Chris Hedges's Blog, page 368

Kamala Harris Confronts Her Past as Prosecutor Ahead of 2020

WASHINGTON—As she nears a decision on whether to seek the presidency, Sen. Kamala Harris is taking on what could be a hurdle in a Democratic primary: her past as a prosecutor.

In her memoir published Tuesday, the California Democrat describes herself as a “progressive prosecutor” and says it’s a “false choice” to decide between supporting the police and advocating for greater scrutiny of law enforcement. The argument is aimed at liberal critics of her record who argue she was sometimes too quick to side with the police and too slow to adopt sentencing reforms.

“I know that most police officers deserve to be proud of their public service and commended for the way they do their jobs,” Harris writes in “The Truths We Hold.” ″I know how difficult and dangerous the job is, day in and day out, and I know how hard it is for the officers’ families, who have to wonder if the person they love will be coming home at the end of each shift.”

But, she continues, “I also know this: it is a false choice to suggest you must either be for the police or for police accountability. I am for both. Most people I know are for both. Let’s speak some truth about that, too.”

After high-profile fatal shootings involving police officers and unarmed people of color, the criminal justice system’s treatment of minorities is a top issue among Democratic voters. The passage suggests Harris is aware that her seven years as the district attorney in San Francisco, followed by six years as California’s attorney general, is something she will have to explain and signals how she may frame her law enforcement career if she decides to run for the White House.

“It’s a presidential campaign, and every aspect of a candidate’s record is going to be scrutinized and they’re going to have to answer for it,” said Mo Elleithee, a longtime Democratic operative who leads Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service. “She knows that this is something that’s heading her way and a good candidate is one who doesn’t wait for it to hit them. A good candidate is someone who addresses it proactively, and she appears to be doing that.”

Beyond the book, Harris supported legislation that passed the Senate late last year and overhauls the criminal justice system, especially when it comes to sentencing rules.

In the book, Harris recounts an instance when she was an intern at the Alameda County district attorney’s office and an innocent bystander was one of many people arrested during a drug raid. Harris said she “begged” and “pleaded” on a late Friday afternoon for a judge to hear the case so the woman could avoid spending the weekend in jail.

Kate Chatfield, the policy director of the California-based criminal justice reform group Re:store Justice, said Harris did do “some good” when she was in law enforcement, but that it was “incumbent on the public to hold her accountable for the ways in which she either didn’t do enough or actually did some harm.”

“When the conversation shifts, one should be expected to be questioned about those choices,” Chatfield said, noting among other issues Harris’s advocacy for tougher truancy laws.

By addressing policing in the book, Harris is taking on an issue that confronted Democrats and some Republicans in 2016. Democrat Hillary Clinton was criticized for her husband’s role in passing the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which created stricter penalties for drug offenders and funneled billions of dollars toward more police and new prisons.

The issue is likely to be the subject of fierce debate in 2020 as well and could expose divisions among the wide field of candidates — presenting hurdles for some and opportunity for others.

Former Vice President Joe Biden was the head of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee when the 1994 crime bill — which is now criticized as having helped create an era of mass incarceration — was passed and signed into law, which could be an obstacle for him. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker was central to the passage of the Senate’s criminal justice overhaul package and is certain to tout it if he decides to launch a presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is also considering a 2020 bid, often refers to her own prosecutorial past.

The memoir — and the publicity surrounding it — will shift the 2020 campaign spotlight to Harris this week after much of the focus has been on her Senate colleague Elizabeth Warren. Last week, the Massachusetts Democrat became the most prominent person yet to take steps toward a presidential run by forming an exploratory committee. Her weekend trip to the leadoff caucus state of Iowa also generated largely flattering headlines.

Some criminal justice advocates said they were happy the issue would get more attention in 2020.

“When we had the 2016 elections, it was at the height of Ferguson and Baltimore, and we still didn’t have serious engagement with criminal justice reform,” said Phillip Goff, the president of the Center for Policing Equity, referring to the protests that followed the deaths of black men at the hands of police officers in Missouri and Maryland. “My hope is that we require candidates to demonstrate that they know more than the catchphrases of the activists in their bases.”

Surveys underscore the potency of criminal justice issues among Democrats. A February 2018 poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that majorities of Democrats — but far fewer Republicans — think there’s been little progress for African-Americans on criminal justice or policing issues over the past 50 years. The poll showed that 45 percent of Americans, including 62 percent of Democrats and 19 percent of Republicans, thought there had been little to no progress on fair treatment for black Americans by the criminal justice system. Similarly, 46 percent of Americans, including 63 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of Republicans, said there’s been little to no progress for African-Americans on fair treatment by police.

While it’s not yet clear how Harris’ prosecutorial background could affect her primary bid, it could help her if she faces President Donald Trump in the 2020 general election.

“He ran as the law-and-order president,” Elleithee said of Trump. “Being able to go toe-to-toe with him on law and order in a smarter way, I think, is going to be important. Should she win the nomination and does it by navigating this topic well, then I think she would be a strong voice and a force to be reckoned with when it comes to issues of law and order, criminal justice and civil rights as they collide in a general election.”

___

Associated Press writers Hillel Italie in New York and Emily Swanson in Washington contributed to this report.

Drug Ads Surge as U.S. Medical Marketing Hits $30 Billion

Ads for prescription drugs appeared 5 million times in just one year, capping a recent surge in U.S. medical marketing, a new analysis found.

The advertisements for various medicines showed up on TV, newspapers, online sites and elsewhere in 2016. Their numbers soared over 20 years as part of broad health industry efforts to promote drugs, devices, lab tests and even hospitals.

The researchers estimated that medical marketing reached $30 billion in 2016, up from $18 billion in 1997. Spending on consumer-focused ads climbed fastest. But marketing to doctors and other health professionals still grabbed the biggest share with the bulk of it paying for free drug samples.

“Marketing drives more treatments, more testing” that patients don’t always need, said Dr. Steven Woloshin, a Dartmouth College health policy expert. Woloshin wrote the report with his wife, Dr. Lisa Schwartz, both longtime critics of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. She died in November.

They analyzed marketing data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, other federal and state agencies, private companies and medical research. The report covers 1997, when the FDA eased rules for TV ads, through 2016. Although some types of spending waxed and waned during those years, Woloshin said the upward trend is concerning and suggests consumers need to be increasingly skeptical about marketing claims.

The report was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. All marketing spending was adjusted to 2016 dollars.

A journal editorial notes that medical marketing has survived legal challenges and “needs no apologist.” It has helped make patients more informed consumers and it’s up to doctors to help their patients understand product claims, although some physicians need more education themselves about deceptive marketing, the editorial suggests.

Consumer-Focused Marketing

Spending on direct-to-consumer marketing climbed fastest, from $2 billion or 12 percent of total marketing to almost $10 billion and one-third of overall spending. Only the U.S. and New Zealand allow prescription drug advertising, which in the U.S. went from just over $1 billion and 79,000 ads to $6 billion and 5 million ads in 2016.

The category also includes TV ads and other marketing for hospitals, which skyrocketed to almost $3 billion.

Spending on disease-awareness ads more than doubled, to $430 million spent on 401 campaigns. Woloshin said this was among the most disturbing trends. Drug names aren’t mentioned, but manufacturers often use these to “sell” diseases that can be treated by costly new drugs, he said.

Doctor-Focused Marketing

Marketing aimed at doctors, nurses and other health professionals went from $16 billion to $20 billion, about two-thirds of all spending. About $12 billion went for free drug samples, although that spending has dropped recently. Spending on personal pitches from drug company sales reps was mostly unchanged at $5 billion after an early increase.

The government’s Open Payments  lists doctors with financial ties to drug and medical device makers and in 2022 it will expand to include physician assistants and nurses with advanced training.

Regulatory Oversight

Federal law says advertising must be truthful, not deceptive and backed by scientific evidence. The FDA oversees prescription drug and device advertising; the Federal Trade Commission regulates over-the-counter products. The analysis suggests that the surge in medical marketing has led to spotty oversight by both agencies. It notes that while company submissions more than doubled over the two decades, reaching nearly 100,000, FDA violation letters for misleading drug marketing dropped from 156 to 11. That could mean drug companies are doing a better job of self-policing but Woloshin said it’s more likely regulators are overwhelmed by the volume and can’t keep up.

Still, the report notes an increase in FDA violation letters about marketing of unapproved genetic tests. And off-label or deceptive marketing practices have resulted in $11 billion in fines and 103 settlements between drug companies and federal and state regulators since 1997.

What Doctors Say

The American Medical Association in 2015 supported banning direct-to-consumer ads for prescription drugs and says doctors should not accept medical industry payments or gifts intended to influence prescribing habits. “The vast majority of physicians prescribe drugs and treatments they believe are in the best interest of their patients,” the AMA said in a response to the new analysis.

What Industry Says

Holly Campbell, spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, defended industry marketing practices and said direct-to-consumer ads can make patients better informed about their health and treatment options. She said these ads also “increase awareness of the benefits and risks of new medicines and encourage appropriate use of medicines.”

___

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

How the Shutdown Is Affecting Air Travelers

DALLAS—The partial government shutdown is starting to affect air travel.

Over the weekend, some airports had long lines at checkpoints, apparently caused by a rising number of security officers calling in sick as they face the prospect of missing their first paycheck this week.

Safety inspectors aren’t even on the job. A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said Monday that inspectors are being called back to work on a case-by-case basis, with a priority put on inspecting airline fleets.

So far, the most visible signs of the shutdown — in its 18th day Tuesday — include the closure of some government buildings and national parks and trash overflowing bins on the National Mall in front of the Capitol.

By increasingly affecting air travel, however, the pain will be felt more widely.

Here are some common questions about the shutdown’s impact on airports and travel, along with the answers:

Who Is Supposed to Keep Working?

About 10,000 air traffic controllers who work for the Federal Aviation Administration, about 51,000 Transportation Security Administration officers, and an undisclosed number of federal air marshals have been told to keep reporting to work because they are deemed essential. Government employees have always been paid after past shutdowns ended, and that is the widespread expectation this time too.

Are They Showing Up?

TSA acknowledges that more screeners are calling in sick at some airports, including Dallas-Fort Worth International. It gave few numbers but issued a statement Friday saying that more have been missing work since the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. The TSA said the effect was “minimal.”

Then over the weekend, travelers reported longer checkpoint lines at some airports, including LaGuardia in New York.

On Monday, TSA tweeted that agents screened 2.22 million passengers nationwide on Sunday, which it called a “historically busy day due to holiday travel.” TSA said only about 220,000 travelers waited at least 15 minutes at checkpoints, while 0.2 percent — fewer than 5,000 — waited at least 30 minutes.

How Will TSA Respong to No-Shows?

Airport screeners start around $24,000 and most earn between $26,000 and $35,000 a year, according to TSA. That is far less than many other government employees, making them more vulnerable if they don’t get paid.

TSA spokesman Jim Gregory said officials are managing. “If we don’t have appropriations by midweek or so, (officers) will miss their first paycheck. That’s obviously where it becomes more difficult,” he said.

Gregory said the agency has a team of officers who can go to airports facing a shortage, a tactic developed in case natural disasters prevented screeners from getting to work.

What About Traffic Controllers?

About 1,900 air traffic controllers — nearly one in every five — are eligible to retire right now.

“I don’t know how long they’re going to stay on the job if they are not getting a paycheck,” said Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

There is an even larger group of recently hired trainees and apprentices, and Rinaldi said a long shutdown could cause some of them to take other jobs.

Will the Shutdown Lead to Flight Delays?

Rinaldi said safety is not being compromised but that capacity to manage traffic could be reduced if the shutdown worsens an existing shortage of controllers. That could lead to flight delays, he said. Others are not so sure.

“It would have to get pretty bad before the government said (to airlines), ‘Hey, start scaling back your plans for service,'” said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst. “You could see that in a worst-case scenario.”

An early test of the air traffic system could come around the Feb. 3 Super Bowl in Atlanta, when an influx of corporate jets and private planes will further crowd the sky above the nation’s busiest airport. Planning for handling that traffic has been put on hold, Rinaldi said.

What About Safety?

The largest pilots’ union wrote to President Donald Trump last week urging a quick end to the shutdown, which it said was threatening the safety of the nation’s airspace.

On Tuesday, the new Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said the Trump administration hasn’t answered questions about how the shutdown is affecting the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to screen passengers heading to the U.S. and to assess security at foreign airports.

Patrick O’Carroll, executive director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said there has been no deterioration of safety, no reductions in coverage, and no reports of air marshals — armed, undercover officers on flights — calling in sick.

Who Is Inspecting Planes?

Federal aviation safety inspectors are not deemed essential government employees; they have been furloughed.

FAA spokesman Gregory Martin said the agency is recalling inspectors for certain jobs including assignments at the airlines, as in previous shutdowns.

“We’re going to continue to prioritize with the resources that we have,” Martin said. “Our focus is on the commercial air carriers and volumes of people they carry.”

Martin did not say how many inspectors are working or how the number of inspections being done compared with pre-shutdown levels.

Chuck Banks, one of those furloughed inspectors, said colleagues are being called in when an airline needs something, like a plane certified for flight. The routine, normal oversight of operations at airlines and repair shops is not being done, leaving companies to regulate themselves, he said.

“Do you like the fox watching the hen house?” he said. “Every day the government stays shut down, it gets less safe to fly.”

What Other Government Services Are Affected?

The National Transportation Safety Board is delaying accident investigations and hearings. While there have not been any fatal airline crashes, the board has delayed other investigations, including an examination of a Florida highway accident that killed five children on their way to Walt Disney World.

NTSB representatives did not answer phone calls or reply to emails Monday. A recorded message for the public affairs office said nobody would respond until the shutdown ends.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has closed many centers where people apply for Global Entry, a program that lets travelers get expedited clearance into the U.S. It is not clear if any applications are being processed; spokespeople at the agency did not respond for comment.

The Hypocrisy of the ‘Liberal’ Foreign Policy Establishment Knows No Bounds

This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.

If anyone else were president, the “liberals” would be celebrating. After all, pulling American soldiers out of a couple of failing, endless wars seems like a “win” for progressives. Heck, if Obama did it there might be a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. And there should be. The intervention in Syria is increasingly aimless, dangerous and lacks an end state. Afghanistan is an unwinnable war – America’s longest – and about to end in outright military defeat. Getting out now and salvaging so much national blood and treasure ought to be a progressive dream. There’s only one problem: Donald Trump. Specifically, that it was Trump who gave the order to begin the troop withdrawals.

Lost in the haze of their pathological hatred of President Trump, the majority of mainstream liberal pundits and politicians can’t, for the life of them, see the good sense in extracting the troops from a couple Mideast quagmires. That or they can see the positives, but, in their obsessive compulsion to smear the president, choose politics over country. It’s probably a bit of both. That’s how tribally partisan American political discourse has become. And, how reflexively hawkish and interventionist today’s mainstream Democrats now are. Whither the left-wing antiwar movement? Well, except for a few diehards out there, the movement seems to have been buried long ago with George McGovern.

Make no mistake, the Democrats have been tacking to the right on foreign policy and burgeoning their tough-guy-interventionist credentials for decades now. Terrified of being painted as soft or dovish on martial matters, just about all the “serious” baby-boomer Dems proudly co-opted the militarist line and gladly accepted campaign cash from the corporate arms dealers. Think about it, any Democrat with serious future presidential aspirations back in 2002 voted for the Iraq War – Hillary, Joe Biden, even former peace activist John Kerry! And, in spite of the party base now moving to the left, all these big name hawks – along with current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – are still Democratic stalwarts. Heck, some polls list Biden as the party’s 2020 presidential frontrunner.

More disturbing than the inconsistency of these political hacks is the vacuousness of the supposedly liberal media. After Trump’s announcement of troop withdrawals, just about every MSNBC host slammed the president and suddenly sounded more hawkish than the clowns over at Fox News. Take Rachel Maddow. Whatever you think of her politics, she is – undoubtedly – a brilliant woman. Furthermore, unlike most pundits, she knows a little something about foreign policy. Her 2012 book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power was a serious and well-researched critique of executive power and the ongoing failure of the wars on terror. Drift was well reviewed by regular readers and scholars alike.

Enter Donald Trump. Ever since the man won the 2016 election, Maddow’s nightly show has been dominated the hopeless dream of Russia-collusion and a desire for Trump’s subsequent impeachment. Admittedly, Maddow’s anti-Trump rhetoric isn’t completely unfounded – this author, after all, has spent the better part of two years criticizing most of his policies – but her zealousness has clouded her judgment, or worse. Indeed, that Maddow, and her fellow “liberals” at MSNBC have now criticized the troop withdrawals and even paraded a slew of disgraced neoconservatives – like Bill Kristol – on their shows seems final proof of their descent into opportunistic hawkishness.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this new “liberal” hawkishness is the pundits’ regular canonization of Jim Mattis and the other supposed “adults” in the room. For mainstream, Trump-loathing, liberals the only saving grace for this administration was its inclusion of a few trusted, “grown-up” generals in the cabinet. Yet it is a dangerous day, indeed, when the supposedly progressive journalists deify only the military men in the room. Besides, Mattis was no friend to the liberals. Their beloved President Obama previously canned “mad-dog” for his excessive bellicosity towards Iran. Furthermore, Mattis – so praised for both his judgment and ethics – chose an interesting issue for which to finally fall-on-his-sword and resign. U.S. support for the Saudi-led starvation of 85,000 kids in Yemen: Mattis could deal with that. But a modest disengagement from even one endless war in the Middle East: well, the former SECDEF just couldn’t countenance that. Thus, he seems a strange figure for a “progressive” network to deify.

Personally, I’d like to debate a few of the new “Cold Warriors” over at MSNBC or CNN and ask a simple series of questions: what on the ground changed in Syria or Afghanistan that has suddenly convinced you the US must stay put? And, what positivist steps should the military take in those locales, in order to achieve what purpose exactly? Oh, by the way, I’d ask my debate opponents to attempt their answers without uttering the word Trump. The safe money says they couldn’t do it – not by a long shot. Because, you see, these pundits live and die by their hatred of all things Trump and the more times they utter his name the higher go the ratings and the faster the cash piles up. It’s a business model not any sort of display of honest journalism.

There’s a tragic irony here. By the looks of things, so long as Mr. Trump is president, it seems that any real movement for less interventionism in the Greater Middle East may come from a part of the political right – libertarians like Rand Paul along with the president’s die hard base, which is willing to follow him on any policy pronouncement. Paradoxically, these folks may find some common cause with the far left likes of Bernie Sanders and the Ocasio-Cortez crowd, but it seems unlikely that the mainstream left is prepared to lead a new antiwar charge. What with Schumer/Pelosi still in charge, you can forget about it. Given the once powerful left-led Vietnam-era protest movement, today’s Dems seem deficient indeed on foreign policy substance. Odds are they’ll cede this territory, once again, to the GOP.

By taking a stronger interventionist, even militarist, stand than Trump on Syria and Afghanistan, the Democrats are wading into dangerous waters. Maybe, as some say, this president shoots from the hip and has no core policy process or beliefs. Perhaps. Then again, Trump did crush fifteen Republican mainstays in 2015 and shock Hillary – and the world – in 2016. Indeed, he may know just what he’s doing. While the Beltway, congressional-military-industrial complex continues to support ever more fighting and dying around the world, for the most part the American people do not. Trump, in fact, ran on a generally anti-interventionist platform, calling the Iraq War “dumb” and not to be repeated. The president’s sometimes earthy – if coarse – commonsense resonated with a lot of voters, and Hillary’s hawkish establishment record (including her vote for that very same Iraq War) didn’t win her many new supporters.

Liberals have long believed, at least since McGovern’s 1972 trouncing by Richard Nixon, that they could out-hawk the Republican hawks and win over some conservatives. It rarely worked. In fact, Dems have been playing right into bellicose Republican hands for decades. And, if they run a baby-boomer-era hawk in 2020 – say Joe Biden – they’ll be headed for another shocking defeat. The combination of a (mostly, so far) strong economy and practical policy of returning US troops from unpopular wars, could, once again, out weigh this president’s other liabilities.

Foreign policy won’t, by itself, tip a national election. But make no mistake, if the clowns at MSNBC and “liberal” hacks on Capitol Hill keep touting their newfound militarism, they’re likely to emerge from 2020 with not only smeared consciences, but four more years in the opposition.

Danny Sjursen is a US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Copyright 2018 Danny Sjursen

Turkey Slams U.S. Request for Assurances on Syrian Kurds

SHANNON, Ireland—Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the U.S. national security adviser of making “a very serious mistake” Tuesday by demanding that Ankara guarantee the safety of Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria before the U.S. withdraws its troops from the war-torn country.

A strained morning of negotiation in Turkey ended without assurances of protection for forces that fought alongside U.S. troops against the Islamic State group, and indeed brought them fresh new threats from Turkey. The diplomatic setback raised fresh questions about how the U.S. would protect its allies in the fight against IS and about the pace of the drawdown of U.S. forces in Syria.

“John Bolton has made a very serious mistake. We cannot make any concessions in this regard,” Erdogan said Tuesday, just before Bolton left the country with tensions between the NATO allies at new highs. He added that Ankara’s preparations for a new military offensive against what the Turkish leader describes as terror groups in Syria are “to a large extent” complete.

Bolton had insisted that Turkey refrain from conducting any operation unless it was approved by and coordinated with the U.S. Turkey’s presidential spokesman fired back publicly that Turkey would not seek permission from its allies to conduct a military offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters, but was willing to coordinate operations.

A senior administration official said Erdogan’s comments did not reflect President Donald Trump’s understanding of his Dec. 23 conversation with the Turkish leader, days after the U.S. president announced his intent to withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria. Trump “thought he got a commitment from Erdogan” to protect the Kurds, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the official wasn’t authorized to speak on the record.

An official at Tuesday’s meeting between Bolton and senior Turkish officials said presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin stated that Erdogan committed that Turkey would not take offensive action while U.S. forces were there.

Bolton departed Turkey without meeting with Erdogan in an apparent snub by the Turks — the meeting had been expected for days. A spokesman for Bolton said U.S. officials were told Erdogan cited the local election season and a speech to parliament for not meeting with him.

In the more than two-hour meeting with Kalin, Bolton outlined five U.S. principles for the Syria drawdown, including that “the United States opposes any mistreatment of opposition forces who fought with us against ISIS.”

In the high-stakes session in Ankara’s presidential complex, Bolton also rebuked Erdogan’s column in The New York Times, in which the Turkish leader restated his position that the Syrian Defense Forces were members of terrorist groups and criticized the U.S. air campaign against the Islamic State.

An official at the meeting said Bolton told Kalin that Erdogan’s op-ed was “wrong and offensive.”

The official added that the U.S. stuck by Trump’s request that the Kurds who fought with the U.S. not be mistreated, and the Turks stuck by their position that the Kurds “are terrorist groups and they’re free to go after them.”

Trump abruptly announced last month he intended to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, and the U.S. has sent mixed signals over how soon that would be accomplished. Bolton’s trip to the Mideast was aimed at assuring allies it would not be done precipitously.

But Kalin told reporters after talks with Bolton there is no slowdown in the timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Syria. He said U.S. officials have said during their discussions that the withdrawal could take place within “120 days.”

Kalin said talks with Bolton focused on how the U.S. would collect the weapons that were given to Kurdish militia fighting Islamic States as well as the future of U.S. bases in Syria. He said he handed over two dossiers to Bolton — one on Turkish help to Kurdish populations in Iraq and Syria, the other on the Kurdish militias’ “criminal activities and human rights violations.”

A Bolton spokesman, Garrett Marquis, said in a statement that Bolton and Turkish officials “had a productive discussion of the President’s decision to withdraw at a proper pace from Northeast Syria.”

But Erdogan, for his part, said Bolton had “made a very serious mistake. Whoever thinks this way is also mistaken. We cannot make any concession in this regard and those involved in a terror corridor” in Syria would “receive the necessary punishment.”

Trump’s shifting timetable for pulling U.S. troops out of Syria has left allies and other players in the region confused and jockeying for influence over a withdrawal strategy that appeared to be a work in progress.

Trump faced widespread criticism that he was abandoning the Kurds in the face of Turkish threats. Officials said at the time that although many details of the withdrawal had not yet been finalized, they expected American forces to be out by mid-January.

After Bolton announced this week the U.S. pullout would not be as immediate as Trump had initially declared, U.S. allies were still seeking clarification from American diplomats.

Turkey insists its military actions are aimed at Kurdish fighters in Syria — the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units, or YPG — whom it regards as terrorists, and not against the Kurdish people. That has been Ankara longtime position and Turkey has rejected any role for Kurdish fighters in restoring peace to the war-torn region.

The Pentagon said Monday no U.S. troops have withdrawn from Syria yet, but added that there is an “approved framework” for withdrawal.

Bolton maintained there is no fixed timetable for completing the drawdown, but insisted it was not an indefinite commitment to the region. Still, some 200 U.S. troops will remain in the vicinity of al-Tanf, in southern Syria, to counter growing Iranian activity in the region, he said.

___

Associated Press writers Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, Bassem Mroue in Beirut and Robert Burns and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Government Shutdown Won’t Delay Tax Refunds: Trump Official

WASHINGTON—Taxpayers who are owed refunds will be paid on time, despite the government shutdown that has closed many federal agencies, a Trump administration official said Monday as concern mounted over the risk that the payments could be delayed.

The acting director of the White House budget office, Russell Vought, said customary rules will be changed to make the payments possible. He told reporters that an “indefinite appropriation” was available for the refunds, which would go out as normal.

As it dragged through a third week, the partial government shutdown could not have come at a worse time for the Internal Revenue Service. Tax-filing season officially begins Jan. 28, and while those who owe Uncle Sam will still have to pay up by April 15, people who are due to receive money back have worried about whether the closure could postpone their payments.

About three-quarters of taxpayers receive annual refunds, giving them an incentive to file their returns early. Many lower-income people count on refunds as their biggest cash infusion of the year.

The IRS said late Monday that it will recall a large number of furloughed employees to process returns. They will probably work without pay. Under the previous rules, hundreds of billions of dollars in refunds could be delayed because funding would not be available.

Some experts question whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to reverse those earlier policies to allow the government to issue refunds during a shutdown. Vought framed the move as part of President Donald Trump’s goal to make the shutdown “as painless as possible.”

The administration’s announcement came as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled her intention to begin passing individual bills to reopen federal agencies in the coming days, starting with the Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, to ensure Americans receive their refunds.

Some Senate Republicans have been growing increasingly anxious about the extended shutdown and could support such legislation from the Democratic-led House.

With the White House announcement on refunds, “They’re reversing a long-standing legal position,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow and tax expert at the Urban Institute. But, he added, “Who’s going to sue? It would be hard to show damages. … So they might be able to get away with it.”

In 2011, the chief counsel at the IRS concluded that such payments were legally allowed during a shutdown. At the time, the White House Office of Management and Budget, under President Barack Obama, rejected that position and directed the IRS not to pay refunds during a shutdown. But the IRS said Monday in a news release that the OMB had reviewed the issue at the Treasury’s Department’s request and now agrees with the IRS counsel’s position.

The IRS said it will recall a “significant portion” of its roughly 52,000 furloughed employees to work on tax returns. The agency also announced the Jan. 28 date to start processing returns. That’s within the normal timeframe.

“We are committed to ensuring that taxpayers receive their refunds notwithstanding the government shutdown,” IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in a statement. “I appreciate the hard work of the employees and their commitment to the taxpayers during this period.”

If the shutdown weren’t enough to contend with, taxpayers and the IRS have to grapple with the most sweeping overhaul of the U.S. tax code in three decades. Enacted by Republicans in December 2017, the changes provided for $1.5 trillion in tax cuts mainly financed by government deficits. The package was signed into law by Trump as his signature legislative achievement.

The new law, which took effect Jan. 1, 2018, gave generous tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest Americans and more modest reductions to middle- and low-income households.

Nonpartisan tax experts have projected that the law will bring lower taxes for the great majority of Americans, though not all. According to the Tax Policy Center, a middle-income household should on average get a $930 tax cut for 2018, lifting its after-tax income by 1.6 percent.

The IRS’ challenges come as the agency is hobbled by what is widely viewed as a skimpy budget. Republicans controlling the congressional purse strings for years accused the IRS of having a liberal bias and unfairly targeting conservative tax-exempt groups. Last year, with the new tax law looming, Congress was more willing to open its wallet for the IRS and rejected to an extent the Trump administration’s proposed cuts. But it ended up cutting in other areas, with the result that the agency budget is about the same — $11.4 billion — as in recent years.

It’s Time to Bring Back the Corporate Death Penalty

“The prevalence of the corporation in America has led men of this generation to act, at times, as if the privilege of doing business in corporate form were inherent in the citizen, and has led them to accept the evils attendant upon the free and unrestricted use of the corporate mechanism as if these evils were the inescapable price of civilized life, and, hence to be borne with resignation.

“Throughout the greater part of our history, a different view prevailed.

“Although the value of this instrumentality in commerce and industry was fully recognized, incorporation for business was commonly denied long after it had been freely granted for religious, educational, and charitable purposes.

“It was denied because of fear. Fear of encroachment upon the liberties and opportunities of the individual. Fear of the subjection of labor to capital. Fear of monopoly. Fear that the absorption of capital by corporations, and their perpetual life, might bring evils similar to those which attended mortmain [immortality]. There was a sense of some insidious menace inherent in large aggregations of capital, particularly when held by corporations.”

—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1933 dissent in Liggett v. Lee

The good citizens of California have been wondering out loud who killed 86 of their citizens in the Camp Fire, along with dozens of other Californians over the years in other fires. Now both federal and state prosecutors are focusing on a likely suspect: Pacific Gas and Electric.

California’s largest private, for-profit corporate utility appears to have killed a number of people over the years, in many cases because of negligence apparently prompted by a desire to jack up corporate profits.

As a corporation, they play by different rules than you or I.

Imagine you got a holiday package delivery gig, and decided to make more money by increasing the number of packages you can deliver in a day. The easiest way to accomplish this is by ignoring state and local regulations (speed limits) and drive like a maniac.

But what happens if, in your haste, you hit and kill a bunch of schoolkids in a crosswalk?

Particularly if you’d already been busted multiple times for felony reckless driving and had already killed other entire families driving badly on public streets…several different times in several different cities. And, on top of that, if you had lied to the police and the courts, saying that you’d been driving very, very carefully—all while you tried to hide or destroy the evidence.

You’d spend many years in prison for those deaths and the cover-ups; in some states you may even face the death penalty.

Now consider what happens when a corporation behaves like that.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) has already been nailed for “speeding”—ignoring laws that require them to operate in a way that’s safe—and people have already died, on multiple occasions.

PG&E was found guilty for the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion that injured more than 50 people and killed eight. They were fined $1.6 billion and are on probation now.
Two years ago, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California noted in a public statement that the company had continued to break that same law. “The jury found PG&E guilty of six felony counts—five willful violations of the Pipeline Safety Act and one count of corruptly obstructing the federal investigation…” As an additional penalty, they were ordered to perform 10,000 hours of community service, pay a $3 million fine, and another five years was added to their “probation.”
In 2017 alone, PG&E’s failure to properly maintain and operate their equipment and rights-of-way caused 17 fires in California; while investigators referred 11 of those cases to prosecutors for code violations, so far there have been no new indictments.
In December of 2018, PG&E was again busted by the California Public Utilities Commission for not only refusing to mark and warn people of the locations of their gas pipelines in a timely fashion, but, as CNN noted , they “[P]ressured workers to falsify data…”

And the crimes of PG&E pale in comparison to those of the tobacco industry, the asbestos industry, and companies like ExxonMobil that promoted lies about global warming while continuing to profitably and massively pollute.

The Corporate Death Penalty Is Not New

While the human death penalty has largely disappeared in the world and is fading in the U.S. (a good thing), the corporate death penalty needs a revival.

The corporate death penalty, widespread in the 19th century, is a political and economic Darwinian process that weeds bad actors out of the business ecosystem to make room for good players.

The process of revoking corporate charters goes back to the very first years of the United States. After all, the only reasons states allow (“charter”) corporations (normal business corporations can only be chartered by a state, not the federal government) is to serve the public interest.

As the Wyoming Constitution of 1889 laid out:

“All powers and franchises of corporations are derived from the people and are granted by their agent, the government, for the public good and general welfare, and the right and duty of the state to control and regulate them for these purposes is hereby declared. The power, rights and privileges of any and all corporations may be forfeited by willful neglect or abuse thereof. The police power of the state is supreme over all corporations as well as individuals.”

When a corporation does business ethically and legally, it serves its local community, its employees, its customers, and its shareholders. For over a century, American corporations were held to this very reasonable standard.

Beginning in 1784, Pennsylvania demanded that corporations include a revocation clause in corporate charters that automatically dissolved them after a few decades so they couldn’t grow so large or so rich as to become a public menace. It also authorized the state to dissolve any corporation that harmed the state or its citizens, including customers and employees.

It was pretty explicit:

“Nor shall any charter for the purposes aforesaid be granted for a longer time than twenty years; and every such charter shall contain a clause reserving to the legislature the power to alter, revoke, or annul the same, whenever in their opinion it may be injurious to the citizens of the commonwealth…” (Article I, Section 25)

As the United States grew, the federal government passed laws requiring corporate-death-penalty revocation clauses in the state corporate charters of insurance companies, in 1809, and banks in 1814. By the late 1880s, every state required them for all business corporations.

From the founding of America to today, governments routinely revoked corporate charters, forcing liquidation and sale of assets, although it’s been over a century since such efforts have focused on corporations large enough to have amassed financial and, thus, political power.

In the 19th century, banks were shut down for behaving in a “financially unsound” way in Ohio, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania. And when corporations that ran turnpikes in New York and Massachusetts didn’t keep their roads in repair, those states gave the corporations the death sentence.

In 1825, Pennsylvania passed laws making it even easier for that state to “revoke, alter, or annul” corporate charters “whenever in their opinion [the operation of the corporation] may be injurious to citizens of the community,” and by the 1870s, 19 states had gone through the long and tedious process of amending their state constitutions expressly to give legislators the power to terminate the existence of corporations that originated in those states.

Presidents have even run for public office and won on platforms including the revocation of corporate charters. One of the largest issues of the election of 1832 was Andrew Jackson’s demand that the corporate charter of the Second Bank of the United States not be renewed.

Following that lead, states all over the nation began examining their banks and other corporations, and in just the year 1832, the state of Pennsylvania pulled the corporate charters of 10 corporations, sentencing them to corporate death “for operating contrary to the public interest.”

Oil corporations, match manufacturers, whiskey trusts, and sugar corporations all received the corporate death penalty in the late 1800s in Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, and New York, among others.

President Grover Cleveland invoked the mood of the times in his 1888 State of the Union address, when he said:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

The Oligarchs Rise Up

When, in the 1880s, the State of Ohio began threatening Standard Oil Trust of Ohio with the corporate death penalty, John D. Rockefeller and his oligarchic buddies publicly called for states to change their corporate governance laws to get around all of the restrictions that Ohio and most other states had placed on them.

New Jersey heard the call, and thus became the first state to engage in what was then called “charter-mongering”—changing its corporate charter rules to satisfy the desires of the nation’s largest businesses. In 1875, its legislature abolished maximum capitalization (size) limits.

In 1888, the New Jersey legislature took another huge and dramatic step to help out Rockefeller by authorizing—for the first time in the history of the United States—New Jersey-chartered companies to hold stock in other companies. The Standard Oil Trust was legally still in business (Ohio outlawed trusts in 1892, but by then Rockefeller had moved his corporate governance to New Jersey), renamed “Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.” (It’s now ExxonMobil, the company that has funded lies about climate change for decades.)

As New Jersey and then Delaware threw out old restrictions on corporate behavior, allowing corporations to have interlocking boards, to live forever, to define themselves for “any legal purpose,” to own stock in other corporations, and so on, corporations began to move both their corporate charters and, in some cases, their headquarters to the charter-mongering states.

By 1900, trusts for everything from ribbons to bread to cement to alcohol had moved to Delaware or New Jersey, leaving 26 corporate trusts controlling, from those states, more than 80 percent of production in their markets.

There was pushback in New York, though. In 1894 the Central Labor Union of New York City campaigned for the New York State Supreme Court to revoke the charter of Standard Oil Trust of New York for “a pattern of abuses,” and the court agreed and dissolved the company.

In 1912, New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson was alarmed by the behavior of corporations in his state, and “pressed through changes [that took effect in 1913] intended to make New Jersey’s corporations less favorable to concentrated financial power.”

But as New Jersey began to pull back from charter-mongering, Delaware stepped into the fray, passing in 1915 laws similar to but even easier on corporations than New Jersey’s.

Delaware, over the next few decades, continued to strip away their corporate accountability rules so that, as the state’s website said in 2002, “More than 308,000 companies are incorporated in Delaware including 60 percent of the Fortune 500 and 50 percent of the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange.” (The site today merely has “corporate-friendly” gibberish.)

Progressives Fight Back

In reaction to public disgust with the predatory and monopolistic behavior of these corporate giants, the “Progressive Era” of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency (1901-1909) saw numerous laws passed designed to restrain bad corporate behavior. The most well-known was the 1907 Tillman Act, which made it a felony for a corporation to give money to federal politicians’ campaigns.

The Tillman Act was based, in part, on numerous state laws, like this one that Wisconsin passed in 1905 (and was taken off the books in 1954):

“Political contributions by corporations. No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office. [Wis. Laws, Section 4479a (Sec. I, ch. 492, 1905)]” (emphasis added)

The penalty for an individual (even a lawyer or lobbyist representing a corporation) breaking this law on behalf of a corporation was not just a large fine but a two-year prison term, and if the corporation itself was found to be violating the law, it faced the corporate death penalty: “dissolution of the corporation and sale of its assets.”

But 1921 saw the end of all that, when Republican Warren G. Harding successfully ran for president on a platform of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization. His twin slogans were, “More business in government [privatize], less government in business [deregulate],” and “Return to normalcy” (take taxes back down to where they were before World War I).

When elected, he lowered the top tax rate from 91 percent to 25 percent, producing a huge “sugar high” for the economy. It kicked off the Roaring ’20s and led straight to the Great Crash of 1929, which was made much worse by Harding’s successful deregulation of the banks and brokerage houses.

Between the 1920s and the 1980s all U.S. states amended their constitutions or changed their laws to make it easier for large corporations to do business without having to answer to the citizens of the state, without size limits, and with infinite lifespans.

Today, every state still has laws that allow it to impose the corporate death penalty; it’s just been decades since they’ve been used against a large corporation. (Small companies are routinely shut down by Secretaries of State, sometimes for malfeasance but mostly just because they’ve become inactive or failed to pay their taxes.)

Corporations have successfully argued before the Supreme Court that they should have First Amendment rights of free speech, Fourth Amendment rights of privacy, Fifth Amendment protections against takings, and Fourteenth Amendment rights as “persons” to “equal protection [with you and me] under the law,” among other “rights of personhood.”

It’s long past the time that these “persons,” when they become egregious and recidivist criminals (and particularly when they repeatedly kill people), be treated the same as human criminals: remove them from society permanently.

New, smaller, more innovative companies can fill the spaces now occupied by bloated corporate criminals. The result will be (as it was after AT&T was broken up in the 1970s for violating anti-monopoly laws) an explosion of innovation, competition, and opportunity.

If enough corporate criminals are targeted, the American business renaissance could spread across industries including media, pharmaceuticals, airlines, tech, banking, insurance, food, chemicals, oil and beyond.

It would be a real stimulus, meaningful and long-lasting, as opposed to Trump’s tax-cut heroin.

It’s time for our states to start enforcing the corporate death penalty.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The Senate’s First Bill of 2019 Reveals Just How Beholden It Is to Israel

The partial federal government shutdown is entering its third week. Government workers, furloughed or working without pay, are making stressful decisions. “For me, it’s do I consider a car payment or do I pay the gas bill or the phone bill?” Tomas Kaselionis, who works for FEMA, told the New York Times last week.

Against this backdrop, the Senate, which remains open, has announced its first bill of the session. However, as Ryan Grim and Glenn Greenwald write in The Intercept, S.1 is “not a bill to open the government.”

It also does not address immigration, the economy or any other of the critical issues affecting Americans’ lives. Instead, Grim and Greenwald continue, “S.1 will be a compendium containing a handful of foreign policy-related measures, the main one of which is a provision — with Florida’s GOP Sen. Marco Rubio as a lead sponsor — to defend the Israeli government.” The bill gives state and local governments broad authority to boycott companies that are participating in the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which targets Israeli products and services.

In the U.S., 26 states already have laws that punish various entities for participating in boycotts, and 13 states have similar bills pending. Rubio’s bill, The Intercept writes, “is designed to strengthen the legal basis to defend those Israel-protecting laws from constitutional challenge.”

While S.1 was ostensibly written with companies and governments in mind, Grim and Greenwald point out that anti-BDS bills can still, intentionally or not, target individuals:

[This is] because individual contractors often work for state or local governments under the auspices of a sole proprietorship or some other business entity. That was the case with Texas elementary school speech pathologist Bahia Amawi, who lost her job working with autistic and speech-impaired children in Austin because she refused to promise not to boycott goods produced in Israel and/or illegal Israeli settlements.

.

This is not the first time the Senate has tried to attach anti-BDS language into a larger bill.  At the end of the last Congress, The Hill wrote, Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and other leaders were “scrambling at the eleventh hour to include controversial language in a year-end spending bill prohibiting U.S. companies from joining boycotts of Israel launched by the United Nations or similar groups.” It would have, according to The Intercept, criminalized BDS participation.

Defenders of that bill, The Hill explained, said it would only “expand an existing prohibition on companies participating in anti-Israel boycotts led by foreign governments to those orchestrated by international governmental organizations (IGOs).” A Cardin spokesperson told The Hill, “We don’t want our companies to be forced into implementing other countries’ decisions to boycott U.S. allies.”

The ACLU disagreed, writing a letter to the Senate saying, “The impacts of the legislation would be antithetical to free speech protections enshrined in the First Amendment.” Following the letter and pressure from additional advocates, prominent sponsors dropped their support and the bill stalled.

Rubio’s bill has Democratic supporters, including Cardin, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow, both of Michigan. Sources tell The Intercept that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., also supports the bill, though Schumer’s office declined to comment on those reports.

The ACLU is again challenging such a bill. “The legislation, like the unconstitutional state anti-boycott laws it condones, sends a message to Americans that they will be penalized if they dare to disagree with their government,” ACLU senior legislative counsel Kathleen Ruane said in a statement to The Intercept. She continued, “We therefore urge senators to vote no on the Combatting BDS Act.”

News Outlets Shame the Incarcerated for Eating Decent Food on Holidays

News outlets including NBC News, The Washington Post and USA Today drew criticism for stories that echoed frustrated workers and shamed the incarcerated for being served holiday meals. The articles quoted prison guards who were “bitter” that, as the government shutdown left them working without pay, incarcerated people were allowed to eat a decent meal or celebrate a holiday.

Several lawsuits claim prisoners are underfed and even starved, while prison food itself is of notoriously poor quality.

For Christmas, New Year’s and other holidays, inmates are served a slightly nicer meal like steak or Cornish hen, the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. The meals highlighted in the media coverage were “planned weeks… in advance of the government shutdown,” it added.

Prison guards are among 420,000 essential federal employees working without knowing when their next paycheck will come and unsure of how to put food on the table. The articles never explain what almost seems too obvious, though: incarcerated people have no say in a government shutdown or when it ends.

5 reporters, three stories full of bald racial innuendo, each one with a full interview from the same prison guard union leader at Coleman Penitentiary pic.twitter.com/FuZU8KrqaO

— Dad (@fivefifths) January 7, 2019

Is NBC News proposing that federal prisoners be starved during the shutdown? Or should their pre-ordered holiday food supplies just be discarded and new, less-palatable sounding meals purchased? https://t.co/Rp015siAuE

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) January 7, 2019

That’s an incredibly misleading photo. There’s no food in prison that looks like that. In my experience, just bc they call something “steak” doesn’t mean you’d even want to feed it to your dog. https://t.co/KHLM7Gn1dE

— Keri Blakinger (@keribla) January 7, 2019

USA Today and The Washington Post quoted emails that prisoners wrote to their friends about the meals, raising concern about the journalistic ethics of reporting those monitored emails. They were provided by Joe Rojas, who is a guard at Florida’s Coleman Federal Correctional Complex and the head of the prison union. Last April, inmates there also were banned from receiving written letters or greeting cards as part of a national policy.

In 2017, the Bureau of Prisons reached a settlement over sexual discrimination at Coleman after current and former female guards and nurses said they had experienced years of abuse by male colleagues and inmates. The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where NBC News said that inmates were served Cornish hen on Jan. 1, also has a record of reported abuse. Last August, a female inmate there said she was raped by two guards.

Rojas has previously said Coleman is considered a prison for people who might be targets in a regular prison—“snitches, for high-profile inmates, and for people that drop out of gangs”—suggesting that meals there might not be representative of the whole.

In September, convicted serial molester and former U.S. Olympic gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar was sent to Coleman. It is also where Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger served part of his sentence. The Metropolitan Detention Center is where rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine was transferred after safety concerns at a different prison. It is also where infamous former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli was sent after his bail was revoked for offering money to anyone who grabbed hair from Hillary Clinton’s head during her book tour.

 

Democrats in Congress Unveil Ambitious Plan to Fix Our Elections

On the second day of the 116th Congress, the new House Democratic majority will introduce H.R. 1, the most comprehensive democracy reform legislation seen this century. It addresses voting rights and electoral procedures, campaign finance rules and loopholes, and seeks to institute higher ethical standards for federal officeholders and more.

One can look at the For The People Act as a wish list of inclusive, transparent and publicly accountable solutions and best practices that seek to come to grips with today’s world of voting, election advocacy and voter engagement—or suppression. Or one can look at its dozens of focal points as a catalog of everything that has broken down in a system that vainly labels itself the world’s greatest democracy.

“When they trust you on this issue, they trust you on other issues as well,” said Rep. John Sarbanes, D-MD, chair of the House Democrats’ Democracy Reform Task Force and a longtime public financing advocate, describing H.R. 1. “That confidence is what democracy is all about.”

The bill’s overall framing is to counter systemic corruption that blocks some citizens—but not others—from voting; or allows large donors to hide their identity while funding attacks they wouldn’t publicly want to be associated with; or enables current and recent officeholders to personally profit from serving in the highest levels of the federal government.

“The anti-corruption stuff isn’t new,” said Miles Rapoport, Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy at Harvard Kennedy School, who previously led the government reform groups Common Cause and Demos. “People always say it’s rigged. It’s corrupt, etc. I think what’s new now is people say our democracy itself, our elections themselves, are screwed up, rigged, incompetently run—one thing or another.”

“What I am excited about is these things [specific anti-democratic facets and remedies] are having real resonance,” Rapoport continued. “It’s not just ‘Drain the Swamp,’ which everyone can say, right and left, and means different things to different people.”

The bill is a compendium of 22 previously introduced political reform bills and some new provisions. Most of the reforms have been proposed by Democratic lawmakers to counter abuses pioneered or deployed this century by Republicans—whether extreme gerrymanders, voter suppression, or stealth financing—or rulings from the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that have deregulated campaigning.

“Throughout the last two years, we have heard people say they didn’t just want to be part of a resistance, they wanted to insist on a set of values,” Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-MN, one of the newly elected freshmen from 2018’s blue wave, in a press conference about the bill late last year. “I think, for us, it’s really important to remember that accessibility, transparency and the trust of the public is the cornerstone of our democracy… They didn’t want to send us here to resist [President Trump] and only work on oversight. They want to make sure we are insisting on furthering a set of values.”

The Reform Agenda

Broadly speaking, H.R. 1 has three main sections: voting, campaign finance and ethics. Many of these reforms are to counter barriers erected by the GOP in recent years following the Supreme Court’s 2013 gutting of the federal Voting Rights Act.

The voting section seeks to remove barriers to participation by:

Requiring every state to offer online voter registration;
Requiring all states to automatically register every eligible voter;
Allowing voter registration at more state and federal government offices;
Allowing same-day registration during early voting and on Election Day;
Preventing states from using sloppy data mining to purge voters from rolls;
Preventing states from using returned mail as the basis to purge voters;
Limiting who can challenge a voter’s credentials at polling places;
Outlawing distributing deceptive information about the process;
Restoring voting rights to felons after serving their sentences.

It seeks to fortify the integrity of the voting and counting process by:

Requiring all states use paper ballots where votes are counted by hand or scanners;
Requiring provisional ballots will be counted—no matter where they are turned in;
Requiring at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections;
Requiring early voting locations be near public transportation;
Preventing states from imposing restrictions on voting by mail;
Making colleges and universities voter registration centers;
Requiring the Post Office deliver mail-in ballots for free;
Making Election Day a federal holiday;
Paying for modernized voting systems.

It seeks to restore federal oversight of voting rights by:

Affirming Congress’s right to restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which granted the Justice Department veto power over jurisdictions with histories of voting discrimination;
Affirming the federal government’s power to protect Native American voting;
Declaring that being an infrequent voter is insufficient ground to be purged.

The bill would also counter extreme partisan gerrymanders—which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to do in several recent major cases—by requiring states to use independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional districts after the 2021 Census. Last fall, a handful of states passed ballot measures to create such commissions after seeing the GOP’s domination of that process in 2011.

The bill’s campaign finance reform sections are a mix of new disclosure requirements and procedural improvements to revive the presidential public financing system and expand public financing as an option in the states. Those provisions, which are designed to close current loopholes, include:

Banning the use of shell companies that funnel foreign money into U.S. campaigns;
Banning campaign contributions from corporations with significant foreign ownership;
Requiring super PACs and other vehicles to disclose donors giving more than $10,000;
Requiring large digital platforms to maintain a public archive of all political ads, and prevent foreigners from directly or indirectly buying ads;
Calling for the IRS to create new rules for non-profit political spending;
Requiring government contractors disclose their political spending;
Requiring presidential inaugural committees disclose their spending.

The bill also seeks to restore and expand public financing of campaigns, where small donations are matched by public funds—a means of lessening the reliance on larger donations and special interests. It does this by:

Asserting Citizens United was wrongly decided by the Supreme Court and Congress has authority to regulate campaign contributions and expenditures;
Creating a six-to-one match for donations up to $200 to congressional and presidential candidates;
Allowing lower-income candidates to use campaign funds for expenses like rent, childcare and elder services;
Defining what is and isn’t a “coordinated” expense among political allies.

The bill’s ethics section calls for a “code of ethics” for the U.S. Supreme Court, spends additional money on policing activities by foreign agents in domestic campaigns, and expands who is required to register as a lobbyist. It seeks to prevent conflicts of interest by requiring presidential appointees to recuse themselves in issues where the executive branch or their spouses have a stake in the outcome.

There are other provisions targeting the executive branch, including:

Barring payments from corporations to people entering government service;
Barring former employees from being a federal contractor for two years;
Barring ex-executive branch employees from lobbying former colleagues;
Requiring the president and vice-president file financial disclosure reports;
Reviving the oversight powers of the branch’s Office of Government Ethics;
Instituting rules barring personal enrichment or gifts to executive branch employees;
Requiring the president and vice-president release their income tax returns.

A To-Do List or Catalog of Broken Government?

Longtime democracy reformers like Public Citizen’s Craig Holman note that each of these focal points is itself a microcosm needing checks and balances.

“Some of the more significant reforms, to me, are elements that I helped write,” he said Thursday. “For example, we would apply the conflict of interest code, 18 USC 208, to the White House, to the president in particular. And then enforce it by changing the Office of Government Ethics, which is the executive branch ethics agency, and make it the actual ethics cop. Currently, it’s just an advisory body. It can’t do anything. It can’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to. We’ve seen Trump just refuse to abide by the ethics rules, because OGE has no authority to make him do so. So we’d change OGE from an advisory agency to an actual ethics cop with the enforcement authority over the White House.”

Holman points to other conflicts of interest that are as serious as they are unresolved.

“There’s a provision that would require full disclosure and no personal use of funds that have been raised for the inauguration,” he said. “As you may know, Trump is now under investigation for some $50 million missing from his inaugural financing.”

Erin Chlopak, director of campaign finance strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, said H.R. 1 “on the campaign finance side really addresses a number of different issues in our current system. They include trying to bring in more people into the process through public financing programs, both at the congressional and presidential levels.”

“It’s addressing some of the disclosure loopholes that exist with our current system,” she continued. “The current laws really don’t address all of the advertising that’s happening in the online space. The current regime was really created when most of the advertising was taking place on radio and TV. So this would incorporate the Honest Ads Act-type provisions to extend the requirements that exist for those other media to the digital space, and also require a public database for ads purchased on those platforms. So even when the ads become ephemeral and disappear, there would still be a place to locate them.”

Chlopak also said the bill would outlaw the current game of hide-and-seek that many big donors play—anonymously funding campaigns but not lending their names to the effort.

“It would address the lack of disclosure issue created using super PACs and C4 and LLCs and other ways to essentially hide their identity by transferring money from one entity to another to avoid being disclosed as the original source of financing of a particular campaign activity,” she said. “Another way this addresses current problems is post-Citizens United and other cases that led to the emergence of super PACs, the FEC has failed to clarify or to create any rules defining what it means to coordinate with a super PAC. So now we have these ostensibly independent organizations that exist solely to promote a single candidate. The new legislation would define what sorts of activities amount to coordination between a campaign and a super PAC.”

Republican Resistance Expected

In short, H.R. 1 is designed to rebalance the rules governing the current world of election advocacy and voting. While it can be seen as a statement of best practices, or even a pro-democracy political platform, it attests to the depth of intentional dysfunctions that are imposed on the political system, culture of campaigns, and voting process by those who stand to gain money, power or influence by tilting the process.

None of the experts interviewed Thursday thought Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, would take up the House’s massive political reform agenda. But they also expressed some optimism that the public was seeing the depths of the distortions undermining American democracy and a need for serious systemic remedies.

“Adopting all of these things addresses distinct problems,” Chlopak said. “They work in tandem with each other to address flaws in the system. Broadly speaking, we think any of them independently would certainly be an improvement on what we currently have. But none of them [the various planks] independently address all of the problems that we are currently dealing with. We think that they are all important.”

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