Chris Hedges's Blog, page 411

Trump’s Military Deployment to the U.S.-Mexico Border Is Illegal

Donald Trump’s decision to send thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexican border to intercept migrants who intend to apply for asylum is not just a bald-faced political stunt — it is also illegal.

Passed in 1878 to end the use of federal troops in overseeing elections in the post–Civil War South, the Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of the military to enforce domestic U.S. laws, including immigration laws. For this reason, Trump’s decision to deploy the military to the border to enforce US immigration law against thousands of desperate migrants from Central America — who have undertaken the perilous journey over 1,000 miles through Mexico to the US border in order to apply for asylum — is an unlawful order.

Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force, told Truthout, “The deployment of US troops to the Southern border is an illegitimate political ploy and a serious misuse of the military. This action casts shame on a government that treats refugees seeking asylum as enemies.”

The illegality of Trump’s order to the military opens the door to the possibility that service members will resist it: Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Nuremberg Principles and Army Field Manuals, service members have a duty to obey lawful orders and a duty to disobey unlawful orders.

Before the midterm elections, pandering to his nativist base, Trump began the deployment of 5,200 active duty troops to Texas, California and Arizona at the southern US border, with the promise of nearly 10,000 more. On October 29, describing the impending arrival of migrants seeking asylum as an “invasion,” Trump tweeted, “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”

The Trump administration had originally dubbed the military deployment as “Operation Faithful Patriot,” but it soon abandoned that name, ostensibly to downplay the law enforcement duties of the military troops. Trump’s lawyers invariably realized that using the military to enforce the laws is prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act.

The Military Is Legally Forbidden From Enforcing Immigration Law

The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the willful use of “any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws.” It has been applied as well to the Navy and Marine Corps. The only exception to the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibition is “in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”

Defense Department officials told The New York Times that troops deployed to the border would help construct tents and fencing and some would “potentially” operate drones on the border.

Whether the drones are armed or used for surveillance, they would be assisting in the enforcement of the immigration laws.

“Sending troops to the US border with Mexico is as immoral and illegal as sending them to invade and occupy foreign lands.”Moreover, the Los Angeles Times reported, “Black Hawk helicopters equipped with night sensors will be available to ferry Border Patrol personnel ‘exactly where they need to be’ to ‘spot groups’ and ‘to fast-rope down’ to intercept migrants trying to cross the border. Military aircraft will conduct surveillance.”

Troops who carry out these functions would also be participating in the enforcement of the immigration laws.

Only in the event of an invasion or insurrection on US soil does the president have the power to order the use of the military within the United States.

There is no invasion or insurrection occasioned by the migrant caravan. In an interview with The New York Times, Adm. James G. Stavridis, former commander of the US military’s Southern Command, called out Trump’s “fictitious caravan invasion.”

Indeed, “Military personnel are legally prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement, and there is no emergency or cost-benefit analysis to justify this sudden deployment,” Shaw Drake, policy counsel for the ACLU Border Rights Center, said in a statement.

The Duty to Disobey Unlawful Orders

The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) requires that all military personnel obey lawful orders. Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice says, “A general order or regulation is lawful unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States….” Both the Nuremberg Principles and the Army Field Manuals create a duty to disobey unlawful orders.

“Sending troops to the US border with Mexico is as immoral and illegal as sending them to invade and occupy foreign lands,” Gerry Condon, president of Veterans For Peace, told Truthout. “Donald Trump is carrying out a racist war against asylum seekers who are fleeing extreme violence, which in turn is caused by decades of US support for repressive regimes in Central America.”

Members of Veterans For Peace are fanning out along the US/Mexico border from California to Texas in order to reach out to the troops that Trump has ordered to the border.

Condon added, “Soldiers who follow their conscience and refuse to follow illegal orders will have our support. We can also put GIs in contact with legal resources to help them get honorably discharged from the military.”

Trump’s Cynical and Illegal Attack on the Right to Apply for Asylum

Trump’s verbal attacks on the migrants and his deployment of troops to the border was a cynical ploy to help Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Although he mounted a consistent tirade against the “caravan” in the weeks leading up to the midterms, Trump has hardly mentioned it since November 6. He did cite it when he announced his new proclamation limiting asylum claims.

Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, any person who arrives in the United States has the right to apply for asylum. Applicants must show they are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin due to a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Yet Trump’s new proclamation would deny migrants the right to apply for asylum unless they entered the United States at a designated port of entry, which violates the 1951 Refugee Convention.

On November 9, the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking an injunction to block Trump’s new restrictions on asylum. The complaint states that Trump’s proclamation is “in direct violation of Congress’s clear command that manner of entry cannot constitute a categorical asylum bar.”

Congressional Pushback

In a November 1 letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis, 108 House Democrats decried the “militarization of the southern border to score political points and stoke misleading fears among Americans of immigrants.” They noted, “The President has exploited the caravan of people traveling to the US to seek asylum for his own political gain, and he continues to politicize and militarize this humanitarian crisis as these men, women, and children are fleeing violence and persecution in an unstable part of the world.”

The congress members called on Mattis to clarify the duration of the deployment, the number of troops deployed, the rules of engagement, what training troops have received, and how much the deployment will cost American taxpayers.

Nearly 2,500 hopeful migrants have already arrived in Tijuana and thousands more are en route. Several organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, have sent legal backup to the border. Members of Veterans For Peace are also at the border, offering support to troops who refuse unlawful orders to enforce the immigration laws.

Trump’s border deployment order ends December 15. Pushback by individual Congress members is important. But Trump responds to negative publicity, so it is the mass mobilization of opposition that may cause him to back down.

Top Rival Decides Not to Challenge Pelosi for Speakership

WASHINGTON — Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge, the top potential rival to Nancy Pelosi for House speaker, dropped out of the running Tuesday, delivering a blow to efforts to topple the California Democrat.

Fudge announced her decision just as Pelosi said she was naming the Ohio congresswoman as incoming chair of a newly revived elections subcommittee that will delve into voting rights access, a top priority of the new Democratic majority. The move also came the same day Fudge faced questions over her past support for a man now suspected of stabbing his ex-wife.

Her consideration to run for speaker, Fudge said, was in part to “ensure diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels of the House.” She was “now confident that we will move forward together,” she said in a statement.

As a former chairwoman of the influential Congressional Black Caucus, Fudge noted she was assured by Pelosi assured that black women, in particular, “will have a seat at the decision-making table.”

Pelosi’s move to revive the elections subcommittee of the House Administration Committee is an example of the reach of the leader’s office to dole out plum assignments to lawmakers — or withhold them — as she works to shore up votes to become speaker.

Pelosi said Fudge has been a “driving force in our voter protection efforts” and in her new position the congresswoman will “play a critical role in our Democratic Majority’s efforts to ensure access to the ballot box for all Americans.”

Pelosi kick-started the committee that had been dormant for the past few years under the GOP majority and handed the gavel to Fudge.

The turn of events comes as Democratic lawmakers are on Thanksgiving recess ahead of a closed-door vote next week on new leadership.

Democrats are expected to vote Pelosi as their nominee for speaker, but it’s unclear if she has enough support from her ranks when the full House votes in January.

Pelosi’s bid was boosted Tuesday by praise from former President Barack Obama.

Obama said when history is written, Pelosi will be remembered as “one of the most effective legislative leaders that this country has ever seen.” He called her an “extraordinary partner” during his presidency.

“Nancy is not always the best on a cable show, or with the quick soundbite or what have you, but her skill, tenacity, toughness, vision is remarkable,” Obama said on “The Axe Files” podcast.

At least 16 Democrats have signed on to a letter in favor of new leadership, and several incoming freshmen lawmakers have said they won’t vote for Pelosi.

But Pelosi has several weeks over the holiday season to listen to lawmakers and may be able to shore up her support.

Earlier Tuesday, Fudge came under scrutiny for her past support of Lance Mason. She had been among several officials who wrote letters of support over recent years for Mason, a former county judge and state senator who pleaded guilty in 2015 to beating Aisha Fraser Mason so badly that her face required reconstructive surgery.

Fraser Mason, a schoolteacher and mother, was fatally stabbed Saturday. Lance Mason is a suspect in the slaying and is likely to be charged, authorities said Monday.

Police said in court documents the ex-judge was fleeing the scene of the homicide when he slammed his SUV into a patrol cruiser.

Fudge said in a statement Tuesday that her efforts to vouch for Lance Mason three years ago were based on “the person I knew for almost 30 years.”

“The person who committed these crimes is not the Lance Mason familiar to me. They were horrific crimes, and I condemn them,” Fudge said. “I and everyone who knew Aisha are mourning her loss.”

Dozens of letters were written on Mason’s behalf between his August 2014 arrest for the first attack on Fraser Mason and when his disciplinary case went before the Ohio Supreme Court in October 2017. Judge, who worked with Mason, and prominent lawyers were among those who wrote in support of Mason. Cleveland 19 News tweeted a copy of a letter Fudge wrote to the local prosecutor.

“Lance accepts full responsibility for his actions and has assured me that something like this will never happen again,” Fudge wrote in the letter.

“Lance Mason is a good man who made a very bad mistake,” she added. “I can only hope that you can see in Lance what I and others see.”

—

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Alan Fram in Washington contributed to this report.

Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 50 at Gathering of Islamic Scholars

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide bomber targeted a gathering of hundreds of Islamic scholars in the Afghan capital on Tuesday, killing at least 50 people as Muslims marked the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad.

Another 83 people were wounded in the attack, with 20 of them in critical condition and the toll likely to rise, Public Health Ministry spokesman Wahid Majroh said.

The suicide bomber was able to sneak into a wedding hall in Kabul where hundreds of Muslim religious scholars and clerics had gathered to mark the holiday. No one immediately claimed the attack, but both the Taliban and a local Islamic State affiliate have targeted religious scholars aligned with the government in the past.

“The victims of the attack unfortunately are all religious scholars who gathered to commemorate the birthday of Prophet Muhammad,” said Basir Mujahid, spokesman for the Kabul police chief. He said police had not been asked to provide security for the event, and that the bomber had easily slipped into the hall. Most wedding halls have private security.

Mohammad Muzamil, a waiter at the wedding hall, said he had gone into the back to fetch water for the guests when he heard the explosion.

“Everything was covered with smoke and dust,” he said. “There were dead bodies all around on the chairs, in large numbers.”

Police sealed off roads leading to the scene. Hundreds of family members and relatives gathered at hospitals, looking at lists of those killed and wounded that were posted outside.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani condemned the bombing, calling it “an attack on Islamic values and followers of the Prophet Muhammad,” and declaring Wednesday a day of mourning.

“It is an attack on humanity,” Ghani said.

The U.N. Security Council also condemned the attack and expressed sympathy to the families of the victims.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan also condemned the bombing and expressed condolences to the victims. Afghanistan and the United States have long accused Pakistan of harboring the Taliban, whose leadership is based there. Pakistan denies the allegations, and says it uses its limited influence over the group to encourage peace efforts.

The Islamic State group claimed a suicide bombing in June that killed at least seven people and wounded 20 at a meeting of top clerics in the capital. The body of religious leaders, known as the Afghan Ulema Council, had issued a decree against suicide attacks and called for peace talks. IS said it had targeted “tyrant clerics” who were siding with the U.S.-backed government.

The Taliban denied involvement in the June attack but they also denounced the gathering.

Both militant groups want to overthrow the U.S.-backed government and impose a harsh form of Islamic rule, but they are bitterly divided over leadership and ideology, and have clashed on a number of occasions.

Afghan security forces have struggled to combat the twin insurgencies since the U.S. and NATO formally ended their combat mission in 2014, shifting to a support and counterterrorism role. President Donald Trump’s decision last year to send in additional U.S. forces has had little if any impact on the ground.

The Taliban carry out near-daily attacks targeting security forces and government officials across the country, while the IS affiliate has bombed gatherings of minority Shiites, killing hundreds of civilians.

E. Coli Outbreak Brings Nationwide Warning on Romaine Lettuce

NEW YORK — Health officials in the U.S. and Canada told people Tuesday to stop eating romaine lettuce because of a new E. coli outbreak.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it is working with officials in Canada on the outbreak, which has sickened 32 people in 11 states and 18 people in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

The strain identified is different than the one linked to romaine earlier this year but appears similar to last year’s outbreak linked to leafy greens.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency doesn’t have enough information to ask suppliers for a recall, but he suggested that supermarkets and restaurants should withdraw romaine until the source of the contamination can be identified. People are also being advised to throw out any romaine they have at home.

The contaminated lettuce is likely still on the market, Gottlieb told The Associated Press in a phone interview.

He said FDA wanted to issue a warning before people gathered for Thanksgiving meals, where the potential for exposure could increase.

“We did feel some pressure to draw conclusions as quickly as we could,” he said.

In Canada, officials issued similar warnings to the two provinces where people were sickened. They said there was no evidence to suggest people in other parts of the country had been affected.

Most romaine sold this time of year is grown in California, Gottlieb said. The romaine lettuce linked to the E. coli outbreak earlier this year was from Yuma, Arizona. Tainted irrigation water appeared to be the source of that outbreak, which sickened about 200 people and killed five.

The FDA’s blanket warning in the current outbreak is broader and more direct than the ones issued in the earlier outbreak, said Robert Whitaker, chief science officer for the Produce Marketing Association. In the earlier outbreak, the warnings about romaine from Yuma might have been confusing, he said.

Whitaker said the industry group told members they should cooperate with the FDA and stop supplying romaine lettuce, especially since people have been told to stop buying and eating it.

No deaths have been reported in the current outbreak, but 13 people in the U.S. and six in Canada have been hospitalized. The last reported U.S. illness was on Oct. 31, while and the most recent illness in Canada was early this month.

Tracing the source of contaminated lettuce can be difficult because it’s often repackaged by middlemen, said Sarah Sorscher, deputy director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. That can mean the entire industry becomes implicated in outbreaks, even if not all products are contaminated.

“One of the problems with produce is that it can be very hard to trace back,” she said.

She said washing contaminated lettuce won’t ensure that harmful germs are killed.

Infections from E. coli can cause symptoms including severe stomach cramps, diarrhea and vomiting. Most people recover within a week, but some illnesses can last longer and be more severe.

Health officials have also been reminding people to properly handle and cook their Thanksgiving birds amid a widespread salmonella outbreak linked to raw turkey. Last week, Hormel recalled some packages of Jennie-O ground turkey that regulators were able to tie to an illness.

But unlike with romaine lettuce, regulators are not warning people to avoid turkey. Salmonella is not prohibited in raw meat and poultry, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which overseas raw meat, said cooking should kill any salmonella.

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

Trump Provides Written Responses to Mueller Questions

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has provided the special counsel with written answers to questions about his knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 election, his lawyers said Tuesday, avoiding at least for now a potentially risky sit-down with prosecutors. It’s the first time he has directly cooperated with the long investigation.

The step is a milestone in the negotiations between Trump’s attorneys and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team over whether and when the president might sit for an interview.

The compromise outcome, nearly a year in the making, offers some benefit to both sides. Trump at least temporarily averts the threat of an in-person interview, which his lawyers have long resisted, while Mueller secures on-the-record statements whose accuracy the president will be expected to stand by for the duration of the investigation.

The responses may also help stave off a potential subpoena fight over Trump’s testimony if Mueller deems them satisfactory. They represent the first time the president is known to have described to investigators his knowledge of key moments under scrutiny by prosecutors.

But investigators may still press for more information.

Mueller’s team months ago presented Trump’s legal team with dozens of questions they wanted to ask the president related to whether his campaign coordinated with the Kremlin to tip the 2016 election and whether he sought to obstruct the Russia probe by actions including the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

The investigators agreed to accept written responses to questions about potential Russian collusion and tabled, for the moment, obstruction-related inquiries.

Mueller left open the possibility that he would follow up with additional questions on obstruction, though Trump’s lawyers — who had long resisted any face-to-face interview — have been especially adamant that the Constitution shields him from having to answer any questions about actions he took as president.

Trump’s lawyers say it’s time for the investigation to end, but Mueller’s team may well press for additional information.

Trump attorney Jay Sekulow offered no details on the current Q&A, saying merely that “the written questions submitted by the special counsel’s office … dealt with issues regarding the Russia-related topics of the inquiry. The president responded in writing.”

He said the legal team would not release copies of the questions and answers or discuss any correspondence it has had with the special counsel’s office.

Another of Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said the lawyers continue to believe that “much of what has been asked raised serious constitutional issues and was beyond the scope of a legitimate inquiry.” He said Mueller’s office had received “unprecedented cooperation from the White House,” including about 1.4 million pages of materials.

“It is time to bring this inquiry to a conclusion,” Giuliani said.

The president told reporters last week that he had prepared the responses himself.

Trump said in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday that he was unlikely to answer questions about obstruction, saying, “I think we’ve wasted enough time on this witch hunt and the answer is, probably, we’re finished.”

Trump joins a list of recent presidents who have submitted to questioning as part of a criminal investigation.

In 2004, President George W. Bush was interviewed by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s office during an investigation into the leaked identity of a covert CIA officer. In 1998, President Bill Clinton testified before a federal grand jury in independent counsel Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation.

“It’s very extraordinary if this were a regular case, but it’s not every day that you have an investigation that touches upon the White House,” said Solomon Wisenberg, a Washington lawyer who was part of Starr’s team and conducted the grand jury questioning of Clinton.

Mueller could theoretically still try to subpoena the president if he feels the answers are not satisfactory.

But Justice Department leaders, including acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker — who now oversees the investigation and has spoken pejoratively of it in the past — would have to sign off on such a move, and it’s far from clear that they would. It’s also not clear that Mueller’s team would prevail if a subpoena fight reached the Supreme Court.

“Mueller certainly could have forced the issue and issued a subpoena, but I think he wants to present a record of having bent over backwards to be fair,” Wisenberg said.

The Supreme Court has never directly ruled on whether a president can be subpoenaed to testify in a criminal case. Clinton was subpoenaed to appear before the Whitewater grand jury, but investigators withdrew the subpoena after he agreed to appear voluntarily.

Other cases involving Presidents Richard Nixon and Clinton have presented similar issues for the justices that could be instructive now.

In 1974, for instance, the court ruled that Nixon could be ordered to turn over subpoenaed recordings, a decision that hastened his resignation. The court in 1998 said Clinton could be questioned under oath in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones.

The Cynical Saudi-Israeli Alliance and the Reshaping of the Middle East

This story was initially published on antiwar.com.

The Saudis did 9/11. Okay, probably not their government or their intelligence services directly—though there is some controversial, if circumstantial evidence that raises serious questions—but rather their citizens (15 out of 19 hijackers) and their ideology. The Saudi Wahhabi brand of fundamentalist Islam differs only ever so slightly from the faith of al-Qaida and Islamic State. Furthermore, the Saudis spent decades using their excess oil wealth to build madrassas, fund religious organizations, and otherwise spread their intolerant vision throughout the poorest communities in the Islamic world. In doing so, they helped found a generation’s worth of jihadi groups from the Taliban to al-Qaida to Islamic State.

All the while, the United States quietly acquiesced—even though the blowback from this cynical alliance helped kill Americans and damage Washington’s good name across the region. Uncle Sam long ignored the Saudis’ innumerable domestic human rights abuses and funding of terrorism and stood by Riyadh at every turn. Well, Saudi Arabia produced a lot of oil and bought a lot of American weapons. Besides if the Saudis were villains, at least they were (and are) our villains.

Ironically, over the same fifty year time span, the U.S. backed another Mideast player—Israel—that, on the surface, couldn’t be more different from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Israeli was ostensibly democratic (at least for Jews) and should have been anathema to a Saudi government that sought religious leadership of the Islamic world—especially as they were protectors and keepers of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Instead, though the Saudis sometimes ramped up the rhetoric of Palestinian suffering, Riyadh inched ever closer to a tacit alliance with the Jewish State, seeing Israel as a powerful partner in their obsessive rivalry with Shia Iran. Both partners had long viewed Iran as the greatest threat to the status quo of Saudi-Israeli regional hegemony.

Enter the horrific 9/11 attacks. Each and every hijacker was actually from Mideast countries that were friendly with Washington. That was part of their gripe: that the U.S.-backed oppressive regimes and dictatorships in the region, along with apartheid-Israel. In the upcoming “war” against terror, countries like Iraq and Iran should have been natural allies. Both hated al-Qaida and Sunni-chauvinist jihadism. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the Mideast should have seen that clear as day. Instead, the George W. Bush administration—which was remarkably close to the House of Saud and the Israeli right—allowed those two “partners” to convince the U.S. that Iraq and Iran were the real problem—even though they had nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever.

The rest, as they say, is history. Bush included both Iran and Iraq in his “Axis of Evil,” then toppled Saddam and isolated Tehran. Hundreds of thousands died, nearly $6 trillion was spent and the region has been utterly unstable ever since. Worldwide terror attacks exponentially increased in the decades following 9/11. Planet Earth, is, no doubt, more dangerous and full of suffering than at any time since the Second World War.

So why? Why did (and does) the U.S. allow the Saudi-Israeli tail to wag the proverbial American dog? There are a litany of reasons, but let us focus on three. First, America is the largest arms dealer in the world and military-industrial complex powerhouse corporations like Boeing, Honeywell, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin exert unparalleled influence over Congress and the executive branch. Money veritably owns American politics. Second, the war hawk “deep state,” so to speak, a right-wing nationalist cabal that had been waiting in the wings during the Clinton years—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton—took the wheel in the Bush years. This gang, along with neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, was obsessed with Iraq and wanted to reshape the whole region with the U.S. as the Mideast hegemon.

Finally, there’s a nefarious strain of right-wing Protestant evangelical millenarianism in the U.S. that unflinchingly backs Israel. These true believers seem to genuinely believe that Jesus can’t return to judge the living and the dead until the Jews are firmly ensconced in the Holy Land. But no mistake, this reflexive backing Israel is a rather one-sided affair and shockingly cynical. These same evangelicals, who make up a significant minority of the American electorate, believe that when Jesus does return those same Israeli Jews will be going to hell!

In the end, the results of this American kowtow to the Saudi-Israeli nexus have had unfathomably detrimental consequences. U.S. soldiers—like several of my own—ended up fighting and dying against secular Sunnis and Shia militias that had nothing to do with 9/11 and should have been natural allies. The Trump administration—filled with a new generation of nationalist zealots—inches ever closer to what would be a tragic and costly regime change in Iran. America’s reputation in the Greater Middle East has been permanently sullied, uniting Sunni and Shia alike in a generational hatred of Washington that truly endangers U.S. citizens. Indeed, in poll after credible global poll, the United States is voted the greatest threat to world peace. Furthermore, U.S. actions continue to facilitate desperate humanitarian and refugee crises in Yemen and Gaza, among other hot spots. And, finally, U.S. support empowers a reactionary right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel. It’s all such a vicious circle.

This author holds out little hope for a change to the current state of affairs. Still, sober strategy and human empathy demands an end to Saudi-Israeli hold on U.S. foreign policy. The way forward would be long, but it is clear: end the mainstream media blackout of the tragedy in Gaza; end the recognition of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital city; step away from the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and recognize Washington can never be a neutral arbiter; freeze weapons sales to both Israeli and the Kingdom; open negotiations with Iran to de-escalate the regional Cold War and win over their more U.S.-friendly youth; and, of course, demilitarize U.S. policy across the entire region.

Were the U.S. to live up to its long purported values, its citizens would have to choose policies and send the message that reflexive support of Israel and the Saudis, and the instinctive framing of all Muslims as “terrorists” harms our nation’s soul and strategy. Too bad there is no mainstream U.S. political party ready to even consider a change.

 

Trump Fans Place Their Bets on Iraqi Dinar Scam

Donald Trump has a long history of endorsing get-rich-quick schemes and encouraging Americans to get involved. On “Celebrity Apprentice,” he featured ACN Inc., a multilevel marketing firm best known for selling a video phone. ACN was in trouble with regulators in three countries for exaggerating its sales numbers and making false promises to those hoping to make a profit by selling the phones to their friends, family and local community. He also had promised attendees of Trump University they would learn “the secrets of success” in real estate, if they only paid him thousands of dollars.

Controversies and lawsuits involving such endeavors have not stopped the president from finding new marketing opportunities. This time, Trump has set his sights on the dinar, the Iraqi currency.

That currency, as Will Sommer writes in The Daily Beast, is almost worthless outside of Iraq, but that didn’t stop Trump from singing its praises during a 2017 news conference. “In the clip,” Sommer explains, “Trump says, with characteristic vagueness, that all currencies will soon ‘be on a level playing field.’ ”

Trump had been talking about trade imbalances with China, but many of his excited supporters took his “rambling speech as proof that the Iraqi dinar would soon be worth as much or even more than the dollar, making anyone who had been smart enough to buy in early a millionaire,” Sommer writes.

Hayes Kotseos, who runs a North Carolina pool-maintenance company, is one such true believer. Kotseos told Sommer that she and her husband spent from $5,000 to $10,000 on dinars. Her adult children bought them too.

Their hope, as described to Sommer, is that “Trump and the Iraqi government will somehow ‘revalue’ or ‘RV’ the currency, boosting its current value of less than $0.001 to $3 or $4.”

Promoters have been claiming “that near-mythical event will occur for nearly a decade,” the article continues. “But if it does it would theoretically make a millionaire of anyone with the foresight to put just a few thousand dollars into dinars.”

Trump may be the latest person promoting the idea the dinar has a latent wealth, but he’s not the first. “The rumored wealth surrounding the dinar dates back to its pre-Gulf War price,” Sommer points out, “when each dinar was more than $3. But sanctions and years of war have pummeled its value to less than one-tenth of one U.S. penny … the long-awaited ‘RV’ never seems to come.”

In 2015, rumors started to spread that Trump himself had invested in the dinar (there’s no evidence, according to The Daily Beast, that he has). The rumors spawned a variety of widely read hoax articles, according to data from Google Trends. Current dinar investors like the Kotseoses are also drawn in by people like Kim Clement, “a South African ‘prophet’ whose fans believe predicted Trump’s election. Before his death in 2016, Clement also often mentioned a dinar revaluation.”

On Twitter and YouTube, videos, threads and comment sections are filled with pleas for help from Trump to speed up the RV.

Financial experts and lawyers are not so convinced. The dinar scheme, says attorney Jay Addison, is “a study in stupidity.”

Sommer adds that Addison carefully monitored the situation, watching “for six years as dinar believers’ hopes for a revaluation failed to materialize. After writing a 2012 blog post about why the dinar was a bad investment, Addison heard from dinar investors who insisted the RV was about to occur. Six years later, it still hasn’t happened.”

There’s also been fraud:

In October, the owners of a Georgia-based dinar reseller that made $600 million selling the dinar and other currencies were convicted of fraud for misleading investors about the dinar’s chances to gain value.

Their scheme, according to prosecutors, included paying off a dinar “guru” to tell his fans in chat rooms and conference calls that he had high-level sources in American and Iraqi government and international financial institutions who were sure a revaluation was imminent.

Kotseos remains undaunted, telling Sommers that her family can afford to take the risk, and “she’s convinced that she’ll be able to resell her dinar and at least recover a majority of her investment.”

Read the full article here.

Who, Exactly, Is Title IX Meant to Protect?

While Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education investigates federal claims backed by a men’s rights group that women’s studies programs discriminate against men and violate Title IX, survivors of sexual assault are fighting for the ability to attend school without fear of violence.

DeVos, the secretary of education, enraged advocates against sexual violence and harassment when she issued proposed changes last week to Title IX, a federal civil rights law that says any school that discriminates against students based on their sex will not receive federal funding. The proposed changes, activists say, would be detrimental to an already fraught system.

The proposed changes “will return schools to a time where rape, assault and harassment were swept under the rug,” said Jess Davidson, interim executive director of the advocacy group End Rape on Campus.

The suggested rules would make it so that schools aren’t held responsible for most interactions that happen off-campus or online. They also would narrow the scope of what qualifies as sexual harassment. Perhaps most troubling to activists, the proposed rules would allow a defendant to view all evidence and cross-examine a witness through an intermediary in a live hearing, despite the fact that these are not criminal proceedings. Critics say the cross-examination could intimidate witnesses and reduce the number of survivors who choose to come forward.

Brett Sokolow, executive director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, told Inside Higher Ed that often a school’s decision is stacked toward people who can spend more on legal representation:

There’s this huge asymmetry between male responding parties who can afford lawyers and female reporting parties who can’t. For a lot of those victims—male, female or otherwise identified individuals—who know they can’t afford good legal advice going in, if the other side has high-paid lawyers, I think it’s going to create a powerful incentive to not persist.

Meanwhile, the man who filed the men’s rights complaint, Turkish doctoral candidate Kursat Pekgoz, was involved in a Title IX investigation at the University of Southern California regarding “hostile” behavior toward a woman with whom he had previously had a sexual relationship. He in turn filed a Title IX complaint and a lawsuit, which was thrown out, saying the investigation had hurt his career. He was ordered to pay $50,000 of the woman’s legal fees.

The basis of Pekgoz’s current Title IX complaint, which is filed against Yale, Princeton, USC and Tulane University, is that gender studies programs and women-only groups are discriminatory because women are the majority in most colleges.

California Officials Grill Tesla Over Alarming Safety Conditions

California officials doling out lucrative tax exemptions to Tesla Inc. grilled the electric carmaker’s top safety executive on its treatment of injured workers at a meeting in the state capital this week.

Tesla is the biggest beneficiary of a state program providing financial incentives to manufacturers that help lower greenhouse gas emissions. It has received more than $200 million in sales and use tax exemptions since 2009 from the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority.

Members of the state board on Tuesday questioned Tesla officials about an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting that found the company’s medical clinic failed to properly care for injured workers as part of a strategy to avoid counting injuries.

“I have to tell you, I feel personally that it’s necessary for us to do a little more digging before we’d be in the position to make any further allocations,” said Steve Juarez, a deputy state treasurer. “It’s very serious allegations that have been made in that article, and we need to get to the bottom of it.”

We reported earlier this month that Tesla’s medical clinic systematically sent injured employees back to the production line, even when some could barely walk. The clinic also inappropriately dismissed injuries as not relating to work and sent injured workers to the emergency room in a Lyft instead of an ambulance.

Tesla pressured the clinic to minimize injuries and instructed clinic staff to stop prescribing exercises so the injuries didn’t have to be counted, we found. Five former clinic employees said the clinic’s practices were unsafe and unethical. Our earlier investigation found that Tesla undercounted injuries and ignored the concerns of its own safety professionals.

Laurie Shelby, Tesla’s vice president for environment, health and safety, responded to the board’s questions by phone, disputing our reporting and praising CEO Elon Musk for inviting her to talk about safety on an earnings call.

“The article is false and it’s also disingenuous,” she said. “There is no intentional, no underreporting of injuries. It’s just not who we are. And I’m a transparent leader, and it will never occur. And Elon wouldn’t stand for it either. Nobody, nobody at Tesla gets anything for having injury rates go down.”

Concerned about previous reports of safety problems, the board imposed a requirement in March for Tesla to report back every four months on its efforts to improve health and safety issues. In July and again on Tuesday, Shelby cited a declining injury rate and said it’s aiming to become “the safest factory in the world.”

Shelby also trumpeted Tesla’s “new and improved” health clinic, managed since June by Dr. Basil Besh of Access Omnicare.

“Tesla’s new clinic offers more specialized on-site care, and it’s staffed by three full-time physicians,” Shelby said.

It was one of several misleading statements Shelby made to the financing authority. The clinic has had only one on-site doctor, who works during the day, according to former clinic employees. On the night shift, medical assistants were often left on their own, sometimes acting outside their scope of practice, while a doctor was on-call by phone.

Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez, the California Department of Finance’s chief deputy director for policy, told Shelby that she was contacted “by people who have essentially said this clinic exists to stop reporting” of injuries. Shelby denied that.

Board members said they were struggling with how to judge our findings and Tesla’s claims without the ability to investigate.

State Treasurer John Chiang, chairman of the financing authority, said in a statement that his office “unfortunately, does not have the legal authority or auditing resources to validate or dismiss these charges through an investigation.” Chiang said he will refer it to the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal/OSHA, and the state labor department.

“We will continue to monitor the situation and revisit the issue, as needed, and future awards may rely on the results,” the statement said.

Michael Picker, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, asked Tesla to provide more specific data on the most injury-prone parts of the factory so that he could evaluate progress over time. He said he was concerned when Shelby told him such information is not reported to Tesla’s board.

“I’m worried that there’s not people paying attention to that at the highest levels,” he said.

Tesla is due to report back to the financing authority in the spring.

Anna Watson, a physician assistant who worked at the Tesla clinic for three weeks in August, blew the whistle on the clinic’s practices in our story. She drove from Silicon Valley to Sacramento to speak at the meeting, decrying the lack of medical care provided to injured workers.

“The way that the injuries are disregarded and dismissed during their initial medical appointment is not acceptable,” she said.

“I’m trying to say to somebody to do something about it soon,” said a visibly nervous Watson, her voice shaking, “because the main plant at Tesla I feel is headed for an avoidable catastrophe.”

Besh, the clinic’s owner, called in to say “the clinic exists to take great care of people” and relies on accurate diagnoses. “We call balls and strikes right down the middle,” he said.

Shelby made several statements to the board that were contradicted by former clinic employees, injured factory workers and clinic records.

Claim: Access Omnicare’s clinic is better than an emergency room

Shelby said Access Omnicare’s main clinic, about 5 miles from the factory, “has everything you would need, so you don’t have to send somebody to an emergency room and wait hours upon hours to get care.”

But workers who got referred to the main clinic often had to wait days for an appointment, according to Watson. Stephon Nelson, for example, waited eight days after his crushing back injury to be seen, his medical records show. In the meantime, Tesla’s on-site clinic sent him back to work full duty, even though he could barely walk.

Claim: Nobody is denied treatment

Shelby said the clinic doesn’t provide follow-up care for some temporary workers because their employment agencies need to add Access Omnicare as a provider. But she said, “Nobody’s ever denied immediate treatment.”

In fact, there was a blanket policy to turn away temporary workers as recently as August, our reporting shows.

A July text message instructed clinic staff to not treat any contract workers. The messages were sent by Amirra Besh, the clinic’s administrator and the doctor’s wife, according to former employees.

A follow-up text said not to treat them “under any circumstances:”

Claim: All workers get treatment

This week, Shelby said the clinic provides treatment to all workers, even those who are determined to have injuries or illnesses not related to work. “We still treat them,” she said.

In July, she told the board, “Of course you don’t turn people away.” But the clinic’s policy, according to former employees, has been to send workers with non-occupational injuries to their primary care physician.

A July text message relayed that policy to staff:

PCP stands for “primary care physician.”

Former clinic employees said they were told to dismiss injuries as not work related even when they were.

Claim: Tesla’s clinic provides care for injured workers

Shelby repeatedly has cited the clinic’s on-site “24/7” care in presentations to the board. On Tuesday, she said: “The clinic is not there to stop reporting. It’s there to provide care for the employees who are injured on the job.”

But former employees said they weren’t allowed to do much beyond take vital signs and provide ice and a place to rest. Those admitted to the clinic couldn’t get basic things such as prescription-strength ibuprofen, they said.

This text to clinic staff says not to dispense medications:

A medical assistant who worked at the clinic said she would tell workers to find a first aid kit.

“What’s the point of having a medical department if you’re not going to do anything?” she said.

Claim: Cal/OSHA investigation cleared Tesla

Shelby said Cal/OSHA conducted an extensive review and “identified only two minor issues – an extension cord and an item that we recorded too early on our logs.” In fact, Cal/OSHA said in an email to us that its “investigation identified several instances of injury recording violations, however they could not be cited as they were outside of the six-month statute of limitations.”

Claim: Reveal unfairly left out Tesla’s safety consultants

Shelby faulted us for not including comments from two safety consultants hired by the company. She said the experts, Rich Fairfax and Stephen Newell, visited the plant, conducted a recordkeeping audit and “substantiated that we have a good process.”

Fairfax and Newell, who are former high-level officials with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told Reveal that they visited the factory for about a week in July and were impressed with Tesla’s safety program. But neither visited the medical clinic. We didn’t include them because they didn’t have independent knowledge relevant to our investigation of the clinic’s practices.

Newell called Shelby, who he has known for years, a “thought leader.” For his recordkeeping review, Newell said he looked at a sample of injuries that Tesla already had recorded on its logs.

To really determine whether a company is undercounting injuries, he said a full audit of employee medical records would be necessary. But he said that’s a laborious process that’s rarely done and wasn’t needed in this case.

Instead, Newell said, “you look at a sample of records and you kind of get a feel as to whether something smells right or not.” He said he had a good feeling from Tesla.

Fairfax said he visited the plant “to do walkthroughs and limited assessments because we didn’t have a lot of time.” He came away without any serious concerns, he said.

“What they have accomplished is phenomenal,” he said in a subsequent email. “I really think you should be writing a piece describing their improvement from where they were to where they are at now.”

Fairfax said he was told by Tesla that there was no prohibition on calling 911, which was contradicted by former clinic employees.

Regarding the case of Stephon Nelson, who was sent back to work full duty with a crushing injury to his back, Fairfax said: “I find that hard to believe that that would happen. My sense is that would not happen.”

Nelson’s own medical records show that’s exactly what happened.

Why the Perfect Red-State Democrat Lost in 2018

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

Taylor Sappington heard the call like so many other Democrats in the year after Nov. 8, 2016. He had seen Donald Trump coming, homing in on his little town of Nelsonville, Ohio, in the state’s impoverished Appalachian southeast. The town of 5,300 people had voted for Barack Obama twice by large margins.

Trump was Nelsonville’s pick in 2016, though it was more by default than acclamation. Trump won there with less than a majority, with 30 percent fewer votes than Obama had gotten four years earlier.

Sappington, a 27-year-old Ohio native, took this as evidence that Nelsonville was not beyond redemption, that the town where he had grown up in hard circumstances — the son of a single mother who was for a time on food stamps, living deep in the woods in a manufactured home — wasn’t really Trump country.

Not so long ago at all, Ohio was considered the quintessential swing state — it had, after all, voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election starting with 1964. Something happened this decade, though. The 2010 national “shellacking” of Democrats left a particularly strong mark in Ohio. The Republicans who assumed control of Columbus pulled off an aggressive gerrymandering of federal and state legislative districts. In 2012, when Obama won the state for the second time, Republicans held 12 of the state’s 16 congressional seats despite winning only 52 percent of the total House vote.

The state’s makeup had been trending red, too. At a time when the share of white voters without college degrees — who are fast becoming the Republican base — decreased nationwide, it held strong in Ohio. The state was drawing relatively few immigrants, its education system was sliding in national rankings and, with its smaller cities and towns falling far behind thriving Columbus, it was losing many young college grads to jobs out of state.

Not Taylor Sappington, though. He wanted to stay. He had gotten hooked on national politics in high school, around the time he read a book on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. And he had gotten out of Nelsonville, winning nearly a full ride to George Washington University.

But he felt out of place in D.C. — the wealthy students who abused expensive drugs and thought nothing of paying big cover charges at clubs, the dead-eyed people in suits rushing down the sidewalks — and he’d come back to finish at Ohio University, down the road from Nelsonville, in Athens. He took a break from school to work for Obama’s 2012 campaign in Ohio. And even before he had his diploma in hand, he’d run for, and won, a seat on the Nelsonville City Council.

The council seat came with only a $100 monthly stipend. So Sappington kept working as a waiter at the Texas Roadhouse in Athens. Later on, he added another gig: fixing broken smartphone screens in partnership with his younger brother, who drove an hour each way to work as a correctional officer at the prison in Chillicothe.

Sappington was content to stick with this combination for a while. He scratched out a living while pushing his agenda on the council: finding the money to fix the town’s rutted roads, demolishing vacant homes, pushing for a mayoral system of government.

Then came 2016, which gave Trump an eight-percentage-point win in Ohio and swept in a new state representative for the district that included Nelsonville, which had been held by a Democrat for the previous eight years.

It was now held by a young Republican, Jay Edwards, who had been three years ahead of Sappington at Nelsonville-York High. He was a star quarterback who’d gone on to play linebacker at Ohio University, the scion of a prosperous local family.

Sappington was still mourning the election when, just a few weeks later, he confronted darkness of a different order. His longtime boyfriend — a gentle autodidact who had taught himself to build furniture and musical instruments when not working at Ruby Tuesday — committed suicide, at age 25.

At the next council meeting, Sappington spoke about the death, and the need for better mental health services in southeast Ohio. Edwards was in the audience, as both Sappington and another council member recall, and stood up to leave in the middle of his remarks. (Edwards declined to comment on the record about that meeting or the race.)

A few months later, Sappington suffered another loss: the suicide of one of his cousins. A high school friend, a former service member, was succumbing to opiate addiction.

The gloom seemed relentless. Sappington decided the best way to fight it was to have something else to think about. Late last year, he made up his mind to run against Edwards, to reclaim the 94th House District in the Ohio statehouse for the Democrats.

He knew it would be a challenge. He was young. He would be vastly outspent. On the other hand, the district had been blue until very recently, and 2018 was promising to be a strong Democratic year. And he could, at least, count on support from unions and national progressive groups.

What he didn’t reckon with was that those organizations were already making a very different sort of calculus about his district, and about Ohio in general.

In December 2017, with the help of students at Ohio University, Sappington produced an arresting two-minute campaign video that included drone footage panning over Nelsonville, with its handsome town square lined with semi-abandoned brick buildings. “Why is it that so many will grow up without parents because of this drug crisis? Why is it that our graduates struggle to find good-paying jobs?” he said in the video. “So much of this seems invisible in Columbus.”

The video was so powerful that the Ohio House Democratic Caucus played it at a fundraiser in Columbus. Sappington learned of this secondhand, he said, because he wasn’t invited to the event. In general, he was having difficulty getting assistance from party leaders in Columbus, who seemed to be ranking candidates’ eligibility for support based in large part on the money they’d been able to raise. It wasn’t easy for a waiter in the poorest corner of the state to get people to write him checks, but Sappington had been prepared for that challenge.

What he hadn’t been prepared for was the lack of organizational support. Progressive groups in Washington and New York were focused mostly on congressional seats — never mind that it was state legislatures that would determine congressional lines for the next decade.

But most confounding were the unions. One by one, they started supporting Edwards. And not just the building-trades unions, which sometimes side with Republicans, but the Service Employees International Union and the public sector unions — AFSCME, the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Civil Service Employees Association. The only endorsements Sappington received were from the National Association of Social Workers and the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers.

He was stunned. He was about as pro-union as one could be. In his video, he had mentioned his earlier activism against the law that Ohio Republicans had pushed through in 2011, eliminating collective bargaining for public employees, which was later overturned by referendum. His mother had been active in AFSCME; his brother belonged to the Civil Service Employees Association. And Sappington himself was a low-wage service worker. Yet he was losing labor support to a Republican who had supported a state budget that effectively reduced funding for education and who was a staunch opponent of abortion rights, a position at odds with many public employee union members.

What he learned when he asked around, and what I later confirmed, was that the unions were, in many cases, making a grimly pragmatic decision in his race and others around the state. The Democrats had fallen to such a woeful level in Ohio state government that unions felt as if they had no choice but to make friends, or at least nonenemies, with some Republicans, in hopes of staving off anti-union measures such as “right-to-work” legislation and elimination of prevailing-wage standards.

For years, unions in the Midwest have rightly prided themselves on delivering the Democrats far higher margins among white working-class union members than among their nonunion brethren. But Trump had strained that bond in some unions, drawing support from many members even as their leaders had remained nominally committed to Hillary Clinton. Most unions were back on board with the Democrats in Midwestern federal and statewide races this year. In state legislative races in Ohio, though, unions hedged their bets.

The Ohio Education Association, for instance, endorsed 13 Republicans in state House races and three in State Senate races, while staying neutral in some others.

“If we were just looking at this as a partisan exercise and ‘to the winner go the spoils,’ we’d have been on the outside looking in, and we can’t let that happen,” said Scott DiMauro, vice president of the Ohio Education Association. “Republicans have supermajorities in both houses, and we’ve got to work with both parties to make progress on key issues.”

Joe Weidner, communications director for AFSCME’s statewide Council 8, gave a similar rationale. “We don’t just push the button for the Democrat,” he said. “It’s for the people who are behind us and will support us and we’ll support them. Party is important for us; we align a lot with the Democrats. But we also have Republicans we align with.”

Seen from one side, this was realpolitik. Seen from another, it was self-fulfilling fatalism, consigning the unions’ Democratic allies to permanent minority status.

Sappington forged on without the unions. His campaign’s slogan: “Health Care. Infrastructure. Integrity.” He had the help of a dedicated band of supporters, including an Ohio University student, Jordan Kelley, who was on leave from his studies while he saved money for his final semesters working at Buffalo Wild Wings. Bit by bit, Sappington raised money, bringing in about $80,000. That was enough for radio ads, postage for thousands of handwritten postcards and stipends for campaign workers.

But it was far less than the $430,000 that Edwards had raised since 2016, nearly half of which was from unions. He shared much of this largess with others in his party, which meant the unions’ money was also helping Republicans who were less pro-labor than Edwards.

In August, Sappington got the ultimate affirmation of his candidacy: He was one of 81 candidates across the entire country endorsed by Obama. That imprimatur cast the unions’ position in an even starker light: They were now lined up behind a Republican against a Democrat endorsed by the still-popular ex-president.

Other organizational backing remained slow in coming. The state House Democratic Caucus sent a young campaign manager and paid half of his salary, but he was ill-suited to rural organizing and he stayed only six weeks. Sappington struggled to get Democratic candidates for statewide office to campaign alongside him in the district. One national progressive group whose help he had sought sent no money, but did send, as a gesture of moral support, a package that included nuts and dried fruit.

On the night before the election, when other candidates might have done final phone-banking, Sappington had to report to Texas Roadhouse for a staff meeting on new food-safety measures. The next day, he traveled around the district to check on turnout levels. At night he headed to a vacation cabin in the woods that he had rented to watch election returns. His friends and family assembled to eat his mom’s chili and watch MSNBC.

Sappington sat with a laptop, monitoring the numbers trickling in from around the 94th District. Athens had turned out strongly, and he’d racked up big majorities there. But he’d been swamped in the rural areas. Edwards’ margin was the exact same as it had been against a different Democratic opponent two years ago: 58 percent to 42 percent.

The numbers were bleak for Democrats across the state. Sherrod Brown had won re-election to the Senate against a flawed opponent, by about six percentage points, but he was an anomaly. Democrats had not managed to win a single one of those gerrymandered congressional seats. They still held only four of 16, despite winning 48 percent of the congressional vote. They had lost not only the election for governor but for every other statewide office.

They’d picked up only four seats in the state House and lost one in the Senate, leaving Republican supermajorities in both chambers — this despite Democrats having won nearly a majority of total votes in those races, a sign of just how effectively gerrymandered districts were. In a way, the Democrats’ failure to make big gains had affirmed the unions’ self-protective strategy; but that failure had been partly abetted by the unions themselves.

There was another aspect, though, to the failure of the unions, state party leaders and progressive organizations to strongly support candidates like Taylor Sappington. He is a native of small-town Ohio, working-class not only in his roots but in his own livelihood: exactly the sort of elected official whom Democrats say they need to cultivate in areas where the party is losing ground.

At 9:45 p.m., Sappington slipped out of the cabin to call Jay Edwards and concede the race.

When he came back into the cabin, his face was drawn. He said that Edwards hadn’t immediately known who was calling, and a hard conversation was made harder.

“Hey, Jay,” he recalled saying. “It’s Taylor Sappington.”

“Taylor who?” said Edwards.