Chris Hedges's Blog, page 333

Judge Dismisses Suit by Dakota Access Pipeline Developer

In a “landmark” ruling on Thursday, a federal court in North Dakota tossed out a “baseless” case against Greenpeace and other environmental and Indigenous activists who organized protests against the deeply controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which drew thousands of people to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2016.

District Judge Billy Roy Wilson dismissed all claims against all defendants in a lawsuit brought by fossil fuel giant Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), which sought to hold the water protectors liable under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act for millions of dollars in alleged damages.

“Donating to people whose cause you support does not create a RICO enterprise,” Wilson wrote in his opinion. “Posting articles written by people with similar beliefs does not create a RICO enterprise.”

This is a very big win–and it took a big effort from @greenpeaceusa and others to make it happen. Thanks to those who fought for the right to fight! https://t.co/WBYFSSqBgx

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) February 15, 2019

While the protests against DAPL, which were met with a militarized response from law enforcement, were ultimately unsuccessful—and the now-operational pipeline already boasts an alarming track record of oil spills—the activists and their attorneys welcomed the win in court on Friday, noting that Wilson’s ruling aligns with that of a similar case that was dismissed in 2017.

“We are confident that this decision will set a precedent that deters Energy Transfer and other corporations from abusing the legal system in their quest to bully those who speak truth to power,” declared Greenpeace USA general counsel Tom Wetterer. “This is a huge victory not just for Greenpeace but for anyone and everyone who has ever stood up against powerful corporate interests.”

Wetterer posited that the dismissal of ETP’s “baseless lawsuit against Greenpeace and others sends a clear message to companies trying to muzzle civil society that corporate overreach will not be tolerated. It is also a check on corporate efforts to silence dissent.”

Defense attorneys called the case a “textbook example” of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP).

“The goal of a SLAPP is not to win, but to burden the defendants with costly and time-intensive litigation procedures, while creating a chilling effect that discourages others from speaking out on issues of public concern,” EarthRights International explained in a statement on Friday. “The judge’s swift dismissal suggests that the federal judiciary may be losing patience with these abusive tactics.”

Denouncing ETP’s “embarrassing and expensive attempt to silence organizers who stand for justice,” Astha Sharma Pokharel, a legal fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, charged that the “baseless lawsuit should never have been filed, but [this] victory will only strengthen the movements they tried so hard to suppress.”

Celebrating the win, defendant Krystal Two Bulls concluded: “Loss. Defeat. Dismissal. This is what happens when greedy corporations go after Indigenous women grounded in the power of prayer, the power of relationship building, and the power of collective organizing. Not only was my right to free speech upheld by this decision, but also my rights as an Indigenous woman to steward this land. Now, more than ever, we ALL need our rights to share our voices uplifted, supported, and protected.”

Huge victory! In a win for free speech, Judge dismisses a vengeful lawsuit by pipeline company against Krystal Two Bulls, a Native American organizer from #StandingRock, @Greenpeace, and other defendants. #protecttheprotest https://t.co/Xw5Ijpu0tp pic.twitter.com/C2rLmBUqkl

— EarthRights Intl. (@EarthRightsIntl) February 15, 2019

Putting Trump to Shame Without Ever Saying His Name

“American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin”

A book by Terrance Hayes

“In a second I’ll tell you how little / Writing rescues,” writes Terrance Hayes in the opening poem of his most recent collection, “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.” Written in the days after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, Hayes’ sonnets have an urgency and a potency that will leave readers’ heads spinning. And while it can be hard for this reader to be grateful for anything remotely related to Trump, I must say that if the anger he inspired erupted into poetry this powerful, I am thankful, at the very least, for Hayes’ verses.

Using Wanda Coleman’s revision of the 14-line form commonly reserved for romance, the author slashes open the all-American wounds of racism and sexism that never quite seem to heal. The point is not to salve them or save us through verse (remember, reader, this book isn’t about rescue), but to acknowledge the violentlegacy that’s been eating our country alive since before the Constitution was even drafted.

Every one of the 65 poems in the book is titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” as if assassination, which has played such a prominent role in our nation’s story, is Americans’ destiny. Certainly, for the speaker in the Hayes’ poems, violence in many forms, including murder, police brutality and suicide, is a daily reality that cannot be separated from any poetry that is truly labeled “American.” How can it be otherwise in a country where gun ownership is rampant and where, in 2018, a mass shooting took place on average once a day? This quotidian American violence is an even more common occurrence in the lives of people of color, who suffer additional harm from systemic racism embedded in the legal system as well as the national psyche. In a poem that explores the ideas behind the poetic form itself, Hayes points to other uniquely American phenomena: mass incarceration and Jim Crow laws.

“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,

Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.

… I make you both gym & crow here. …

I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.

Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough

To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.”

Hayes brings black icons from throughout U.S. history into his sonnets: James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Jimi Hendrix, Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes, Aretha Franklin, Toni Morrison and more, as if to remind all Americans as well as their leader: These are the greats that make up our shared history and you cannot erase them from the pages. Or, as he writes in another poem, “America’s struggle with itself / Has always had people like me at the heart of it.” Political figures, past and present, also make their way into the American sonnets—including Martin Luther King Jr. and Maxine Waters. Perhaps one of the most tender love poems in the book (which is paralleled only by a love ode to Baldwin’s face) is a sonnet about the 15-term member of Congress:

“Maxine Waters, being of fire, being of sword,

Shaped like a silver tongue. … I love your mouth,

Flood gate, storm door, you are black as the gap

In Baldwin’s teeth, you are black as a Baldwin speech.

I love how your blackness leaves them in the dark.

I love how even your sound-bite leaves a mark.”

The final rhyming iambic couplet becomes as memorable as one of Waters’ own phrases and imbues the words “blackness” and “dark” with power rather than the stigma white supremacy has historically drowned them in.

Click here to read long excerpts from “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin” at Google Books.

Another naming ritual takes place in the collection’s pages. While it is a clear nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has emphasized the importance of saying the names of victims of police brutality and other forms of violence that people of color are disproportionately harmed by, a grief-fatigued Hayes chooses a different path. Rather than name “all the black people I’m tired of losing, / all the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson, / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago,/ Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves” the poet instead uses names to put a lyrical hex—“a pinch of serious poison,” “the opposite of a prayer”—on the many American assassins who have dug those graves such as the Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Trayvon Martin’s killer George Zimmerman.

Then there’s the name that looms large throughout the book, the one belonging to, as Harry Potter fans might call him, he-who-must-not-be-named. As if naming the 45th president would be a way of playing right into the hands of attention-seekers, Hayes instead either hints at the recognizable characteristics of the current occupant of the White House, or uses the words “trump” and “trumpet” in creative ways throughout his sonnets to call the U.S. leader out on his racism, sexism, lying—you name it. Take, for example, the poem that begins, “Are you not the color of this country’s current threat / advisory?” in which the poet proclaims of the president, “I know your shade. You are the color of a sucker punch.” In another poem, Hayes’ speaker demands, “Mister Trumpet what the fuck do you know.” In yet another, Hayes directly censures the president for his comments about women and Mexicans, speaking to him as one of the “assassins” all of his poems are dedicated to.

“…You

Are not allowed to say shit about Mexicans when you

Ain’t actually got any Mexican friends—bet you’ve never

Been invited to a family dinner. You ain’t allowed to deride

Women when you’ve never wept in front of a woman

That wasn’t your mother.”

The attacks on the marginalized that we’ve grown so accustomed to hearing spewed from the mouth of the U.S. leader are highlighted as anathema to the “family values” the right consistently claims to espouse. Hayes attributes his hateful rhetoric to his lack of understanding of friendship and family in the larger sense—the American collective family that is made up of so many cultures, including Mexican culture. In the same poem, Hayes struggles with the complicated national trajectory that led Americans from electing its first black president to voting for a man whom Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “the first white president.”

“Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader

You despise, the racists said when the president

Was black and I’ll be damned if I ain’t saying it too.

Is this a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty,

Stupidity, an idiot’s threats & gangsta narcissisms threading

Every shabby sentence his trumpet constructs?”

The clever enjambment in the first lines marks the difference between the “leader” and “president” the nation had in Barack Obama, and the “mandate for whiteness” that has taken his place. As he grapples with the root of this choice, Hayes stumbles upon greed as one of the main explanations behind Trump’s election.

“America, you just wanted change is all, a return

To the kind of awe experienced after beholding a reign

Of gold. A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection

Of your own. … Like no

Culture before us, we relate the way the descendants

Of the raped relate to the descendants of their rapists.

May your restlessness come at last to rest, constituents

Of Midas. I wish you the opposite of what Neruda said

Of lemons. May all the gold you touch burn, rot & rust.”

The “rust” at the end of the poem harks back once again to the real estate magnate’s notorious orange-hued skin. Hayes’ comment on “the raped” and “the rapists” lays bare the despicable past of slavery—an institution that is the foundation not only of the United States as a country, but its glittering wealth as well. As Baldwin wrote, “For a very long time America prospered; this prosperity cost millions of people their lives.”

Perhaps the most powerful sonnet in the collection comes near the end of the book. It takes us back to Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Money, Mississippi, back further to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and returns us to the present-day avarice, prejudice and fear that threatens to unravel our fragile union.

“Suppose you could speak nothing but money

And acrimony. … Suppose we cannot

Forget what happened in Money. Suppose

You’re someone who celebrates Thomas Jefferson’s

Birthday. Suppose he was someone whose love

For a black woman was blinded by blackness,

Hers & his, yours & mine. I ain’t mad at you,

Assassin. It’s not the bad people who are brave

I fear, it’s the good people who are afraid.”

It was precisely this “moral apathy, [this] death of the heart” that Baldwin said “terrified” him. And for good reason—it is very likely the American tragedy that will destroy us all.

 

Gunman Kills 5 People, Wounds 5 Police Officers in Illinois

AURORA, Ill. — A gunman opened fire at a manufacturing plant in suburban Chicago on Friday, killing five people and wounding five police officers before he was fatally shot, police said.

Aurora Police Chief Kristen Ziman told a news conference that the gunman was 45-year-old Gary Martin and said he was believed to be an employee at the Henry Pratt Co. in the city about 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of Chicago. She told reporters that officers arrived within four minutes of receiving reports of the shooting and were fired upon as soon as they entered the 29,000-square-foot manufacturing warehouse.

Police said they did not know the gunman’s motive.

“May God bless the brave law enforcement officers who continue to run toward danger,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said at the news conference.

Hospitals reported treating at least seven patients from the shooting, though their conditions weren’t released.

Two of the officers were airlifted to trauma centers in Chicago, Ziman said. She said a sixth officer suffered a knee injury. Officials did not say the total number of people injured other than the police officers.

Dozens of first responder vehicles converged on the building housing the company in Aurora after police received multiple calls about an active shooter at 1:24 p.m. CST.

Several ATF teams also responded to the shooting and were at the scene, according to the agency’s Chicago spokeswoman, and the FBI said it also responded.

John Probst, an employee at the Henry Pratt Co. in Aurora, told ABC7 that he ran out of the back door as the shooting unfolded Friday afternoon. Probst says he recognized the gunman and that he works for the company.

“What I saw was the guy running down the aisle with a pistol with a laser on it,” Probst said.

Probst said he wasn’t hurt but that another colleague was “bleeding pretty bad.”

The company makes valves for industrial purposes.

The White House said President Donald Trump was briefed on the shooting and monitoring the situation as he prepared to depart for a weekend trip to his home in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump tweeted his thanks to law enforcement officers in Aurora and offered his condolences to the victims and their families. “America is with you,” he said.

Presence Mercy Medical Center was treating two patients and a third had been transferred by helicopter to another hospital, spokesman Matt Wakely said. Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital and Advocate Lutheran General Hospital each had one patient from the shooting, spokeswoman Kate Eller said. Rush Copley Medical Center received three patients from the shooting and all are being treated for non-life threatening injuries, spokeswoman Courtney Satlak said.

Amazon Won’t Pay a Dime in Federal Taxes This Year

Amazon won’t pay a dime in federal taxes this year—just as it didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes the year before.

According to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which examined Amazon’s public filings, the online retailer reported a $129 million federal income tax rebate for 2018—good for a tax rate of negative 1 percent, or 22 percent below the federal corporate income tax rate. Amazon’s profits this year were $11.2 billion versus $5.6 billion in 2017. As of last September, the company was valued at over $1 trillion.

“When Congress in 2017 enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and substantially cut the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, proponents claimed the rate cut would incentivize better corporate citizenship,” the report reads. “However, the tax law failed to broaden the tax base or close a slew of tax loopholes that allow profitable companies to routinely avoid paying federal and state income taxes on almost half of their profits.”

So what exactly does Amazon contribute? HuffPo’s Antonia Blumberg reveals that the multinational paid a total of $412 million in federal, state, local and foreign taxes in 2017; two years prior, it paid $273 million. Blumberg also notes that Amazon has effectively avoided sales taxes by passing them off to the consumer in all 45 states where they exist, along with Washington, D.C.

If nothing else, ITEP’s findings underscore the shamelessness of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ extended search for a second corporate headquarters—a 13-month extravaganza in which officials from more than 200 cities attempted to outbid each other with increasingly elaborate tax incentives and subsidies. Earlier this week, the company announced that it would scrap its plans to build a new corporate campus in Long Island City, N.Y., amid fierce backlash from labor organizers, local communities and their representatives.

“It’s too soon to know whether this new revelation, following hard on the heels of Netflix’s similar announcement last week, means that the floodgates have opened for a wave of Fortune 500 corporate tax avoidance,” the ITEP report concludes. “We’ll have a better sense of that a month from now, when most big multinationals will have released their financial reports for 2018, the first full year of the new Trump corporate tax law. But these initial findings appear to confirm the view that last year’s tax law was a gigantic missed opportunity for true corporate tax reform.”

Could This Be the Humane Housing Policy We’ve Been Waiting For?

For decades, U.S. housing policy has neglected homeless people with substance abuse disorders by relying on a treatment-first “linear model” barring them from subsidized or government-supported housing. But a new plan is showing promising results in servicing this overlooked community, and it already has the backing of both Democrats and Republicans.

The Housing First model is radically straightforward: provide homes to the homeless. Unlike other approaches to ending homelessness, the model neither predicates itself on sobriety nor on the completion of services or programs—a sharp departure from the linear model, which requires individuals to complete treatment for substance abuse before granting eligibility for permanent housing.

Housing First has garnered attention from federal officials since 2014, but many have been surprised that Ben Carson, the conservative secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has upheld its standards under the Trump administration. HUD’s Housing First requirements ensure that homeless assistance service providers comply before receiving a portion of the record-breaking $2 billion in federal funding allotted to such programs earlier this month.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the homeless population is disproportionately affected by drug abuse. According to the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2.7 percent of Americans age 12 and older met the criteria for illicit drug use disorder, and 10.6 percent of survey participants reported drug use within the past 30 days. The National Coalition for the Homeless reports even higher rates of drug abuse—26 percent—among homeless individuals. Yet another study, from the American Public Health Association, finds that as much as two-thirds of the homeless population have a lifetime history of alcohol and drug abuse.

These exorbitantly high rates raise pressing questions about cause and effect. The National Coalition for the Homeless is quick to dispel the myth that homelessness invariably begins with drug abuse. Frequently, those who turn to drugs are coping with stresses related to existing living and housing situations. According to a 2007 study published by Visions Mental Health and Addiction Journal, some homeless people view drug and alcohol use as a vital component to social acceptance within the homeless community. And because many homeless people do not maintain social networks of their own, they may view integration into this community as necessary to their survival.

Still, drug abuse can help cause an individual to become homeless. The National Coalition for the Homeless notes that “for people who are already struggling to pay their bills, the onset or exacerbation of an addiction may cause them to lose their housing.” Those with substance abuse disorders may have difficulty holding a job and making rent or housing payments. Additionally, drug abusers often forfeit a vital safety net by alienating themselves from friends and family. The Visions Mental Health and Addiction Journal found that substance abuse issues were a major factor for as much as two-thirds of the homeless population.

The federal adoption of Housing First is not the first implementation of this policy. Many cities have adopted the model as a matter of necessity. In a 2008 survey of the United States Conference of Mayors, 68 percent of its members reported substance abuse as the most prevalent cause of urban homelessness among single individuals. Another 12 percent called it  one of the top three causes of homelessness among families. In 2016, the organization reported that the best way to tackle homelessness in its communities was through “more mainstream housing assistance and/or affordable housing,” as well as “better coordination with mental health and substance abuse services.”

Housing First counts Utah among its greatest successes. In 2015, NPR reported that the state’s chronically homeless population fell by an astounding 91 percent over 10 years. For the fiscally conservative-minded, not only was the program effective, it yielded significant savings for taxpayers. Utah’s Homeless Task Force reported that the average cost of care per chronically homeless person in Utah was $19,208. After the adoption of Housing First, the cost of housing and assigned caseworkers was less than half that ($7,800).

Since 2016, however, the state’s homeless population has doubled. “State officials cite a combination of factors for the backward slide, including rising land and housing costs in booming U.S. cities, stagnant wage growth and a nationwide opioid epidemic,” reports Real Change News. Still, proponents of Housing First remain hopeful. “The only thing I’ve ever seen that really worked in terms of reducing the number of people on the street was the Housing First policy,” Glenn Bailey, who directs the Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City, told Real Change News.

While Housing First is not impervious to market factors or demographic changes, the model nonetheless creates new opportunities for a population long underserved. And as federal and municipal governments move away from policies that restrict housing access to drug abusers, they inch ever closer to ending the scourge of homelessness. In the process, they may even find reductions in substance abuse among those with a safe and affordable home of their own.

Former Trump Officials Are Openly Flouting Rules Against Lobbying

It’s been more than two years since President Donald Trump, who rallied campaign supporters with calls to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists and their ilk, took office. But despite that campaign promise, Washington influence peddlers continue to move into and out of jobs in the federal government.

In his first 10 days in office, Trump signed an executive order that required all his political hires to sign a pledge. On its face, it’s straightforward and ironclad: When Trump officials leave government employment, they agree not to lobby the agencies they worked in for five years. They also can’t lobby anyone in the White House or political appointees across federal agencies for the duration of the Trump administration. And they can’t perform “lobbying activities,” or things that would help other lobbyists, including setting up meetings or providing background research. Violating the pledge exposes former officials to fines and extended or even permanent bans on lobbying.

But loopholes, some of them sizable, abound. At least 33 former Trump officials have found ways around the pledge. The most prominent is former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who resigned in December after a series of ethics investigations. He announced Wednesday that he is joining a lobbying firm, Turnberry Solutions, which was started in 2017 by several former Trump campaign aides. Asked whether Zinke will register as a lobbyist, Turnberry partner Jason Osborne said, “He will if he has a client that he wants to lobby for.”

Among the 33 former officials, at least 18 have recently registered as lobbyists. The rest work at firms in jobs that closely resemble federal lobbying. Almost all work on issues they oversaw or helped shape when they were in government. (Nearly 2,600 Trump officials signed the ethics pledge in 2017, according to the Office of Government Ethics. Twenty-five appointees did not sign the pledge. We used staffing lists compiled for ProPublica’s Trump Town, our exhaustive database of current political appointees, and found at least 350 people who have left the Trump administration. There are other former Trump officials who lobby at the state or local level.)

As we’ve reported before, some former officials are tiptoeing around the rules by engaging in “shadow lobbying,” which typically entails functions such as “strategic consulting” that don’t require registering as a lobbyist. Others obtained special waivers allowing them to go back to lobbying. In a few cases, they avoided signing the pledge altogether. Legislation aimed at closing some of the loopholes is contained in the Democratic-led ethics reform package, HR 1, the “For the People Act,” which had its first hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee last month. (The same bill was proposed in the previous session of Congress, and the sponsors cited ProPublica’s reporting.)

Increasingly, both lobbyists and the firms that hire them are taking advantage of a loophole unique to the Trump ethics pledge: A clause that allows former political appointees to lobby on “any agency process for rulemaking, adjudication or licensing” despite the five-year lobbying ban. “Rulemaking” includes deregulation, a Trump administration priority. “Rulemaking is mostly what agencies do, and that’s what most lobbyists do. So that’s a pretty big carve-out,” said Virginia Canter, a former Obama administration ethics attorney who now works for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Companies have taken notice.

(n) “Lobbying activities” has the same meaning as that term has in the Lobbying Disclosure Act, except that the term does not include communicating or appearing with regard to: a judicial proceeding; a criminal or civil law enforcement inquiry, investigation, or proceeding; or any agency process for rulemaking, adjudication, or licensing, as defined in and governed by the Administrative Procedure Act, as amended, 5 U.S.C. 551 et seq.

—An excerpt from the Trump ethics pledge

Of course, the lobbying-government revolving door isn’t new. The Obama administration hired dozens of previously registered lobbyists, and many officials returned to K Street firms afterward. The “Daschle loophole” is named after former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who sidestepped lobbying laws after he left the Senate by becoming a “policy adviser.”

Such influencers, more numerous than registered lobbyists, are allowed to operate because they don’t meet the legal threshold requiring them to list themselves as lobbyists. By law, registration is required if a person spends 20 percent or more of his or her time lobbying. That leaves a lot of leeway, said Paul Miller, president of the National Institute for Lobbying & Ethics, an association for what it calls advocacy professionals. (“We’re just like you,” the organization’s website states.) Miller said he hears from people who do lobbying work, but haven’t registered, and “their phones are ringing off the hook.” Miller added, “It’s our No. 1 priority and concern.”

Ex-lobbyists play prominent roles in the Trump administration. The acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (and nominee for the permanent job), Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal industry lobbyist. David Bernhardt, the acting Interior Department secretary and nominee for the permanent position, was chair of a lobbying firm’s natural resources division.

By our count, at least 230 former and current registered lobbyists have worked in the Trump administration.

The departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Interior, Justice and Treasury, as well as the Office of Management and Budget, did not respond to questions about their former employees-turned-lobbyists. The Department of Homeland Security directed questions to the White House, which declined to comment. The departments of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development noted that the ethics pledge doesn’t prohibit former Trump officials from lobbying Congress or career employees at the agency.

At least 18 former Trump officials have become registered lobbyists at the federal level. Typically, they have been careful to avoid violating the ethics pledge. That usually means they interact with representatives, senators and congressional staff, but not with appointees at federal agencies or the White House. Here are several who have gone into lobbying jobs in the past year:

Courtney Lawrence was a longtime aide for Reps. Bill Cassidy and Tom Price and a federal lobbyist for the insurance trade association America’s Health Insurance Plans before taking a job as assistant secretary for legislative affairs at Health and Human Services in March 2017, when Price briefly headed the agency. Lawrence stayed for 18 months before leaving in August 2018 for a director role at Cigna Corp., the health insurance conglomerate.

Lawrence registered as a lobbyist with Cigna in October. Her disclosure forms state that she was working on proposed changes to Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and prescription drug rebates. Federal lobbying disclosures show that Lawrence was one of several lobbyists to communicate with federal agencies and the White House, and not just members of Congress. In a statement, Cigna asserted that the lobbying disclosure — which was prepared by the company — is inaccurate. Cigna blamed a “formatting issue.” The statement said Lawrence “does not and will not lobby the Executive Branch.” The company said it would correct her lobbying disclosure form

Jared Sawyer, a longtime Senate committee attorney and lobbyist, was deputy assistant secretary for financial institutions policy at the Treasury Department, overseeing two offices that regulate and monitor financial institutions and insurers. Sawyer was the lead policymaker on a set of proposed rule changes that would ensure that asset management and insurance firms don’t face the same regulations as banks.

In June, Sawyer left and took a job as a principal at Rich Feuer Anderson, a Washington lobbying firm catering to the financial services industry. He disclosed a host of clients, including BlackRock Capital, JPMorgan Chase and the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, all of which were seeking guidance on navigating the offices Sawyer oversaw in the Trump administration. Rich Feuer Anderson did not respond to requests for comment.

Jason Larrabee was the Department of the Interior’s principal deputy assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks before taking a lobbying job at Van Ness Feldman in May. In announcing Larrabee’s hiring, Van Ness Feldman noted his “deep understanding of our clients’ industries.” Larrabee has mostly lobbied congressional leaders on issues unique to the Interior Department, including National Park Service concessions, California water policy and Interior Department appropriations. In a statement, Van Ness Feldman said Larrabee signed the ethics pledge and is following its rules.

Larrabee worked on at least one project involving the agency he used to work for. Van Ness Feldman was hired last year to represent San Francisco-based ferry service company Hornblower Cruises and Events, which was seeking a new contract with the Interior Department to run passenger ferries to Alcatraz island. Congressional records show four lobbyists, including Larrabee, working for Hornblower. Larrabee is the only one with previous federal government work experience.

Larrabee “has not engaged in any DOI agency contacts” and “any such contacts were undertaken by other individuals” listed in lobbying disclosures, Van Ness Feldman said. In December, Hornblower was awarded a 15-year contract from Interior’s National Park Service to run the Alcatraz ferries.

(In response to ProPublica’s questions, Van Ness Feldman also said it would be correcting other lobbying disclosure reports the firm prepared, which it said incorrectly listed Larrabee and others as lobbying the Interior Department. “The firm takes ethical obligations seriously,” it said in its statement.)

Jonny Slemrod was the chief legislative aide for Mick Mulvaney at OMB. In November, he became a partner at Harbinger Strategies, a boutique lobbying firm founded by onetime aides to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Sen. Trent Lott. Slemrod told Politico at the time that he would register as a lobbyist, but three months later, he has yet to do so. At OMB, Slemrod helped secure congressional support for the Tax Reform and Jobs Act of 2017 and, according to his online biography, he was Mulvaney’s “lead liaison to Congress and negotiator on numerous policy issues including all appropriations and authorizing measures.” Harbinger lobbied on behalf of the nation’s largest banks during the negotiations on the tax law. Now, the firm employs a person who helped formulate the law, though, because of the lack of disclosure, it’s impossible to determine whether Slemrod is involved in such work. Harbinger did not respond to requests for comment.

Other former Trump officials-turned-registered lobbyists include Shannon McGahn, a former Treasury attorney (and the wife of former White House counsel Don McGahn), who is now the top lobbyist at the National Association of Realtors; Alex Campau, a White House health policy aide now running the health lobbying team at Cozen O’Connor; Downey Magallanes, who was deputy chief of staff for policy at Interior before running Capitol Hill lobbying for BP America; Matt Kellogg, who was Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary for banking and finance before taking a lobbying job at HSBC; Beth Zorc, who now works as head of public policy at Wells Fargo after a stint as principal deputy general counsel at Housing and Urban Development; and Hunter Hall, who served as the Commerce Department’s deputy director of advance before taking a job as deputy director of federal affairs at the Picard Group. Chris Shank, a senior adviser to Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, left to join lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates then returned to the Defense Department in August 2018 as director of the Strategic Capabilities Office. (BP America said Magallanes is only lobbying the House and Senate, and HSBC said Kellogg is in compliance with lobbying rules and honoring the ethics pledge. Wells Fargo declined to comment. Cozen O’Connor, Picard Group and the Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment.

An increasingly common tactic by ex-Trump officials is to create their own advisory and consulting firms that carefully skirt the line between lobbying and other services, like strategic or crisis communications, advocacy work or policy expertise. After leaving the Defense Department last year, Sally Donnelly and Tony DeMartino formed Pallas Advisors, described as a strategic advisory firm with “decades of experience at senior levels of the public and private sector” and providing “insight into how governments think and operate,” according to its website. Donnelly and DeMartino had previously worked together at a strategic advice firm that Donnelly used to own, SBD Advisors, with a client list that included Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg and Uber.

Donnelly and DeMartino have come under scrutiny. The tech giant Oracle is embroiled in a closely watched lawsuit with the Pentagon over a $10 billion cloud computing contract that experts expect Amazon to win. Oracle alleges, among other things, that the Defense Department allowed Donnelly and DeMartino to work on the project despite conflicts of interest. Oracle claims that DeMartino manipulated proposal requirements for Amazon’s benefit. (The Government Accountability Office looked into those claims and found that Donnelly played no significant part in the contract selection process and that DeMartino played no substantive role in the proposal requirements.)

At their new firm, Pallas, Donnelly and DeMartino don’t have to disclose their clients. A Pallas spokesman, attorney Michael Levy, said Donnelly and DeMartino signed the ethics pledge, are complying with all post-government restrictions and are not lobbying.

Scott Krause was executive secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, overseeing briefings and acting as a gatekeeper for the department’s senior leadership. He left after more than a year in the job, in May 2018, to start his own consulting firm, Krause Transformation. Its website says the firm “provides business transformation consulting, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) business development” and other services.

Krause told ProPublica that he signed the ethics pledge and doesn’t plan to lobby, adhering to a five-page memo he received from Homeland Security’s general counsel. But while he can’t talk to most of his former Homeland Security colleagues, he said he is allowed to offer “behind the scenes assistance with a company regarding DHS, which is why my company offers DHS expertise.”

“Behind the scenes” work is a gray area in government lobbying and legal circles, allowing former government officials to help clients navigate federal processes and relationships without violating conflict-of-interest laws. “There’s always been a question about what’s permitted as far as communication before the federal government and what’s permitted behind the scenes,” Canter said. When firms represent foreign interests or work on trade issues, Canter and others said, legal restrictions come into play. When they don’t, it’s usually fair game.

The FBI Is Dismantling Its War Crimes Unit

The FBI is dismantling a special unit that investigates international war crimes and hunts down war criminals – including suspected torturers and perpetrators of genocide, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has learned.

The unit, which was created a decade ago and has its roots in federal efforts to hunt Nazis living in the United States after World War II, has had a hand in many high-profile prosecutions.

Most recently, its investigators helped take down the Liberian warlord Thomas Woewiju, whom agents found living a quiet life in Philadelphia. At trial, witnesses said Woewiju’s men herded civilians through checkpoints decorated with severed heads and strings of human intestines. He was convicted of perjury in July.

Now, human rights advocates worry that criminals like Woewiju could evade justice.

“These are difficult cases to prove because they need rock-solid investigations,” said Beth Van Schaack, a law professor at Stanford University who was deputy ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues in the Obama administration. Scrapping the FBI unit “is inevitably going to jeopardize prosecutions,” she said.

In a statement, the FBI confirmed the shuttering of the war crimes unit but argued its dissolution “in no way reflects a reduced commitment by the FBI” to enforce human rights law. The agents previously dedicated to human rights work will continue that work as members of the FBI’s civil rights program, the agency said.

But the move could run afoul of Congress, which mandated the unit’s establishment and funds its work every year as part of the FBI’s budget. Sources tell Reveal that most of the agents previously dedicated to human rights likely will now be assigned to other jobs and worry that perpetrators of torture and genocide will be free to act with impunity.

In addition to finding international war criminals living in the U.S., the FBI’s human rights unit also has investigated and apprehended perpetrators of war crimes against Americans abroad, along with Americans who commit war crimes themselves – such as military contractors accused of killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan or U.S. citizens who fight alongside the Islamic State. All those efforts now could fall through the cracks.

Human rights advocates, who have become increasingly concerned with President Donald Trump’s embrace of ruthless autocrats such as Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, worry that the move could be political.

“We worry when we see something go from a tweet that is very hostile to a policy that is very hostile,” said Dixon Osburn, executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability, a legal nonprofit that brings human rights cases in civil court.

One of the center’s recent legal victories highlights the work the FBI unit needs to be doing, Osburn said.

In February 2012, American journalist Marie Colvin was killed in an artillery assault on a media center in Homs, Syria. The center sued, and two weeks ago, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that “the defendant, the Syrian Arab Republic, engaged in an act of extrajudicial killing of a United States national by planning and executing an attack on the Baba Amr Media Center, and is liable to plaintiffs for the resulting injuries.”

“A targeted murder of an American citizen, whose courageous work was not only important, but vital to our understanding of warzones and of wars generally, is outrageous,” Jackson wrote, “and therefore a punitive damages award that multiples the impact on the responsible state is warranted.”

She ordered the Syrian government to pay the Colvin family’s funeral expenses and more than $300 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

With the civil verdict in hand, Osburn said the government should be aggressively pursuing a criminal case against the Syrian officials responsible for her killing.

“You have the determination that an American was murdered by senior leaders of a foreign government,” he said. “This is the sort of case where the FBI could invest some resources, the sort of case you could lose if you don’t invest in.”

But with the shuttering of the FBI’s human rights unit, that seems less likely, especially with frequent tweets from the president that seem to glorify human rights violations.

“When the Twitterverse starts ruling the budgets, that’s when we get concerned,” Osburn said.

Trump Declares National Emergency in Order to Build Border Wall

WASHINGTON—Battling with one branch of government and opening a new confrontation with another, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency Friday to fulfill his pledge to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Bypassing Congress, which approved far less money for his proposed wall than he had sought, Trump said he will use executive action to siphon billions of dollars from federal military construction and counterdrug efforts for the wall, aides said. The move drew immediate bipartisan criticism on Capitol Hill and is expected to face rounds of legal challenges.

Trump made the announcement from the Rose Garden, as he claimed illegal immigration was “an invasion of our country.”

Trump’s move followed a rare show of bipartisanship when lawmakers voted Thursday to fund large swaths of the government and avoid a repeat of this winter’s debilitating five-week government shutdown. Trump’s insistence on wall funding has been a flashpoint in his negotiations with Congress for more than two years, as has the resistance of lawmakers in both parties to meeting the president’s request. West Wing aides acknowledged there was insufficient support among Republicans to sustain another shutdown fight, leading Trump to decide to test the limits of his presidential powers.

The money in the bill for border barriers, about $1.4 billion, is far below the $5.7 billion Trump insisted he needed and would finance just a quarter of the more than 200 miles (322 kilometers) he wanted this year.

To bridge the gap, Trump announced that he will be spending roughly $8 billion on border barriers — combining the money approved by Congress with funding he plans to repurpose through executive actions, including the national emergency. The money would come from funds targeted for counterdrug efforts and military construction, but aides could not immediately specify which military projects would be affected.

Despite widespread opposition in Congress to proclaiming an emergency, including by some Republicans, Trump was responding to pressure to act unilaterally to soothe his conservative base and avoid appearing like he’s lost his nerve on his defining promise to voters. Trump advisers on the campaign and inside the White House insist that, fulfilled or not, the promise of a wall is a winning issue for Trump as he heads into his re-election campaign as long as he doesn’t appear to be throwing in the towel on it.

Word that Trump would declare the emergency prompted condemnations from Democrats and threats of lawsuits from states and others who might lose federal money or said Trump was abusing his authority.

In a sing-songy tone of voice, Trump described how the decision will be challenged and work its way through the courts, including up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He said, “Sadly, we’ll be sued and sadly it will go through a process and happily we’ll win, I think.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called it an “unlawful declaration over a crisis that does not exist” and said it “does great violence to our Constitution and makes America less safe, stealing from urgently needed defense funds for the security of our military and our nation. ”

“The President’s actions clearly violate the Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, which our Founders enshrined in the Constitution,” they said in a joint statement. “The Congress will defend our constitutional authorities in the Congress, in the Courts, and in the public, using every remedy available.”

Democratic state attorneys general also said they’d consider legal action to block Trump.

In a comment that will surely be used to challenge the legal underpinnings of his emergency declaration, Trump hinted at the political realities behind his action. “I could do the wall over a longer period of time,” he said. “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

Even if his emergency declaration withstands scrutiny, Trump is still billions of dollars short of the overall funding needed to build the wall as he promised in 2016. After two years of effort, Trump has not added any new border mileage; all of the construction so far has gone to replacing and repairing existing structures. Ground is expected to be broken in South Texas soon on the first new mileage.

Trump’s vision for the wall already has been substantially scaled down since his campaign for the White House, when it was to be built of concrete and span the length of the 1,900-mile border and be paid for by Mexico. Now, he’s looking to build “steel slats” along about half of the 1,900-mile stretch, relying on natural barriers for the rest. Previous administrations constructed over 650 miles of barriers.

The White House said Trump would not try to redirect federal disaster aid to the wall, a proposal they had considered but rejected over fears of a political blowback.

Some Republicans warn that future Democratic presidents could use his precedent to force spending on their own priorities, like gun control. GOP critics included Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who said emergency declarations are for “major natural disasters or catastrophic events” and said its use would be of “dubious constitutionality.”

Trump argued that his immediate three predecessors had made emergency declarations, though the presidents he cited did not use emergency powers to pay for projects that Congress wouldn’t support.

Congressional aides say there is $21 billion for military construction that Trump could tap, but by law it must be used to support U.S. armed forces. The Defense Department declined to provide details on available money.

The declaration caps a tumultuous two months of negotiating and political warfare in the nation’s capital, with consequences likely to last through next year’s campaign.

Trump sparked a shutdown before Christmas after Democrats snubbed his $5.7 billion demand for the wall. The closure denied paychecks to 800,000 federal workers, hurt contractors and people reliant on government services and was loathed by the public.

With polls showing the public blamed him and GOP lawmakers, Trump folded on Jan. 25 without getting any of the wall funds. His capitulation was a political fiasco for Republicans and handed Pelosi a victory less than a month after Democrats took over the House and confronted Trump with a formidable rival for power.

—

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Padmananda Rama, Andrew Taylor, Deb Riechmann, Colleen Long, Lolita Baldor and Matthew Daly contributed.

Trump’s Latest Power Grab Triggers Calls for Impeachment

While Democrats are preparing to propose a joint resolution challenging President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration in order to obtain funding for a border wall, one legal scholar is among those arguing  the time has come to pursue a far more direct and effective method of combating the president’s lawlessness: impeachment.

With Trump’s national emergency declaration [issued] Friday morning, international law professor Francis Boyle said there is no time to lose.

“This should be initiated immediately,” said Boyle. “All you need is one brave member of the U.S. House of Representatives to meaningfully assert that body’s Power of the Purse. Trump’s indications that he will override that legislative power and the seeming acquiescence by some Democrats is illegitimate and dangerous and subverts a fundamental premise of the Constitution.

Boyle—who worked closely with former Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas) to introduce a resolution to impeach President George H.W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors after he initiated the first Gulf War—said Congress has a solid case for bringing charges against Trump over his violation of the U.S. Constitution:

A Bill of Impeachment could consist of articles including for (1) violating Article 1, Section 7 of the United States Constitution: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives…” (2) Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law…” (3) It also violates the Federal Anti-Deficiency Statute.

With Trump preparing to unilaterally take control of government funds by declaring a national emergency, Boyle said, lawmakers’ “most direct remedy is impeachment.”

Journalist John Nichols, who has advocated for impeachment as “the cure for a constitutional crisis,” was among those who agreed with Boyle on social media, arguing that the U.S. is indeed in a state of national emergency as Trump has claimed—just not an emergency that will be fixed with a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.

I agree with President Trump that there is a national emergency. We just have different responses to what we deem to be a crisis.

He favors a wall.

I favor impeachment.

— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) February 15, 2019

Declaring a national emergency over nothing is also a despicable act of unconstitutional power grabbing. #ImpeachTrump https://t.co/3JFqBuXcuU

— AlanB_1973 (@alanb_1973) February 15, 2019

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and advocate for impeachment, wrote on Twitter Thursday evening that looking back at the Trump administration, future generations will likely be baffled if lawmakers fail to impeach the president.

Honestly, what’s it going to say to us and future generations if we DON’T impeach Trump?

— Peter Gleick (@PeterGleick) February 14, 2019

Jesus Christ’s Lesson for the 21st Century

The biblical story of the good Samaritan is one that Tom Catena not only knows well, but strives to live by. A devout Catholic and Ivy League-educated doctor, Catena realized early on that he would dedicate his time on earth to helping those in need, though he couldn’t have predicted the heroic path his life would take.

In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Catena tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer how he ended up searching for and finding meaning as well as love in an African war zone. “I went [to the Nuba Mountains] as a [medical] missionary,” he tells Scheer. “The way I look at things is, I want to go somewhere where whatever abilities I have can be used to the most effect. … This is a very remote place with nearly no health care at all.”

Catena, the subject of Kenneth Carlson’s film, “The Heart of Nuba,” is the only doctor in a region in Sudan with a population of 750,000. There, despite facing bombings by the authoritarian government at war with rebels in the region, the American doctor works relentlessly to treat patients in a hospital he helped establish. But his ultimate goal has not been solely to practice medicine, but to train locals in the field so they will be able to care for their community when he’s gone.

Not that Catena plans to leave any time soon. Not only does the medical missionary say he “find[s] great fulfillment in [the] work” he does there, he’s become a part of the community in a number of ways, most recently through his marriage to a local nurse. Catena has also found spiritual meaning in his work and holds that religion should always be “countercultural,” blueprints for which can be found in the lives of Jesus Christ and St. Francis of Assisi. Acknowledging that there is objectively a lot of harm that religion has done throughout history, Catena tells Scheer he also thinks religions such as Catholicism “can be used for such a great force for good,” a goal he hopes to achieve with his own missionary work.

Listen to Catena and Scheer discuss faith and service in the face of great adversity, as well as heart-wrenching scenes the doctor has witnessed in the Nuba Mountains. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.

Robert Scheer: Hi, welcome to another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests, I hasten to say. And in this case, it’s Dr. Tom, as he’s known in the Nuba Mountains in the southern part of Sudan. Tom Catena, to be formal about it, grew up in upstate New York in the small town of Amsterdam, near Albany; played football at Brown. And then decided he wanted to be a doctor. He went into the Navy, went to Duke and got his degree and studied, went on a mission to Africa, Kenya, for six years. And then in 2008, ended up in the Nuba Mountains, where he has been running the Mother of Mercy hospital ever since. And a friend of mine, Ken Carlson, made a wonderful movie called “The Heart of Nuba.” And if you watch that movie–and Ken went there to see your work and touch base, and then actually interviewed the dictator–we’ll get to that a little bit–who’s responsible for bombing your hospital, which I thought showed great courage on Ken’s part. But you know, what’s—what are these guys, you’re at Brown, you’re supposed to be a success in life, and you end up devoting yourself to a community, and now you’re actually married to a nurse from the community. And you’ve chosen to make your life there, and it’s really rough. You don’t, you know, have running water; you don’t, I think, have an X-ray machine, at least that’s been described that way. So just tell us, what has this journey been about?

Tom Catena: Well you know, it’s interesting, Bob. I went there as a missionary, medical missionary. And you know, I think for us and the way I look at things is, I want to go somewhere where whatever abilities I have can be used to the most effect. And there’s a guy named Willie Sutton, I don’t know if you ever heard of him, he was a bank robber. And people said hey, Willie, why do you rob banks? And he said, well, that’s where the money is. And that’s kind of my way to look at my job and at medicine. Say, well, why did you go to the Nuba Mountains? I say, well, that’s where the greatest need is. Not to be too superlative, but one of the greatest needs in the world. This is a very remote place with nearly no health care at all. So it’s a very, you know, for a guy who likes medicine and likes doing a huge variety of medicine, it’s a very target-rich environment. So I really enjoy the work, and find great fulfillment in that work.

RS: OK, but come on. For 350 bucks a month [Laughter]—you know, I just love—we did talk the other day, because you spoke in my class at USC. And I must say, this was an incredibly important talk for students to hear. Because they’re going to graduate, and they’re wondering, you know, who’s going to pay off their debt, and was this all worth it, and it’s this terrible job market. And you said two things that come across clearly in the movie. But you said it in the class, and you know, they just—wow. People took it in. And you said, one, if I don’t go back to my hospital, if I don’t work there, that means that these people have a life that is less important than my own. You know, you take seriously this idea that everyone has a soul, everyone’s life is important. And so you know, you don’t go to the suburbs and just—not that those people aren’t important. But you make that decision, which I thought was very powerful. And then you said, you know, you told them—you said you know, at the end of the day—you’re now, what, 54 or something?

TC: Fifty-four, right.

RS: Fifty-four. But you know, so you’re not anywhere near the end of the days. But you know, you said, you know, the toys, the possessions, all that stuff doesn’t really add up. And you said, you know, having made a difference, having made a difference. You know, that’s an idea we have forgotten. And you’re being a bit modest; you’re operating in a region, the Nuba Mountains are in the southern part of Sudan. Pretty vicious dictator who’s been branded by international court as a war criminal. The place gets bombed. And you’re the only doctor, surgeon, for a population of 750,000 people in an area the size of Austria. And you’re making $350 a month, and you’re on 24/7. You’ve had malaria, you’ve been bombed. What keeps you going? This is a long time. You didn’t go there for a month or something, or a mission. You know, you’ve been there since ‘08. You started the hospital.

TC: Right. Yeah, and I’ve been out now for two months, and I’m itching to get back now, Bob. [Laughs] That’s where I feel I belong. You know, I’ll tell you, all the things you said are true. But I think all of us as humans, there’s something built into our DNA which says we are all looking for meaning in life. And I think once you feel you have that, that trumps everything else. When you see things through that lens, you see possessions and the trappings of success in a very different light. And I think pretty much every day—even when I have terrible days in Nuba, when I’m terrified of what’s going to happen, when we have bad patient outcomes—at the end of the day, I can say there’s no other place on earth I’d rather be. And that’s a pretty good place to be when you can say that. The amount of money you take, the amount of money you get, whether you have running water or not, whether you have electricity, whether it’s hot—all those things kind of take a back seat, at least in my worldview. I admit that is, you know, possibly a bit extreme. But I think once you’re in that environment, you see how the people live, and that this is their life also, and you kind of enter into that life. And you really, you truly try to do it so you value others’ lives the same as your own, try to get into that way of thinking. It really does have a way of transforming one’s attitude. You really own that, not to say it to make a bunch of fluff and a bunch of crap, but to say look—and I really, really believe that. And I was asked, you know, I was told by my sponsoring group, no, you got to get out; you know, come out of Nuba for a while, when things calm down you can go back in. And the stark reality was—I’m trying to say this without sounding like I’m boasting—but if I left, along with the sisters, people would have died. You know, wounded would have come, there would have been no one to take care of them, do the operations, and they would have died there on the spot. To me, that was saying well, you come out, potentially spare your life, you’re giving up the lives of all these people. It was a very black-and-white way of looking at that. And I thank God I was able to just kind of hang out and stay there, because I know—I promise you, if I had left at that time, that would have been the biggest regret of my life. I would have really, that thing would have really bothered my conscience. So I’m very happy I stayed on with things. And I’m still alive.

RS: Well, let’s bring God into this. You do pray every morning. You do the rosary, you go to a darkened shed, get yourself together, you say focus your mind, at 5:00, 5:30. Then you have 350 to 400 patients in this hospital. You’re going to do rounds every day. And you’re stretching the limits of medicine. You know, as you say, there are some things you can’t do. You know, in the movie you say a physician—“do no harm”—can you do brain surgery? It’s not the same as taking out an appendix. Can you—you know, what is the procedure, what instruments do you have? You have to read up on things, you have to learn. And you know, it’s an incredible obligation. I must say, one of the powerful things about Ken Carlson’s film, “The Heart of Nubia,” you know, for me, is that for those of us who don’t have religion at the center of our life—and for a number of reasons that’s probably true of a good part of our population. And in part, that’s the responsibility and failure of religion. After all, you’re there for the Catholic Church. And I think your example—I don’t want to gild the lily here too much—is a reminder that religion has also played a positive role.

TC: Of course. Yeah.

RS: But you know, it sounds odds to almost say it. And I do want to address a question that’s come up in my class when we’ve shown the movie, this whole notion of the white man’s burden. You are a white guy. You’re there, and now you’re married to someone from the tribe, a nurse, and you’re committed to that community. But you didn’t go there, you know, in the old measure of the Catholic Church to save pagan babies, and capture the souls, and be gone and in and out, and meanwhile be a cover for foreign powers to grab the oil, which there is in these mountains, and other things. You’ve taken seriously the idea that you’re going to be judged, and you’re going to be judged by how you treat the least among us.

TC: Right.

RS: Right? In terms of their economic—you take that seriously.

TC: Very seriously.

RS: And I find that refreshing. I just have to ask you, why do you have this deep belief? How do you sustain it?

TC: Well you know, I think I was, I’m what’s called a cradle Catholic, so kind of born into the faith. And my family was quite devout growing up. So I had that, all the kind of groundwork was there. I’d say even with that, during my college years it was kind of a spiritual reawakening that was aided by a Protestant campus minister, a guy named Kent Dahlberg, who really helped my faith grow a lot at that time. And I think during this time, I just—I don’t know, I think it’s just a calling. I don’t know if you can say it a different way. It wasn’t, you know, bells and whistles and thunderclaps; it was just kind of a very gradual nudge in that direction. That this, the gospel of Christ speaks to us today. And my great mentor, and this is St. Francis of Assisi, who I see had a very—I don’t want to equate myself with St. Francis; he’s way ahead of me. I mean, but he had a very similar life. He was born to a very wealthy merchant in Assisi in Italy. The father wanted him to enter the business—they were cloth merchants—and Francis turned his back on all that. The church at the time was similar to the church of today; it was corrupted. They were, in similar ways, they were tithing with a lot of wealth; they had, you know, they had armies; the lifestyles of the priests and religious were somewhat immoral. So really, a lot of parallels to the church today. And the way Francis approached it, he didn’t attack the church—he was very much a son of the church—but looked at it saying, let’s reform from within. And he actually had a vision, and Christ said, Francis, rebuild my church. And Francis, being a concrete guy like I am, started building, putting, you know, mortar and stone together, and put the church up. It wasn’t until after he realized that what Christ meant was a spiritual rebuilding of the church. And Francis very quietly, by his example, was able to bring people back to the faith. And I’ve said this to many people, a quote attributed to Francis is he apparently said, “Preach always, and sometimes use words.” And I try to always remember that, that the job of a missionary is not to go and beat people over the head. It’s to go and show the love of Christ by what you’re doing. And with time and patience, people will kind of gradually come over and say, what is it about this guy? He’s kind of weird, but there’s something he’s doing that we don’t quite understand–then we can start talking. Very slowly. I mean, the faith is not something—you know, I cannot go and convert somebody. You know, that’s not my role. It’s to show Christ’s love by what I’m doing. God is the one that changes hearts. Everybody has a spark of God in them. I think—you know, maybe it’s presumptuous for me to say that, but I think we’re born with that. Everybody is looking for meaning, and for something higher than this current, you know, the life we live.

RS: Right. And the reason you’re so refreshing—and by the way, the current pope, after all, has evoked St. Francis as the ideal—but he’s functioning in a church that has been marked by deep corruption, exploitation, contradictions. Yes, concern for the poor, but go along with the wealthy. And he’s tried to readjust that, so as opposed to some other pope that might be in there now, you actually probably have the backing of the church. And you seem to have had a bishop locally who was supportive. But I do want to, you know, address this model thing. Because one of the things that you are a model for is, you know, you mentioned Jesus Christ—you’re the Christ, not of the prosperity gospel; you’re the Christ of the good Samaritan. You’re saying the guy at the side of the road has been beaten and is naked, and you’re going to put him on your donkey, you’re going to take him to the hotel, you’re going to make sure—and you’re going to check whether there was a delivery. This is not just a statement. You tell him you’re going to come back on your trip and make sure he was taken care of. Well, most of us fail that test right now when we see homeless people, you know, two blocks from where we are in prosperous San Francisco. And I want to mention this white man’s burden, because when we first showed the movie “The Heart of Nuba” in our class, there were people who raised that. But I noticed some other people, and it included some people from Africa, young black students in our school, they mentioned another context. Africa was messed up by white people. The white man’s burden is real because, after all, it was white people who did slavery; it was white people who drew the lines of what are nation states. And a lot of this rivalry that people get caught in now is over resources and over power, and foreign interference. After all, the people bombing your hospital are flying very high-tech planes that they’ve obtained from Russia, and the U.S. has sort of looked the other way at times. I mean, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who went to see you, actually made that point; the Obama administration kind of didn’t want to trouble it. And in the movie, you’re very strong in condemning human rights organizations and international organizations. You say, why don’t they care about these people? Are these not high-profile victims? Right? Tell us a little bit about that.

TC: This idea of the white man’s burden, ah, I find it somewhat interesting. It’s not, it’s like the place where I work is not closed to other people. [Laughs] I mean, if some non-white person wants to come and help, he’s more than, he or she is more than welcome. I don’t see it as so much of a race issue as being more of an economic and, you know. For now, though, the white people in general have more power, more money, whatever. So when you have that, you have more influence. I think there is a responsibility for people with power to speak out. When there are human rights abuses, they have an obligation to speak out. What we’ve found is that, we were in rebel-held territory, yet inside—you talk about rebels, but these are people living there. And a lot of these international organizations were unwilling to come and help because they didn’t want to violate the sovereignty of Sudan. Which is, I understand the concept, but by not violating the sovereignty of a government which have been called “serial genocidaires,” you are making the people suffer even more. So why not just do the right thing? Say look, we understand you’re a sovereign nation, but these are innocent people suffering, and we’re going to come and we’re going to help these people. Be transparent about it, you’ll know about it, but we—you know, we don’t care, we’re going to come and help people, regardless of what you think. What’s, I don’t see anything wrong with that. I think that should be the model that countries use. I understand there are political ramifications, but sometimes you just have to do the right thing and forget about everything else.

RS: Well, and you’re doing the right thing actually drew attention to the plight of these people when the rest of the world–and we can be really clear about it—every aid organization had pulled out. That’s why you’re the only doctor. It wasn’t like you wanted to be the only doctor. And as a result of your being there, and people like Ken Carlson and Nick Kristof; you know, Ken making his movie, Nick Kristof went to visit you, he wrote very powerfully in the New York Times about it. He actually, one of the great things about your effort there is you are open to Muslims and Christians and people who practice indigenous religion, or no religion. You’re quite open in this regard. And he quotes a leading Muslim figure in saying, Dr. Tom is Jesus Christ! [Laughter] And Nicholas Kristof said, wait, wait, that’s a little far. [Laughter] And then this Muslim leader says, well, in healing the sick, caring for the poor, you know, righting wrongs, and so forth. And Nick Kristof ends—I mean, he was obviously moved by his visit, and he actually engaged in a public appeal on his blog for funds to support this operation. And he said, this is the antidote to the corruption, basically, he said, of our conservative so-called political use of religion. This is really doing it, being there. When Ken Carlson, who had been a neighbor of mine, went to make this movie, I said, are you out of—are you crazy? You’re going to get killed. And then, as a result of making this movie and showing it to people and so forth, he got an interview with the dictator that is bombing your hospital.

TC: Yeah.

RS: Can you tell us about that? And actually, there’s been positive news; there’s been a cease fire. So bring us up to date.

TC: Ken’s an incredible human being, as you know very well. He’s got more energy than a thousand people put together. You know, it takes a heck of a lot of courage to fly into the, to fly into Khartoum and go and meet this guy, to meet Bashir.

RS: Well, first of all, bring us up to date. First thing that took a lot of courage was he flew in to meet you.

TC: Right. We’re in rebel-held territory, so we’re there against the will of the government. We’re not there—in a sense, we’re not there legally, with the good grace of the government. So if you got to fly into—when Ken flew in, he had to fly into two different airstrips in South Sudan. South Sudan, at the time, was in civil war. As we were, but they were in a separate civil war in South Sudan. So when the plane opened, Ken starts taking pictures. And someone took offense at that and points a gun at him. And Ken got him talked down, and they kind of made peace. And the pilot said, you’re lucky, because like literally a week before then, they took 24 people off a plane and killed all of them. This part of the world is very violent. They don’t follow the rules. Kind of when you’re there, you realize all the rules you learned about growing up—like, that stuff doesn’t apply there. Your life is kind of the same as everybody else’s, you know. I remember one time we were being bombed, and I thought, what are they doing? Don’t they realize there are people down here? And it’s this realization that you’re kind of with everybody else, you know? So I think Ken got that realization. And he was able to talk these guys down, and came up, and then we had to go and pick him up, and it was an eight-hour drive up to the hospital. We’re very remote. So when Ken went to interview Bashir, he flew straight into Khartoum, didn’t pass the Nuba Mountains. But I think the risk he took was that he had been in Nuba on two separate occasions; the Khartoum government knew he was there; and he was there basically illegally.

RS: And they’d seen his movie.

TC: They’d seen his movie. Which is inflammatory against the Khartoum regime. This is not a government–

RS: Well, it calls him “genocidal dictator.”

TC: Exactly. And I think Ken’s movie made no bones about the fact that this is a genocidal regime. So you’re in a country which routinely imprisons, tortures, and kills people that speak out against it. There’s no freedom of any type. And Ken is there interviewing this guy. So I think it took incredible courage for him to show up in the mouth of the beast and do the interview. And it was shocking for me, because Ken was–he said he was going, and he said at first, he said they wanted me to come. I’m like, you know, there’s no way I’m going up there. He said, no, they’ll even send a helicopter down to the Nuba Mountains to pick you up. I thought, these people are absolutely crazy. I said, you know, they’ll make sure this thing is going to get shot down when we get up there. But he ended up interviewing Bashir. And it was, it was very chilling for me, for Ken to do the interview. He was sending pictures—

RS: Explain who Bashir is.

TC: So Omar Hassan al-Bashir is the president of Sudan. He’s been in power since 1989, so he’s been in power for 30 years. He’s been indicted by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was for the war, civil war in Darfur. But that was just one incident. Whatever he’s accused of in Darfur, the same pattern has happened in the Nuba Mountains on separate occasions. He’s still in power, there are protests now in Khartoum against his regime. They’ve been going on for the past six weeks, and still there’s been no conclusion to all that. Both Bashir and his National Congress Party are not people that you want to associate with, or be in their clutches. So really, Ken took a big risk by going up there.

RS: You live in a situation where you’re jumping into foxholes, and the whole population is running out of the hospital and jumping into foxholes when planes go over, because they quite often are there to bomb civilians. And your own home was bombed.

TC: Right. We’ve got, I mean, the hospital—we have, I don’t know, 30 or 40 foxholes on the property. Every homestead has a foxhole. Where I live with my wife, we have two foxholes that are ready. So the planes come over, you dive in those things. So everybody’s tuned into this. You know, I think when the hospital was bombed, there was a bit of a debate whether to speak out and say much. And looking back at that, we waited too long—we spoke out immediately, but in a sense we waited too long, because we should have been speaking out more vociferously before then. Because dictators like Bashir and regimes like his like to operate in a vacuum. So the more people speak out, the more these atrocities are known, the more difficult it is for them to continue on with things. So I, in the end, I mean, in summation of all this, I think it’s the right thing to do to always make–even if the international community doesn’t do much at the time, at least you’ve spoken out, and there are, people are aware it’s more difficult for these people to do it again.

RS: So we’re going to take a quick break so stations can identify themselves. And we’ll be right back with Dr. Tom, Dr. Tom Catena, who has been in the Nuba Mountains working as the only doctor for 750,000 people. It’s an incredible story. And is going back—what, in a matter of days, or—?

TC: I’ll be back in a few weeks.

RS: Few weeks.

TC: Yeah, in about two or three weeks I’ll be back in action.

RS: OK, and hopefully people will see the movie. [omission for station break] We’re back with Dr. Tom Catena. The movie that I’m telling people they should see, if they get hold of it, is “The Heart of Nuba.” And it describes—what I love about your story is this was not a photo op, OK? This is not some movie person or star saying I’m going to pay attention to poor people. This is a guy who, you know, successful doctor, graduate of Brown and Duke University and so forth. You’re now a member of the community. You’re married to a woman who became a nurse, who’s from the local tribe. And this is your life. And so you, it’s not just that you make the statement, “If I leave here, I’m saying my life is more important than these people because I’m their only doctor”—you’re now saying, I am these people.

TC: Well, Ken always tells me that I married up, and I think he’s right. [Laughs] You can say what you want about me; my wife’s an incredible person. What I love about the whole process we went through with our courtship and all this kind of stuff, it was all strange and interesting, but the family treated me as they would treat any of the Nuba. Which I think is the greatest compliment they could have given me. In other words, they didn’t look at me and reject me as an outsider—that was one option—or they didn’t see me as, you know, the rich guy from America so they can take advantage of me. They treated me like anybody else. I had to pass through all their rites of passage in order to marry their sister and their daughter. I had to pay the dowry, like anybody else, but they didn’t—you know, I paid the dowry that kind of any other person would have paid. And had to do all the requirements that they need. You know, marriage is a long process there. I really respect them very much for doing that, that they treated me as an equal. And I think in the end, I think that’s what everybody wants. I think everybody, whether you’re denigrated or put on a pedestal, you just want to be treated as an equal, as the same as anybody else, so we can just kind of interact on a normal level. I’m very happy with the way the family’s treated me.

RS: Well, and what Ken Carlson’s movie, “The Heart of Nuba,” gets across, and you’re the center of it, is the complexity of the local culture. I mean, this word “primitive,” you know, when we talk about economy, does not—this is a very complex, longstanding culture. And also one that is quite open to different traditional religions, and it’s a caring culture. Not to glorify poverty; these people live under a lot of hardship and drought and so forth. And people should be clear, this—your mission is to have the new Dr. Toms be from the tribe, be from the area, right?

TC: Right. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

RS: And so you should describe that a little bit. Because this is not the old missionary thing—I’m going to go in and save souls, and goodbye and good luck, and grab your oil and start wars and everything. Because there has been a dark side to missionary activity also.

TC: Right. You know, I think some of that, Bob, I think missionaries have learned over the centuries how to do it better. So you bring up the local church, and in this case the local church includes the hospital; [we’re] a church hospital. But as an extension of that, from the day we started there—both myself and Sister Angelina, who was the head nurse who had been with us for 10 years, who just left to do another job—our goal has been to develop the local people. And over the course of 11 years, we’ve gotten to the point where we have four local people in medical school, three men and one woman, and we have one more that’s going this summer. So we’ll have five people in medical school in a few months; the first one will finish his course in about a year. And the goal is to get all the different levels of people trained so they can take over any of the hospital in a few years. And not only that, but they can be the ones to now develop a health system within the Nuba Mountains. They’re from the place, they’re in the best place to know what the needs are, they have all the local knowledge, all the local languages. I think it’s just the best way to do it. Let me just kind of do my thing, do what I can do to bring them up to a certain level, and then kind of turn them loose and let them fly on their own. And I think that’s kind of the model we’re trying to perpetuate, not only in the Nuba Mountains, but hopefully through Aurora, in other parts.

RS: So let me ask you about this, because for my sensibility, the single most moving scene in Ken Carlson’s movie was your involvement with the leper colony. And traditionally, the leper, this illness has been made to make people nonhuman, or untouchable, in the most extreme, throughout the world. You know, and you’re there with people embracing them, you’re establishing your common humanity. So tell us about that.

TC: Well you know, leprosy is, it’s a fascinating disease. And it’s an Old World disease, it’s been around forever. It’s so fascinating, because you look back in Leviticus in the Old Testament, and you read about leprosy. They talk about how to treat it, you know, how to treat leprosy; what do you do with lepers, you have to take them and separate them, and lepers had to walk around with either a bell or a clapper, and announce themselves, and say “unclean, unclean” so that people would stay away from them. They had to live in their own separate colonies. It’s very much a part of our history. And you know, when you realize that this is a disease that’s transmitted by respiratory droplets, the same way the common cold is transmitted. But to get it, you need prolonged, close contact with people. So you can’t get it from touching them or embracing them, or just kind of, you know, joking around with them. That won’t do it. So you know, I think the fear factor’s not there; in the old days, there was this huge fear that it could be spread easily. And that was what caused such revulsion in people. I think, if I may again draw on my favorite saint, St. Francis was in a time and a culture where lepers were reviled. You know, some of the thinking was they were being punished by God, therefore it was their fault that they had leprosy. So imagine not only being sick and disfigured and losing your hands, but you also feel that you’ve internalized this, feel like you’re being punished for having this infectious disease. But Francis was able to cross that, and he was able to overcome his own revulsion against leprosy. And he embraced, he encountered a leper on the road, and the leper was ringing his bell, saying “unclean.” And Francis kind of came up to the guy and embraced him. And to do that at that time was really something revolutionary. You know, I try to take those lessons from—this was 800 years ago—and bring it to modern day, and how can we do that today, and interact that way.

RS: So let’s take that lesson from 800 years ago, and maybe wrap this up with that. Because maybe that’s the really critical lesson. It’s making people the other, and then when you put religion on it, then God is siding with you against the other. This is the basis of all of our religious wars. And so religion has not most often been a unifying force; it’s been a divisive force. And then invoking an almighty with the idea, yes, he wants them to suffer. But this notion of Francis, saint, the original, and the leper, that, you know, embracing him, really applies to the intolerance we do see in the modern period coming out of religion. As a profoundly religious person, you have to admit, religion has caused a great deal of trouble in our modern world.

TC: Yeah. I mean, I think you can’t look at it objectively and say otherwise. But I think it can be used for such a great force for good. You know, the thing is, a lot of things are not publicized. Where I’m working, what I see is sisters from Uganda and from Mexico doing such incredible work that nobody will ever know about. So what I see, usually, 99.99 percent of the time, is the opposite effect. I see the force that religion has, that drives people to do works of great compassion and mercy. I look at it, and I see it from a different angle from where we are. And that’s been my experience throughout my time in Africa, for 19 years.

RS: The reason I wanted to do this podcast, I’m obviously very impressed with you and I was very much influenced by the movie about what you’ve done. But I saw the impact you had on our students. They are living in a world now where there’s a general feeling of cynicism about religion, and we haven’t come up with the alternative way of having a center of human concern, human rights. And I get back to this regard to the homeless population, which we have an incredible—I mean, we’re in San Francisco right now doing this recording, and you have encampments—and we have rain right now out there. And you know, encampments of people that are suffering, right tonight, you know, getting no care, and so forth. Now, the tale of the good Samaritan from Luke, OK. If you really believe in that religion, you’re supposed to poke your head into that tent. You’re supposed to come to the assistance, find out if they’re alive or dead, who are these people, right. That’s the challenge, not just—now, you’ve taken that challenge in the Nuba Mountains. It’s a challenge on Geary, you know? It’s a challenge on Mission Street, OK. It takes the best of the religion, the concern for the other, and it makes it front and center. Where do you stand on this. And when I watch you—after all, we’re not talking, I got to remind people as we close, this guy’s going back to a life—and it’s a great life. There’s music, there are festivals, the people love each other, they care about each other. You know, in the leper colony, even, which is the most difficult, there is affection, there is humor, there is love. So we’re not talking about, oh, go help the wretched, and that the wretched will always be wretched—no. We’re talking about a common humanity. That’s, I think, the strength of your message, that you are not different than these people, you are involved in training them to have your skill set. I want people to understand, this is not a guilt trip. You know, at least not for me. It is a role model of the good life. That’s what you told my students. Maybe you could repeat that.

TC: I can’t remember what I said, to be honest with you, Bob. But I think if you want any kind of happiness or joy in this life, the path to that is to live a life of service. If you want the good life, for me, the good life is not having a car collection; the good life is living a life of service. By doing that, you’ll have such incredible meaning that everything else will pale in comparison. And I think each person has to determine for himself or herself what that is. You know, for me it plays out working in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan; for somebody else, it’s doing something totally different. And I think each of us has to find more or less our own path, you know, what that leads to.

RS: You’re basically saying, quite apart from whether you’re going to get an eternal life from this, or whether you’re going to be rewarded, you’re actually saying in this secular world—in the secular world, this is the most satisfying way to live.

TC: Yes, absolutely.

RS: That’s a powerful message, you know.

TC: Yeah. [Laughs]

RS: No, because it’s not—oh, yeah, I’ll wear the hair shirt and I’ll suffer [Laughter], but you know, the Almighty will rise me up and I’ll you know, blah blah, have the good life. No. You’re saying the quality of life, and that’s what I love about that movie “The Heart of Nuba,” it’s a celebration of this life. This life. Not do this and you’ll get the reward. And I think that’s a message that we’ve lost. The common humanity, the—and you know, again, the tale of the Good Samaritan. You are judged by how you treat the other. And that is the Syrian refugee who’s trying to take his children or her children into Germany. It is the refugee from Central America or from Mexico who are trying to escape conditions or find a job or reunite a family. That’s really the powerful message here.

TC: Religion should be countercultural; it should not be cultural. So you find yourself floating with the culture and being too comfortable—and I’m not saying miserable, I’m saying too comfortable–there’s something wrong. Religion is supposed to be countercultural. Christ was countercultural. St. Francis was countercultural. So if we look at the great spiritual leaders, they were not guys that went along with the flow. They were always a bit “off.” Not “off” like crazy, but really had the—were doing what they were supposed to do, doing the right things. But it was against the grain of society. You know, I always have to remember that. If you’re getting, I don’t want to say too popular, but we’re supposed to be a little bit kind of “off,” if I can use that word.

RS: That’s a good point on which to end it, because what you mean by being “off” is not being so self-centered, not being cynical about other people, trusting. And caring. I mean, you are delivering life. And therefore, that baby, we see you in the film—you want that baby not to be bombed, and you want that baby to grow up as healthy as is possible. And throughout it all, the main thing is you’re going to get up tomorrow and do it again. Dr. Tom, you know, you are, I think, a great role model. I want to thank you for doing this.

TC: Yeah. Thank you, Bob.

RS: That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our engineers at KCRW are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. Our producers are Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Here at Sports Byline, Darren Peck has been a great host and engineer. And see you next week with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.