Chris Hedges's Blog, page 371

Talks to Resume After Trump Says Shutdown Could Last ‘Years’

WASHINGTON—White House officials and congressional staffers will continue negotiations Saturday over the government shutdown, even after President Donald Trump declared he could keep it going for “months or even years.”

Trump met Friday with congressional leaders from both parties as the shutdown hit the two-week mark amid an impasse over his demand for billions of dollars for a border wall with Mexico. Democrats emerged from the meeting, which both sides said was contentious at times, to report little if any progress.

Trump has designated Vice President Mike Pence, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and adviser Jared Kushner to work with a congressional delegation at a meeting set for 11 a.m. Saturday.

Trump is framing the upcoming weekend talks as progress, while Democrats are emphasizing families unable to pay bills.

The standoff has prompted economic jitters and anxiety among some in Trump’s own party. But he appeared Friday in the Rose Garden to frame the weekend talks as progress, while making clear he would not reopen the government.

“We won’t be opening until it’s solved,” Trump said. “I don’t call it a shutdown. I call it doing what you have to do for the benefit and the safety of our country.”

Trump said he could declare a national emergency to build the wall without congressional approval, but would first try a “negotiated process.” Trump previously described the situation at the border as a “national emergency” before he dispatched active-duty troops in what critics described as a pre-election stunt.

Trump also said the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who are furloughed or working without pay would want him to “keep going” and fight for border security. Asked how people would manage without a financial safety net, he declared, “The safety net is going to be having a strong border because we’re going to be safe.”

Democrats called on Trump to reopen the government while negotiations continue. Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “It’s very hard to see how progress will be made unless they open up the government.”

Friday’s White House meeting with Trump included eight congressional leaders — the top two Democrats and Republicans of both chambers. People familiar with the session but not authorized to speak publicly described Trump as holding forth at length on a range of subjects but said he made clear he was firm in his demand for $5.6 billion in wall funding and in rejecting the Democrats’ request to reopen the government.

Trump confirmed that he privately told Democrats the shutdown could drag on for months or years, though he said he hoped it wouldn’t last that long. Said Trump, “I hope it doesn’t go on even beyond a few more days.”

House Democrats muscled through legislation Thursday night to fund the government but not Trump’s proposed wall. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said those measures are non-starters on his side of the Capitol without the president’s support.

A variety of strategies are being floated inside and outside the White House, among them trading wall funding for a deal on immigrants brought to the country as young people and now here illegally, or using a national emergency declaration to build the wall. While Trump made clear during his press conference that talk on DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program) would have to wait and that he was trying to negotiate with Congress on the wall, the conversations underscored rising Republican anxiety about just how to exit the shutdown.

Some GOP senators up for re-election in 2020, including Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine, have voiced discomfort with the shutdown in recent days.

But with staff level talks there is always an open question of whether Trump’s aides are fully empowered to negotiate for the president. Earlier this week, he rejected his own administration’s offer to accept $2.5 billion for the wall. That proposal was made when Pence and other top officials met with Schumer at the start of the shutdown.

During his free-wheeling session with reporters, Trump also wrongly claimed that he’d never called for the wall to be concrete. Trump did so repeatedly during his campaign, describing a wall of pre-cast concrete sections that would be higher than the walls of many of his rally venues. He repeated that promise just days ago.

“An all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED, as has been reported by the media. Some areas will be all concrete but the experts at Border Patrol prefer a Wall that is see through (thereby making it possible to see what is happening on both sides). Makes sense to me!” he tweeted Dec. 31.

Trump was joined by Pence in the Rose Garden, as well as House Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise. McConnell, who went back to the Capitol, unaware of the press conference, said it was encouraging that the White House officials and the congressional contingent would meet over the weekend “to see if they can reach an agreement and then punt it back to us for final sign off.”

Schumer said that if McConnell and Senate Republicans stay on the sidelines, “Trump can keep the government shut down for a long time.”

“The president needs an intervention,” Schumer said. “And Senate Republicans are just the right ones to intervene.”

Adding to national unease about the shutdown are economic jitters as analysts warn of the risks of closures that are disrupting government operations across multiple departments and agencies at a time of other uncertainties in the stock market and foreign trade.

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Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Mary Clare Jalonick, Laurie Kellman, Kevin Freking, Matthew Daly, Deb Riechmann and Eileen Putman contributed to this report.

Weather Channel App Accused of Selling Users’ Personal Data

LOS ANGELES—People relied on the most popular mobile weather app to track forecasts that determined whether they chose jeans over shorts and packed a parka or umbrella, but its owners used it to track their every step and profit off that information, Los Angeles prosecutors said Friday.

The operator of The Weather Channel mobile app misled users who agreed to share their location information in exchange for personalized forecasts and alerts, and they instead unwittingly surrendered personal privacy when the company sold their data to third parties, City Attorney Michael Feuer said.

Feuer sued the app’s operator in Los Angeles County Superior Court to stop the practice. He said 80 percent of users agreed to allow access to their locations because disclosures on how the app uses geolocation data were buried within a 10,000-word privacy policy and not revealed when they downloaded the app.

“Think how Orwellian it feels to live in a world where a private company is tracking potentially every place you go, every minute of every day,” Feuer said. “If you want to sacrifice to that company that information, you sure ought to be doing it with clear advanced notice of what’s at stake.”

A spokesman for IBM Corp., which owns the app, said it has always been clear about the use of location data collected from users and will vigorously defend its “fully appropriate” disclosures.

Feuer said the app’s operators, TWC Product and Technology LLC, sold data to at least a dozen websites for targeted ads and to hedge funds that used the information to analyze consumer behavior.

The lawsuit seeks to stop the company from the practice it calls “unfair and fraudulent” and seeks penalties of up to $2,500 for each violation. Any court decision would only apply to California.

Marketed as the “world’s most downloaded weather app,” The Weather Channel app claims approximately 45 million users a month, the lawsuit said.

Users who download the free app are asked whether to allow access to their location to “get personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts.” It does not say how the company benefits from the information.

While disclosures may be included in the privacy policy, state law says “fine print alone can’t make good what otherwise has been made obscure,” Feuer said.

He said he learned about the sale of the private data from an article in The New York Times.

The lawsuit comes as companies, most notably Facebook and Google, are increasingly under fire for how they use people’s personal data. Both companies faced congressional hearings last year on privacy issues, which are likely to remain on lawmakers and regulators’ minds both nationally and in California.

In June, California lawmakers approved what experts are calling the country’s most far-reaching law to give people more control over their personal data online. That law doesn’t take effect until next year.

Feuer said he hopes the case inspires other lawsuits and legislation to curb data-sharing practices.

IBM bought the app along with the digital assets of The Weather Company in 2015 for $2 billion but did not acquire The Weather Channel seen on TV, which is owned by another company.

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AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report.

Jailed American Spent Years Collecting Russian Contacts

WASHINGTON—A U.S. corporate security executive and former Marine who has been jailed in Moscow on spying charges has spent more than a decade cultivating friends and contacts in Russia, both virtual and real.

Paul Whelan sought out friends throughout the country, most often through a social networking site that is similar to Facebook and popular largely in Russia. Several told The Associated Press that the American never seemed sinister, merely someone who was interested in Russia and wanted to be pen pals.

“I know him as a friendly, polite, educated, and easygoing guy,” said one of his contacts, who, like the other Russians interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because of Whelan’s legal troubles.

Whelan was arrested Dec. 28 while on a two-week visit to the country and has been charged with espionage. The Russian government has so far given no details about the allegations against him, but a close look at his social media history suggests why he might have come to the attention of the Russian security services, regardless of his motives.

He has collected dozens of contacts on the social media site, nearly all of them men, many of whom have at least some connection to the military.

His family back home says he was nothing more than a tourist. In a Washington Post op-ed published Friday, his twin brother, David, urged the U.S. government to pressure Russia to release him.

“Paul is a kind and considerate brother, son and uncle, and a generous and loyal friend,” he wrote. “He travels as often as he can, both for work and pleasure. He is many things to many people, but he is not a spy.”

Whelan, 48, could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of spying. He is also a citizen of Britain, Canada and Ireland, which brings international pressure on Russia from several fronts. He was born in Canada to British parents, but grew up in Michigan, where he now lives.

His family said he was in Moscow over the holidays for the wedding of a fellow former Marine and had planned to travel to St. Petersburg before flying home this weekend. Instead he’s in Lefortovo, a notorious prison run by the KGB in Soviet times and still used for foreigners accused of spying.

Whelan has been visiting Russia since at least 2007, when he took advantage of a military program for Marines deployed in Iraq that gave them 15 days of leave and paid for the travel.

Even before then, he had begun developing a network of contacts throughout Russia. Some said they met him online in 2006 and became “pen pals,” trading practice in English for Russian. Whelan seemed fascinated with Russia and its culture, they said.

For nearly a decade, he has had an account on VKontakte, which means In Contact. Of his 58 friends at the time of his arrest, 54 were men. Many attended universities affiliated with the military, civil aviation or technical studies. Many share his interest in sports and firearms.

“We was guys with guns,” wrote another of his friends, who said he was a student working nights as a security guard when he first met Whalen online.

Both men, who live in separate Russian cities far from Moscow, said they first met Whelan in person in 2008 when he traveled around the country to meet some of his new friends. Others said they have only communicated online.

Whelan’s brother said it would not be surprising to find Russian soldiers among his contacts.

“I’m pretty sure that some of the people he knows through social media are probably Russian soldiers because there are a lot of Russian soldiers and he probably knows one,” David Whelan said in an interview.

One of Paul Whelan’s friends on VKontakte said he believed the arrest was a mistake because a true spy would never act as openly as he did. He said Whelan gave him his home address and they exchanged Christmas cards.

Former CIA officers also have expressed doubts that Whelan was working for U.S. intelligence. They note that the CIA would be unlikely to use someone in Russia without diplomatic immunity and leave them vulnerable to arrest.

Whelan’s Marine record also would likely prevent U.S. intelligence from hiring him. He began active duty with the Marines in 2003 and was deployed twice to Iraq, rising to staff sergeant. But his military career ended with a court martial in 2008, when he was convicted on charges that included attempted larceny and dereliction of duty.

Court documents released by the military show he was accused of attempting to steal more than $10,000 while on duty in Iraq, where he worked as a clerk, in September 2006. He was also convicted of using a false social security number and profile for a military computer system to grade his own examinations, and of writing 10 bad checks totaling around $6,000.

He was dropped two grades in rank and given a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps.

“This guy is not an intel asset,” said Malcolm Nance, a veteran intelligence officer. “He’s not the type of person you would use as an asset. There is no way.”

Nance said he suspects Russian intelligence officers have been watching Whelan for years, wondering if they could use him in some way and maybe trying to flip him.

A member of Russia’s parliament suggested Friday that once the investigation into Whelan was completed, he could be swapped for Maria Butina, a Russian woman jailed in the U.S. since July. She pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to act as a foreign agent by trying to infiltrate conservative circles and the National Rifle Association to influence U.S. politics.

However, she has been cooperating with federal prosecutors and is unlikely to spend too much time behind bars. Federal sentencing guidelines call for no jail time to six months.

After his discharge, Whelan returned to his job in the temporary staffing company Kelly Services, based in Troy, Michigan, where he had worked since 2001 in the IT department until taking the leave of military absence. He was Kelly’s head of global security and investigations until 2016.

Early the following year, Whelan joined auto parts supplier BorgWarner as global security director. BorgWarner, based in Auburn Hill, Michigan, has facilities around the world but none in Russia and he never traveled to the country for business, company spokeswoman Kathy Graham said.

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Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

Welcome to the Jungle: New Democrats Get Early Political Lesson

WASHINGTON—The education of the star-studded class of House freshmen has begun.

Lesson one: Speaking with the bluntness of a candidate can produce swift and uncomfortable results.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib learned that before lunch Friday, when her profane remarks the night before vowing to impeach President Donald Trump drew almost no support, and plenty of pushback, from members of her party.

“It’s been pretty intense,” Tlaib, D-Mich., told The Associated Press in a brief hallway interview Friday as she reported to the House to face her colleagues.

Hours after Tlaib was sworn in as part of the history-making class of freshmen that helped flip the House to Democratic control, she ran afoul of the widespread sense among her colleagues that they should focus for now on health care and other policies rather than impeachment — at least until special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation concludes.

“We’re gonna impeach the motherf—er,” Tlaib exclaimed during a party Thursday night hosted by the liberal activist group MoveOn, according to video and comments on Twitter.

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House Democrats Ramp Up Calls for Trump's Impeachment



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It was a striking coda to the Democrats’ heady ascendance to the House majority Thursday, sparking unusually public corrections from House veterans.

“I disagree with what she said,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., during a CNN interview. His committee would be the one to begin impeachment proceedings.

“It is too early to talk about that intelligently,” Nadler said. “We have to follow the facts.”

Newcomers routinely stumble as they learn how things are done on Capitol Hill. But Tlaib and her classmates have been celebrated in magazine profiles for their independence and their promises to stand up to the powers that be. By rebuking one, the more seasoned Democrats were effectively warning the others.

“I think some of our new members probably don’t realize that you are always on, that when you are a member of Congress, there’s always someone listening,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. She said she hopes Tlaib’s remarks aren’t news for long.

More than Tlaib’s profanity, it was her vow to impeach Trump that drew her colleagues’ disapproval.

Tlaib’s defiance flew in the face of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s warning to focus on policies the candidates had promised ahead of the Nov. 6 elections. The timing also chafed, just hours before congressional leaders were headed to the White House to try to resolve the standoff over the border wall Trump is demanding in exchange for reopening the government. Republicans pounced, using the occasion to question the Democrats’ true priorities and Pelosi’s leadership.

With a tight smile, Pelosi rejected Tlaib’s profanity and her impeachment vow.

“That is not the position of the House Democratic caucus,” Pelosi said on MSNBC of Tlaib’s comments. “I don’t think we should make a big deal of it.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., served up a reminder to the new members that seniority rules in Congress.

“She’s a freshman. It’s her first day here,” Connolly said of Tlaib. “She went in front of an enthusiastic crowd of her supporters and it was red meat for them. She yielded to that temptation.”

“I’m sure upon reflection,” Connolly suggested, “she might choose other words to describe her feelings.”

Talk of impeachment remains in the air, fueled by a handful of Democrats on Pelosi’s left flank who are pressuring her to more aggressively pursue the issue. But such proceedings appear unlikely for now. Even if the House advances any articles of impeachment, a two-thirds-majority vote to convict Trump in the Republican-controlled Senate and remove him from office would seem out of the question, barring astonishing new revelations.

Tlaib wasn’t the only freshman who got a lesson in how one comment can upend Capitol Hill.

Some of Tlaib’s classmates were pursued for reaction — standard results when a political ally says something that raises eyebrows.

“I am not talking about those things,” laughed Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., when asked Friday to respond to Tlaib’s remarks.

She said she was elected because she talked about preserving health care. “I’m not going to tell anyone else what to do, but certainly, I think, it would behoove all of us to really be working for the people who need” Congress’ help.

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Associated Press Writers Alan Fram and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

Robert Reich: House Democrats Must Be Pushed

Democrats are now in control of the House of Representatives, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I know and have worked with many of them. They are people of integrity who will strive to do what’s right for America. Pelosi is tough and courageous. Were it not for her insistence, President Obama would not have pushed for the Affordable Care Act.

But they are not miracle workers. Republicans still control the Senate.

They will make life harder for Donald Trump, to be sure. They will investigate. They have the power of subpoena. The House Ways and Means Committee is specifically authorized to subpoena Trump’s tax returns. They might even move to impeach Trump, if Robert Mueller reports what I expect him to.

But they will do little to change the growing imbalance of wealth and power in this country unless they are pushed to do so. Do not ever underestimate the influence of Wall Street Democrats, corporate Democrats, and the Democrats’ biggest funders. I know. I’ve been there.

This is where you come in. Millions of us worked hard to create a “blue wave” and put Democrats in control of the House. But our work is not over by any stretch. Nothing good happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington are organized and mobilized to make it happen.

We must support Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats when they need our support to do the right things. We also need to push them when they need pushing. And we must fight them when they begin to cave.

So keep vigilant and active. Stay involved in the grassroots organizations that spearheaded the Democrat’s victory in November – groups like Indivisible.org, MoveOn.org, aflcio.org, blacklivesmatter.org, swingleft.org, face2face-action.org, commoncause.org, friendsoftheearth.org, greenpeace.org, ourrevolution.org, publiccitizen.org, and workingfamilies.org, to name only a few. And if you’re not yet activist members, join them.

The fight has only just begun.

Neoconservatives Are Ascendant in Donald Trump’s America

In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq, The Weekly Standard released its final issue. Two years removed from Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, one might be forgiven for concluding the publication’s demise sounded the final death knell of neoconservatism—an ideology that has been soundly defeated at the polls and appears to lack even a constituency, the ubiquity of Bill Kristol on cable news notwithstanding.

If only. As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books, the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump’s America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the “neo-neoconservatives” or “post-neoconservatives,” as he’s dubbed them.

“Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion,” Wertheim writes. “The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post.”

In his essay, Wertheim traces the history of the movement from World War II through the Cold War and up to 9/11, which allowed Kristol and Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz, among others, to forge an existential threat in the form of “Islamofascism.” Indeed, neoconservatism draws from the philosophical tradition of Leo Strauss, who wrote in the “The City and Man” that “the crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.” For the Straussians and their intellectual descendants, military conflict offered that sense of purpose, whether the enemy was Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Al-Qaeda.

Trump’s presidency has proved a clarifying moment. “[He] has forced neoconservatives to decide, for the first time, whether they are more against ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘globalism,'” continues Wertheim. “If anti-totalitarians take Trump to be perverting what they hold dear, anti-globalist neocons have found in Trump a kindred spirit and vehicle for power. Yet, even as they are fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have bypassed the political wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on either side of the Trump divide.”

Within Trump’s cabinet, neoconservatism remains represented by national security adviser John Bolton, who has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan. Wertheim contends that while right-wing non-interventionism is typically attributed to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, neoconservatives have also historically taken aim at global institutions, if not globalism itself. Few have embodied this notion more than Bolton, who has made a career of bashing both the United Nations and its Security Council. During the Obama administration, Wertheim notes, he regularly sounded the alarm that “leftists like Obama were attempting to give away American sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies.”

“For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance,” he observes. “Trump elevated ‘globalism’ from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics.”

Which brings us to neoconservatives’ suddenly lofty perch outside of the Trump administration. For Republican apostates like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Max Boot, Wertheim contends, the president has offered the “next best thing” to a foreign dictator: “an enemy within.” His personal degeneracy and unabashed corruption have allowed them to “reclaim their preferred role as the moral truth-tellers in America.”

“More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump resistance have welcomed these neocons into their fold,” Wertheim observes. “Boot, Kristol, Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and Senator John McCain appear daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the ‘axis of evil’ as George W. Bush’s speechwriter, earns resistance retweets by warning of ‘this hour of liberal peril’ in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New York Times hired Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal in an effort to “broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions,” a curious rationale given that Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change the op-ed page’s lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist.”

Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party’s leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim’s conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting.

“What best explains centrist Democrats’ rapprochement with neoconservatives isn’t an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style,” he writes. “Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats’ fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history.”

Read Wertheim’s essay at The New York Review of Books.

Street Vending Is Legal in Los Angeles After a Decade of Organizing

This piece originally appeared on Waging Nonviolence.

Street vending was legalized in Los Angeles on Jan. 1, marking an important victory for economic and immigrant justice in the city. This comes after statewide decriminalization through the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act, or SB946, signed into law in September 2018 by Gov. Jerry Brown. SB946 limits violations and fines imposed on vendors and is a turning point in the fight to protect many migrant families from Trump-era deportations.

These achievements at the state and local level were won through a hard-fought campaign led by sidewalk vendors — in partnership with Los Angeles Street Vending Coalition, or LASVC, and other allies — that began more than 10 years ago. These victories should be recognized and celebrated, but the work to safeguard street vending in our society is just beginning.

While California has the largest economy in the United States — and the fifth largest in the world — it also has the highest poverty rate of any state. One path out of this poverty, especially for the immigrant community, has been through street vending.

There are over 50,000 street vendors currently operating in Los Angeles alone and these micro-enterprises represent a $504 million industry. Around 75 percent sell clothing, accessories and other merchandise and some 10,000 sell food. The majority of vendors identify as Latinx, 80 percent are women of color and a majority are seniors.

Street vending became prevalent in Los Angeles after the enactment of the United States Refugee Act of 1980. This act granted asylum to hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees, many of whom settled in Los Angeles and became the majority of the city’s street vendors. The act’s passage coincided with a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles, which resulted in a jobs crisis for communities of color, especially migrant families.

As the number of street vendors rose, many storefront owners became hostile and resisted the thousands of vendors in their neighborhoods. These businesses have a history of calling the police, who enforce prohibition on vendors through increased surveillance, fines, arrest and potential jail time. Criminalized by the city, street vendors could be charged with a misdemeanor, punishable with up to six months in jail and up to a $1,000 fine, the confiscation/destruction of their property and potential deportation.

For 10 years vendors and community partners have been strategically organizing to create a permit system that protects the rights of local entrepreneurs and legalizes their work. The campaign emphasized forming partnerships between privately-owned brick-and-mortar stores and street vendors operating in the vicinity. Carlos Perez, founder of Un Solo Sol, a community kitchen in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights, and a coalition member, powerfully stresses that storefront and street vending are part of the same economic ecosystem.

In 2008, a group of street vendors in Boyle Heights were facing increased harassment by the police, who were issuing tickets, fines and confiscating personal property. This eventually led to the police shutting down their vibrant sidewalk market. In response, the vendors began to organize in partnership with the East L.A. Community Corporation, or ELACC. They began reaching out to community leaders and together initiated popular educational meetings and seminars, galvanizing vendors to organize around the framework that centered the human right to vend in the city.

During monthly organizing committee meetings across the city, women vendors steered the coalition. Together they organized press conferences, protests, art builds and acts of civil disobedience at key marches and rallies in the city, including on May Day and International Women’s Day.

A community forum on the state of street vending was organized that led to the official launch of LASVC, a coalition made of more than 60 community organizations, small business owners, local councils and activists, in 2012. In 2013, councilmembers were moved by the group’s impactful grassroots efforts and introduced a motion to speak about a permitting process.

Over the next few years, the community forum model was expanded and structured around zones representing other parts of Los Angeles with large street vending communities, including Boyle Heights, Highland Park, Pacoima and Leimert Park. Each zone had core leaders that received special training to mobilize their fellow co-workers to join the campaign and participate in organizing monthly meetings and forums. These active vendor leaders became the ultimate drafters of the policy proposed to the city council for legalization.

The focus of these ongoing forums was to uplift the stories and voices of vendors, their families and community members who rely on their services. Traditional and contemporary art were embraced to communicate campaign goals and advance demands. This included screen printing solidarity shirts and aprons saying “Legalize Street Vending” to be worn by sidewalk vendors and supporters across the city. Years of arduous campaign organizing led to a local political victory; in April 2017 city council decriminalized street vending, protecting vendors from some penalties, such as deportation, but not from fines.

Decriminalization of vending at the state level followed in the fall of 2018 with the enactment of SB946. Decriminalization is not legalization, however, and this bill leaves both the specifics of permit and regulatory programs to local jurisdictions. Los Angeles City Council voted to establish a permit program to protect vendors instead of a regulatory process based on rules and bylaws. The permit program taxes vendors, which addresses a concern raised by brick-and-mortar stores that feel burdened by their own taxes, and it also requires food vendors to meet a set of health code standards.

This means additional costs for Los Tamaleros — popular food trucks that make and sell tamales — and other vendors who make food at home. Many will now need new equipped carts and certified storage containers as well as access to licenced commercial kitchens to prepare provisions. A month after City Council voted in support of vendors to establish a permit program, they officially legalized street vending in Los Angeles, which takes effect on Jan. 1.

Over the years participants in the campaign explored how sidewalk vending could be legally integrated into the city’s economy in a just manner that acknowledges merchants as small business owners who generate money and create jobs. The town hall model, with its emphasis on political education and grassroots engagement, led to the vision of a local legalized vending policy. This vision was scaled up to include protections for workers across the state and continues to build the movement towards an inclusive economy grounded in equity and protections for the most disenfranchised in the workforce.

Meetings continue to be organized, as more vendors join in the effort to foster “active streets,” a term used by ELACC Organizing Director Carla De Paz. Active streets are areas with more vendors that have increased foot traffic, lighting and human interaction, which create communities around memories and cultural expression. De Paz also notes how active streets cultivate a sense of collective security that can be recognized as an alternative to policing.

The all important permit program is not completed, and it is up to city council to finalize the written measure. The campaign has emphasized several goals moving forward. They are focused on incentivizing vendors to sell healthy food in neighborhoods without access to fresh fruits and vegetables and developing a stronger non-profit infrastructure to support merchants. This includes creating more community-run licensed kitchens, and partnerships that legitimize vendors within the vast network of farmers markets throughout the city. A “buycott” was launched for the holiday season, encouraging communities to find creative ways to support their neighborhood vendors.

The future is bright for the coalition, and their dynamism has the potential to lead to a national and transnational solidarity movement that could empower vendors globally.

House Democrats Ramp Up Calls for Trump’s Impeachment

As the Democratic Party took control of the U.S. House on Thursday, the first day of the 116th Congress, along with the lower chamber’s leadership shift came a renewed push from some Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump.

Democratic Reps. Brad Sherman (Calif.) and Al Green (Texas) on Thursday re-introduced Articles of Impeachment against Trump for allegedly obstructing justice by firing former FBI director James Comey, among other actions. Sherman, with Green’s support, had previously filed an impeachment resolution in July of 2017, when the House was under GOP control.

Since Republicans refused to hold hearings on that measure, H.Res. 438, and all legislation introduced last session but not enacted into law was terminated on Wednesday, Sherman said in a statement: “Accordingly, it’s necessary and appropriate to reintroduce the Articles of Impeachment. I have not changed the text. I continue to believe that obstruction of justice is the clearest, simplest, and most provable high crime and misdemeanor committed by Donald J. Trump.”

“Every day, Donald Trump shows that leaving the White House would be good for our country,” the 12-term congressman told the Los Angeles Times early Thursday, before the congressional session convened. In terms of his impeachment resolution, Sherman said, “There is no reason it shouldn’t be before the Congress.”

Today, I reintroduced Articles of #Impeachment against @realDonaldTrump with @RepAlGreen. I have not changed the text from the Articles I first introduced in July 2017. pic.twitter.com/LUkI6pyWiX

— Rep. Brad Sherman (@BradSherman) January 3, 2019

Responding to Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) critique of his decision to continue the impeachment effort, Sherman tweeted out his column published by HuffPost in October of 2017, when he wrote: “We have clear and convincing evidence that President Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice. It is time now for the House Judiciary Committee to begin hearings on impeachment.”

Now, however, Sherman and newly re-elected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem inclined to wait until they know more about the ongoing probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the possibility of collusion with the Trump campaign. As Sherman put it, “I understand that a majority of our Democratic Caucus will want to wait until Special Counsel Robert Mueller completes his report, which I would hope will be issued in the next two to three months.”

Pelosi, in an interview published Thursday morning, told TODAY‘s Savannah Guthrie that she wasn’t ruling out Trump being indicted or impeached, calling it “an open discussion.” But, she added: “We have to wait and see what happens with the Mueller report. We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason. So we’ll just have to see how it comes.”

Is @NancyPelosi willing to rule out impeachment?

“We have to wait and see what happens with the Mueller report. We shouldn’t be impeaching for a political reason, and we shouldn’t avoid impeachment for a political reason.” -Pelosi pic.twitter.com/J5e53528Ui

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) January 3, 2019

Others are less inclined to take the slow road and wait for Mueller’s findings. Ahead of taking her first oath as a member of Congress on Thursday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—joined by John Bonifaz, co-founder and president of Free Speech For People (FSFP)—argued in the Detroit Free Press:

[We] do not need to wait on the outcome of that criminal investigation before moving forward now with an inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives on whether the president has committed impeachable “high crimes and misdemeanors” against the state: abuse of power and abuse of the public trust. Each passing day brings more pain for the people most directly hurt by this president, and these are days we simply cannot get back. The time for impeachment proceedings is now.

As The Nation‘s John Nichols concluded about their “carefully considered” op-ed, “This sense of urgency, rooted in her own history as a lawyer and activist, will inform Tlaib’s service, as she makes clear in her rejection of petty political calculations regarding impeachment.”

Members of Congress need to join @RashidaTlaib in the call for impeachment proceedings against the president. Call your Rep. today. Keep the pressure on. Together, we will defend our Constitution. TY @NicholsUprising for this piece https://t.co/SMfhsGf4Oh @FSFP @projectimpeach

— John Bonifaz (@JohnBonifaz) January 3, 2019

Nichols himself also has made the case for impeaching Trump, writing in his column for The Capital Times earlier this week that “if Americans take seriously the impeachment process that led to the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974, then we can no longer neglect the arguments for Trump’s impeachment.”

However, while efforts to impeach Trump have drawn comparisons to Nixon, there may be some differences in how it all shakes out. As Bill Blum posited for Truthdig on Wednesday, “unlike Nixon, Trump will not resign. Some of his children and his son-in-law may be indicted, the stock market may continue its tumble, the country may slide into a recession, and the Republican establishment may desert him, but he won’t follow Nixon’s lead and quit.”

“Trump will remain until the bitter end and seek reelection,” Blum concludes, “not because he is a man of courage and principle, but because he has no other safe personal option… Trump has little to gain by departing the Oval Office early and much to lose if he does. Guided by narcissism and self-interest, and backed by his dogged white nationalist base, he’ll stay put until he is either removed or defeated at the polls.”

U.S. Employers Add Stellar 312,000 Jobs in December

WASHINGTON—U.S. employers dramatically stepped up their hiring in December, adding 312,000 jobs in an encouraging display of strength for an economy in the midst of a trade war, slowing global growth and a partial shutdown of the federal government.

The Labor Department says the unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.9 percent, but that reflected a surge in job seekers—a positive for growth.

Average hourly pay improved 3.2 percent from a year ago.

The health care, food services, construction, and manufacturing sectors were the primary contributors to last month’s hiring.

The strong job gains suggest that the tumbling stock market has yet to depress expectations that the economy will expand for a 10th straight year. Still, growth is likely to slow as the stimulus from last year’s tax cuts wane.

White-Collar Crimes Are Human-Rights Crimes

Here’s a pop quiz: How long has corporate corruption existed? Answer: As long as corporations as we know them have been in business. Thanks to journalist David Montero’s meticulously sourced survey, “Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network,” the consumer public now has access to a wealth of details about the astonishingly shady antics in which multinationals have been engaging since the retro-imperialist heyday of the British East India Company.

And this malignant strain of corporatism is only getting worse. As Robert Scheer remarks to Montero in this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” it amounts to nothing short of a “virulent, corrosive, murderous arrangement that has only accelerated in recent years.” Some potential reasons why this global scourge hasn’t been more aggressively treated include: greed; willful ignorance; the widely supported myth that the phenomenon is “just” about white-collar crime; a false sense that corporate malfeasance ranges outside of various states’ jurisdictions; and powerful companies engaging in a race to the bottom because, well, everyone else is doing it.

But Montero is ready to serve notice to a host of Fortune 500 companies—helpfully name-checked throughout the episode—that at least two hard-nosed investigators are onto them. Not only has the extent of the damage done been vastly underestimated and underreported, but so long as it grows in the dark, it’s able to feed into the worst kinds of crises around the world. After taking in Montero’s argument, Scheer sums up the stakes powerfully as he remarks that “white-collar crimes are human rights crimes.”

Listen to Montero’s interview with Scheer or read a transcript of their conversation below:

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, from David Montero, who’s a highly regarded journalist of considerable experience. And he’s written what I think is kind of a classic book: “Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network.” And what the book asserts, in great detail with wonderful case studies, is that this is a historic problem of modern capitalism. And it goes back in this book to the British East India Company, the very company that the American Revolution was fought to challenge, with the Boston Tea Party and other things. And traces this virulent, corrosive, murderous arrangement that has only accelerated in recent years. And it begins with the claims about the Russian interference in our election, Russian oligarchs, and so forth, but it really takes in the most prestigious of American companies. And so let me get you to talk about why this book now. Because after having read it, it sort of makes a compelling case that despite our efforts, beginning most prominently with Frank Church, Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s, to do something about this problem, it’s a festering problem that is actually more important now, maybe, than ever.

David Montero: Yeah, and I think the reason it’s more important than ever now is because, one, we’ve laxly enforced a law that we had on the books since 1977—we’ve only laxly enforced it—that law was supposed to prohibit corporations from paying bribes abroad. We now have a president in the White House who’s vocally opposed to this law. His administration has done things to roll back that law. But more importantly, in the person of the president himself, we have someone whose business interests seem to be tainted by this crime itself, and himself. And that, I would say that more than just the efforts that the administration under Trump has made to roll back provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Trump being in the White House and being tainted by this crime itself sends a far more disturbing message, that we need to do something about this crime.

RS: Is it more disturbing, or is it just more obvious that, ah—? It’s sort of the ugly face of a kind of international capitalism, that the people who practice this would rather it not be noticed. And you have Fortune 500 companies like Alcoa, Chevron, Shell, Simmons, Novartis, Bristol-Myers Squibb; you can go down the list, it’s just about every multinational corporation has engaged in this practice of going along with bribes, kickbacks, and everything. And their defense is, it’s the only way you could do business. And they’re accepting the normalcy of corrupting, basically, the international business community. That’s the inescapable conclusion, I think, from your book.

DM: Yeah, and why that’s disturbing is, again, you know, these are cutting-edge companies; these are world-class companies, as you mentioned the names; these are household names. It’s really kind of shocking and disturbing that the only way that a lot of them seem to think they can compete abroad is to pay bribes to government officials. And the reason they think that is why? Because that’s what their competitors are doing. But when you do something that your competitors are doing which is also illegal and inefficient and destructive to the business itself, it’s not very innovative. And that was what was kind of surprising to me: that these companies that make these incredibly innovative products, and they have a history of innovation when it comes to selling them, they’re not innovative at all. They just pay bribes. And they’re not just tainting the international business community; these are bribes that they pay to government officials in some of the poorest, already unstable places on earth. And that money goes on to have a terrible impact, a lasting impact for decades, and is funneled into all kinds of nefarious things. Like conflict, like terrorism. And overall, it deepens poverty in those countries. It’s a crime that right now, the public and the Justice Department tend to think of, and certainly prosecute, as a white-collar business crime. But it’s much broader than that, much more complicated and much more devastating.

RS: I’m talking to David Montero. He’s the author of “Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network.” It’s incredibly well documented, and it presents an issue that, you know, is incredibly important but overlooked. And I want to get into the overlooked part of it. You were a correspondent for a publication that I used to read a lot, the Christian Science Monitor; I thought they did a great job. And then of course you were well-known as a producer for PBS’s Frontline series; you’re a highly regarded journalist. Why has this been overlooked? You’ve written for a lot of important publications, the New York Times, The Nation, Le Monde diplomatique, all these others. Why is it under the rug? And then let me ask you, by the way, doesn’t this involve these corporations being more than passive? First of all, they get an advantage if they know how to bribe better than others; if they’ve got their channel, their system set up, they don’t want to ask too many questions. And they also are able to corrupt their home government, in this case the U.S. government, to not aggressively follow the law. Isn’t that really the subtext here?

DM: You were saying just about why it’s been so underreported—just to address that first, I think part of the reason it’s underreported is, again, the public and the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission tend to think of this as a white-collar crime; it’s a business issue. And so a lot of people think, well, if a corporation pays bribes abroad, why should I care? That’s a business thing, that doesn’t affect me. I started looking at this from the lens of Bangladesh, which is a country where I lived for a year, and I lived there during a time when it was experiencing not only terrible corruption but terrible terrorism, the first suicide bombings, et cetera. I started digging into a particular case that involved Siemens, the German industrial company, and bribes they had paid in Bangladesh. And when I started following the money, actually looking at—well, Siemens paid these bribes, which have been publicly announced by the Justice Department, and not much else. When I started looking into those payments and where they went, I uncovered that they had been given to a minister in the Bangladeshi government who was in turn a patron of a terrorist group. That sort of was eye-opening to me and made me think, well, it’s not only that these bribes are a business issue; if we follow the money, which has not been done enough, and we uncover where the money goes, we find devastating things. And I think part of the reason it’s not been looked at much is because it’s expensive, and it takes a lot of time to go and follow the money in places like Bangladesh. The corporations certainly don’t want to do that. The Justice Department doesn’t make an effort to really understand; it’s not in their purview, it’s not in their mandate to understand the fallout of these bribes, so they don’t do that. And journalists, again, it’s not something that’s necessarily on their radar, and it’s not something they have the resources to do. So I think that’s why it kind of got swept under the rug.

RS: Well, but you’re kind of giving them a pass. I mean, first of all, the very idea that white-collar crime–you know, I just had some young people who work with, have come out of gangs here in Los Angeles, in my class; they served hard time for their crimes. And their crimes didn’t affect as many people as the corporations you’re talking about, the executives. What is it about this double standard? That you can bribe a whole nation–I mean, after all, for instance, Bangladesh, that’s a factory-floor country now, right? They make a lot of the clothes that we’re wearing, and everything else. People, you know, their working conditions, their living conditions, are a basic human rights concern for the world. And then some companies can go in there and totally corrupt the local government–well, they probably also can keep unions out; they can probably make sure we don’t, the country doesn’t do much for working conditions or the life of the people. So white-collar crimes are human rights crimes, very often.

DM: Oh, absolutely. And this one in particular, yeah.

RS: Well, talk about that a little bit, because I mean, there is a theme running through your book that could let these people off the hook–like, it’s always been thus. You know, going back to the British East India Company. But the fact is, it’s always been exploitive, vicious, and ever more so now.

DM: It’s always been thus, and again, I think the crime has been looked at the wrong way, and as a result, the prosecution has been pretty weak. And that’s what I was trying to argue in the book, that this is a crime that has existed for 400 years, since there were corporations. And the impact, as we saw with the British East India Company in India, has been devastating. But the companies have never been held to account for the devastation; they’ve just been held to account because our laws say that they violated the mandate to keep accurate books and records. In other words, we prosecuted as if it were just a white-collar crime. So that’s what I’m saying, is that it’s not just a white-collar crime; I agree with you, it’s a human rights issue, it’s something that affects poverty and political civility. I think the corporations get away with it because, to go back to something you said before, they often argue that they’re extorted, and they sometimes argue that they’ve been passive participants in these schemes. Which is not true; if you look at the hundreds of cases that the Justice Department has filed in the last 10 years alone, this is active bribery. I mean, some companies have an entire department in their operation that handles these payments. It’s very elaborate, and it’s very active. So this whole idea that they’re sort of being passively extorted, and we couldn’t do business otherwise, and those sorts of arguments, is definitely not valid.

RS: But what is their influence over the U.S. government? I mean, clearly, you know, you have good contact in these government agencies as a reporter; they’ve turned over files to you, people talk to you. The book has a lot of this great detail. But what I took away from it is, yes, Donald Trump may be the most offensive president we’ve had in this regard, because he himself has perfected the art, has been able to function in these countries; so you know, he probably has been at the scene of these crimes more often than most presidents. But clearly, there’s a lack of political will, and bipartisan. I mean, some of these companies—for instance, GE is mentioned in your book. You know, it’s a company where two out of three jobs have gone abroad, and they have all kinds of problems with GE Capital, and their financial, and blah blah blah. But Jeffrey Immelt, the head of GE, was the head of Barack Obama’s jobs council. He was held up as an exemplary businessman. And this is true of a number of the companies. And American foreign policy has actually been the handmaiden of these companies, their ability to function.

DM: Maybe it goes back to this fact: while a corporation cannot pay a bribe abroad—that is illegal under our laws; if you try, even attempt to pay a bribe to a government official abroad, that is illegal—but here in this country, lobbying is not. And so, yeah, the corporations have a huge amount of money to legally lobby; that wouldn’t be called bribing here in the United States. But yeah, they wield an incredible amount of power. And I mean, we have just seen an example of this; after Trump became president, the Republican-led House rolled back a very important—bipartisan, I should mention—effort to inject more transparency into business deals involving oil companies and mining companies under the Cardin-Lugar provision of the Dodd-Frank Act. That was a really important piece of legislation, but that was one of the first things that, thanks to the oil companies which lobbied very hard, the House repealed, and Trump signed into law.

RS: You know, there’s a notion of free market capitalism, and you know, Adam Smith, Ricardo, the great prophets of that. And those notions of the free market, everybody thinks that that somehow was an unequivocal endorsement of capitalism—no. It was a warning that there’s another kind of capitalism—of the cartels, monopoly capitalism, restrictive trade—that would threaten the virtues of a free market. That’s why Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations talked about, you know, the invisible hand; that no one should be able to control the action. But the multinational corporations, and they are dominant now—they want a hand. They want it controlled.

DM: They have an invisible hand through bribes. There isn’t a free market that we think, there isn’t free and fair competition. In fact, it’s all—I don’t want to say it’s all rigged, but it’s greatly rigged through bribes.

RS: In your book, you describe a normalcy of corruption. And then I kept thinking, OK, so what does Apple do in China? What does Lockheed do in their airplane sales? Trump just bragged about the biggest arms deal we have with Saudi Arabia that we’ve ever had. Does this go on in all of these places, and with these very respectable companies?

DM: That’s what history would tell us. Again, we discovered that companies were doing this back in 1977, right after Watergate, because very prestigious companies like Lockheed, and the titans of industry, so to speak, were doing this. So in one sense, we just don’t know; the estimates we have are that about 30 percent of companies globally pay bribes. But that’s based on what they tell us through surveys, and it’s based on the number of cases that are detected; we just don’t know, we’re looking at the tip of the iceberg. But yes, Rolls Royce, a company that is known for making the best engines in the world, the most cutting-edge engines in the world, and was considered, you know, a paragon of success and corporate leadership for 10 years, between 2006 and 2016—it turns out the way they made their money was not through brilliant corporate leadership, it was through bribes. They hired people around the world, these shady middlemen, which is a common practice, who paid off government officials in Nigeria and Indonesia. And the thing that’s striking about that is, Rolls Royce didn’t need to do that, in one sense; they have good products. It’s not as if their engines are terrible; they have some of the best engines in the world. But they, again, thought, well, we won’t compete with Pratt & Whitney, or other competitors, if we don’t pay these bribes. They either thought that or they decided, we’re not even going to take a chance; we’re just going to pay these bribes and beat the competition. And they know that they can do that because the laws are not really going to hold them to account for it.

RS: And I just want to be clear, in your book, you deny the basic argument, which is that they have to do it, they have no choice. And in your book you indicate there’s another motive: that if they can have a preponderant position in a market, if they have the support of that local government, they can have what they call a desirable business environment. That government will also suppress labor discontent; you see it in even, say, Vietnam, where strikes are broken in order to—here’s a government that, a communist government, and they had a revolution and fought off the United States and everything. Yet you know, you have companies like Nike and everything operating in Vietnam, and the government is a partner in giving them an acquiescent, suppressed workforce. And the key to modern capitalism seems to be to have a cartel or monopoly hold on a market share. And you want to exclude the competition. And that’s what the bribing facilitates, right? It’s just a cost of doing business that ends up being very lucrative.

DM: Absolutely, and in countries like Bangladesh—and I mention Bangladesh because it’s an example I know very well—but in a period between 2001 and 2006 there was a particular government in control, and that government was notoriously corrupt and run by two brothers who were the sons of the prime minister. And I think a lot of corporations really liked having that system, where they knew as long as they keep paying off these guys, they’ll get the contracts they want. That these guys will force contracts through Parliament that the country doesn’t even need—a telecom project, for example, or a power station project. And this is wasting public money, but it’s a turnkey solution. If you have a corrupt politician in power, and you’re a company willing the pay the bribes, then yeah—I mean, this is what would be called state capture, right? You have a system that is just perfectly benefiting your aims and their aims, and it’s the people who are losing out.

RS: I want to return to that point, but let me take a break for a few minutes here. …[omission for station break] We’re back with David Montero, the author of “Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network.” And we’re just now talking about, what did you say the phrase is? State capture. And I want to get into that a little bit. We’ve just had the renegotiation of the NAFTA agreement, NAFTA 2.0, by Donald Trump. But a couple of the positive features is there’s actually a built-in protection for goods that come in; that workers on 45 percent or something of the product have to make 16 bucks an hour; in some of these places they’re making less than 2 bucks an hour, in Mexico. And also, the idea that maybe local courts—Canadian, Mexican, U.S. courts—might have some jurisdiction, instead of private corporate courts. But in looking into that, in Mexico for example, one of the things that companies get when they go down to Mexico, is there are these fake unions that people join. They aren’t real unions that could really put pressure on a company to pay more than a couple of bucks an hour. And I’m just wondering whether the bribing has created an overwhelming norm, and that’s why we have Apple computers in front of every student in a college classroom, that’s why all the clothes we wear are made in Bangladesh or Vietnam or China. Because those governments are being bribed, one way or another, to deliver an acquiescent workforce. And that is the business model, it’s not the exception.

DM: I can’t speak to that directly; I didn’t look at a case that involved how bribes affected labor specifically. But I can see your point with, again, a government in a place like Bangladesh being very much open to the idea of, if you bribe us we’ll give you the contracts you want. In the case of these two brothers I mentioned, they certainly, some of their concerns that they owned were factories; no one’s been able to trace back whether or not factories they owned were mistreating their workers or anything like that. But the point is that, yeah, I see what you’re saying; that there’s a sense that these governments would be willing to flout other laws. If they’re willing to take bribes and pass contracts that their country doesn’t even need, yeah, it’s possible.

RS: Yeah, I mean, the reason I’m pushing this—and it is a big issue in your book, because you’re really arguing this is not a victimless crime. It’s often presented as a victimless crime; that’s how you do business, you grease the palm, goods get made, everybody’s happy. But in your book, you keep reminding us that there are victims, and one victim is the American worker. This lowers wages, it has an effect on our quality of life. And that’s why I’m bringing it up. I mean, these are concessions obtained in considerable measure through bribery of powerful people in the governments that are the factory floor, or what have you, for these goods. And the consequence is negative, considerably negative, for the average person in the home country, the United States in this case.

DM: Well, yeah. And it’s incredibly negative, I think even more importantly, for the average citizen in the country where the bribes are paid. Because that’s where the fallout really takes place. But certainly, yeah, this is a system through which the corporations benefit; the handful of officials who receive the bribes benefit; but on either side of the equation, in the United States and in the country where the bribes are paid, ordinary people lose out. That may include that, right, a company pays a bribe for a contract, and as a result, an American company loses that contract; and that has happened many, many times, and as a result Americans lose jobs, or as you said, wages go down. And in the countries where these bribes are paid, again, if you follow the money, you find that the impact of these bribes is very devastating, so devastating, and devastating for a very, very long time. These are crimes with an impact that takes sometimes a decade to unfold. And again, it increases poverty, it increases conflict. And that’s part of the problem that I really didn’t see being told. And I think that’s why the laws against the crime are not really that enforced.

RS: Yeah. The book is called “Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network.” And that is not, from reading this book, to me, an overstatement. And if it’s a network, then, you know, the consequences are pervasive not just in the country—and here maybe I’m taking issue with your emphasis—where the bribes are being extended, but in the home country. For example, we have a big argument—I’m doing this broadcast from Los Angeles; the county and the city of L.A. just did pass resolutions guaranteeing a somewhat higher minimum wage that will rise in the next few years. That doesn’t mean a whole lot if most of the goods that we’re using are producing countries that have an incredibly low minimum wage. And if that low minimum wage is maintained elsewhere because of the bribery and corruption of those governments, whether it’s Mexico or China or anywhere else, that means you’re not going to do a whole lot through your own political activity, your own voting, your own activity within the home country to improve conditions, because these terms are set elsewhere, and they’re set in a sea of corruption in this global corporate bribery network. So I think the book has an ominous message, really, beyond what we’ve discussed so far.

DM: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s disturbing that this is, for a lot of companies, it is and has been for a long time, standard operating procedure. This is such an elaborate system, the way it works; it’s not that a company goes to a foreign minister and hands him $10,000 under the table. The way bribery works in the modern era is far more complicated than that, and requires a network of people, both within the organization and then who are hired outside of the organization, to pass on these bribes. It takes an incredible amount of effort to launder the money once the officials receive it. So it really is a network, and it’s an operation that’s much more sophisticated and ominous than we think when we think of someone just passing money under the table.

RS: The power of this book is you offer case studies that cannot be ignored. And it means that within a large company, there are whole divisions devoted to this kind of bribery. And people are in on it–accountants, executives, and so forth. This is a major part of doing business. And so I want to go from there, and we only have a few minutes left. I’d like to get into the role of our own government. Because you are really quite flattering in this book about individual civil servants within our own government who are supposed to be monitoring this. And they’re well-intentioned, they get the data, they try to bring the cases. But most often, it doesn’t go very far. And the fines are not very large given the profits involved; it’s more of a slap on the wrist. And I want you to just take the trajectory in this book from the mid-1970s, when thanks to Senator Frank Church and others, and good media reporting for once, whistleblowing, we actually were conscious of this corruption. And how much progress have we really made since the mid-1970s in controlling this global corporate bribery network? Is it worse now, is it better?

DM: Yeah, as you mentioned, after Watergate in the 1970s it was the most poignant reckoning as a country we had with how this—this system exists, and how it exists. Congress held hearings for three or four years in which they really delved into the issue, and that resulted in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, this law. So there was a time in the late ’70s, early ’80s, when there was a great amount of momentum behind stopping this crime; we understood why it was so bad, it involved our best companies, it was wreaking havoc abroad. But then a number of things happened, and we kind of lost sight of the law. The first was that the FCC and the Justice Department could not really decide, well, who’s in charge of enforcing this law? And by the way, it’s a law that doesn’t just deal with market violations; it’s a very complex law touching on national policy, foreign policy, et cetera. They didn’t have the expertise to do it. Nonetheless, it was decided they would jointly enforce this law, neither of them having really the adequate expertise to do so. Communism collapsed, and that was one of the main motivations for why we had this law; we were worried that the bribery abroad, that our corporations were involved in, was helping communists; it was giving them ammunition to say, look at these corrupt corporations funding these capitalist parties, and et cetera. Communist collapsed, and then by the 1990s, really this law became about protecting American competitiveness. The whole argument of “we need to protect citizens abroad” sort of died out; it became, the CIA of all things uncovered that foreign corporations were costing American companies billions of dollars in contracts because they were stealing them through bribery. And the CIA became very active in cracking down on this by handing over intercepts and other things. So by the early 2000s, we had literally one guy at the Justice Department enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and not surprisingly, he was an incredible—I mentioned in the book, Peter Clark, he was an incredible force in that sense. But there’s only so much one man can do. By the mid-2000s, enforcement of the FCPA was entirely lacking. And so there has been an upsurge in the last 10 years, as the result of a couple of different factors including more international cooperation and more political will. But the fines that the companies are forced to pay, for one thing, they’re so low. According to one study, they are equivalent to about one percent of a company’s market cap. That’s not much to be punitive. The Justice Department has many prosecutors working on this crime, but they’re incredibly complex, and they often don’t have the resources to really delve into them. What they would rather see is, bring enough evidence to get a corporation to settle, and pay a moderate fine, and that sends the message of deterrence. But clearly, it doesn’t.

RS: Well, I mean, people should ponder what you just said. We have lots of people in our prison system; we have the largest incarcerated population in absolute terms in the world. And our society is vigilant in going after someone who’s committed a petty crime, even, the third time, and try to put them away forever. And yet we get this slap on the wrist. And the idea that you have one person—one person!—in this huge bureaucracy devoted to controlling this, it tells the story. And it tells it, I think—I’m all for Trump-bashing and everything, but the fact of the matter is, he didn’t invent this problem. He may personify the problem, but we’re talking about, you know, the Clinton administration, the Obama administration, the two Bush administrations, going back to the Nixon administration. And so there’s a general intent, or lack of will, to hold these large corporations accountable. I don’t know, I don’t want to misstate the book, and people should read the book, draw their own conclusions. But the conclusion that I came away [with] from reading “Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network,” I felt I needed to take a shower.

DM: [Laughs]

RS: I felt I had just been dipped in a cesspool. And these are people who have been to the Harvard Business School, and you know, they’re top lawyers, they’re businesspeople, they talk a good game, they wear the finest suits, talk about integrity. And they live in a cesspool of corruption. I mean, you mentioned Siemens; it’s a German company of great, high regard, right? And these companies, they’re the blue-chip companies, and the norm of their operation throughout the world is to set an example of deep, deep corruption. Am I putting too fine a point on this? I don’t want to distort the book.

DM: No, not at all. I just want to point out, though, at the moment the Justice Department certainly has more than one person enforcing this. They have, I think, 24 prosecutors. But, right, for a long time it was only one person. But no, I think you’re absolutely not overstating this. I think that it’s standard operating procedure at many corporations; it’s very active, it’s very organized, this bribery. And it has a devastating impact. And it’s done by corporations that have already paid fines to the Justice Department, and in return for not being prosecuted through a settlement, they have said to the Justice Department, we are really sorry, we promise we’re going to reform, here’s the money for our fine. And they move on, and then a couple years later, guess what we find out—oh, they did it again. And they again reach a settlement where the Justice Department says, we won’t prosecute you, you guys promise to reform, we’ll take the fine. And it seems like on the one hand, their reforms are window dressing, and the Justice Department’s fines are kind of a slap on the wrist, and it’s not really making an impact for the corporations or for the people abroad who suffer for this.

RS: Your book describes these incredibly prosperous business executives, corporate lawyers, and so forth, who are quite comfortable in a system where they know when they violate the laws and bring misery to large numbers of people around the world, and corrupt the other political systems—they’re the worst role models for American democracy in the world; it’s a role model of corruption—that they’re not going to be hurt by this. Their company is not going to be hurt. They’re going to get the slap on the wrist. I just wonder, what will the people who read the New York Times, or the L.A. Times, Washington Post, who are in these corporate boardrooms—and presumably you’ll get some good reviews, hopefully—but what will they think when they read this book? Will they feel a sense of shame? Will they want to reform the system? Will they think it’s only Trump? If it’s only Trump, then how do you explain going back 400 years? You know, what do you think the reaction will be?

DM: Yeah, I think the reaction should be a wake-up call. I think some executives that I spoke to, including some who’d gone to jail for bribery in the past, they claimed–I think I believe them–they weren’t aware that bribes had such a devastating impact. And I think that’s part of the problem. People pay these bribes and they think it goes into a vacuum, and that allows them to get away with it legally, but also on their conscience. So I’m hoping that people who read this book, if they work in a corporation, it will be a needed wake-up call for them to say, wow, this is really devastating stuff; this money doesn’t just go into a black hole. It funds some really, really terrible things. And that, yes, I think hopefully the book will set a precedent that they can’t just get away with this by saying, well, we didn’t know the bribes were going to do that; we didn’t know they had that effect. And I hope that it may result in maybe more meaningful fines, if people understand the impact that this bribery has; it’s not just a white-collar crime.

RS: Great. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. I’ve been talking to David Montero. The book is called “Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network.” And if you’re one of those folks who thinks you don’t want to read about economics, then you don’t really want to read about people, you don’t want to read about the world condition. This book—and it’s vivid, and it’s telling of case stories, it’s a page-turner, and I highly recommend it. And that’s it for this week’s edition of Scheer Intelligence. Kat Yore and Mario Diaz are our brilliant engineers here at KCRW. Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon are our producers. And we were ably assisted this week by the public radio affiliate in Pittsburgh, WESA. That’s it for this week’s Scheer Intelligence. We’ll see you next week.