Chris Hedges's Blog, page 393

Vladimir Putin Outmaneuvers the U.S. Yet Again

Don’t look now, but Vladimir Putin has racked up another win in his latest skirmish with the West.

The victory took place Nov. 25 in the Kerch Strait, the narrow strip of water separating the disputed Crimean Peninsula from the Russian mainland to the east. It occurred when the Russian coast guard fired on and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels. As always, the details are in dispute, with the Ukrainians claiming that their boats informed the Russians about their plans to navigate the strait but received no reply and Russia saying the opposite.

But there’s no doubt as to the result. By briefly closing the strait, Russia has demonstrated that it can restrict access at will to roughly half the Ukrainian coastline that lies within the Sea of Azov, including the economically vital ports of Mariupol and Berdyansk.  Although Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko immediately called for Western intervention, it also demonstrated that there is little NATO can do in response.

While expressing “full support” for Ukraine, the alliance said nothing about Poroshenko’s request that NATO ships force their way through the Kerch Strait in defiance of the blockade. The same goes for Ukraine’s call to Turkey to close off Russian naval access to the Dardanelles, the equally narrow body of water connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean.  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s only response was an offer to mediate.

So while Poroshenko declared that “the only language that Putin understands is the solidarity of the Western world,” it appears that the West is solidly behind a cautious policy of non-interference.

It’s an astonishing reversal from the heady days of early 2014 when it was Russia that was at the point of being cut off. Although the corporate media wanted Western readers to think that the “Automaidan” revolution then underway in Kiev was an attempt to cast off the Russian yoke, it was really about something altogether different: NATO’s unrelenting drive to the east and its clear intention of seizing Russia’s historic naval base in the southern Crimean port of Sebastopol.

Sebastopol, Russia’s main warm-water outlet since 1783, had long been a thorn in the side of U.S.-backed Ukrainian nationalists. After Nikita Khrushchev transferred the largely Russian-speaking Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, the port wound up in Ukrainian hands after that country gained independence in 1991. Moscow continued to operate the base under a long-term lease, but there was no doubt that the arrangement would come to an end once NATO accepted Ukraine’s bid for membership, as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and John McCain all urged it to in 2008. Conceivably, Russia could have made up for the loss by expanding naval operations in Novorossiysk, located on the Black Sea some 200 miles to the east. But not only would an expansion project have been long and expensive, but Novorossiysk is distinctly less attractive due to frequent storms and “bora” winds that, in bad weather, force ships to leave the port and shelter on the high seas.

The loss of Sebastopol would thus have been a major blow. As a Forbes magazine analyst wrote in 2014: “Put simply, without a naval base in Crimea, Russia is finished as a global military power.”

That was the expected outcome as a U.S.-backed coup sent Ukraine’s legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, packing in February 2014 and installed a fiercely anti-Russian government in his place. Gone were the days when Russia could use its Black Sea Fleet to pressure U.S. allies such as Georgia, which also borders on the Black Sea and which found itself under a Russian blockade during a brief war in 2008.  The days when Russia could use its Black Sea Fleet to shore up the Bashar al-Assad’s besieged government in Syria were waning as well. U.S.-NATO leverage was expanding from the Caucasus to the Levant.

Or so it seemed. But then, amid the upsurge in Kiev, Putin neatly detached Crimea from Ukraine and added it to Russia in an operation the New York Times described as “breathtaking and so far apparently unstoppable.” Warned Putin: “NATO ships would have ended up in the city of Russian navy glory, Sevastopol.” But once annexation was complete, he was able to crow: “After a long, hard and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!” In July 1942, Hitler’s forces finally succeeded in taking Sebastopol after 250 days of fierce fighting. Seven decades later, America’s own drang nach osten, or drive to the East, had come up short.

After years of Ukrainian harassment, Russia seized the opportunity to pour resources into Sebastopol and beef up naval operations. It expanded its defense shield “over the whole of the Black Sea with a potent combination of supersonic anti-ship missiles having a range of 600 kilometers [and] advanced warplanes,” according to one analysis. It installed its newest surface-to-air S-400 missile system and announced plans to station advanced Podsolnukh (“Sunflower”) radar, supposedly capable of detecting F-22 and F-35 stealth aircraft. It doubled the number of soldiers stationed on the peninsula, quintupled the number of fighter jets, and better than tripled the number of ships. With cargo traffic to Berdyansk and Mariupol reportedly cut in half due to Russian restrictions, the result is a profound shift in the balance of economic and military power.

This is not the first time Putin has turned tables on his tormenters.  He’s done it before, most notably in Syria in September 2015 when, to American anger and dismay, he sent warplanes to shore up the Assad government when it seemed to wobble after years of U.S. and Saudi-sponsored jihad.

Which leads to a question: Why is the Russian president so good at one-upping his Western opponents? Is it because he plays chess while Americans play checkers, as Ted Cruz once put it? Because he’s super smart?

The answer is, yes, Putin is indeed a clever operator. But that’s not all. He also has the advantage of fighting on his own turf against an empire that is over-extended militarily and enervated intellectually. In Ukraine, the Obama administration thought it could knock over a regime it deemed hostile merely by injecting some $5 billion in support of pro-U.S. forces. (See speech by former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland beginning at 7:40). But as in Libya in 2011, it was unprepared for what regime change would bring, in this case a revolt by eastern Russophones outraged by a nationalist takeover in which neo-fascist forces were clearly in the lead—as even the cheerleaders at the New York Times were forced to admit. Although Western media quickly denounced the takeover as nothing less than an assault on “the liberal world order,” they forgot that the U.S. had violated the same order in Kiev by helping to drive out a legally elected head of state.

They forgot other things too. One is that the takeover in Crimea enjoyed overwhelming popular support, with 97 percent voting in favor in a referendum marked by an 80-percent turnout. (A poll a year later found that 82 percent still favored annexation, with only four percent opposed.) Another is that driving Russophones into the arms of Moscow would present Putin with a priceless opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and strengthen his position on the Black Sea.

It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. But this leads to another question: is Putin’s win in the Kerch Strait a positive development? After all, he’s an authoritarian whose regime is characterized by massive corruption and decreasing room for dissent. Is there any reason to cheer now that he’s tightened his grip on the Black Sea?

There isn’t. But there is reason to cheer that an even greater strong man—the American empire—has stumbled. In one arena after another, the U.S. has teamed up with the most dangerous forces—neo-Nazis in Ukraine, Wahhabist jihadis in the Middle East, out-and-out fascists like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, etc.—in an effort to maintain its increasingly tenuous position as global hegemon. The more desperate the effort grows, the more threatening it becomes to anyone opposing U.S. policies. As a captured raider supposedly told Alexander the Great, “Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor.”

U.S. diktat dwarfs anything exercised by Russia. So it’s worth at least a small round of applause that the global bully has been checked.

Trump Bickers With Democratic Leaders, Threatens Shutdown

WASHINGTON—Bickering in public with Democratic leaders, President Donald Trump threatened repeatedly on Tuesday to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t provide the money he says is needed to build a wall at the Mexican border.

Trump’s comments came as he opened a contentious meeting with Democratic Senate and House leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, with a partial shutdown looming on Dec. 21 when funding for some agencies will expire. The president and Pelosi tangled over whether the House or the Senate was holding up his proposal. Trump and Schumer jabbed at each other over the import of the midterm elections — and who will be blamed if a shutdown occurs.

“If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other, whether it’s through you, through military, through anything you want to call, I will shut down the government,” Trump ultimately declared. “I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down.”

The televised discussion was Trump’s first encounter with the newly empowered Democrats since their midterm victories in the House. It offered a remarkable public preview of how divided government might work — or break down — over the next two years as the 2020 presidential election nears.

After the public session, barely a half hour passed before the Democrats exited their private meeting with the president, issuing stern warnings.

“This Trump shutdown, this temper tantrum that he seems to throw, will not get him his wall and will hurt a lot of people,” said Schumer.

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan acknowledged Tuesday that the GOP-led House has yet to pass legislation that includes the $5 billion in border wall funds that Trump has been requesting. Ryan likely lacks sufficient votes from Republicans who will lose their majority at the end of the month.

Trump is seeking far more for his long-stalled border wall than the $1.6 billion the Senate has agreed to for border security, including physical barriers and technology along the U.S. southern border.

The Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the Democrats began civilly, with Trump noting progress for bipartisan criminal justice legislation in the Senate. But the session quickly unraveled as he mentioned his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Said Trump with a smile: “And then we have the easy one, the wall. That will be the easiest of all, what do you think, Chuck?” Schumer shot back sternly: “It’s called funding the government.”

When Pelosi said Trump did not have sufficient support for the wall in the House, Trump interjected: “Nancy, I do.”

Pelosi later said: “This has spiraled downwards.”

After Pelosi and Schumer noted Democratic success in the midterm elections, the president asked whether Republicans had won the Senate in the November election.

“When the president brags he has won North Dakota and Indiana, he’s in real trouble,” retorted Schumer with a smile.

Pence, a former House member, sat silently as Trump and the two Democrats bickered. Pence later called the meeting a “good discussion.” Asked to describe the atmosphere in the private meeting that followed the public quarrel, Pence said, “candid.”

Pelosi and Schumer have urged Trump to support a measure that includes a half-dozen government funding bills largely agreed upon by lawmakers, along with a separate measure that funds the Department of Homeland Security at current levels through Sept. 30. The homeland bill includes about $1.3 billion for fencing and other security measures at the border.

If Trump rejects that, Democrats are urging a continuing resolution that would fund all the remaining appropriations bills at current levels through Sept. 30.

“We gave the president two options that would keep the government open,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a statement after the meeting. “It’s his choice to accept one of those options or shut the government down.”

Pelosi, who is seeking to become House speaker when the new Congress convenes in January, said she and many other Democrats consider the wall “immoral, ineffective and expensive.” She noted that Trump promised during the 2016 campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall, an idea Mexico has repeatedly rejected.

If Democrats refuse to support the wall, the military will build the remaining sections, Trump said. “The wall will get built,” he insisted.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the incoming House Homeland Security chairman, said using the military to build the wall “just doesn’t make any sense. I can think of a lot more important things we can do with the military then build a fence.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said circumstances were “beginning to resemble a movie we’ve seen before,” noting that Democrats forced a brief shutdown in January in a dispute over immigration policies.

“It didn’t work out very well,” McConnell said. “The reality is that the president’s request is entirely reasonable.”

Schumer and other Democrats supported a 2006 law that authorized hundreds of miles of fencing along the southern border, McConnell said, urging Democrats to again back physical barriers — by whatever name — along the border.

___

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Jill Colvin, Laurie Kellman and Alan Fram contributed to this report.

Facing Pressure, McConnell Agrees to Criminal Justice Vote

WASHINGTON—Under pressure from President Donald Trump and many of his Republican colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he will bring legislation to the floor to overhaul the nation’s sentencing laws.

McConnell’s decision comes after more than three years of overtures from a large, bipartisan group of senators who support the criminal justice bill, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump announced his support for the legislation last month, but McConnell treaded cautiously and said the bill was among a number of competing priorities for the lame-duck session.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican, said Trump’s push for the legislation had been “critical to the outcome here.”

“Senator McConnell was always concerned about the small window of time that we have to do all these things we need to do, but the president was insistent that this be included,” he said.

If the legislation passes, it could be a rare bipartisan policy achievement for this Congress and the largest sentencing overhaul in decades.

Most Democrats support the bill, which would revise 1980s and ’90s-era “tough on crime” laws to boost rehabilitation efforts for federal prisoners and give judges more discretion when sentencing nonviolent offenders, particularly for drug offenses. Supporters say the changes would make the nation’s criminal justice system fairer, reduce overcrowding in federal prisons and save taxpayer dollars.

The legislation has been a priority for Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has worked behind the scenes with supportive Republican senators over the last two years and pushed Trump to support it. It was also a top issue for former President Barack Obama, who had hoped to see the bill become law before he left office.

Supporters have long said that the bill would pass if McConnell would just put it on the floor. But McConnell appeared to have concerns that it would divide his caucus. One vocal GOP opponent, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has criticized the bill as allowing for early release of serious and repeat felons.

McConnell said he was moving the bill as soon as this week “at the request of the president” and following improvements to the legislation. A revised bill makes some changes requested by Senate Republicans and law enforcement groups who had concerns it would be too soft on some offenders.

Cornyn announced Tuesday morning that he had requested changes to the bill to bring on more Republicans. He said one of the changes was to ensure that fewer firearms offenders got reduced sentences.

“My goal all along has been trying to grow the vote and gain support for the law enforcement community, and I think the bill has improved as a result, and I think the prospects for passage are much better,” he said.

Cornyn said similar sentencing reforms on the state level in Texas show that criminal justice overhaul can be successful.

“Texas is proof positive that you can close the revolving door of incarceration, reduce crime, and save taxpayer dollars at the same time,” Cornyn said.

It’s unclear how long it will take to move the bill. McConnell said senators should be prepared to stay in session the week following Christmas if necessary to complete their work.

Grassley has grown frustrated in recent days as he has questioned why McConnell wouldn’t move the bill in the final days of this Congress. And Trump has tweeted at McConnell to ask him to move.

“Hopefully Mitch McConnell will ask for a VOTE on Criminal Justice Reform,” Trump tweeted last week. “It is extremely popular and has strong bipartisan support. It will also help a lot of people, save taxpayer dollars, and keep our communities safe. Go for it Mitch!”

Minutes later Grassley tweeted that he and the president had spoken about “the growing support” for the legislation.

“Pres Trump told me he wants it done THIS CONGRESS,” Grassley tweeted.

Supporters who have been pushing the bill for years — including many law enforcement organizations, liberal advocacy groups and major GOP donors — were elated.

“It’s an incredibly groundbreaking moment and it’s really emotional for the broad coalition who has worked so hard on this legislation for so many years,” said Holly Harris, executive director of the advocacy group Justice Action Network. “I never doubted the leader would be on the right side of history on this bill.”

Can a New Political Party Save America From Itself?

When it comes to criticizing the Democratic Party, nothing speaks like experience within the belly of the beast. Ralph Nader is living proof. After years of effectively pressuring congressional Democrats to protect consumers and the environment against corporate greed, he watched firsthand as the party bowed to the demands of Big Business during the Jimmy Carter administration.

And then there’s Nick Brana, the leading activist behind the Movement for a People’s Party (MPP).  Like Nader, Brana isn’t content merely to expose the corruption of the dismal dollar Democrats—a party that late political scientist Sheldon Wolin rightly called “the inauthentic opposition.” He’s looking to replace them with something much better: Let’s call it an “authentic opposition.”

Don’t let his tender age of 29 fool you. Brana has served his time inside the belly of the beast that is the Democratic donkey, first as a volunteer for Barack Obama and later as a member of John Kerry’s political action committee. These experiences gave him a front-row seat to the “quid pro quo” between concentrated wealth and elected officials.

Brana later served as the deputy director for voter protection of close Clinton ally and top Democratic Party fundraiser Terry McAuliffe’s successful 2013 Virginia gubernatorial campaign. It was, in his words, “a test run for the [2016] Hillary Clinton campaign.” There, Brana got to know future Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook and other high-ranking Clinton staffers.

“I was naive,” Brana recalls. He thought activists could bring about progressive change for working people, the poor and the common good through the Democratic Party.

Now he thinks of the Democrats and the Republicans as “two subsidiaries of a single corporation.” While the Republicans make no serious pretense of being anything but an oligarchic organization, Brana says, the Democrats play a more “insidious” and disingenuous part. Their “counterrevolutionary” role is to masquerade as the people’s voice and function as a great “black hole for progressive energies and passions.” In his estimation, the Democratic Party is a nefarious shock absorber for the ruling class.

While commuting to and from his job for McAuliffe, Brana began listening to left-wing podcasts featuring iconic author and dissident Noam Chomsky, whose description of the U.S. as  “a one-party state with two right-wing parties” (Brana’s words) resonated with his own experience.

After McAuliffe won, Brana decided not to follow him to the Virginia state capital. Alienated by the corporatism of the party’s neoliberal masters during the Obama years, and inspired by Chomsky, he took a break from politics before ultimately joining the campaign of progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2015. There he served as national political outreach coordinator.

And yet his leftward progression remained far from complete. Sanders gave Brana the thankless job of lobbying the Democratic Party’s explicitly anti-insurgent “superdelegates” to the national convention. The task “showed me definitively that the party was not materially different from the GOP,” Brana told me two weeks ago. Ultimately, it proved to be “an eye-opening experience.” The Democratic superdelegates were “offended that we wanted to talk to them about policy,” Brana recalled.

The fact that Sanders performed far better than Goldman Sachs- and Council on Foreign Relations-approved Clinton in one-on-one match-up polls with Donald Trump at the end of the primary season held no interest whatsoever to the elite functionaries Brana tried to coax into Sanders’ camp.

This experience dispelled Brana once and for all of the notion that he could make the world a better place through the Democratic Party. The party, he determined, was not a political entity at all but a privately owned business under the command of “a committee of corporations.” Thinking that the organization’s “oligarchic” nature could be undone by “some magic bullet” candidate, Brana told me, “is like believing that a single drop of clean water could purify a bucket of toxic sludge.”

“You don’t take the Democratic Party over,” Brana says. “It takes over you.”

Sanders offered an alternative. The Vermont senator tantalized through a grassroots small-donor campaign that received literally no big-business support while skewering plutocracy and America’s savage economic inequality. This was an extraordinary development in a primary awash in corporate money.

Were it not for the fixing of the primaries and the Democratic National Convention by the Clintonite “committee of the corporations” that owned the Democratic National Committee, Sanders might well be sitting in the White House right now. Trump would be back in his Manhattan tower, his political life relegated to the Twittersphere.

Brana favors the metaphor of a burning house. “When your home is on fire,” he says, “you run for the exits. If the door on the left is closed, you’ll run for the door on the right.” Think of the house as the U.S. political system. Think of the fire as neoliberal capitalism, engulfing the country in precarity and inequality. The “left” exit to which Sanders beckoned was blocked by the unelected dictatorship of atop the Democratic Party, leaving voters to choose between a flame-throwing centrist and a racist, misogynistic reactionary. Trump ultimately claimed the populist mantle that Clinton openly disdained, outperforming his Democratic opponent with small (middle-class and working-class) donors. Resentment abhors a vacuum.

Proving the axiom that the Democratic Party resents the progressive left more than it does an increasingly dangerous right, establishment Democrats accused Sanders of nasty things like “voodoo economics,” “unicorn politics” and unrealistic “pie-in-the sky” prescriptions. Bill Clinton himself stooped to accusing Sanders of stealing voter data and calling his supporters “sexists” who smeared anyone who “disagreed with them as part of the establishment.”

Sanders took these attacks in distressingly self-effacing stride. He sucked it up like a good party man, reserving his barrel-chested thunder for Trump and the Republicans. Just as Green Party activist, election strategist and former Democratic Party insider Bruce Dixon predicted, Sanders kept his head down and campaigned obediently for the “lying neoliberal warmonger” Hillary Clinton.

He did so while knowing full well she was in deep trouble, thanks to her remarkable unpopularity, her related corporate conservatism and her stunning failure to run on a serious policy platform.

Sanders feared a Trump presidency, and with good reason. But what about the decimated opposition party his election victory left in its wake?

Just weeks after the totalitarian was inaugurated, Brana and seven former Sanders staffers launched Draft Bernie for a People’s Party. The new organization pressed the democratic socialist to follow his original instinct to run for president as an independent—a decision that Bernie’s senior advisers Tad Devine and Jeff Weaver ultimately talked Sanders out of in 2015. Brana and his comrades asked Sanders to honor the Eugene Debs poster than hangs on his Senate office wall by bringing his database of 13 million voters and small donors on board for an authentic popular opposition party, beyond the corporate duopoly.

In September 2017, they delivered 50,000 petition signatures to Sanders’ Senate office in Washington. The petition arrived during a left-progressive Convergence Conference in which famed academic Cornel West referred indirectly to Sanders’ deafening silence on the American war machine, and how its cost canceled out his social-democratic policy agenda. “You can’t have a democratic experiment if 53 cents on your dollar are already headed to the military industrial-complex,” West said at the time.

With Brana sitting directly to his right on a stage with socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant and left-wing comedian Jimmy Dore, West wondered aloud if “our dear brother Bernie Sanders [has] become too comfortable and adjusted to the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, the Schumers and the Pelosis and the Hillary Clintons.”

“Brother Bernie may not last long in the corporate Democratic Party,” West said, “so I’ve got a hunch he may come running [out of the party] many months from now. But you cannot proceed predicated on what he does!”

In the months since, Sanders has shown no signs he intends to run as an independent. The self-proclaimed democratic socialist has spurned his petitioners, tailoring his political revolution to the parameters of a two-party system. And how is that working for ordinary Americans when three individuals (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) now possess more wealth among them than the bottom half of the nation, and the 1 percent holds the same net worth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent?

The answer should be obvious. Corporate forces have since solidified and enhanced the power of anti-democratic superdelegates, many of them corporate lobbyists, while moving to eliminate party caucuses, seen as too friendly to progressive insurgents in the Sanders mode. They have also imposed a neo-McCarthyite “loyalty test” that empowers the DNC to advance-veto any presidential nominee deemed insufficiently faithful to the Democratic Party. All of these steps and more aim to further insulate the party from another dreaded populist insurgency.

For the 2018 congressional midterms, the “CIA Democrats” fielded an unprecedented number of military and intelligence veterans as candidates.  Of 107 contenders originally fielded in the primary season with endorsements from Sanders’ “Our Revolution” organization, just 44 made it to the general election, most of them in bright-red (Republican) districts where they hardly stood a chance. Twelve won their general elections. Of those 12, five were incumbent officeholders and five more were longtime party politicians in line for higher office. Only two insurgent Sanders-supported candidates opposed by the party went on to unseat establishment Democrats in their primaries—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna Pressley of Boston.

And just how left-wing are these two new congresswomen? Despite their instant “radical” celebrity, Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley both endorsed the multimillionaire arch-neoliberal Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s Just the Way it Is” Pelosi as the House speaker. Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Pressley spoke out when Pelosi marked the Democrats’ midterm victory on election night by promising to advance “a bipartisan marketplace of ideas” with the creeping white-nationalist Republicans and their horrific, creeping-fascist president.

Sanders’ recent “Ten Point Plan” for Democrats contains desirable progressive measures, including progressive taxes, “bold action on climate change” and “a path toward Medicare for All.” But Brana is certainly right to predict the Pelosi-led Democratic majority will make little if any progress toward advancing a single one of these proposals.

There’s no bold call in this plan for massive, desperately required reductions to the Pentagon’s budget, which swallows up billions of taxpayer dollars required to implement the environmental and social democratic programs Sanders claims to support. And just last week, Bernie chatted up corporate “New” Democrats Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker as possible 2020 hopefuls on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”

Brana isn’t interested in forming the next third or fourth party on the margins of the America’s zero-sum elections system.  He believes independent parties have a role to play in forcing major parties to change their tune on certain matters, but there’s a limit to how far they can go. Instead, the MPP’s goal is to replace the Democrats as the nation’s second major party altogether—one that will fulfill its predecessor’s declared mission of fighting for working people against corporate power. Curiously enough, the model here is not the original Populist Party of the 1890s, which splintered into the William Jennings Bryan Democrats and Eugene V. Debs Socialists. Instead, their template is the Republican Party of the 1850s, which stepped into the vacuum following the demise of the Whig Party—a ship that had crashed upon the shoals of sectionalism and slavery.

The neoliberal post-New Deal Democrats have been shipwrecking for decades by corporate class rule and plutocracy. The Carter-Clinton-Obama-Pelosi Dems need to give way to a new People’s Party like the Daniel Webster-Winfield Scott-Millard Fillmore-Zachary Taylor Whigs gave way to the Republican Party of John Fremont, William Seward, Horace Greely, Salmon Chase and Abraham Lincoln in the mid-to-late 1850s.

When might this happen? Brana has no illusions about an overnight realignment, but he thinks two coming “shocks” to U.S. progressives and the nation at large could create the climate for a political realignment.  First, Sanders, now 77, will run again for president as a Democrat and be defeated all over again by corporate Democrats who will rig the contest just as before, despite his groundswell of progressive support and his status as the most popular politician in the country. Brana believes the Democrats may nominate Joe Biden, 76, who is laughably billing himself as “the anti-populist.” Second, the U.S. economy will tumble into its next recession. This, in turn, will supercharge calls for serious regulation, even nationalization of the leading U.S. financial institutions, and for bringing our overgrown corporate oligopolies under public control.

So do we simply wait for these developments and hope for the best in the meantime? Hardly. Endorsed by an impressive roster of progressive personalities, the MPP has rallied for climate justice with Zero Hour, demonstrated for peace with the Women’s March on the Pentagon, boycotted Driscoll’s berries on behalf of exploited farmer workers, picketed with striking teachers and hotel employees, promoted the public banking movement, backed the impressive independent congressional candidacy of Tim Canova in Florida, participated in civil disobedience with the Poor People’s Campaign, and helped institute Ranked Choice Voting in Maine. The fledgling party’s Labor-Community Campaign has also won the support of unions representing tens of thousands, along with AFL-CIO executive council members and state presidents.

Brana and his comrades are committed to working with the labor movement, which still has 15 million members and spends more than $100 million on elections each year, making it a natural base for progressive political action in the country.

Their timing is impeccable. Thanks to a decades-long corporate takeover of the Democratic Party, the labor movement is more primed for independent political action now than it has been at any time in the last century.  Consider these two remarkable resolutions passed at the 2017 AFL-CIO Convention: (1) “whether candidates are elected from the Republican or Democratic Party, the interests of Wall Street have been protected and advanced, while the interests of labor and working people have generally been set back,” and (2) “the time has passed when we can passively settle for the lesser of two evils politics.”

Encouraged by these remarkable statements on the part of the nation’s preeminent labor federation, MPP activists have consulted with leaders of the Labor Party of 1996-2007. Two lessons they take from their experience are the needs to run independent candidates outside the Democratic Party and to forge strong community alliances beyond the workplace and the union hall.

Brana thinks the economic and political earthquakes will be “watershed moments for an independent party to build a labor-community campaign” that could eventually sweep the Democrats off the national stage and open the door for a new progressive populism.

Ultimately, Brana’s vision may be our last, best hope of saving America from itself. The current political alignment is leading us over authoritarian and ecocidal cliffs, raising the distinct possibility that there will be no historians to record the politics of the neoliberal age, or whatever dystopian age comes to succeed it.

In the meantime, the so-called “blue wave” of the midterm elections could prove useful to the MPP’s cause. As I have long argued, the Democrats are most able to effectively and deceptively pose as a popular opposition party and to claim that the solution to the nation’s problems is to vote them into power. They expose their corporatism when they hold key elected positions and reveal themselves as entirely inadequate to the task of representing the people.

The IRS Has Been Gutted Beyond All Recognition

This story was co-published with The Atlantic.

In the summer of 2008, William Pfeil made a startling discovery: Hundreds of foreign companies that operated in the U.S. weren’t paying U.S. taxes, and his employer, the Internal Revenue Service, had no idea. Under U.S. law, companies that do business in the Gulf of Mexico owe the American government a piece of what they make drilling for oil there or helping those that do. But the vast majority of the foreign companies weren’t paying anything, and taxpaying American companies were upset, arguing that it unfairly allowed the foreign rivals to underbid for contracts.

Pfeil and the IRS started pursuing the non-U.S. entities. Ultimately, he figures he brought in more than $50 million in previously unpaid taxes over the course of about five years. It was an example of how the tax-collecting agency is supposed to work.

But then Congress began regularly reducing the IRS budget. After 43 years with the agency, Pfeil — who had hoped to reach his 50th anniversary — was angry about the “steady decrease in budget and resources” the agency had seen. He retired in 2013 at 68.

After Pfeil left, he heard that his program was being shut down. “I don’t blame the IRS,” Pfeil said. “I blame the Congress for not giving us the budget to do the job.”

Had the billions in budget reductions occurred all at once, with tens of thousands of auditors, collectors and customer service representatives streaming out of government buildings in a single day, the collapse of the IRS might have gotten more attention. But there have been no mass layoffs or dramatic announcements. Instead, it’s taken eight years to bring the agency that funds the government this low. Over time, the IRS has slowly transformed, one employee departure at a time.

The result is a bureaucracy on life support and tens of billions in lost government revenue. ProPublica estimates a toll of at least $18 billion every year, but the true cost could easily run tens of billions of dollars higher.

The cuts are depleting the staff members who help ensure that taxpayers pay what they owe. As of last year, the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.

The IRS conducted 675,000 fewer audits in 2017 than it did in 2010, a drop in the audit rate of 42 percent. But even those stark numbers don’t tell the whole story, say current and former IRS employees: Auditors are stretched thin, and they’re often forced to limit their investigations and move on to the next audit as quickly as they can.

Without enough staff, the IRS has slashed even basic functions. It has drastically pulled back from pursuing people who don’t bother filing their tax returns. New investigations of “nonfilers,” as they’re called, dropped from 2.4 million in 2011 to 362,000 last year. According to the inspector general for the IRS, the reduction results in at least $3 billion in lost revenue each year. Meanwhile, collections from people who do file but don’t pay have plummeted. Tax obligations expire after 10 years if the IRS doesn’t pursue them. Such expirations were relatively infrequent before the budget cuts began. In 2010, $482 million in tax debts lapsed. By 2017, according to internal IRS collection reports, that figure had risen to $8.3 billion, 17 times as much as in 2010. The IRS’ ability to investigate criminals has atrophied as well.

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’ decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme — and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.

The story has been different for poor taxpayers. The IRS oversees one of the government’s largest anti-poverty programs, the earned income tax credit, which provides cash to the working poor. Under continued pressure from Republicans, the IRS has long made a priority of auditing people who receive that money, and as the IRS has shrunk, those audits have consumed even more resources, accounting for 36 percent of audits last year. The credit’s recipients — whose annual income is typically less than $20,000 — are now examined at rates similar to those who make $500,000 to $1 million a year. Only people with incomes above $1 million are examined much more frequently.

We submitted a detailed list of questions to the IRS and asked about the budget cuts’ effects on the agency’s enforcement efforts. The agency replied with a brief statement. “The IRS has substantial resources to identify and audit noncompliant taxpayers and continues to deter those attempting to evade their legal obligations,” it said.

In ProPublica’s interviews with dozens of tax professionals and more than 50 former and current IRS employees — part of an ongoing series on the state of tax enforcement — many agency veterans wondered whether the damage of the past several years will ever be undone. And they had a greater worry: that the American public will inevitably realize how weak the IRS has become.

The effects of an explosion in tax cheating would be dire. The nation’s already soaring budget deficit would surge by hundreds of billions of dollars more, pushing it well past $1 trillion. Commissioners of the IRS, starting with President George W. Bush’s appointee, Douglas Shulman, have warned Congress about a crisis like this since the budget cuts began, in 2011. But after eight years, Republican lawmakers, who are chiefly responsible for the reductions, show no signs that they think the danger is urgent. By the time the danger becomes indisputable, immense harm will already have been done.

“In the last few years, it was really frustrating,” said Pam Reicks, a former manager at the IRS who, until she retired at the end of last year, oversaw a program to audit wealthy taxpayers with undeclared offshore bank accounts. “It’s like in the fall when you bob for apples,” she told us. “You’ve got a tub of apples and can’t use your hands to grab them. You can see all this abuse and fraud, and people not paying their taxes, but can’t use your hands to get it.”

The IRS has never been a popular cause on Capitol Hill. But Democrats and Republicans long shared a grudging consensus that the agency’s basic work of tax collection deserved protection.

That changed when the Republican Party came into power in 1994 and Newt Gingrich became the speaker of the House. The new majority’s main priority was tax cuts, and vilifying the IRS helped its case. Some conservatives favored a “fair tax,” a consumption tax based on purchases. Proponents said that this simplified approach to taxation would allow them to “abolish” the IRS.

The notion wasn’t a fringe position within the party. Former Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected mainstream Republican, ran for president in 1996 on a platform of abolishing the IRS. A Republican congressman in 1998 introduced a bill to repeal the Internal Revenue Code by 2002. “Abolish the IRS” remains a potent talking point. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, campaigned on the slogan when he ran for president in 2016.

In 1997 and 1998, the Republican-controlled Senate held a series of dramatic hearings on alleged abuses by the IRS. Agency employees testified behind black curtains with their voices disguised, like Mafia snitches, to protect their identity. The testimony depicted an organization run amok, with claims of biased examiners and lurid tales of agents in flak jackets storming establishments. One restaurant owner told of a raid to seize business records at the home of an employee, during which agents forced a teenage boy to the floor at gunpoint and made a group of teenage girls at a slumber party get dressed “under the watchful eyes of male agents.” A USA Today headline read: “Witnesses Accuse IRS Investigators of ‘Gestapo-like’ Raids.”

Congress followed the hearings with a sweeping overhaul of the agency, limiting the IRS’ collection powers and independence and giving taxpayers new protections. In the Senate, the reform bill passed 97–0, and President Bill Clinton signed it.

It was only afterward that the Government Accountability Office debunked the allegations of IRS abuses. “Generally, we found no corroborating evidence that the criminal investigations described at the hearing were retaliatory against the specific taxpayer,” the report stated. “In addition, we could not independently substantiate that IRS employees had vendettas against these taxpayers.”

By then it was too late. Reeling from the new law and the public attacks, IRS audits and collections tumbled to historic lows.

Recovery took years, but because the IRS wasn’t a locus of partisan warfare during the presidency of George W. Bush, it did happen. By 2010, under the administration of Barack Obama, the IRS’ budget hit its high point: $14 billion in today’s dollars, about $2.5 billion above where it is today. Collections rebounded.

But that spring, over unified Republican opposition, Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. The sprawling health care bill was also, indirectly, a sprawling tax bill, since it relied on the IRS to help administer many of its provisions.

In the midterm elections that followed, Republicans took the House of Representatives in a wave similar to that of 1994. The first bill introduced by House Republicans in 2011 was a budget that slashed funding across the government and took special aim at the IRS. In addition to calling for a cut to its budget of $600 million, the bill prohibited the IRS from using any of its funding to carry out key parts of the Affordable Care Act. It didn’t pass.

Since then, Republicans have cited the ACA as a reason to withhold funding from the IRS. In 2013, in response to an IRS request for a budget increase, former Rep. Ander Crenshaw, a Florida Republican who then sat on the House Appropriations Committee, said: “Any kind of increase of this magnitude was going to be a challenge for some very basic reasons. There are a lot of objections to the Affordable Health Care Act, a lot of objections to Obamacare.”

The agency faces a structural political problem. On one side are anti-tax Republicans, while on the other are Democrats who fear publicly supporting the taxman. “This is an agency that doesn’t have any friends,” said James Dyer, a Republican who worked for years on the House Appropriations Committee staff. “There’s no advocacy on the Hill for them except what they do for themselves.”

In 2013, the IRS’ bulwarks collapsed. First, as part of a budget deal with Obama’s administration, Republicans got what they had previously sought: a $600 million cut, which came on top of cuts in the previous two years. Then things got even worse. In May, an IRS inspector general reported that the agency had targeted right-leaning nonprofits for scrutiny, igniting what came to be known as the Lois Lerner scandal, named for the manager who had overseen the effort. Shortly thereafter, another report criticized the IRS for loose spending on its conferences. Republicans seized on both scandals, calling hearings and launching investigations.

To head an agency that was now devastated by budget cuts and scandal, Obama appointed John Koskinen. He was a turnaround specialist, a Mr. Fix-It who, at 74, emerged from retirement for one last job. Most recently, he’d led Freddie Mac after the mortgage giant was taken over by the government during the 2008 financial crisis. Fifteen years before, the Clinton White House tapped him to oversee preparations to avert the Y2K crisis. He was a Washington version of Winston Wolfe from “Pulp Fiction,” if Wolfe were unfailingly polite and liked working with large bureaucracies.

A pragmatist, Koskinen is someone who, by his own description, almost never gets angry. To deal with the crisis, he embarked on a morale-boosting cross-country tour, starting in Cincinnati, the center of the nonprofit scandal. He toured two cities a week for three and a half months. Ultimately, he spoke with more than 22,000 IRS employees. They didn’t gripe, he told us; they were focused on getting the resources to do their job. “This was as good a workforce as I have ever worked with.”

Cutting the IRS budget didn’t make sense to him. It was one of the few areas of government that had a positive return on investment. Koskinen told the Senate, “I don’t know any organization in my 20 years of experience in the private sector that has said, ‘I think I’ll take my revenue operation and starve it for funds.’”

When that argument failed, Koskinen tried to ease the vitriol through a personal connection. In 2014, he contacted Hal Rogers, who was then the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Koskinen had grown up in Ashland, Kentucky, not far from Rogers’ district. He requested a meeting, couldn’t get in and kept at it. After a few calls, he threatened Rogers’ staff that he would come and sit in their offices until Rogers met with him. They capitulated. When Koskinen and Rogers finally sat down together, sure enough, they knew folks in common. One of Koskinen’s good friends had gone to college with Rogers. The two had a friendly meeting.

The next time Koskinen went to the Hill to testify, Rogers welcomed him warmly: “It is always good to see someone with strong Kentucky roots in the hearing room, particularly during basketball season.” He added, “I think much of you personally, Mr. Commissioner.” Then Rogers launched into a litany of criticisms: The IRS was trying to implement the Affordable Care Act against Congress’ wishes; it was spending too much, wasting too much, resisting reforms and letting the poor commit too much fraud. By that time, the Republican narrative had taken hold: The IRS had to be “held accountable” for wasting millions on lavish conferences and persecuting conservative nonprofits for their political beliefs.

These charges ignored inconvenient facts. The IRS conference spending had already plummeted, from $38 million in 2010 to $5 million in 2012 — before the Republicans first criticized the agency for overspending. And inspector general reports later pointed out that the IRS division that oversaw tax-exempt organizations had also targeted progressive groupsand concluded that the IRS had taken prompt action to address the previously identified problems in the nonprofit unit.

Nevertheless, the scandals provided the rationale for ongoing budget cuts. The IRS lacked the “moral authority” to appeal for a budget increase, said Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, then the chair of the House Budget Committee, in 2013.

The cuts also forced discipline, Republicans argued. “We deliberately lowered the IRS funding to a level that would make the IRS think twice about what you are doing and why you are doing it,” Crenshaw told Koskinen in a hearing, “because you don’t have a single dime to spare on anything frivolous or foolhardy or even mediocre.”

Neither Crenshaw nor any other current or former Republican member of Congress agreed to speak with ProPublica about the IRS. Some staffers talked on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press on the record and acknowledged that the budget cuts were a mistake. Asked about the cuts, a Hill Republican staffer said, “It was punishment,” adding that the IRS clearly “needs more money and needs more people.”

The lowest point for Koskinen — and for the IRS — came when, a few weeks before Christmas in 2014, after four years of consistent cuts, Congress slashed an additional $350 million from the agency’s budget. Because the cut came three months into the fiscal year, and only a few months before filing season began, it sent the agency scrambling. Desperate, Koskinen even considered briefly shutting down the IRS. Koskinen’s deputy said that this was the only time he saw his boss angry. “That night, I had trouble getting to sleep,” Koskinen said. “Normally I go to sleep in about 22 seconds. It drives my wife crazy.”

The sudden cut meant that the IRS couldn’t hire enough seasonal employees to answer taxpayer questions. As a result, almost two-thirds of the tens of millions of taxpayer calls would go unanswered that year.

Koskinen was outspoken about the cause of the poor service. He liked to counter the constant urging to do “more with less” with a dose of realism. In fact, he said, the IRS would do “less with less”: answer fewer calls and do fewer audits.

That upset Republicans, who charged in a contentious 2015 hearing that IRS mismanagement, not the budget cuts, was causing the decline in service. Mike Kelly, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania, attacked Koskinen, the ever-optimistic turnaround specialist, for being too negative. “I would encourage you to be a little more upbeat,” Kelly told Koskinen. “It is spring! Let’s talk about the good side of it.” The congressman also didn’t like Koskinen’s frequent quip that the budget cuts were really a “tax cut for tax cheats.”

“I don’t think that I would want to be a cheerleader, telling those people that don’t want to pay their taxes: ‘Hey, you know what? We are not going to be able to come after you,’” said Kelly, adding that “those comments are better kept internally.”

Koskinen replied with a speech he’d given many times before and would give again. A collapse in tax compliance was really possible, he said. People will catch on. He worried about the U.S. becoming Italy or Greece. “What I don’t want to do is have somebody later on say, ‘You never warned us,’” he told Congress. “This is your warning.”

It’s a decision that everyone who works at the IRS has to make: How will you respond when someone asks, “So what do you do?” Answer forthrightly, and you’re bound to be met with either iciness or open hostility. Over her 30-year career, Pam Reicks, the former IRS manager, adopted a solution that’s common for IRS lifers. “I work for the government,” she’d say.

Not that she was the least bit embarrassed by what she did. She was proud to play a role in making sure that the tax system was fair and that the rich paid their share. The walls of her home office are covered with family pictures, awards from the IRS and an American flag. Get her started on the topic of auditing, and her large eyes will grow wide as she excitedly tells you why it’s such tricky, interesting detective work.

When Reicks joined the IRS in 1987, she saw it as an exciting way to expand her world. Born and raised in Red Cloud, Nebraska (population 1,000), she was curious and eager to learn. She began her career in Waterloo, Iowa, first auditing individuals and then working her way up to businesses. She preferred auditing businesses, because poring over the books of companies taught her how they really worked.

Reicks moved to Des Moines and climbed her way to management. She tried to inspire agents with her enthusiasm. “I’m, Go, IRS!, you know?” she said with a laugh. “Go team!”

By 2011, she had shifted to a new job, one that offered plenty to satisfy her curiosity. At the time, the IRS was cracking down on Americans hiding money in tax havens. The Justice Department, with the help of whistleblowers, had pierced the veil of secrecy that shielded Switzerland’s bank accounts. Banks sent lists showing thousands of account holders — many of them probable tax cheats — to U.S. authorities. But the scope of the problem was too big. The IRS simply couldn’t audit everybody who had an offshore account.

One solution was to allow people to turn themselves in. The IRS launched programs that offered reduced penalties to those who came forward voluntarily, before an audit was opened. Tens of thousands did. But, of course, an unknown number of tax dodgers did not. Reicks’ new job, as a senior manager in the offshore program, was to help the IRS figure out how many of those people it could audit.

Auditing taxpayers with accounts in tax havens is hard. Revenue agents have to investigate the scope of any cheating and figure out whether it was intentional. Tracking down the necessary documents from foreign countries can add frustrating delays. The average time to complete an offshore audit, Reicks remembered, was close to three years.

Part of her task was to make sure that managers and revenue agents, who feel pressure to show productivity, did not cut these audits short. Some of the cases involved huge amounts of money. But IRS employees aren’t supposed to think about that. Since the IRS-reform bill in 1998, the agency is prohibited from evaluating agents based on how much money they bring in. Instead, they are evaluated on how efficiently they open and close audits. “You have to account for your time,” Reicks said, “and if you’re not churning out the exams, you have to explain why you’re not.”

The budget cuts meant agents had to trudge through these jungles without a map. Not only were there fewer agents every year to do these audits, but many of the ones who remained were less experienced. Training and travel budgets had been slashed along with everything else. The agents conducting these audits were scattered across the country, as was Reicks’ team of 11 experts, who were supposed to guide them. In-person training became a rare luxury. Instead, most instruction was done online: PowerPoint slides appeared on a screen while someone talked. “But this stuff is so complicated that without somebody sitting in front of you, you don’t know if they’re getting what you’re saying,” Reicks said.

The entire IRS has seen a similar shift. As a result, training has become less effective, IRS employees told ProPublica, and the thoroughness of audits has diminished. It’s also made the IRS a worse place to work.

“The last time I was aware of hiring,” said Marie Allen, who retired in 2016 after a 32-year career at the IRS that included time auditing wealthy taxpayers, “I saw the young, angel, baby-faced agents coming in. They were told to sit down in a cubicle, given a computer and told, ‘This is your training.’” A couple of trainees decided to quit rather than suffer through weeks more of this, she said. “So we lost young talent by basically boring them to death.”

Even established employees can feel themselves falling behind, making it harder to match up against sophisticated opponents. “We’re staying stagnant in what we know,” said an IRS employee who works on audits of corporations. Add to that the pressure to close audits as quickly as possible, and auditors often feel like they are rushing past signs of suspicious activity. “All I have time for is low-hanging fruit, basically,” the employee said. “It’s not only not fair to American taxpayers, it’s not very satisfying for me, either.”

As time went on, Reicks said, the IRS was able to undertake fewer and fewer audits of offshore accounts. Given a list of American accounts in a tax haven, the IRS would often be able to audit only 10 to 15 percent of them, she remembered. That meant the agency was not able to adequately pursue tens of thousands of people who had kept their bank accounts secret from the U.S. government.

In 2015, shortly after congressional Republicans forced the sudden $350 million cut that so upset Koskinen, Reicks began a new stage of her career. To prepare its managers for possible elevation to the executive level, the IRS puts them in temporary assignments. Over the course of a couple years, Reicks would get a different job every three to six months. But while the type of work changed at each assignment, the basic problem she faced did not: There weren’t enough people to do the work.

Her final assignment put her in charge of exam activities at two of the IRS’ “campuses” in the Northeast. At the campuses, in row upon row of cubicles, thousands of tax examiners and customer service reps review correspondence and answer phone calls from taxpayers.

Employees, Reicks said, constantly asked whether the IRS was going to hire more workers. With no good news to report, the best Reicks could do was assure them that they were responsible only for the work assigned to them, not for the work the IRS should be doing. “I get that the four desks around you are all empty,” she remembered saying. “This is what we have. We will adjust the workload accordingly.”

Lacking staff, the IRS has shrunk programs — even those that brought in billions. One such casualty: pursuing taxpayers who do not bother to file tax returns. Tracking those people and businesses down, determining what they owe and then reviewing what they submit in response is time-consuming. “Why generate new work when we don’t have the resources to do the work we have right now?” asked Shantelle Kitchen-Nelson, who managed a collections campus in Philadelphia in 2017 and recently retired.

As the IRS has fallen further and further behind on collecting the debts of those who filed a return but didn’t pay their taxes, many of those obligations have been allowed to surpass the 10-year statute of limitations. “For our customers,” said Jay Freeborne, a tax professional in Seattle who advises clients with tax debts, “those are touchdowns. When debts expire, we high-five them.”

“This is a great time for not being compliant with paying taxes,” said Richard Schickel, a former IRS collection agent who now counsels taxpayers. “I have 11 clients who owe more than $1 million who are not being worked at all.”

As Reicks toured different parts of the IRS, she was impressed by her colleagues. But she was working 80-hour weeks, often advising on offshore issues in addition to her current assignment, and living for chunks of time in hotels. On top of all that, her mother and brother had died in the same month.

She decided not to put herself up for promotion and moved back to Nebraska, to live in Omaha, near her sister. She returned to her old job of supervising offshore audits full time. But by then, in 2017, things had grown noticeably worse.

Reicks looked forward to the end of the year, when she’d reach 30 years of service and be eligible to retire with full retirement benefits. She’d always thought she’d stay longer than that. But she realized that she couldn’t.

“I got tired,” she said.

It’s unclear when — or whether — Congress might begin to reinvest in the IRS. The best that can be said is that it’s been a few years since the last deep cut.

In 2015, when the IRS ability to answer taxpayer phone calls hit a low point, the budget discussions on Capitol Hill took a turn. Republicans agreed to boost the agency’s funding — but only part of it. The “taxpayer services” portion, which goes toward hiring seasonal employees to answer the phones, got bumped up. The “enforcement” portion of the budget continued to be pared: Today, adjusting for inflation, it’s $1.5 billion lower than it was in 2010, a decrease of 23 percent.

This year, Republicans again selectively increased IRS funding. The massive new tax cut law has dumped loads of extra work on the IRS, which now has to write rules interpreting the legislation, reprogram aged computer systems and retrain its employees. Republicans understand that if the IRS fails to roll out their tax overhaul well, they might feel the political consequences. To help the agency cope, Congress handed it an extra $320 million, with the instruction that the money be used solely to implement the new law.

The budget for 2019 is likely to be more of the same. When asked whether lawmakers might eventually provide increased funds to hire auditors and collectors, Republican Hill staffers told ProPublica that the members of Congress they work for will follow the lead of the new IRS commissioner, Charles Rettig. If Rettig, who was confirmed in September, asks for more money for the 2020 budget, Congress might support it, they said.

Rettig, a tax lawyer with decades of experience defending wealthy clients against the IRS, has been publicly noncommittal so far. Pressed by Democratic senators at his confirmation hearing, all he would say was that “one of [his] top priorities would be to analyze the budget.” This was a stark contrast to Koskinen’s outspoken advocacy.

In the meantime, the IRS continues to shrink. Annual revenue from audits is down by about $10 billion, adjusted for inflation, since 2010, and billions more have been lost by not pursuing nonfilers and other sources of unpaid tax debts. If the IRS had maintained a level of enforcement similar to that of the years from 2004 to 2010, it would have collected about $18 billion more than it did last year, ProPublica estimates. The total shortfall since 2011 has been about $95 billion.

The true cost is likely much larger, since IRS enforcement has a magnifying effect. People who undergo audits are less likely to evade taxes in the future, just as nonfilers who are caught are more likely to file voluntarily, studies have shown. Take away enforcement, and evaders are emboldened and grow in number.

One factor that has helped obscure this deterioration is the growth of the U.S. economy, which has pushed up tax receipts since the Great Recession. The IRS took in $3 trillion in 2017, up from $2 trillion in 2011. Republicans have pointed to this as proof that nothing is amiss: “You could argue,” Crenshaw said to Koskinen in a 2016 hearing, “if you collect more revenue with less money, then maybe if you had even less money you would collect even more revenue.”

But the increase in receipts is misleading. During that period, for example, the top marginal tax rate went up, so the richest taxpayers were paying more. More important, in 2011, Americans had deep losses from the 2008 financial crisis that were still depressing tax obligations. In the following years, receipts outpaced economic growth, a typical phenomenon during recoveries. Still, that increase was weaker than government analysts expected. Even before last year’s tax cuts, tax receipts as a percentage of GDP never reached the levels of the late 1990s or mid-2000s.

It will be years before we know whether tax cheating has in fact increased. The last IRS report to assess what it calls the “tax gap,” issued in 2016, analyzed the period from 2008 to 2010. It found that taxpayers had paid about 82 percent of the taxes they truly owed. If the rate of compliance in 2017 was the same, that would translate to $667 billion in missing taxes.

Even the tiniest drop in compliance would cost billions more. But no one we spoke with who has worked at the IRS thinks the drop is likely to have been small. “One day it will be clear,” Koskinen said, “but by that time, you’re in deep yogurt.”

Brexit Deal in Turmoil as May Postpones Parliament Vote

LONDON—Facing almost certain defeat, British Prime Minister Theresa May on Monday postponed a vote in Parliament on her Brexit deal, saying she would go back to European Union leaders to seek changes to the divorce agreement.

May’s move threw Britain’s Brexit plans into disarray, intensified a domestic political crisis and battered the pound. With EU officials adamant the withdrawal deal was not up for renegotiation, the country does not know on what terms it will leave — and whether May will still be Britain’s leader when it does.

In an emergency statement to the House of Commons, May accepted that the divorce deal she struck last month with EU leaders was likely to be rejected “by a significant margin” if the vote were held Tuesday as planned.

May said she would defer the vote so she could seek “assurances” from the EU and bring the deal back to Parliament. She did not set a new date for the vote. The U.K.’s departure is supposed to take place on March 29.

Opposition lawmakers — and ones from May’s Conservative Party — were incredulous and angry. Some accused her of trampling on parliamentary democracy.

“The government has lost control of events and is in complete disarray,” Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said.

Corbyn demanded, and was granted, an emergency debate Tuesday on the postponement. But Labour lawmaker Lloyd Russell-Moyle was expelled from Parliament for the day after he grabbed the House of Commons’ ceremonial mace as a sign of protest.

The centuries-old gilded staff is the symbol of royal authority. Without it, the Commons can’t meet or pass laws.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading pro-Brexit Conservative, expressed despair at the Brexit shambles.

“It’s not really governing,” he said. “It’s just an awful muddle.”

Monday’s turmoil sent the pound to a 20-month low against the dollar of $1.2550.

It was a new blow for May, who became prime minister after Britain’s 2016 referendum decision to leave the EU. She has been battling ever since — first to strike a divorce deal with the bloc, then to sell it to skeptical British lawmakers.

May insisted the agreement hammered out with the EU after a year and a half of negotiations was “the best deal that is negotiable.” But it has been scorned by lawmakers on all sides of Britain’s debate about Europe.

Derisive laughter erupted in the House of Commons when May claimed there was “broad support” for many aspects of the deal.

Pro-Brexit lawmakers say the deal keeps Britain bound too closely to the EU, while pro-EU politicians say it erects barriers between the U.K. and its biggest trading partner and leaves many details of the future relationship undecided.

The main sticking point is a “backstop” provision that aims to guarantee an open border between EU member Ireland and the U.K.’s Northern Ireland after Brexit. The measure would keep Britain under EU customs rules, and is supposed to last until it is superseded by permanent new trade arrangements.

Critics say it could leave Britain tied to the EU indefinitely, unable to strike new trade deals around the world.

May said she would hold talks with EU leaders ahead of a summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday, seeking “further reassurances” over the backstop.

“Nothing should be off the table,” she said.

EU leaders signaled they are prepared to help Britain, up to a point, but insisted the Brexit agreement could not be changed.

“The deal is the deal,” Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said. “It’s taken two years to put together. It’s a fair deal for both sides.”

European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted: “We will not renegotiate the deal, including the backstop, but we are ready to discuss how to facilitate U.K. ratification.”

A key member of the European parliament’s Brexit team, Green lawmaker Philippe Lamberts, predicted May’s shuttle diplomacy would fail to secure changes.

“The only net result of this round of capitals will be an additional amount of CO2 in the atmosphere,” he said.

Despite May’s dogged determination to press on, the tumult leaves her in a precarious position. Conservative rivals are preparing for a potential leadership challenge, and Labour has threatened call for a no-confidence motion in the government.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said her Scottish National Party would support an attempt to topple the government and trigger a new election.

“This shambles can’t go on — so how about it?” Sturgeon tweeted at Corbyn.

Corbyn stopped short of calling a no-confidence vote Monday, but said if May could not renegotiate with the EU, “then she must make way.”

Delays in approving the Brexit deal increase the chances of Britain crashing out of the EU with no agreement. The government and the Bank of England have warned that could bring logjams to British ports and plunge the country into its deepest recession in decades.

May said the government would step up preparations for a no-deal Brexit in order to mitigate its worst effects. It has already stockpiled medicines and other key goods.

Carolyn Fairbairn, head of the Confederation of British Industry, said the delay was “yet another blow for companies desperate for clarity.”

“Investment plans have been paused for two-and-a-half years,” she said. “Unless a deal is agreed quickly, the country risks sliding towards a national crisis.”

May has also warned that rejecting her deal could result in Britain not leaving the EU at all.

Some campaigners in the U.K. want just that. They got a boost Monday when the EU’s top court ruled that Britain can change its mind over Brexit if it wants.

Britain invoked Article 50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty in March 2017, triggering a two-year exit process. A group of Scottish legislators had asked the European Court of Justice to rule on whether the U.K. could pull out of the withdrawal procedure on its own.

The court said Monday that when an EU member country has notified the bloc of its intent to leave, “that member state is free to revoke unilaterally that notification.”

May has repeatedly said the government will not seek to delay or reverse Brexit. She said Monday that Parliament had a duty to “get Brexit done and get it done right. ”

And she urged lawmakers to unite in a spirit of conciliation — a plea that has, so far, fallen on deaf ears.

“There will be no enduring and successful Brexit without some compromise on both sides of the debate,” May said.

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Associated Press writers Lorne Cook and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed.

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See the AP’s Brexit coverage at: https://apnews.com/Brexit

Report: USOC Failed to Protect Athletes in Nassar Abuse Case

DENVER—An independent report details a toxic pattern of bureaucratic paralysis among Olympic leaders who reacted slowly, if at all, after they knew Larry Nassar was suspected of molesting young gymnasts.

From the top office at the U.S. Olympic Committee to FBI bureaus in three cities to what was essentially an unchecked, rogue operation at the Karolyi Ranch in Texas, nobody stepped in quickly enough to stifle Nassar’s crimes, the report concludes.

That delay ultimately gave the USA Gymnastics physician more than a full year to abuse gymnasts after the first allegations surfaced.

The USOC swiftly fired sports performance chief Alan Ashley in the wake of Monday’s release of the 233-page report from the law firm Ropes & Gray. One of its conclusions was that neither Ashley nor Scott Blackmun, who resigned in February as CEO of the USOC, elevated concerns about Nassar’s alleged abuse when they first learned of them from USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny in July 2015.

And an email from Penny notifying Blackmun and Ashley of Nassar’s decision to step down from his volunteer position in September 2015 — after allegations had surfaced but before they’d become widely known — was deleted from both executives’ accounts. The report suggests Blackmun was fearful his email system may have been vulnerable to Russian hacking.

“One thing we’ve learned from this experience is that these types of situations should be escalated,” said Susanne Lyons, a board member who served as acting CEO earlier this year. “Transparency is important.”

The report says the USOC; USAG; Nassar’s employer, Michigan State; and the FBI all failed to protect athletes. The USOC’s failures led to an approximately 14-month period — July 2015 to September 2016 — during which Nassar was allowed to continue to molest girls despite the allegations.

“While Nassar bears ultimate responsibility for his decades-long abuse of girls and young women, he did not operate in a vacuum,” the report says. “Instead, he acted within an ecosystem that facilitated his criminal acts.”

Nassar is serving decades in prison on charges of child pornography and for molesting young women and girls under the guise of medical treatment; many of his accusers testified in heart-wrenching detail at his sentencing hearing in January.

The USOC commissioned the report shortly after the testimony. More than 100 people were interviewed, including some survivors of sexual abuse. But a sizable number of Nassar victims — including 180 being represented by attorney John Manly — refused to participate because Manly didn’t believe the report was completely independent of the USOC.

“That being said, it is a stinging indictment of the highest levels of the leadership of the United States Olympic Committee for their role in the cover-up (of) the largest sex-abuse scandal in the history of sports,” Manly said.

Among the conclusions:

— Blackmun never reported the allegations to either the USOC board or anyone on his staff. When asked about the Nassar case by chief security officer Larry Buendorf, who had received word separately from Penny, Blackmun told Buendorf he was aware of the issue and did not seek further guidance. Blackmun, who voluntarily answered questions for the report, explained he understood the seriousness of the Nassar allegations but because they involved an “insider” — Nassar was well-respected and had worked with USAG for nearly 30 years — the case was “especially sensitive.”

— While Penny repeatedly tried to get the FBI to investigate, one of his key objectives was to keep the allegations from spilling into the public, to avoid “sending shockwaves through the community,” as he said in a conversation with an FBI agent. Because of that, very few inside USAG knew the extent of Nassar’s crimes — a factor that curtailed efforts to control him.

— Despite Penny’s contacts with law enforcement, the report concludes “the investigation appears to have languished … for over seven months” in the FBI’s Detroit office. USAG later took the allegations to the FBI’s Los Angeles office, but not until the Indianapolis Star report detailing Nassar’s abuse came out in September 2016 did that office take action.

—The Texas training center where much of the abuse occurred was run by Bela and Martha Karolyi, whose penchant for churning out gold medalists earned them virtual carte blanche without having to answer to parents, individual coaches, or USAG and USOC authorities. The harsh regimen they imposed left athletes afraid to report injuries and almost completely beholden to Nassar, who “had broad latitude to commit his crimes, far from the gymnasts’ parents and unimpeded by any effective child-protective measures.”

The backdrop of it all was a U.S. Olympic bureaucracy that had grown reluctant to police the sports organizations it oversaw. When Blackmun took over the USOC, its relationships with the national governing bodies were at a low point. He spent years trying to repair the relationships and the USOC “chose to adopt a deferential, service-oriented approach” to NGBs, according to the report.

“In this governance model, the USOC exerted its broad statutory authority and monetary influence over individual sports primarily for the purpose of encouraging success at the Olympic Games, effectively outsourcing any decisions regarding on-the-ground child-protective practices to the NGBs,” the report states.

That, in the minds of many of the survivors, was the most critical shortcoming: In short, the USOC valued medals over the athletes who won them.

Border Patrol Arrests 32 at San Diego Demonstration

SAN DIEGO—U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested 32 people at a demonstration Monday that was organized by a Quaker group on the border with Mexico, authorities said. Demonstrators were calling for an end to detaining and deporting immigrants and showing support for migrants in a caravan of Central American asylum seekers.

A photographer for The Associated Press saw about a dozen people being handcuffed after they were told by agents to back away from a wall that the Border Patrol calls “an enforcement zone.” The American Friends Service Committee, which organized the demonstration, said 30 people were stopped by agents in riot gear and taken into custody while they tried to move forward to offer a ceremonial blessing near the wall.

Border Patrol spokesman Theron Francisco said 31 people were arrested for trespassing and one was arrested for assaulting an officer.

More than 300 people, many the leaders of churches, mosques, synagogues and indigenous communities, participated in the demonstration at San Diego’s Border Field State Park, which borders Tijuana, Mexico.

The rally held on a beach divided by the border wall was the second confrontation for Border Patrol agents since a caravan of more than 6,000 migrants, predominantly Hondurans, reached Tijuana last month. A confrontation with rock-throwers from Mexico led to U.S. agents firing tear gas into Mexico on Nov. 25 and a five-hour closure of the nation’s busiest border crossing.

Thousands of migrants are living in crowded tent cities in Tijuana after undertaking a grueling journey from Central America to the U.S. border. Many face waiting weeks or months in Mexico while they apply for asylum. The U.S. is processing up to about 100 claims a day at the San Diego crossing, which is creating a backlog.

The demonstration Monday was meant to launch a national week of action called “Love Knows No Borders: A moral call for migrant justice,” which falls between Human Rights Day on Monday, and International Migrants’ Day on Dec. 18, the group said.

“Showing up to welcome and bless children, mothers and fathers seeking asylum from very difficult and dehumanizing circumstances is the right and humane thing to do,” said Bishop Minerva G. Carcano, from the San Francisco Area United Methodist Church. “How we act in these moments determines who we will become as a nation.”

The group also is calling on Congress to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

This Is What It Looks Like When Imperialism Comes Home

You have to hand it to him—the man has a way with words and he sure knows how to fire up his base. Early in November, President Donald Trump addressed a crowd of supporters in Montana, and he gushed with pride about his recent deployment of active-duty troops to the U.S. border with Mexico. The commander in chief bragged about the job his troops were doing in fending off the “invasion”—that isn’t an invasion at all, of course—from a “caravan” of asylum-seeking Central American migrants who were, at the time, 700 miles away. Regarding recent footage of those troops working on the border, he casually said he “noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire, used properly, can be a beautiful sight.” Beauty, as they say, is certainly in the eye of the beholder.

Now, at least for the next two months, Mr. Trump remains this soldier’s commander in chief, so I won’t remark on him or his general personality. Still, I was more than a little troubled by this astounding comment. It’s not just that these migrants are empirically not an invading force, generally not “armed,” and certainly not infused with “unknown Middle Easterners” (read: terrorists). And it’s not just that the United States is itself at least partially to blame for the refugee crisis infecting Central America. Nor is it that the sight of tear gas fired at women and children—in scenes reminiscent of the Gaza Strip—is more than a little distressing.

As the pre-midterm election rhetoric of refugee demonization ramped up, as the tear gas was fired, it was actually the presence of active-duty soldiers deployed within the U.S. and the act of laying barbed and concertina wire to shut out asylum seekers that jarred this damaged career officer.  Sure, the dubious legal status of those troops—arguably in contravention of the 140-year-old Posse Comitatus Act—was also bothersome. That act bars the U.S. military from using its capabilities to enforce domestic order without a specific congressional authorization—only don’t expect Congress or the president to seek one. No, it was all more personal, and the visceral images on my screen abruptly brought back old, shameful memories from my own career: recollections of just how un-beautiful the sight of barbed wire truly is.

Thousands of miles and seven years ago, while serving as the commander of a cavalry reconnaissance troop in Kandahar, Afghanistan, then Capt. Sjursen worked for a doozy of a colonel. In an effort to isolate the nearby village of Charcusa from Taliban intrusion, we’d decided to station a small, rotating squad to live within the nearly abandoned hamlet. That would have been more than enough to secure the space and “protect” the few villagers—mostly women, children and elderly men—from local Taliban fighters. Never mind that most of these fighters were the villagers’ husbands and sons—we hadn’t the time to reflect on that ironic and problematic fact. A war was on and the key was to hold ground and keep the Taliban out of shooting range of our base. It was 2011, I’d already fought a useless war in Iraq, and all I cared about was protecting my soldiers while treating the locals with a degree of decency.

My command, however, didn’t think our troop presence was sufficient. Seeking to replicate the concrete bonanza that had “worked” during the 2007-08 “surge” in Baghdad, the chain of command ordered me to surround the entire village with tall, concrete T-walls. That would not only be an eyesore, I replied, but would block the village’s many irrigation canals and starve the inhabitants of Charcusa.

The colonels took a couple of days to consider the inconvenient fact while I began to hope in vain that I’d won a small victory over the obtuse American idea-fairy.  Command ultimately decided that while they’d relent on the T-wall order, I would have to surround this tiny, destitute, mud-hut village with hundreds of spools of triple-strand concertina wire. The powers-that-be made it clear that they’d countenance no questions asked from this known skeptic of a captain. So, like the obedient subaltern I then was, I relented.

My troopers spent days laying the ugly, scary and ultimately unnecessary strands of wire. When the job was done, ancient, war-ravaged Charcusa resembled East Berlin during the Cold War, or, worse, a concentration camp. In a bit of absurd irony, we also installed a swing set inside the wire for the village children. I took strange comfort in that, though I abhorred the swings’ juxtaposition with the barbed-wire barricades. Soon after, my colonel dropped by for a brief visit and uttered the words that triggered me today, so many years later: “Danny, you did a beautiful job!” It was a compliment that cut like a knife. At that moment, I would have preferred to be insulted, threatened or demeaned, as I so often was.

What exactly was “beautiful” about our barbed wire accomplishment?  We’d turned a local village into a prison camp and controlled the access of native civilians to their own fields and homes; we’d added a visual blight to an otherwise pristine environment;  and, ultimately, we didn’t take a single step toward victory in Afghanistan—whatever that meant anymore. As it turns out, U.S. soldiers only ever truly held ground that they stood upon or had walled off with barbed wire.  All fantasies of nation-building, democracy promotion and “counterinsurgency” crumbled continuously before our eyes. In the 18th year of our nation’s longest war, such delusions are crumbling still.

Today, just as my soldiers had isolated themselves with concertina wire, our entire homeland is being barbed-wired off from the rest of the continent. In Afghanistan, we kept the people out of—or within—their own villages. In Arizona and other border states, the U.S. Army has now been ordered to keep what Jesus Christ might have called “the least among us” out of the United States.

No, barbed wire isn’t beautiful. It is ugly, it is militaristic, it cannot unite but only seek to divide our ever-connected human souls. This is what happens when the empire comes home, boomeranging overseas sins back into our own communities.

I’m glad, this time, that it is not me being ordered to lay the hateful wire.

The tragedy is, however, that there are always others ready to step up and do so.

Young, Autistic and Locked Away

Truthdig is proud to present this article as part of its Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, a series from a network of female correspondents around the world who are dedicated to pursuing truth within their countries and elsewhere.

“Eden has been locked away and left to rot,” says Perry Collins, a London cab driver. Collins is speaking of Eden Norris, his 26-year-old stepson, who has autism and learning disabilities and lives in a locked, privately owned facility nearly 200 miles from the family’s West London home.

Norris has spent nearly nine years in institutions, with only brief periods of living outside. His mother, Deborah Evans, is also disabled, due to incapacitating anxiety and panic attacks. The family is only able to visit Norris every two weeks because it’s a 13-hour round trip to his facility in Norwich.

“He’s entitled to have a family life,” Collins says. “It’s his human right, but instead he’s lost his life, and we miss him.”

Norris was voluntarily institutionalized when he experienced a crisis at the age of 17, which was worsened by lack of adequate professional support. He became extremely anxious, needing care his family could not provide at the time. This is not unusual—many young people falter when they transition from child-centered support in the formal education system into a patchier and cash-strapped system of support for disabled adults.

This transition period is when many—like Norris—are most at risk of being institutionalized. Inside poorly managed and underfunded facilities, many residents become distressed and act in challenging ways. The staff, who may be poorly paid and trained, often lack the skills to help them. Instead of receiving the support they need, patients are routinely restrained, overmedicated and segregated in cells, which they cannot leave for days, even months.

Although patients may have entered institutions voluntarily, they’re often not able to leave voluntarily. In Norris’ case, he was kept in long-term segregation in his first institution, where he had what his mother describes as “some meltdowns.” The staff, in reaction, pressed charges and applied successfully for a section 37 of the Mental Health Act, which “sections” a person, or allows involuntary institutionalization for an undefined period of time.

Norris has spent the past three years at the Assessment and Treatment Unit (ATU) at Cawston Park Hospital in Norwich. His parents say he is often kept sedated and that when he arrived, he was isolated and fed through a hatch. They also say that because of the medication he is given, he has chest pains and usually sleeps about 14 hours a day. Since entering institutions, his weight has soared from 210 to more than 300 pounds. (Andrew Gordon, director of communications at Cawston Park Hospital, says he cannot comment on individual cases.)

After an intense effort by his family, Norris was released briefly in December 2017 to live in a supported-living residence in London. Norris’ parents feel he didn’t receive adequate support and continuity of care in that residence, and although they provided support themselves, the placement broke down when Norris’ anxiety returned. He was returned to the hospital after a few weeks.

Eden Norris at home with his dog, Donny, in 2010.

If their children have been sectioned, parents aren’t allowed to remove them from institutions without the approval of a psychiatrist or other responsible clinician. If patients do manage to leave, many are so traumatized by their experiences in a facility that they have more crises outside, and they end up back in inpatient settings. Some parents who have expressed concern about institutional conditions have been threatened with court orders.

Jeremy (whose full name is being kept private under a local government ruling) has highlighted the case of his daughter Beth on social media and the BBC. Beth, who has autism, has been held in seclusion in a facility for 23 months. The staff deemed her such a risk that, despite a lack of corroborative evidence, she was fed through a hatch. She is currently sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Jeremy’s local council, or governing authority, threatened him with a gag order when he tried to publicize her plight, but the council later backed down.

After a public outcry, Jeremy met with Matt Hancock, the U.K. health secretary. Beth’s case is being reviewed, and the family is campaigning to move her nearer to home and out of seclusion permanently.

Critics, including disabled people and their families, warn that while things may change for individuals whose cases reach the media, the system remains the same. Hancock has asked for a review of the seclusion system for people with disabilities, but many Britons—partly because previous initiatives have failed—are pessimistic that conditions will change radically.

Failure to Transform Care

The situation wasn’t supposed to be this way for patients and their families. After an outcry following a BBC investigation of abuse at the privately run Winterbourne View care home in 2011, the government promised to move people out of expensive ATUs where some people had been held for years. The cost of each placement was heavy then—more than $200,000 per year. It’s now even more expensive.

British citizens can access health care free of charge through the National Health Service (NHS). It runs and pays for ATUs, but local councils pay for care in the community. Critics say this payment system is one reason people spend so long in institutions. These critics feel that local councils, which are often strapped for money, hesitate to pay for community-based care when they can shift the costs to the NHS instead.

Perry Collins, left, and his stepson, Eden Norris.

As the government slowly developed its ATU closure policy, other abuse scandals and tragedies followed, including the preventable death of 18-year-old Connor Sparrowhawk (known as LB), who drowned in a bath at an NHS facility in Oxfordshire in 2013. The Justice for LB campaign fueled demands for action and accountability regarding the treatment of people with disabilities in institutions.

In October 2015, the NHS and local government leaders published a $58 million plan, known as Building the Right Support. Under the plan, March 2019 was to be the closure date of England’s last NHS hospital for people with learning disabilities. It was also the date nearly half the 2,600 beds in ATUs would be eliminated. The government pledged to invest more money into community living instead.

The community living model covers a range of options including supported  environments in which disabled people live together with professional help; independent living in which disabled people can choose their own care providers such as personal assistants; and living without support in any kind of accommodation. This model tends to be less expensive than institutionalization, and it promotes inclusion in the community.

But the ATU closure process has stalled. Throughout the U.K., an estimated 3,000 disabled children and adults still are housed in ATUs and similar inpatient settings. The facilities are designed for short emergency stays, but many people remain for long periods. NHS data shows that people with a learning disability or autism who are sent to such units stay for an average of 5½ years.

A recent news investigation found that 40 disabled patients have died in ATUs in just 2½ years. Nine were under 35 years old. The institutions in which they died were scheduled for closure years ago.

A significant worry is caused by the fact that the number of children and young people in the system is increasing. A study by the Challenging Behaviour Foundation shows the number of children with a learning disability or autism in inpatient units grew from 110 in March 2015 to 230 in April 2018.

Steve Broach is a lawyer who works with U.K. families to challenge poor treatment of their loved ones. “We are going backward toward institutionalization,” he says. “The role of services is to get people to live a full life, but that isn’t happening.”

Families and specialists say the system is failing from childhood on. Younger children are also at risk of restraints, seclusion and physical harm in both special and mainstream educational settings. Elly Chapple, whose daughter was restrained and injured in an educational setting, is in touch with families experiencing similar issues. Many of those families believe the situation is at a crisis point in schools and ATUs. “There are hundreds of cases like Beth,” Chapple says. “She is the tip of the iceberg.”

Chapple is determined to see change happen. “Disability is the last taboo to break, and we are fighting for our place, and our children are still suffering,” she says. “Why else, in 2018, would we have children in cells?”

Lancaster University professor Chris Hatton charts the pathway that disabled young people follow into closed institutions. “So you have children who have had little support, getting shunted out of mainstream education and out of sight of society, despite the policy noise about early intervention,” says Hatton, who specializes in public health and disability. “And then these invisible kids have a crisis … (and then there is) a panic response, which is when the institutions appear on the scene, and you get a huge rise in young people entering inpatient facilities.”

Simone Aspis, who has learning disabilities, is a “self-advocate” who challenges the institutional role and supports patients who want to leave locked facilities. “The route into these institutions for young people with autism and learning disabilities is too easy,” Aspis says. She explains that the proof used to section patients is often based on behavior that is different and deviates from the norm, rather than on aggressive behavior. “A lot of young people … don’t get the support they need, their behavior gets difficult—and then they get sectioned,” she says.

Policy Versus Reality in the U.K. and Europe

As in the U.K., the concept of independent living for disabled people has become embedded in policy in the European Union and farther afield, but the reality of institutionalization remains dire. In the U.K., community living initiatives have freed many disabled people, leaving those with learning disabilities and autism at risk of being locked away. However, in many EU countries, people with a range of conditions, including sensory and physical disabilities, remain in institutions.

More than a decade ago, the EU committed member countries to a deinstitutionalization initiative based on “shared European values of human dignity, equality and the respect for human rights.” The goal of the initiative was to transition disabled individuals from residential institutions to community-based care.

In 2014, the EU limited European Structural and Investment Funds to some member states, unless those states moved more residents into community living. Those member states—mainly in Eastern Europe but also including Greece—were forbidden from using two key EU funding pots to build or renovate institutions. Billions of euros were spent on the initiative, but success was limited.

recently reported that, in the name of care and treatment, children with disabilities remain locked away, neglected and abused, restrained and malnourished throughout Europe. Central and Eastern Europe have the largest proportion of children in institutions in the world.

The rate of placement in formal care in these regions is alarming. In Hungary, large facilities with poor human rights records are scheduled for closure, but the government plans to build smaller facilities rather than move residents into the community. Human rights groups have protested this, but the European Commission has thus far refused to suspend funding.

In Greece, the children’s charity Lumos reports that children, many of whom have disabilities, are still being physically restrained and abused in institutions, with some even being caged in beds.

In Belgium, more than 5,000 disabled adults and children are being warehoused in poor conditions on behalf of the French state. French parents complain that their children are sent to Belgium and they are not offered alternative placements.

Even the policy of transitioning institutional residents to community-based care is in danger. As EU budget negotiations currently take place, proposed rules no longer make it a priority to promote the transition for people with disabilities. This means that building or renovating institutional care facilities could once again be eligible for funding, which would work against community placements for disabled people.

Organizations that campaign for the end to institutions in Europe are pushing back before the budget is set. European Structural and Investment Funds play a pivotal role in motivating and supporting the transition from institutional care to community-based living. Advocates of community living are horrified that the clock may be turned back and money earmarked for social inclusion may be used to segregate people with disabilities.

Profit Motive

In the U.K., an additional factor contributes to keeping institutions open: the profit motive.

While the British government runs many institutions via the National Health Service, some large corporations—including two U.S. health care companies—also run private-sector institutions in the U.K., and those facilities need clients.

It isn’t in the interest of those companies to promote community living, according to Alicia Wood, head of public affairs for Dimensions, a nonprofit that advocates community living for people with learning disabilities, autism and complex needs. “Every time there is a tragedy in a long-stay hospital, everyone wrings their hands,” Wood says. “Tackling the profit motive is an essential part of the changes that must happen to fix our broken system.”

Experts believe the U.K. government’s target to reduce the numbers of disabled people in inpatient settings by March of 2019 will almost certainly not be met. “Things may well change for individuals, but I don’t know if it has any bigger effect; instead there is an attempt to manage away the story,” Hatton says. “Bigger forces are swamping any attempt to do anything but tweak. Brexit has consumed everything at the moment. There is interest in scandal reduction, but not policy change.”

Aspis questions why Britain is using its resources on segregation rather than inclusion. “We are (one of the richest countries) in the world,” she says. “We can choose whether or not to lock people up.”

Eden Norris, for his part, has spent more than one-third of his life in locked institutions, despite having committed no crime. Perry Collins says the family has been told Norris may be able to leave soon to live in a homier setting nearer his parents. But that would be on a trial basis; because he has been sectioned, he can be recalled and locked away again.

Collins just wants his stepson to be reunited with the family in West London in time for Christmas. Collins says: “Every time we visit, he says ‘Mummy, I just want to come home. But they don’t listen to me.’ ”