiti to take to the streets. Their message is simple: if you won’t let us breathe, we won’t let you breathe, and if you suffocate Venezuela, you suffocate us.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Bush Wasn’t Kidding About Taking the ‘War on Terror’ Global

In September 2001, the Bush administration launched the “Global War on Terror.” Though “global” has long since been dropped from the name, as it turns out, they weren’t kidding.

When I first set out to map all the places in the world where the United States is still fighting terrorism so many years later, I didn’t think it would be that hard to do. This was before the 2017 incident in Niger in which four American soldiers were killed on a counterterror mission and Americans were given an inkling of how far-reaching the war on terrorism might really be. I imagined a map that would highlight Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria — the places many Americans automatically think of in association with the war on terror — as well as perhaps a dozen less-noticed countries like the Philippines and Somalia. I had no idea that I was embarking on a research odyssey that would, in its second annual update, map U.S. counterterror missions in 80 countries in 2017 and 2018, or 40% of the nations on this planet (a map first featured in Smithsonian magazine).

As co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, I’m all too aware of the costs that accompany such a sprawling overseas presence. Our project’s research shows that, since 2001, the U.S. war on terror has resulted in the loss — conservatively estimated — of almost half a million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone. By the end of 2019, we also estimate that Washington’s global war will cost American taxpayers no less than $5.9 trillion already spent and in commitments to caring for veterans of the war throughout their lifetimes.

In general, the American public has largely ignored these post-9/11 wars and their costs. But the vastness of Washington’s counterterror activities suggests, now more than ever, that it’s time to pay attention. Recently, the Trump administration has been talking of withdrawing from Syria and negotiating peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet, unbeknownst to many Americans, the war on terror reaches far beyond such lands and under Trump is actually ramping up in a number of places. That our counterterror missions are so extensive and their costs so staggeringly high should prompt Americans to demand answers to a few obvious and urgent questions: Is this global war truly making Americans safer? Is it reducing violence against civilians in the U.S. and other places? If, as I believe, the answer to both those questions is no, then isn’t there a more effective way to accomplish such goals?

Combat or “Training” and “Assisting”?

The major obstacle to creating our database, my research team would discover, was that the U.S. government is often so secretive about its war on terror. The Constitution gives Congress the right and responsibility to declare war, offering the citizens of this country, at least in theory, some means of input. And yet, in the name of operational security, the military classifies most information about its counterterror activities abroad.

The U.S. is fighting its global war on terror in 40% of the world’s nations (Stephanie Savell, Costs of War Project, originally published in the February issue of Smithsonian magazine)

This is particularly true of missions in which there are American boots on the ground engaging in direct action against militants, a reality, my team and I found, in 14 different countries in the last two years. The list includes Afghanistan and Syria, of course, but also some lesser known and unexpected places like Libya, Tunisia, Somalia, Mali, and Kenya. Officially, many of these are labeled “train, advise, and assist” missions, in which the U.S. military ostensibly works to support local militaries fighting groups that Washington labels terrorist organizations. Unofficially, the line between “assistance” and combat turns out to be, at best, blurry.

Some outstanding investigative journalists have documented the way this shadow war has been playing out, predominantly in Africa. In Niger in October 2017, as journalists subsequently revealed, what was officially a training mission proved to be a “kill or capture” operation directed at a suspected terrorist.

Such missions occur regularly. In Kenya, for instance, American service members are actively hunting the militants of al-Shabaab, a US-designated terrorist group. In Tunisia, there was at least one outright battle between joint U.S.-Tunisian forces and al-Qaeda militants. Indeed, two U.S. service members were later awarded medals of valor for their actions there, a clue that led journalists to discover that there had been a battle in the first place.

In yet other African countries, U.S. Special Operations forces have planned and controlled missions, operating in “cooperation with” — but actually in charge of — their African counterparts. In creating our database, we erred on the side of caution, only documenting combat in countries where we had at least two credible sources of proof, and checking in with experts and journalists who could provide us with additional information. In other words, American troops have undoubtedly been engaged in combat in even more places than we’ve been able to document.

Another striking finding in our research was just how many countries there were — 65 in all — in which the U.S. “trains” and/or “assists” local security forces in counterterrorism. While the military does much of this training, the State Department is also surprisingly heavily involved, funding and training police, military, and border patrol agents in many countries. It also donates equipment, including vehicle X-ray detection machines and contraband inspection kits. In addition, it develops programs it labels “Countering Violent Extremism,” which represent a soft-power approach, focusing on public education and other tools to “counter terrorist safe havens and recruitment.”

Such training and assistance occurs across the Middle East and Africa, as well as in some places in Asia and Latin America. American “law enforcement entities” trained security forces in Brazil to monitor terrorist threats in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics, for example (and continued the partnership in 2017). Similarly, U.S. border patrol agentsworked with their counterparts in Argentina to crack down on suspected money laundering by terrorist groups in the illicit marketplaces of the tri-border region that lies between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

To many Americans, all of this may sound relatively innocuous — like little more than generous, neighborly help with policing or a sensibly self-interested fighting-them-over-there-before-they-get-here set of policies. But shouldn’t we know better after all these years of hearing such claims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where the results were anything but harmless or effective?

Such training has often fed into, or been used for, the grimmest of purposes in the many countries involved. In Nigeria, for instance, the U.S. military continues to work closely with local security forces which have used torture and committed extrajudicial killings, as well as engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Philippines, it has conducted large-scale joint military exercises in cooperation with President Rodrigo Duterte’s military, even as the police at his command continue to inflict horrific violence on that country’s citizenry.

The government of Djibouti, which for years has hosted the largest U.S. military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, also uses its anti-terrorism laws to prosecute internal dissidents. The State Department has not attempted to hide the way its own training programs have fed into a larger kind of repression in that country (and others). According to its 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, a document that annually provides Congress with an overview of terrorism and anti-terror cooperation with the United States in a designated set of countries, in Djibouti, “the government continued to use counterterrorism legislation to suppress criticism by detaining and prosecuting opposition figures and other activists.”

In that country and many other allied nations, Washington’s terror-training programs feed into or reinforce human-rights abuses by local forces as authoritarian governments adopt “anti-terrorism” as the latest excuse for repressive practices of all sorts.

A Vast Military Footprint

As we were trying to document those 65 training-and-assistance locations of the U.S. military, the State Department reports proved an important source of information, even if they were often ambiguous about what was really going on. They regularly relied on loose terms like “security forces,” while failing to directly address the role played by our military in each of those countries.

Sometimes, as I read them and tried to figure out what was happening in distant lands, I had a nagging feeling that what the American military was doing, rather than coming into focus, was eternally receding from view. In the end, we felt certain in identifying those 14 countries in which American military personnel have seen combat in the war on terror in 2017-2018. We also found it relatively easy to document the seven countries in which, in the last two years, the U.S. has launched drone or other air strikes against what the government labels terrorist targets (but which regularly kill civilians as well): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. These were the highest-intensity elements of that U.S. global war. However, this still represented a relatively small portion of the 80 countries we ended up including on our map.

In part, that was because I realized that the U.S. military tends to advertise — or at least not hide — many of the military exercises it directs or takes part in abroad. After all, these are intended to display the country’s global military might, deter enemies (in this case, terrorists), and bolster alliances with strategically chosen allies. Such exercises, which we documented as being explicitly focused on counterterrorism in 26 countries, along with lands which host American bases or smaller military outposts also involved in anti-terrorist activities, provide a sense of the armed forces’ behemoth footprint in the war on terror.

Although there are more than 800 American military bases around the world, we included in our map only those 40 countries in which such bases are directly involved in the counterterror war, including Germany and other European nations that are important staging areas for American operations in the Middle East and Africa.

To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented “training and assistance.”

A Better Grand Plan

How often in the last 17 years has Congress or the American public debated the expansion of the war on terror to such a staggering range of places? The answer is: seldom indeed.

After so many years of silence and inactivity here at home, recent media and congressional attention to American wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemenrepresents a new trend. Members of Congress have finally begun calling for discussion of parts of the war on terror. Last Wednesday, for instance, the House of Representatives voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the Senate has passed legislation requiring Congress to vote on the same issue sometime in the coming months.

On February 6th, the House Armed Services Committee finally held a hearing on the Pentagon’s “counterterrorism approach” — a subject Congress as a whole has notdebated since, several days after the 9/11 attacks, it passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump have all used to wage the ongoing global war. Congress has not debated or voted on the sprawling expansion of that effort in all the years since. And judging from the befuddledreactions of several members of Congress to the deaths of those four soldiers in Niger in 2017, most of them were (and many probably still are) largely ignorant of how far the global war they’ve seldom bothered to discuss now reaches.

With potential shifts afoot in Trump administration policy on Syria and Afghanistan, isn’t it finally time to assess in the broadest possible way the necessity and efficacy of extending the war on terror to so many different places? Research has shown that using war to address terror tactics is a fruitless approach. Quite the opposite of achieving this country’s goals, from Libya to Syria, Niger to Afghanistan, the U.S. military presence abroad has often only fueled intense resentment of America. It has helped to both spread terror movements and provide yet more recruits to extremist Islamist groups, which have multiplied substantially since 9/11.

In the name of the war on terror in countries like Somalia, diplomatic activities, aid, and support for human rights have dwindled in favor of an ever more militarized American stance. Yet research shows that, in the long term, it is far more effective and sustainable to address the underlying grievances that fuel terrorist violence than to answer them on the battlefield.

All told, it should be clear that another kind of grand plan is needed to deal with the threat of terrorism both globally and to Americans — one that relies on a far smaller U.S. military footprint and costs far less blood and treasure. It’s also high time to put this threat in context and acknowledge that other developments, like climate change, may pose a far greater danger to our country.

Jeffrey Rosen Nominated for Deputy Attorney General

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated Jeffrey Rosen, a longtime litigator and deputy transportation secretary, to replace Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general.

In his current post, the 60-year-old Rosen serves as the Department of Transportation’s chief operating officer and is in charge of implementing the department’s safety and technological priorities. He rejoined DOT in 2017 after previously serving as general counsel from 2003 to 2006.

From 2006 until 2009, Rosen was the general counsel and a senior policy adviser at the White House Office of Management and Budget. He also worked as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Rosen held a variety of positions, including senior partner, at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, the same law firm as the new attorney general, William Barr. Rosen spent nearly 30 years at Kirkland & Ellis in a variety of management roles, including acting as the co-head of the firm’s Washington, D.C., office, he told senators at his confirmation hearing in March 2017.

The current deputy attorney general, Rosenstein, is expected to leave his post in mid-March.

His departure had been expected since Barr was confirmed as attorney general last week. Rosenstein had served as deputy for almost two years and it is common for new attorneys general to have their own deputies. Barr told people close to him that he wanted his own No. 2 as part of taking the attorney general job.

Rosenstein began overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the investigation. Barr now has control of Mueller’s investigation, which is probing Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and contacts with the Trump campaign.

Rosen, a Virginia resident who is married with three adult children, is a graduate of Harvard Law School.

Trump Wants California to Pay Back Billions for Bullet Train

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Trump administration said Tuesday that it plans to cancel $929 million awarded to California’s high-speed rail project and wants the state to return an additional $2.5 billion that it has already spent.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announcement follows through on President Donald Trump’s threats to claw back $3.5 billion that the federal government gave to California to build a bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vowed a fight to keep the money and said the move was in response to California again suing the administration , this time over Trump’s emergency declaration to pay for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“This is clear political retribution by President Trump, and we won’t sit idly by,” Newsom said in a statement. “This is California’s money, and we are going to fight for it.”

It’s the latest spat between the White House and California. Trump earlier in the day linked the emergency declaration lawsuit to the train, noting that California filed the challenge on behalf of 16 states.

“California, the state that has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control Fast Train, with no hope of completion, seems in charge!” the president tweeted.

The train project has faced repeated cost overruns and delays since California voters approved it in 2008. The Trump administration argued Tuesday that the state hasn’t provided required matching dollars and can’t complete certain construction work by a 2022 deadline.

Newsom declared in his first State of the State address last week that he planned to scale back the project and focus immediately on building 171 miles (275 kilometers) of track in central California. His office said he still plans to complete the full line, although he said the current plan would cost too much and take too long.

He’s pledged to continue environmental work on the full line, which is required to keep the federal money.

Congress nearly a decade ago approved the $929 million that Trump wants to cancel. The state has not started spending that money. But it has already spent the extra $2.5 billion that Trump now wants back.

The U.S. Department of Transportation said it is “actively exploring every legal option” to get back the money.

The grant agreement between California and the federal government, signed in 2010, outlines several scenarios in which the federal government could take the money back. It can take the money back, for example, if the grantee fails to make “adequate progress” or “fails to complete the project or one of its tasks” or if the state doesn’t meet its matching fund requirements.

If the federal government decides to take the money back, it doesn’t have to wait for California to write a check. The agreement states the federal government could offset the money it would pay California for different transportation or other projects.

California hasn’t yet fully matched the $2.5 billion in stimulus money. It’s in the process of doing so now, using money from the 2008 bond passed by voters and revenue from the state’s cap-and-trade program. It can’t unlock the $929 million grant until it completes its match.

Still, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has already budgeted for the full $3.5 billion. It’s put toward constructing a 119-mile (191.5-kilometer) segment of track in the Central Valley expected to cost $10.6 billion.

Dan Richard, the outgoing chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s board of directors, said people’s livelihoods depend on the project through jobs and other economic development in the Central Valley.

“It would be very important to avoid anything that would disrupt the economic recovery in the Central Valley that has been brought about by high-speed rail,” he said.

We’ve Sleepwalked Into a Constitutional Crisis

From Trump’s very inauguration day speech, written for him by the fascist gadfly Steve Bannon and man still without a prom date Stephen Miller, it was apparent that the 45th president was a constitutional crisis waiting to happen.

And now, without our realizing it for the most part, the constitutional crisis is here.

The Constitution gives Congress the right to spend money and to designate how it may be spent. Republicans used that authority to stop the Obama administration from closing the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, denying the president the funds necessary to shut it down.

Having the power of the purse lie with the legislature goes back to British parliamentary practice of the late medieval and early modern period. Making the king go to parliament for permission to institute a new tax for some new royal enterprise is a feature of the Magna Carta, the ‘Great Charter’ imposed on the king by the barons in 1215.

Trump’s ‘Declaration of Emergency’ over his trumped up border wall crisis is an attempt to sidestep constitutional principle and to have the president instead of Congress decide how appropriated monies will be used. In principle, Trump is doing what Reagan and his Iran-Contra criminal circle did in the 1980s, when the Congress’s Boland Amendment forbade the president to use US taxpayer money to support the right wing death squads or ‘contras’ in Nicaragua. Oliver North, Elliot Abrams and others just went around the Boland Amendment, illegally selling weapons to Iran and using the cash to support the contras. Those actions were unconstitutional, as Trump’s is today.

It seems that Congress will attempt to over-rule Trump. Some 16 states are already suing over the so-called emergency, and the House of Representatives may also sue. Congress may also attempt to stop Trump with legislation, and if he tries to veto it, they will attempt to over-ride the veto in both houses of Congress.

Trump will either get his way on the declaration of emergency or not, but either way he has provoked a constitutional crisis.

As a historian of the Middle East, let me just point out that declaring a state of emergency in that region is a means of creating a president for life. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt declared a state of emergency in 1981 when he came to power on the assassination by Muslim extremists of Anwar el Sadat, the former president. Mubarak’s state of emergency was not lifted until the 2011 youth revolution that unseated him. Often Middle Eastern regimes put nice rights into their constitution, as in Algeria, but then the military-backed declares a national emergency and sets aside the constitution, as happened in Algeria.

For an authoritarian president to declare a state of emergency in the Middle East signals a desire toe stay in power for the rest of his life.

Trump is of course creating numerous constitutional crises. He call for ‘retribution’ on Saturday Night Live in response to a skit by Alec Baldwin making fun of his wall obsession. In genuine democracies the president does not threaten satirists with ‘retribution.’ That is something Field Marshal al-Sisi would do (and has done) in Egypt. Satirist Bassem Youssef had to abandon his television show lest he face retribution from al-Sisi.

Trump’s attack on the first amendment and also his calling his top Justice Department and FBI personnel are all part of the general constitutional crisis

 

Probe Sought on Force-Feeding of Immigrants by ICE

Nearly 50 Democratic lawmakers called for a watchdog investigation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday after the agency confirmed it had been force-feeding immigrant detainees on a hunger strike.

Reporting by The Associated Press revealed late last month that nine Indian men who were refusing food at a Texas detention facility were being force-fed through nasal tubes against their will.

On Thursday, all force-feeding at the detention center near the El Paso airport abruptly stopped after a U.S. district judge said the government had to stop involuntarily feeding two of the detained immigrants.

The 49 lawmakers are calling for the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to investigate on-site conditions of ICE facilities and the policies surrounding the involuntary force-feeding of immigrant detainees. Earlier this month, the Geneva-based United National human rights office said that the United States could be violating the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

“We implore you to exercise your oversight responsibilities to make improving conditions at immigration detention facilities a top priority for ICE and ensure the humane treatment of detainees in federal custody,” said the letter spearheaded by Oregon Democratic Rep. Suzanne Bonamici and Texas Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, who toured the El Paso Processing Center and met with the men after the initial reports of the force-feeding. “These complaints reveal unequivocal abuses of power that violate the rights of detainees.”

ICE declined to comment directly on the request for an investigation Tuesday but said the agency has “a strict zero-tolerance policy for any kind of abusive or inappropriate behavior in its facilities.” The agency said that if allegations of inappropriate behavior surfaced, they would be investigated by DHS Office of the Inspector General and ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

“For their health and safety, ICE closely monitors the food and water intake of those detainees identified as being on a hunger strike,” the agency said in a statement. “ICE does not retaliate in any way against hunger strikers.”

The inspector general’s office did not immediately return a call or email seeking comment.

Detained immigrants have sporadically staged hunger strikes around the country for years, protesting conditions they face while seeking asylum.

ICE said Tuesday 13 immigrants from Cuba, India, Mexico and Nigeria held in detention facilities nationwide were refusing food, but none were being force-fed. That included 10 detainees at the El Paso Processing Center, one at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, one at the Krome Service Processing Center in Florida, and one at the Central Arizona Correctional Center.

One hunger striker in El Paso, an asylum seeker from the Indian state of Punjab, had previously described the process as involving being dragged from his cell three times a day and strapped down on a bed as a group of people poured liquid into tubes inserted into his nose.

Force-feeding, which began under court order earlier this year, had not previously been reported. Before it began in El Paso, advocates said they weren’t aware it had happened before.

White House Officials Pushed to Share Nuclear Tech With Saudis

WASHINGTON—Senior White House officials pushed a project to share nuclear power technology with Saudi Arabia despite the objections of ethics and national security officials, according to a new congressional report citing whistleblowers within the Trump administration.

Lawmakers from both parties have expressed concerns that Saudi Arabia could develop nuclear weapons if the U.S. technology were transferred without proper safeguards.

The Democratic-led House oversight committee opened an investigation Tuesday into the claims by several unnamed whistleblowers who said they witnessed “abnormal acts” in the White House regarding the proposal to build dozens of nuclear reactors across the Middle Eastern kingdom.

The report raises concerns about whether some in a White House marked by “chaos, dysfunction and backbiting” sought to circumvent national security procedures to push a Saudi deal that could financially benefit close supporters of the president.

The report comes at a time when lawmakers are increasingly uneasy with the close relationship between the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia, which has raised alarms even among members of the president’s party in Congress. Trump has made the kingdom a centerpiece of his foreign policy in the Middle East as he tries to further isolate Iran. In the process, he has brushed off criticism over the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudis’ role in the war in Yemen.

At the same time, Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner is developing a Middle East peace plan that could include economic proposals for Saudi Arabia.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the report, the nuclear effort was pushed by former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired in early 2017. Derek Harvey, a National Security Council official brought in by Flynn, continued work on the proposal, which has remained under consideration by the Trump administration.

Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, announced the investigation Tuesday.

Relying on the whistleblower accounts, email communications and other documents , the committee’s report details how NSC and ethics officials repeatedly warned that the actions of Flynn and a senior aide could run afoul of federal conflicts of interest law and statutes governing the transfer of nuclear technology to foreign powers.

Flynn is awaiting sentencing for lying to the FBI in the Russia investigation.

On Tuesday, a person close to Flynn’s legal team said that Russia special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has reviewed the matters raised in the congressional report and no charges related to it have been filed. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing investigation.

Congressional investigators are also probing the role of Tom Barrack, a proponent of the nuclear proposal who ran Trump’s presidential inaugural committee, which is under separate investigation by federal prosecutors in New York. Rick Gates, a former Barrack employee and cooperator in Mueller’s investigation, was also involved in advocating for the nuclear proposal.

A spokesman for Barrack said in a statement that he will cooperate with the House probe.

“Mr. Barrack’s engagement in investment and business development throughout the Middle East for the purpose of better aligned Middle East and U.S. objectives are well known, as are his more than four decades of respected relationships throughout the region,” the statement said, noting that Barrack never joined the Trump administration.

Harvey did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the report, the whistleblowers came to the committee because they had concerns “about efforts inside the White House to rush the transfer of highly sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in potential violation of the Atomic Energy Act and without review by Congress as required by law — efforts that may be ongoing to this day.”

A 2017 article by the nonprofit news outlet ProPublica detailed some of the concerns raised inside the National Security Council about the nuclear proposal — known as the “Marshall Plan for the Middle East” — advocated by a company called IP3 International.

IP3 is led by a group of retired U.S. military officers and national security officials, including retired Rear Adm. Michael Hewitt, retired Army Gen. Jack Keane and former Reagan National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane. IP3 and other proponents of nuclear power in the Middle East argue that the U.S. needs to be involved because otherwise it will lose out to Russia, China and others on billions of dollars in business. They also say that U.S. involvement — and the limits on nuclear fuel that come with it— are essential to stem an arms race in the region.

IP3 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Up until the month before he joined the Trump administration, Flynn listed himself on public documents as a consultant to a previous iteration of Hewitt’s company advocating a similar nuclear power proposal, though the company told The Washington Post that Flynn was offered a role as an adviser but never formally came aboard.

Still, according to the report, Flynn served as a conduit for IP3 inside the White House.

Just days after Trump’s inauguration, the company sent Flynn a draft memo for the president’s signature that would have appointed Barrack as a “special representative” in charge of carrying out the nuclear power proposal and called on the director of the CIA and the secretaries of State, Energy, Treasury and Defense to lend him support. The report also quotes former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland as saying Trump personally told Barrack he could lead the plan’s implementation.

The report also catalogs the actions of Harvey, the Flynn confidant who was put in charge of the NSC’s Middle East and North African affairs.

According to the report, upon entering the White House in January 2017, Harvey saw his mission as getting Trump to adopt the nuclear proposal despite the objections of ethics and national security officials.

Even when H.R. McMaster, who replaced Flynn as national security adviser, and NSC lawyer John Eisenberg directed that work stop on the proposal because of concerns about its legality, Harvey continued pursuing the proposal, according to the report.

Harvey was fired from the NSC in July 2017. He then joined the staff of GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California, a Trump ally and the former Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee.

___

Associated Press writers Darlene Superville, Ben Fox and Stephen Braun in Washington, Jim Mustian in New York and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

Everyone Has Fallen for the Lies About Venezuela

There are three things I know for sure in this fanciful, sometimes inglorious experience we call life:

You will never have a safety pin when you need one, and you will have thousands when you don’t need one.
Wild animals are breathtakingly majestic until they’re crawling up your pant leg.
A U.S. presidential administration will never admit that it invaded another country or backed a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of said country.

This is why it was so very shocking last week when members of the Trump administration admitted they were backing a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of another country.

That country is Venezuela. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

Let’s take a second to go over the big three. There are three things that seem to provoke the ornery United States into overthrowing or bringing down a foreign government, no matter how many innocent civilians may die in the process. (If enough die, the perpetrators often get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.) If your country has one of these things, the U.S. might screw with you. If your country has two of these things, the U.S. will definitely screw with you. If your country has three of these things, then look behind you, because the U.S. is currently screwing you:

1. Being socialist.

Pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t have the same economic system as we do, we treat it like you have candy and we’re not allowed to have any, so we slip razor blades in yours and tell everyone your candy kills people.

2. Dropping the U.S. dollar.

Iraq dropped the dollar. We invaded.

Syria dropped the dollar. We invaded.

Iran dropped the dollar. We want to invade.

Libya dropped the dollar. We invaded.

Pakistan dropped the dollar in trade with China, and the following day the U.S. added them to the list of countries violating religious freedom. (I guess you could argue they did indeed violate our religion: The dollar.)

Basically, we do NOT take kindly to countries dropping the dollar.

In unrelated news, Venezuela dropped the dollar.

3. Having oil or other natural resources the U.S. needs.

In case you were curious, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the known world. (But we haven’t checked northern Wyoming yet, because it’s a long, cold drive with nary a 7-11.)

So these are the three ACTUAL reasons the U.S. has created an attempted coup in Venezuela over the past several weeks. And right now, you are falling into one of two categories. Either you’re saying to yourself, “Of course those are the reasons. Those are the only reasons the U.S. ever tries to bring down governments.” OR you still have some strange, deep-rooted faith in our Pepsi-and-pharmaceutical-owned media outlets, and therefore you’re thinking, “That’s not true. The U.S. supports the opposition in Venezuela because we want to help those poor starving people.” But if that were accurate, we would be tripping over ourselves to help starving and sick people around the world. Instead we (oddly) only seek to help them when they have oil under their feet. And in fact, data has proven this true. A study a few years ago from the Universities of Portsmouth, Warwick and Essex found that foreign intervention in civil conflicts is 100 times more likely if the country has a great deal of oil, versus none.

So who is feeding the average American the idea that our involvement in Venezuela is about helping people? Only EVERY mainstream media channel in America—from MSNBC to Fox News to NPR to Bill fuckin’ Maher. It’s truly mind-numbing to watch so-called “liberals” march in lockstep with the likes of John Bolton, Elliot Abrams, Donald Trump and every neocon not currently in a coma.

These outlets froth at the mouth while presenting segments explaining that the Venezuelan people are starving, but they also purposefully avoid mentioning that a lot of Venezuela’s hardships are due to U.S. sanctions. This isn’t to say Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has done an awesome job. But whether he has or not, saying we must sanction them to help them is like if somebody fell through a plate glass window and you said, “Let’s help him! Let’s start cutting the glass shards out of his skin with this rusty flathead screwdriver I found in an abandoned mine! Then we’ll pour Mountain Dew and sewage water in the wounds to help them heal!”

But that’s what our sanctions are designed to do. They’re devised from day one to hurt poor and average people the most, in order to make them angry enough to rebel. Over a year ago, when Rex Tillerson was secretary of state, he publicly said we could tell our sanctions on North Korea were working great because poor fishermen were washing up on the beaches starved to death. (One is perplexed by how difficult it is at times to tell the difference between “helping other countries” and mass murder.)

Sanctions are not smart bombs. They destroy everybody, except the rich—who have enough money to weather the sanctions. Come to think of it, sanctions are kind of like smart bombs. We’re told they’re only going to hit the bad guys, but in fact “smart bombs” kill all kinds of innocent civilians, just like sanctions do.

Furthermore, the U.S. “humanitarian aid” that we claim to be sending is not what it seems. Even NPR took a break from its traditional role as State Department stenographer-in-training to reveal that the “humanitarian aid” is actually meant to create regime change. And McClatchy last week uncovered that the North Carolina-based private freight company 21 Air LLC has made 40 secretive flights to Venezuela from the U.S. in the past month, and the Venezuelan government claimed the flights were filled to the brim with assault weapons and ammunition destined for opposition forces. (Apparently we thought the Venezuelans were going to cook up a fresh pot of bullet stew to ease their hunger pains.) To make matters worse, two executives at the company have ties to an air cargo company that helped the CIA “rendition” supposed terrorists to black sites for “interrogation” (read: torture).

The next piece of propaganda lovingly pedestalled by our mainstream media robot-heads is simply calling Juan Guaidó the “interim president” without mentioning that he was not elected to that position and only 30 out of 200 nations recognize him as such. He just declared himself president. Last I checked, that’s not really how governments work. But if it is—OK, I hereby declare myself governor of … let’s say, Idaho. No one will really notice. I’m pretty sure the current governor is a hedgehog in a bow tie.

There are many other things CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and all the rest don’t want you to know about Juan Guaidó. For example, until he named himself president, 81 percent of Venezuelans didn’t even know who he was, according to a poll conducted by the Venezuela-based firm Hinterlaces. And he only won his own assembly seat with 26% of the vote. In order to win elections in any country, you often need more than 30 percent of the people to have heard of you. Pauly Shore has more name recognition among Venezuelans than Juan Guaidó.

On top of that, Guaidó went to George Washington University. As the Grayzone Project reported, “[In 2007] He moved to Washington, D.C., to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George Washington under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund. …”

Guaidó went to GW, trained under Mr. IMF, and then we declared him president of Venezuela. That’s like studying at the WWE, training under Henry Kissinger, and then the U.S. declares you the King of Japan.

But it doesn’t stop there, according to the Grayzone Project:

“Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.”

Furthermore, Juan Guaidó has already said he wants to sell Venezuela’s oil to foreign companies and let the IMF back in, which will drown the country in debt.

So he’s an American regime-change pawn who was groomed by the IMF to take over Venezuela and give away their natural resources. What a catch. … But if this is what the Venezuelan people really want, then we should respect their wishes. The corporate media tells us this is what the people want, right?

Except that it’s not.

“According to a study conducted in early January 2019 … 86 percent of Venezuelans would disagree with international military intervention,” Grayzone’s Ben Norton reported last month. “And 81 percent oppose the US sanctions that have gravely hurt the nation’s economy.”

So, based on the Hinterlaces poll, most Venezuelans didn’t know Guaidó until recently. Most Venezuelans still support Maduro even if they believe corruption in the government has increased (whether you personally like Maduro or not doesn’t matter), and most Venezuelans don’t want military intervention or U.S. sanctions. Yet CNN and NPR and Fox News and the BBC and every other corporate outlet will have you thinking everyone is starving to death, on their knees begging for America’s democracy bombs to rain down like dollar bills at a strip club.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe those people really need our help, and U.S. intervention will work out great—exactly like it did in Syria,

and Yemen,

and Iraq,

and Iran,

and Afghanistan,

and Chile,

and Honduras,

and Haiti,

and Somalia,

and Libya,

and Guatemala,

and Nicaragua,

and Colombia,

and Panama,

and Fraggle Rock,

and those tree forts where the EWOKS LIVED!

Now that we have a general understanding of the situation (and why Anderson Cooper is not keen to remind viewers what happened with Fraggle Rock in the early ’90s), let’s get back to the question of oil.

When I first started writing this, I didn’t have proof the American government wanted Venezuela’s oil; it was just a hunch. Kinda like if you put a balloon in a room with a porcupine, you have a hunch he’ll pop the balloon. But I didn’t have a quote from a top Trump administration official saying, “We’d like to take their oil.”

Then national security adviser and Mustache of Doom John Bolton said, “hold my beer.” While on Fox News he stated clearly, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

That’s Beltway Speak for “We want their oil.”

For 20 years we’ve been trying to destroy Venezuela, and our government always gives the standard line: “We want to help the people. We care about their democracy. They have a lot of inflation, and that’s why we need to drop our freedom bombs on their heads.” They’ve trotted out that bullshit brigade under Bush, Obama and now Trump. The officials never just say, “Yeah, there’s like, tons of oil there, and we want it.”

Yet, here it is. The disguise of neoliberal world domination has come off. (Ironically, the fake mustache was yanked off to reveal a much larger mustache.)

Also, it’s amazing how monotone and matter-of-fact Bolton is as he speaks. A U.S.-backed coup often ends in terrible violence with tens of thousands of innocent people killed. It’s truly heartbreaking, no matter which side you support. Sometimes it ends up with a brutal military junta taking control. Yet, here is John Bolton discussing it the same way he would analyze whether to have chocolate fudge ice cream or apple pie for dessert. (“Hmmm, possible death of a hundred thousand people? That sounds good—I’ll have that.”)

This is all the more horrifying because these policies are decided by unelected maniacs like Elliot Abrams, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. Trump just named Abrams special envoy to Venezuela despite the fact the guy has a resume that would make Josef Mengele blush. And what’s even more jaw-dropping is watching the liberati like Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher and nearly every democrat in Congress get in line to support the talking points of right-wing warlords (the belligerati) like Bolton, Abrams, Pompeo, Trump, Hannity and nearly every Republican in Congress. The mountains of propaganda put forward make it hard to breathe (the air is thinner up here).

Worse yet—even the Wall Street Journal stated the U.S. push to oust Maduro is just the first shot in the oligarchy’s plan to reshape Latin America. It turns out sociopathy is addictive. Our American empire knows no bounds to its nation-building (after nation-destroying).

The Venezuelan people deserve self-determination, no matter how you feel about the current government. The absolute last thing they need is to be turned into a neocon / neoliberal parking lot in which America rips all their resources out from under them while calling it “freedom.” Luckily, there are already many signs this U.S.-created attempted coup is failing.

—

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  This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show, “ Redacted Tonight .”

Elizabeth Warren Unveils Plan to Fund Universal Child Care

As Bloomberg reported last year, Americans spend almost as much on child care as they do on rent. Now, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has become the first 2020 presidential contender to unveil a plan to address those rising costs.

HuffPost reporter Jonathan Cohn observes that “child care has rarely gotten serious attention in American politics.” The World War II-era Latham Act, which provided child care for women working in wartime factories, was phased out when the war ended. In the 1960s, anti-poverty legislation resulted in Head Start centers that provided early child care and education for low income families, but, as Cohn points out, the prospects for more and better child care legislation are dim now “given Republican control of the Senate and the White House and the GOP’s skepticism of large-scale government spending programs.”

Warren’s plan would provide free child care to families with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which is approximately $51,000 annually for a family of four. All other families would pay only up to 7 percent of their income, no matter their number of children.

The 7 percent figure, Cohn explains, doesn’t come “out of thin air.” It’s the amount the Department of Health and Human Services currently defines as affordable child care. “But these days,” he writes, “care costs a lot more than that for large numbers of families across the country”—an average of 11 percent for married couples and a whopping 37 percent for single parents, according to data from Child Care Aware of America, a research and advocacy organization.

“In the wealthiest country on the planet, access to affordable and high-quality child care and early education should be a right, not a privilege reserved for the rich,” Warren writes as she introduces her plan in her post on medium.com.

If enacted, her plan would increase the number of children with access to early childhood education “from 6.8 million (or one-third of those under 5 years old) to 12 million (or 60 percent of children under 5), the economists said. It would cut formal care costs for families with young children by about 17 percent,” Sahil Kapur writes in Bloomberg, which used data from an analysis of a care.com index in its 2018 report on child care.

Warren’s plan would offer federal funding to child care facilities that meet federal staffing, education and safety standards.

According to estimates provided to HuffPost, Warren’s proposal would cost $700 billion over the next decade.

“The new outlays in Warren’s plan would be at least four times what the federal government currently spends on its main early childhood programs, which include Head Start, a block grant for state-level child care programs, and a tax credit that mostly benefits middle-class families,” Cohn writes.

As a source familiar with Warren’s plan told HuffPost, “The fact that somebody is coming out of the blocks and talking about [child care] in such a big way, it’s a really important sign.”

With her plan to make child care accessible, Warren has become the first candidate to add the issue to the list of policies—including “Medicare for All,” the Green New Deal and a $15 minimum wage—that Democrat presidential hopefuls are touting to burnish their progressive credentials.