Chris Hedges's Blog, page 42

Lobbies’ Greatest Ally in the Effort to Sabotage Health Care Reform

Ever since The Intercept (11/20/18) found several planning documents by the Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future (PAHCF), a benign-sounding corporate alliance formed to prevent any kind of reform and prop up the dysfunctional US healthcare system’s profits, corporate media have been reporting on the PAHCF’s efforts to defend the US’s for-profit healthcare system (The Hill, 6/28/19).

The lobbying group declares that its aim is to “change the conversation around Medicare for All” in order to “minimize the potential for this option in healthcare from becoming part of a national political party’s platform in 2020.” According to media reports, one healthcare executive reassured employees in a company meeting that the healthcare industry has “done a lot more than you would think” to sabotage any move in the direction of universal healthcare (Washington Post, 4/12/19). The PAHCF’s massive coalition of lobbyists representing virtually every part of the for-profit healthcare industry are united not only in opposition to a single-payer system like Medicare for All, but also to “every single Democratic proposal that would significantly expand the government’s role in healthcare.”

But the healthcare industry’s efforts to block all meaningful change in our medical system would not be nearly so successful were corporate media not working in tandem to spread these same lobbyist talking points.

The Intercept expose (11/20/18) revealed how the campaign against Medicare for All builds on previous campaigns to “disqualify government-run healthcare as a politically viable solution.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the healthcare industry has spent over $2 billion on lobbying across the past four years, more than any other industry. PAHCF has been recorded to have bought around half of all political advertising in the early-voting state of Iowa in the summer of 2019, and their million-dollar attack ads were broadcast throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential debates. PAHCF is also engaged in an astroturf campaign that doesn’t disclose that several “voices throughout the nation” parroting the insurance lobby’s talking points—presented as ordinary Americans who fear universal healthcare—have ties to lobbying firms and health insurance corporations (Splinter, 3/19/19).

What are some of these talking points? According to the New York Times’ “Healthcare and Insurance Industries Mobilize to Kill ‘Medicare for All’” (2/23/19):

The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it….

In a daily fusillade of digital advertising, videos and Twitter posts, the coalition, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that Medicare for All will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients—arguments that echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health plan in 1993 and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago.

Politico’s “The Army Built to Fight Medicare for All” (11/25/19) reported that the PAHCF’s “core conviction” is that “things aren’t actually that bad,” and explained why the industry group opposes any reform (even a deeply flawed public option) to expand the public sector’s healthcare coverage:

The industry still views single payer as the doomsday scenario. But by early 2019, it’d become far from the only worrying possibility, as prominent Democrats floated all manner of routes to universal healthcare. The problem: Each achieved their goal in roughly the same way—by having the federal government annex broad swaths of the private insurance market, either by creating a competing public option or expanding the existing Medicaid or Medicare programs deeper into the private sector’s territory.

Those plans might sound more palatable to the ordinary American, but to Partnership members it still meant fewer customers, lower pay rates and a new, unnecessary regime of profit-pressuring regulations. So as each 2020 presidential contender rolls out their own signature take on an overhaul, the response from the Partnership has been loud and unflinching: No.

“The politicians may call it Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, or the public option,” reads an ad run by the Partnership during September’s Democratic presidential debate. “But they mean the same thing.”

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because these are the same talking points echoed by corporatist Democrats, and amplified by corporate media, that FAIR has critiqued throughout this election cycle (FAIR.org, 4/29/19, 6/25/19, 7/1/19, 10/2/19).

“Voter support may not withstand warnings of tax increases or changes to employer-sponsored insurance,” the New York Times (10/19/18) warns.

When corporate media aren’t busy featuring negative op-eds from politicians that PAHCF’s undisclosed lobbyists helped write, one can find regular columns featured in The Hill (1/31/19) and the New York Times (10/19/18) telling us not to get “too excited about Medicare for All” because it’s a “terrible” idea championed by “young Bolsheviks” that would make Trump look like a “sure winner in 2020.” There are no shortage of op-eds in the Washington Post (2/19/19, 2/22/19, 10/25/19, 1/7/20) echoing the “government-run healthcare” canard, telling us that we don’t need to go “full Canada” because Medicare for All is a “pipe dream” and a bunch of “pointless quibbling.”

Politico (9/23/19) made the disingenuous and incoherent argument that pitting a public option that leaves the wasteful and parasitic health insurance industry intact against Medicare for All is a “false choice,” and a “fear tactic sowed by defenders of corporate greed meant to divide us,” while simultaneously arguing that “preserving the option for employers and unions to continue to innovate in healthcare is critically important.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times dutifully followed PAHCF guidelines by attacking both a public option and Medicare for All. The Times’ “How a Medicare Buy-In or Public Option Could Threaten Obamacare” (7/29/19) argued that a public option “may well threaten the ACA in unexpected ways.” After noting how the “ACA is a solidly profitable business for insurers,” in spite of “stock drops” over “investor concerns over Medicare for All proposals,” the Times raised fears that a

buy-in shift in insurance coverage could profoundly unsettle the nation’s private health sector, which makes up almost a fifth of the United States economy. Depending on who is allowed to sign up for the plan, it could also rock the employer-based system that now covers some 160 million Americans.

The New York Times (3/23/19) declares that there’s “no precedent” for the government eliminating an major economic sector—which would seem to overlook both Abolition and Prohibition.

The Times’ “Medicare for All Would Abolish Private Insurance. ‘There’s No Precedent in American History’” (3/23/19) argued for the status quo, which leaves tens of thousands of people dying every year from a lack of insurance, with an estimated 530,000 families suffering medical bankruptcies every year, with relentless and unsustainable drives to raise premiums and deductibles to maximize profits and lower for-profit insurers’ “medical loss ratio” (the figure given to investors to inform them of how much money they lost to medical claims). Before concluding with a statement from Mark Bertolini—a former CEO of insurance company Aetna—informing us that “it’s not that simple” to “shut down all the private insurance companies,” the Times warned readers that

doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.

Such a change would shake the entire healthcare system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.

Corporate media have also boosted centrist presidential candidates taking the most money from the healthcare industry (FAIR.org, 4/28/19, 7/3/19, 9/9/19, 12/12/19). Joe Biden is a reliable mouthpiece for the PAHCF’s opposition to Medicare for All by constantly lying about the proposal, even shamelessly using dead family members to attack it. A company linked to Biden’s campaign has also been caught testing messages “designed to undercut support among Democrats for Medicare for All,” finding that Democrats are “most swayed by” arguments that the “program would impose a heavy cost on taxpayers and threaten Medicare for senior citizens.” Pete Buttigieg famously flip-flopped on the issue after accepting the legal bribes often euphemized as “campaign contributions.”

The talking point of consumer “choice,” Wendell Potter (New York Times, 1/14/20) notes, “makes the idea of changing the current system sound scary and limiting. The problem? It’s a PR concoction.”

That corporate media is pushing PAHCF’s pernicious talking points should not be surprising; former insurance executive turned whistleblower Wendell Potter confessed in his book Deadly Spin how PR executives like himself “cultivate contacts and relationships among journalists and other media gatekeepers” to manipulate coverage and public opinion to quash reforms. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Potter pointed out that one of the major themes of healthcare coverage is essentially an insurance industry hoax:

We were told by our opinion research firms and messaging consultants that when we promoted the purported benefits of the status quo that we should talk about the concept of “choice”: It polled well in focus groups of average Americans….

But those of us who held senior positions for the big insurers knew that one of the huge vulnerabilities of the system is its lack of choice. In the current system, Americans cannot, in fact, pick their own doctors, specialists or hospitals — at least, not without incurring huge “out of network” bills.

When a staunchly consistent Medicare for All advocate like Bernie Sanders has an increasingly serious shot at winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 2020 election cycle, it’s especially important to push back against the overwhelming propaganda onslaught from the gargantuan healthcare industry.

Noam Chomsky Is the Antidote to Trump’s Facism

In addition to the obvious terrors — gutting our social safety net, near-wars with North Korea and Iran, the family separations, and the everyday racism and xenophobia — the Trump era has been threaded with two subtler but no less damaging afflictions: confusion and paranoia. Not knowing on any given day whether President Donald Trump and his sycophants are serious about such critical matters as sending bombs into North Korea or the Middle East, say, or planning to take away our health care is nearly as damaging as the actions themselves.

It wears us down, even weakening our resolve to fight back. Amidst this confusion and stress, Noam Chomsky, linguist, historian, activist, and philosopher, has been a bracing force of clarity; his writing and interviews cut through the endless noise of opinions, punditry and argument, distilling the perils of our current moment in the most direct way. He’s 90 years old, and despite decades of being a critical progressive voice, he shows no signs of slowing down.

Sometimes that clarity is frightening. Chomsky is not here to soothe your fears. In a November interview he told Truthout’s C.J. Polychroniou, regarding the prospect of four more years of Trump, that such an outcome “may spell the end of much of life on earth, including organized human society in any recognizable form.”

Regarding the 2020 election as a whole, Chomsky told Polychroniou that he finds it “psychologically impossible to discuss the 2020 election without emphasizing, as strongly as possible, what is at stake: survival, nothing less.”

Even as Democratic debate moderators devote little time to climate change, Chomsky is sounding the alarm. In an interview with Jacobin in July, he explained the extent of the crisis:

We are approaching ominously close to the level of global warming 125,000 years ago when sea levels were 6 to 9 meters higher than today, and the rapid melting of Antarctic sea ice threatens to narrow the gap, possibly by nonlinear acceleration, some recent studies suggest. …

The challenge would be great even if states were committed to overcoming it. Some are. But it is impossible to overlook the fact that the most powerful state in human history is under the leadership of what can only be accurately described as a gang of arch-criminals who are dedicated to racing to the cliff with abandon.

Chomsky is also very concerned about surveillance, in particular as illustrated by developments in China. As he told Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in a recent interview, “The kind of model toward which society is moving is already illustrated to a substantial extent in China, where they have very heavy surveillance systems and … what they call a social credit system,” he explained on Scheer Intelligence, the KCRW radio show.

Chomsky added, “This is going to expand enormously as we move to what’s called the internet of things, meaning every device around you — your refrigerator, your toothbrush and so on — is picking up information about what you’re doing, predicting what you’re going to do next, trying to control what you’re going to do next, advise what you do next.”

America’s interventions abroad have also not escaped Chomsky’s wrath. Of Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela, he told Jacobin, “The Trump sanctions have turned a severe crisis into a catastrophe, as recognized by the opposition’s leading economist, the well-informed Francisco Rodriguez — the usual impact of sanctions on civilian societies.”

In Part Two of the recent Scheer Intelligence interview, Chomsky grapples with the actions of Israel, providing necessary historical context, and a warning about the perils of blindly ignoring the government’s atrocities, including its treatment of Palestinians. He tells Scheer, “If you care about Israel, what you tell them is you’re sacrificing security for expansion,” Chomsky argues. “And it’s going to have a consequence. It’s going to lead to moral deterioration internally, and decline in status internationally, which is exactly what happened. […] You go back to the 1970s, Israel was one of the most admired states in the world. […] Now it’s a pariah state.”

Rather than practicing unquestioning allegiance, Chomsky recommends active questioning, telling Scheer, “You don’t love a state and follow its policies. … You criticize what’s wrong, try to change the policies, expose them; criticize it, change it.”

Chomsky was referring to Israel, but he could just as easily be talking about America, or even Americans’ attitude toward their preferred candidates. For his clear-eyed analysis of America under Trump, his decades-strong willingness to challenge authority and admit uncomfortable truths, and boundless intellectual energy, Noam Chomsky is our Truthdigger of the month.

The Disaster of Utopian Engineering

This column is drawn from notes that Chris Hedges wrote in preparing for a debate held today by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Hedges, speaking from Princeton, N.J., argued for the motion: “Be it resolved, politics isn’t working as usual. It’s time for a revolution.” Opposed was David Brooks, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times who spoke from Washington, D.C. A podcast of the contest will be available later.

Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations led by those who believe they found a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that vision. History is replete with disastrous utopians — the Jacobins, the Marxists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.

The ideology of neoliberalism, which makes no economic sense and requires a willful ignorance of social and economic history, is the latest iteration of utopian projects. It posits that human society achieves its apex when individual entrepreneurial actions are free from government constraints. Society and culture should be dictated by the primacy of property rights, open trade — which sends manufacturing jobs to sweatshops in China and the global south and permits the flow of money across borders — and unfettered global markets. Labor and product markets should be deregulated and freed from government oversight. Global financiers should be given control of the economies of nation-states. The role of the state should be reduced to ensuring the quality and integrity of money, along with internal and external security, and to privatizing control of land, water, public utilities, education and government services such as intelligence and often the military, prisons, health care and the management of natural resources. Neoliberalism turns capitalism into a religious idol.

This utopian vision of the market, of course, bears no relationship to its reality. Capitalists hate free markets. They seek to control markets through mergers and acquisitions, buying out the competition. They saturate the culture with advertising to manipulate public tastes and consumption. They engage in price fixing. They build unassailable monopolies. They carry out schemes, without checks or oversight, of wild speculation, predation, fraud and theft. They enrich themselves through stock buybacks, Ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset stripping and the imposition of crippling debt peonage on the public. In the United States, they saturate the electoral process with money, buying the allegiance of elected officials from the two ruling parties to legislate tax boycotts, demolish regulations and further consolidate their wealth and power.

These corporate capitalists spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fund organizations such as Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce and think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation to sell the ideology to the public. They lavish universities with donations, as long as the universities pay fealty to the ruling ideology. They use their influence and wealth, as well as their ownership of media platforms, to transform the press into their mouthpiece. And they silence heretics or make it hard for them to find employment. Soaring stock values, rather than production, become the new measure of the economy. Everything is financialized and commodified.

These utopians mutilate the social fabric through deindustrialization, turning once-great manufacturing centers into decayed wastelands, and the middle and working class, the bulwark of any democracy, into a frustrated and enraged precariat. They “offshore” work, carry out massive layoffs and depress wages. They destroy unions. Neoliberalism — because it was always a class project and this was its goal — redistributes wealth upward. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions,” Karl Polanyi writes in his book “The Great Transformation,” human beings “perish from the effects of social exposure” and die as “victims of acute social dislocation.”

Neoliberalism, as a class project, is a brilliant success. Eight families now hold as much wealth as 50% of the world’s population. The world’s 500 richest people in 2019 added $12 trillion to their assets, while nearly half of all Americans had no savings and nearly 70% could not have come up with $1,000 in an emergency without going into debt. David Harvey calls this “accumulation by dispossession.” This neoliberal assault, antagonistic to all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on amassing capital, has obliterated the self-corrective democratic mechanisms that once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible. It has turned human beings and the natural world into commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse. The ruling elites’ slavish devotion to corporate profit and the accumulation of wealth by the global oligarchy means they are unwilling or incapable of addressing perhaps the greatest existential crisis facing the human species — the climate emergency.

All competing centers of power, including government, have now been seized by corporate power, and corrupted or destroyed. We have undergone what John Ralston Saul calls a coup d’état in slow motion. It is over. They won.

At the same time, these utopians, attempting to project American power and global dominance, launched invasions and occupations throughout the Middle East that have descended into futile quagmires costing the United States between 5 trillion and 7 trillion dollars. This utopian project in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and, by proxy, in Yemen has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced or made refugees of millions, wrecked cities and nations, created failed states that incubate radical jihadist groups and fatally weakened American power. Indeed, these wars, some now in their 18th year, are the greatest strategic blunder in American history. The utopians — culturally, linguistically and historically ignorant of the countries they occupied — believed in their naiveté that they could implant democracy in places like Baghdad and see it emanate out across the Middle East. They assured us we would be greeted as liberators; the oil revenues would pay for reconstruction and Iran would be cowed and defanged. This was no more achievable or grounded in reality than the utopian scheme to unfetter the market and unleash worldwide prosperity and liberty.

Once a cabal — monarchial, communist, fascist or neoliberal — seizes power, its dismantling of the mechanisms that make reform possible leaves those who seek an open society no option but to bring the system down. The corporate state, like the communist regimes I covered in Eastern Europe, is not reformable from within. The failures that plague us are bipartisan failures. On all of the major structural issues, including war and the economy, there is little or no divergence between the two ruling political parties of the U.S. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an oligarchic elite, as Aristotle warned, leaves only two options — tyranny or revolution. And we are fast on the road to tyranny.

Neoliberal utopianism, because it suppresses the freedoms to organize, to regulate and to protect the common good and empowers the freedoms to exploit and consolidate wealth and power, is always fated, Polanyi writes, to end in authoritarianism or outright fascism. The good freedoms are lost. The bad ones take over.

Neoliberalism has given rise to the worst form of monopoly capitalism and greatest level of income inequality in American history. The banks and the agricultural, food, arms and communications industries have destroyed regulations that once impeded their monopolies, allowing them to fix prices, suppress wages, guarantee profits, abolish environmental controls and abuse their workers. They have obliterated free market competition.

Unfettered capitalism, as Karl Marx pointed out, destroys the so-called free market. It is hostile to the values and traditions of a capitalist democracy. Capitalism’s final stage, Marx wrote, is marked by the pillage of the systems and structures that make capitalism possible. It is not capitalism at all. The arms industry, for example, with its official $612 billion defense authorization bill — a figure that ignores numerous other military expenditures tucked away in other budgets, masking the fact that our real expenditure on national security expenses is over $1 trillion a year — has gotten the government to commit to spending $348 billion over the next decade to modernize our nuclear weapons and build 12 new Ohio-class nuclear submarines, estimated at $8 billion each. We spend some $100 billion a year on intelligence —read surveillance — and 70% of that money goes to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, which gets 99% of its revenues from the U.S. government. We are the largest exporters of arms in the world.

The fossil fuel industry swallows up $5.3 trillion a year worldwide in hidden costs to keep burning fossil fuels, according to the International Monetary Fund.  This money, the IMF notes, is in addition to the $492 billion in direct subsidies offered by governments around the world through write-offs, write-downs and land-use loopholes.

Taxpayer subsidies to the big banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs — are estimated at $64 billion a year, an amount roughly equal to their typical annual profits.

In 1980 freight trains were deregulated. The number of Class I railroads shrank from 40 to 7. Four account for 90% of the industry’s revenue. Nearly one-third of all shippers have access to only one railroad.

President Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 was touted as a way to open the cable industry to competition. Instead, it saw a massive consolidation of the industry into the hands of about half a dozen corporations that control what 90% of Americans watch or hear on the airwaves.

The airline industry, freed from regulation, was rapidly consolidated. Four airlines control 85% of the domestic market. They have divided the country into regional hubs where they extort fees, fix prices, cancel flights at will, leaving passengers stranded without compensation, and provide shoddy service.

The pharmaceutical and insurance corporations that manage our for-profit health care industry extracted $812 billion from Americans in 2017. This represents more than one-third (34.2%) of total expenditures for doctor visits, hospitals, long-term care and health insurance. If we had a public health system, such as in Canada, it would save us $600 billion in costs in a single year, according to a report by Physicians for a National Health Plan. Health administration costs in 2017 were more than fourfold higher per capita in the U.S. than in Canada ($2,479 versus $551 per person), the group notes. Canada implemented a single-payer “Medicare for All” system in 1962. In 2017, Americans spent $844 per person on insurers’ overhead. Canadians spent $146.

Neoliberalism cannot be defended as more innovative or more efficient. It has not spread democracy, and by orchestrating unprecedented levels of income inequality and political stagnation has vomited up demagogues and authoritarian regimes that falsely promise vengeance against ruling elites who betrayed the people. Our democracy under this assault has been replaced with meaningless political theater.

As the academics Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens detailed in their exhaustive 2017 study “Democracy in America?”:

the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans [have] little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have … much more political clout. … [T]he general public [is] … virtually powerless. … The will of majorities is … thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves. … Majorities of Americans favor specific policies designed to deal with such problems as climate change, gun violence, an untenable immigration system, inadequate public schools, and crumbling bridges and highways. … Large majorities of America favor various programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut “corporate welfare.” Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies. …

There should be no debate about how to effect change. Piecemeal and incremental reform is always preferable to the inevitable anarchy any power vacuum creates. The problem is that our utopian engineers in their giddy dismantling of an economic and democratic system, as well as their draining of state resources in the wars they prosecute overseas, have dynamited the tools that could save us. They have left us no option but to revolt and remove them from power.

We will carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience to bring down these corporate oligarchs or live in an Orwellian tyranny, at least until the climate emergency renders the human species extinct. Regulations, laws, planning and control are not the enemies of freedom. They keep capitalists from extinguishing freedom, denying justice and abolishing the common good. The freedom of the capitalist class to exploit human beings and the natural world without restraint transforms the freedom for the many into freedom for the few. That was always the point.

Budget Deficit to Break $1 Trillion Despite Strong Economy

WASHINGTON — An annual congressional report says the U.S. budget deficit is likely to burst through the symbolic $1 trillion barrier this year despite a healthy economy.

Tuesday’s Congressional Budget Office report follows a burst of new spending last year and the repeal in December of several taxes used to help finance the Affordable Care Act. Those have combined to deepen the government’s deficit spiral well on into the future, with trillion-dollar deficits likely for as far as the eye can see.

The annual CBO update of the government’s economic and fiscal health estimates a $1 trillion deficit for the ongoing fiscal year, which would bring the red ink above $1 trillion for the first time since 2012, when former President Barack Obama capped four consecutive years of $1 trillion-plus budget deficits. The government, slated to spend $4.6 trillion this year, would have to borrow 22 cents of every dollar it spends.

Most economists say the most relevant way to look at the deficit is to measure it against the size of the economy, with deficits at 3 percent or so of gross domestic product seen as sustainable. The latest report shows deficits averaging 4.8 percent of GDP over the course of the coming decade.

“As a result of those deficits, federal debt would rise each year, reaching a percentage of the nation’s output that is unprecedented in U.S. history,” the CBO report says.

Obama’s deficits came as the U.S. economy recovered from the deep recession of 2007-2009. The return of trillion-dollar deficit now comes as the economy is humming on all cylinders, with the CBO predicting that the jobless rate nationwide will average below 4 percent through at least 2022. The growth rate is predicted to average 2.2 percent this year.

“The economy’s performance makes the large and growing deficit all the more noteworthy,” said CBO Director Phillip Swagel. “Changes in fiscal policy must be made to address the budget situation, because our debt is growing on an unsustainable path.”

The government reported a $984 billion deficit for the 2019 budget year. Cumulative deficits over the coming decade are expected to total $13 trillion — a total that would have gone higher save for CBO’s belief that yields on Treasury notes will remain unusually low as the government refinances its $23 trillion debt.

The recent surge in the deficit has followed passage of the 2017 Trump tax bill, which has failed to pay for itself with additional economic growth and revenues as promised by administration figures like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The surge in deficits also follows a final rewrite last summer of a failed 2011 budget deal to increase spending of both defense and domestic programs.

Divided government isn’t helping the deficit picture as the Democratic-controlled House led the way in repealing $377 billion worth of “Obamacare” tax hikes, including a so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost health plans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was also a driving force in last summer’s budget accord, which is scored at adding $1.7 trillion to the deficit over the coming decade.

CBO holds a traditional view of economists that debt that’s too high has a “crowding out” effect on private sector investment in the economy and can lead to higher interest rates and maybe even a European-style debt crisis. But interest rates have remained low despite CBO’s alarms and more liberal economists hold a much more dovish view of the effects of higher deficits on the economy.

The CBO report landed amid an intensifying presidential campaign in which concerns about the deficit are not really an issue. President Donald Trump has promised to leave Social Security pensions and Medicare benefits off the table as his administration seeks ways to blunt the political impact of the eye-popping deficit figures.

The administration’s budget is being released next month but is likely to be largely ignored, especially as election-year politics take over.

Palestinians Call on World to Reject Trump ‘Peace’ Deal

The so-called “peace deal” authored by White House adviser Jared Kushner was met with protests and condemnation by Palestinians on Tuesday ahead of an expected announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, D.C.

With critics calling it the opposite of a peace plan as well as an effort for both leaders to distract from domestic legal and political scandals, the proposal was set to be unveiled jointly by the two leaders just hours after Netanyahu was formally indicted on corruption charges back home and amid the second week of an impeachment trial against Trump in the U.S. Senate.

Palestinian leaders urged the international community to boycott the plan that the pair are set to unveil, with Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh calling the deal “nothing but a plan to finish off the Palestinian cause.”

“This is a plan to protect Trump from impeachment and protect Netanyahu from prison. It is not a Middle East peace plan.”

—Mohammad Shtayyeh, Palestinian prime minister“This is a plan to protect Trump from impeachment and protect Netanyahu from prison. It is not a Middle East peace plan,” Shtayyeh said. “We reject it and we demand the international community not be a partner.”

The deal reportedly will allow Israel to annex large swaths of Palestinian territories, all of contested Jerusalem, and Israeli settlements.

Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman—vocal proponents of Israeli settlements in the West Bank—were largely responsible for drafting the deal, while Palestinian leaders were not invited to the discussions.

Trump said Monday that the deal was “very good for” Palestinians and called it “historic.”

“Palestinian freedom isn’t for Trump to give away or for Netanyahu to steal,” countered Rabbi Alissa Wise, acting co-executive director at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), on Twitter.

Palestinian freedom isn’t for Trump to give away or for Netanyahu to steal. #DOAPeacePlan

— Rabbi Alissa Wise (@AlissaShira) January 27, 2020

Sending love and rage to Palestinians all over the globe today. I’m certain that in response to these callous, vicious overreaches they just confirm that the world will rise to realize freedom for Palestine and us all. https://t.co/TwxeN4pn2C

— Rabbi Alissa Wise (@AlissaShira) January 28, 2020

Palestinian freedom isn’t for Trump to give away or for Netanyahu to steal. #DOAPeacePlan

— Rabbi Alissa Wise (@AlissaShira) January 27, 2020

Shtayyeh said the deal “contradicts the basics of international law and inalienable Palestinian rights,” and Palestinian leadership threatened to withdraw from the Oslo Accords—in which Israel recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a party to peace negotiations—over the plan.

At protests on the Gaza Strip, Palestinians held up pictures of Trump and Netanyahu with red marks crossing them out.

“We will not allow this deal to pass and we will resist it in every way in order not to open the way for it, as we consider it as a way to put an end to our national rights,” Talal Abu Zarifa, Democratic Front leader, told the Middle East Eye at a demonstration.

“We will not allow this deal to pass”

Palestinians gear up for mass protests to denounce Trump’s Israel-Palestine plan, which they say is an attempt to finish off their cause. pic.twitter.com/6huGvATeiA

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) January 28, 2020

Palestinians in Rafah (Gaza Strip) protesting Trump Mideast peace plan. More Palestinian protests expected later Tuesday and Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/l48dDpygTo

— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) January 28, 2020

On social media, JVP highlighted a number of actions taken by the Trump administration in the past three years to undermine Palestinians’ human rights, including cuts to humanitarian aid, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, and claiming Israel has ownership of Golan Heights in Syria.

We know that no peace can come without justice for Palestinians, and that means building and supporting a broad-based effort that allows for self-determination and equality. JVP commits to working towards this future for all in Israel/Palestine. #DOAPeacePlan pic.twitter.com/Hk4ADFpzcQ

— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) January 28, 2020

“We know that no peace can come without justice for Palestinians, and that means building and supporting a broad-based effort that allows for self-determination and equality,” tweeted the group. “JVP commits to working towards this future for all in Israel and Palestine.”

Trump Team: Impeachment Not About ‘Unsourced Manuscripts’

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s legal team neared the end of his impeachment trial defense Tuesday, painting him and his aides as hounded by investigation and taking a dismissive swipe at an unpublished book by John Bolton that is said to contradict a key defense argument.

“It is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” said Trump attorney Jay Sekulow. “That’s politics, unfortunately.”

He was referring to reports of a forthcoming book by former Trump’s former national security adviser, who writes that Trump told him that he wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine until it helped with investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden. Trump and his lawyers have repeatedly insisted he never tied the security aid to political investigations.

While scoffing at the manuscript, Trump and the Republicans have strongly resisted summoning Bolton to testify in person about what he saw and heard as Trump’s top national security adviser.

One of the president’s lawyers, Deputy White House Counsel Pat Philbin, told the senators that America’s Founding Fathers took care to make sure that impeachment was narrowly defined, with impeachable offenses clearly enumerated.

“There has to be a defined offense in advance,” Philbin said.

News of the Bolton’s manuscript clouded White House hopes for a big finish Tuesday as well as a swift end to the impeachment trial. Democrats are demanding witnesses, and some Republicans are expressing openness to the idea.

One Republican, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, is floating an idea to subpoena Bolton’s book manuscript so senators can see the evidence themselves — but only in private.

It’s an idea that may be gaining traction even as other Republicans have warned against a protracted legal dispute with the White House, which has tried to block administration officials.

GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote on Twitter that he “totally” supports Lankford’s proposal. Graham, a key Trump ally, said the Bolton document should be made available to the Senate, in a classified setting, “where each Senator has the opportunity to review the manuscript and make their own determination.”

However, Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, called the proposal, which would keep Bolton out of public testimony, “absurd.”

“We’re not bargaining with them. We want four witnesses, and four sets of documents, then the truth will come out,” Schumer said.

Senate Republicans were to meet behind closed doors to consider next steps.

The Bolton revelations distracted from hours of arguments Monday by Trump’s lawyers, who declared anew that no witness has testified to direct knowledge that Trump’s delivery of aid was contingent on investigations into Democrats. Bolton appeared poised to say exactly that if summoned by the Senate.

“We deal with transcript evidence, we deal with publicly available information,” Trump attorney Jay Sekulow said. “We do not deal with speculation.”

Trump is charged with abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine’s leader to help investigate Biden at the same time his administration was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid. A second charge accuses Trump of obstructing Congress in its probe.

On Monday, Trump’s attorneys, including high-profile lawyers Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz, launched a historical, legal and political attack on the entire impeachment process. They said there was no basis to remove Trump from office, defended his actions as appropriate and assailed Biden, who is campaigning for the Democratic nomination to oppose Trump in November.

Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi devoted her presentation to Biden and his son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukraine gas company when his father was leading the Obama administration’s diplomatic dealings with Kyiv. The legal team argued that Trump had legitimate reasons to be suspicious of the younger Biden’s business dealings and concerned about corruption in Ukraine and that, in any event, he ultimately released the aid without Ukraine committing to investigations the Republican president wanted.

Trump has sought, without providing evidence, to implicate the Bidens in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine. Though anti-corruption advocates have raised concerns, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the former vice president or his son.

Democrats say Trump released the money only after a whistleblower submitted a complaint about the situation.

Starr, whose independent counsel investigation resulted in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton — he was acquitted by the Senate — bemoaned what he said was an “age of impeachment.” Impeachment, he said, requires an actual crime and a “genuine national consensus” that the president must go. Neither exists here, Starr said.

“It’s filled with acrimony and it divides the country like nothing else,” Starr said of impeachment. “Those of us who lived through the Clinton impeachment understand that in a deep and personal way.”

Dershowitz, the final speaker of the evening, argued that impeachable offenses require criminal-like conduct — a view largely rejected by legal scholars. He said “nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense.”

“Purely non-criminal conduct, including abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, are outside the range of impeachable offenses,” Dershowitz said.

Even as defense lawyers laid out their case as planned, it was clear Bolton’s book had scrambled the debate over whether to seek witnesses. Trump’s legal team has rejected Bolton’s account, and Trump himself denied it.

“I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens,” Trump tweeted. “If John Bolton said this, it was only to sell a book.”

Republican senators face a pivotal moment. Pressure is mounting for at least four to buck GOP leaders and form a bipartisan majority to force the issue. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.

“John Bolton’s relevance to our decision has become increasingly clear,” GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she has always wanted “the opportunity for witnesses” and the report about Bolton’s book “strengthens the case.”

At a private GOP lunch, Romney made the case for calling Bolton, according to a person unauthorized to discuss the meeting and granted anonymity.

Other Republicans, including Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, said if Bolton is called, they will demand reciprocity to hear from at least one of their witnesses. Some Republicans want to call the Bidens.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hadn’t known know about Bolton’s book, his office said. But the GOP leader appeared unmoved by news of the book. His message at the lunch, said Indiana GOP Sen. Mike Braun, was, “Take a deep breath, and let’s take one step at a time.”

Once the president’s team wraps up its arguments, senators have 16 hours for written questions to both sides. By late in the week, they are expected to hold a vote on whether or not to hear from any witnesses.

Trump and his lawyers have argued repeatedly that Democrats are using impeachment to try to undo the results of the last presidential election and drive Trump from office.

Democrats, meanwhile, say Trump’s refusal to allow administration officials to testify only reinforces that the White House is hiding evidence. The White House has had Bolton’s manuscript for about a month, according to a letter from Bolton’s attorney.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Mary Clare Jalonick, Andrew Taylor, Matthew Daly, Laurie Kellman and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Trump Unveils Controversial Peace Plan for the Middle East

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unveiled his long-awaited Middle East peace plan Tuesday, calling for the creation of a State of Palestine with its capital in portions of east Jerusalem. He declared it a “win-win” opportunity for both Israel and the Palestinians.

The plan ends speculation as to whether his administration, in preparing a proposal without input from Palestinian leaders, would abandon a “two-state resolution” to the conflict.

Trump, releasing the plan before a pro-Israel audience at the White House with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his side, acknowledged that he has done a lot for Israel, but he said he wanted the deal to be a “great deal for the Palestinians.” Trump said the deal is a “historic opportunity” for Palestinians to achieve an independent state of their own.

The plan more than doubles the territory currently under Palestinian control, although it also recognizes Israeli sovereignty over major settlement blocs in the West Bank, something to which the Palestinians will almost certainly object. The Palestinians have already rejected the proposal, accusing Trump of being biased in favor of Israel as he has adopted policies that bolster Israel at their expense.

The plan does call for a four-year freeze in new Israeli settlement construction, during which time details of a comprehensive agreement would be negotiated. However, it was not immediately clear if the freeze could be extended if a final deal is not concluded in the four years.

The 50-page political outline goes further in concessions to the Palestinians than many analysts had believed was likely. However, it would require them to accept conditions they have been previously unwilling to consider, such as accepting West Bank settlements. It builds on a 30-page economic plan for the West Bank and Gaza that was unveiled last June and which the Palestinians have also rejected,

Under the terms of the “peace vision” that Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has been working on for nearly three years, the future Palestinian state would consist of the West Bank and Gaza, connected by a combination of above-ground roads and tunnels.

Netanyahu and his main political challenger in March elections, Benny Gantz, had signed off on the plan.

The White House event came as Trump’s impeachment trial continues in the Senate and Israel’s parliament had planned a hearing to discuss Netanyahu’s request for immunity from criminal corruption charges. Netanyahu withdrew that request hours before the proceedings were to begin, but Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is still expected to meet. The body had been likely to vote against immunity, dealing Netanyahu a blow.

In the run-up to the March 2 election, Netanyahu had called for annexing parts of the West Bank and imposing Israeli sovereignty on all its settlements there. Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, and the Jordan Valley in particular is considered a vital security asset.

Security responsibility for the Jordan Valley would remain in Israel’s hands for the foreseeable future but could be scaled back as the nascent Palestinian state builds its capacity, under the terms of the plan, which says that statehood will be contingent on the Palestinians meeting international governance criteria.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the plan’s release, said they expected negative responses from the Palestinians, as well as Turkey and Iran, but were hopeful that Jordan and Egypt, the only two Arab nations to have peace treaties with Israel, would not reject it outright. The officials said they expected Gulf Arab states like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and others to cautiously welcome the plan.

The reaction of Jordan, which would retain its responsibilities over Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque under the plan, will be particularly significant, according to the officials, who said Kushner and others were reaching out to Arab leaders ahead of the rollout.

The Palestinians see the West Bank as the heartland of a future independent state and east Jerusalem as their capital. Most of the international community supports their position, but Trump has reversed decades of U.S. foreign policy by siding more blatantly with Israel. The centerpiece of his strategy was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the American Embassy there. He’s also closed Palestinian diplomatic offices in Washington and cut funding to Palestinian aid programs.

Those policies have proven popular among Trump’s evangelical and pro-Israel supporters and could give him a much-needed boost from his base as he gears up for a reelection battle this year.

But the Palestinians refuse to even speak to Trump and they called on support from Arab leaders. The Palestinian leadership also has encouraged protests in the West Bank, raising fears that the announcement in Washington could spark a new round of violence. Ahead of the announcement, the Israeli military said it was reinforcing infantry troops along the Jordan Valley.

Catholic Leaders Haven’t Answered for the Church’s Child Abuse

This story is co-published with the Houston Chronicle.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

It took 40 years and three bouts of cancer for Larry Giacalone to report his claim of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a Boston priest named Richard Donahue.

Giacalone sued Donahue in 2017, alleging the priest molested him in 1976, when Giacalone was 12 and Donahue was serving at Sacred Heart Parish. The lawsuit never went to trial, but a compensation program set up by the archdiocese concluded that Giacalone “suffered physical injuries and emotional injuries as a result of physical abuse” and directed the archdiocese to pay him $73,000.

Even after the claim was settled and the compensation paid in February 2019, however, the archdiocese didn’t publish Donahue’s name on its list of accused priests. Nor did it three months later when Giacalone’s lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, criticized the church publicly for not adding Donahue’s name to the list.

Church leaders finally added Donahue to the list last month after ProPublica asked why he hadn’t been included. But that, too, sowed confusion. Despite the determination that Giacalone was entitled to compensation, Donahue’s name was added to a portion of the list for priests accused in cases deemed “unsubstantiated” — where the archdiocese says it does not have sufficient evidence to determine whether the clergy member committed the alleged abuse.

“To award a victim a substantial amount of money, yet claim that the accused is not a pedophile, is an insult to one’s intelligence,” said Garabedian, who has handled hundreds of abuse cases over the last 25 years. “It’s a classic case of the archdiocese ducking, delaying and avoiding issues.”

Donahue, in an interview with ProPublica, denied the allegation by Giacalone.

Over the last year and a half, the majority of U.S. dioceses, as well as nearly two dozen religious orders, have released lists of abusers currently or formerly in their ranks. The revelations were no coincidence: They were spurred by a 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report, which named hundreds of priests as part of a statewide clergy abuse investigation. Nationwide, the names of more than 5,800 clergy members have been released so far, representing the most comprehensive step toward transparency yet by a Catholic Church dogged by its long history of denying and burying abuse by priests.

But even as bishops have dedicated these lists to abuse victims and depicted the disclosures as a public acknowledgement of victims’ suffering, it has become clear that numerous alleged abusers have been omitted and that there is no standard for determining who each diocese considers credibly accused.

A spokesman for the Boston Archdiocese initially said Donahue wasn’t on its list of accused priests because he was still being investigated and subsequently called the delay an “oversight.”

Even when dioceses and religious orders identify credibly accused clergy members, the information they provide about those named varies widely. Some jurisdictions turn over far more specifics about problem priests — from where they worked to the number of their victims to the details of their wrongdoing — than others.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, or USCCB, has issued no instructions on disclosures related to credibly accused priests, leaving individual dioceses and religious orders to decide for themselves how much or how little to publish. The USCCB says it does not have the authority to order dioceses to release names or to resolve disputes over who should be on the lists, though in 2002 after a scandal in Boston, the conference did put in place new protocols intended to ensure alleged abuse by clergy was reported and tracked.

“Recognizing the authority of the local bishop, and the fact that state and local laws vary, the decision of whether and how to best release lists and comply with varying civil reporting laws have been the responsibility of individual dioceses,” said Chieko Noguchi, a USCCB spokeswoman.

While the USCCB can propose policies for church leaders in the U.S., the bishops themselves are appointed by the pope and answer to him.

ProPublica has collected the 178 lists released by U.S. dioceses and religious orders as of Jan. 20 and created a searchable database that allows users to look up clergy members by name, diocese or parish. This represents the first comprehensive picture of the information released publicly by bishops around the country. Some names appear multiple times. In many cases, that accounts for priests who were accused in more than one location. In other instances, dioceses have acknowledged when priests who served in their jurisdiction have been reported for abuse elsewhere.

Kathleen McChesney, a former FBI official who helped establish a new set of child protection protocols within the USCCB in the early 2000s, has urged bishops and religious orders for nearly two decades to create a comprehensive list of accused clergy. She said our database will allow the public to better track dioceses’ disclosures, rather than seeing each list in isolation.

“People don’t know where to look,” McChesney said. “The contribution of the one list will help a lot of people to perhaps identify someone that they believe abused them.”

Still, much crucial information remains missing. Despite the recent surge of releases, 41 dioceses and dozens more religious orders have yet to publish lists, including five of seven dioceses in Florida, home to more than 2 million Catholics.

The database also doesn’t include many accused clergy members whom bishops have yet to acknowledge, even if they’ve issued lists. An organization called Bishop Accountability has long maintained its own database of publicly accused priests, drawn from court records, news articles and church documents. The organization’s list includes more than 450 names connected to dioceses that have not released disclosures.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, an advocacy organization for victims of clergy abuse, has pushed dioceses to identify known abusers and turn over records on them for decades. This process has finally begun, but the church’s obdurate culture of concealment remains, said David Clohessy, who led the group for nearly 30 years.

“They continue to be as secretive as possible, parceling out the least amount of information possible and only under great duress,” Clohessy said. “They are absolute masters at hairsplitting — always have been and still are.”

“Do we now know the names of more predator priests than before? Yes, of course. Are we anywhere near full transparency? Absolutely not.”

A Lack of Standards

Until recently, only a few dozen bishops had released lists of priests with credible allegations against them. Many did so only when compelled by courts, as a condition of bankruptcy proceedings.

That changed after August 2018, when the Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, published a 900-page grand jury report detailing not only abuse but a systematic cover-up by church leaders throughout the state. The report came just weeks after the resignation of then- Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., and one of the highest ranking Catholic leaders ever felled by abuse allegations.

“The overall feel was like 2002 happening all over again,” Kevin Eckery, a Diocese of San Diego senior administrator, said, referring to the intense scrutiny that followed a Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation into sexual abuse by priests. “You could see that there was a need for a response that was about action and not a response that was about more words.”

Many of the 178 dioceses that have released new or updated lists of accused clergy since last year have cited the Pennsylvania grand jury report as a reason for doing so.

Still, without a consensus among church leaders on what constitutes a credible accusation, bishops have used vastly different standards to determine who should be named.

The Archdiocese of Seattle, which released its list prior to the grand jury report, began by dividing allegations into three categories: cases in which priests admitted the allegations or where allegations were “established” by reports from multiple victims; cases that clearly could not have happened; and cases that fell into a gray area, like those that were never fully investigated at the time they were reported. The archdiocese decided it would name priests whose cases fell into the first category and leave out the second group, but it sought additional guidance on the third set of cases.

“There’s the question of who determines it to be credible,” said Mary Santi, the chancellor and chief of staff for the Archdiocese of Seattle. “We decided that we couldn’t be the determiners of that.”

The Seattle Archdiocese brought in McChesney to help choose which names to disclose. Dozens of dioceses have turned to outside advisers, hiring former judges, former local law enforcement agents and law firms while others relied on internal review boards, composed of mostly non-clergy members.

Ultimately, dioceses have set different limits on what to publish. The Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas disclosed the names of priests even in cases in which officials could not substantiate the allegations themselves. In New Hampshire, the Diocese of Manchester’s bishop also opted for greater transparency than most, disclosing clergy members who were currently under investigation and who had died before an inquiry was complete.

Other jurisdictions, however, drew tighter lines, sometimes based on idiosyncratic criteria. In Nebraska, the Archdiocese of Omaha leaves out names of seminarians with “substantiated” allegations of abuse against minors. In Ohio, the Diocese of Toledo did not identify priests who died before a victim came forward because they “posed no threat,” the diocese’s website explained.

SNAP leaders have pushed the diocese to publish those names, so far to no avail. “Their lack of transparency is devastating to those left in their wake,” Claudia Vercellotti, a SNAP leader in Toledo, said. “It defies logic that even when the church leader is dead, they are still protecting them over offering healing and transparency to the victims.”

Many dioceses have chosen not to include members of religious orders, such as the Jesuits, who have been accused of abuse. Religious order members, who make up 30% of U.S. priests, are taught and ordained within those orders, but they often spend much of their time working in the parishes and schools of local dioceses.

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee, at the direction of its court-appointed bankruptcy committee, discloses extensive information about each accused priest it names, including timelines of their careers and documentation of when and where they abused their victims.

But it leaves out religious order priests and priests who died before victims reported the abuse. Names of the deceased are only added if enough victims come forward to “show a trend,” though the archdiocese does not define how many allegations that would require.

Jerry Topczewski, chief of staff for Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki, said there’s room for debate over which accused clergy members should be named, but each diocese has to draw the line somewhere.

“At some point you have to make a decision,” Topczewski said. “Someone’s always going to say your list isn’t good enough, which we have people say, ‘Your list is incomplete.’ Well, I only control the list l can control and that’s diocesan priests.”

It’s impossible to know how many accused clergy members dioceses have opted not to put on their lists.

Bishop Accountability applies different standards for inclusion on its list than church leaders, tracking public accusations against nuns and other clergy members often left off the official rolls.

As a result, there are sometimes substantial gaps between the group’s tallies and those of dioceses.

The Archdiocese of Boston currently lists 171 names. Bishop Accountability lists 279, including dozens of religious order priests omitted from the official list as well as several priests who died before victims came forward.

“For every person who’s left off a list, bishops ought to be aware that they are retraumatizing survivors and doubling the insult and doubling the pain,” Terence McKiernan, the founder of Bishop Accountability, said.

Lost in the Archives

Over his 40-year career, Alfredo Prado was accused of abusing children repeatedly, in nearly every corner of Texas where he was assigned by his order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

Today, he’s named on six separate diocesan lists of credibly accused priests. Yet each jurisdiction gives different information about him, making it difficult to piece together the arc of his career, the totality of his wrongdoing or what became of him.

The year Prado was ordained is shown on one list as 1958 and on two lists as 1957. The Diocese of San Angelo and the Diocese of Victoria refer to him as “Alfred” rather than “Alfredo.” San Antonio is the only diocese that discloses the total number of children he was accused of abusing within its jurisdiction, five.

His status is also characterized differently from one diocese to another. He’s described as suspended by the Diocese of Corpus Christi, dismissed from his religious order and the clerical state by the Archdiocese of San Antonio, and laicized (or returned to the lay state) by the Diocese of San Angelo. The Diocese of Amarillo adds that he fled to Costa Rica, but it doesn’t say when (according to news reports, it was in the early 2000s). The Diocese of San Angelo says Prado died, but doesn’t list the year. Only the Diocese of Victoria provides a complete bio for Prado, noting each time his status changed, though the list does not confirm he’s dead.

ProPublica contacted Prado’s order, which has not released its own list; an administrator said the order did not know if Prado was alive or dead.

Prado’s story is a striking example of inconsistencies in the information that bishops disclose about accused clergy members. Perhaps most remarkable is that it happened in Texas, where church leaders have made an effort to coordinate their releases. Nationally, the disparities in disclosures are even more pronounced.

At one end is the Diocese of Sacramento in California, which issues a release on each credibly accused clergy member, outlining identifying information that helps distinguish one priest from another such as their ordination dates, seminaries, birthdays and every place they served within the diocese. Leaders also disclose each accusation submitted against the clergy member, including the year it was reported, the nature of the abuse and the victim’s age and gender.

The Diocese of Ogdensburg in upstate New York is at the other end of the spectrum. Its list provides the first and last name of accused priests, with hardly any additional information.

Most disclosures fall somewhere in between. The Diocese of San Bernardino in California, for example, outlines each clergy members’ current status in the church, the assignments they held within the diocese, the dates of abuse and when the diocese reported the incident to law enforcement.

Dioceses consistently label clergy who have died as “deceased,” which accounts for about half of the priests in ProPublica’s database. Jurisdictions are far less uniform in giving information about living members’ current locations or standing in the church. Over 700 clergy members’ status isn’t given or is marked as “unknown.”

Details about credibly accused priests’ abuse are scarce. Church leaders have disclosed the number of allegations made against roughly 10% of the clergy members they’ve named, according to a ProPublica data analysis.

In the early 2000s, dioceses across the country filled out detailed surveys compiled by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the first-ever nationwide study of sexual abuse by clergy. The USCCB mandated the study as one of the new safety initiatives outlined in the 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Dioceses have continued reporting new allegations annually to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

Two John Jay researchers who helped diocesan employees fill out the initial surveys say that sometimes the lack of details about abuse by priests stems from sparse recordkeeping or different ways of defining abuse, especially when it comes to older allegations.

“It was thought about differently, so it was recorded differently than it would be today,” one of the researchers, Karen Terry, said.

Still, dioceses have other information that they often do not disclose, including schools or parishes clergy members were assigned to while serving in a diocese.

McChesney, whose firm, Kinsale Management Consulting, has worked with a few dozen dioceses and religious orders on their disclosures over more than a decade, says dioceses typically keep thorough records of who is serving and when.

“If you want to find out if somebody was baptized in 1889 in La Crosse, Wisconsin, you can find that,” she said.

Disclosing those details can help survivors, especially those who were young at the time of their abuse, to distinguish between clergy with common or similar names, McChesney said.

Only about 58% of the clergy members listed have information about what parishes or schools they served in. Often, the assignment histories provided by dioceses list only a priest’s appointments within that diocese, not where they worked or what positions they held over the rest of their careers.

“It’s so simple,” McChesney said. “All it takes is a good research look and frankly, if you look sometimes at websites of dioceses and universities in the area, you can put that together.”

Mary Gautier, a senior research associate at the Georgetown center, said smaller dioceses with limited budgets don’t always have the money or staff to dig through their archives.

“One thing that the church is very good at is recordkeeping … but it’s very, very time consuming and labor intensive to really go through years and years and years of personnel records and track all this out,” Gautier said. “And I mean doing hand searches. There’s none of this computerized, of course.”

Decades of Rage

After his years in Boston, Donahue spent much of the last 20 years of his career serving in Honduras, where he established and ran schools funded by his organization, the Olancho Aid Foundation. He was back in the United States for medical care in 2015 when he was informed of the first of two abuse allegations made against him. The second accusation, by Giacalone, came in 2017.

In the interview with ProPublica, Donahue denied both men’s allegations and said he assumed his accusers had confused him with someone else or were looking for a payoff from the church. One accuser says he was abused for several years, up until 1981, but Donahue noted that in 1980, he moved to another assignment, elsewhere in Massachusetts.

“I never met either one of them,” Donahue said in the interview at his house in Cape Cod. “From a faith perspective, I’m trying to think there’s a reason I’ve gone through this cross, for the last three years, with these false allegations. Why me? I don’t know.”

After the first abuse allegation, in 2015, Donahue was prohibited by the archdiocese from participating in public ministry or entering parish or school property and was barred from returning to his work in Honduras.

The accuser who came forward in 2015, also represented by Garabedian, has submitted a claim through the archdiocese’s compensation program and is waiting for the church to decide if the claim is credible, Garabedian said.

Giacalone, now 55, says Donahue’s abuse led to decades of rage, alcoholism and drug use. He said he started drinking the day Donahue touched him. “What was I going to turn to?” he told ProPublica. “I thought I’d get relief. The first couple times, yeah, it helped me forget. But getting stinking drunk doesn’t really do anything for you.”

Giacalone said that he was held back in school and dropped out at one point, and that he had trouble holding down work and had run-ins with the police from an early age. In December 2010, he faced assault charges after his wife told police he had threatened and pushed her; the charges were dropped after she refused to go forward with a case.

He doesn’t blame the dispute with his wife or other low points in his life directly on his sexual abuse, but says it colored everything that followed. “It all stems, mostly, from that incident,” he said.

When a reporter told Giacalone that the Boston Archdiocese had found his accusation against Donahue to be “unsubstantiated,” even after the decision that Giacalone had to be compensated, he shook his head.

“I feel bad for their parishioners,” he said. “They are living a lie too.”

Katie Zavadski of ProPublica and Nicole Hensley of The Houston Chronicle contributed reporting.

Logos for the Dioceses of San Angelo, Victoria and Amarillo by Roberto221. Logos for the Archdiocese of San Antonio and the Diocese of Corpus Christi by Alekjds. Logo for the Diocese of Lubbock by Jayarathina.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Is a Product of Our Crappy Health Care System

This article originally appeared on Salon.

“What the f**k are you doing to people?” the slyly grinning Gwyneth Paltrow asks in the trailer for her new Netflix series, “The Goop Lab.” I’ve been asking myself the same about her for years now. I finally think I get it, though. Goop is a monster of our own making.

When Goop launched in 2008, it was a chatty newsletter, another little bon bon of thoughts and ideas for your inbox in the peak era of Daily Candy. Over time, it evolved into something else — a friendly, unapologetically new agey powerhouse lifestyle brand and a true pioneer in the field of “wellness” and “self-care,” as defined by rich, thin, blonde women.

Paltrow’s transformation from sun-dappled, Oscar-winning, pop star-marrying, Hollywood royalty to bestselling cookbook author to person whom a disturbing number of women trust for health advice has been a long time in coming. As a colleague observed recently, “It’s like she’s now assumed her final form.” I can think of few other entrepreneur/stars who so adroitly straddle her line of self-awareness and cluelessness. Goop’s own history of itself proudly notes the moment in 2013 when “Star Magazine calls GP the most hated celebrity the same week People names her most beautiful” and ends with the fanciful future date of its “first anti-gravity colonic.” “I am who I am,” Paltrow said in 2009. “I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.” That’s a statement that’s almost admirable in a weird way, but in another way makes you want to burn everything down.

Paltrow doesn’t really expect her acolytes to be $25,000 a year types either, though she has her share of low tax bracket rubberneckers, to be sure. I am admittedly one of them. A mere month ago, I was enthusing right here about a Goop approved dental floss. The brand appeals to the pipe dream that with just the colon cleanse, you too could get your metaphoric and literal sh*t serenely, vibrantly together.

Because I have my own unique health story, I am sometimes invited to talk to bigshots from hospitals and healthcare organizations about patient engagement. Most of them are great and sincerely trying to make an often needlessly complex, traumatizing experience better. And some of them just want someone to tell them how to get their patients to obligingly do what they tell them to do. The idea that the system is what’s flawed and in need of modification doesn’t really seem to enter their minds. And this, I think, is how we wind up with such alarmingly terrible alternatives.

Why are people using commercial genetic testing kits — regardless of very serious implications for their personal privacy and that of their families — instead of coming to see their doctors? Maybe because when you buy a genetic testing kit, you’re a consumer, not a patient? Which designation offers the appearance of more agency and control, and which sound painful and invasive? Why are parents falling for dangerous flat-out lies about vaccines and putting their children at serious health risk? Sure, it’s in part because gullibility and narcissism are a potent cocktail for many. But also, the routinized, impersonal nature of plenty of pediatric practices can be scary, especially to nervous new parents. Not every doctor does a great job of balancing clear science with basic empathy.

And then there’s just the overall crap way that patients — women in particular — are treated by the healthcare system. Their symptoms are brushed off, their pain minimized. It’s a system far crueler to women of color and the underinsured. But I don’t know a single female without at least one enraging anecdote. There’s the hospital that insisted a friend’s screaming young daughter keep getting up and walking around, after failing to note she had five broken ribs after an accident. There’s the gynecologist who delayed, then botched another friend’s surgery, a mistake that ultimately killed her. Another gynecologist, another friend, and a diagnosis based on longstanding and quite wrong information about female anatomy and sexual function that nearly killed her too.

I’d add the male doctor who sighed, when I came to the hospital after a miscarriage in my early 30s, “You yuppies think you have all the time in the world.” Or how I go for my therapy on a dark, cinderblock-lined floor that looks like a set from a horror movie that takes place in a prison. Last night, I was out with a friend who remarked how her schizophrenic sister, who lives in Europe, would likely not have been able to be hospitalized, nor have a job to return to, if she lived here in the U.S. This very morning, I met with my GP about a health concern and had to repeatedly ask him to explain the arcane medical terms he was blithely tossing around to refer to my body and my problem. I think of these things, and I begin to understand how women with more leverage in the world would be eager to explore friendlier-looking alternative options for their care, however crackpot they may be. Which brings me to that notorious candle.

I have no inclination to steam my vagina or put a jade egg in it or engage it any other Goopy nonsense. Nor do I concur with Gwyneth Paltrow that calling a $75 candle “This Smells Like My Vagina” is “a little bit punk rock,” no matter how many mosh pits redolent with the scent of genitals I may have flung myself around in back in the day.

But I do understand that women’s bodies and their aromas and their excretions are a subject of terror and disgust, not just in the big dumb general population but in the supposedly safe and protected one of medicine as well. I spent two years in an otherwise excellent clinical trial where I was asked weekly about my bowels and never once about my periods. Last fall, I had to have an invasive procedure, and the person doing my intake never once looked up from the forms in front of her, as if mortified on my behalf.

A brand worth a reported $250 million doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not hard to see how someone — a woman — exhausted by a cold and impersonal system that treats her precious, amazing body as distasteful would be drawn to an apparently relatable yoga mom who also wants to chat about sheet pan dinners and eyelash curlers. Who offers the illusion of empowered emancipation. It’s not hard to see why opening up your chakras sounds more appealing than some once a day pill that’s constantly being peddled on Hulu.

Plenty of Goop’s sketchy, commerce-driven claims have been roundly debunked in recent years. In 2018, the company was ordered to pay $145,000 after claims regarding those infamous vaginal wellness eggs, as well as an “Inner Judge Flower Essence Blend” for depression, were found to be “unsubstantiated.” The company was also called out by NASA itself after it claimed its “Body Vibes” stickers were “made with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut’s vitals during wear.” A NASA spokesman said in 2017, “Not only is the whole premise like snake oil, the logic doesn’t even hold up.”

And yet, on “The Goop Lab,” a “body worker and chiropractor” says he can “influence how energy is moving so that your body can heal faster” and shares his hypothesis that “If you just change the frequency of vibration of the body itself, it changes how the cells regrow.” In another episode, Dr. Valter Longo, while warning of the serious dangers of calorie restriction, also notes that it “prevents completely diabetes and cuts cancer and cardiovascular disease in half.” Studies of controlled, well-monitored fasting are indeed exciting, but they are still often based on small groups and other variables, and nowhere near as decisively all encompassing as Longo casually suggests.

When you consider how emotional, divisive, and deeply high stakes the issues like insurance, pharmaceutical regulation, and the opioid epidemic have become – especially this election year – it’s not difficult to see the how how critical the conversation around our care has become. There’s a reason patients have lost faith in modern medicine. It’s easy to laugh off, or more likely shudder, at Paltrow’s “Goop Lab” promise of “optimization of self.” But know that this juggernaut exists because of the failures of so many other systems. “This series is designed to entertain and inform, not provide medical advice,” the show warns at the top of each episode. But in a world where patients where considered people and medical advice could also be entertaining and informative, we wouldn’t be suckers for a Goop Lab at all.

“The Goop Lab” is currently streaming on Netflix.

 

Bryant’s Pilot May Have Gotten Lost in the Fog

CALABASAS, Calif.—Coroner’s officials worked to recover victims’ remains Monday from the hillside outside Los Angeles where a helicopter carrying former NBA superstar Kobe Bryant and eight others crashed in a wreck that aviation experts said may have been caused by the pilot becoming disoriented in the fog.

While the cause of the tragedy is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, some experts raised questions of whether the helicopter should have even been flying. The weather was so foggy that the Los Angeles Police Department and the county sheriff’s department had grounded their own choppers.

Bryant’s Sikorsky S-76 went down Sunday morning, killing the retired athlete along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and everyone else aboard and scattering debris over an area the size of a football field.

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Kobe Bryant, His Daughter and 7 Others Die in Helicopter Crash



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Crews recovered three bodies on Sunday and resumed the effort on Monday amid an outpouring of grief and shock around the world over the loss of the basketball great who helped lead the Los Angeles Lakers to five NBA titles during his dazzling 20-year career.

The pilot, identified as Ara Zobayan, had asked for and received special clearance to fly in heavy fog just minutes before the crash. Several aviation experts said it is not uncommon for helicopter pilots to be given such permission, though some thought it unusual that it would be granted in airspace as busy as that over Los Angeles.

But Kurt Deetz, who flew for Bryant dozens of times in the same chopper that went down, said permission is often granted in the area.

“It happened all the time in the winter months in LA,” Deetz said. “You get fog.”

The helicopter left Santa Ana in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, shortly after 9 a.m., heading north and then west. Bryant was believed to be headed for his youth sports academy in nearby Thousand Oaks, which was holding a basketball tournament Sunday in which Bryant’s daughter, known as Gigi, was competing.

Air traffic controllers noted poor visibility around Burbank to the north and Van Nuys to the northwest. At one point, the controllers instructed the chopper to circle because of other planes in area before proceeding.

The aircraft crashed in Calabasas, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles, around 9:45 a.m. at about 1,400 feet (426 meters), according to data from Flightradar24. When it struck the ground, it was flying at about 184 mph and descending at a rate of more than 4,000 feet per minute, the data showed.

Bryant had been known since his playing days for taking helicopters instead of braving the notoriously snarled Los Angeles traffic. “I’m not going into LA without the Mamba chopper,” he joked on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in a 2018 interview, referring to his own nickname, Black Mamba.

Randy Waldman, a helicopter flight instructor who teaches at the nearby Van Nuys airport, said its likely the pilot got disoriented in the fog and the helicopter went into a fatal dive.

“It’s a common thing that happens in airplanes and helicopters with people flying with poor visibility,” Waldman said. “If you’re flying visually, if you get caught in a situation where you can’t see out the windshield, the life expectancy of the pilot and the aircraft is maybe 10, 15 seconds, and it happens all the time, and it’s really a shame.”

Waldman said it was the same thing that happened to John F. Kennedy Jr. when his plane dropped out of the sky near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in 1999.

“A lot of times somebody who’s doing it for a living is pressured to get their client to where they have to go,” Waldman said. “They take chances that maybe they shouldn’t take.”

David Hoeppner, an expert on helicopter design, said he won’t fly on helicopters.

“Part of it is the way they certify and design these things,” said Hoeppner, a retired engineering professor at the University of Utah. “But the other part is helicopter pilots often fly in conditions where they shouldn’t be flying.”

Jerry Kidrick, a retired Army colonel who flew helicopters in Iraq and now teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said the helicopter’s rapid climb and fast descent suggest the pilot was disoriented.

When that happens, he said, pilots must instantly switch from visual cues to flying the aircraft using only the machine’s instruments.

“It’s one of the most dangerous conditions you can be in,” Kidrick said. “Oftentimes, your body is telling you something different than what the instruments are telling you. You can feel like you’re leaning to the left or the right when you’re not. If the pilot isn’t trained well enough to believe the instruments, you get in a panic situation.”

On Sunday, firefighters hiked in with medical equipment and hoses, and medical personnel rappelled to the site from a helicopter. About 20 investigators were on the site early Monday. The Los Angeles County medical examiner, Dr. Jonathan Lucas, said it could take at least a couple of day to to recover the remains.

Among those killed in the crash were John Altobelli, 56, longtime head coach of Southern California’s Orange Coast College baseball team; his wife, Keri; and daughter, Alyssa, who played on the same basketball team as Bryant’s daughter; and Christina Mauser, a girls’ basketball coach at a Southern California elementary school.

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Condon reported from New York and Koenig from Dallas. Associated Press writer Brian Melley also contributed to this story.