Chris Hedges's Blog, page 383

Progressives Suggest Other Ways to Spend Potential Wall Budget

As President Donald Trump continued to throw a temper tantrum and threaten a government shutdown if he didn’t get billions of dollars to build his infamous border wall, Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) turned to Twitter on Friday to challenge the GOP trope that the federal government simply doesn’t have the money to implement bold progressive policies such as Medicare for All or a Green New Deal.

Spending legislation advanced by the Republican-controlled House Thursday night would allocate $5.7 billion to the wall, but that bill—at odds with a Senate-approved measure that lacks wall funding—seems unlikely to get through the upper chamber without Trump’s favored “nuclear option” of changing the Senate rules.

As the threat of a government shutdown loomed, the incoming congresswoman highlighted the other ways—from increasing teacher pay to replacing water pipes—that lawmakers could spend the money:

And just like that, GOP discovers $5.7 billion for a wall.

$5.7 billion

What if we instead added $5.7B in teacher pay?
Or replacing water pipes?
Or college tuition/prescription refill subsidies?
Or green jobs?

But notice how no one’s asking the GOP how they’re paying for it. https://t.co/jXdm1w9bpy

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 21, 2018

Stony Brook University public policy and economics professor Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, responded to Ocasio-Cortez by homing in on one of the key policy items backed by the incoming representative, tweeting: “Congress authorizes the spending. Period. The mechanics of paying for a #GreenNewDeal are exactly the same.”

Notice how it’s all about finding the VOTES. It’s how *everything* is paid for. Congress authorizes the spending. Period. The mechanics of paying for a #GreenNewDeal are exactly the same. https://t.co/EuJUfRrVck

— Stephanie Kelton (@StephanieKelton) December 21, 2018

A Green New Deal, supported by climate advocates nationwide and a growing number of House Democrats, would couple measures to address the global climate crisis with policies to create jobs and a more just economy. While Ocasio-Cortez has called for the creation of a House Select Committee to craft such a deal, top Democrats including presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.) have been accused of trying to kill it.

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—which endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s successful bid to oust long-time Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) last summer—responded to news of the potential $5.7 billion in border wall funding with a focus on healthcare. Along with a rising portion of the public, both DSA and Ocasio-Cortez support Medicare for All—a proposal championed by, among others, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would guarantee healthcare for all Americans.

Meanwhile, 30 million people still don’t have healthcare https://t.co/KEAaDAiTm3

— DSA for Medicare for All (@dsam4a) December 21, 2018

Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein responded to Ocasio-Cortez with some figures—suggesting that the U.S. could implement universal pre-K or provide coverage to more than 800,000 uninsured Americans with the money the House GOP wants to give Trump to bolster his anti-immigrant policies and fulfill one of his key campaign promises:

With $5.7B, you could:

– Cover 852,017 uninsured Americans
or
– Fund universal pre-K plan (options b/w $2B-$12B)

Granted you'd want these be recurring expenses rather than annual, but GOP also wants $25 billion for wall

– Repairing Flint's water pipes: $55 million https://t.co/c4Gkht3kFV

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) December 21, 2018

 

Want Better Sex? Consider Moving to a Socialist Country.

Young Americans are having less sex than ever. It seems counterintuitive in an age when dates are supposedly available with the swipe of fingertip across a smartphone, but according to a 2017 study from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, younger millennials—those born in the early 1990s—are more than twice as likely to be sexually inactive during their early 20s than previous generations at the same age.

For heterosexual women in particular, there are a number of reasons this might be the case. It could be the deprioritization of female pleasure, resulting in fewer orgasms for women. Or it might be capitalism. Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” argues that the economic system contributes not only to women’s sexual dissatisfaction, but to their ability to find satisfying romantic partners and any semblance of work-life balance.

Speaking to Truthdig shortly after the book’s release, Ghodsee emphasizes that she’s not advocating a return to Stalinism. “I’m not saying that we should go back to any form of 20th-century state socialism,” she explains. “Those experiments failed. What I am saying is that there are ways in which there were policies and ideas for policies that were put into place, and that we can extract and get rid of all of the nasty residue of 20th-century state socialist authoritarianism, and take these policies and repurpose them for the 21st century.”

This conversation has been condensed and edited.

Ilana Novick: What does it mean to have better sex under socialism? Is it about the act itself, and romance, or is it about how relationships between men and women are impacted by their country’s political system?

Kristen Ghodsee: The title obviously makes it sound as if it’s only about some kind of intimate transaction between people, but I’m really thinking about the relationships more broadly between men and women and society.

I’m not only even talking just about intimate relationships. I’m actually talking about friendships, I’m talking about parent-child relationships, I’m basically talking about the ways in which human beings in 2018 are increasingly seeing their attentions, affections and emotions being commodified by the market.

What I wanted to do is to do a thought experiment and say, “OK, what would heterosexual relationships look like outside of a market economy?” That’s actually not a really easy study to conduct in 2018, for obvious reasons. So, I decided to go back and look very specifically at these technological studies that were done in the former Eastern bloc.

IN: Speaking of sex itself, I wanted to ask you about the surveys you referenced, from Poland, Germany and other Eastern bloc countries, where women reported a higher rate of sexual satisfaction than in similar studies in Western countries. Tell me about these studies. How confident are you in their results?

KG: This is a very subjective question, but it’s interesting nevertheless, even though the data is complicated, that East German women reported feeling happy after sex at a much higher rate than West German women did. When I use this data, it’s a small evidentiary base, partially because not a lot of people have done work on this, and I think that more people now will; I hope that people will. But it’s also because I’m thinking about this sexual economics theory and the socialist critique of capitalist sexual relations.

It turns out if we want to do an experiment and we want to actually look at what sex is like in different economic systems, this is the perfect natural experiment—to look at women who lived or were raised and became sexually mature under socialism, and then experience a completely different type of sexuality post-’89 or ’91. In the book I talk about a study that’s also done in the urban areas—middle-class urban women in Russia—and it turns out that there is a very different sexual script that emerges after ’91 than women who were born between ’45 and ’65 in the Soviet Union.

Then the other thing that I talk about in the book is [that] we can actually look at studies in this country—and there’s another study in Western Germany—that show us whether or not people who share household chores more equitably have more or less sex. It turns out there are a couple of good studies that show that the perception that household chores are equally shared actually results in higher sexual frequency.

Now, again, that’s a quantity-versus-quality issue, and this is a very difficult conversation to have, but I think a lot of people would generally say if you’re having more sex with your partner, it’s probably just going to be better because you’re going to have more practice. You’ll know a lot more about what your partner likes and doesn’t like.

IN: Capitalism, and specifically market economies’ impact on two areas of women’s lives—work and finding relationships—is a big focus of the book. It seems like women, whether simply because of deeply ingrained gender roles or the kinds of work they seek, end up with less leverage both in terms of finding well-compensated, satisfying work and equitable relationships. Is that right? And if so, why?

KG: The specific thing that I latch onto in the book is this sexual economics theory, which is a 2004 paper that tries to define heterosexual courtship, and sex and sexuality is something that women sell and men buy on a market where prices are determined by supply and demand. When I read that paper, knowing what I know about socialist critiques of capitalist sexuality that go all the way back to the 19th century, I was really struck by how this sexual economics theory paper ends up, probably unknowingly, replicating the language of these old socialist critics of capitalist sexuality.

But it’s not just about sex. I’m very careful about the term “sex,” because I also realized that one of the issues with the book that has been raised is that I don’t really deal very much with people who fall outside of the heteronormative span, but I think that it applies broadly to anyone who’s having relationships in a capitalist economy.

IN: You write about how the Soviet Union’s advances in science and technology, achieved with the help of women, spurred the American government to pass legislation that ultimately gave women more civil rights. Does the United States have an equivalent to the Soviet Union today? Do we need the specter of competition in order to make life more equitable for women?

KG: I absolutely think so. You can just look back at the history of this country, and a lot of social progress was made because of a really threatening alternative to capitalism that we wanted to avoid.

You can look at all sorts of examples of American-funded government studies. The Americans sent economists to the Soviet Union in the ’50s to see what the Soviets were doing to incorporate women into the labor force, and these reports are very clearly telling the federal government that we have to do something about our quote unquote woman power, right? So that when President Kennedy establishes the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, in the preamble to that executive order, it says that he’s going to establish this committee to look at the role of women in our society for the interest of national security. So they were definitely thinking about these things in terms of Cold War competition with a rival.

IN: Even as many state socialist countries were able to integrate women into the workforce, they all encountered challenges when these women had children—similar challenges to the ones many American families living under capitalism face today: Even if women work outside the home, the women do the bulk of the domestic labor and child care. Why does this problem seem to transcend economic systems?

KG: Feminists have been debating this for a really long time. As long as women are … primarily responsible for child care and childbearing and rearing and nursing and all of that stuff, you are always going to have this really deep tension between wanting to have women in the workforce and requiring them or desiring of them their reproductive labors.

I’m not going to pretend that the state socialist societies in Eastern Europe got this perfect, because patriarchy ran really deep. Even though some really tried very hard to get fathers involved in child-rearing and to get husbands and partners involved in domestic work, overwhelmingly women faced a double burden. They had formal employment responsibilities and then they would come home and they would have domestic work. …  [I]n the case of Bulgaria, there was a 1969 time-budget survey that was done by the Bulgarian Women’s Committee and they found that between work and housework and commuting, Bulgarian women were working about 14.5 hours a day, which was incredibly exhausting, and this was partially contributing to the falling birth rate, because people were just too overwhelmed to even consider having another child.

IN: What did these countries do to get fathers more involved in child care and domestic labor?

KG: Most of these societies—with some really glaring exceptions, as in Romania and Albania—but most by the late socialist period still required women to be in the workforce, but they were implementing all of these really progressive policies—job-protected paid maternity leave, child allowances, very generous subsidies for early nursery schools and kindergartens. Basically, they’re trying to socialize some of the reproductive labor so that society basically helps bear some of the burden for these children, because, of course, the state wants these children because they’re future citizens and taxpayers, and they’re going to pay into the pension plan and potentially be soldiers, so children are, in fact, a social good.

IN: Are there countries that get this balance right today?

KG: I think that where we have really good examples of a balance between allowing women in to work in the labor force but then also really supporting them in their reproductive roles while not being coercive about it are in places like Sweden or in places like Iceland or Norway or Denmark or Finland—these Scandinavian countries which really have a very nice balance of incorporating women into the labor force and a really robust social safety net that really supports families with young children. In the case of Sweden, and I believe in Iceland as well, their whole parental-leave policy is set up so that fathers also have to take mandatory time out of the labor force in order for the couple to fully benefit from the money for parental leaves. This money comes out of tax revenue and it’s something the state is—basically, that society is—willing to pay for because they see this as a valuable thing.

Now, I am very aware of the fact that the Scandinavian countries are very small, and they’re more ethnically homogenous than a big, massive country like the United States. But I do think that we can look at some of our closest allies—the U.K., we can look at Canada … France, for instance, is a really good example—that have taken a lot of these policies and adapted them so that some of the reproductive labor required of women is socialized.

IN: Even as governments, for example, subsidize child care and incentivize men taking parental leave, men and women still struggle to balance domestic labor, in terms of the full range of domestic labor: actually raising children, cleaning, cooking, etc. How much does this government legislation actually influence the interactions that we have in our private lives?

KG: Those are precisely the core issues that I’m actually trying to deal with in the book.

So we can look at, again, a comparative study of Austria and Hungary. Austria and Hungary are very similar culturally. They were both part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, they were divided, obviously, after World War II into communism and capitalism. What we can look at is in 2017, we can look at Eurostat figures that show us very clearly that the percentage of Hungarian children that are in full-time child care is much higher than the percentage of Austrian children who are in full-time child care. The reason for that is that Hungarian men and Hungarian society accept that women should work, or when women want to work, they’re not being bad human beings or bad mothers by leaving their children at a daycare center or at a kindergarten or a crèche.

What we see in countries where there’s greater levels of gender equality and more state support for all sorts of social services—so we’re not only talking about child care but also health care and also tertiary education, you know, college or trade school—the pressure on the individual is released. We’re all a lot more relaxed, because we’re a lot less stressed. And secondly, we’re also in a situation where women have a social safety net, so that they don’t have to stay with a man in order to pay her rent, or in order to get health care, or all of the things that women do. They stay in abusive or unhappy or unhealthy relationships because they’re afraid of losing this material base.

IN: How do economic systems impact relationship satisfaction and how men and women relate to each other?

KG: Think about it. We talk about investing in relationships. We talk about investing in a friendship, or you spend time with somebody. You don’t share time with somebody—you spend time. So even the way that we talk about human relationships is increasingly using very commodified language, and I think that that’s what leads to this kind of disingenuousness. It can lead—it doesn’t necessarily lead, but it can lead—to a kind of disingenuousness, so that your reactions with other people are always sort of framed in, “What is this going to do for me or how am I going to benefit from this?” Rather than, “Wow, I just want to hang out with this person because I think they’re cool and I really like them and I just want to share my time.” It’s a very different way of embodying ourselves as subjects.

Partial Shutdown Begins After Lawmakers Fail to Reach Deal

WASHINGTON—A partial federal shutdown took hold early Saturday after Democrats refused to meet President Donald Trump’s demands for $5 billion to start erecting his cherished Mexican border wall, a chaotic postscript for Republicans in the waning days of their two-year reign controlling government.

Vice President Mike Pence, Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney left the Capitol late Friday after hours of bargaining with congressional leaders produced no apparent compromise. “We don’t have a deal. We’re still talking,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., told reporters.

Late Friday, Mulvaney sent agency heads a memorandum telling them to “execute plans for an orderly shutdown.” He wrote that administration officials were “hopeful that this lapse in appropriations will be of short duration” — an expectation that was widely shared.

With negotiations expected to continue, the House and Senate both scheduled rare Saturday sessions. House members were told they’d get 24 hours’ notice before a vote.

The gridlock blocks money for nine of 15 Cabinet-level departments and dozens of agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation, Interior, Agriculture, State and Justice.

The lack of funds will disrupt many government operations and the routines of 800,000 federal employees. Roughly 420,000 workers were deemed essential and will work unpaid just days before Christmas, while 380,000 will be furloughed, meaning they’ll stay home without pay.

Those being furloughed include nearly everyone at NASA and 52,000 workers at the Internal Revenue Service. About 8 in 10 employees of the National Park Service will stay home and many parks were expected to close.

The Senate passed legislation ensuring workers will receive back pay, which the House seemed sure to approve.

Some agencies, including the Pentagon and the departments of Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services, were already funded for the year in agreements reached earlier, and they will operate as usual.

The U.S. Postal Service, busy delivering packages for the holiday season, will not be affected because it’s an independent agency. Social Security checks will still be mailed, troops will remain on duty and food inspections will continue.

Also still functioning will be the FBI, the Border Patrol and the Coast Guard. Transportation Security Administration officers will continue to staff airport checkpoints and air traffic controllers will also remain at work.

Trump has openly savored a shutdown over the wall for months, saying last week he’d be “proud” to have one and saying Friday he was “totally prepared for a very long” closure. While many of Congress’ most conservative Republicans were welcoming such a confrontation, most GOP lawmakers have wanted to avoid one, since polling shows the public broadly opposes the wall and a shutdown over it.

“None of them have succeeded,” veteran Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said of past shutdowns. He said the political fallout has always damaged “Republicans who said, ‘By God, we’ll show them.’ It doesn’t work that way, it just doesn’t.”

Despite saying last week he’d not blame Democrats for the closure, Trump and his GOP allies spent the last two days blaming Democrats anyway. Trump said now was the time for Congress to provide taxpayers’ money for the wall, even though he’s said repeatedly that Mexico will pay for it — something that country has repeatedly rebuffed.

“This is our only chance that we’ll ever have, in our opinion, because of the world and the way it breaks out, to get great border security,” Trump said Friday. Democrats will take control of the House January 3, and they oppose major funding for wall construction.

Looking for a way to claim victory, Trump said he would accept money for a “Steel Slat Barrier” with spikes on the top, which he said would be just as effective as a “wall” and “at the same time beautiful.”

Trump called GOP senators to the White House Friday morning, but Republicans said afterward that the session did not produce a strategy.

Early this week, the Senate approved a bipartisan deal keeping government open into February and providing $1.3 billion for border security projects but not the wall. In a GOP victory Thursday, the House rebelled and approved a package temporarily financing the government but also providing $5.7 billion for the border wall.

Friday afternoon, a Senate procedural vote showed that Republicans lacked the 60 votes they’d need to force that measure through their chamber. That jump-started negotiations between Congress and the White House.

Republicans conceded that one of their biggest hurdles was Trump’s legendary unpredictability and proclivity for abruptly changing his mind.

“The biggest problem is, we just don’t know what the president will sign,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

So restive were senators returning to Washington that McConnell and others sported lapel buttons declaring them members of the “Cranky Senate Coalition.”

The White House said Trump did not go to Florida on Friday as planned for the Christmas holiday.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Kevin Freking, Mary Clare Jalonick and Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report.

How a Plant-Based Diet Could Finally Take Root

“What The Health: The Startling Truth Behind the Foods We Eat”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

Excerpted from  “What The Health: The Startling Truth Behind the Foods We Eat” by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn, with Eunice Wong . Published by BenBella Books, 2018. This excerpt is reproduced with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Editor ’ s Note: The book excerpted here, “ What the Health: The Startling Truth Behind the Foods We Eat, ” was written by Truthdig ’ s Book Review Editor, Eunice Wong.

 In 1946, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company launched a major ad campaign with the centerpiece slogan, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarettes.” Print and TV spots featured capable, kindly doctors in white coats puffing on their Camels. In the early 1940s, Reynolds created a “Medical Relations Division”—which was actually part of the company’s advertising firm—that directly recruited the help of physicians and researchers to support the faux health claims made in Camel ads.

It wasn’t hard to do. During the American Medical Association convention in 1947, doctors in the hundreds lined up for free cigarettes.

Many people believed that the dangers of smoking were dependent on the individual. That myth was very useful to the tobacco industry. As long as the public was convinced that some people could smoke without damaging their health, while unlucky others—for whatever reason—would suffer ill effects, then anti-smoking measures would remain on a private level.

But despite powerful marketing forces, science began to fracture the façade. The first major study to link smoking and lung cancer was published in 1950. It was the first rock in an avalanche of scientific literature warning against tobacco use.

Fourteen years later, in 1964, the US Surgeon General released the first federal report, based on over 7,000 medical studies, cautioning the American public of the significant connection between smoking, lung cancer, and heart disease.

In 1965, the year after the Surgeon General’s warning, 42.4 percent of adults in the US smoked. That number fell to 15.5 percent in 2016.

And those Camel-loving doctors? Their smoking rate plummeted to 3.3 percent.

In the 1960s, public awareness of the connection between cigarettes and fatal, preventable disease precipitated a crisis for the tobacco industry.

The country was on to them. Something had to be done.

In 1969, Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation circulated a now famous internal document:

Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.

And the tobacco industry has continued to manufacture doubt, even in the face of irrefutable scientific evidence and social stigma. Perhaps more significantly, it has provided a blueprint for other industries wishing to manufacture doubt.

“If there’s enough controversy, people throw up their hands,” Dr. Greger said. “‘I’m just going to eat whatever I like.’ That’s what the food industry wants. The strategy is to confuse the public.”

“The animal agriculture industries, like the tobacco industry, know exactly what they’re doing,” Dr. Barnard said. “They know meat and eggs contain saturated fat that affects your blood cholesterol; they know dairy doesn’t build strong bones. But they fund research to say, ‘Maybe these products aren’t so bad,’ and run enormous ad campaigns. If you can’t promote the fact that beef is going to damage your heart health or contribute to cancer, what can you say? ‘Well, it’s got a good sizzle.’ And when the bottom falls out of their North American market, they go overseas.”

“My patients tell me, ‘You say milk fat is bad for me, but these studies say milk fat is good for me. I don’t know what to believe, so I’m eating the cheese,’” Dr. Davis said. “If the food industries can get my colleagues to speak against myself and other doctors who are advocating a health-promoting, plant-based diet, and make me look extreme, then they’ve neutralized my message. And that’s the goal.”

(“Being vegan is extreme?” Dr. Greger exclaimed. “How about being bisected in half, having your chest cracked open, surgeons taking veins from your legs, rewiring your plumbing and trying to literally bypass the problem metaphorically and literally!?”)

…

In 1965, a year after the Surgeon General’s warning, Congress required warning labels to be put on cigarettes.

I thought back to the day I heard that the WHO had declared red meat a carcinogen, launching me on this journey. Even then, I wondered why the Surgeon General hasn’t gone after meat.

“I think it’s a matter of time,” Dr. Barnard said. “It took time to show that tobacco was linked to lung cancer, but eventually we could say, ‘Tobacco industry, fight all you want. We’ve got enough evidence now.’ We’re now at the point where we have enough evidence against eating animal products. There’s no question that people who avoid animal products are healthier in many ways than those who eat them. It’s a matter of time before the government tackles this more seriously. We’re already seeing that movement. Every five years, the dietary guidelines inch closer to a plant-based diet. In 2011, the meat group was thrown out of My Plate. They’ve now got a protein group, which could be beans or tofu. There’s a dairy group, but to their credit, soymilk is included. It’s not perfect, but we’re moving along.”

Dr. Klaper loved the idea of warning labels. “Just as a cigarette package says, ‘This has been shown to increase your chance of lung cancer,’ packages of meat, dairy, and eggs should clearly state, ‘These products have been scientifically shown to increase your risk of heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes, erectile dysfunction, autoimmune diseases, cancers of various types, and other conditions.’”

When a controversial fact is finally absorbed into public consciousness, a revolution happens. What was heresy becomes self-evident. The earth revolves around the sun. Global warming is driven by human activity. Smoking kills. Animal protein kills.

“Think of all those years in which it was considered rude if you told a guest not to smoke in your house,” said Dr. Goldhamer. “We put up with that crap for a long time before it became acceptable to say no.”

Nobody wants a smoker in their house, because you’re breathing the toxic byproducts of their bad habit. But someone else eating a burger doesn’t affect you…does it?

“Diet is not a personal choice,” said Dr. McMacken. “I understand how people think it is, but in reality, our individual food choices affect our nation, our planet, billions of animals, and they affect us as a human species.”

“Right now, we spend more on healthcare than any other country in the world,” Dr. Davis said. “We’re getting bigger and bigger, and sicker and sicker. That affects everybody. There’s a serious problem with people who say, ‘You do what you want, and I do what I want. Leave me alone with my decisions.’ A healthy person might be eating their vegetables and legumes, living disease-free, but a significant chunk of their tax dollars are going towards the unhealthy people, and that’s only going to get worse…”

Call it secondhand eating.

… And yet for all that healthcare spending, the US has the lowest life expectancy among 12 high-income nations, and some of the worst health outcomes.

“The average bypass operation is $70,000 to $200,000 or more,” said Dr. Mills. “Multiply that by millions, you’re breaking the bank.”

Our healthcare costs are bankrupting the country.

Economists Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel estimate that reducing the country’s mortality from heart disease or cancer by a mere 1 percent is currently worth nearly $500 billion. Reducing all causes of mortality by only 10 percent would be worth $18.5 trillion. That’s just 10 percent—remember, chronic diseases are responsible for 70 percent of deaths.

But our current medical system, as we’ve seen, is built on sickness, not health.

“It’s extremely tempting for medicine to continue doing these procedures for the income,” Dr. Esselstyn said. “What would really turn the system in the right direction is if we paid physicians for making people healthy. If a patient has a first, second, or third stent, somebody ought to be penalized for not treating the causation of the illness. Dr. Kim Williams made it clear that our motivation as cardiologists ought to be to put ourselves out of business. That is medical leadership with integrity.”

…

Plant-based solutions aren’t—yet—profitable to the medical and pharmaceutical industries. But they could be an incalculable boon to the insurance industry. That’s why Kaiser Permanente, one of the country’s largest non-profit health plans, began advocating in 2013 for its 17,000 doctors to actively encourage their patients to avoid eating animal products. Kaiser published a booklet called “The Plant-Based Diet,” steering their 10.6 million members to resources like PCRM and Dr. Greger’s NutritionFacts.org.

And in a “Nutritional Update for Physicians: Plant-Based Diets,” which references Drs. Esselstyn, Barnard, Ornish, McDougall, and Campbell, as well as the Adventist Health and EPIC studies, the Permanente Journal writes,

Healthy eating may be best achieved with a plant-based diet, which we define as a regimen that encourages whole, plant-based foods and discourages meats, dairy products, and eggs as well as all refined and processed foods… Physicians should consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients, especially those with high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or obesity… Despite the strong body of evidence favoring plant-based diets, including studies showing a willingness of the general public to embrace them, many physicians are not stressing the importance of plant-based diets as a first-line treatment for chronic illness… The purpose of this article is to help physicians understand the potential benefits of a plant-based diet, to the end of working together to create a societal shift toward plant-based nutrition… Too often, physicians ignore the potential benefits of good nutrition and quickly prescribe medications instead of giving patients a chance to correct their disease through healthy eating and active living…The future of health care will involve an evolution toward a paradigm where the prevention and treatment of disease is centered, not on a pill or surgical procedure, but on another serving of fruits and vegetables (emphasis added).

BOOM. From an insurance industry giant. They want the people they cover to stay healthy because that saves Kaiser Permanente money. If the science showed that salmon and chicken breasts promoted health, Kaiser Permanente would be pushing that diet. It is all. About. Money.

Yellow Vest Protesters Go Global With Their Fight

Last weekend, the number of people protesting on the streets in Paris appeared to have shrunk considerably compared to demonstrations on previous weekends. The labor movement known by participants’ gilets jaunes (yellow vests) entered its fifth weekend of protest activity after the French government announced plans to raise taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel. The movement, with no identified leader and no official hierarchy, has drawn supporters around the country concerned about broader issues of economic inequality.

Though French President Emmanuel Macron made concessions on Dec. 10, including raising the minimum wage by 100 euros ($114) a month and cutting out a planned tax on pensions under 2,000 euros ($2,280) a month, many in Paris feel this is not enough and believe the central issue remains unresolved. They have rejected both the neoliberal agenda supported by some purportedly left-leaning officials—including Macron himself— and the trickle-down theory popular on the right.

Isabel, a 47-year-old unemployed single mother, stopped for a brief interview during the protests last weekend. “It’s apolitical. It’s not a movement about the right or the left,” she said on Saturday at Republic, one of the main meeting spots in Paris for the gilets jaunes.

Republic, in the city’s 20th arrondissement, contains a wide mix of cultures, from Algerian to Chinese to Middle Eastern as well as French people. It was one of the most heavily guarded and, eventually, tear-gassed areas during Act IV (the fourth weekend of protest activity) in Paris two weekends ago, and it was also heavily marked by the “casseurs” (breakers), whom officials accused of rioting. Before the French version of 2011’s Occupy Wall Street movement was dispersed, its encampment was set up in Republic.

The yellow-vest movement inspired Isabel to attend the first protests she’s ever joined. “I’m here for the poverty in the world. We want France to be the model,” she said.

The fuel-tax hike may have sparked the movement, but the outcry continues. “I work all day, six days a week, and by the 15th of the month, I am in the red. I am not accepting this anymore,” said a male protester (who asked to remain anonymous) at a gathering at Opera in Paris.

The marchers who were interviewed agreed that climate change is an issue that needs to be tackled, but not on the backs of the working poor. Isabel explained: “I am very worried about climate change, and I believe it is just a matter of time before the climate movement and the inequality movement will come together. But why are they charging the poor, who can’t survive a huge tax hike, while the rich pay no tax on fuel for their boats? … And there is no tax on kerosene for airlines.” This theme was repeated by protesters at multiple rally points across Paris.

Part of the plan for Saturday’s protest was to make it more decentralized, due to the new inability to gather in big crowds. Entryways to places such as Opera and the Champs-Elysées were blocked off by the police shortly after the protests began, and people inside those areas could only move slowly, one by one, through a police blockade. French government officials said these measures were necessary due to the violence of the casseurs and the destruction they caused to buildings and national monuments. Those small but impactive factions have been widely condemned by the government and the public.

But the new restrictions didn’t stop the streets from filling Saturday with small groups of people wearing yellow vests. In one group near Opera, a man from Bretagne, France (who also requested anonymity), said, “I drove four hours last night to be in Paris this weekend. I can’t even get inside.” It was supposed to be his first demonstration in Paris.

Zaïa, a 23-year-old animator for children’s entertainment, said, “We want to know where our money goes, and we want everyone to have the same advantage. We pay tax and that’s fine, but we want to know where it goes. Why are the ones at the top paying nothing? It doesn’t help us on the bottom.”

In his Dec. 10 speech, which was watched by more than 23 million people, Macron held firm on his pro-business policies. The former Rothschild banker has been viewed as the president of the rich since taking office and lifting parts of the impôt de solidarité sur la fortune, or solidarity tax on wealth. Macron said at the time that his action was intended to stimulate the economy and to convince companies leaving France due to high tax rates to return to the country’s business community.

Nikita (who used a pseudonym at the protests) explained that for him, the movement is not aimed specifically at Macron, nor is it about the fuel-tax hike (which he believes should have never been proposed); rather, it’s about the entire system in place that he believes needs to be overhauled. He feels France needs to model for the rest of the world how to fight economic inequality. “We save Paris, we save France, we save humanity,” he said simply.

He’s not alone in thinking big. In recent weeks, various unions, student groups and advocacy groups announced plans to stage protests in the future. A poll published by Institut français d’opinion publique (Ifop) last month suggested that two-thirds of the French population believe a “social explosion” is set to occur in coming months.

According to a December Ifop survey, 72 percent support the gilets jaunes movement but do not condone violence. Everyone interviewed by Truthdig at the protests also condemned the violence. The Ifop poll also found that Macron’s approval rating is hovering around 23 percent.

But not everyone in Paris sides with the gilets jaunes activists, and a substantial swath of the French population reportedly believes that the freeze in the fuel-tax rises should be enough to quell the protests.

French law student Margaux, 24, said that she doesn’t know if the movement will die down anytime soon. She was clear on one point, however: “The government has done practically nothing, and we aren’t happy.”

Police Are Enabling Rampant Abuse in Immigrant Children’s Shelters

A World Cup soccer match was playing on the shelter’s TV when the two older teenagers tackled Alex on July 1 and dragged him into the empty bedroom. Wrestling him onto his stomach, one of them, a tattoo on his forearm, got on top. As Alex struggled to move, he said he could feel the teen’s penis grinding against his butt.

“Take off his shorts!” he heard the other teen, who’d bragged he’d been a gang member in Honduras, shout. “Let’s get him naked!”

Just 10 days earlier, Alex, 13, had been caught by the Border Patrol after traveling from Honduras with his 17-year-old sister and 5-year-old stepbrother, to flee the country’s gang violence. Now, they were being held at Boystown outside Miami, one of more than 100 youth shelters in the government’s sprawling system meant to provide a temporary haven for migrant children caught crossing the border.

The two teens had been taunting Alex since he’d arrived at the shelter, making crude sexual jokes about his pregnant sister. Now, in the bedroom, Alex said, they yanked down the front of his shorts.

“At least your sister has already tasted a man,” he heard one of them sneer. “But you haven’t even tried a woman.”

Alex said he fought as hard as he could, somehow managing to pull up his shorts and kick until he broke free. As he lay on the floor catching his breath, he said, the boys fled, warning him to keep his mouth shut.

Over the past six months, ProPublica has gathered hundreds of police reports detailing allegations of sexual assaults in immigrant children’s shelters, which have received $4.5 billion for housing and other services since the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America in 2014. The reports, obtained through public records requests, revealed a largely hidden side of the shelters — one in which both staff and other residents sometimes acted as predators.

Several of the incidents have led to arrests of shelter employees or teenage residents. And in one particularly heinous case, a youth care worker was convicted in September of molesting seven boys over nearly a year at an Arizona shelter. The employee had worked for months without a full background check.

Coverage of such incidents by ProPublica and other media triggered demands for investigations.

Arizona’s governor ordered a statewide inspection of the shelters, leading to the shutdown of two centers run by Southwest Key after the nonprofit failed to provide proof that its employees had completed background checks.

And late last month, federal investigators warned that the Trump administration had waived FBI fingerprint background checks of staffers and had allowed “dangerously” few mental health counselors at a tent camp housing 2,800 migrant children in Tornillo, Texas.

But ProPublica’s review of the hundreds of police reports showed something else about the assaults. Something that went beyond background checks. Kids at shelters across the country were, indeed, reporting sexual attacks in the shelters, often by other kids. But again and again, the reports show, the police were quickly — and with little investigation — closing the cases, often within days, or even hours.

And there are likely even more such cases. ProPublica’s cache of records is missing many police reports from shelters in Texas, where the largest number of immigrant children are held, because state laws there ban child abuse reports from being made public, particularly when the assaults are committed by other minors.

Now, as the immigration system struggles to house and care for 14,600 children — more than ever before — an examination of how federal and state authorities investigated the assault against Alex, one of those children, reveals startling lapses.

For a few days, Alex said, he didn’t report his assault, heeding his attackers’ warning, worried that speaking up would delay his release from Boystown. But as they continued to harass him, he decided to tell his counselor.

The counselor told him that a surveillance tape had captured the teenagers dragging him by his hands and feet into a room, and that there might have been a witness.

But Alex’s report did not trigger a child sexual assault investigation, including a specialized interview designed to help children talk about what happened, as child abuse experts recommend.

Instead, the shelter waited nearly a month to call the police. When it finally did, a police report shows, the shelter’s lead mental health counselor told the officers “the incident was settled, and no sexual crime occurred between the boys like first was thought among the staff.”

And instead of investigating the incident themselves, officers with the Miami-Dade Police Department took the counselor’s word for it and quickly closed the case, never interviewing Alex.

A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami, which received $6 million last year to care for about 80 children at Boystown, said it handled Alex’s case correctly, blaming him for any delays. In response to questions, a Miami-Dade police spokesman said the department was reopening the case.

An examination of Alex’s case shows that almost every agency charged with helping Alex — with finding out the full extent of what happened in that room — had instead failed him.

The police closed Alex’s case 72 minutes after responding to the call.

Alex’s mother, Yojana, had just gotten off work on July 27, bone-tired after another hot day installing swimming pools in southwest Missouri, when the call came from Boystown. She’d been expecting her regular chat with her children, so when her cellphone showed a Florida number, she answered excitedly.

Yojana had left them behind in Honduras four years earlier to seek a better life in the United States. Now after a month in the shelter, they’d soon be reunited.

But instead of her children, she heard the unfamiliar voice of a shelter staff member. Something had happened to Alex.

There was surveillance video, the woman said, showing two older teenagers grabbing Alex, throwing him to the floor and dragging him into a bedroom.

“But there are no cameras in the room,” she said, “so we couldn’t see the rest.”

The woman passed the phone to Alex, who sobbed as he told his mother what happened in the bedroom.

When she hung up, Yojana was furious. The attack had happened more than three weeks ago. Why was she only finding out about it now? Where was the staff? Why wasn’t anyone watching them? And what if the attack had been worse than Alex said?

As a mother, Yojana said her instincts were to go to the police — to break down any door she had to — to make sure the shelter and the teens were held accountable. But she knew that in the United States, she wasn’t just any mother. She and her husband, Jairo, had separately crossed the border illegally several years earlier and had been living in the country without permission ever since. The family agreed to let us tell their story as long as we didn’t use their last names.

Yojana had reason to worry. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been arresting parents and family members, or members of their households, who are in the country illegally when they come forward to claim their children. This month, ICE said it had arrested 170 such sponsors, or people connected to them, between July and November; 109 of those people had no criminal record.

If Yojana and Jairo went to the authorities, or pressed too hard, they could risk everything they’d worked for.

Weeks earlier, Alex had started on a path he thought would lead to help. Four days after the attack, he finally got up the courage to report it to his counselor. “She told me it was very sad what happened to me and that she was very sorry,” Alex recalled. His counselor took him to the office of her supervisor, Marianne Cortes, where he repeated his story.

Then, he said, Cortes told him that she and his counselor would watch the surveillance video and “if it’s like you told me, we’ll put in a report.” After they watched the video, Alex said, his counselor told him that there was something else on the tape, something he hadn’t realized during the attack. There’d been a witness.

“In the video, my counselor told me there was another boy in a window,” he said.

But then, after those revelations, nothing happened. There was no further investigation.

In an interview, archdiocese spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta said at that time there was no reason for one. Alex “was interviewed by staff, and he claimed it was verbal harassment, sexual gestures and teasing about his sister, but no nudity,” she said.

The staff had reviewed the surveillance footage, she said: “They did grab him by his hands and feet and take him in the room.” But, she said, it was “humiliating,” not criminal.

The shelter reported the incident to federal regulators as sexual harassment. Staff didn’t call the police, she said, “because there was no sexual contact or inappropriate behavior — other than making fun of him.”

Waiting three weeks to call Yojana was “an oversight,” Ross Agosta said, which Cortes noticed when she prepared to call Yojana to begin the reunification process.

It wasn’t until July 30, she said, that Alex told staff that something sexual had happened. But Alex said by that time, Cortes knew the full story. He’d told her when he first reported it in early July and she heard it again as she stood by while he told his mom on July 27.

On July 30, Ross Agosta said, the shelter called the Miami-Dade police and the Florida Department of Children and Families.

Child abuse experts say waiting in such a situation goes against best practices. Regardless of what Alex revealed the first time, they said, counselors who work with children should know that it’s common for assault victims to withhold details initially.

“Sometimes it can be overwhelming,” said Chris Newlin, the lead author of a U.S. Justice Department report on best practices for interviewing children in abuse cases. Young victims may be unsure of what to do, what will happen if they tell or how the system works, he said. They may have been threatened or they may be traumatized.

Newlin said a child in Alex’s situation would be even less likely to report because of his immigration status. That’s why it’s critical, he said, for staff members to take every case seriously and look for signs of trauma.

Ross Agosta said the police came to the shelter on July 30 followed the next day by DCF investigators. And both agencies, she said, determined there “was no sexual assault.”

After the call from Alex, Yojana and Jairo dropped everything and started driving across the country to Boystown. It was supposed to be a happy time, but now they were filled with worry.

Yojana, 33, had come to the United States from Honduras in 2014, leaving behind Alex, then 9, and his sister, Yemerly, 13. She joined a sister in southwest Missouri and found work at a chicken plant, packing frozen pieces on the graveyard shift.

She kept up with her kids through video chats and posted pictures on Facebook of Alex’s face painted like a clown at a birthday party she missed.

The money she sent to Honduras allowed Alex and Yemerly to attend private school, a rare privilege she hoped would insulate them from the country’s gang violence. Yojana hadn’t made it past the sixth grade, but Yemerly was studying to be a civil engineer.

But that display of economic success made them vulnerable to kidnappers, she and Jairo said. One night, after not hearing from Yemerly for several days, Yojana saw a TV news report about five young girls being kidnapped and decided it was time.

“If we didn’t send for them to come, we might regret it for life,” Jairo said.

Alex, Yemerly and their stepbrother Amahury set off from Honduras in June with their 8-year-old cousin. They traveled in a packed refrigerated trailer through Mexico and, 11 days later, crossed the Rio Grande in a green inflatable raft. They were quickly caught by the Border Patrol and taken to Catholic Charities’ Msgr. Bryan Walsh Children’s Village — a facility most people call Boystown.

Five weeks later, on the day they were finally reunited in the Boystown cafeteria, photos show Yojana didn’t even stop to put her handbag down before hugging her children tightly to her. Alex was now taller than her with a new haircut, a thick wave of black hair on top with the sides shaved to a point in the back like the soccer stars he worshipped. Yemerly cried in her mother’s arms.

“Right there, in that moment,” Yojana said later, “it felt like the children that I left in Honduras had come back to life.”

But, she said, she could feel a part of Alex was closed off. The kids wouldn’t be released for two days, so when Alex called her at the hotel, Yojana decided to press for more details about the attack and record it on her phone.

During the call, Alex told her the police were coming and he’d been told they “are going to interview me.” But he was scared that anything he said could interfere with his getting out. “I just don’t want to be here anymore.”

Yojana urged him to tell the truth. “When the police arrive, you tell them the exact same thing you told me,” Yojana said. “Don’t be afraid of what those kids did. You must tell them what happened.”

Yojana could hear the staticky sound of a walkie-talkie in the background.

“Hold on,” Alex said, “the counselor is coming for me.”

What happened next is disputed. Alex said after he hung up he was never interviewed by police or anyone else.

The Miami-Dade police initially told ProPublica it couldn’t find any reports about an alleged sexual assault at Boystown despite being provided with Alex’s full name, the shelter’s address, the date and a description of the incident.

After culling through a log of 145 calls the police had received from the shelter since 2013, we found it under the vague label “Conduct Investigation.”

According to the report, Miami-Dade police officers arrived at Boystown at 4:42 p.m. on July 30 and completed their investigation at 5:54 p.m. The report doesn’t describe what they did for that 72 minutes. The narrative is three sentences long.

Cortes, it said, had called the police “to advise that on the listed date and approximate time” Alex had “an incident” with two other boys. But she “advised the incident was settled and no sexual crime occurred between the boys like first was thought among the staff.”

That was essentially it. The police left. There was nothing about a surveillance video. They didn’t interview the teenagers or the potential witness. They didn’t talk to Alex. There was no mention of how Boystown had come to its conclusion — or why the police believed it.

Under “Case Status,” an officer had typed “CLOSED.”

In a brief phone call, Cortes said she couldn’t discuss how she and others in the shelter responded because of privacy rules and referred questions to the archdiocese.

“The only thing I could tell you is that we advocated the most for him and his care,” Cortes said. “Anything that happens with any child there that might be a trauma, we take it for face value. We don’t minimize it. We take everything very serious.”

Detective Alvaro Zabaleta, a Miami-Dade police spokesman, said he didn’t know if the officer who responded had been told there was video. But he didn’t want to second-guess his judgment in not interviewing Alex.

Shelter staff members, Zabaleta said, are trained to work with immigrant children and the issues they face. So when “you’re dealing with kids and you have their counselor,” he said, “they become their voice, and they’re there to look out for the best interest of the child.”

But the officer’s decision not to interview Alex struck child abuse experts we spoke with as unusual.

“How can you possibly conduct an investigation without getting input from the one person who you think can be your most credible witness about what may or may not have happened?” Newlin said. “How do you know who to talk to? How do you know what evidence to possibly look for if you don’t obtain a statement from that individual?”

Mike Haney, who formerly oversaw abuse prevention and intervention at DCF and the Florida Department of Health, said the state developed its model for abuse investigations in 1978 when it created “child protection teams” made up of pediatricians, social workers and child psychologists. The teams work with local law enforcement agencies and DCF to assess child abuse reports, provide services and conduct what are known as “forensic interviews.”

Haney said such interviews should occur “as soon as it’s reasonably appropriate for the child,” but generally within 24 to 48 hours. That’s because children come under a lot of pressure when a report is made to law enforcement and DCF, he said.

“For an officer to respond to that type of allegation and not interview the kid, I’m not sure what the officer was thinking,” Haney said. “And if the clinician said, ‘I talked with the kids, they said this,’ I’d want to know that the child gave me the same story.”

Still, under Florida law, Haney said, the officer was under no obligation to call in a child protection team to conduct a forensic interview. That’s because the law only requires such interviews when the child alleges abuse by a parent or caregiver. And what Alex says happened to him is what’s known in Florida as a “child on child.”

“In my opinion, we should be referring any child if there’s an allegation of sexual abuse for a professional assessment,” Haney said. “But that becomes a resource issue, a funding issue, a staff issue. That’s the biggest reason. There would be a significant cost increase if we make it available to any child.”

The hundreds of police reports reviewed by ProPublica revealed many hastily dismissed incidents like Alex’s in immigrant youth shelters.

In 2016, a staff member at a shelter outside Phoenix observed one boy making hip-thrusting movements on top of another boy with a blanket in between them. The victim couldn’t stop crying and wouldn’t speak to the staff member. A police officer took a report and the case was closed.

A year earlier at the same facility, a youth care worker walked in on a boy who had his shorts partially down and was standing behind another boy who also had his pants down and was bending over a bed. The next day, during a medical exam, the boy told a nurse that one of his roommates had held him down while the other raped him. Five days later, however, when he was finally brought in for an official interview, the boy denied that anything had happened. That case, too, was closed.

In March 2017, a 16-year-old Honduran boy told a shelter employee in New York that his roommate had raped him while he’d been at a shelter in Renton, Washington. After nearly two months of back-and-forth, a detective finally interviewed the teen. But by that time, the boy no longer wanted “to do anything about it.” Like the others, the case was closed.

In many cases, the responding officers simply filed brief information reports about the incidents, without investigating them as potential crimes.

Critics say this highlights a flaw of the system. Because immigrant kids are typically only in the investigating agencies’ jurisdictions for a few weeks, even if a detective wanted to pursue a case, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy. Kids get moved around a lot in the shelter system, sometimes without warning or in the middle of the night. When they’re released, they’re often sent out of state to live with parents or relatives who might want to avoid interactions with police because they’re undocumented themselves or living with someone who is.

When Boystown finally released Alex and his siblings on Aug. 1, they handed Yojana a folder. It contained Alex’s intake papers, vaccination records and blood tests. There was information for Yojana about how to be a good sponsor and how to follow up with immigration court. But there wasn’t anything, not even an incident report, about what happened to Alex.

When Jairo asked to see the surveillance video, a staff member informed him that the security cameras were on a loop.

“They said that after 30 days, the video is erased, and much to our regret, today is the 31st day,” Jairo said. “How convenient.”

But in that moment, he and Yojana didn’t want to press. They had their children again. And for the first time in their lives, they could step outside and into America together.

After leaving Boystown, the family huddled at a nearby Honduran restaurant to decide if they should go to the police or if they should just get home.

They’d only been given a few days off work, and Jairo felt pressure to get back. On the other hand, somebody should pay for what happened to Alex, if not for his sake, to prevent other children from being harmed in the shelter.

Then again, the shelter said it filed a police report. Even if Alex hadn’t been interviewed yet, surely an officer would follow up.

“I wanted to grab my phone and break it because I couldn’t stand it anymore — the pressure,” Jairo said. “I have so many responsibilities on my shoulders and this was another on top of that. Plus, we already had our children, and that was good.”

They decided to leave.

Back in Missouri a few days later, Alex squeezed into the backseat of Jairo’s pickup, tagging along on a swimming pool job.

As they drove east on Interstate 44, passing the exit-ramp oases of Waffle Houses, Best Westerns and Flying J truck stops, Alex stared out the window silently, occasionally resting his head on the window or running his fingers nervously along the seams of his jeans.

For days, Yojana and Jairo had been wavering between wanting to seek justice but feeling powerless over how to go about it. Jairo said he had a business card for a lawyer in Kansas City who could take Alex’s case and maybe get to the bottom of what happened. But Jairo and Yojana hadn’t called for an appointment.

There was a lot they were trying to sort out. They weren’t sure if Alex was telling the whole story of what happened at Boystown or keeping something even worse from them. Yojana said she’d tried to broach the subject, but Alex told her not to ask him about it anymore.

Alex said that on the day the police came, he and his counselor “were waiting for the police to talk to me, but Marianne Cortes spoke with them, and then my counselor told me they didn’t need to interview me anymore.”

Alex said he was left confused. He’d wanted to tell the police what the two boys did to him and didn’t understand why the shelter had talked to the police on his behalf.

When asked what he wanted to happen, Alex was unequivocal. “I want to report them,” he said. “To go to the police.”

In mid-August, DCF released a report citing Boystown for three violations of the state’s rules regarding residential child care facilities.

The report said the shelter had been understaffed. It had failed to report suspected child abuse in a timely fashion. And it had failed to notify a child’s parents or legal guardian after a critical incident.

The records didn’t mention Alex or describe what prompted the investigation. But they show that on Aug. 16 — a little over two weeks after Alex was released — Boystown agreed to a “corrective action plan.” It promised to retrain employees and file biweekly reports that would allow the state to check that Boystown had enough staff to supervise the kids.

DCF spokesman David Frady said he couldn’t speak about Alex’s case or even confirm that there’d been an incident at Boystown because of privacy concerns.

“I’m not able to confirm or deny whether or not we’ve spoken to an alleged victim,” he said.

Miami-Dade police denied a request to interview the responding officers and refused to release body-camera footage of their visit to Boystown. Of the 17 minutes of video and audio that exists, the department said only 12 seconds was public because Florida law prohibits release of any body-cam recording taken within a “private residence.”

ProPublica challenged the decision, but the department said the conversation occurred in an office, a place where the social worker could expect privacy.

However, after receiving our questions about the handling of the case and reviewing the incident, Zabaleta said, the department had assigned an investigator to take a second look — effectively reopening the case.

The department then said it wouldn’t even release the 12 seconds of footage because the case was still under investigation.

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which funds and regulates the shelters, said that after the incident, Boystown transferred the “perpetrators” to a different dorm. But the agency declined to answer questions about whether Boystown had handled the incident properly or what, if anything, ORR had done in response.

“Our focus is always on the safety and best interest of each child,” spokeswoman Lydia Holt said in an email. “We have no additional information to share regarding this case.”

Today, Alex’s case remains in the hands of the state attorney’s office. But child abuse experts say the likelihood of learning the truth of what happened to him in the bedroom at Boystown grows dimmer every day.

This much is clear: If Alex’s case is any guide, the thousands of children passing through the nation’s overburdened shelter system — understaffed and increasingly akin to long-term orphanages — should not expect a rigorous investigation if they suffer abuses in the shelters.

“Somebody has to pay for these mistakes because these are monstrous things,” Jairo said. “It can’t go unpunished. If it stays that way, in many centers, this is going to continue to happen.”

Prior to the publication of this story, and without the knowledge of ProPublica, Silvina Sterin Pensel, a freelance reporter, started a GoFundMe page to help a relative of Jairo get back to Missouri after her son was released from a New York shelter. The fundraising effort was launched after ProPublica and Sterin Pensel had secured the cooperation of Jairo and his family for this story and had no bearing on the reporting.

Supreme Court Shoots Down Trump Asylum Ban

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court won’t let the Trump administration begin enforcing a ban on asylum for any immigrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined his four more liberal colleagues Friday in ruling against the administration in the very case in which President Donald Trump had derided the “Obama judge” who first blocked the asylum policy.

New Justice Brett Kavanaugh and three other conservative justices sided with the administration.

There were no opinions explaining either side’s votes.

The court’s order leaves in place lower court rulings that blocked Trump’s proclamation in November automatically denying asylum to people who enter the country from Mexico without going through official border crossings.

Trump said he was acting in response to caravans of migrants making their way to the border.

The administration had also complained that the nationwide order preventing the policy from taking effect was too broad. But the court also rejected the administration’s suggestion for narrowing it.

The high court action followed a ruling Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar that kept the ban on hold pending the outcome of a lawsuit challenging it. The case could take months to resolve.

The ban conflicts with an immigration law that says immigrants can apply for asylum regardless of how they enter the U.S., Tigar said.

In the first court ruling on the issue, Tigar said on Nov. 19 that U.S. law allows immigrants to request asylum regardless of whether they entered the country legally.

The ruling prompted Trump’s criticism of Tigar as an “Obama judge” and led to an unusual public dispute between Trump and Roberts, who rebuked the president with a statement defending the judiciary’s independence.

Tigar was nominated for the federal bench by President Barack Obama.

Robert Reich: The End Is Near for Trump

This morning I phoned my friend, the former Republican member of Congress.

ME: So, what are you hearing?

HE: Trump is in deep sh*t.

ME: Tell me more.

HE: When it looked like he was backing down on the wall, Rush and the crazies on Fox went ballistic. So he has to do the shutdown to keep the base happy. They’re his insurance policy. They stand between him and impeachment.

ME: Impeachment? No chance. Senate Republicans would never go along.

HE (laughing): Don’t be so sure. Corporate and Wall Street are up in arms. Trade war was bad enough. Now, you’ve got Mattis resigning in protest. Trump pulling out of Syria, giving Putin a huge win. This dumbass shutdown. The stock market in free-fall. The economy heading for recession.

ME: But the base loves him.

HE: Yeah, but the base doesn’t pay the bills.

ME: You mean …

HE: Follow the money, friend.

ME: The GOP’s backers have had enough?

HE: They wanted Pence all along.

ME: So …

HE: So they’ll wait until Mueller’s report, which will skewer Trump. Pelosi will wait, too. Then after the Mueller bombshell, she’ll get 20, 30, maybe even 40 Republicans to join in an impeachment resolution.

ME: And then?

HE: Senate Republicans hope that’ll be enough – that Trump will pull a Nixon.

ME: So you think he’ll resign?

HE (laughing): No chance. He’s fu*king out of his mind. He’ll rile up his base into a fever. Rallies around the country. Tweet storms. Hannity. Oh, it’s gonna be ugly. He’ll convince himself he’ll survive.

ME: And then?

HE: That’s when Senate Republicans pull the trigger.

ME: Really? Two-thirds of the Senate?

HE: Do the math. 47 Dems will be on board, so you need 19 Republicans. I can name almost that many who are already there. Won’t be hard to find the votes.

ME: But it will take months. And the country will be put through a ringer.

HE: I know. That’s the worst part.

ME: I mean, we could have civil war.

HE: Hell, no. That’s what he wants, but no chance. His approvals will be in the cellar. America will be glad to get rid of him.

ME: I hope you’re right.

HE: He’s a dangerous menace. He’ll be gone. And then he’ll be indicted, and Pence will pardon him. But the state investigations may put him in the clinker. Good riddance.

Pope Tells Abusive Priests to Turn Themselves In

VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis demanded Friday that priests who have raped and molested children turn themselves in and vowed that the Catholic Church will “never again” hide their crimes.

Francis dedicated his annual Christmas speech to Vatican bureaucrats to abuse, evidence that a year of devastating revelations of sexual misconduct and cover-up around the globe has shaken his papacy and caused a crisis of confidence in the Catholic hierarchy.

Francis acknowledged that the church in the past had failed to treat the problem seriously, blaming leaders who out of inexperience or short-sightedness acted “irresponsibly” by refusing to believe victims. But he vowed that going forward the church would “never again” cover up or dismiss cases.

“Let it be clear that before these abominations the church will spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice whosoever has committed such crimes,” he said.

Francis urged victims to come forward, thanked the media for giving them voice and issued a stark warning to abusers: “Convert and hand yourself over to human justice, and prepare for divine justice.”

Francis’ remarks capped a dreadful year for the Catholic Church, one that began with his own botched handling of a sprawling sex abuse scandal in Chile and ended with the U.S. hierarchy in a free-fall of credibility as state prosecutors began uncovering decades of cover-up.

Francis has summoned church leaders from around the globe for a February abuse prevention summit, in an indication that he has come to realize that the problem is far greater and far more global than he had understood at the start of his pontificate.

Francis’ blanket demand that abusers turn themselves in to face “human justice” was significant, and echoed his previous demands for mafia bosses and corrupt politicians to convert.

Vatican guidelines currently only call for bishops to report priestly abusers to police in those countries where civil law requires it — a technicality that survivors and their advocates have long blasted as a convenient dodge to the church’s moral obligation to protect children regardless of what civil law requires.

Survivors and their advocates, however, found Francis’ words hollow, noting that just this week the chief prosecutor in the U.S. state of Illinois accused church officials there of hiding the names of around 500 priests accused of abuse.

“While refusing to reveal the name of one cleric who committed or concealed child sex crimes, Francis gives yet another promise about ending cover ups,” said David Clohessy, former director of the U.S.-based survivor group SNAP. “If he’s serious, Francis could show it by suspending all Illinois bishops until they ‘come clean’ or the attorney general’s investigation clears them of wrongdoing.”

Anne Barrett Doyle of the online resource BishopAccountability said it was fantasy to think that criminals will suddenly turn themselves in, when the Vatican itself has blocked bishops from adopting mandatory reporting norms, such as in Ireland in the 1990s.

“He minimizes and mischaracterizes the protection of abusers by church leaders, chalking it up to lack of training or awareness, rather than a deliberate choice to conceal and deceive,” she said, adding that his claim that the cover-up was a thing of the past is also wrong since it is ongoing.

Francis warned the Vatican bureaucrats who run the 1.2 billion-strong church that the scandal now undermines the credibility of the entire Catholic enterprise and prayed for help so that the Church can discern true cases from false ones, and accusations from slander.

“This is no easy task, since the guilty are capable of skillfully covering their tracks,” he said, adding that abusers also choose their victims carefully, finding those who will stay silent and live in “fear of shame and the terror of rejection.”

It was perhaps a veiled reference to ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the disgraced retired archbishop of Washington who is now facing a canonical trial on allegations he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s.

The McCarrick revelations have fueled the crisis in confidence in the U.S. and Vatican hierarchy since it was apparently an open secret that he slept with seminarians but nevertheless was allowed to rise up the church ranks.

Francis’ reference to the difficulty in distinguishing allegation from slander perhaps related to his own failure to believe Chilean victims of a notorious predator priest.

During Francis’ disastrous trip to Chile in January, he dismissed survivors’ allegations of cover-up as “slander,” sparking outrage in Chile and beyond. Francis eventually did an about-face, apologized to the victims and acknowledged he had made “grave errors in judgment.”

Going forward, he urged those who have been victims of sexual abuse, abuse of power and abuse of conscience to speak out.

“The greater scandal in this matter is that of cloaking the truth,” he said.

“I myself would like to give heartfelt thanks to those media professionals who were honest and objective and sought to unmask these predators and to make their victims’ voices heard,” he said.

The cardinals and bishops of the Curia listened attentively, including the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, who has long been blamed for the Vatican’s refusal to acknowledge the depth of the problem during the quarter-century pontificate of St. John Paul II.

Sodano, who once dismissed media reports of abuse as “petty gossip,” made no mention of the scandal. In introductory remarks Friday to the pope, he thanked Francis for his pastoral visits in Rome and around the world, for having canonized Pope Paul VI and for having issued a new teaching document.

In previous years, Francis has used his Christmas greetings to issue blistering criticisms of the failings of the Curia, accusing Vatican bureaucrats of suffering from “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and taking part in the “terrorism of gossip.”

His remarks this year were more global, noting that all around there are priests who “without batting an eye” are ready to betray all that the church stands for and enter into a “web of corruption” by abusing those in their care.

“Often behind their boundless amiability, impeccable activity and angelic faces, they shamelessly conceal a vicious wolf ready to devour innocent souls,” he said.

North Carolina Official Asked Feds to Act in Voting Case

RALEIGH, N.C.—North Carolina’s top elections official issued an urgent plea nearly two years ago for the Trump Administration to file criminal charges against the man now at the center of ballot fraud allegations that have thrown a 2018 Congressional race into turmoil.

N.C. Board of Elections Executive Director Kim Strach warned in a January 2017 letter obtained by The Associated Press that those involved in illegally harvesting absentee ballots in rural Bladen County would likely do it again if they weren’t prosecuted. Josh Lawson, top lawyer for the elections board, said Friday that Strach’s memo was followed less than a month later with an in-person meeting with federal prosecutors in Raleigh where elections investigators provided evidence accusing Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. and others of criminal activity.

“Our findings to date suggest that individuals and potentially groups of individuals engaged in efforts to manipulate election results through the absentee ballot process,” Strach wrote in the letter. “The evidence we have obtained suggest that these efforts may have taken place in the past and if not addressed will likely continue for future elections.”

At the time, there was only an acting U.S. attorney in office. Later in 2017, President Donald Trump’s appointee arrived, but took no action to prosecute the matter. Instead he focused on a different priority — prosecuting a handful of non-citizens who had allegedly voted.

A spokesman for Robert J. Higdon, Jr., who took over as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina in September 2017, has declined to comment on why no charges were filed following the state’s criminal referrals against Dowless and other Bladen county political operatives.

Higdon’s office issued a media release in August of this year touting charges against 19 foreign nationals who allegedly voted in or before the 2016 presidential election. The cases were filed in the wake of Trump’s false claim that he lost the 2016 popular vote to his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton because millions of illegal immigrants had cast ballots.

State elections board Chairman Joshua Malcolm declined in an interview Thursday to evaluate how U.S. prosecutors handled the board’s referral of its 2016 Bladen County elections investigation, saying the board has a “very particular role.” Strach’s staff has legal authority to investigate elections crimes, but cannot make arrests or file criminal charges.

After federal prosecutors took no action, documents show the elections board referred the case to state prosecutors in January 2018. No charges were filed before the 2018 election, which was marred by voting irregularities involving absentee ballots cast in Bladen and two neighboring counties. Authorities say Dowless is the subject of an investigation into those irregularities.

“Our role is to investigate matters … and to refer matters to prosecutors and law enforcement officials to carry out their responsibility,” said Malcolm, a Democrat. “We don’t control what happens once we make a referral.”

The board has refused to certify the results of the November general election for the state’s 9th congressional district. Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes in 2018’s only still unresolved House election, according to unofficial results. State leaders in both parties now concede a do-over election might eventually be needed, though GOP officials have sought to put the blame for the mess squarely onto the elections board.

The state elections board plans to review the evidence at a Jan. 11 public hearing.

Dowless, 62, is a convicted felon turned political operative. Investigators are looking into whether Dowless and others working on the GOP candidate’s behalf ran an illegal operation to collect large numbers of absentee ballots from voters in at least two counties.

Dowless didn’t respond Wednesday to a voicemail or text message seeking comment. His lawyer, Cynthia Adams Singletary, said in a statement Tuesday that any speculation regarding her client and the 9th District election is premature and unwarranted. Through his attorney, Dowless has declined to be interviewed by state investigators.

Harris, the Republican candidate, said in an interview last week that it was his decision to hire Dowless, though he denied knowledge of any potential wrongdoing.

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Associated Press investigative reporter Michael Biesecker reported from Washington.