Chris Hedges's Blog, page 372

Newly Empowered House Democrats Pass Funding Plan Without Wall

WASHINGTON—On their first day in the majority, House Democrats have passed a plan to re-open the government without funding President Donald Trump’s promised border wall.

The largely party-line votes Thursday night came after Trump made a surprise appearance at the White House briefing room, pledging to keep up the fight for his signature campaign promise.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trump and Senate Republicans should “take yes for an answer” and approve the border bill, which was virtually identical to a plan the Senate adopted on a voice vote last month.

“We’re not doing a wall. Does anyone have any doubt that we’re not doing a wall?” Pelosi told reporters at a news conference Thursday night.

Pelosi, who was elected speaker earlier Thursday, also took a shot a Trump, calling his proposal “a wall between reality and his constituents.”

Trump strode into the White House briefing room Thursday — the 13th day of the partial government shutdown —and declared that “without a wall you cannot have border security.” He then left without taking questions from reporters.

The appearance came hours after the new Congress convened, with Democrats taking majority control of the House and returning Pelosi to the speakership after eight years of GOP control. The Democratic legislation to re-open the government without funding the wall is going nowhere in the Senate, where Republicans want Trump’s endorsement before voting on a funding package.

Trump is demanding billions of dollars to build his wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, which the Democrats have refused.

Asked if she would give Trump $1 for a wall to reopen the government, Pelosi said: “One dollar? Yeah, one dollar. The fact is a wall is an immorality. It’s not who we are as a nation.”

Congressional leaders from both parties met with Trump at the White House on Wednesday but failed to make progress during their first sit-down in weeks. The White House has invited the leaders back Friday for another round of talks that officials have suggested might be more successful now that Pelosi has been sworn in.

Reporters were told Thursday that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders would be holding a hastily called late afternoon briefing. Instead, out walked Trump, flanked by members of the unions that represent border patrol and immigration enforcement agents. It was his first time delivering remarks at the briefing room podium.

“You can call it a barrier, you can call it whatever you want,” Trump said. “But essentially we need protection in our country. We’re going to make it good. The people of our country want it.”

Trump said his meeting with the union officials had long been planned and just happened to come at “a very opportune time.” He also claimed his refusal to budge was winning praise, telling reporters, “I have never had so much support as I have in the last week over my stance for border security.”

Polls show a majority of Americans oppose the border wall, although Republicans strongly support it.

White House and Department of Homeland Security officials have spent recent days trying to make a public and private case that the situation at the border has reached a “crisis” situation that demands more money than Democrats have offered.

Trump tweeted an ominous video Thursday with images of what appeared to be migrants trying to rush the border and clashing with law enforcement, beneath the words “crisis at the border,” ”drugs” and “crime.” The video concludes with footage of Trump at the border along with audio from one of his rallies in which he vows to build his promised border wall and the crowd chants “Build the wall!”

The Democratic package to end the shutdown includes a bill to temporarily fund the Department of Homeland Security at current levels — with $1.3 billion for border security, far less than Trump has said he wants— through Feb. 8 as bipartisan talks would continue. It was approved, 239-192.

Democrats also approved a separate measure to fund the departments of Agriculture, Interior, Housing and Urban Development and others closed by the partial shutdown, at levels Senate Republicans had largely agreed to last year. The bill, which would provide money through the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30, was approved, 241-190, with several House Republicans joining Democrats.

The White House has rejected the Democratic package.

“Why not fully fund the Department of Homeland Security? Why doesn’t the Pelosi bill do that?” said White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer urged Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to put the House Democratic package on the Senate floor and send it to the president, saying it would show Trump “the sweet light of reason.”

McConnell has dismissed the idea as a “total nonstarter” and a waste of time.

But some Republican senators appeared open to at least part of the Democrats’ proposal.

“I’m not saying their whole plan is a valid plan, but I see no reason why the bills that are ready to go and on which we’ve achieved an agreement should be held hostage to this debate over border security,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

“Congress needs to take further action on border security, but that work should be done when the government is fully open,” added Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo.

Vice President Mike Pence, who was on the Hill Thursday to swear in new senators, took a hard line, telling Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, “Bottom line, if there’s no wall, there’s no deal.”

Trump has said the partial shutdown, which began Dec. 22, will last “as long as it takes” to get the funding he wants.

The White House said Trump made calls Thursday to the family of Cpl. Ronil Singh, the Newman, California, police officer shot to death during a Dec. 26 traffic stop. The suspected shooter is a Mexican man accused of living in the U.S. illegally. Republicans have seized on the case to call for tougher border security.

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Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Laurie Kellman, Kevin Freking, Alan Fram and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

North Korean Envoy to Italy Vanishes; Did He Defect?

ROME — North Korea’s top diplomat in Italy has gone into hiding along with his wife, according to a South Korean lawmaker, raising the possibility of a defection of a senior North Korean official.

The news came from South Korea’s spy agency, which briefed lawmakers in Seoul on Thursday on the status of North Korea’s acting ambassador to Italy, Jo Song Gil. It said he went into hiding with his wife in November before his posting to Italy ended late that month.

A high-profile defection by one of North Korea’s elite would be a huge embarrassment for leader Kim Jong Un as he pursues diplomacy with Seoul and Washington and seeks to portray himself as a geopolitical player.

South Korean lawmaker Kim Min-ki said an official from Seoul’s National Intelligence Service shared the information during a closed-door briefing. Kim did not say whether the spy agency revealed anything about Jo’s current whereabouts or whether he had plans to defect to South Korea.

Kim said the NIS said it has not been contacted by Jo.

According to Kim, the NIS official said Jo and his wife left the official residence in early November, weeks before his term was to end. Kim said he couldn’t confirm if the NIS official revealed whether Jo and his wife were accompanied by any children. The NIS earlier said it couldn’t confirm a South Korean media report that Jo was under Italian government protection as he seeks asylum in a Western nation.

North Korea has not yet commented on Jo’s status.

An official with the Italian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that Jo hadn’t requested asylum from Italy. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with standard practice, also said Jo no longer held diplomatic status in Italy, presumably since his assignment had ended.

Without citing any sources, Italian daily La Repubblica raised the possibility that while the Foreign Ministry was saying Jo hadn’t sought asylum from Italy, that didn’t rule out that the North Korean might have turned to other offices, such as Italian intelligence agencies for “assistance from Italy in order not to return to his country.”

North Korea, which touts itself as a socialist paradise, is extremely sensitive about defections, especially among its elite diplomatic corps, and has previously insisted that they are South Korean or U.S. plots to undermine its government.

About 30,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, according to South Korean government figures.

Many defectors have said they wanted to leave North Korea’s harsh political system and widespread poverty. North Korea often accuses the South of deceiving or paying people to defect, or claims that they have been kidnapped.

North Korea may publicly ignore Jo’s possible defection or hold back harsh criticism to avoid highlighting the vulnerability of its government as it tries to engage Washington and Seoul in negotiations, said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University.

Jo had been North Korea’s acting ambassador to Rome after Italy expelled then-Ambassador Mun Jong Nam in October 2017 to protest a North Korean nuclear test and long-range missile launch.

Jo seemed comfortable moving around Italy. In March 2018, accompanied by another embassy official, Pak Myong Gil, he visited two factories in Italy’s northeastern Veneto region with an eye on eventual trade, according to La Tribuna di Treviso, a local daily.

One factory produced bathroom furnishings and another made accessories from marble. The newspaper quoted the local businessmen as assuming at first the delegation consisted of South Koreans, not North Koreans, given the economic sanctions against North Korea.

Among the Italians accompanying the North Koreans was a former Italian senator for what is now the League party, which in general opposes economic embargoes as bad for business.

The politician, Valentino Perin, told AP he had spoken with Jo many times, including about preparations for the visit to the Veneto region. Perin said he last met with Jo on Sept. 5, at an official reception organized by the North Korean embassy in Rome.

Showing Jo’s business card, Perin said the North Korean was “very proud of his people and of his country.

The last senior North Korean diplomat known to have defected is Thae Yong Ho, a former minister at the North Korean Embassy in London, who fled to South Korea in 2016.

In an interview on South Korean television, Thae said he worked with Jo for more than a decade in the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s Europe bureau and that Jo had a child when Thae last saw him in 2013.

Thae said Jo comes from a family of diplomats, with his father and father-in-law both serving as ambassadors.

The embassy in Italy is critical for North Korea because it handles annual negotiations with the Rome-based World Food Program over aid to North Korea, Thae said. He also said Italy has been a hub for smuggling luxury items to the North Korean elite, and Jo would have been involved in those activities.

Thae said Jo would have been North Korea’s main diplomat for the Vatican and would have also handled discussions involving a possible visit to the North by Pope Francis if such talks had taken place. South Korea said in October that North Korean leader Kim mentioned during a summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in that he would welcome a papal visit.

Thae said he believes Jo was to be replaced by incoming ambassador Kim Chon in November but did not reveal how he obtained such information.

While not identifying him by name, North Korea’s state media described Thae as “human scum” after his defection in London, and claimed he was trying to escape punishment for serious crimes. Thae, who has been an outspoken critic of Kim while living in South Korea, denied the accusation and said he defected because he didn’t want his children to live “miserable” lives in the North.

It’s possible that Jo is trying to defect because of similar reasons, said Koh, a policy adviser for South Korea’s president.

“It could be difficult for some diplomats to accept being called back to the North after enjoying years living in the free West. They could want their children to live in a different system and receive better education,” he told The Associated Press.

The highest-level North Korean to seek asylum in South Korea is Hwang Jang-yop, a senior ruling Workers’ Party official who once tutored Kim Jong Un’s late father, dictator Kim Jong Il.

Hwang’s 1997 defection was hailed by many South Koreans as an intelligence bonanza. Hwang died in 2010.

Also in 1997, the North Korean ambassador to Egypt fled and resettled in the United States.

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Kim Tong-Hyung reported from Seoul.

Dow Falls 660 Points Amid Investor Fears on Apple Sales

NEW YORK — Stocks tumbled Thursday on Wall Street, with technology companies suffering their worst loss in seven years, after Apple reported that iPhone sales are slipping in China.

The rare warning of disappointing results from Apple stoked investors’ fears that the world’s second-biggest economy is losing steam and that trade tensions between Washington and Beijing are making things worse. The sell-off also came after a surprisingly weak report on U.S. manufacturing.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 660 points, or 2.8 percent, and the broader S&P 500 index fell 2.5 percent.

Apple stock plummeted 10 percent, wiping out more than $74 billion of the company’s market value. That’s almost as much as Starbucks is worth and more than Lockheed Martin, Lowe’s, Caterpillar, General Electric or Morgan Stanley.

Other major exporters, including heavy-machinery manufacturers and tech companies like Intel and Microsoft, also took big losses.

“For a while now there’s been an adage in the markets that as long as Apple was doing fine, everyone else would be OK,” said Neil Wilson, chief markets analyst at Markets.com. “Therefore, Apple’s rare profit warning is a red flag for market watchers. The question is to what extent this is more Apple-specific.”

Over the past year, the U.S. and China slapped new tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of imports in a trade war that threatens to snarl multinational companies’ supply lines and reduce demand for their products. Companies such as General Motors, Caterpillar and Daimler have all said recently that trade tensions and slower growth in China are damaging their businesses.

“When the largest and second-largest economies in the world get into a trade dispute, the rest of the world’s going to feel the effects. That’s what we’re seeing now,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of Cresset Wealth Advisors.

In a letter to shareholders Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that iPhone demand is waning in China and that the company expects revenue of $84 billion for the quarter that just ended. That’s $7 billion less than analysts expected.

Cook’s comments echoed the concerns that have pushed investors to flee stocks over the past three months. The U.S. stock market in 2018 posted its worst year in a decade.

The S&P 500 lost 62.14 points Thursday, closing at 2,447.89. The Dow fell to 22,868.22. The Nasdaq, which has a high concentration of tech stocks, retreated 202.43 points, or 3 percent, to 6,463.50.

U.S. government bond prices surged, sending yields to their lowest level in almost a year, and gold and high-dividend stocks like utilities also rose as investors looked for safer places to put their money.

The Institute for Supply Management said its index of U.S. manufacturing fell to its lowest level in two years, and new orders have fallen sharply since November. Manufacturing is still growing, but at a slower pace than it has recently.

Apple’s stock has slumped 39 percent since early October. The company also recently announced that it would stop disclosing how many iPhones it sold each quarter, a move many investors suspected was an attempt to hide bad news.

Apple took its biggest loss in six years and ended at $142.19. Microsoft fell 3.7, Intel 5.5 percent. The S&P 500 technology companies had their worst day since August 2011.

Among big industrial companies that could suffer from a drop in demand from China, Caterpillar declined 3.9 percent, Deere 2.7 percent and Boeing 4 percent.

“This situation is yet another example of how politics — in this case, the trade war — has exacerbated real but manageable economic concerns and turned them into something worse than they have to be,” Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network, wrote in a note to clients.

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Pan Pylas contributed to this story from London.

Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential Bid Leaves Questions to Be Answered

With the launch of her exploratory presidential committee on New Year’s Eve, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been among the first to jump into what is sure to be a crowded field of Democrats vying for their party’s 2020 nomination. In a four-minute video, she laid out in clear terms her bold, progressive agenda for a people-centered economy—a major improvement on the video she published last fall as part of her widely criticized response to President Donald Trump’s false accusations about her Native American ancestry.

For Warren to make her intentions clear nearly two years before the actual election is a good problem to have during this time of political devastation being wrought by Trump. With a partial government shutdown in progress that has no end in sight, and an announced pay freeze for federal workers, the president’s callousness toward working Americans is more apparent than ever. Into this fray, surely Warren’s move is a welcome one. There are, however, caveats to the senator’s bid and critical lessons for voters looking ahead to an inordinately long campaign season.

First, the good stuff: Warren has a strong track record of fighting on behalf of working Americans. Prior to becoming senator, her greatest achievement was to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government agency designed to enforce existing regulations protecting ordinary Americans against the shenanigans of banks and the financial industry. As a U.S. senator, Warren has backed a “Medicare for All” bill, spoken out against harsh conditions facing immigrants in detention, criticized the war in Afghanistan, and called for an end to the U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen. Most recently, she has also backed the idea of a “Green New Deal” to address the ongoing environmental and economic crisis through a green jobs program—a critical litmus test for progressives in Congress.

Second, she has taken a strong position on racial justice, an issue that stymied Sen. Bernie Sanders early in his primary campaign ahead of the 2016 election. In Trump’s first year in office, Warren took a bold position against Jeff Sessions during his confirmation as Attorney General, attempting to read a letter by Coretta Scott King denouncing Sessions’ attacks on black voting rights. She has just hired , a black woman, as her new chief of staff. Most importantly, she has made very clear that the economic struggles facing Americans are more deeply felt by people of color. In her exploratory committee launch video, Warren narrates, “Working families today face a lot tougher path than my family did. And families of color face a path that is steeper and rockier—a path made even harder by the impact of generations of discrimination.”

Third, if this nation is to ever have a female president, Warren would be a good first choice, and certainly a much better one than Hillary Clinton. Warren is a huge improvement on Clinton in terms of progressive policy positions. Unlike the 2016 Democratic nominee, she has clearly articulated many of the Democratic Party’s stated ideals from the beginning of her campaign and unequivocally thrown her political weight behind them. Wall Street executives view Warren as an enemy—as evidenced by their intense lobbying of the Obama administration against her leadership of the CFPB. Clinton, on the other hand, was a well-known friend to corporate America.

Warren’s own family story is a poignant one—her father was a military veteran who worked as a janitor while her mother earned minimum wage at a Sears department store. Despite her family’s strong working-class roots, Warren went on to become a professor at Harvard Law School in 1995. Her family history, however, is also the starting point for where Warren’s potential downfall as a presidential candidate lies.

Her disastrous response to Trump’s constant childish heckling of her family’s links to Native American ancestry could be Warren’s Achilles’ heel. The elaborate nature of the video and website she released last fall checked off almost every strategic mistake she could have made, starting with validating Trump’s racist slurs. The video begins with Trump’s voice, making clear that she was addressing his questioning. As many have pointed out, the best way to tackle a lying bully is to ignore him rather than to give him the attention he is desperately seeking. Perhaps the worst mistake she made in her quest to address Trump was to reduce the idea of Native American ancestry to a genetic calculation—a move that was roundly criticized by indigenous Americans and that may have actually hurt their struggle to maintain sovereignty.

Not only did the DNA test expose her naïveté in political strategizing, it alienated Native American communities. Unless Warren addresses the mistake she made head-on and apologizes to those impacted, it will haunt her throughout her campaign. Indeed, her ability to acknowledge her error will also be a critical test of whether she truly cares about people of color, or is simply using voters of color as her party has done all too often .

Warren’s other major challenge will come from Sanders, who is also likely to launch a bid for the nomination. Progressives who supported Sanders’ bid for the Democratic nomination in 2016 are still seething over Warren’s decision to endorse Clinton over Sanders during primary election season, despite her political alignment with Sanders’ values. Now Warren will have to contend with a popular lawmaker who has a decades-long political record, as well as experience running a primary campaign. She will also have to find a way to distinguish herself from Sanders—a conundrum that analysts are already speculating over. Her greatest advantages in appealing to Sanders’ supporters and other voters may be her relative youth and her gender.

No doubt there will be endless debates between progressives as to whether Warren deserves support, whether she is better than Sanders, whether she can beat Trump, or whether she is progressive enough. There will be exhortations to “unite” behind one or another candidate based on cynical calculations of who is a more formidable rival to Trump. The likely entry of former Vice President Joe Biden into the race may recreate the bitter 2016 battle between Democratic Party stalwarts and activists eager to push the party to the left.

We have only to read the news on a daily basis to be reminded of the extensive damage that Trump has done to people, institutions and the planet as we head into the 2020 race. If Trump has taught us anything, it is that electoral politics do matter and that there is indeed a significant difference between a center-right Democrat and a far-right demagogue.

Leading into the primary races of 2020 our task as progressives is to demand that Warren—and all the other Democratic candidates—understand clearly that they serve the American people, not the elites. It is to insist that they not replicate Clinton’s folly in casting herself as “not-Trump” rather than hammering out a bold vision for progress. It will also be incumbent on us all to ensure that whoever wins the Democratic nomination in 2020 will defeat Trump in order to end the devastation he has unleashed on the nation. The last two years have dragged on for far too long. The next two years will as well.



Trump Administration Considering Major Civil Rights Law Changes: Report

The Trump administration has reversed multiple government policies implemented in previous administrations, including rolling back protections in the Affordable Care Act, lifting limits on greenhouse gas emissions and limiting the Justice Department’s use of consent decrees, which ProPublica calls “a storied civil rights tool,” one that supporters say forces local and state governments to implement civil rights reforms that might otherwise languish.

Now civil rights laws are once again in danger of a major rollback, according to a new internal memo from the Justice Department, details of which were reported by The Washington Post Thursday.

Trump administration officials, in the memo, directed senior civil rights officials to review how “disparate impact” regulations can be changed or removed in the officials’ area of expertise. Under the concept of disparate impact, an action or policy can be considered discriminatory if it has an unequal impact based on, for example, race or ethnicity, even if that impact was unintentional.

Similar reviews, the Post reports, are also under consideration at the Department of Education, as well as at Housing and Urban Development. The concept has been applied to lawsuits in multiple issues.

In housing, this applies to lawsuits like one in New York, against an apartment complex with a policy of not renting to anyone with a criminal record. The plaintiffs alleged that the rule had an uneven, discriminatory impact against potential African-American and Latino renters, and relied on disparate impact to make that case.

In education, the Obama administration previously reached settlements with multiple school districts, including one in Lodi, Calif., which found disparities in how students were disciplined. “African American students,” the Post writes, “were five times as likely as white peers to receive out-of-school suspensions for willful defiance or disruption.”

Limiting the power of disparate impact “has been a longtime goal of conservative legal thinkers,” the Post writes. They’ve avoided action, however, “partly out of concerns that the Supreme Court might disagree, or that such changes would be unpopular and viewed as racist.” Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank focused on race and ethnicity, has previously lobbied against disparate impact and said even the George W. Bush administration was “skittish on civil rights.”

Civil rights lawyers and advocates say limiting the use of disparate impact could cripple anti-discrimination laws. “Disparate impact is a bedrock principle,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Post. She added, “Through the courts, we’ve been able to marshal data and use the disparate-impact doctrine as a robust tool for ferreting out discrimination.”

Discrimination can be insidious and hard to prove. As Ajmel Quereshi, senior counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the Post, “Most people don’t have access to what’s going on in somebody’s mind. Even if a decision was intentionally discriminatory, it’s going to be very difficult to prove.”

Read the full article here.

Sanders Contrite as 2016 Aides Face Harassment Allegations

NEW YORK — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his chief lieutenants are offering contrition as some of his 2016 campaign staffers face allegations of sexual harassment that threaten to derail a second White House bid before it begins.

Hours after a New York Times report detailed allegations of unwanted sexual advances and pay inequity on his first campaign, Sanders apologized late Wednesday “to any woman who felt that she was not treated appropriately.”

“Of course, if I run again, we will do better next time,” Sanders told CNN.

Yet there were immediate signs that the allegations, which did not directly involve Sanders, could hurt the self-described democratic socialist’s 2020 ambitions in the midst of the #MeToo era. In the wake of the report, some Democratic activists and operatives complained about the aggressive culture during the first campaign when male staffers and supporters were sometimes labeled “Bernie bros.”

“I’m not the least bit surprised,” National Organization for Women President Toni Van Pelt told The Associated Press, noting she was forced to block Sanders’ supporters from her social media feed in 2016. “To me, it was really clear this was the way they were running the campaign.”

She blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, at least in part, on Sanders and his supporters.

“It wasn’t just Trump, it wasn’t just the Russians, it was also the sexist people that ran his campaign,” Van Pelt said.

The timing could not be worse for Sanders, who is gearing up for a second presidential bid. His senior adviser told the AP last month that Sanders would run a “much bigger” operation and would start out as a front-runner if he ultimately decided to run.

Yet the 2020 Democratic field would have little in common with that of 2016, in which Sanders emerged as the anti-establishment alternative to Clinton.

Should he run again, the 77-year-old would enter a crowded field that features multiple prominent liberal women. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has already launched a presidential exploratory committee. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who has been a central figure in Washington’s reckoning with the #MeToo era, is considering a presidential run. Sen. Kamala Harris of California could also be a leading contender.

Even before the Times’ story was published, Politico reported that more than two dozen former campaign workers and volunteers had requested a meeting with Sanders to discuss sexual violence and harassment that occurred during the 2016 campaign.

The Times detailed one situation in which a campaign surrogate touched a strategist’s hair in a “sexual way,” among other unwanted advances. The Times also reported that in some cases, women were expected to sleep in the same quarters as men they didn’t know. Others discovered examples of men who were paid significantly more for doing similar jobs.

Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, said the meeting with concerned former staff and volunteers would take place in a matter of days, although it had not yet been scheduled as of late Wednesday.

“The fact is if somebody didn’t feel safe in any way, it was a failure. I, we apologize profusely. This is not acceptable,” she told the AP. She continued: “I welcome hearing from the individuals that had such problems because we need to talk about this. And women need to feel and to be safe on campaigns, in their workplaces, on campuses and in their homes.”

O’Meara Sanders said she and her husband became aware of the allegations only after the campaign was over. They subsequently implemented a series of safeguards on his 2018 Senate re-election campaign, which included mandatory staff training, strict guidelines and the creation of a complaint hotline run by a third party.

“We didn’t hear specific things during the campaign. We heard some of them after the campaign. We’ve heard others just now that were never reported,” O’Meara Sanders said. “We were, as you can imagine, out on the road and you do delegate. But we do think at the top level, people did the best they possibly could.”

Sen. Sanders noted the 2016 campaign grew from just a handful of employees to roughly 1,200 workers in just a few months.

“I am not going to sit here and tell you we did everything right in terms of human resources,” he told CNN.

There was no immediate indication that Sanders was backing away from another presidential run.

When asked about her husband’s 2020 aspirations, O’Meara Sanders said the new situation would have no impact on their plans.

RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the National Nurses United and a chief Sanders ally, suggested the revelations might help his political future by forcing an important conversation and stronger anti-harassment policies.

“This is Bernie Sanders. This is someone who believes from the bottom of his heart in equality. He does. I think he’ll be the best president in the history of America on equality,” DeMoro said. “I’m hopefully going to be part of organizing every woman in this country for Bernie in 2020.”

Nina Turner, who leads the Sanders’ political arm, Our Revolution, noted that none of the women who alleged misconduct said Sanders had any direct knowledge.

“This is hurtful, this moment is heavy — as well it should be when people are coming out saying they were mistreated in the campaign based on their gender,” Turner said in an interview. “But hopefully if he does run again, this will give him the opportunity to change that.”

“The vast majority of the people who supported him will continue to support him,” she added.

But on the ground in South Carolina, a key state on the presidential primary calendar where Clinton beat Sanders in 2016, Democratic state Sen. Marlon Kimpson said people were already decidedly “less enthusiastic” about Sanders heading into 2020.

Kimpson said the state’s Democratic primary voters — most are women — would want to hear directly from Sanders about what he knew about the allegations and when.

“In this day and age, the allegations of sexual harassment have to be taken very seriously and action must be taken swiftly to send a message to your campaign that this behavior will not be tolerated,” Kimpson said. “This will be a material issue in people making up their minds if he’s talking the talk and walking the walk.”

Van Pelt, of the National Organization for Women, cast the blame on Sanders whether he had direct knowledge of misconduct or not.

“If he didn’t know,” she said, “he has no business being in office.”

Austin’s Police Department Improperly Cleared Dozens of Rapes

This story is a collaboration with Newsy and ProPublica.

WASHINGTON — An independent audit by Texas officials found Austin’s Police Department improperly cleared nearly a third of sexual assault cases from 2017 that auditors recently examined, indicating the city’s true rate of solving rape cases is lower than what police officially reported to the public and government officials.

The audit was requested by the Police Department following a joint investigation by Newsy, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica. The investigation revealed that Austin police and dozens of law enforcement agencies across the country are making it appear as though they have solved a significant share of their rape cases when they have simply closed them without making an arrest, using a process known as exceptional clearance.

The project found that in 2016, Austin police reported that 51 percent of rape cases were cleared, but that suspects were arrested only 17 percent of the time. The rest were exceptionally cleared — a category that requires police know the identity and location of the suspect and have probable cause to make an arrest, but cannot because the suspect is dead, already in prison, if prosecutors decline to take a case or if the survivor is not ready to speak with authorities. The Austin Police Department has promoted its high clearance rate at City Council meetings as a sign of its effectiveness in fighting crime.

Austin Police Chief Brian Manley announced the preliminary results of the audit by the Texas Department of Public Safety at a New Year’s Eve news conference.

The audit looked at 95 sexual assault cases processed by the Austin police in January, November and December of 2017 that police had exceptionally cleared. DPS says it selected the months based on the large number of clearances submitted during those months.

Manley said the preliminary findings, which the department received Dec. 13, concluded “30 rape offenses that were exceptionally cleared did not meet the criteria for exceptional clearance” as defined by FBI rules for the national uniform crime report. He announced that 29 were properly classified. The preliminary report did not say how the 30 misclassified cases should have been classified.

The independent state findings come after Austin police officials said their own internal review had concluded their use of exceptional clearances was “appropriate.” Facing pressure from advocates following our investigation, Austin police asked for the state review that was released on New Year’s Eve.

Elizabeth Donegan, who led the city’s sex crimes unit for years, said in an exclusive interview in November that she had been pressured by superiors to change rape cases from “suspended” to exceptionally cleared. A suspended case is one where police investigators don’t have probable cause to make an arrest or don’t yet meet the requirements from the FBI to classify the case as “cleared.”

Donegan said reclassifying suspended cases as cleared would have inflated the city’s publicly reported clearance rate for rape.

“I think it just gives a false sense to the community that this case has been thoroughly investigated, and it’s closed,” Donegan said.

She says she was transferred out of the sex crimes unit after refusing to reclassify the cases. The department’s reported clearance rate for rape increased after her removal, with data showing a substantial increase in the rate of exceptionally cleared rapes. In October, Manley acknowledged the increase in the department’s use of exceptional clearance following Donegan’s departure, and said leadership had a “difference of opinions” with her.

At the time, Manley defended the department’s actions further, saying police leadership conducted its own internal review of Donegan’s claims and concluded suspended rape cases were properly reclassified to “cleared.”

On Monday, Manley acknowledged the Department of Public Safety’s findings and said Austin police would not wait for the state’s final report, expected this month, before carrying out sweeping reforms.

“Immediately we reached back out to DPS’ incident-reporting bureau and asked them if they would assist us in retraining our detective bureau so we can ensure every detective was current on their knowledge and was following appropriate guidelines,” he said.

Manley said the Department of Public Safety is currently reviewing Austin’s training guidelines and will help retrain supervisors, who will then retrain every one of the 296 detectives who work in the department’s investigative bureau. The trainings are being fast-tracked, as Austin police are up against a Feb. 15 deadline to report the city’s official crime numbers for 2018.

Manley said after the department is trained, it will conduct its own internal review of exceptionally cleared crimes from 2018 before officially reporting them as cleared to state or federal agencies. The new review will cover all violent crimes for 2018, not just rapes.

“It’s important we take these steps to shore up these areas where maybe we are doing something inaccurately so that we can have confidence in the information we are putting forward,” Manley said on Monday.

Donegan, however, said the Department of Public Safety findings about rape clearances reveal only “the tip of the iceberg” and are a symptom of a larger problem with how police and prosecutors are handling reports of rape.

“What he’s talking about is an easy fix if you look at the surface,” she said. “If you do a deeper dive, I think you’ll find there are real issues with the thoroughness of the investigations themselves.”

Donegan suggested that an outside team of experts in sexual assault investigations should be assembled to dig further. Austin City Councilwoman Alison Alter said in December she is working with advocacy groups and other members on the council to help direct the city to conduct a deeper examination of why so many rape victims stop cooperating after having contact with police and prosecutors.

10 Cataclysmic Scenarios if We Fail to Control Climate Change

The summer of 2018 was intense: deadly wildfires, persistent drought, killer floods and record-breaking heat. Although scientists exercise great care before linking individual weather events to climate change, the rise in global temperatures caused by human activities has been found to increase the severity, likelihood and duration of such conditions.

Globally, 2018 is on pace to be the fourth-hottest year on record. Only 2015, 2016 and 2017 were hotter. The Paris climate agreement aims to hold temperature rise below 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, but if humankind carries on its business-as-usual approach to climate change, there’s a 93 percent chance we’re barreling toward a world that is 4 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century, a potentially catastrophic level of warming.

A Warning and a Reckoning

In 1992, 1,700 scientists around the world issued a chilling “warning to humanity.” The infamous letter declared that humans were on a “collision course” with the natural world if they did not rein in their environmentally damaging activities.

Such apocalyptic thinking might be easy to mock, and not entirely helpful in inspiring political action if end times are nigh. In 2017, however, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries co-signed their names to an updated—and even bleaker—version of the 1992 manifesto.

The latest version, titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” asserts that most of the environmental challenges raised in the original letter—i.e., depletion of freshwater sources, overfishing, plummeting biodiversity, unsustainable human population growth—remain unsolved and are “getting far worse.”

“Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising [greenhouse gases] from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption,” the paper states.

“Moreover,” the authors wrote, “We have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”

But they stressed that, “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.”

More recently, President Trump’s own administration released on November 23 the 1,600-page Fourth National Climate Assessment, a quadrennial report compiled by 13 federal agencies. This report paints a particularly grim picture, including more frequent droughts, floods, wildfires and extreme weather, declining crop yields, the rise of disease-carrying insects and rising seas—all of which could reduce U.S. gross domestic product by a tenth by the end of the century.

So what we saw this summer? Unless humanity gets its act together, we can expect much worse to come. Here’s a peek into our climate-addled future.

Species Extinction

The Amazon, one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, could lose about 70 percent of its plant and amphibian species and more than 60 percent of its birds, mammals and reptile species from unchecked climate change, according to a 2018 study by the University of East Anglia, the James Cook University and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which analyzed the impact of climate change on nearly 80,000 species of plants, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians inhabiting the WWF’s 35 “Priority Places” for conservation.

The study’s most alarming projection was for the Miombo Woodlands in central and Southern Africa, one of the priority places most vulnerable to climate change. If global temperatures rose 4.5 degrees Celsius, the researchers projected the loss of 90 percent of amphibians and 80 percent or more of plants, birds, mammals and reptiles.

This incredible loss of biodiversity affects humans, too. “This is not simply about the disappearance of certain species from particular places, but about profound changes to ecosystems that provide vital services to hundreds of millions of people,” the authors warned.

Food Insecurity and Nutritional Deficiencies

While climate change could actually benefit colder parts of the world with longer growing seasons, tropical and subtropical regions in Africa, South America, India and Europe could lose vast chunks of arable land. For coastal countries, rising seas could inundate farming land and drinking water with salt.

Staple crops such as wheat, rice, maize and soybeans, which provide two-thirds of the world’s caloric intake, are sensitive to temperature and precipitation and to rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. A sweeping 2017 study showed that every degree-Celsius of warming will reduce average global yields of wheat by 6 percent, rice by 3.2 percent, maize by 7.4 percent and soybeans by 3.1 percent.

What’s more, according to a recent paper, carbon dioxide levels expected by 2050 will make staple crops such as rice and wheat less nutritious. This could result in 175 million people becoming zinc deficient (which can cause a wide array of health impacts, including impaired growth and immune function and impotence) and 122 million people becoming protein deficient (which can cause edema, fat accumulation in liver cells, loss of muscle mass and in children, stunted growth). Additionally, the researchers found that more than 1 billion women and children could lose a large portion of their dietary iron intake, putting them at increased risk of anemia and other diseases.

Farewell to Coastal Cities and Island Nations

Unless we cut heat-trapping greenhouse gases, scientists predict sea levels could rise up to three feet by 2100, according to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment report.

This could bring high tides and surges from strong storms, and be devastating for the millions of people living in coastal areas. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a report earlier this year that predicted parts of Miami, New York City and San Francisco could flood every day by 2100, under a sea-level rise scenario of three feet.

Entire countries could also be swallowed by the sea due to global warming. Kiribati, a nation consisting of 33 atolls and reef islands in the South Pacific, is expected to be one of the first.

Kiribati won’t be alone. At least eight islands have already disappeared into the Pacific Ocean due to rising sea levels since 2016, and an April study said that most coral atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century.

Social Conflict and Mass Migration

In 2017, New York Magazine Deputy Editor David Wallace-Wells wrote an alarming and widely read essay called “The Uninhabitable Earth” that focused almost entirely on worst-case climate scenarios. He discussed that, with diminished resources and increased migration caused by flooding, “social conflict could more than double this century.”

The article’s scientific merit has been fiercely debated, but the World Bank did conclude in March 2018 that water scarcity, crop failure and rising sea levels could displace 143 million people by 2050. The report focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, which represent 55 percent of the developing world’s population. Unsurprisingly, the poorest and most climate-vulnerable areas will be hardest hit.

Lethal Heat

Today, around 30 percent of the global population suffers deadly levels of heat and humidity for at least 20 days a year, a 2017 analysis showed. If emissions continue increasing at current rates, the researchers suggested 74 percent of the global population—three in four people—will experience more than 20 days of lethal heat waves.

“Our attitude towards the environment has been so reckless that we are running out of good choices for the future,” Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the study’s lead author, told National Geographic.

“For heatwaves, our options are now between bad or terrible,” he added. “Many people around the world are already paying the ultimate price of heatwaves.”

Surging Wildfires

The Camp Fire, which burned more than 150,000 acres in Butte County in November, was the deadliest and most destructive fire in California’s history, killing at least 85 people. The Mendocino Complex Fire, which started in July and torched roughly 300,000 acres in Northern California, was the largest fire in the state’s modern history. The second-largest was 2017’s Thomas Fire, which burned 281,000 acres in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

But the Golden State’s fires will only get worse, according to California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment released by the governor’s office in August. If greenhouse gases continue rising, large fires that burn more than 25,000 acres will increase by 50 percent by the end of the century, and the volume of acres that will be burned by wildfires in an average year will increase by 77 percent, the report said.

“Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt typically cause soils to be drier for longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a longer wildfire season, particularly in the western United States,” The Union of Concerned Scientists explained in a blog post.

“These hot, dry conditions also increase the likelihood that wildfires will be more intense and long-burning once they are started by lightning strikes or human error.”

Hurricanes: More Frequent, More Intense

It’s not currently clear if changes in climate directly led to 2017’s major hurricanes, including Harvey, Irma, Maria and Ophelia. What we do know is this: Moist air over warm ocean water is hurricane fuel.

“Everything in the atmosphere now is impacted by the fact that it’s warmer than it’s ever been,” CNN Senior Meteorologist Brandon Miller said. “There’s more water vapor in the atmosphere. The ocean is warmer. And all of that really only pushes the impact in one direction, and that is worse: higher surge in storms, higher rainfall in storms.”

NOAA concluded this June that, “It is likely that greenhouse warming will cause hurricanes in the coming century to be more intense globally and have higher rainfall rates than present-day hurricanes.”

Melted Polar Ice and Permafrost

The Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and continued loss of ice and snow cover “will cause big changes to ocean currents, to circulation of the atmosphere, to fisheries and especially to the air temperature, which will warm up because there isn’t any ice cooling the surface anymore,” Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, told Public Radio International. “That will have an effect, for instance, on air currents over Greenland, which will increase the melt rate of the Greenland ice sheet.”

Not only that, frozen Arctic soil—or permafrost—is starting to melt, causing the release of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It’s said that the permafrost holds 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. Wadhams explained that the fear is that the permafrost will melt in “one rapid go.” If that happens, “The amount of methane that comes out will be a huge pulse, and that would have a detectable climate change, maybe 0.6 of a degree. … So, it would be just a big jerk to the global climate.”

The Spread of Pathogens

Disturbingly, permafrost is full of pathogens, and its melting could unleash once-frozen bacteria and viruses, The Atlantic reported. In 2016, dozens of people were hospitalized and a 12-year-old boy died after an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia. More than 2,000 reindeer were also infected. Anthrax hadn’t been seen in the region for 75 years. The cause? Scientists suggested that a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that was infected with the disease decades ago, according to NPR.

While we shouldn’t get too frightened about Earth’s once-frozen pathogens wiping us out (yet), the warming planet has also widened the geographic ranges of ticks, mosquitoes and other organisms that carry disease.

“We now have dengue in southern parts of Texas,” George C. Stewart, McKee Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and chair of the department of veterinary pathobiology at the University of Missouri, told Scientific American. “Malaria is seen at higher elevations and latitudes as temperatures climb. And the cholera agent, Vibrio cholerae, replicates better at higher temperatures.”

Dead Corals

As the world’s largest carbon sink, our oceans bear the brunt of climate change. But the more carbon it absorbs (about 22 million tons a day), the more acidic the waters become. This could put a whole host of marine life at risk, including coral reef ecosystems, the thousands of species that depend on them and the estimated 1 billion people around the globe who rely on healthy reefs for sustenance and income. According to Science, “Researchers predict that with increasing levels of acidification, most coral reefs will be gradually dissolving away by the end of the century.”

These climate predictions are worst-case scenarios, but there are many more dangers to consider in our warming world. A report recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change found “evidence for 467 pathways by which human health, water, food, economy, infrastructure and security have been recently impacted by climate hazards such as warming, heatwaves, precipitation, drought, floods, fires, storms, sea-level rise and changes in natural land cover and ocean chemistry.”

Half a Degree Matters

Since the 19th century, the Earth has warmed by 1 degree Celsius. Now, a major IPCC special report released in October warns that even just a half-degree more of warming could be disastrous. “Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5ºC or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II.

The panel said that “limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society.”

With President Trump saying he doesn’t believe his own administration’s climate report, that sustainable and equitable society remains a distant dream.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.

Progressives Urge Democrats to Vote Down Conservative ‘Pay-Go’ Plan

After the incoming House Democratic majority’s newly released rules package made clear that presumptive Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is moving to ram through a fiscally conservative “pay-go” measure despite widespread grassroots opposition, progressives condemned the proposed rule as a harmful “roadblock” to a bold agenda and urged their representatives to vote it down.

“In order for pay-go to go into effect, it needs to pass the House,” Warren Gunnels, policy director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), pointed out on Twitter. “If some 18 Democrats vote no, it fails. The vote will take place on Thursday. Will enough progressives have the courage to vote no on the first roadblock to Medicare for All, Green New Deal, and college for all? Let’s see.”

In a petition pressuring House Democrats to vote against any rules package containing pay-go, Social Security Works declared that the proposed provision “would leave Democrats fighting for working families with one arm tied behind their backs.”

“Reject the pay-go rules that perpetuate deficit scaremongering and bolster claims that we need to cut Social Security and Medicare,” reads the group’s petition, which currently has over 23,800 signatures.

Tell your House member that PayGo is a no go!

Sign our petition: https://t.co/6RWr0Fwtoc

Then give them a call: https://t.co/ej9WYhzxa0 https://t.co/1eYAxfVt7g

— SocialSecurityWorks (@SSWorks) January 2, 2019

If implemented, pay-go would require all new spending to be offset by budget cuts or tax hikes. Such a restriction, progressive lawmakers and economists argue, would unnecessarily hamstring the House Democratic majority’s ability to pursue the bold agenda that voters demanded in the November midterms

“This is a terrible move from Pelosi and Democratic Party leadership and a slap in the face for movements demanding justice and prosperity for all—not just a privileged few,” argued Justice Democrats communications director Waleed Shahid.

“There’s enormous appetite in the Democratic Party and among all Americans for major public investment to tackle our nation’s major crises: deepening inequality and structural racism and climate disaster,” Shahid added in a statement. “Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership’s support of pay-go makes actually solving these crises all but impossible. The Democratic Party leadership is unilaterally disarming and shooting themselves in the foot.”

Message to House Dems: Do NOT vote for “PayGo” in the rules package. It’s a brainless Republican idea that tax cuts or mandatory spending increases must be offset by tax increases or mandatory spending cuts. Totally disables fiscal policy. https://t.co/t9PXK0c9wm

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) January 2, 2019

Just hours after the House Democrats’ proposed rules package was made public, Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—who will be sworn in on Thursday—and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) became the first lawmakers to vow to vote no if pay-go is included.

In a tweet, Khanna declared: “I will be voting no on the rules package with pay-go. It is terrible economics. The austerians were wrong about the Great Recession and Great Depression. At some point, politicians need to learn from mistakes and read economic history.”

Echoing Khanna’s opposition, Ocasio-Cortez announced that she will also oppose the rules package, arguing that pay-go is “a dark political maneuver designed to hamstring progress on healthcare and other legislation.”

“We shouldn’t hinder ourselves from the start,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.

Tomorrow I will also vote No on the rules package, which is trying to slip in #PAYGO.

PAYGO isn’t only bad economics, as @RoKhanna explains; it’s also a dark political maneuver designed to hamstring progress on healthcare+other leg.

We shouldn’t hinder ourselves from the start. https://t.co/WW3UaBs7vh

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 2, 2019

As Common Dreams reported at the time, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) in December successfully killed a deeply regressive, Pelosi-backed tax rule that would have made progressive policy priorities like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal impossible to fund.

With a vote on the rules package slated for Thursday, advocacy groups and policy experts argued that the pay-go fight is another chance for the growing and emboldened CPC to flex its muscle and signal that it is prepared to fight for an ambitious agenda.

“We urge them to recognize that this era calls for bold leadership,” declared Social Security Works. “That means improved Medicare for All, expanded Social Security, and taking on Big Pharma to lower prescription drug prices. Our government’s priority should be delivering results for the people, not appeasing the Wall Street Journal editorial page.”

“Let’s stop this fiscal madness in its tracks,” concluded Stony Brook University economics professor Stephanie Kelton, who has urged Democrats to ditch their deficit obsession and unleash “the power of the public purse” on behalf of progressive policies. “We need a flexible budget to rebalance our economy.”

Employers Are Doing Irreversible Damage to Older Workers’ Lives

Tom Steckel hunched over a laptop in the overheated basement of the state Capitol building in Pierre, South Dakota, early last week, trying to figure out how a newly awarded benefit claims contract will make it easier for him do his job.

Steckel is South Dakota’s director of employee benefits. His department administers programs that help the state’s 13,500 public employees pay for health care and prepare for retirement.

It’s steady work and, for that, Steckel, 62, is grateful. After turning 50, he was laid off three times before landing his current position in 2014, weathering unemployment stints of up to eight months.

When he started, his $90,000-a-year salary was only 60 percent of what he made at his highest-paying job. Even with a subsequent raise, he’s nowhere close to matching his peak earnings.

Money is hardly the only trade-off Steckel has made to hang onto the South Dakota post.

He spends three weeks of every four away from his wife, Mary, and the couple’s three children, who live 700 miles away in Plymouth, Wisconsin, in a house the family was unable to sell for most of the last decade.

With Christmas approaching, he set off late on Dec. 18 for the 11-hour drive home. When the holiday is over, he’ll drive back to Pierre.

“I’m glad to be employed,” he said, “but this isn’t what I would have planned for this point in my life.”

Many Americans assume that by the time they reach their 50s they’ll have steady work, time to save and the right to make their own decisions about when to retire.

But as Steckel’s situation suggests, that’s no longer the reality for many — indeed, most — people.

ProPublica and the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, analyzed data from the Health and Retirement Study, or HRS, the premier source of quantitative information about aging in America. Since 1992, the study has followed a nationally representative sample of about 20,000 people from the time they turn 50 through the rest of their lives.

Through 2016, our analysis found that between the time older workers enter the study and when they leave paid employment, 56 percent are laid off at least once or leave jobs under such financially damaging circumstances that it’s likely they were pushed out rather than choosing to go voluntarily.

Only one in 10 of these workers ever again earns as much as they did before their employment setbacks, our analysis showed. Even years afterward, the household incomes of over half of those who experience such work disruptions remain substantially below those of workers who don’t.

“This isn’t how most people think they’re going to finish out their work lives,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist and veteran scholar of the older labor force who worked on the analysis. “For the majority of older Americans, working after 50 is considerably riskier and more turbulent than we previously thought.”

The HRS is based on employee surveys, not employer records, so it can’t definitively identify what’s behind every setback, but it includes detailed information about the circumstances under which workers leave jobs and the consequences of these departures.

We focused on workers who enter their 50s with stable, full-time jobs and who’ve been with the same employer for at least five years — those who HRS data and other economic studies show are least likely to encounter employment problems. We considered only separations that result in at least six months of unemployment or at least a 50 percent drop in earnings from pre-separation levels.

Then, we sorted job departures into voluntary and involuntary and, among involuntary departures, distinguished between those likely driven by employers and those resulting from personal issues, such as poor health or family problems. (See the full analysis here.)

We found that 28 percent of stable, longtime employees sustain at least one damaging layoff by their employers between turning 50 and leaving work for retirement.

“We’ve known that some workers get a nudge from their employers to exit the work force and some get a great big kick,” said Gary Burtless, a prominent labor economist with the Brookings Institution in Washington. “What these results suggest is that a whole lot more are getting the great big kick.”

An additional 13 percent of workers who start their 50s in long-held positions unexpectedly retire under conditions that suggest they were forced out. They begin by telling survey takers they plan to keep working for many years, but, within a couple of years, they suddenly announce they’ve retired, amid a substantial drop in earnings and income.

Jeffrey Wenger, a senior labor economist with the RAND Corp., said some of these people likely were laid off, but they cover it up by saying they retired. “There’s so much social stigma around being separated from work,” he said, “even people who are fired or let go will say they retired to save face.”

Finally, a further 15 percent of over-50 workers who begin with stable jobs quit or leave them after reporting that their pay, hours, work locations or treatment by supervisors have deteriorated. These, too, indicate departures that may well not be freely chosen.

Taken together, the scale of damage sustained by older workers is substantial. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are currently 40 million Americans age 50 and older who are working. Our analysis of the HRS data suggests that as many as 22 million of these people have or will suffer a layoff, forced retirement or other involuntary job separation. Of these, only a little over 2 million have recovered or will.

“These findings tell us that a sizable percentage, possibly a majority, of workers who hold career jobs in their 50s will get pushed out of those jobs on their way to retirement,” Burtless said. “Yes, workers can find jobs after a career job comes to an early, unexpected end. But way too often, the replacement job is a whole lot worse than the career job. This leaves little room for the worker to rebuild.”

When you add in those forced to leave their jobs for personal reasons such as poor health or family trouble, the share of Americans pushed out of regular work late in their careers rises to almost two-thirds. That’s a far cry from the voluntary glide path to retirement that most economists assume, and many Americans expect.

Steckel knows a lot about how tough the labor market can be for older workers, and not just because of his own job losses. He’s spent much of his career in human resources, often helping employers show workers — including many, like him, over 50 — the door.

In most instances, he said he’s understood the business rationale for the cuts. Employers need to reduce costs, boost profits and beat the competition. But he also understands the frustration and loss of control older workers feel at having their experience work against them and their expectations come undone.

“Nobody plans to lose their job. If there’s work to do and you’re doing it, you figure you’ll get to keep doing it,” he said recently. But once employers start pushing people out, no amount of hard work will save you, he added, and “nothing you do at your job really prepares you for being out” of work.

For 50 years, it has been illegal under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act, or ADEA, for employers to treat older workers differently than younger ones with only a few exceptions, such as when a job requires great stamina or quick reflexes.

For decades, judges and policymakers treated the age law’s provisions as part and parcel of the nation’s fundamental civil rights guarantee against discrimination on the basis of race, sex, ethnic origin and other categories.

But in recent years, employers’ pleas for greater freedom to remake their workforces to meet global competition have won an increasingly sympathetic hearing. Federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have reacted by widening the reach of the ADEA’s exceptions and restricting the law’s protections.

Meanwhile, most employers have stopped offering traditional pensions, which once delivered a double-barreled incentive for older workers to retire voluntarily: maximum payouts for date-certain departures and the assurance that benefits would last as long as the people receiving them. That’s left workers largely responsible for financing their own retirements and many in need of continued work.

“There’s no safe haven in today’s labor market,” said Carl Van Horn, a public policy professor and director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Even older workers who have held jobs with the same employer for decades may be laid off without warning” or otherwise cut.

In a story this year, ProPublica described how IBM has forced out more than 20,000 U.S. workers aged 40 and over in just the past five years in order to, in the words of one internal company planning document, “correct seniority mix.” To accomplish this, the company used a combination of layoffs and forced retirements, as well as tactics such as mandatory relocations seemingly designed to push longtime workers to quit.

In response, IBM issued a statement that said, in part, “We are proud of our company and our employees’ ability to reinvent themselves era after era, while always complying with the law.”

As an older tech firm trying to keep up in what’s seen as a young industry, IBM might seem unique, but our analysis of the HRS data suggests the company is no outlier in how it approaches shaping its workforce.

The share of U.S. workers who’ve suffered financially damaging, employer-driven job separations after age 50 has risen steadily from just over 10 percent in 1998 to almost 30 percent in 2016, the analysis shows.

The turbulence experienced by older workers is about the same regardless of their income, education, geography or industry.

Some 58 percent of those with high school educations who reach their 50s working steadily in long-term jobs subsequently face a damaging layoff or other involuntarily separation. Yet more education provides little additional protection; 55 percent of those with college or graduate degrees experience similar job losses.

Across major industrial sectors and regions of the country, more than half of older workers experience involuntarily separations. The same is true across sexes, races and ethnicities, although a larger share of older African-American and Hispanic workers than whites are forced out of work by poor health and family crises, the data shows. This could indicate that minority workers are more likely to have jobs that take a bigger toll on health.

Once out, older workers only rarely regain the income and stability they once enjoyed.

Jaye Crist, 58, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was a mid-level executive with printing giant RR Donnelley until his May 2016 layoff. Today, he supports his family on less than half his previous $100,000-a-year salary, working 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at a local print shop, 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. at the front desk of a Planet Fitness gym and bartending on Sundays.

Linda Norris, 62, of Nashua, New Hampshire, earned a similar amount doing engineering work for defense contractors before being laid off in late 2015. She spent much of 2016 campaigning for then-candidate Donald Trump and is convinced her fortunes will change now that he’s president. In the meantime, she hasn’t been able to find a permanent full-time job and said she has $25 to her name.

The HRS is widely considered the gold standard for information about the economic lives and health of older Americans. It’s funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Social Security Administration and is administered by the University of Michigan. It has been cited in thousands of academic papers and has served as the basis for a generation of business and government policymaking.

Our analysis suggests that some of those policies, as well as a good deal of what analysts and advocates focus on when it comes to aging, don’t grapple with the key challenges faced by working Americans during the last third or so of their lives.

Much public discussion of aging focuses on Social Security, Medicare and how to boost private retirement savings. But our analysis shows that many, perhaps most, older workers encounter trouble well before they’re eligible for these benefits and that their biggest economic challenge may be hanging onto a job that allows for any kind of savings at all.

“We’re talking about the wrong issues,” said Anne Colamosca, an economic commentator who co-authored one of the earliest critiques of tax-advantaged savings plans, “The Great 401(k) Hoax.” “Having a stable job with good wages is more important to most people than what’s in their 401(k). Getting to the point where you can collect Social Security and Medicare can be every bit as hard as trying to live on the benefits once you start getting them.”

Layoffs are the most common way workers over 50 get pushed out of their jobs, and more than a third of those who sustain one major involuntary departure go on to experience additional ones, as the last decade of Steckel’s work life illustrates.

Steckel spent 27 years with the U.S. affiliate of Maersk, the world’s largest container cargo company, working at several of its operations across the country. It was while managing a trucking terminal in Chicago that he met his wife, an MBA student who went on to become the marketing director at Thorek Memorial Hospital on the city’s North Side.

In the late 1990s, Steckel was promoted to a human resources position. It required the family to relocate to the company’s headquarters in northern New Jersey, but the salary — which, with bonuses, would eventually reach about $130,000 — allowed Mary to be a stay-at-home mom.

Steckel saw himself continuing to climb the company’s ranks, but as shipping technology changed and business slumped in the middle of the last decade, Maersk started consolidating operations and laying people off. Steckel flew around the country to notify employees, including some he knew personally.

“It was pretty hard not to notice that many — not all, but many — were over 50,” he said. A Maersk spokesman confirmed Steckel worked for the company but otherwise declined to comment.

In early 2007, Steckel, then 51, was laid off.

He and Mary moved back to the Midwest, where the cost of living was lower and they had relatives.

Layoffs are common in the U.S. economy; there were 20.7 million of them last year alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In most instances, those who lose their jobs find new ones quickly. Steckel certainly assumed he would.

But laid-off workers in their 50s and beyond are more apt than those in their 30s or 40s to be unemployed for long periods and land poorer subsequent jobs, the HRS data shows. “Older workers don’t lose their jobs any more frequently than younger ones,” said Princeton labor economist Henry Farber, “but when they do, they’re substantially less likely to be re-employed.”

Steckel was out of work for eight months. The family made do, buoyed by generous severance pay and a short consulting contract. They did without dinners out, vacations or big purchases, but were basically okay.

Steckel was hired again in January 2008, this time as a benefits manager for Kohler, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures. At about $90,000, his salary was 30 percent lower than what he’d made at Maersk, but Wisconsin was so affordable that the family was able to buy the house and five acres in Plymouth.

Kohler seemed like a safe bet. Many of its employees had never worked anywhere else, following their parents and grandparents into lifetime jobs with the company. But as Steckel started in his new position, the U.S. financial crisis cratered real estate and home construction and, with them, Kohler’s business.

This time, Steckel’s role in executing layoffs was explaining severance packages to the company’s shellshocked factory workers.

“Most of these people were in their late 40s and 50s and there was nothing out there for them,” he said. “They’d come in with their wives and some of them would break down and cry.”

After three years, Kohler’s problems leapt from the factory to the front office. Steckel, by then 54, was laid off again in April 2010. A Kohler spokeswoman did not reply to phone calls and emails.

Still the family’s sole breadwinner, with kids in fourth, eighth and ninth grades, he scrambled for new work and, after a string of interviews, landed a job just four months later as the manager of retirement plans at Alpha Natural Resources.

Alpha, in the coal mining business, was riding a double wave of demand from China and U.S. steel producers, snapping up smaller companies on its way to becoming an industry behemoth.

Steckel’s job was a big one, overseeing complicated, union-negotiated pensions and savings arrangements. At $145,000, the salary represented a substantial raise from what he’d been making at Kohler and was even more than he’d earned at Maersk. The Steckels relocated again, this time to the tiny southwest Virginia town of Abingdon.

“We started thinking: ‘This may be it. This is where we’ll stay,’” Mary Steckel said. “Then, all that changed.”

In January 2011, Alpha bought Massey Energy for $8.5 billion and with it the responsibility for reaching financial settlements with the families of 29 miners killed the previous year in an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. The combination of the settlement costs and a sustained fall in coal prices forced layoffs at Alpha and eventually led to the company’s bankruptcy.

Steckel struggled to collect decades of paper records on wages and years of service in order to calculate pension payments for laid-off miners, virtually all in their 50s and 60s. “There were no jobs for them, but they were owed [pension benefits] and they wanted their money yesterday,” he said. A spokesman for the successor company to Alpha, Contura Energy, did not return phone calls or emails.

Once again, he processed other employees’ layoffs right up until his own, in March 2013. He was 56. The Steckels packed the kids and the family’s belongings into their Mercury Sable station wagon and went back to Wisconsin.

There, Mary took a job at Oshkosh Defense, which builds Humvees and other equipment for the military. Tom was out of work almost six months before landing a consulting contract to work in Milwaukee with Harley-Davidson, the motorcycle maker.

If it had lasted, the position would have paid about $90,000, or about what he’d made at Kohler, and, for a time, it seemed possible that it might turn into a regular job. But it didn’t, and he was out again that December.

Unlike Steckel, Jean Potter of Dallas, Georgia, seemed to leave her longtime job at BellSouth by her own choice, taking early retirement in 2009, when she was 55.

But that wasn’t the full story, she said. Potter, who’d had a 27-year career with the telephone company, rising from operator services to pole-climbing line work to technical troubleshooting, said she only retired after hearing she was going to lose her $54,000-a-year job along with thousands of other employees being laid off as part of the company’s acquisition by AT&T.

Under the law, retirements are supposed to be voluntary decisions made by employees. The 1967 ADEA barred companies from setting a mandatory retirement age lower than 65. Congress raised that to 70 and then, in 1986, largely prohibited mandatory retirement at any age. Outraged by companies’ giving employees the unpalatable choice of retiring or getting laid off, lawmakers subsequently added a requirement that people’s retirement decisions must be “knowing and voluntary.”

Yet for almost two decades now, when HRS respondents who’ve recently retired have been asked whether their retirements were “something you wanted to do or something you felt forced into,” those who’ve answered they were forced or partially forced has risen steadily. The number of respondents saying this has grown from 33 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2014, the last year for which comparable figures are available.

“The expectation that American workers decide when they want to retire is no longer realistic for a significant number of older workers who are pushed out before they are ready to retire,” said Rutgers’ Van Horn.

Potter was convinced she’d secured money and benefits by leaving as a retiree that she would not otherwise have received. She felt better for making the decision herself and figured she’d go back to school, get a college degree and find a better job.

“I thought I’d gotten the drop on them by retiring,” she said.

But looking back, Potter acknowledges, her decision to retire was hardly freely chosen.

“If I had to do it over, I’d take early retirement again, but you can’t very well call it voluntary,” she said recently. “All the old people were toast. They were going to get laid off, me included.”

Jim Kimberly, a spokesman for AT&T, said the company could not confirm Potter’s employment at BellSouth because of privacy concerns. Speaking more generally, Kimberly said “We’re recognized for our longstanding commitment to diversity. We don’t tolerate discrimination based on an employee’s age.”

There was a time when older workers thought they could use early retirements as a stepping stone, locking in years of payments for leaving and then adding income from new jobs on top of that.

But many have discovered they can’t land comparable new jobs, or, in many cases, any jobs at all. In the decade since she left Bell South, Potter, now 65, has yet to find stable, long-term work.

After getting her bachelor’s degree in Spanish in 2014, Potter applied to teach in the Cobb County, Georgia, public schools but could only get substitute work. She got certified to teach English as a second language but said she was told she’d need a master’s degree to land anything beyond temporary jobs.

She’s scheduled to receive her master’s degree next June. In the meantime, she tutors grade-school students in math, English and Spanish and works as a graduate assistant in the office of multicultural student affairs at Kennesaw State University. She makes do on $1,129 a month from Social Security and a graduate-student stipend of $634, while applying, so far unsuccessfully, for other work.

She’s applied for jobs selling cellphones in a mall, providing call-center customer service and even being a waitress at a Waffle House. For the Waffle House job, she said she was told she wouldn’t be hired because she’d just leave when she got a better offer.

“Isn’t that what every waitress does?” she recalled replying. “Why hire them and not me?”

As with retirements, our analysis of the HRS data shows that, among older workers, quitting a job isn’t always the voluntary act most people, including economists, assume it to be.

The survey asks why people leave their jobs, including when they quit. It includes questions about whether their supervisors encouraged the departure, whether their wages or hours were reduced prior to their exit and whether they thought they “would have been laid off” if they didn’t leave.

We found that even when we excluded all but the most consequential cases — those in which workers subsequently experienced at least six months of unemployment or a 50 percent wage decline — 15 percent of workers over 50 who’d had long-term, stable jobs quit or left their positions after their working conditions deteriorated or they felt pressured to do so.

Quitting a job carries far greater risk for older workers than for younger ones, both because it’s harder to get rehired and because there’s less time to make up for what’s lost in being out of work.

After a simmering disagreement with a supervisor, David Burns, 50, of Roswell, Georgia, quit his $90,000-a-year logistics job with a major shipping company last February. He figured that the combination of his education and experience and the fact that unemployment nationally is at a 20-year low assured that he’d easily land a new position. But 10 months on, he says he’s yet to receive a single offer of comparable work. To help bring in some money, he’s doing woodworking for $20 an hour.

Burns has an MBA from Georgia State University and two decades in shipping logistics. A quick scan of online job ads turns up dozens for logistics management positions like the one he had in the area where he lives.

When he’d last lost a job at the age of 35, he said it took him only a couple of months and four applications to get three offers and a new spot. But in the years since, he said, he seems to have crossed a line that he wasn’t aware existed, eliminating his appeal to employers.

He keeps a spreadsheet of his current efforts to find new work. Through November, it shows he filed 160 online job applications and landed 14 phone interviews, nine face-to-face meetings and zero offers.

“My skills are in high demand,” he said. “But what’s not in high demand is me, a 50-year-old dude!”

“People can quibble about exactly why this kind of thing is going on or what to do about it, but it’s going on.”

Meg Bourbonniere had a similar experience just as she seemingly had reached the pinnacle of a successful career.

Two weeks after being appointed to a $200,000-a-year directorship managing a group of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in March 2015, Bourbonniere, then 59, said her supervisor called with an odd question: When did she think she’d be retiring?

“I kept asking myself, ‘Why would that be important today?’” she recalled. “The only thing I could come up with was they think I’m too old for the job.‘’

After she answered, “I’ll be here as long as you are,” she said she ran into an array of problems on the job: her decisions were countermanded, she was given what she saw as an unfairly negative job review and she was put on a “personal improvement plan” that required her to step up her performance or risk dismissal. Finally, a year after being hired, she was demoted from director to nurse scientist, the title held by those she’d managed.

Michael Morrison, a spokesman for Mass General’s parent organization, Partners HealthCare, confirmed the dates of Bourbonniere’s employment but said there was nothing further he could share as the company doesn’t comment on individual employees.

Bourbonniere said she accepted the demotion because her husband was unemployed at the time. “I couldn’t not work,” she said. “I was the chief wage earner.”

Through a friend, she found out about an opening for an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Rhode Island that, at about $75,000, paid only a third as much as the Mass General job. She told the friend she’d apply on one condition. “I said she had to tell the dean how old I was so I wouldn’t go through the same experience all over again.”

On paper, Bourbonniere quit Mass General of her own accord to take the position at URI. But, in her eyes, there was nothing voluntary about the move. “I had to go find another job,” she said. “They demoted me; I couldn’t stay.”

Soon after Steckel’s consulting contract ended in late 2013, he got what he saw as a sharp reminder of the role age was playing in his efforts to get and keep a job.

While searching job sites on his computer, Steckel stumbled across what seemed like his dream job on LinkedIn. Business insurer CNA Financial was looking for an assistant vice president to head its employee benefits operation. Best yet, the position was at CNA’s Chicago headquarters, a mere 145 miles from Plymouth. He immediately applied.

The application asked for the year he’d graduated from college.

Older job seekers are almost universally counseled not to answer questions like this. The ADEA bars employers from putting age requirements in help-wanted ads, but as job searches have moved online, companies have found other ways to target or exclude applicants by age. Last year, ProPublica and The New York Times reported that employers were using platforms like Facebook to micro-target jobs ads to younger users. Companies also digitally scour resumes for age indicators, including graduation dates.

Steckel left the field in the CNA application blank, but when he pushed “submit,” the system kicked it back, saying it was incomplete. He reluctantly filled in 1978. This time, the system accepted the application and sent back an automated response that he was in the top 10 percent of applicants based on his LinkedIn resume.

Hours later, however, he received a second automated response saying CNA had decided to “move forward with other candidates.” The rejection rankled Steckel enough that he tracked down the email address of the CNA recruiter responsible for filling the slot.

“Apparently, CNA believes a college application date is so important that it is a mandatory element in your job application process,” his email to the recruiter said. “Please cite a credible, peer-reviewed study that affirms the value of the year and date of one’s college graduation as a valid and reliable predictor of job success.”

He never got an answer.

Contacted by ProPublica, CNA spokesman Brandon Davis did not respond to questions but issued a statement. “CNA adheres to all applicable federal, state and local employment laws, and our policy prohibits any form of discrimination,” it said.

Steckel landed his current job with the state of South Dakota in March 2014.

Going back and forth between Pierre and Plymouth since then, he’s driven the equivalent of once around the world. If, as he hopes, he can hang onto the position until he retires, he figures he’ll make it around a second time.

During his off hours in the spring, when he’s not with his family, he fishes in the Black Hills. In the fall, he goes out with his Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun and hunts duck. The loneliest months are January and February. That’s when the Legislature is in session, so he can’t go home, and it’s usually too cold to do much outside. He spends a lot of time at the Y.

A half-century ago, in a report that led to enactment of the ADEA, then-U.S. Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz said that half of all private-sector job ads at the time explicitly barred anyone over the age of 55 from applying and a quarter barred anyone over 45.

Wirtz lambasted the practice in terms that, although backward in their depiction of work as solely a male concern, still ring true for older workers like Steckel and their families.

“There is no harsher verdict in most men’s lives than someone else’s judgment that they are no longer worth their keep,” he wrote. “It is then, when the answer at the hiring gate is ‘You’re too old,’ that a man turns away … finding nothing to look backwards to with pride [or] forward to with hope.”

Asked how the years of job turmoil and now separation have affected her family, Mary Steckel resists anger or bitterness.

“The children know they are loved by two parents, even if Tom is not always here,” she said. She doesn’t dwell on the current arrangement. “I just deal with it.”

As for Tom?

“He hasn’t admitted defeat,” Mary said, although something has changed. “He’s not hopeful anymore.”

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