Chris Hedges's Blog, page 415

Midterm Contests in Florida and Georgia Bring Conclusions, Questions

Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said the former Republican Secretary of State will be the next governor, but only because he abused his office’s power to suppress a multitude of Georgia voters.

“I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election,” she said. “But to watch an elected official who claims to represent the people in the state baldly pin his hopes for election on suppression of people’s democratic right to vote has been truly appalling. So let’s be clear: this is not a speech of concession.”

Abrams pledged to fight against GOP-led voter suppression in her state by filing a massive federal lawsuit in coming days. She said she has run out of legal options to count more votes under the current state law, but vowed to challenge that regimen in the federal courts to “fix what is broken.”

Abrams’ dramatic speech capped a difficult day for Democrats. In Florida, ongoing recounts showed Democrats falling short of votes needed in races for governor and U.S. Senate. Here are summations from the two states.

Florida

On Friday, the second round in Florida’s statewide recount began—most notably in the Senate race—where the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Bill Nelson, hoped to overtake the 12,500-vote lead held by Republican Gov. Rick Scott. However, as the day progressed and reports trickled in, it was clear that Nelson would not find the votes he needed. In urban areas like Orange County, where Orlando is located, only 46 more votes were awarded to Nelson, according to GOP lawyers observing the recount elsewhere.

Democrats mostly pinned their hopes on manually reviewing 31,000 ballots in Broward County where no votes were cast in the Senate race. They were hoping electronic scanners had misread ballots, rather than the county’s use of a poorly designed ballot led thousands of Democrats to miss voting in the race. (Countywide, seven in 10 voters chose Nelson, the recount affirmed.)

Broward County had several congressional races. One House district had no challenger, so it was not on the November ballot. Thus, the Senate race was alone on some ballot cards. Apparently, a disproportionate number of the empty ovals, or under-votes, were on this ballot type. County officials created that layout, but the campaigns signed off on it.

Nelson has no remedy. He cannot fight for votes that were not cast. On Thursday, when the first round of the statewide recount was conducted, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum did not gain enough additional votes to move to round two. Thus, the party’s top two candidates, who led in pre-election polls, both appear to have lost by less than one percentage point. (Official results will be certified next week.)

Looking deeper, Republicans and Democrats observing Friday’s recount had another explanation that contrasted what has been unfolding in Florida with Georgia. In Florida, Democrats did not have much of what’s called a “ground game,” or a sufficient grassroots effort to turn out voters. On Friday, a lawyer in Tallahassee, who saw a room filled with Democratic observers, asked, “Where were all these people last week?”

In contrast, Georgia’s Abrams did have a sizeable field operation going into the November 6 election. That effort generated sufficient evidence to prompt four federal court rulings this week to count rejected ballots. That evidence has positioned Abrams to proclaim that her opponent, ex-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, abused his office as the state’s top election official to run a dishonest race.

Georgia

In her speech late Friday, Abrams vowed to launch a new group, Fair Fight Georgia, that would not rest until the state’s draconian voting laws were replaced by fairer and more inclusive rules and procedures.

This week has seen a half-dozen federal court rulings hold that aspects of Florida and Georgia law were unconstitutional deprivations of voting rights. While federal courts ordered both states to extend counting timetables, and to accept thousands of rejected ballots—based on how people signed their absentee or provisional ballot envelope—Georgia had the most obstacles.

Unlike Florida’s Democrats, the Abrams campaign and her state party anticipated there would be barriers. They created an Election Day hotline, which they kept active for the rest of the week following Election Day. As a result, they not only received more than 10,000 phone calls, but collected those voters’ information and accounts to include in their lawsuits. After the federal court rulings, the party found and ferried those voters to resolve any issue stopping their votes from being counted.

But those efforts were apparently not enough to slow or stop Kemp’s ascension as governor.

Friday was the last day that Georgians whose ballots were rejected for signing issues could resolve those problems. It was also the last day, in both states, that overseas civilian and military ballots could be received and counted. After election night, Abrams was tens of thousands of votes behind Kemp in unofficial counts. So her strategy had been to find additional votes in uncounted ballots, to trigger a recount or a runoff.

As of Thursday, Abigail Collazo, Abrams’ communication director, said the campaign needed 15,437 more votes to trigger a recount and 17,751 votes to trigger a runoff.

Early on Friday, the Abrams campaign upped their public criticisms of how Kemp managed an election that resulted in a catalog of voter suppression. In a new radio ad, the campaign listed some of the hurdles and barriers. In her speech, Abrams noted eyewitness accounts of voters who were not on local precinct lists and were turned away—not even given a provisional ballot.

That ad, and her speech, cited purging a million Georgians voters from the state’s voter lists, voting machine shortages, electronic pollbook failures, provisional ballot shortages, lines lasting as long as five hours, “technical issues,” “misinformation” and other protocols that derail voters.

The ad concluded, “This election, was your voice heard? For every voice to be heard, every vote must be counted. Share your story.”

It’s clear that Abrams, despite acknowledging that she will not be the next governor, is seeking more evidence to include in her next federal lawsuit.

What’s Next?

The current round of vote counting in Georgia and recounting in Florida will formally conclude in the next few days—as deadlines fall for various ballot categories, followed by reporting deadlines of those county totals to state officials. In short, these hard-fought contests are winding down.

Stepping back, there will be plenty of analysis of the changing political complexions of these states—and in others such as Texas and Arizona. The legitimacy of Kemp’s victory will shadow his administration, along with scrutiny of the laws and administrative rules that disenfranchised Georgia voters.

And questions about technology and procedures in Florida’s machine-run recount will be raised, as many counties showed the current system was not up to handling simultaneous races. In contrast, some of the country’s best voting systems—which could have quickly resolved questions about the reasons for Broward County’s 31,000 Senate race under-votes—were not used. That’s because their use was only authorized for audits, not for recounts.

This article was produced by Voting Booth , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Abrams Ends Georgia Governor Bid but Plans to Sue

ATLANTA — Democrat Stacey Abrams ended her challenge to Republican Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor’s race on Friday, but pledged to fight the former secretary of state’s “gross mismanagement” of the elections with a federal lawsuit.

Speaking defiantly to a news conference, Abrams said her actions did not constitute a concession, but she acknowledged that she had no further recourse under the law and that Kemp would be certified the winner.

“Let’s be clear: This is not a speech of concession,” she said. “Because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith I cannot concede that.”

In accepting Abrams’ decision to end her campaign, Kemp said he appreciated “her passion, hard work, and commitment to public service.”

“The election is over and hardworking Georgians are ready to move forward,” he said. “We can no longer dwell on the divisive politics of the past but must focus on Georgia’s bright and promising future.”

Kemp, a 55-year-old businessman, had been secretary of state since 2010. He was backed by and had embraced President Donald Trump as he tried to maintain GOP dominance in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the governor’s mansion since 1998.

He was heavily criticized for refusing to step down from his post overseeing elections in which he was a candidate. Abrams’ campaign accused him of trying to suppress the votes of minorities by purging voter rolls and implementing a state law requiring that the names of voters on their registration forms exactly match those on their government identification. Kemp said he was trying to maintain the integrity of Georgia’s voter rolls.

Officials from Abrams’ campaign had told The Associated Press on Thursday that the candidate was considering the unprecedented move of invoking a state law that would let her challenge the results based on “misconduct, fraud or irregularities … sufficient to change or place in doubt the results.”

But ultimately she declined to do so.

Instead, Abrams said she would fight to restore integrity to Georgia’s election system in a new initiative called “Fair Fight Georgia.”

“In the coming days, we will be filing a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for the gross mismanagement of this election and to protect future elections,” Abrams said. She did not give details.

Abrams also said she would support John Barrow, the Democrat vying to succeed Kemp as secretary of state in a runoff next month.

Kemp stormed to the GOP nomination with ads featuring everything from the candidate cranking a chain saw and jokingly pointing a gun toward a teen male suitor of his daughter, to Kemp’s offer to “round up criminal illegals” himself in his pickup truck. He’s promised a tax cut and teacher pay raises and pledged to continue Georgia’s refusal to expand Medicaid insurance under President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care overhaul.

Abrams’ campaign sparked huge energy across the state and she became a national Democratic star. Election turnout among both sides’ energized bases nearly equaled that of the 2016 presidential vote.

Aides close to Abrams said that since the election she had been wrestling with competing priorities: She wanted to advance her assertions that Georgia’s elections process makes it too hard for some citizens to vote. But she also recognized that a protracted legal fight would harm that cause and potentially her political future.

Kemp’s victory is an important marker for Republicans ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Kemp’s narrow margin already suggests that Georgia, a state Trump won by 5 percentage points in 2016, could be a genuine battleground in 2020. Trump bet big on Kemp, endorsing him ahead of Kemp’s Republican primary runoff and campaigning for him the weekend prior to the Nov. 6 election. Now, Trump will be able to return with an incumbent governor as he seeks a second term.

Abrams’ political future is less certain. She made believers of old-guard Democrats in Georgia who didn’t think a black woman could compete in a general election, and she emerged as the party’s clear leader. But the party also has plenty of other ambitious politicians who will want to take advantage of the path that Abrams has laid out. The next big shot for Democrats is a 2020 Senate race, with Republican Sen. David Perdue making his first re-election attempt.

CNN’s Jim Acosta Back at Work After Judge’s Ruling

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to immediately return the White House press credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, though a lawsuit over the credentials’ revocation is continuing.

U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, an appointee of President Donald Trump, announced his decision at a hearing Friday morning. The judge said Acosta’s credentials must be reactivated to allow him access to the White House complex for press briefings and other events.

Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, was back in the afternoon. The White House said it would be developing new rules for orderly press conferences.

The White House revoked Acosta’s credentials last week after he and Trump tangled verbally during a press conference following the midterm elections. CNN sued and asked the judge to issue a temporary restraining order forcing the White House to give back Acosta’s credentials. The judge agreed.

CNN alleged that Acosta’s First and Fifth Amendment rights were violated when the White House revoked his “hard pass.”

While the judge didn’t rule on the underlying case, he ordered Acosta’s pass returned for now in part because he said CNN was likely to prevail on its Fifth Amendment claim — that Acosta hadn’t received sufficient notice or explanation before his credentials were revoked or been given sufficient opportunity to respond before they were.

The judge said the government could not say who initially decided to revoke Acosta’s hard pass and how that decision was reached.

“In response to the court, we will temporarily reinstate the reporter’s hard pass,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “We will also further develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future.”

Speaking to reporters after the decision, Trump said, “If they don’t listen to the rules and regulations, we will end up back in court and we will win.”

He later added: “We want total freedom of the press. It’s very important to me, more important to me than anybody would believe. But you have to act with respect when you’re in the White House, and when I see the way some of my people get treated at press conferences, it’s terrible. So we’re setting up a certain standard, which is what the court is requesting.”

The White House had spelled out its reasons for revoking Acosta’s credentials in a tweet from Sanders and in a statement after CNN filed its lawsuit. But the judge said those “belated efforts were hardly sufficient to satisfy due process.”

But the judge also emphasized the “very limited nature” of his ruling Friday. He noted he had not determined that the First Amendment was violated.

The judge told attorneys to file additional court papers in the case by Monday.

On Friday afternoon, more than 50 members of the White House press corps greeted Acosta as he strode through the northwest gate of the presidential compound. He said he was grateful for the judge’s ruling, that it was a test and the media passed the test.

“This is just any other day at the White House for me and I would like to get back to work,” he said.

Trump has made his dislike of CNN clear since before he took office and continuing into his presidency. He has described the network as “fake news” both on Twitter and in public comments.

At last week’s press conference, Trump was taking questions from reporters and called on Acosta, who asked about Trump’s statements about a caravan of migrants making its way to the U.S.-Mexico border. After a terse exchange, Trump told Acosta, “That’s enough,” several times while calling on another reporter.

Acosta attempted to ask another question about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and initially declined to give up a handheld microphone to a White House intern. Trump responded to Acosta by saying he wasn’t concerned about the investigation, calling it a “hoax,” and then criticized Acosta, calling him a “rude, terrible person.”

Hours later, the White House pulled Acosta’s credentials.

The White House’s explanations for why it seized Acosta’s credentials have shifted over the past week.

Sanders initially explained the decision by accusing Acosta of making improper physical contact with the intern seeking to grab the microphone.

But that rationale disappeared after witnesses backed Acosta’s account that he was just trying to keep the microphone and Sanders distributed a doctored video that made it appear Acosta was more aggressive than he actually was.

On Tuesday, Sanders accused Acosta in a written statement of being unprofessional by trying to dominate the questioning at the news conference.

Screenwriter and Author William Goldman Dead at 87

NEW YORK — William Goldman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and Hollywood wise man who won Academy Awards for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” and summed up the mystery of making a box office hit by declaring “Nobody knows anything,” has died. He was 87.

Goldman’s daughter Jenny said her father died early Friday in New York due to complications from colon cancer and pneumonia. “So much of what’s he’s written can express who he was and what he was about,” she said, adding that the last few weeks, while Goldman was ailing, revealed just how many people considered him family.

Goldman, who also converted his novels “Marathon Man,” ″Magic,” ″The Princess Bride” and “Heat” into screenplays, clearly knew more than most about what the audience wanted. He was not only a successful film writer but a top script doctor, the industry title for an uncredited writer brought in to improve or “punch up” weak screenplays.

Goldman also made political history by coining the phrase “follow the money” in his script for “All the President’s Men,” adapted from the book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate political scandal. The film starred Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. Standing in the shadows, Hal Holbrook was the mystery man code-named Deep Throat who helped the reporters pursue the evidence. His advice, “Follow the money,” became so widely quoted that few people realized it was never said during the actual scandal.

A confirmed New Yorker, Goldman declined to work in Hollywood. Instead, he would fly to Los Angeles for two-day conferences with directors and producers, then return home to fashion a script, which he did with amazing speed. In his 1985 book, “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” he expressed disdain for an industry that elaborately produced and tested a movie, only to see it dismissed by the public during its first weekend in theaters.

“Nobody knows anything,” he remarked.

Screenwriter and filmmaker Aaron Sorkin called Goldman a mentor.

“He was the dean of American screenwriters and generations of filmmakers will continue to walk in the footprints he laid,” Sorkin said in a statement. “He wrote so many unforgettable movies, so many thunderous novels and works of non-fiction, and while I’ll always wish he’d written one more, I’ll always be grateful for what he’s left us.”

Goldman launched his writing career after receiving a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1956. Weary of academia, he declined the chance to earn a Ph.D., choosing instead to write the novel “The Temple of Gold” in 10 days. Knopf agreed to publish it.

“If the book had not been taken,” he told an interviewer, “I would have gone into advertising … or something.”

Instead, he wrote other novels, including “Soldier in the Rain,” which became a movie starring Steve McQueen. Goldman also co-authored a play and a musical with his older brother, James, but both failed on Broadway.

James Goldman would later write the historical play “The Lion in Winter,” which he converted to film, winning the 1968 Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

William Goldman had come to screenwriting by accident after actor Cliff Robertson read one of his books, “No Way to Treat a Lady,” and thought it was a film treatment. After he hired the young writer to fashion a script from a short story, Goldman rushed out to buy a book on screen writing. Robertson rejected the script but found Goldman a job working on a screenplay for a British thriller. After that he adapted his novel “Harper” for a 1966 film starring Paul Newman as a private eye.

He broke through in 1969 with the blockbuster “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” starring Newman and Redford. Based on the exploits of the real-life “Hole in the Wall” gang of bank robbers, the movie began a long association with Redford, who also appeared in “The Hot Rock,” ″The Great Waldo Pepper” and “Indecent Proposal.”

Other notable Goldman films included “The Stepford Wives,” ″A Bridge Too Far” and “Misery.” The latter, adapted from a Stephen King suspense novel, won the 1990 Oscar for Kathy Bates as lead actress.

In 1961 Goldman married Ilene Jones, a photographer, and they had two daughters, Jenny and Susanna. The couple divorced in 1991.

Born in Chicago on Aug. 12, 1931, Goldman grew up in the suburb of Highland Park. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1952 and served two years in the Army.

Despite all his success as a screenwriter, Goldman always considered himself a novelist and didn’t rate his scripts as great artistic achievements.

“A screenplay is a piece of carpentry,” he once said. “And except in the case of Ingmar Bergman, it’s not an art, it’s a craft.”

HUD Inspections Are Passing Apartments in Unspeakable Conditions

This article was produced in partnership with The Southern Illinoisan, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

In the winter of 2017, a toddler was rushed to the emergency room after swallowing rodent poison inside her family’s unit at the federally subsidized Clay Arsenal Renaissance Apartments in Hartford, Connecticut. Her mother had placed sticky traps throughout the house after another one of her children was bitten on the arm by a mouse, according to a local housing advocate who worked with the family.

This August, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley sued the St. Louis Housing Authority and the private management company it hired to run the Clinton-Peabody Housing Complex, saying they both violated the state’s consumer protection laws by advertising that the development was habitable even though it was plagued by a pest infestation, black mold and water damage.

That same month, residents of Texas Coppertree Village Apartments in Houston filed suit against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, saying the federal government had failed to hold their landlord accountable for deplorable conditions and criminal activity at the federally subsidized complex, including rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies.

In all three cases, despite well-known, long-standing problems, the properties had passed their most-recent inspections mandated by HUD.

Apartment complexes subsidized by HUD collectively house more than 2 million low-income families around the country. Some are run by public housing authorities and others are owned by private for-profit or nonprofit landlords. By law, the owners of such complexes must pass inspections demonstrating they are decent, safe and sanitary in exchange for millions of dollars in federal money each year.

But as thousands of renters across the country have discovered, passing scores on HUD inspections often don’t match the reality of renters’ living conditions. The two-decade-old inspection system — the federal housing agency’s primary oversight tool — is failing low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities and undermining the agency’s oversight of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded rental subsidies, an investigation by The Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica has found.

HUD has given passing inspection grades for years to dangerous buildings filled with rats and roaches, toxic mold and peeling lead-based paint, which can cause lifelong learning delays when ingested by young children. The same goes for buildings where people with disabilities have been stranded in high-rise apartments without working elevators, or where raw sewage backs up into bathtubs and utility drains. The agency has passed buildings where ceilings are caving in and the heat won’t kick on in frigid winter months as old boiler systems give out.

The failure of HUD’s inspection system has been on display in the southern Illinois towns of Cairo and East St. Louis, which have had their public housing taken over by HUD. In both towns, complexes received passing scores as decades-old buildings deteriorated.

HUD’s inspection system “is pretty much a failure,” and the agency’s staffing levels after years of budget cuts are “wholly inadequate” to assess properties, said Sara Pratt, a former senior HUD official who worked at the agency under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Kate Walz, director of housing justice with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, a social justice and legal advocacy organization based in Chicago, said, “We just shake our heads sometimes.”

“Some owners fail an inspection and they have a great building, and some owners pass it, and they have just a horrible building,” she added. “We’re running up against this all the time.”

The consequences of these failures are made more severe by the paucity of affordable housing in communities across the country. Nearly one in five of the nation’s 43 million renters spend more than half of their income on housing, according to an April report by the Pew Charitable Trusts. With few alternatives available to families who live in deep poverty, many choose to stay where they are and endure their conditions rather than complain and risk eviction and homelessness.

That’s why it’s critical that HUD ensures the safety and stability of government-funded housing units set aside for low-income families, housing advocates say. It’s a difficult charge given that the vast majority of these apartments are decades old, and many of them have gone without routine maintenance for years.

Representatives of the Clay Arsenal Renaissance Apartments have said that they tried to fix problems there and that the property’s passing scores meant it met HUD’s standards. After a yearslong effort led by tenants, HUD ended its contract with the owner in May. The St. Louis Housing Authority did not respond to a call seeking comment, but in news reports it said that efforts have been made to improve conditions at Clinton-Peabody, including by addressing the mice problem. And after tenants of the Texas Coppertree Village Apartments filed suit against HUD, inspectors gave the building a failing score and HUD has issued two default notices to its owner. HUD’s response to the tenants’ lawsuit was due on Tuesday, but the department has sought an extension.

The Southern emailed a synopsis of its findings to a HUD spokesman several weeks ago. The agency declined to comment in detail. HUD spokesman Jereon Brown said in an email that “the perfect system hasn’t been, and probably will not be designed. That given, the agency continues to learn and we realize the challenges of a 20-year old system.”

HUD declined to make Secretary Ben Carson available for an interview, but in late October, Carson shared a two-page statement on Twitter that said he “directed a wholesale reexamination” of how the department conducts inspections. Carson wrote that the agency is exploring “immediate improvements and those refinements over the long-term.”

The letter did not elaborate on those changes or when additional details would be made public.

“We’re simply signaling that change is coming,” Brown said. “The details will be released when we’re convinced we have a system that will better serve the residents.”

HUD’s inspection system was born out of political fallout from the agency’s previous oversight failures.

“HUD has been plagued for years by scandal and mismanagement,” then-HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo told lawmakers during a Senate hearing in 1997, announcing a reform plan, of which standardized inspections was a central feature. In the 1980s, he said, HUD was the “poster child for fraud, waste and abuse.”

“At the time, if you knew HUD at all, you knew it through its failures,” Cuomo said, citing as examples Cabrini-Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, large public housing complexes that have since been leveled.

Facing calls for his department’s elimination, Cuomo called for the creation of a Real Estate Assessment Center within HUD, which would largely rely on contractors to assess the financial and physical conditions of landlords managing HUD-subsidized properties.

All properties are supposed to be inspected at least once every three years, and poorer performing ones more often. HUD also has the ability to perform an inspection at other times in response to complaints by tenants or others. Scores are issued on a 100-point scale, with a 60 needed to pass. After the inspection, landlords receive a list of all life-threatening health and safety violations, and they have three days to fix those problems. If a privately owned property fails with a score below 30 or has two consecutive scores below 60, it is referred for enforcement action, which can include termination of a contract.

HUD survived the 1990s, but not before Congress cut a quarter of its annual budget and ordered a massive downsizing. The agency’s workforce has been reduced by more than half since the mid-1980s, from roughly 17,000 to about 8,000.

HUD has fielded complaints for years about flaws with its inspection system, particularly with respect to its complicated scoring algorithm that struggles to tell the difference between unsafe properties and decent ones, said Mike Gantt, senior vice president of The Inspection Group, a consulting company that helps properties prepare for their inspections.

“Many people have believed these scores to be largely meaningless for nearly 20 years, and this includes many HUD officials who will say so privately,” Gantt said. “This is not a newly discovered problem. Any claim to the contrary amounts to a cover-up or ignorance of historical fact.”

Through a spokesman, Cuomo, now the governor of New York, defended the creation of the inspection system in the 1990s, saying that before it, there was no uniform system for inspecting federally subsidized housing across the nation. But spokesman Tyrone Stevens added that, with the passing of two decades and a dropoff in federal funding and oversight, Cuomo believes the system needs to be reevaluated.

The system’s flaws were brought into sharp relief a few years ago, when deplorable conditions in apartment buildings owned by the nonprofit Global Ministries Foundation prompted news reports and a 2016 Senate hearing that called into question HUD’s oversight.

Over a number of years, the nonprofit and a subsidiary had purchased 60 properties for low-income residents in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, New York, North Carolina and Tennessee. The nonprofit, run by an evangelical minister in Memphis, Tennessee, named Richard Hamlet, entered into contracts with HUD to house thousands of tenants in about 40 of the properties.

By 2014, Global Ministries was receiving about $40 million in federal funds annually to offset reduced rents through HUD’s project-based Section 8 program.

Internally, HUD officials were raising serious questions about the conditions at the properties, said John Gemmill, who retired from the department in 2016 as director of the agency’s Memphis office. But externally, little happened, and tenants suffered.

When Cynthia Crawford moved into Warren Apartments in Memphis in 2013, she was desperate for a place to live. For nearly four years prior, she had been homeless, bouncing between friends’ couches and shelters. Her children were in foster care, and to get them back, she had to have a home. But the conditions they endured were horrendous. “These were not just any house mice. I’m talking about rats so big we thought they were possums. A lot of ceilings were falling in on families. Stoves and fridges didn’t work. We had issues with floors falling out from under people,” Crawford said. “It was just an absolutely hopeless feeling.”

For years, the inspection scores assigned to the Memphis properties were inflated as they fell into disrepair, well before Global Ministries purchased them, said Brad Watkins, director of the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center, a civil rights organization that works with tenants. The scores began to drop only after Watkins and others raised concerns with HUD, he said.

Then, in the spring of 2015, Crawford and other residents began organizing and Memphis’ local paper, The Commercial Appeal, revealed that people were living in unsafe units at Warren Apartments, one of the Global Ministries properties. At roughly the same time, Hamlet paid himself a salary of $500,000. After the story ran, HUD inspectors returned, this time issuing a failing score for Warren and Tulane apartments, which were inspected jointly. Months later, HUD moved to end a contract with Global Ministries for these two properties.

This prompted reporters and advocates in other states to start asking questions. In the spring of 2016, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., visited a troubled 400-unit apartment complex in his home state that was owned by Global Ministries. During the visit to Eureka Garden Apartments in Jacksonville, Rubio told a representative of the owner that the conditions he had witnessed were “terrifying and inexcusable,” according to news reports. Days later on the Senate floor, Rubio turned his attention to HUD. He criticized the agency for not giving the property a failing inspection score.

“I, for the life of me, don’t know how they passed any inspections because, I’m telling you, I visited and I’m not a building inspector, but you don’t have to be one to visit this building and know there is no inspection that the building should ever pass,” Rubio said.

That August, under pressure from HUD and the public over poor housing conditions, Hamlet announced plans to put all of Global Ministries’ HUD-subsidized properties up for sale.

Brown, the HUD spokesman, said that Global Ministries “hurt a lot of folks in Memphis” and that the department forced Hamlet to sell his HUD-subsidized properties. But in an interview, Hamlet said that the department had been familiar with deteriorating conditions in the properties that Global Ministries bought, as they had long been a part of HUD’s rental subsidy program under prior owners. The department also had to review his financing plans, approve the purchases and enter into contracts with the nonprofit.

In the interview, Hamlet blamed tenants for lacking basic housekeeping skills, faulted the management companies he hired to run day-to-day operations and said he was targeted by HUD officials because he’s a pastor. He defended his salary, saying a consultant told the nonprofit’s board that he was “underpaid.” “It’s clear we became the pinata of all the frustrations of the whole Section 8 program on some of these older properties,” Hamlet said.

The problems with Global Ministries prompted a broad re-examination of oversight at HUD and promises of reform.

In the last two years alone, Brown said, HUD has increased training and oversight of contractors who conduct inspections on the agency’s behalf. In 2016, HUD ordered inspectors to mark down properties for shoddy repairs such as using plywood to cover holes in drywall or tape to fix a rotting refrigerator gasket. And in 2016 and 2017, the agency decertified more than 50 contract inspectors after determining they had not properly followed protocols.

These changes had a dramatic effect on inspection scores nationally. From 2015 to 2017, the failure rate nationwide roughly tripled — from 4 percent to 13 percent for public housing complexes, and more than doubled from 2 percent to 5 percent for privately owned projects subsidized under HUD’s project-based multifamily programs. About 260 private properties with housing assistance failed, roughly one of out of every 19, as did about 430 public housing complexes, roughly one in eight properties inspected in 2017.

At the same time, the number of inspections of privately owned multifamily properties has decreased dramatically over the same period, from 8,400 in 2015 to 4,900 last year. HUD declined to answer a question about the reason for the drop.

But even after the changes HUD made to improve inspection protocols, unsafe properties continue to pass in some places. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Hartford.

In early 2017, a school family resource coordinator reached out to the Christian Activities Council, a neighborhood advocacy organization in Hartford, after a child at her school said she’d been bitten by a mouse. Cori Mackey, the nonprofit’s executive director, arranged a meeting with the child’s mother to find out more. But at the appointed time, the mother wasn’t home. Her other child had swallowed rat poison and was in the emergency room at a local hospital.

Shortly after this incident, Mackey and other advocates began knocking on doors in Hartford’s North End, a distressed neighborhood that sits a half-mile from the capital city’s downtown.

The Clay Arsenal Renaissance Apartments consist of 26 buildings, each containing six to 12 units. Most tenants did not realize that they shared a landlord, Mackey said. But after speaking about their shared concerns, the tenants decided they wanted to take on the landlord, Ah Min Holding LLC, and its managing member, Emmanuel Ku, and ultimately, HUD. A core group of six residents led the charge.

In April 2017, the Christian Activities Council reached out to HUD’s regional office in Boston to express concerns about unsafe conditions despite the property’s passing inspection scores. The following month, a construction analyst from HUD’s Boston office visited the property and found outdated kitchens, dead mice, nonfunctioning baseboard heaters and rickety outdoor decks, according to a report obtained by The Southern in a records request.

The next month, HUD issued Ah Min Holding a notice of default, giving the owner seven days to fix the most serious health and safety violations. But nothing really changed, the residents said.

Between late June and early July 2017, a HUD inspector assessed the property again. Because the department had been made aware of problems, this particular inspection was more intensive than is typical. Still, the property passed, scoring 73, just one point less than the previous year’s 74.

The property was marked down for mold and mildew, infestation and defective windows and doors inside units. But the owner compensated for those problems by posting high scores in other categories, including the exterior of the buildings and the grounds, which tenants said were manicured in the days before HUD officials arrived, while their units received little attention.

In early July, a little more than a week after the inspection, tenants held a rally and press conference in which several detailed their poor living conditions and what they said was an absentee landlord. Afterward, Joseph Crisafulli, a senior HUD official from the agency’s Boston office, addressed the tenants, saying, “The stories I’ve heard about are as far away from acceptable HUD housing as I’ve heard in my 29 years at HUD.”

That same month, a rodent expert from Cornell University found that the mouse problem at Clay Arsenal defied amateur mouse traps. Because mice were living and breeding behind fridges, in walls and cabinets and in the cushions of plush furniture, he recommended an extensive and professional extermination effort to control the problem.

In September 2017, Yulissa Espinal, one of the tenants’ leaders, gave birth to a baby girl. She and her baby had to stay in the hospital for a week and then in a hotel for another while a social worker and city code enforcement officer attempted to force her landlord to rid her unit of rodents.

When Espinal returned home two weeks later, she said she found a dead mouse in the living room. It wasn’t long before the live mice returned, she said, forcing her to set traps around her baby’s crib at night. “I worried one would get into the crib and bite her,” said Espinal, a school bus driver raising four children on a limited income.

She and others continued to plead with HUD for help, while Ah Min Holding mounted a challenge to another default notice sent by the department, threatening to cancel the company’s contract. Ku’s attorney, Carl A. S. Coan III, told HUD that such a decision was “arbitrary” and “completely contrary” to the department’s enforcement regimen for a property that had passed its most recent inspection. Ku did not respond to request for comment through Coan. HUD withdrew the second default notice and instead required Ku to fix a lengthy list of problems by January 2018, a deadline the department extended numerous times.

Dismayed, the advocates and tenants kept searching for answers. They discovered what they considered an opening: Ah Min Holding had not properly obtained certificates of occupancy for its rental buildings, which require a city inspection when there is turnover of a rental unit. The city agreed. In February of this year, city officials inspected about 100 of Ah Min’s units, and nearly all of them failed.

In April, HUD once again notified Ah Min Holding that the company was in violation of its contract with the department. On May 2, the mayor of Hartford told Ku in a letter that the city would charge Ah Min $99 per violation per day until he fixed the issues. Two weeks later, a city committee voted to end Ah Min Holding’s tax abatement, which was worth about $266,000 annually.

In response to HUD’s April default notice, the property manager for Clay Arsenal said that the repairs required by HUD had been completed, and asked for more time to address the city’s code violations.

On May 31, tenants found letters taped to their door from HUD, announcing that the agency had pulled the company’s contract and would provide them assistance in relocating. HUD also sent Ku a letter stating that “in light of the conditions at the project, and your continuing failure to provide decent, safe housing,” the agency was denying his company’s request for additional time to fix problems.

Rhonda Siciliano, spokeswoman for HUD’s Boston office, said that routine inspections are only one of the agency’s oversight tools for holding landlords accountable: “Is it the primary one? Yes. Is it 100 percent foolproof? No.”

Siciliano said that as soon as problems were brought to HUD’s attention by the advocacy organization, the agency responded. But that’s the problem, said Mackey, the executive director of the nonprofit helping the tenants.

“HUD acted only because we put pressure on them, not because that’s part of their standard oversight system,” she said.

Even as HUD is making promises to further reform the inspection system, years of inflated scores assigned to unsafe and deteriorating properties has caused harm that will be hard to reverse.

Congress has made cuts to programs that pay for renovations at apartment complexes for years, and this has led to a massive backlog of repairs. In 2011, HUD published a study saying that some 1.2 million public housing units needed about $26 billion in large-scale repairs, and that the backlog would grow by more than $3 billion annually. (There has not been a more recent assessment.)

One of the most dramatic public housing oversight failures is playing out in New York City, in Cuomo’s home state, where nearly 400,000 people live in public housing. For decades, the New York City Housing Authority, the nation’s largest, managed to avoid many of the pitfalls and public relations nightmares that plagued other large cities. It was considered a success story for government-run housing. But not anymore.

This winter, thousands of tenants were without heat. The housing authority later admitted it had not properly conducted inspections for lead paint in recent years, and hundreds of children were poisoned. Units are overrun with rats and mold. In a complaint, federal prosecutors accused local officials of trying to conceal the extent of the problems and mislead HUD inspectors with actions such as turning off the water to buildings to conceal leaks and posting “Do Not Enter” signs on basement rooms. The city, which manages the housing authority, has agreed to spend more than $2 billion over a decade on renovation efforts, and to be overseen by a federal monitor under the terms of a consent decree that still must be approved by a federal judge.

Yet, records show that HUD has known about serious health and safety deficiencies inside New York City’s public housing complexes for years. Some inspection reports estimated more than 1,000 health and safety deficiencies; the properties continued to receive passing scores. On Wednesday, a judge declined to sign off on the consent decree because he said it did not go far enough to address conditions he described as “somewhat reminiscent of the biblical plagues of Egypt.” He asked both sides to come back next month with a proposal for how to proceed.

Similarly, in the town of Cairo, located in the southern Illinois region known as “Little Egypt,” residents of the Elmwood and McBride apartment complexes lived with mice, mold and heating outages that forced them to heat their homes with gas ovens. And for years, HUD gave these buildings passing grades as they fell apart.

Today, both buildings are empty.

Vines stretch up their sides. Plywood boards have been stapled over windows. Mangled, wind-whipped metal awnings hang over them. Once home to hundreds of children, it’s now eerily quiet. Before HUD moved everyone out, nearly a sixth of the population of this town at Illinois’ southernmost border lived in the two 1940s-era apartment complexes.

When HUD placed the housing authority into receivership, an agency spokesman told The Southern that HUD was “stunned … at what it saw, not just in terms of deplorable living conditions” but also “poor and absent record keeping, the staggering backlog of critical repairs.”

When HUD finally announced a plan to address the unsafe conditions in the spring of 2017, officials told residents that the buildings were too far gone to save, and that the department was no longer in the business of building public housing. Residents were provided vouchers that subsidize rent in the private market, but many had to leave Cairo because it had few rental apartments. The shuttering of Elmwood and McBride leaves few public housing options: two high-rise towers and several smaller buildings.

When HUD’s inspector general released a report this summer examining why the department didn’t step in sooner, faulty inspections were identified as part of the problem.

Brown, the HUD spokesman, previously told The Southern that what happened in Cairo was a “rare” oversight failure on the department’s part. Three inspectors who had performed physical inspections at the Alexander County Housing Authority between 2009 and 2016 have been decertified for performance issues.

But Jeremy Kirkland, HUD’s acting deputy inspector general, told a House subcommittee in late September, “I am absolutely certain there are others out there like Elmwood and McBride.”

Fire Death Toll Hits 63, With Hundreds Still Missing

CHICO, Calif. — At least 63 people are now dead from a Northern California wildfire, and officials say they have a missing persons list with 631 names on it in an ever-evolving accounting of the victims of the nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century.

The high number of missing people probably includes some who fled the blaze and don’t realize they’ve been reported missing, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said. He said he’s making the list public so people can see if they are on it and let authorities know they survived.

“The chaos that we were dealing with was extraordinary,” Honea said of the early crisis hours last week. “Now we’re trying to go back out and make sure that we’re accounting for everyone.”

Some 52,000 people have been displaced to shelters, the homes of friends and relatives, to motels — and to a Walmart parking lot and an adjacent field in Chico, a dozen miles away from the ashes.

At the vast shelter parking lot, evacuees from California’s deadliest fire wonder if they still have homes, if their neighbors are still alive — and where they will go when their place of refuge shuts down in a matter of days.

“It’s cold and scary,” said Lilly Batres, 13, one of the few children there, who fled with her family from the forested town of Magalia and didn’t know whether her home survived. “I feel like people are going to come into our tent.”

The Northern California fire that began a week earlier obliterated the town of Paradise. Searchers have pulled bodies from incinerated homes and cremated cars, but in many cases, the victims may have been reduced to bits of bones and ash. The latest toll: 63 dead and 9,800 homes destroyed.

At the other end of the state, more residents were being allowed back into the zone of a wildfire that torched an area the size of Denver west of Los Angeles. The fire was 62 percent contained after destroying nearly 550 homes and other buildings. At least three deaths were reported.

Air quality across large swaths of California remains so poor due to huge plumes of smoke that schools from Sacramento to the Pacific Coast were closed on Friday, and San Francisco’s iconic open-air cable cars were pulled off the streets.

Northern California’s Camp Fire was 40 percent contained Thursday, but there was no timeline for allowing evacuees to return because of the danger. Power lines are still down, roads closed, and firefighters are still dousing embers, authorities said.

Anna Goodnight of Paradise tried to make the best of it, sitting on an overturned shopping cart in the parking lot and eating scrambled eggs and tater tots while her husband drank a Budweiser.

But then William Goodnight began to cry.

“We’re grateful. We’re better off than some. I’ve been holding it together for her,” he said, gesturing toward his wife. “I’m just breaking down, finally.”

More than 75 tents had popped up in the space since Matthew Flanagan arrived last Friday.

“We call it Wally World,” Flanagan said, a riff off the store name. “When I first got here, there was nobody here. And now it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. There are more evacuees, more people running out of money for hotels.”

Word began to spread Thursday that efforts were being made to phase out the camp by Sunday, by gradually removing donated clothing, food and toilets.

“The ultimate goal is to get these people out of tents, out of their cars and into warm shelter, into homes,” said Jessica Busick, who was among the first volunteers when she and her husband started serving free food from their Truckaroni food truck last week. “We’ve always known this isn’t a long-term solution.”

A Sunday closure “gives us enough time to maybe figure something out,” said Mike Robertson, an evacuee who arrived there on Monday with his wife and two daughters.

It’s unclear what will be done if people don’t leave Sunday, but city officials don’t plan to kick them out, said Betsy Totten, a Chico spokeswoman. Totten said volunteers — not the city — had decided to shut down the camp.

Walmart has added security to the location and is concerned about safety there, but it is not asking people to leave, spokeswoman LeMia Jenkins said.

Some, like Batres’ family, arrived after running out of money for a hotel. Others couldn’t find a room or weren’t allowed to stay at shelters with their dogs, or in the case of Suzanne Kaksonen, her two cockatoos.

Kaksonen said it already feels like forever since she’s been there.

“I just want to go home,” she said. “I don’t even care if there’s no home. I just want to go back to my dirt, you know, and put a trailer up and clean it up and get going. Sooner the better. I don’t want to wait six months. That petrifies me.”

Some evacuees helped sort immense piles of donations that have poured in. Racks of used clothes from sweaters to plaid flannel shirts and tables covered with neatly organized pairs of boots, sneakers and shoes competed for space with shopping carts full of clothes, garbage bags stuffed with other donations and boxes of books. Stuffed animals — yellow, purple and green teddy bears and a menagerie of other fuzzy critters — sat on the pavement.

Food trucks offered free meals and a cook flipped burgers on a grill. There were portable toilets, and some people used the Walmart restrooms.

Someone walking through the camp Thursday offered free medical marijuana.

Information for contacting the Federal Emergency Management Agency for assistance was posted on a board that allowed people to write the names of those they believed were missing. Several names had the word “Here” written next to them.

Melissa Contant, who drove from the San Francisco area to help out, advised people to register with FEMA as soon as possible, and to not reveal too much information about whether they own or rent homes or have sufficient food and water, because that could delay aid.

“You’re living in a Walmart parking lot — you’re not OK,” she told Maggie and Michael Crowder.

Corporate Media Ignore Their Role in Trump’s Refugee ‘Invasion’ Panic

If the establishment media’s coverage in the home stretch of the 2018 midterm elections is any kind of prologue to 2020, be prepared for an avalanche of right-wing xenophobic propaganda during our next presidential election. That’s because, once again, the political press dutifully chased Trump’s rhetorical tail as Election Day neared, and repeatedly ceded its editorial judgment and newshole to the nativist fearmongering he used to stoke the Republican Party’s base. And nowhere was this fecklessness more apparent than media’s breathless “migrant caravan” coverage.

Left-wing media critics documented these failures almost in real time. Joshua Holland at The Nation (10/25/18) noted in late October how Trump was all but acting as the de facto segment producer for all those ubiquitous cable news panel shows that were spending all their time discussing a few thousand asylum seekers that were more than a thousand miles from the US southern border.

Likewise, a study by the liberal media research site Media Matters (11/2/18) found that Trump might as well have been the front-page assignment editor for elite newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, which simply couldn’t resist the siren song of his manufactured crisis. In all, those two papers published nearly 30 different stories about the migrant caravan on their respective A1 pages in the two weeks before Election Day. And on three different days, the Times devoted two front-page stories to what Trump had not-so-subtly began calling an “invasion.”

What is most striking, however, is the Post and Times’ unmistakable cognitive dissonance and institutional blindspot about this coverage. Throughout the weeks leading up to Election Day, these two news organizations dedicated analysis, blogs and opinion pieces—mostly online—to detailing the naked gamesmanship and misinformation behind Trump using the migrant caravan as a campaign bogeyman. But then the papers’ front pages and their “straight” political coverage routinely used Trump’s assumptions as the premises for framing their stories.

Case in point: On October 25, the Washington Post ran a business section analysis (10/25/18)—“Why False Narratives About the Migrant Caravan and Mail Bombs Won’t Go Away on Social Media—and an online fact check (10/25/18)—“A Caravan of Phony Claims From the Trump Administration”—that sought to debunk the many lies and conspiracy theories fueling the migrant caravan narrative. But neither of these pieces bothered to look at how the Post’s own flood-the-zone coverage was exacerbating the story and giving it the oxygen to make the conspiracy theories more relevant.

In fact, on that same day, the Post’s front-page story (10/25/18) offered a much more friendly framing, one that subtly bought into Trump’s something-must-be-done hysterics: “White House Grapples With Caravan Strategy: President Urges Aides to Craft a More Forceful Plan Than Pressuring Mexico.” The online version’s headline (10/25/18) was no better, positioning the issue as being one of tactics (i.e., how to stop the caravan). Instead of whether or not it should be (i.e., one of policy): “Trump Promises to Stop the Migrant Caravan. But His Administration Struggles With How to Do It.”

The next day’s top headline at the Post (10/26/18) kept this theme alive with its focus squarely on Trump taking action: “Trump Weighs Border Closing; Central American Migrants Targeted; Deploying 1,000 More Troops Also Considered.”

This lack of self-awareness wasn’t confined to the Post. This week, New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Mark Landler wrote a similarly obtuse analysis piece (11/13/18) about the migrant caravan as a campaign issue. Leading off with a damp-bread headline—“A Week After the Midterms, Trump Seems to Forget the Caravan”—Haberman and Landler proceed to offer a workable review of the president’s sudden amnesia about an issue that up until a week ago was tantamount to a national crisis.

However, this Times story also doesn’t bother to look in the mirror. In fact, it fails to mention the words “press” or “media” even a single time, although it does take what could be construed as an oblique potshot at cable news with a brief mention that the “caravan having faded from television screens.” Nowhere is there any mention of the 14 front page stories—averaging one a day—that their own newspaper ran on the migrant caravan in the two weeks before Election Day. Nor was there any acknowledgment that the Times, too, “seems” to have mostly forgotten the caravan, having only run one photo (11/10/18) on the caravan and one full story (11/11/18) on the military deployment to stop it on A1 since Election Day. What’s more, a search of the Times archives found stories mentioning “migrant, caravan” fell by more than half between 10/25/18–11/5/18 (an average of 19 a day) and 11/7/13–11/13/13 (an average of 9 day).

Even more galling, Haberman and Landler included this sentence in their introduction: “There was little dispute, even before Election Day, that Mr. Trump was exploiting the caravan for political purposes.” That sentiment, that the president was merely ginning up outrage to boost Republican voter turnout, though undoubtedly true, was hardly a fixture of all the Times’ staid reporting on the caravan in the previous weeks. For example, an October 26 story on Trump’s decision to deploy more than 5,000 US troops to the border only offered one brief aside—a quote from Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi—that suggested the move was anything close to a brazen political ploy. One could read other Times articles about the caravan as well without encountering this now breezily made conclusion.

The Times lack of introspection was also on display in a blog post (10/26/18) by the paper’s deputy international editor, Greg Winter, who archly pushed back against reader questions about the Times’ editorial calculus for so heavily covering the migrant caravan:

And, yes, President Trump is a big part of the equation. But that does not make the caravan any less of a story. It simply adds yet another powerful dynamic to an already newsworthy phenomenon. After all, Mr. Trump’s immigration policies determine the fate of these migrants, and his repeated return to immigration as a campaign theme shapes the election debate.

It’s not our job to pretend that the caravan and the president’s response are not happening. To the contrary, it’s our mission to explain, with clarity and fairness, what is real, what is not and why it matters.

This defensiveness is not unexpected. After the Times unceremoniously killed off its public editor position 17 months ago, I warned (FAIR.org, 6/1/17) that the move would make it much easier for the paper to shrug off—or completely ignore—criticism of its coverage:

Despite the public editor’s uneven history, the Times and its readers were still unquestionably better served by its presence and its potential. To lose this position means both the paper and the public will suffer in the long run. Corporate media, now more than ever, can only recapture the public’s trust by bringing more transparency and accountability to those people and institutions in power. And yet these news organizations are increasingly uninterested in applying those same principles to themselves.

Just as with the corporate media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 election—at the expense of robust policy coverage—what’s really at issue here is the broader framing and messaging the press sends through its disproportionate focus. If the last month is any indication, establishment news organizations like the Post and the Times still haven’t learned the key lessons about their flawed 2016 election coverage. And so they continue to fall for the feints of a president who leverages their deference for authority to mainline hate and bigotry in the service of his and his party’s political fortunes.

The Biggest Threat to Free Speech No One Is Talking About

If you clicked this story, or have any desire to listen to the interview embedded within, odds are you’re a consumer of independent media. Yet even as you’re reading these words, your ability to do so in a timely manner is in grave jeopardy.

Since the repeal in June of Obama-era rules guaranteeing net neutrality, websites like Truthdig, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams and more risk being pushed into an internet slow lane that could severely hamper their readership, if not drive them out of business entirely. For Jeff Cohen, editor and co-founder of the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), it may be the most urgent threat to the First Amendment no one is talking about.

“The biggest issue of freedom of the press is not that Trump is mean to reporters, as he was last week with CNN’s Jim Acosta and Yamiche Alcindor of “PBS NewsHour,” he tells Robert Scheer. “The biggest freedom-of-the-press issue is that Trump is working with Comcast and AT&T and Verizon to end net neutrality. … Ownership of the media and the ownership of the internet, the fact that these big internet providers are [a] few giant companies that also produce content—it’s very, very dangerous.”

In the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Cohen plumbs a range of topics, including the myriad failures of our political press and the Blue Wave election that wasn’t (quite), as well as the future of the progressive movement. No matter how many congressional seats it ends up flipping, he contends, the Democratic Party is unlikely to change course until it replaces its leadership: “It’s too indebted to the donor class. So they talk with mush in their mouths. ‘We should have more accessibility to affordable housing’—no! What’s popular is ‘Medicare for all.’ ”

Cohen also expounds on the larger mission of FAIR and the kind of counterweight it can provide to an increasingly monolithic media industry. “We set up FAIR because progressive points of view were excluded from mainstream media,” he says. “Typically in mainstream media … the spectrum went from the center to the right. So I spent decades trying to get the progressive view there.”

Between the Federalist Society’s iron grip on the Supreme Court and the ever-encroaching dangers of global warming, the future—both for the country and the planet as a whole—looks impossibly bleak. Yet even in these dark, frenetic times, Cohen maintains we still have reason for optimism. “I study the polls,” he says. “And the polls show that the most progressive demographic, by age, by far, are people under 30, under 35. They’re the most anti-racist demographic, they’re the most tax-the-rich demographic, [and] they’re the most we-better-do-something-about-climate-change demographic.”

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

Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to add the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Jeff Cohen. I think I most recently had seen you in action at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, and you were organizing sort of a grassroots activity. Of course I’ve known you for years, you—way back in the 1980s you started a group called FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, one of the major media watchdog organizations. And then more recently, in 2011, you organized RootsAction.org, and this very effective million and a half people who can push for progressive things. But the reason I wanted to talk to you is, I’m interviewing you the day after the midterm election, here at USC at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. We had a lot of activity at the school, a lot of screens going all last night. Then everyone woke up this morning and not quite sure—there certainly wasn’t the blue wave, but there was blue impact; you get the House. And as I say, when I last saw you, it was a much more optimistic moment, in some sense, for progressives, but the tide was turning within the Democratic Party. And so take me back to the Philadelphia convention, and were you a Bernieite?

Jeff Cohen: I was a spokesperson for the Bernie Delegates Network, which was an independent group of—that represented and networked most of the Bernie delegates; it was independent of the campaign. Were we more optimistic? Of course we were. Because even though there was the disappointment of Bernie not getting the nomination and the Clinton machine winning out, there was a sense for a while that Hillary Clinton, representing the corporate center, or the corporate liberals, would become president. The right wing would be totally divided and in disarray, because Trump had taken over, and if they had lost and lost big they would have been fighting each other. And there would have been this strong, organized left pushing on Hillary while the right is in disarray. That was the scenario that seemed possible in the summer of 2016. But what we learned last night, and what we learned back then, is that you can’t beat Trump with nothing. You can’t beat Trump by just saying, “Trump’s an ogre.” You have to have a program; you have to have a program that excites people. You have to have a program that excites your base, which is young people, people of color, and is sellable to working-class whites. And Bernie Sanders had that program; I’ve just finished a documentary where we interviewed union workers, former union workers in Youngstown, Ohio. Voted for Obama twice, voted for Bernie over Hillary in the 2016 primary, and then voted for Trump. And there’s lots of those people. So, what’s so disappointing about last night—and you say, was it a blue wave; it was like a blue trickle, or a blue ripple. It should have been a blue wave, but the only way you can have a blue wave is if the party stands for something. And the party has to stand for the progressive agenda that will be able to forge a multiracial alliance that can win elections, in middle-class districts, in working-class districts. We don’t have that, because of the leadership of the Democratic Party. It’s too indebted to the donor class. So they talk with mush in their mouths: “We should have more accessibility to affordable housing”—no! What’s popular is Medicare-for-all. A recent Pew poll showed that 51 percent of Republicans are for Medicare-for-all. Free, public college education, and pay for it by a transaction tax on Wall Street. The progressive domestic agenda—and I’ve just written a report on this with other people from RootsAction—it’s extremely popular, not just with progressives! It’s popular with people across the board. But the Democrats don’t put that agenda forward, and that’s why we had a trickle instead of a wave.

RS: OK. But let me just ask, get back to basics here. And I want to establish your credentials here.

JC: OK.

RS: Because you’ve been out there—and let me just say something about FAIR, and they still exist and they still do good-—

JC: FAIR.org.

RS: Yeah. And you were a journalism professor at Ithaca College, and I think I met you that way, because you gave me an award at one point, the I.F. Stone award—

JC: The Izzy Award.

RS: Izzy Award. And for people listening who don’t remember who Izzy was—go to journalism schools, as I say, we’re here at Annenberg, we do have students who know about Izzy; up at Berkeley they do, at Columbia Journalism they do. And he was a legendary journalist, and he was a maverick; he was independent. And he felt, not only did all governments lie—a statement famously attributed to him—but also he felt all politicians lie, and his job was to cut through all of that. Now, I met you while you were doing that; you were also a lot on MSNBC, you were a lot with the sort of liberal euphoria, doing a lot of—I kept watching you on the screen. And you’re a very bright, optimistic fellow; right now, even, you got a—

JC: I’m a talker.

RS: No, but you also have a good smile on your face. So I’m going to confess to you, as my priest. I had a very odd reaction this morning after, you know, the midterm election. Because I watched Donald Trump, and whatever you say about Donald Trump, he brought some energy and feeling to the situation. Now, you know, he’d gotten good news, bad news—you know, somehow there was, again as you suggest, a program. He was going to move ahead. And then I just now look at the screens, and he’s fired [laughs] the attorney general, and he’s going to move aggressively. And then they had Nancy Pelosi come on, and the question—you know, Trump actually endorsed her in his remarks. And I expected Nancy Pelosi to really stick it to this guy, you know? And—no! We’ve been empowered to come back here and really do something for ordinary people! And it was tepid at best, tepid. And it was like, oh, we’re going to save a notion of affordable health care. And she seemed as tone-deaf as Hillary was in the election. My feeling is, what Bernie Sanders brought was the same sort of energy—only it was a left populism—the same sort of energy that Donald Trump has. A progressive populism, as opposed to a reactionary, scapegoating of minorities, vulnerable people, and so forth. And I wonder, you know, you’ve spent the last months in midterm elections and everything; do you, is the Democratic Party really capable of feeling that pain?

JC: No. Not in—not the current leadership. I mean, you’re right; the problem is Pelosi, the problem is Clinton, the problem is Schumer. After the disaster of 2016—and you’re right about my history, I go back decades in this. You know, we set up FAIR because progressive points of view were excluded from mainstream media. Typically in mainstream media—with some exceptions; you were one at the L.A. Times—typically, the spectrum went from the center to the right. So I spent decades trying to get the progressive view there. And I would tell executives, I’d have meetings with media executives, and I’d say: you know, if you had an unabashed progressive in some of these discussions, not only would it be good for democracy, but your ratings would go up. And so what was interesting with the Bernie campaign—and I’ve known Bernie since his first term in Congress—is for the first time, mainstream media was forced, because he had these huge rallies, to have the progressive agenda on the nightly news, every night, especially on cable news. And lo and behold, that progressive message connected with many voters, whether they know the term progressive or not. And again, talking to later Trump voters who voted for Bernie—I’ve met these people. So my whole life has been about trying to get progressive, the progressive message heard by the masses of people. And can the Democratic Party, as it’s currently led, win and defeat Trump, and then after you win an election, govern in a way that you can maintain power? Not with the current leadership. There’s two problems facing our country: one, you’ll hear about on MSNBC every night. It’s the extremism, the racism, the anti-science, the scapegoating of the Republicans. There’s an equal, second problem, and that’s the corporatism and the vacillation and the backpedaling of the Democratic Party. And if all you ever do is talk about that first problem, which is all they talk about hour after hour on MSNBC, you’re giving your viewers half of the story. Because the two things go together. So after the disaster of 2016, when the leadership of the party—this was one of the big calamities in U.S. history, when Trump won—they would not do an autopsy on what they had done wrong. They refused to do it, so we did it. And we put out this report called DemocraticAutopsy.org. What the Democratic leadership and MSNBC was content to do, was look at external factors. So they tried to blame it on Russia, is why they lost in November [2016]; or the Comey intervention, 11 days before the election. These were small factors. But the major factor was within the control of the Democratic Party leadership, and that’s who they chose as their candidate; how they ran that campaign, how they spent their money—and remember, the Clintonites spent more money than the Trumpites in November, in the November 2016 election. So what, our critique of the Democratic Party leadership, and why they need to be replaced—and there will soon be campaigns to replace Schumer and Pelosi and Tom Perez, the leader of the Democratic National Committee—the reason they need to be replaced is they keep making two errors. One is agenda; they don’t have a progressive agenda, it’s mush, it’s tepid, as you said. And two, they don’t spend their money the right way. What you need to do is have a progressive agenda that creates a lot of enthusiasm among young people, people of color, even white working-class people. And then you have to spend your money to get your base out to the polls—that’s black people, Latinos, poor people, young people. Instead, they spend all this money on ads.

RS: But we’re slipping into a language here of the Democrats as somehow being virtuous, if stumbling. And I just want to raise a question for you. Aren’t they really more perfectly, on economic matters, the party of Wall Street? And the result is, even in the ‘16 election, they got more support from Wall Street, and they got it in the midterm now; I haven’t done a clinical analysis of the stats. I want to ask you about this Democratic Party—maybe it is basically a con job, OK, that in fact, you’re deluding people. Most of my friends, most of the people I know, they’re part of the blue wave; I mean, in my own family everywhere, I have—I’ve got this all the time: we’re going to win, we’re going to resist. And the question is, isn’t there a message of false consciousness here? If we’re talking about a base that has working people, black people, brown people—those, that’s the group. College-educated black and brown people were the people hardest hit in the Great Recession, engineered by Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Bill Clinton. You know, they lost 60, 70 percent of their wealth because of these liar loans, swindles and everything. That’s the base that you’re now going to tell they should give the Democrats another chance?

JC: Well, you’re right in—you and I identify the base, but the leadership of the party is, as you say, allied with Wall Street. The Clintonites, the Obama—Obama got more money from Wall Street when he ran for president in 2008 before, in that campaign, before he was the frontrunner. And there were two New York candidates running for president, Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, and Obama was out-fundraising them before he was a frontrunner. So he was well connected, too. So the base of the party—we don’t have a parliamentary system, we don’t have proportional representation. We, at national and statewide levels, we’re reduced to two parties. And progressives need to take over the leadership of the Democratic Party. If it’s left in the hands of the Pelosis and the Schumers and the Tom Perezes, it’s hopeless.

RS: OK, but you know, I like to dig a little deeper in these interviews. And you know, last night—oh, I got in trouble, not just last night, teaching a couple of times. And everyone from my wife to my former dean here, and other people—I said, look, if there are any kids in the room, any students who don’t feel they want to vote, you don’t have to. Now—debatable proposition.

JC: Very debatable.

RS: Very debatable, but after all, we’re at a university, we’re supposed to do critical thinking, we’re supposed to challenge. And I was making a point to develop discussion and argument, you know. And I myself last night had my “I Voted” sticker on; you know, I dutifully went to my polling thing. But I thought, you know, wait a minute; wait a minute. Is this really a game that should absorb so much of our attention? Now, I’m putting the question to you because when I was at the Democratic Convention, you were an important figure to me as a journalist. I wanted to be where you were, the meetings and so forth, because they were the most interesting delegates, the Bernie delegates. They came from all over the country, they were idealistic, they were in touch with their own communities. And, lo and behold, they were betrayed.

JC: Right, but if—you, I’m so glad you brought them up. If all they did was be Bernie delegates and work in the Bernie campaign, then yeah, I’d be disappointed. But the people you’re referring to that I got to know so well in Philadelphia, from every race, every age group, every gender—they’re movement-builders. These are people that work in organizations. They’re union-organizers, they’re tenant-organizers. So I don’t believe you register anything by not voting. But if all you do is work in elections, or you only get active two months before an election, you’re really not an activist. What you have to be doing is building independent organizations, and then also take those organizations and work electorally. But if all you do is electoral work, it’s cyclical; that’s not how you’re going to build a movement that could take over the Democratic Party and take over the country. The important thing is, where do we go? Is there a way of putting forward a progressive agenda and raising money for a presidential campaign or a big campaign? And I think Bernie Sanders proved, you don’t need Wall Street money. You don’t need corporate money. You can get $27 donations. Beto O’Rourke proved it.

RS: When you say he proved it—

JC: He raised far more money than he needed. The problem with Bernie, between Bernie and Hillary had nothing to do with money. Same thing in Texas; Beto O’Rourke wouldn’t take PAC money, wouldn’t take corporate money. There’s a new wave within the Democratic Party, and that’s a—the progressive wave within the party is saying, if we have a progressive agenda, we can rebuild a multiracial alliance that will vote for us. And—thanks to the internet—we can raise money in small-dollar donations that we don’t need Wall Street money anymore. And I think that’s the way of the future; if people go to DemocraticAutopsy.org, you can see the critique we’ve made of the party leadership. And it was made by people—included in our writing team was the coordinator of the Bernie Delegates Network, Norman Solomon. It’s Karen Bernal, who you met in Philadelphia; she’s the head of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party, the biggest caucus. We have the chair of the New Mexico Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party. So there is a wave within the Democratic Party that’s trying to take leadership away from the Clintonites.

RS: Realistically speaking, when I think about American politics in general, there are two forces operating against what, say, Tom Paine—I’m not going to invoke the Founders. You had counterpower from the citizenry, counterpower, and that’s what the Bill of Rights and everything was going to give voice to. Now, you have a very different situation; you have MSNBC, which is supposed to be center-progressive media, but it’s owned by really one of the largest manipulative media companies, right, Comcast. Before that it was owned by a defense contractor and banker that was very instrumental in getting the whole banking meltdown, GE Capital. So they make a show of independence, but we all know there are limits, and when you work for those operations, what’s left of your newspapers are increasingly dependent upon billionaires. So when we think of the quality of our society, the debate it can sustain, it’s all very well and good to say, people are out there organizing movements and so forth. And I don’t want to be negative here; I want to encourage people to do that. But the fact is, we are living increasingly in a 1984 world. We have a surveillance state; we have a very refined degree of social control, manipulation, spying and the ability to coop people. And then you got two guys like us sitting here, ruminating about this election, and I wonder if we’re not burying the lede. The lede is, Donald Trump is not an accident; he is the norm in this manipulative society. He knows how to game the system, and, as Wall Street has shown with stock prices and everything else, they like it.

JC: Oh, yeah.

RS: They like it.

JC: Yeah. Well, I—look, I can’t disagree with what you’ve been saying. I’ve been a leading critic of MSNBC; all they talk about is Russia, Russia, Mueller, Mueller, Mueller.  Imagine if they talked about important things, like all the corporate corruption of Donald Trump. How that would have resonated with voters. He’s violating the Constitution. So MSNBC is a disaster to me. The biggest issue of freedom of the press is not that Trump is mean to reporters, as he was today with the CNN reporter and the NBC reporter. The biggest freedom of the press issue is that Trump is working with Comcast and AT&T and Verizon to end net neutrality, which would push Truthdig and Truthout and Common Dreams and Democracy Now! and The Young Turks into the slow lane. He’s working hand-in-glove with them. What issue do you never hear on Comcast-owned MSNBC about freedom of the press is the biggest freedom of the press debate going on now, which is saving net neutrality. They won’t talk about it. So you are right that the ownership of the media and the ownership of the internet, and the fact that these big internet providers are these few giant companies that also produce content—it’s very, very dangerous. But I’ve got to stay optimistic. What I’m optimistic about is, I study the polls. And the polls show that the most progressive demographic, by age, by far, are people under 30, under 35. They’re the most anti-racist demographic, they’re the most tax-the-rich demographic, they’re the most we-better-do-something-about-climate-change demographic. And so the young people, whether they’re college-educated or not, the polls I look at are all people under 30, are all people under 35. The problem is, do we have enough time left, given climate change and given Trump’s instability with his finger near the button—do we have time for a new generation of people? You and I saw that generation in Philadelphia; these were the Bernie delegates. So many of them were under 30. Look at all the people that were elected yesterday, who are under 35. I mean, I’m from New York; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is electrifying, and she beat the fourth most powerful Democrat in a primary. There are exciting things happening in spite of Wall Street’s influence over the Democratic Party. And, as you say, in spite of the billionaires dominating corporate media. If we can save net neutrality, we still have these alternative avenues by which young people, especially, are getting independent news information. The downside of the internet is Trump sends his crazy tweets, and Breitbart sends its divisive crap that isn’t accurate or factual. You know, there’s an up and a down side. But I’ve studied independent media, and you’ve been a big part of it for half a century. And independent media is more powerful today than probably anytime in the last century. And it won’t be if Trump and Comcast, if they succeed in getting rid of the internet. You know, a free internet, an open internet.

RS: I certainly agree that it’s important to fight the good fight. But we’re doing this on, well, being done from a public radio station. And it’s being done, we’re recording at a university. Our job here is to actually think out loud. Because I think the game is rigged now to such a degree that what we need are some naysayers out there. And I think of Martin Luther King, and when I was the editor of Ramparts we published him when The New York Times denounced him in an editorial, when he at Riverside Church, a year before he was killed, said the United States, my government, is the major purveyor of violence in the world today. That was not a statement that a careful politician would ever even think about; you would be denounced. Yet the United States, today, is the major purveyor of violence in the world today. It has a military budget that is growing all the time, supported by Democrats and Republicans; it intervenes everywhere in the world. And yet, if those good candidates that you’re talking about dared to say, my government is the major purveyor in the violence of the world today, they wouldn’t be treated—you know, let’s cut to the chase here.

JC: Yeah, I agree. But let me respond. You’ve raised the most important issue that liberals won’t talk about, which is U.S. militarism. When Martin Luther King says the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, if he were alive he’d be saying it, as you’re saying it, today. We have 800 military bases, $717 billion National Defense Authorization Act for 2019. And Schumer’s office, and Pelosi, sent out statements about how they were working with Trump to get him the money for our quote defense, unquote. Most Democrats, even progressive ones, on their websites—check out the issues I’m running on—they’ll mention gay rights, they’ll mention health care, they’ll mention environment. They don’t mention the military. They don’t mention endless war. We’ve been involved in war since 2001. It’s the longest war in U.S. history, and they won’t talk about it. But here’s the good news. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Rashida Tlaib, who’s the new congresswoman, a Palestinian-American from Detroit; Ilhan Omar, the Somali refugee, is the new congresswoman from Minnesota; Ayanna Pressley, she beat a 10-term Democrat in the primary, she’s from Boston. On their websites, they talk about cutting the military budget and using that money for social good. If you don’t cut the military budget, how can we provide free, public college education? How can we provide the kind of healthcare that the country needs? So you’re right, you’re right—it’s the biggest issue that the mainstream media won’t talk about, MSNBC doesn’t talk about it. But some of these—obviously, Truthdig talks about it, Truthout talks about it, Democracy Now! talks about it. MSNBC—they don’t talk about, there’s no such thing as U.S. militarism or U.S. imperialism on those stations.

RS: So I’m going to wrap this up by saying I applaud—and I’m not being condescending here—your efforts, and people like Norman Solomon, and the candidates you mentioned. And as I’ve said, I ran as a Democrat for Congress, and I’ve worked in—I worked at the L.A. Times for 29 years, I believe in using whatever you got to get some thought out, some words, some criticism. I think we all have to fight the good fight. But—but—we also have an obligation to speak truth to power in the clearest way. And the odd thing is this right-wing—I would call it neofascist populist. I never minimize the danger of Trump, but the fact of the matter is, there’s something incredibly authentic—

JC: Yes.

RS: About his campaigning. That he touches the pain out there. Now, he does it in an irresponsible way. But the fact of the matter is, it’s not just that the economy is doing well; he’s done some very effective negotiation on trade; NAFTA 2.0, that he negotiated, is a hell of a lot better than the ones that were negotiated under Democrats—

JC: And Obama had eight years to fix it himself and did not.

RS: Yeah. And for the first time, there’s actually some consideration of what is fair wage, and actually letting the courts of Mexico and Canada have some, and America, have some say over whether the treaty is agreeing. I think—North Korea, and so forth. Where he’s really quite dangerous, ironically, is the Russia stuff; he keeps putting sanctions on Russia, he doesn’t take advantage of his conversation with Putin to actually have arms control; he’s just ripped up—not one question today about, at a press conference, about his ripping up arms control on intermediate nuclear weapons. Very, very serious. But I want to end this by saying, none of the people you talk about will talk about the main foreign interference in this election, and it was Israel. And the pivot, the most dangerous thing Trump has done in foreign policy, the most dangerous thing he’s done on domestic policy is the scapegoating of vulnerable people, particularly immigrants. It’s horrible, and it has echoes, strong echoes of fascism, attacking the most vulnerable people. But on foreign policy, and they are related, the real danger is accepting this alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and the idea that Iran, which did not attack the World Trade Center, that somehow Iran is the major problem, and we seem to be heading toward some kind of confrontation with Iran, despite the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese all saying this is nuts, they are honoring the agreement. And you don’t hear anybody talk about it. Now, the president brought it up at his press conference. He said, don’t attack me; he said, Netanyahu has said I’m the greatest thing for world peace. That was the key thing he said at his most important press conference. No one in the media challenged him on that.

JC: Let me react. Yeah. Israel is an untouchable topic in the mainstream media. We know it. People have lost so many jobs over criticism of Israel. And it was a factor when I worked with Phil Donahue at MSNBC, why we got in trouble with management. Because we questioned Israel’s actions. That’s a given. But in terms of Trump, I think you’ve nailed it. I mean, he has an amazing ability to connect with his audience. It’s a white audience; he tells him he loves them; he makes jokes; he’ll talk in very non-politician-like ways. There’s no doubt, he’s got a mastery of mainstream media. He’s got a mastery of television. I mean, when I look at the, who’s to blame for the rise of Trump, you’ve got Jeff Zucker, was the president of NBC entertainment, that created “The Apprentice” for that ego known as Donald Trump. And then he moves over to CNN, and you remember in 2015 and the first months of 2016, at CNN they had basically an all-Trump-all-the-time policy. So Trump is a master of television, and I think he does have this connection to an audience that most Democratic politicians, with their vacillation and their talking with mush in their mouths, don’t have. But you know, there’s so many issues that you mentioned that should be in the national news, and on MSNBC and CNN it was Russia, Russia, Mueller, Mueller, Mueller. You know, FAIR did a survey and they found—this was in July of this year—not one segment on MSNBC on the U.S. role in the massacre in Yemen, the humanitarian crisis, U.S. and Saudi Arabia killing so many civilians. But while zero segments on Yemen, 465 segments mentioning Stormy Daniels. So I mean, we have a real failure in so-called liberal media and what they cover. And Iran and Israel—I mean, it’s a powder keg. You’re right, it’s a common thing, even at The New York Times, which is, you know, can be a strong newspaper. But they have this cliché about Iran as the main state sponsor of terrorism in the world. We know that’s not true, every expert knows it’s not true. Saudi Arabia is the main sponsor. And as you say, we weren’t attacked on September 11th by Iran; quite the contrary. So what I try to get people to do—and 10 years at Ithaca College, my field of study was independent media—divorce yourself from corporate, mainstream media and start really digging into the best independent outlets. We’ve really had a boom in independent media. But all of these critiques you’re making of the political system, and the media system, I agree with. But I guess I have hope for a new generation, and a new generation with a new, independent media that’s been booming.

RS: Well, on that note, I want to [laughs] thank, I guess, Jeff Cohen, who started FAIR, and then now, most recently, has been with RootsAction. And I saw you operate at the Democratic Convention, I know you’re filled with optimism and insight. And you know, if it were your Democratic Party, I’d be much more—

JC: One day it’s going to be someone’s—yeah, one day it will be.

RS: Well, that’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our producers are Josh Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Our engineers at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. And here at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California, Sebastian Grubaugh has been the man on the board. That’s it, see you next week.

 

N. Korea Reports Test of ‘Ultramodern Tactical Weapon’

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un observed the successful test of an unspecified “newly developed ultramodern tactical weapon,” state media reported Friday, in an apparent bid to apply pressure on the United States and South Korea.

It didn’t appear to be a test of a nuclear device or a long-range missile with the potential to target the U.S. A string of such tests last year had many fearing war before the North turned to engagement and diplomacy. Still, any mention of weapons testing could influence the direction of stalled diplomatic efforts spearheaded by Washington and aimed at ridding the North of its nuclear weapons.

The North hasn’t publicly tested any weapons since November 2017, but in recent days Pyongyang reportedly expressed anger at U.S.-led international sanctions and ongoing small-scale military drills between South Korea and the United States.

Earlier this month, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned it could bring back its policy of bolstering its nuclear arsenal if it doesn’t receive sanctions relief.

“It’s North Korea-style coercive diplomacy. North Korea is saying ‘If you don’t listen to us, you will face political burdens,'” said analyst Shin Beomchul of Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies.

Diplomacy has stalled since a summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in June, with Washington pushing for more action on nuclear disarmament and the North insisting that the U.S. first approve a peace declaration formally ending the Korean War and lift sanctions.

Shin said the weapon North Korea tested could be a missile, artillery, an anti-air gun, a drone or other high-tech conventional weapons systems.

Yang Wook, a Seoul-based military expert, said a “tactical weapon” in North Korea refers to “a weapon aimed at striking South Korea including U.S. military bases” there, so the North may have tested a short-range missile or a multiple rocket launch system.

Even if the test was a message for Washington and Seoul, Friday’s report from the North was noticeably less belligerent than past announcements of weapons tests, and didn’t focus on North Korean claims of U.S. and South Korean hostility.

Yang said the latest North Korean test won’t completely break down nuclear diplomacy, though more questions would be raised about how sincere the North is about its commitment to denuclearization.

Asked about the test, the U.S. State Department said that American and North Korean officials are talking about implementing the commitments that Trump and Kim made during their June meeting in Singapore. Eugene Lee, spokeswoman of South Korea’s Unification Ministry, declined to comment on Kim’s inspection of the weapons test.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, attending a Southeast Asian summit in Singapore, cited the “great progress” made on North Korea but said more had to be done.

A year and a half ago, “nuclear tests were taking place, missiles were flying over Japan and there were threats and propagations against our nation and nations in the region,” Pence said.

“Today, no more missiles are flying, no more nuclear tests, our hostages have come home, and North Korea has begun anew to return fallen American heroes from the Korean War to our soil. We made great progress but there’s more work to be done,” he said.

Pence stressed that U.N. sanctions had to remain enforced.

It’s the first publicly known field inspection of a weapons test by Kim Jong Un since he observed the testing of the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile in November of last year, according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry.

The North said the test took place at the Academy of National Defense Science and that Kim couldn’t suppress his “passionate joy” at its success. He was described as “so excited to say that another great work was done by the defense scientists and munitions industrial workers to increase the defense capability of the country.”

Last year’s string of increasingly powerful weapons tests, many experts believe, put the North on the brink of a viable arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles that can target anywhere in the mainland United States.

Trump and Kim are both interested in another summit, but it’s unclear when it might happen. Pence has said the next meeting would allow the two leaders to put what they discussed in their last summit on paper.

__

Associated Press writer Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, Annabelle Liang in Singapore and Matthew Pennington in Washington contributed to this report.

The Last Khmer Rouge Leaders Get Life Sentences

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The last surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge that brutally ruled Cambodia in the 1970s were convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes Friday by an international tribunal.

Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were sentenced to life in prison, the same sentence they are already serving after earlier convictions at a previous trial for crimes against humanity connected with forced transfers and mass disappearances of people. Cambodia has no death penalty.

Both men have suggested they were targets of political persecution.

The verdict read aloud in the courtroom by Judge Nil Nonn established that the Khmer Rouge committed genocide against the Vietnamese and Cham minorities. Schoars had debated whether suppression of the Chams, a Muslim ethnic group whose members had put up a small but futile resistance against the Khmer Rouge, amounted to genocide. The court found Khieu Samphan not guilty of genocide against the Cham, for lack of evidence, though he was found guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese under the principle of joint command responsiblity.

The Khmer Rouge sought to achieve an agrarian utopia by emptying the cities to establish vast rural communes. Instead their radical policies led to what has been termed ‘auto-genocide’ through starvation, overwork and execution.

The crimes against humanity convictions covered activities at work camps and cooperatives established by the Khmer Rouge. These offenses comprised murder, extermination, deportation, enslavement, imprisonment, torture, persecution on political, religious and racial grounds, attacks on human dignity, enforced disappeances, forced transfers, forced marriages and rape.

The breaches of the Geneva Convention governing war crimes included willful killing, torture or inhumane treatment.

Nuon Chea, 92, was brought by ambulance and Khieu Samphan by van from the nearby prison where they are held. The prison and the courthouse were custom built for the use of the tribunal, which is officially called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC.

Both defendants were present as Judge Nil Nonn opened the proceedings, but Nuon Chea suffers heart problems, so was granted permission to later move from the hearing room to a separate holding room.

Khieu Samphan, 87, was present for the entire hearing and with the help of two security guards stood as his sentence was read, showing no obvious emotion.

A large crowd of spectators attended Friday’s session, including members of the Cham minority.

Lah Sath, a 72-year-old Cham man from eastern Kampong Cham province, brought his wife and four young granddaughters to Friday’s session. He said he often heard people talking about the trial and sometimes watched it on TV, but decided it was time to see it with his own eyes.

Just talking about the Khmer Rouge brought back horrible memories of life in those years, he said. The Cham were treated as enemies and exploited without mercy as they were forced to do intensive farm labor, he recalled.

Lah Sath said his younger brother was killed by Khmer Rouge for failing to take good care of a cow.

In addition to Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, the tribunal has carried out one other prosecution, resulting in the 2010 conviction of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, who as head of the Khmer Rouge prison system ran the infamous Tuol Sleng torture center in Phnom Penh.

There are fears that politics will thwart the tribunal from undertaking any further prosecutions.

Cambodia’s long-serving, autocratic Prime Minister Hun Sen has declared he will allow no further case to go forward, claiming they would cause instability. Hun Sen was a Khmer Rouge commander who defected when the group was in power and was installed in government after the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power by a Vietnamese invasion.

Initial work had been done on two more cases involving four middle-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge, but they have been scuttled or bottled up by the tribunal, which is a hybrid court in which Cambodian prosecutors and judges are paired with international counterparts.

The failure to have more extensive proceeding has discomfited some observers, but others point to the tribunals accomplishments

“International tribunals are better than the alternative, impunity. They will always be political and fall short of expectations,” Alexander Hinton, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and author of two books about the tribunal, said ahead of Fiday’s verdicts. “But justice is usually delivered, even if at times, as has been the case with the ECCC, it staggers across the finish line.”