Chris Hedges's Blog, page 447

Here’s How to Make Sure Your Vote Is Properly Counted

Editor’s Note: The 2018 midterm elections are quickly approaching. These non-presidential elections historically give voters a chance to change the country’s course. They will decide whether or not Republicans keep a majority in Congress, as well as determine important governor’s races and more.

A Voter’s Guide to the 2018 Election, written by Steven Rosenfeld, senior writing fellow of Voting Booth, is intended to help new voters, infrequent voters and veteran voters have a better idea of what they must do to be able to vote and have their vote counted. The following is an excerpt from the guide, available in full here.

Polling Place Issues

Sometimes voting is a breeze. You show up, sign in and vote, and that’s it. Other times it’s slow, delayed, confusing and chaotic. Either way, patience and some knowledge of the process is key.

People who vote in polling places and local precincts have a different experience than people who vote by mail (or vote early at county offices). In general, the biggest concerns for voting by mail is having the ballot envelope properly filled out and postmarked.

Voting at polling places is another story. Across America’s 6,467 election jurisdictions and 168,000 voting precincts, the experiences can really vary. There can be heckling by partisans on the street outside—or not. There can be lines and delays to check-in—or not. There can be informed poll workers (citizens nominally paid to run the process) at sign-in tables, or inside as precinct judges—or not. There can be voting machines that work—or not. There can be sufficient backup ballots and knowledgeable officials—or not.

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Whether you are in a more functional or less functional polling place, the voting process is the same. So let’s go through it, especially for new voters. It starts with knowing when Election Day is. (That sounds obvious, but partisan disruptors have been known to tell people that their party votes on Tuesday—when Election Day is—and other parties vote on Wednesday.) This leads to a related point. You don’t have to stop or talk to anybody on the way into a polling place or while waiting in line. Political campaigns are legally required to keep a certain distance from the entrance.

Poll Location and Check-In

But let’s back up. You registered. That means you might receive, by mail, a voter guide with a sample ballot, which often includes statements from candidates, and pro and con positions on the non-candidate issues. That mailing also has one’s polling place location. Some states may only mail a postcard with the poll location. Voters who do not get this information should call their local election office. There are many polling place locator apps online, but it’s best to check directly with your local election officials.

On Election Day, give yourself enough time. (If you are going to be pressed, think about voting early if your state allows that.) When you get to your polling place, you have to check in. This is where you show your ID, if that’s required, or sign your name in a poll book, or sometimes both, and get a regular ballot. Then, you go inside, find a booth to privately mark a paper ballot or use a touch-screen computer, and turn in that ballot (in the folder given to you). Poll workers put the paper ballots into a scanner. You get an “I voted” sticker and you’re done. Voters with disabilities use special consoles.

What can go wrong? Well, every step of this process—for reasons that can range from simple human error, to poor planning by election officials, to bungling poll workers, to machines that malfunction, to rare but still real partisan power plays. In all of these cases, patience and perseverance are the key to casting a vote that will be counted.

Let’s start with long lines. Why would there be long lines? Maybe it’s a certain time of day and people are just showing up all at once. Maybe there are too many questions on the ballot and too few machines or voting booths, causing a voting traffic jam. No matter what, you have to be patient. Anyone in line will be allowed to vote, even if it’s past the official closing time. Check the weather. If it’s cold or wet, take a jacket and an umbrella.

Sometimes, long lines result from election officials making mistaken voter turnout estimates, as that translates into how many voting machines/booths are deployed. There is some chance that scenario will happen this fall, because midterm years usually are the lowest-turnout November elections. That’s mostly been true even in 2018, where there has been greater turnout by Democrats and less turnout by Republicans.

The Backup: Provisional Ballots

Once you’re inside, you have to check in to get a ballot. What happens if you know you have properly registered, but your name and street address are not in the precinct poll book? First, take a deep breath, and know there’s a process to fix this.

The first thing to check is if you’re in the correct polling place and precinct. (Many polls have multiple precincts.) If you are in the right location, but not in the poll book, you can re-register in states offering Election Day registration (see this list) and then get a ballot. If you’re not in one of those states, you will be given what is called a provisional ballot. (In 27 states, partisan “poll watchers” also can challenge a voter’s credentials, triggering a provisional ballot. That’s very rare, but we’ll get to what to do if it happens in a second.)

What is a provisional ballot? They are ballots combined with a partial voter registration form. A 2002 federal law requires every state to offer backup provisional ballots. A voter fills in some different identifying information (address, birthday, etc.—states vary here), so officials can verify your registration before counting your ballot. The most common reasons for issuing a provisional ballot are: voters showing up at the wrong precinct and demanding to vote; people who don’t have the required state ID; people not listed on a precinct voter roll; and people claiming they never got an absentee ballot in the mail. Provisional ballots also have been used as backup if electronic voting machines fail.

People filing provisional ballots have to make sure they are turned in at the right desk—for their precinct. In half the states, turning in a provisional ballot at the wrong precincts means it won’t be counted. This scenario has been called the “right church, wrong pew” problem: You’re in the right polling place but can’t turn it in at any table. The solution is asking the poll workers—and checking that they’re properly signed and turned in.

Most states make an effort to verify and count all of their provisional ballots. But that is not always true—because some states, like Georgia, will not count them if officials have not verified all of the voter’s registration information in three days following Election Day. In other states, like Illinois, voters might have to show up at election offices with additional identifying documentation within a week of Election Day for the ballots to count. Lots of people never make that trip.

Still, provisional ballots are the backup system in all 50 states. So if something goes wrong, despite being proactive with registering and having the right ID with you, fill them out carefully and turn them in. Chances are they will be counted more than not.

If, for some reason, a voter is having a problem with harassment while waiting in line, the precinct check-in process, or getting answers about provisional ballots, there are Election Day hotlines to call lawyers volunteering for a nationwide Election Protection project run by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. That toll-free number is 1-866-OUR-VOTE (687-8683).

Election protection lawyers will tell you exactly what to do, and if necessary, are ready to go into court on your behalf. They will also alert the media about egregious problems, from harassment of voters to undue partisan challenges to any real breakdown in the process.

(In 2018, they are aware a federal court order that for the past 30 years has restricted the Republican National Committee from unduly challenging voters under a “ballot security” pretext—saying people signing in at polls must present additional credentials [usually more ID]—may be repealed. If that happens to you—call them. They will be on it.)

Voting Machine Issues

Once signed in, voters get a paper ballot in a folder and are directed to private booths to fill it out, or they go to electronic voting machines where they touch the screen to make their selections.

Voting machine technology is a controversial topic. But recently there’s more good news than bad with the voting machines used across America. Three-quarters of the country now votes on ink-marked paper ballots, and that figure is growing. Paper ballots are the best way to ensure there is a record of every vote cast. Scanners count these ballots, which can be further examined in recounts and audits. (The newest scanners even compile digital images of all the marked ovals race by race, which have helped to transparently resolve who has won very close contests.)

The bad news surrounds the oldest paperless voting systems, which still are used in 13 states—and entirely across five states (Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, New Jersey, Delaware). The biggest problems with paperless technology are that there is no backup in case the computer memory fails, and the vote counting software is susceptible to hacking, which has been shown to be a possibility in academic settings. (See this chart of voting technology by state and county.)

What does this mean for voters now? It’s counterintuitive, but the visible breakdowns on paperless machines are well known by now, as are their causes and fixes. For example, a decade ago, it was not uncommon for touch-screen users to select one candidate but see another candidate’s name appear. However frustrating it may be, the issues that have bothered activists and academics the most—hacking the results—are concerns voters cannot do anything about while they are using these machines on Election Day.

If you are voting on a touch-screen system and experience a problem, what do you do? You pause, ask poll workers for help, and either use another machine or insist on using a paper ballot backup. That sounds frustrating. Yet there is only so much a voter can do in that moment. You don’t have to be shy here. Voters make mistakes marking ballots all the time. Poll workers give them fresh ballots. They have a process for spoiled ballots. The pragmatic answer here is to speak up if something isn’t right with a machine.

With few exceptions in 2018, electronic voting machine breakdowns are not likely to be a major issue for most voters this fall. That conclusion even extends to the one threat that no voter can do anything about—the prospect of intentionally altered or hacked results. Why? Because since April, most states and the federal government have undertaken unprecedented cyber-security precautions surrounding the computers used in voting. Congress appropriated $380 million to secure these systems from Russian hacking. Ironically, it took a foreign power for election officials to take hacking seriously.

The Long View

The voting process has requirements, steps to be followed, potential bottlenecks and procedural hurdles, and backups if things go wrong. Those complexities raise larger questions, starting with, “Can voters trust this process?”

The answer is yes. We have to. We have no choice. Also, across America, most of the people running the nuts and bolts of elections are career civil servants dedicated to voting. They are not cut from the same cloth as politicians and political appointees who see elections as the pliable path to obtaining power. While there is some overlap, civil servants, as a profession and culture, believe in participatory democracy.

Despite the process’ pluses and minuses, voting is how citizens change or sustain our political system’s leaders. If the stakes in voting weren’t high, or if voting didn’t have an impact, you wouldn’t find all these political efforts in some states to make the process harder for the opposing party’s base.

As we look toward 2018’s midterms, the good news is that voting has become easier and more trustable in most of the country. That reality can be seen in more options to register, more ways to vote and wider use of paper ballots. In other parts of the U.S. where voting is more arduous, voters are not without help. When it comes to getting voter ID in states with stricter laws, non-profit groups are poised to help people. If there are Election Day instances of harassment or obstruction, civil rights lawyers can be easily and quickly reached. There are also fail-safe systems, especially provisional ballots, which, when properly filled out, will be validated and counted in most states using them.

To read the complete text of “A Voter’s Guide to the 2018 Election,” click here to view online, or click here view/download the full guide as a pdf.

The Shameless Opportunism of Nikki Haley

In the Coen brothers’ acerbic spy-thriller send-up, “Burn After Reading,” George Clooney, playing an unfaithful, fitness-obsessed blockhead, disabuses his lover, a vicious Tilda Swinton, that her CIA analyst husband has quit his job to pursue “a higher patriotism.” “Yeah,” he tells her, “well, most of the people in this town who quit were fired.”

It is a truism wrapped in a falsehood. John Malkovich’s Princetonian analyst, the perfectly named Osborne Cox, did in fact quit, but only because he was about to be fired, or at least severely demoted.

Widely considered a minor Coen feature, “Burn After Reading” received mostly lukewarm reviews in that hopey-changey year of 2008 for its bleak, even misanthropic tone. One dissenting voice has been The New Republic’s Jeet Heer, who judged the film an extraordinarily prescient take on the future Trump Era and a small masterpiece.

More than just a satire on espionage, the movie is a scathing critique of modern America as a superficial, post-political society where cheating of all sorts comes all too easily. Unlike movies such as Citizen Kane, Burn After Reading doesn’t offer any easy one-to-one character analogies to Trump and his cronies. Rather, it captures the amorality that leads people to become entangled in mercenary treason.

And so we come to Nikki Haley, our soon-to-be ex-U.N. ambassador, who, as of this weird, warm week in October, was either fired or quit.

The poor New York Times Editorial Board—a collection of self-important, moron-despising Osborne Coxes if ever there was one—seemed close to tears. “Indeed,” it bleated, “a replacement in her mold may be the best to hope for from Mr. Trump.” Operating on the scant evidence that Haley once sententiously proclaimed, “I don’t get confused,” after some daily—hell, hourly—confusion of the administration for which she worked and the anecdotal and frankly unbelievable tale that she “developed a good relationship” with the U.N. secretary-general, the Editorial Board clutches at a last brick of normalcy in the wreckage of its antiquated worldview.

Why did she go? After six years as governor of South Carolina and two as ambassador, Haley said she simply needed time off. It is certainly an odd feature of Washington that some people can go years—and even decades—evincing no particular dedication to family, then suddenly acquire a yearning to spend more time with theirs, whereas others—a Chuck Grassley, who managed to be both somnolent and indefatigable in “plowing” through the Supreme Court nomination of an alleged sex abuser—can spend 60 years in official life without the slightest indication that they ever intend to retire.

Of course, it is far more stressful, busy and taxing to be a governor, even of a small state, than to be a U.S. senator, a member of a body that exists in a condition of collective torpor bordering on catatonia, a towering retirement community without the charm of bingo or the stimulating activity of bus trips to the local symphony.

Ordinarily, a U.N. ambassador falls far to the Senate side of active life. One need only show up to make the occasionally requisite bellicose speech, to harangue some little country for doing what the United States of America does a hundred times a week. But Trump’s foreign policy team, especially Rex Tillerson, his first secretary of state, made the aquatic pace of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson look positively rocket-like. It does seem clear that Haley functioned as something closer to a shadow secretary and national security adviser, at least until Mike Pompeo maneuvered his way into Tillerson’s spot and John Bolton waddled back ashore from the spume of a frigid sea.

Haley did not actually do much in her tenure. The Trump administration has been remarkably successful at the Washington nomination game and at dismantling the American regulatory state where its only opposition is the Democrats, but the world has proven less feckless. The U.S. military has continued to bomb where it would have under a Clinton presidency—where it had been bombing under Obama—but the great deal-maker president has mostly gotten fleeced. He was outmaneuvered by North Korea. China defies him. The renegotiated NAFTA treaty may not survive a new president in Mexico or federal elections in Canada.

Across the Atlantic, Europe is slowly pulling away, despite its exposure to U.S. financial markets and France’s Trump-manqué Emmanuel Macron making grandiose declarations about internationalism any time he notices a microphone in his vicinity. Even the Iran deal, which Haley condemned and Trump tore up, has really just returned to the status quo ante: not ideal, certainly, not good, but something. The best chronicler of this chronic bombast combined with stagnant policy has probably been Daniel Larison, the conservative Trump critic at The American Conservative, who took Haley particularly to task for her ceaselessly aggressive rhetoric.

The Trump administration did manage to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, or at least announce that it was going to do so, although like so much else with this administration it is hard to tell if there is any real “doing” behind the announcing. It cruelly and unnecessarily announced it would block any Palestinian from a senior U.N. post, and apologized ceaselessly for Israel’s reckless violence in Gaza. But even this—a sop to the evangelical base—evaporated into the endless hot air of Trump-world.

Hard-line support for Israel has been Haley’s one consistent foreign policy position during her political career. Beyond that, it is hard to know precisely what she believes, if she believes anything at all. Her conservatism in South Carolina seemed moderate, at least by our increasingly bonkers standards. She did not support gay marriage, but neither did she endorse a South Carolinian “bathroom bill.” She was broadly pro-business, but she also removed the Confederate flag from the state Capitol in the wake of the Dylann Roof shooting in Charleston.

Why she felt so strongly about Israel is anyone’s guess—mine, admittedly, is that it began as pure political calculation, a not-so-subtle signal to the conservative Christian electorate in her state that she, a woman of Sikh heritage who still practices the faith, along with Christianity, was reliably one of them. It’s a remarkable feature of our American Christianity that regular churchgoing is lesser proof of faith than an ostentatious love of the Jewish state.

In another telling coincidence, her own original gubernatorial candidacy was saved by the intervention of that marvelous proto-Trump, Sarah Palin, who swept in to endorse Haley when she was running last in a contested primary. Then, several years later, when Trump appeared as a presidential contender, Haley began as a critic, calling for him to release his taxes and drawing his ire on Twitter, to which she famously responded, “bless his heart.” That was taken as a sign of authenticity and gumption, but in reality she was no less an opportunist than any of the rest of them, ping-ponging from Rubio supporter to Cruz partisan as they appeared to mount creditable challenges to the Trump phenomenon before signing on with Trump when the inevitable, inevitably occurred.

It is rumored that she befriended Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, at least if Michael Wolff is to be believed, and I see no reason to doubt the point. In resigning, she praised them as heroes and Kushner as a genius. I see no reason either to suspect that she was the “anonymous” author behind the masturbatory anti-Trump insider op-ed, especially given her own public writing against it. But I find it hard to imagine that she did not, like the president’s fool daughter and son-in-law, see herself as one of the real adults, a deft and more sophisticated character entirely than the volcanic, mercurial president. In this, they all resemble the bumbling gym employees who form official Washington’s opposite number in “Burn After Reading”: Greed and overestimation of their own abilities lead them—most of them—to death and destruction at the hands of the very people they think they’re outsmarting.

There are of course other rumors that Haley will mount some kind of political challenge to Donald Trump, an absolute fantasy. She will, I suspect, reinvent herself in precisely the mold of a John Bolton, a peripatetic cable news beast who will lurk through whatever modest Democratic backlash Trump’s insanity unleashes, until a cleverer and subtler fascist in the early 2020s achieves power again and brings her back into the fold. “This is our opportunity,” says Frances McDormand in one of the film’s best scenes, “You don’t get many of these. You slip on the ice outside of, you know, a fancy restaurant . . . or something like this happens.”

Bernie Sanders Delivers Stirring Rebuke of Trump’s Authoritarianism

While Donald Trump took to the editorial page of USA Today on Wednesday to spew new lies about key social programs like Medicare and sow fresh divisions with unhinged rantings about the “radical socialist plans” of the Democratic Party, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday offered a scathing and far-reaching rebuke to Trump’s brand of politics by tackling head-on the threat posed by the president’s penchant for authoritarianism and his consistent stoking of social divisions.

In a speech delivered at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Sanders told the small audience that he wanted to “say a few words about a troubling trend in global affairs that gets far too little attention,” as he proceeded to describe a trend that both describes the America under Trump, but one also seen in nations across the globe.

“There is currently a struggle of enormous consequence taking place in the United States and throughout the world,” Sanders declared in his speech. “In it we see two competing visions. On one hand, we see a growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy. On the other side, we see a movement toward strengthening democracy, egalitarianism, and economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.”

Sanders continued by drawing a picture in which an increasingly wealthy and powerful set of elites—not just in the U.S., but in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, South America, Asia, and elsewhere—are actively fomenting anti-democratic angst while butressed by the rise of “demagogues” who, like Trump domestically, “exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to gain and hold on to power.”

In response to such forces, argued Sanders, “Those of us who believe in democracy, who believe that a government must be accountable to its people and not the other way around, must understand the scope of this challenge if we are to confront it effectively.”

And so, he added, “We need to counter oligarchic authoritarianism with a strong global progressive movement that speaks to the needs of working people, that recognizes that many of the problems we are faced with are the product of a failed status quo. We need a movement that unites people all over the world who don’t just seek to return to a romanticized past, a past that did not work for so many, but who strive for something better.”

With a direct hit on the Trumpian mantra of “Make America Great Again,” Sanders warned that looking backwards, though valuable in some respects, is not where a better, more equitable world is to be found.

Instead, he said, what the world needs if it wants to defeat “the forces of global oligarchy and authoritarianism” is a powerful and organized “international movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.”

In the end, Sanders observed,  “Authoritarians seek power by promoting division and hatred. We will promote unity and inclusion.”

And, he concluded, “In a time of exploding wealth and technology, we have the potential to create a decent life for all people. Our job is to build on our common humanity and do everything that we can to oppose all of the forces, whether unaccountable government power or unaccountable corporate power, who try to divide us up and set us against each other. We know that those forces work together across borders. We must do the same. ”

Watch the full speech:

Read Sanders complete remarks, as prepared for delivery:

Thank you so much Dean Nasr for your introduction, to Johns Hopkins for inviting me here, and for all of you joining me here today, as well of those of you watching online.

In the United States, we pay a whole lot of attention to issues impacting the economy, healthcare, education, environment, criminal justice, immigration and, as we have recently seen, Supreme Court nominees. These are all enormously important issues.

With the exception of immediate and dramatic crises, however, foreign policy is not something that usually gets a whole lot of attention or debate. In fact, some political analysts have suggested that by and large we have a one-party foreign policy, where the basic elements of our approach are not often debated or challenged. 

We spend $700 billion a year on the military, more than the next 10 nations combined. We have been at war in Afghanistan for 17 years, war in Iraq for 15 years, and we are currently involved militarily in Yemen – where a humanitarian crisis is taking place.

Meanwhile, 30 million people have no health insurance, our infrastructure is collapsing, and hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college every year. 

The time is long overdue for a vigorous discussion about our foreign policy, and how it needs to change in this new era. 

Today, I want to say a few words about a troubling trend in global affairs that gets far too little attention. There is currently a struggle of enormous consequence taking place in the United States and throughout the world. In it we see two competing visions. On one hand, we see a growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy. On the other side, we see a movement toward strengthening democracy, egalitarianism, and economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.

This struggle has consequences for the entire future of the planet — economically, socially, and environmentally.

In terms of the global economy, we see today massive and growing wealth and income inequality, where the world’s top one percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 99%, where a small number of huge financial institutions exert enormous impact over the lives of billions of people.

Further, many people in industrialized countries are questioning whether democracy can actually deliver for them. They are working longer hours for lower wages than they used to. They see big money buying elections, and they see a political and economic elite growing wealthier, even as their own children’s future grows dimmer.

In these countries, we often have political leaders who exploit these fears by amplifying resentments, stoking intolerance and fanning ethnic and racial hatreds among those who are struggling. We see this very clearly in our own country. It is coming from the highest level of our government.

It should be clear by now that Donald Trump and the right-wing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. All around the world, in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere we are seeing movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices and grievances to gain and hold on to power. 

Just this past weekend, in Brazil’s presidential election, right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, who has been called “The Donald Trump of Brazil,” made a very strong showing in the first round of voting, coming up just short of an outright victory. Bolsonaro has a long record of attacks against immigrants, against minorities, against women, against LGBT people. Bolsonaro, who has said he loves Donald Trump, has praised Brazil’s former military dictatorship, and has said, among other things, that in order to deal with crime, police should simply be allowed to shoot more criminals. This is the person who may soon lead the world’s fifth most populous country, and its ninth largest economy. 

Meanwhile, Brazil’s most popular politician, the former president Lula da Silva, is imprisoned on highly questionable charges, and prevented from running again. 

Bolsonaro in Brazil is one example, there are others which I will discuss. But I think it is important that we understand that what we are seeing now in the world is the rise of a new authoritarian axis.

While the leaders who make up this axis may differ in some respects, they share key attributes: intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, constant paranoia about foreign plots, and a belief that the leaders of government should be able use their positions of power to serve their own selfish financial interests.

Interestingly, many of these leaders are also deeply connected to a network of multi-billionaire oligarchs who see the world as their economic plaything.

Those of us who believe in democracy, who believe that a government must be accountable to its people and not the other way around, must understand the scope of this challenge if we are to confront it effectively. We need to counter oligarchic authoritarianism with a strong global progressive movement that speaks to the needs of working people, that recognizes that many of the problems we are faced with are the product of a failed status quo. We need a movement that unites people all over the world who don’t just seek to return to a romanticized past, a past that did not work for so many, but who strive for something better.

While this authoritarian trend certainly did not begin with Donald Trump, there’s no question that other authoritarian leaders around the world have drawn inspiration from the fact that the president of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy is shattering democratic norms, is viciously attack an independent media and an independent judiciary, and is scapegoating the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society.

For example, Saudi Arabia is a country clearly inspired by Trump. This is a despotic dictatorship that does not tolerate dissent, that treats women as third-class citizens, and has spent the last several decades exporting a very extreme form of Islam around the world. Saudi Arabia is currently devastating the country of Yemen in a catastrophic war in alliance with the United States. 

I would like to take a moment to note the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, last Tuesday. Over the weekend, Turkish authorities told reporters that they now believe Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate, and his body disposed of elsewhere. We need to know what happened here. If this is true, if the Saudi regime murdered a journalist critic in their own consulate, there must be accountability, and there must be an unequivocal condemnation by the United States. But it seems clear that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman feels emboldened by the Trump administration’s unquestioning support. 

Further, it is hard to imagine that a country like Saudi Arabia would have chosen to start a fight this past summer with Canada over a relatively mild human rights criticism if Muhammad bin Salman – who is very close with Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner – did not believe that the United States would stay silent. Three years ago, who would have imagined that the United States would refuse to take sides between Canada, our democratic neighbor and second largest trading partner, and Saudi Arabia on an issue of human rights – but that is exactly what happened. 

It’s also hard to imagine that Israel’s Netanyahu government would have taken a number of steps – including passing the recent “Nation State law,” which essentially codifies the second-class status of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, aggressively undermining the longstanding goal of a two-state solution, and ignoring the economic catastrophe in Gaza — if Netanyahu wasn’t confident that Trump would support him.

And then there is Trump’s cozy relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose intervention in our 2016 presidential election Trump still fails to fully admit. We face an unprecedented situation of an American president who for whatever reason refuses to acknowledge this attack on American democracy. Why is that? I am not sure what the answer is. Either he really doesn’t understand what has happened, or he is under Russian influence because of compromising information they may have on him, or because he is ultimately more sympathetic to Russia’s strongman form of government than he is to American democracy.

Even as he draws closer to authoritarian leaders like Putin, like Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump is needlessly increasing tensions with our democratic European allies over issues like trade, like NATO, like the Iran nuclear agreement. Let me be clear, these are important issues. But the way Trump has gratuitously disrespected these allies is not only ineffective deal-making, it will have enormous negative long-term consequences for the trans-Atlantic alliance.

Further, Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, several months ago made clear the administration’s support for right-wing extremist parties across Europe. In other words, the U.S. administration is openly siding with the very forces challenging the democratic foundations of our longtime allies.  

We need to understand that the struggle for democracy is bound up with the struggle against kleptocracy and corruption. That is true here in the United States as well as abroad. In addition to Trump’s hostility toward democratic institutions here in the United States, we have a billionaire president who, according to a recent report in the New York Times, acquired his wealth through illegal means, and now, as president, in an unprecedented way, has blatantly embedded his own economic interests and those of his cronies into the policies of government.

One of the consistent themes of reports coming out of the investigation into the Trump campaign is the effort of wealthy foreign interests seeking influence and access with Trump and his organization, and with close Trump associates seeking to trade that access for the promise of even more wealth. While the characters involved in these reports are particularly blatant and clumsy in their efforts, the details of these stories are not unique.  

Never before have we seen the power of big money over governmental policy so clearly. Whether we’re talking about the Koch brothers spending hundreds of millions of dollars to dismantle environmental regulations that protect Americans’ health, or authoritarian monarchies like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar spending millions in fossil fuel wealth in Washington to advance the interests of their undemocratic regimes, or giant corporations supporting think tanks in order to produce policy recommendations that serve their own financial interests, the theme is the same. Powerful special interests use their wealth to influence government for their own selfish interests.

During the Congressional fight over the Republicans’ massive tax giveaway to the wealthy, some of my colleagues were very open this. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was very frank: If Republicans failed to pass the bill, he said “the financial contributions will stop.” This, he went on, “will be the end of us as a party.” I applaud Senator Graham for his honesty.

This corruption is so blatant, it’s no longer seen as remarkable. Just the other day, the lead sentence in a New York Times story about Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson was this: “The return on investment for many of the Republican Party’s biggest political patrons has been less than impressive this year.”

Let me repeat that: “The return on investment was less than impressive.” The idea that political donors expect a specific policy result in exchange for their contributions – a quid pro quo, the definition of corruption – is right out there in the open. It is no longer even seen as scandalous.

This sort of corruption is common among authoritarian regimes. In Russia, it is impossible to tell where the decisions of government end and the interests of Putin and his circle of multi-billionaire oligarchs begin. They operate as one unit. Similarly, in Saudi Arabia, there is no debate about separation because the natural resources of the state, valued at trillions of dollars, belong to the Saudi royal family.

In Hungary, far-right authoritarian-nationalist leader Victor Orban models himself after Putin in Russia, saying in a January interview that, “Putin has made his country great again.” Like Putin, Orban has risen to power by exploiting paranoia and intolerance of minorities, including outrageous anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros, but at the same time has managed to enrich his political allies and himself. In February, the Corruption Perception Index compiled by Transparency International ranked Hungary as the second most corrupt EU country.

We must understand that these authoritarians are part of a common front. They are in close contact with each other, share tactics and, as in the case of European and American right-wing movements, even share some of the same funders. For example, the Mercer family, supporters of the infamous Cambridge Analytica, have also been key backers of Donald Trump and of Breitbart news, which operates in Europe, the United States and Israel to advance the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda. Sheldon Adelson gives generously to the Republican Party and right-wing causes in both the United States and Israel, promoting a shared agenda of intolerance and bigotry in both countries.

The truth is, however, that to effectively oppose right-wing authoritarianism, we cannot simply be on the defensive. We need to be proactive and understand that just defending the failed status quo of the last several decades is not good enough. In fact, we need to recognize that the challenges we face today are a product of that status quo.

What do I mean by that?

Here in the United States, in the UK, in France, and in many other countries around the world, people are working longer hours for stagnating wages, and worry that their children will have a lower standard of living than they do.

So our job is not to accept the status quo, not to accept massive levels of wealth and income inequality where the top 1% of the world’s population own half the planet’s wealth, while the bottom 70% of the working age population account for just 2.7% of global wealth. It is not to accept a declining standard of living for many workers around the world, not to accept a reality of 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty where millions of children die of easily preventable illnesses.

Our job is to fight for a future in which public policy and new technology and innovation work to benefit all of the people, not just the few.

Our job is to support governments around the world that will end the absurdity of the rich and multinational corporations stashing over $21 trillion dollars in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, and then demanding that their respective governments impose an austerity agenda on their working families.

Our job is to rally the entire planet to stand up to the fossil fuel industry which continues to make huge profits while their carbon emissions destroy the planet for our children and grandchildren. 

The scientific community is virtually unanimous in telling us that climate change is real, climate change is caused by human activity, and climate change is already causing devastating harm throughout the world. Further, what the scientists tell us is that if we do not act boldly to address the climate crisis, this planet will see more drought, more floods, more extreme weather disturbances, more acidification of the ocean, more rising sea levels, and, as a result of mass migrations, there will be more threats to global stability and security.

A new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released just yesterday warns that we only have about twelve years to take urgent and unprecedented action to prevent a rise in the planet’s temperature that would cause irreversible damage.

The threat of climate change is a very clear example of where American leadership can make a difference. Europe can’t do it alone, China can’t do it alone, and the United States can’t do it alone. This is a crisis that calls out for strong international cooperation if we are to leave our children and grandchildren a planet that is healthy and habitable. American leadership — the economic and scientific advantages and incentives that only America can offer — is hugely important for facilitating this effort. 

In the struggle to preserve and expand democracy, our job is to fight back against the coordinated effort, strongly supported by the president and funded by oligarchs like the Koch brothers, to make it harder to for American citizens – often people of color, poor people, and young people – to vote. Not only do oligarchs want to buy elections, but voter suppression is a key element of their plan to maintain power. 

Our job is to push for trade policies that don’t just benefit large multinational corporations and hurt working people throughout the world as they are written out of public view.

Our job is to fight back against brutal immigration policies that require separating migrant families when they are detained at the border, and require children to be put in cages. Migrants and refugees should be treated with compassion and respect when they reach Europe or the United States. Yes, we need better international cooperation to address the flow of migrants across borders, but the solution is not to build walls and amplify the cruelty toward those fleeing impossible conditions as a deterrence strategy. 

Our job is to make sure that we commit more resources to taking care of people than we do on weapons designed to kill them. It is not acceptable that, with the Cold War long behind us, countries around the world spend over a trillion dollars a year on weapons of destruction, while millions of children die of easily treatable diseases.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, countries around the world spend a total of $1.7 trillion a year on the military. $1.7 trillion. Think of what we could accomplish if even a fraction of this amount were redirected to more peaceful ends? The head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has said we could end the global food crisis for $30 billion a year. That’s less than two percent of what we spend on weapons.

Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty, has estimated that the cost to end world poverty is $175 billion per year for 20 years, about ten percent of what the world spends on weapons.

Donald Trump thinks we should spend more on these weapons. I think we should spend less.

Let us remember what President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1953, just a few months after taking office. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” 

And just as he was about to leave office in 1961, Eisenhower was so concerned the growing power of the weapons industry that he issued this warning: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” We have seen that potential more than fulfilled over the past decades. It is time for us to stand up and say: There is a better way to use our wealth. 

In closing, let me simply that in order to effectively combat the forces of global oligarchy and authoritarianism, we need an international movement that mobilizes behind a vision of shared prosperity, security and dignity for all people, and that addresses the massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.

Such a movement must be willing to think creatively and boldly about the world that we would like to see. While the authoritarian axis is committed to tearing down a post-World War II global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth, it is not enough for us to simply defend that order as it exists.

We must look honestly at how that order has failed to deliver on many of its promises, and how authoritarians have adeptly exploited those failures in order to build support for their agenda. We must take the opportunity to reconceptualize a global order based on human solidarity, an order that recognizes that every person on this planet shares a common humanity, that we all want our children to grow up healthy, to have a good education, have decent jobs, drink clean water, breathe clean air and to live in peace. Our job is to reach out to those in every corner of the world who shares these values, and who are fighting for a better world.

Authoritarians seek power by promoting division and hatred. We will promote unity and inclusion.

In a time of exploding wealth and technology, we have the potential to create a decent life for all people. Our job is to build on our common humanity and do everything that we can to oppose all of the forces, whether unaccountable government power or unaccountable corporate power, who try to divide us up and set us against each other. We know that those forces work together across borders. We must do the same.

Billionaire Sheldon Adelson Has Trump in His Pocket

LATE ON A THURSDAY evening in February 2017, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland for his first visit with President Donald Trump. A few hours earlier, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s Boeing 737, which is so large it can seat 149 people, touched down at Reagan National Airport after a flight from Las Vegas.

Adelson dined that night at the White House with Trump, Jared Kushner and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Adelson and his wife, Miriam, were among Trump’s biggest benefactors, writing checks for $20 million in the campaign and pitching in an additional $5 million for the inaugural festivities.

Adelson was in town to see the Japanese prime minister about a much greater sum of money. Japan, after years of acrimonious public debate, has legalized casinos. For more than a decade, Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands, have sought to build a multibillion-dollar casino resort there. He has called expanding to the country, one of the world’s last major untapped markets, the “holy grail.” Nearly every major casino company in the world is competing to secure one of a limited number of licenses to enter a market worth up to $25 billion per year. “This opportunity won’t come along again, potentially ever,” said Kahlil Philander, an academic who studies the industry.

The morning after his White House dinner, Adelson attended a breakfast in Washington with Abe and a small group of American CEOs, including two others from the casino industry. Adelson and the other executives raised the casino issue with Abe, according to an attendee.

Adelson had a potent ally in his quest: the new president of the United States. Following the business breakfast, Abe had a meeting with Trump before boarding Air Force One for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago. The two heads of state dined with Patriots owner Bob Kraft and golfed at Trump National Jupiter Golf Club with the South African golfer Ernie Els. During a meeting at Mar-a-Lago that weekend, Trump raised Adelson’s casino bid to Abe, according to two people briefed on the meeting. The Japanese side was surprised.

“It was totally brought up out of the blue,” according to one of the people briefed on the exchange. “They were a little incredulous that he would be so brazen.” After Trump told Abe he should strongly consider Las Vegas Sands for a license, “Abe didn’t really respond, and said thank you for the information,” this person said.

Trump also mentioned at least one other casino operator. Accounts differ on whether it was MGM or Wynn Resorts, then run by Trump donor and then-Republican National Committee finance chairman Steve Wynn. The Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported the president also mentioned MGM and Abe instructed an aide who was present to jot down the names of both companies. Questioned about the meeting, Abe said in remarks before the Japanese legislature in July that Trump had not passed on requests from casino companies but did not deny that the topic had come up.

The president raising a top donor’s personal business interests directly with a foreign head of state would violate longstanding norms. “That should be nowhere near the agenda of senior officials,” said Brian Harding, a Japan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “U.S.-Japan relations is about the security of the Asia-Pacific, China and economic issues.”

Adelson has told his shareholders to expect good news. On a recent earnings call, Adelson cited unnamed insiders as saying Sands’ efforts to win a place in the Japanese market will pay off. “The estimates by people who know, say they know, whom we believe they know, say that we’re in the No. 1 pole position,” he said.

After decades as a major Republican donor, Adelson is known as an ideological figure, motivated by his desire to influence U.S. policy to help Israel. “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel,” he said last year. On that issue — Israel — Trump has delivered. The administration has slashed funding for aid to Palestinian refugees and scrapped the Iran nuclear deal. Attending the recent opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, Adelson seemed to almost weep with joy, according to an attendee.

But his reputation as an Israel advocate has obscured a through-line in his career: He has used his political access to push his financial self-interest. Not only has Trump touted Sands’ interests in Japan, but his administration also installed an executive from the casino industry in a top position in the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. Adelson’s influence reverberates through this administration. Cabinet-level officials jump when he calls. One who displeased him was replaced. He has helped a friend’s company get a research deal with the Environmental Protection Agency. And Adelson has already received a windfall from Trump’s new tax law, which particularly favored companies like Las Vegas Sands. The company estimated the benefit of the law at $1.2 billion.

Adelson’s influence is not absolute: His company’s casinos in Macau are vulnerable in Trump’s trade war with China, which controls the former Portuguese colony near Hong Kong. If the Chinese government chose to retaliate by targeting Macau, where Sands has several large properties, it could hurt Adelson’s bottom line. So far, there’s no evidence that has happened.

The White House declined to comment on Adelson. The Japanese Embassy in Washington declined to comment. Sands spokesman Ron Reese declined to answer detailed questions but said in a statement: “The gaming industry has long sought the opportunity to enter the Japan market. Gaming companies have spent significant resources there on that effort and Las Vegas Sands is no exception.”

Reese added: “If our company has any advantage it would be because of our significant Asian operating experience and our unique convention-based business model. Any suggestion we are favored for some other reason is not based on the reality of the process in Japan or the integrity of the officials involved in it.”

With a fortune estimated at $35 billion, Adelson is the 21st-richest person in the world, according to Forbes. In August, when he celebrated his 85th birthday in Las Vegas, the party stretched over four days. Adelson covered guests’ expenses. A 92-year-old Tony Bennett and the Israeli winner of Eurovision performed for the festivities. He is slowing down physically; stricken by neuropathy, he uses a motorized scooter to get around and often stands up with the help of a bodyguard. He fell and broke three ribs while on a ferry from Macau to Hong Kong last November.

Yet Adelson has spent the Trump era hustling to expand his gambling empire. With Trump occupying the White House, Adelson has found the greatest political ally he’s ever had.

“I would put Adelson at the very top of the list of both access and influence in the Trump administration,” said Craig Holman of the watchdog group Public Citizen. “I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I’ve been studying money in politics for 40 years.”

ADELSON GREW UP POOR in Boston, the son of a cabdriver with a sixth-grade education. According to his wife, Adelson was beaten up as a kid for being Jewish. A serial entrepreneur who has started or acquired more than 50 different businesses, he had already made and lost his first fortune by the late 1960s, when he was in his mid-30s.

It took him until the mid-1990s to become extraordinarily rich. In 1995, he sold the pioneering computer trade show Comdex to the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank for $800 million. He entered the gambling business in earnest when his Venetian casino resort opened in 1999 in Las Vegas. With its gondola rides on faux canals, it was inspired by his honeymoon to Venice with Miriam, who is 12 years younger than Adelson.

It’s been said that Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person. Adelson could be thought of as Trump’s idea of a rich person. A family friend recalls Sheldon and Miriam’s two sons, who are now in college, getting picked up from school in stretch Hummer limousines and his home being so large it was stocked with Segway transporters to get around. A Las Vegas TV station found a few years ago that, amid a drought, Adelson’s palatial home a short drive from the Vegas Strip had used nearly 8 million gallons of water in a year, enough for 55 average homes. Adelson will rattle off his precise wealth based on the fluctuation of Las Vegas Sands’ share price, said his friend the New York investor Michael Steinhardt. “He’s very sensitive to his net worth,” Steinhardt said.

Trump entered the casino business several years before Adelson. In the early 1990s, both eyed Eilat in southern Israel as a potential casino site. Neither built there. Adelson “didn’t have a whole lot of respect for Trump when Trump was operating casinos. He was dismissive of Trump,” recalled one former Las Vegas Sands official. In an interview in the late ’90s, Adelson lumped Trump with Wynn: “Both of these gentlemen have very big egos,” Adelson said. “Well, the world doesn’t really care about their egos.”

Today, in his rare public appearances, Adelson has a grandfatherly affect. He likes to refer to himself as “Self” (“I said to myself, ‘Self …’”). He makes Borscht Belt jokes about his short stature: “A friend of mine says, ‘You’re the tallest guy in the world.’ I said, ‘How do you figure that?’ He says, ‘When you stand on your wallet.’”

By the early 2000s, Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands had surpassed Trump’s casino operations. While Trump was getting bogged down in Atlantic City, Adelson’s properties thrived. When Macau opened up a local gambling monopoly, Adelson bested a crowded field that included Trump to win a license. Today, Macau accounts for more than half of Las Vegas Sands’ roughly $13 billion in annual revenue.

Trump’s casinos went bankrupt, and now he is out of the industry entirely. By the mid-2000s, Trump was playing the role of business tycoon on his reality show, “The Apprentice.” Meanwhile, Adelson aggressively expanded his empire in Macau and later in Singapore. His company’s Moshe Safdie-designed Marina Bay Sands property there, with its rooftop infinity pool, featured prominently in the recent hit movie “Crazy Rich Asians.”

While their business trajectories diverged, Adelson and Trump have long shared a willingness to sue critics, enemies and business associates. Multiple people said they were too afraid of lawsuits to speak on the record for this story. In 1989, after the Nevada Gaming Control Board conducted a background investigation of Adelson, it found he had already been personally involved in around 100 civil lawsuits, according to the book “License to Steal,” a history of the agency. That included matters as small as a $600 contractual dispute with a Boston hospital.

The lawsuits have continued even as Adelson became so rich the amounts of money at stake hardly mattered. In one case, Adelson was unhappy with the quality of construction on one of his beachfront Malibu, California, properties and pursued a legal dispute with the contractor for more than seven years, going through a lengthy series of appeals and cases in different courts. Adelson sued a Wall Street Journal reporter for libel over a single phrase — a description of him as “foul-mouthed” — and fought the case for four years before it was settled, with the story unchanged. In a particularly bitter case in Massachusetts Superior Court in the 1990s, his sons from his first marriage accused him of cheating them out of money. Adelson prevailed.

Adelson rarely speaks to the media any more, with occasional exceptions for friendly business journalists or on stage at conferences, usually interviewed by people to whom he has given a great deal of money. “He keeps a very tight inner circle,” said a casino industry executive who has known Adelson for decades. Adelson declined to comment for this story.

ADELSON ONCE TOLD a reporter of entering the casino business late in life, “I loved being an outsider.” For nearly a decade he played that role in presidential politics, bankrolling the opposition to the Obama administration. As with some of his early entrepreneurial forays, he dumped money for little return, his political picks going bust. In 2008, he backed Rudy Giuliani. As America’s Mayor faded, he came on board late with the John McCain campaign. In 2012, he almost single-handedly funded Newt Gingrich’s candidacy. Gingrich spent a few weeks atop the polls before his candidacy collapsed. Adelson became a late adopter of Mitt Romney.

In 2016, the Adelsons didn’t officially endorse a candidate for months. Trump used Adelson as a foil, an example of the well-heeled donors who wielded outsized influence in Washington. “Sheldon or whoever — you could say Koch. I could name them all. They’re all friends of mine, every one of them. I know all of them. They have pretty much total control over the candidate,” Trump said on Fox News in October 2015. “Nobody controls me but the American public.” In a pointed tweet that month, Trump said: “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to [Marco] Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!”

Despite Trump’s barbs, Adelson had grown curious about the candidate and called his friend Steinhardt, who founded the Birthright program that sends young Jews on free trips to Israel. Adelson is now the program’s largest funder.

“I called Kushner and I said Sheldon would like to meet your father-in-law,” Steinhardt recalled. “Kushner was excited.” Trump got on a plane to Las Vegas. “Sheldon has strong views when it comes to the Jewish people; Trump recognized that, and a marriage was formed.”

Trump and his son-in-law Kushner courted Adelson privately, meeting several times in New York and Las Vegas. “Having Orthodox Jews like Jared and Ivanka next to him and so many common people in interest gave a level of comfort to Sheldon,” said Ronn Torossian, a New York public relations executive who knows both men. “Someone who lets their kid marry an Orthodox Jew and then become Orthodox is probably going to stand pretty damn close to Israel.”

Miriam Adelson, a physician born and raised in what became Israel, is said to be an equal partner in Sheldon Adelson’s political decisions. He has said the interests of the Jewish state are at the center of his worldview, and his views align with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-of-center approach to Iran and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.

Adelson suggested in 2014 that Israel doesn’t need to be a democracy. “I think God didn’t say anything about democracy,” Adelson said. “He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state.” On a trip to the country several years ago, on the eve of his young son’s bar mitzvah, Adelson said, “Hopefully he’ll come back; his hobby is shooting. He’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

On domestic issues, Adelson is more Chamber of Commerce Republican than movement conservative or Trumpian populist. He is pro-choice and has called for work permits and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a position sharply at odds with Trump’s. While the Koch brothers, his fellow Republican megadonors, have evinced concern over trade policy and distaste for Trump, Adelson has proved flexible, putting aside any qualms about Trump’s business acumen or ideological misgivings. In May 2016, he declared in a Washington Post op-ed that he was endorsing Trump. He wrote that Trump represented “a CEO success story that exemplifies the American spirit of determination, commitment to cause and business stewardship.”

The Adelsons came through with $20 million in donations to the pro-Trump super PAC, part of at least $83 million in donations to Republicans. By the time of the October 2016 release of the Access Hollywood tape featuring Trump bragging about sexual assault, Adelson was among his staunchest supporters. “Sheldon Adelson had Donald Trump’s back,” said Steve Bannon in a speech last year, speaking of the time after the scandal broke. “He was there.”

In December 2016, Adelson donated $5 million to the Trump inaugural festivities. The Adelsons had better seats at Trump’s inauguration than many Cabinet secretaries. The whole family, including their two college-age sons, came to Washington for the celebration. One of his sons posted a picture on Instagram of the event with the hashtag #HuckFillary.

The investment paid off in access and in financial returns. Adelson has met with Trump or visited the White House at least six times since Trump’s election victory. The two speak regularly. Adelson has also had access to others in the White House. He met privately with Vice President Mike Pence before Pence gave a speech at Adelson’s Venetian resort in Las Vegas last year. “He just calls the president all the time. Donald Trump takes Sheldon Adelson’s calls,” said Alan Dershowitz, who has done legal work for Adelson and advised Trump.

Adelson’s tens of millions in donations to Trump have already been paid back many times over by the new tax law. While all corporations benefited from the lower tax rate in the new law, many incurred an extra bill in the transition because profits overseas were hit with a one-time tax. But not Sands. Adelson’s company hired lobbyists to press Trump’s Treasury Department and Congress on provisions that would help companies like Sands that paid high taxes abroad, according to public filings and tax experts. The lobbying effort appears to have worked. After Trump signed the tax overhaul into law in December, Las Vegas Sands recorded a benefit from the new law the company estimated at $1.2 billion.

The Adelson family owns 55 percent of Las Vegas Sands, which is publicly traded, according to filings. The Treasury Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Now as Trump and the Republican Party face a reckoning in the midterm elections in November, they have once again turned to Adelson. He has given at least $55 million so far.

IN 2014, ADELSON TOLD an interviewer he was not interested in building a dynasty. “I want my legacy to be that I helped out humankind,” he said, underscoring his family’s considerable donations to medical research. But he gives no indication of sticking to a quiet life of philanthropy. In the last four years, he has used the Sands’ fleet of private jets, assiduously meeting with world leaders and seeking to build new casinos in Japan, Korea and Brazil.

He is closest in Japan. Japan has been considering lifting its ban on casinos for years, in spite of majority opposition in polls from a public that is wary of the social problems that might result. A huge de facto gambling industry of the pinball-like game pachinko has long existed in the country, historically associated with organized crime and seedy parlors filled with cigarette-smoking men. Opposition to allowing casinos is so heated that a brawl broke out in the Japanese legislature this summer. But lawmakers have moved forward on legalizing casinos and crafted regulations that hew to Adelson’s wishes.

“Japan is considered the next big market. Sheldon looks at it that way,” said a former Sands official. Adelson envisions building a $10 billion “integrated resort,” which in industry parlance refers to a large complex featuring a casino with hotels, entertainment venues, restaurants and shopping malls.

The new Japanese law allows for just three licenses to build casinos in cities around the country, effectively granting valuable local monopolies. At least 13 companies, including giants like MGM and Genting, are vying for a license. Even though Sands is already a strong contender because of its size and its successful resort in Singapore, some observers in Japan believe Adelson’s relationship with Trump has helped move Las Vegas Sands closer to the multibillion-dollar prize.

Just a week after the U.S. election, Prime Minister Abe arrived at Trump Tower, becoming the first foreign leader to meet with the president-elect. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were also there. Abe presented Trump with a gilded $3,800 golf driver. Few know the details of what the Trumps and Abe discussed at the meeting. In a break with protocol, Trump’s transition team sidelined the State Department, whose Japan experts were never briefed on what was said. “There was a great deal of frustration,” said one State Department official. “There was zero communication from anyone on Trump’s team.”

In another sign of Adelson’s direct access to the incoming president and ties with Japan, he secured a coveted Trump Tower meeting a few weeks later for an old friend, the Japanese billionaire businessman Masayoshi Son. Son’s company, SoftBank, had bought Adelson’s computer trade show business in the 1990s. A few years ago, Adelson named Son as a potential partner in his casino resort plans in Japan. Son’s SoftBank, for its part, owns Sprint, which has long wanted to merge with T-Mobile but needs a green light from the Trump administration. A beaming Son emerged from the meeting in the lobby of Trump Tower with the president-elect and promised $50 billion in investments in the U.S.

When Trump won the election in November 2016, the casino bill had been stalled in the Japanese Diet. One month after the Trump-Abe meeting, in an unexpected move in mid-December, Abe’s ruling coalition pushed through landmark legislation authorizing casinos, with specific regulations to be ironed out later. There was minimal debate on the controversial bill, and it passed at the very end of an extraordinary session of the legislature. “That was a surprise to a lot of stakeholders,” said one former Sands executive who still works in the industry. Some observers suspect the timing was not a coincidence. “After Trump won the election in 2016, the Abe government’s efforts to pass the casino bill shifted into high gear,” said Yoichi Torihata, a professor at Shizuoka University and opponent of the casino law.

On a Las Vegas Sands earnings call a few days after Trump’s inauguration, Adelson touted that Abe had visited the company’s casino resort complex in Singapore. “He was very impressed with it,” Adelson said. Days later, Adelson attended the February breakfast with Abe in Washington, after which the prime minister went on to Mar-a-Lago, where the president raised Las Vegas Sands. A week after that, Adelson flew to Japan and met with the secretary general of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party in Tokyo.

The casino business is one of the most regulated industries in the world, and Adelson has always sought political allies. To enter the business in 1989, he hired the former governor of Nevada to represent him before the state’s gaming commission. In 2001, according to court testimony reported in the New Yorker, Adelson intervened with then-House Majority Whip Rep. Tom DeLay, to whom he was a major donor, at the behest of a Chinese official over a proposed House resolution that was critical of the country’s human rights record. At the time, Las Vegas Sands was seeking entry into the Macau market. The resolution died, which Adelson attributed to factors other than his intervention, according to the magazine.

In 2015, he purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the state’s largest newspaper, which then published a lengthy investigative series on one of Adelson’s longtime rivals, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which runs a convention center that competes with Adelson’s. (The paper said Adelson had no influence over its coverage.)

In Japan, Las Vegas Sands’ efforts have accelerated in the last year. Adelson returned to the country in September 2017, visiting top officials in Osaka, a possible casino site. In a show of star power in October, Sands flew in David Beckham and the Eagles’ Joe Walsh for a press conference at the Palace Hotel Tokyo. Beckham waxed enthusiastic about his love of sea urchin and declared, “Las Vegas Sands is creating fabulous resorts all around the world, and their scale and vision are impressive.”

Adelson appears emboldened. When he was in Osaka last fall, he publicly criticized a proposal under consideration to cap the total amount of floor space devoted to casinos in the resorts that have been legalized. In July, the Japanese Diet passed a bill with more details on what casinos will look like and laying out the bidding process. The absolute limit on casino floor area had been dropped from the legislation.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made an unusual personnel move that could help advance pro-gambling interests. The new U.S. ambassador, an early Trump campaign supporter and Tennessee businessman named William Hagerty, hired as his senior adviser an American executive working on casino issues for the Japanese company SEGA Sammy. Joseph Schmelzeis left his role as senior adviser on global government and industry affairs for the company in February to join the U.S. Embassy. (He has not worked for Sands.)

A State Department spokesperson said that embassy officials had communicated with Sands as part of “routine” meetings and advice provided to members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. The spokesperson said that “Schmelzeis is not participating in any matter related to integrated resorts or Las Vegas Sands.”

Japanese opposition politicians have seized on the Adelson-Trump-Abe nexus. One, Tetsuya Shiokawa, said this year that he believes Trump has been the unseen force behind why Abe’s party has “tailor-made the [casino] bill to suit foreign investors like Adelson.” In the next stage of the process, casino companies will complete their bids with Japanese localities.

ADELSON’S INFLUENCE has spread across the Trump administration. In August 2017, the Zionist Organization of America, to which the Adelsons are major donors, launched a campaign against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. ZOA chief Mort Klein charged McMaster “clearly has animus toward Israel.”

Adelson said he was convinced to support the attack on McMaster after Adelson spoke with Safra Catz, the Israeli-born CEO of Oracle, who “enlightened me quite a bit” about McMaster, according to an email Klein later released to the media. Adelson pressed Trump to appoint the hawkish John Bolton to a high position, The New York Times reported. In March, Trump fired McMaster and replaced him with Bolton. The president and other cabinet officials also clashed with McMaster on policy and style issues.

For Scott Pruitt, the former EPA administrator known as an ally of industry, courting Adelson meant developing a keen interest in an unlikely topic: technology that generates clean water from air. An obscure Israeli startup called Watergen makes machines that resemble air conditioners and, with enough electricity, can pull potable water from the air.

Adelson doesn’t have a stake in the company, but he is old friends with the Israeli-Georgian billionaire who owns the firm, Mikhael Mirilashvili, according to the head of Watergen’s U.S. operation, Yehuda Kaploun. Adelson first encountered the technology on a trip to Israel, Kaploun said. Dershowitz is also on the company’s board.

Just weeks after being confirmed, Pruitt met with Watergen executives at Adelson’s request. Pruitt promptly mobilized dozens of EPA officials to ink a research deal under which the agency would study Watergen’s technology. EPA officials immediately began voicing concerns about the request, according to hundreds of previously unreported emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They argued that the then-EPA chief was violating regular procedures.

Pruitt, according to one email, asked that staffers explore “on an expedited time frame” whether a deal could be done “without the typical contracting requirements.” Other emails described the matter as “very time sensitive” and having “high Administrator interest.”

A veteran scientist at the agency warned that the “technology has been around for decades,” adding that the agency should not be “focusing on a single vendor, in this case Watergen.” Officials said that Watergen’s technology was not unique, noting there were as many as 70 different suppliers on the market with products using the same concept. Notes from a meeting said the agency “does not currently have the expertise or staff to evaluate these technologies.” Agency lawyers “seemed scared” about the arrangement, according to an internal text exchange. The EPA didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt pushed the agency to ink a research deal with a company owned by Adelson’s friend. Pruitt asked if a deal could be done “without the typical contracting requirements.”

Watergen got its research deal. It’s not known how much money the agency has spent on the project. The technology was shipped to a lab in Cincinnati, and Watergen said the government will produce a report on its study. Pruitt planned to unveil the deal on a trip to Israel, which was also planned with the assistance of Adelson, The Washington Post reported. But amid multiple scandals, the trip never happened.

Other parts of the Trump administration have also been friendly to Watergen. Over the summer, Mirilashvili attended the U.S. Embassy in Israel’s Fourth of July party, where he was photographed grinning and sipping water next to one of the company’s machines on display. Kaploun said U.S. Ambassador David Friedman’s staff assisted the company to help highlight its technology.

A State Department spokesperson said Watergen was one of many private sponsors of the embassy party and was “subject to rigorous vetting.” The embassy is now considering leasing or buying a Watergen unit as part of a “routine procurement action,” the spokesperson said.

A Mirilashvili spokesman said in a statement that Adelson and Mirilashvili “have no business ties with each other.” The spokesman added that Adelson had been briefed on the company’s technology by Watergen engineers and “Adelson has also expressed an interest in the ability of this Israeli technology to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who are affected by water pollution.”

EVEN AS THE CASINO business looks promising in Japan, China has been a potential trouble spot for Adelson. Few businesses are as vulnerable to geopolitical winds as Adelson’s. The majority of Sands’ value derives from its properties in Macau. It is the world’s gambling capital, and China’s central government controls it.

“Sheldon Adelson highly values direct engagement in Beijing,” a 2009 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks says, “especially given the impact of Beijing’s visa policies on the company’s growing mass market operations in Macau.”

At times, Sands’ aggressive efforts in China crossed legal lines. On Jan. 19, 2017, the day before Trump took office, the Justice Department announced Sands was paying a nearly $7 million fine to settle a longstanding investigation into whether it violated a U.S. anti-bribery statute in China. The case revealed that Sands paid roughly $60 million to a consultant who “advertised his political connections with [People’s Republic of China] government officials” and that some of the payments “had no discernible legitimate business purpose.” Part of the work involved an effort by Sands to acquire a professional basketball team in the country to promote its casinos. The DOJ said Sands fully cooperated in the investigation and fixed its compliance problems.

A year and a half into the Trump administration, Adelson has a bigger problem than the Justice Department investigation: Trump’s trade war against Beijing has put Sands’ business in Macau at risk. Sands’ right to operate expires in a few years. Beijing could throttle the flow of money and people from the mainland to Macau. Sands and the other foreign operators in Macau “now sit on a geopolitical fault line. Their Macau concessions can therefore be on the line,” said a report from the Hong Kong business consultancy Steve Vickers & Associates.

A former Sands board member, George Koo, wrote a column in the Asia Times newspaper in April warning that Beijing could undercut the Macau market by legalizing casinos in the southern island province of Hainan. “A major blow in the trade war would be for China to allow Hainan to become a gambling destination and divert visitors who would otherwise be visiting Macau,” Koo wrote. “As one of Trump’s principal supporters, it’s undoubtedly a good time for Mr. Adelson to have a private conversation with the president.”

It’s not clear if Adelson has had that conversation. According to The Associated Press, Adelson was present for a discussion of China policy at the dinner he attended with Trump at the White House in February 2017. In September, Trump escalated his trade war with China. He raised tariffs on $200 billion Chinese imports. China retaliated with tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. products.

Adelson has said privately that if he can be helpful in any way he would volunteer himself to do whatever is asked for either side of the equation — the U.S. or China, according to a person who has spoken to him.

Torossian, the public relations executive, calls Adelson “this generation’s Rothschild” for his support of Israel. In early May, the Adelsons gave $30 million to the super PAC that is seeking to keep Republican control of the House for the remainder of Trump’s term. A few days later, Trump announced he was killing the Iran nuclear deal, a target of Adelson’s and the Netanyahu government’s for years. The following day, Adelson met with the president at the White House.

Five days later, Adelson was in Israel for another landmark, the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem marked a major shift in U.S. foreign policy, long eschewed by presidents of both parties. Besides dealing a major blow to Palestinian claims on part of the city, which are recognized by most of the world, it was the culmination of a more than 20-year project of the Adelsons. Sheldon and Miriam personally lobbied for the move on Capitol Hill as far back as 1995.

In an audience dotted with yarmulkes and MAGA-red hats, the Adelsons were in the front now, next to Netanyahu and his wife, the Kushners and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. A beaming Miriam, wearing a dress featuring an illustration of the Jerusalem skyline, filmed the event with her phone. She wrote a first-person account of the ceremony that was co-published on the front page of the two newspapers the Adelsons own, Israel Hayom and the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “The embassy opening is a crowning moment for U.S. foreign policy and for our president, Donald Trump. Just over a year into his first term, he has re-enshrined the United States as the standard-bearer of moral clarity and courage in a world that too often feels adrift.”

Adelson paid for the official delegation of Guatemala, the only other country to move its embassy, to travel to Israel. “Sheldon told me that any country that wants to move its embassy to Jerusalem, he’ll fly them in — the president and everyone — for the opening,” said Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce CEO Duvi Honig, who was in attendance.

Klein, the Zionist Organization of America president, was also there. The Adelsons, he said, “were glowing with a serene happiness like I’ve never seen them. Sheldon said to me, ‘President Trump promised he would do this and he did it.’ And he almost became emotional. ‘And look, Mort, he did it.’”

Deported Parents May Lose Kids to Adoption, Report Finds

As the deportees were led off the plane onto the steamy San Salvador tarmac, an anguished Araceli Ramos Bonilla burst into tears, her face contorted with pain: “They want to steal my daughter!”

It had been 10 weeks since Ramos had last held her 2-year-old, Alexa. Ten weeks since she was arrested crossing the border into Texas and U.S. immigration authorities seized her daughter and told her she would never see the girl again.

What followed — one foster family’s initially successful attempt to win full custody of Alexa — reveals what could happen to some of the infants, children and teens taken from their families at the border under a Trump administration policy earlier this year. The “zero-tolerance” crackdown ended in June, but hundreds of children remain in detention, shelters or foster care and U.S. officials say more than 200 are not eligible for reunification or release.

Federal officials insist they are reuniting families and will continue to do so. But an Associated Press investigation drawing on hundreds of court documents, immigration records and interviews in the U.S. and Central America identified holes in the system that allow state court judges to grant custody of migrant children to American families — without notifying their parents.

And today, with hundreds of those mothers and fathers deported thousands of miles away, the risk has grown exponentially.

States usually seal child custody cases, and the federal agencies overseeing the migrant children don’t track how often state court judges allow these kids to be given up for adoption. But by providing a child’s name and birthdate to the specific district, probate or circuit court involved, the AP found that it’s sometimes possible to track these children.

Alexa’s case began in November 2015 under the Obama administration, years before Trump’s family-separation policy rolled out. Her 15-month separation from her mother exposes the fragile legal standing of children under the care of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and a flawed, piecemeal system that can change the course of a child’s life.

It took 28 minutes for a judge in a rural courthouse near Lake Michigan to grant Alexa’s foster parents, Sherri and Kory Barr, temporary guardianship. Alexa’s mother and the little girl’s immigration attorney were not even notified about the proceedings.

Based on their experiences with Alexa, the Barrs had become convinced that Alexa’s mom was a bad mother and that the little girl would be abused if she were reunited with her.

“My wife and I are sick over this,” Kory Barr told the judge, who wished him good luck as he granted the foster parents’ request two days after Christmas.

The federal system that had custody of Alexa says the state courts never should have allowed foster parents to get that far, no matter how good their intentions. But each state court system, from New York to California, runs wardship and adoption proceedings differently — and sometimes there are even variations between counties.

In Missouri, an American couple managed to permanently adopt a baby whose Guatemalan mother had been picked up in an immigration raid. That seven-year legal battle terminating the mother’s parental rights ended in 2014. In Nebraska, another Guatemalan mother prevailed and got her kids back, but it took five years and over $1 million in donated legal work.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement and Bethany Christian Services, the agency that placed Alexa in foster care, would not comment on her case. But Bethany said foster parents are informed they’re not allowed to adopt migrant children.

Since the 1980s, however, Bethany acknowledged that nine of the 500 migrant children assigned to its foster program have been adopted by American families. The children, ages 3 to 18, were adopted after it was determined it wouldn’t be safe or possible for them to go back to their families; at least one asked to be adopted by his foster parents, and another was a trafficking victim, Bethany said.

“We never want families to be separated,” Bethany CEO Chris Palusky said. “That’s what we’re about, is bringing families together.”

John Sandweg, who headed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Obama administration, said he worries that many more migrant children recently taken from their families may never see them again.

“We have the kids in the U.S. and the parents down in Central America, and now they’ll bring all these child welfare agencies into play,” Sandweg said. “It’s just a recipe for disaster.”

In Ramos’ darkest days, she would lay on her bed, stare at the ceiling and sob, her hand on her stomach.

“This girl, she was here, in my womb,” she said. “We are meant to be together. Always.”

___

Alexa’s mother was born in the middle of a bloody civil war in El Salvador that gave way to violent street crime. She was pregnant at 13; that daughter was raised by grandparents.

Starting at age 19, Ramos had four sons with another man over the course of a decade, followed by the arrival of Alexa in 2013. She and her daughter looked alike — both bright-eyed, with dark hair framing their smooth skin.

It was after the children’s father found another woman that the abuse began, Ramos said.

“The worst time was when he kicked me so hard it left a bruise and it never went away,” she later told an asylum officer. Without makeup, a dent in the center of her forehead is apparent.

Ramos went to a shelter, but said she became increasingly convinced that her former partner would track her down and kill her. She applied for a U.S. visa, she said, but got nowhere.

During a custody battle in their home city of San Miguel, Ramos said her children’s father filed false police reports, including one alleging that she encouraged a 17-year-old girl to have sex with an adult. With the help of his own mother, who told authorities her son had made up the accusations, she successfully cleared her name and the cases were dropped.

Yet it was that information — later deemed “outdated and unsubstantiated” by the U.S. Justice Department — that was used in a Michigan court as support for the argument that Alexa should be permanently separated from her mother.

Ramos scraped together $6,000 to pay a smuggler who could help her escape from the man she said warned her she’d “never be at peace.” On the monthlong, 1,500-mile pilgrimage, she carried Alexa, a change of clothes, diapers, cookies, juice and water.

The toddler was exhausted by the journey. She slumped for days in a backpack carrier when they walked, and dozed and fidgeted when they traveled by car. When she was sleepy and agitated, she insisted on being cradled in her mother’s arms.

After crossing the Rio Grande near Roma, Texas, Ramos and her 2-year-old were arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Their ordeal appeared nearly over, since domestic violence was then considered grounds for asylum.

In El Salvador, Ramos might earn $5 a day selling clothes or waitressing. In the U.S., she could earn more than that in an hour. Ramos yearned for a new beginning.

It took less than an hour for her hopes to shatter. The border agent screening her records spotted a red flag: She was a criminal, he said, charged in El Salvador. Alexa, crying, was pulled from her mother’s arms.

“They told me I would never see her again,” Ramos recalled.

Ramos said she begged agents to send Alexa to friends in Texas, but said they gave up when two calls went unanswered.

The departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services have not disputed that events could unfold that way in the federal system. DHS spokeswoman Katie Waldman said Tuesday that the agency had not yet been able to investigate Ramos’ claims, but “takes seriously our responsibility for those in our custody.”

Three days after Ramos’ separation from her daughter, court records show, the U.S. government labeled Alexa an “unaccompanied minor,” which meant she entered the bureaucracy for migrant youth, typically teens, who arrive in the U.S. alone. The toddler was issued a notice to appear on “a date to be set, at a time to be set, to show why you should not be removed from the United States.”

At 28 months, Alexa was intelligent and engaging, but her vocabulary was limited to Spanish words for colors, some numbers and her favorite foods.

She initially was placed with a Spanish-speaking foster family in San Antonio, Texas, who would call Ramos in the detention center and put Alexa on the phone. “Each time they called, I could not stop crying,” Ramos said. “Crying and crying, because I wanted to be with her.”

More than two weeks after their separation, ICE agents moved Ramos seven hours away to a rural Louisiana facility surrounded by high fences topped with coiled razor wire. While Alexa and her foster family decorated a Christmas tree, Ramos slept in a pod of bunkbeds.

Two months after her arrival there, Ramos used a translator to speak on the phone with an asylum officer who asked about her family, why she left El Salvador and what her children’s father might do if she went back. Alexa was safe, Ramos told the officer, but “I think he will kill me.”

The next day, Ramos got word that she had “demonstrated a credible fear of persecution or torture,” according to the asylum supervisor at the DHS.

Her case was assigned to Oakdale Immigration Court in Louisiana, where the three judges had denied 95 percent of all asylum requests that year, compared to the national average of about 50 percent. She said she called the list of pro bono lawyers she was provided, to no avail.

Without a lawyer, her chance at asylum slipped away. Like everyone else around her, she was being deported.

The federal government offers all deported parents the chance to take their children with them, but Ramos said she was ordered to sign a waiver to leave Alexa behind. “The agent put his hand on mine, he held my hand, he forced me to sign,” she said.

Immigration agents then handcuffed Ramos and put her on a plane south, soaring over the volcanos and jungles of Central America.

At the time, it was unusual for parents to be deported while their children remained behind in federal foster care, but that occurred again and again this summer. More than 300 parents were deported to Central America without their children this summer, many of whom allege they were coerced into signing paperwork they didn’t understand, affecting their rights to reunify with their children. Some parents also contended that U.S. officials told them their children would be given up for adoption.

“And the reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanent orphaned child, and that is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration,” U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said in August while overseeing a lawsuit to stop family separations.

The AP asked the State Department, as well as embassy officials in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whether they were working with deported parents to find their children in the U.S.

The State Department deferred to the DHS, which said in a statement: “DHS is not aware of anyone contacting embassy or consulate in a foreign country to be reunified with a child. This is unsurprising given the fact that these parents made a knowing decision to leave their child in a foreign country.”

___

By April 2016, Alexa was transferred to the care of Bethany Christian Services, one of the nation’s largest adoption agencies. As thousands more Central American children crossed the border alone during President Barack Obama’s second term, the nonprofit agency’s work providing temporary and long-term foster care to unaccompanied children had begun to grow.

Over the years, the Michigan-based agency has received support from local donors that include Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her family members, who have contributed more than $3.1 million. One DeVos relative worked for Bethany, and another served on its board.

As the agency started receiving more Central American children, several former Bethany social workers said they were encouraged to recruit new foster families at the agency’s traditional base, the Christian Reformed Church, and other local churches.

“All of a sudden when we had these younger kids to place, everyone was really excited about that,” said Sarah Zuidema, a former Bethany supervisor who grew up within the denomination. “They just felt that if these kids could know Jesus, everything would be OK.”

Among the families who stepped up to help were the Barrs — Kory, a physical therapist at a nearby rehabilitation hospital, and his wife, Sherri, who ran a home-organization business. The Barrs had three daughters who were raised in a devout home and already had fostered two Salvadoran sisters in 2013.

Bethany’s outreach to local families was part of a rising Christian movement to mobilize support to address what Bethany has called the “global refugee crisis.” The movement emphasizes that fostering is aligned with spiritual beliefs, and urges families to approach the role with open hearts.

When Bethany placed Alexa in the Barrs’ home, the couple signed a form promising they would not try to seek custody because the Office of Refugee Resettlement was legally responsible for the child. But eight months later, fearing for the girl’s safety, that is exactly what they did.

On June 5, 2016, Alexa celebrated her third birthday 3,000 miles away from her mother. The next month, a social worker sent Ramos Facebook photos showing Alexa wearing an American flag tank dress, drawing outside in the Michigan sunlight. In another shot, the girl appears at the Barrs’ front door clad in a hot pink ensemble, next to a little red wagon and the family dog.

Around this time, Alexa began meeting with a play therapist and, based on their observations of the girl, the Barrs became deeply suspicious that she had been exposed to abuse before she reached their home. Ramos said they then began limiting her phone contact with her daughter.

The foster program notified the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, which opened an investigation but decided the complaint lacked sufficient evidence.

Ramos had cried when social workers approached her about the abuse allegations and insisted that Alexa had always been safe in her care. Because Alexa had spent nearly a third of her life away from her mother, she then grew distressed at the thought that her daughter might have been harmed during their separation.

In August, the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, which has a federal contract to advocate for the best interests of immigrant children navigating the legal system, began investigating whether Alexa could safely be returned to her mother. An evaluator repeatedly visited Ramos and interviewed her family, neighbors and employer.

Meanwhile, Salvadoran diplomatic officials began making periodic visits to Grand Rapids to check on Alexa and advocate for her release.

“The foster family started putting up barrier after barrier to delay her departure,” said Patricia Maza-Pittsford, El Salvador’s consul general in Chicago.

Finally, the girl’s immigration attorney, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. immigration courts all reached agreement: It was past time for Alexa to be back with her mother.

Just days before Christmas 2016, a federal immigration judge ordered her deported. The Barrs were told to pack up Alexa’s things and have her ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Alexa had learned to speak English, bonded with her foster sisters and captured their hearts. The Barrs were certain she had been abused and remain so to this day. So they hired a lawyer and went to court.

“The Office of Refugee Resettlement is planning to put Alexa on a plane back to her abuser,” the couple said in a handwritten application seeking guardianship. Alexa’s mother, they wrote, “has not owned her crimes, not been rehabilitated.”

During an emergency hearing, Kory Barr pounded on the judge’s bench as he begged him to help them keep the girl in Michigan and insisted that child-welfare experts needed more time to investigate.

“Every day they are telling us this could happen very fast,” he said. “We have her bags packed.”

Judge Mark Feyen confessed he wasn’t familiar with the federal agencies involved, saying, “This is kind of hard to pin down exactly who the interested parties are.”

Responding to their concerns that Alexa’s life could be in danger, Feyen granted the Barrs temporary custody after their attorney, Joshua Mikrut, asserted he had a “loose understanding” that a prior order had been issued suspending Ramos’ parental rights, though he didn’t know where. The judge asked him to return with proof, and also scheduled a full guardianship hearing for a few weeks later.

“Every time I get one of these, I learn a little more,” the judge said.

Within days, a federal immigration judge granted an emergency motion to stay Alexa’s departure.

___

When state courts gain control of a child being detained by the federal government, that child can become invisible in the system. Alexa and her mother were held in federal custody. But states — not the federal government — typically run child-welfare systems.

Alexa’s mom didn’t know where to turn, and she didn’t have the money to hire an attorney. But she did have Facebook.

In El Salvador, in the days surrounding the Michigan guardianship hearing, she posted a series of increasingly desperate videos — which went viral in Central America and in one case attracted 2.5 million views — speaking directly to the Barrs, to her daughter, to anyone who might help her get Alexa back.

“I’m the girl’s mother. You aren’t anything to her — you just met her because I traveled with her,” she sobbed in one video, her voice breaking as she addressed the Barrs. “Look inside your hearts. I had her in my belly for nine months. I’m the mother and I’m waiting for her.”

In another video, she cried as she displayed dolls modeled on the Disney movie “Frozen” that she bought to give Alexa for Christmas.

Outraged and sympathetic comments poured in and word reached Salvadoran government officials in El Salvador and the Chicago consul’s office. Pressure mounted.

A month after the Barrs were granted guardianship of Alexa, the Justice Department weighed in sharply.

“The Barrs obtained their temporary guardianship order in violation of federal law,” U.S. prosecutors argued. The Barrs’ attorney and the Michigan judge also violated federal law by seeking and granting guardianship, and failed to inform Ramos or Alexa’s lawyers about the proceedings, they wrote.

More than a month after they had petitioned to keep Alexa, Sherri and Kory Barr despairingly gave up. The federal government, they wrote the judge, “seems to have us painted into a corner with no way out.”

While Mikrut acknowledges the Barrs sometimes were blinded by their passion, he said the federal system should allow challenges to its decisions about the welfare of children in its care.

A few days later, the Barrs sent Alexa home with a huge bag of toys and clothes and a letter from “Papa Foster,” as Kory Barr called himself.

“Mi querida Alexa,” he began, or “my dear Alexa.” He wrote about how she loved her first snow, how they pretended to hold wrestling matches, how he cried at the thought of life without the “baby” of their family.

“I hope this is not the last time we see you, but if it is, I want you to know that I will keep you in my heart forever,” he wrote.

___

Alexa was stunned when she landed in El Salvador in February 2017. Her mother sobbed and clung to her, but the girl barely recognized this woman who called herself Mama. When could she go home to “Mama Foster, Papa Foster” and her three blonde, blue-eyed sisters? And what was this woman saying?

Alexa had lost all her Spanish and spoke English to her mother, using words like “water” and “chicken.” Ramos, who spoke almost no English herself, had to point to pictures or call friends to translate.

The Ramos’ small brick home, shared with two of Alexa’s brothers, is on a quiet dirt street a few blocks from the main drag, a colorful and chaotic mix of shops and services.

Alexa pined for her house in suburban Grand Rapids, its green lawn, her pink room. She rarely giggled and didn’t want to play or eat.

Children traumatically separated from their parents are more likely to suffer from emotional problems throughout their lives, according to decades of scientific research. And some more recent studies have found that separation can damage a child’s memory.

Ramos showed Alexa baby pictures to help her relearn their relationship.

“I am your mother. I love you so very much,” she told her in Spanish, over and over.

Slowly, over time, Alexa began to smile and understand her native tongue. She bonded again with her mother and brothers. Bright and energetic, she now often winds her small arms around her mother’s waist and neck. When she wants attention, she whispers in her mother’s ear.

Ramos still struggles with the pain of the separation, and to support her family on the few dollars a day she earns at a pizzeria. She often posts Facebook photos and videos of herself with her daughter, a visual assertion of their bond.

She fears for parents who were separated from their children under the zero-tolerance policy and has taken to Facebook to urge them to fight to get their kids back.

“If they give our children up for adoption without our permission, that isn’t justice,” she said during a recent interview in a park. “They are our children, not theirs.”

For months after she came home, Alexa asked if she could talk to the Barrs but Ramos wasn’t ready. She had a change of heart when she learned Sherri Barr was ill and now lets them talk every so often.

“I do not feel resentment for them because they also love her and because the family is going through a bad time,” Ramos said. “We all deserve an opportunity.”

The Barrs worry about Alexa’s safety in El Salvador, but say they also worry about Ramos’ well-being. They now consider their relationship with mother and daughter part of God’s plan.

“No one wins in this one,” Sherri Barr said.

___

Burke reported from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Mendoza reported from San Miguel, El Salvador.

 

 

 

An ExxonMobil-Backed Carbon Tax Will Not Save the Planet

Amid warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that there’s a closing window to act to prevent a climate catastrophe—and critiques that its report released Monday was far too conservative—critics are calling out ExxonMobil for pledging a $1 million contribution to a campaign for a carbon tax as a sneaky attempt to control the debate on climate action and dodge greater financial liability.

“This is a scam: Exxon wants a super low price on carbon so they can boost their natural gas business and avoid other regulations,” 350.org co-founder Jamie Henn responded in a series of tweets.

“Read the fine print,” Henn continued. “As part of the deal for supporting a price on carbon, Exxon wants to be freed from all climate liability. They know that just like Big Tobacco they could be on the hook for billions in damages for lying about climate change.”

Progressives and climate campaigners have argued both for and against market-based solutions such as a carbon tax, but have tended to agree that fossil fuel giants back such proposals not because they support climate action, but because they want to undermine efforts such as lawsuits that have sought to hold Exxon and other oil and gas producers accountable for their decades of denialism and contributions to the global climate crisis.

“Market-based carbon pricing schemes are a false solution to climate change, and a dangerous distraction from the urgent transition to a truly clean, renewable energy future we must undertake now,” Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said in a statement on Tuesday.

“It comes as no surprise that ExxonMobil and other oil companies are calling for anything and everything short of moving off fossil fuels entirely—most notably, the unwieldy and unproven concept of carbon taxes,” Hauter added. “The IPCC report acknowledges that carbon taxes would have to be incredibly high to make even a dent in the crisis.”

Responding to Exxon’s latest move, Kate Aronoff, who has written extensively about the climate crisis, said, “It’s not a lot of money, but they’re not very subtly trying to stake a claim to whatever climate policy debate happens.” She also noted that the tax proposed by the Exxon campaign group, Americans For Carbon Dividends, “is way too low.”

1. This has been coming for a while (oil majors called for a global carbon price in 2015) 2. It’s not a lot of money, but they’re not very subtly trying to stake a claim to whatever climate policy debate happens post-2018/20 3. $40/ton is way too low https://t.co/mbHYz0lepI

— Kate Scare-onoff (@KateAronoff) October 9, 2018

Referencing a new analysis from Alex Kaufman at the Huffington Post on the potential impact of a carbon tax, Henn pointed out: “DC-types love carbon pricing but usually fail to mention that there’s no political way you could get the price high enough to actually solve the climate problem. It’s only one piece of the puzzle.”

Important stuff. DC-types love carbon pricing but usually fail to mention that there’s no political way you could get the price high enough to actually solve the climate problem. It’s only one piece of the puzzle. https://t.co/yemggaBqej

— Jamie Henn (@Agent350) October 9, 2018

Writing within the context of the IPCC report released Monday, Kaufman outlined how its warnings—however conservative, when compared to other recent climate studies—challenged but “doesn’t seem to have shaken many Republican climate hawks’ faith that market tweaks alone can deliver the unprecedented emissions cuts needed to avert disaster.”

While Josiah Neeley, a senior fellow at the right-wing climate policy think tank R Street Institute, insisted to Kaufman that “a market-based, revenue-neutral carbon tax is perfectly capable of achieving rapid decarbonization as is called for in the new IPCC report,” the actual authors of the report don’t agree. As Kaufman noted:

Asked during an IPCC press conference on Sunday night if carbon pricing could radically overhaul the global economy in the next decade, two IPCC authors started to laugh. James Skea, a co-chair of an IPCC working group, said it was “one among that portfolio of instruments that can be used” but could not serve as a panacea.

“There are some areas where carbon pricing may not be the most appropriate approach,” he said from Incheon, South Korea.

Referencing Kaufman’s article and the IPCC report on Twitter Monday, Bill McKibben, another co-founder of 350.org, also concluded: “One takeaway from today’s climate report is that we’ve waited long enough that almost no-one thinks a carbon price alone can get us where we need to go. It’s one part of a ‘portfolio of solutions.'”

Hauter, meanwhile, urged Congress to pass the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act (OFF Act)—unveiled by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) last year—which she called “the most ambitious climate legislation ever introduced.”

“The alarming findings of the latest IPCC report,” Hauter charged, “validate an aggressive approach to deepening climate chaos that scientists, advocates, and elected officials across the country are steadily endorsing: a rapid transition off fossil fuels that would make our society almost entirely reliant on clean, renewable energy in the next ten years.

Even If We Limit Global Warming, Fire and Drought Will Remain Threats

The most limited rise in global temperatures, never mind higher ones, is going to exact a price through fire and drought. Even assuming the world keeps to its Paris promise to contain average planetary temperature increases to “well below 2°C” by 2100, drought conditions in China will intensify ten or 20-fold, according to new research.

And even if this warming, driven by ever increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from burning coal, oil and gas, is held to the implicit ambition of no more than 1.5°C above the average for most of human history, the area charred by wildfires each summer in Europe could increase by 40%, according to a separate study.

If the temperatures continue to rise to as much as 3°C by the century’s end, the area covered by charred foliage and smoking tree trunks could rise by 100%.

The temperature targets are important because 195 nations agreed in 2015 at a UN conference in Paris to limit greenhouse gas emissions and hold planetary average temperatures to if possible 1.5°C and certainly no more than 2°C.

3°C in prospect

In the last century or so, increasing ratios of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere have lifted average temperatures by about 1°C already, and although almost all nations have announced plans to switch to solar and wind power for future energy sources, and to restore the forests that absorb carbon, the world still seems on course for a rise to 3°C by the end of the century.

Politicians and climate sceptics argue that action to contain global warming will be expensive. But over and over again, climate science research continues to demonstrate that inaction could be even more expensive.

China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Scientists from China, Poland and Germany report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they used computer simulations and a range of climate change forecasts to model what could happen to rainfall and vegetation in China over the next 80 years, and then tried to calculate the effect on China’s developing economy.

Between 1949 and 2017, drought affected crops over an area of more than 2 million square kilometres – this is one sixth of the country’s arable land. And between 1984 and 2017, direct economic losses reached more than $7bn a year, at 2015 prices.

“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C can strongly reduce the increase of burned area”

If the temperature stabilises at a 1.5°C increase, losses compared to the period 1986-2005 will increase tenfold. Compared to the immediate past of 2006-2015, the study estimates that losses will still rise threefold. And should the temperature go beyond 1.5°C to 2°C, average drought loss could double again.

Studies such as these simply match what has happened in the past with what could happen in the future – always provided that things continue as they seem to be proceeding now. The studies can deliver only very broad-brush outlines of the shapes of things to come.

Higher average temperatures will mean ever more pronounced extremes of drought and rainfall, and a study earlier this year warned that, in China alone, catastrophic flooding as a consequence of climate change could cost the country $380bn over the next 20 years.

Europe, too, the same study argued, would suffer significant losses as a consequence of climate change. Another such study in 2017 estimated that climate change – and the attendant hazards of flood, drought, wildfire and heatwaves – could threaten 350 million Europeans every year.

Consistent pattern

Forest and scrub fires char on average about 4,500 square kilometres of Mediterranean Europe every year: in 2017, there were damaging blazes in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, with human casualties and extensive ecological and economic losses.

Now new research led by Spanish scientists and reported in the journal Nature Communications uses computer simulations and available data to take a look at the fires next time, as the temperatures rise.

The authors warn that even though there are large uncertainties in such projections, there is also a consistent pattern: the higher the temperatures, the more sustained the droughts, and the larger the areas that will be incinerated.

They do offer a palliative solution, though. “Limiting global warming to 1.5°C can strongly reduce the increase of burned area,” they say.

Military Families Speak Out Against the Afghanistan War

You’d hardly know it from the news, but we’ve been continuously at war in Afghanistan since 2001. The war quietly turned 17 on October 7.

Unfortunately, America’s amnesia didn’t prevent Command Sergeant Major Tim Bolyard from being killed in Afghanistan in early September during his eighth combat tour and 13th deployment.

Eight combat tours — which should be illegal — sent Bolyard down-range repeatedly in a war President Obama purportedly ended over three years ago. A war this country forgot long before that.

A nation that doesn’t remember the men and women sent to fight on its behalf has no business whatsoever sending more. And a democracy that spends more time debating kneeling before the flag than the justification for issuing folded ones desperately needs to get re-acquainted with the Constitution — and its moral compass.

Our loved ones didn’t sign up to serve a president. They signed up to serve the American people, most of whom have no idea what they’re fighting for.

I don’t know, either. Nor do any of the other 4,000-plus members of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO).

We all have spouses, parents, partners, siblings, and children who’ve served in the post-9/11 era. Founded in 2002 by two military families to oppose the invasion of Iraq, our loved ones are still serving there and in Afghanistan.

We’ve spent more than a decade and a half burying children, grieving parents, mourning spouses and siblings, and caring for wounded warriors. We have no more loved ones left to give.

Shame on a country that continues to take our troops to wars long declared done, squandering their service and absolving the collective conscience with two words: “They volunteered.” 

The fact that soldiers wear the uniform by choice shouldn’t permit “the American people and their elected representatives to be indifferent about the war in Afghanistan,” retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry told the New York Times.

The former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan added: “We continue to fight simply because we are there.”

That “we” is a miniscule 1 percent of the population that’s paying the human cost of this country’s check for war — the democratic equivalent of a dine-and-dash. The body count for U.S. troops in Afghanistan is 2,414, plus more than 20,000 injured. Those figures rise into the hundreds of thousands for Afghan soldiers and civilians.

Then there’s the financial cost: Over $1 trillion, according to TheBalance.com.

Even so, Congress has repeatedly cut taxes, especially for the rich, since the wars began. Our fiscal policy is one of kicking the can down the road to future generations, who are paying enough already for fossil-fueled climate change.

Sixteen of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since 2001. The massive carbon footprint generated by armed forces in combat zones, a primary institutional driver of global warming, ensures that these endless wars will end up costing everyone.

Our troops and families of veterans pay the price every day. Before our loved ones returned from their first tours, we were told “Combat is a one-way door: Once you walk through it, you can never go back.”

I used to think that only applied to veterans. I know better now.

“It is time for this war in Afghanistan to end,” said General John W. Nicholson recently, as he was preparing to leave the country for the last time. Nicholson had spent a total of 31 months — four tours — in Afghanistan as the commander in charge of a shape-shifting mission.

Support the troops, America: Bring them home now. Enough folded flags.

When America Embraced Islamophobia

These days, our global political alliances seem to shift with remarkable rapidity, as if we were actually living in George Orwell’s 1984. Are we at war this month with Oceania? Or is it Eastasia? In that novel, the Party is able to erase history, sending old newspaper articles down the Ministry of Truth’s “memory hole” and so ensuring that, in the public mind, the enemy of the moment was always the enemy. Today, there is one constant, though. The Trump administration has made Muslims our enemy of the first order and, in its Islamophobia, is reinforced by an ugly resurgence of fascism in Germany, Italy, Hungary, and other European countries.

It’s hard today even to imagine that, in the late 1980s, the rightwing Christian Voice Magazine published a “candidate’s biblical scoreboard,” urging its readers (and potential voters) to rate their politicians by how “biblically” they cast their ballots in Congress. One key measure of this: Did that legislator support the anti-Communist Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan, a cause warmly supported by evangelist Pat Robertson in his 1988 presidential campaign? Now, attempting to appeal to twenty-first-century evangelicals, President Trump has announced that “Islam hates us.”

The kaleidoscope of geopolitics and Islamophobia is now spinning so fast that it should make our heads spin, too. At times, it seems as if Donald Trump is the anti-Ronald Reagan of the twenty-first century, idolizing former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, but seeing former U.S. allies in the Muslim world like Pakistan as purveyors of “nothing but lies and deceit” — until, that is, with bewildering rapidity, he suddenly gives us the “good” (that is, oil-rich) Muslims again, willingly performing a sword dance with the Saudi royals, seemingly entirely comfortable with the scimitar of the Saracen.

Islamophobes Galore

While the president oscillates between abusing and fawning over the elites of the Muslim world, his true opprobrium is reserved for the poor and helpless. His hatred of refugees uprooted by the horrific Syrian civil war, for instance, stems from his conviction that this population (predominantly women and children, as well as some men fleeing the fighting) might actually be adherents of the so-called Islamic State group (also known as ISIL, ISIS, or Daesh) and so part of the building of a secretive paramilitary force in the West. He’s even speculated that “this could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time. A 200,000-man army, maybe.”

This summer, he also tweeted: “Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!” And a day later claimed it had risen by 10%. Though immigrant communities can indeed produce some crime until they find their footing, the crime rate in Germany, despite the welcoming of two million immigrants in 2015 alone, has fallen to a 30-year low, as have crimes by non-German nationals.

Nor, of course, is there an army of terrorists the size of the active-duty forces of France or Italy among those hapless Syrian refugees. Still, that outlandish conspiracy theory may be part of what lay behind the president’s blatantly unconstitutional 2015 call for a “total and complete shut-down” of Muslims coming to the United States. Consider it a great irony, then, that some significant part of the turmoil in the greater Middle East that helped provoke waves of refugees and an Islamophobic backlash here and in Europe was, at least in part, the creation of this country, not Muslim fundamentalist madmen.

The Islamophobes like to argue that Islam is an inherently violent religion, that its adherents are quite literally commanded to such violence by its holy scriptures, the Qur’an. It’s a position that, as I explain in my new book, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, is both utterly false and ahistorical. As it happens, you would have to look to far more recent realities to find the impetus for the violence, failed states, and spreading terror groups in today’s Greater Middle East. Start with the Reagan administration’s decision to deploy rag-tag bands of Muslim extremists (which al-Qaeda was first formed to support) against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That set in motion massive turmoil still roiling that country, neighboring Pakistan, and beyond, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Of course, al-Qaeda notoriously blew back on America. Its September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington were then used by American neoconservatives in the administration of George W. Bush — some of whom had served in the Reagan years, cheering on the American-backed Afghan fundamentalists, as well as their Arab allies — to set the United States on a permanent war footing in the Muslim world. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, promoted on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein’s government supported al-Qaeda, kicked off a set of guerrilla insurgencies and provoked a Sunni-Shiite civil war that spread in the region.

Hundreds of thousands would die and at least four million people, including staggering numbers of children, would be displaced over the years thanks to George W. Bush’s boondoggle. The al-Qaeda franchise ISIL (formed initially as al-Qaeda in Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion) arose to expel American troops there. Ultimately, its militants made inroads in neighboring Syria in 2011 and 2012 and the U.S. allowed them to grow in hopes of putting pressure on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.

As is now all too clear, such policies created millions of refugees, some of whom streamed towards Europe, only to be greeted by a rising tide of white Christian bigotry and neo-Nazism. There’s no way to measure the degree to which America’s wars across the Greater Middle East and North Africa have, in fact, changed our world. When, for instance, British Prime Minister Tony Blair signed on to Bush’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, how could he have foreseen that he was helping set off events that would result in a British withdrawal from the European Union (a decision in which anti-immigrant sentiment played an outsized role) — and so the diminishment of his country?

Having helped spread extremism and set in motion massive population displacements, Western elites then developed a profound fear of the millions of refugees they had helped chase out of the Middle East. Executive Order 13769, President Trump’s abrupt January 2017 visa ban, which created chaos at American airports and provoked widespread protests and court challenges — many of its elements were, however, ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court — appears to have been premised on the notion that a Trojan Horse of Muslim extremism was headed for American shores.

In reality, the relatively small number of terrorist attacks here by Muslim-Americans (covered so much more intensively than the more common mass shootings by white nationalists) have most often been carried out by “lone wolves” who “self-radicalized” on the Internet and who, had they been white, would simply have been viewed as mentally unbalanced.

Still, realities of that sort don’t make a dent in the president’s agenda. In 2018, the Trump administration will likely only admit about 20,000 refugees, far less than last year’s 45,000, thanks to administration demands that the FBI carry out “extreme vetting” of all applicants without being given any extra resources to do so. Of the refugees admitted in the first half of this year, only about one in six was a Muslim, while in 2016, when 84,995 refugees were admitted, they were equally divided between Christians and Muslims.

On average, the U.S. still admits a little more than a million immigrants annually, of which refugees are a small (and decreasing) proportion. Since 2010, more immigrants have come from Asia than any other area, some 45% of them with college degrees, which means that Trump’s very image of immigrants is wrong.

His ban on immigrants from five Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia) was largely symbolic, since they were generally not sources of significant immigration. It was also remarkably arbitrary, since it did not include Iraq or Afghanistan, where violent insurgencies and turmoil continue but whose governments host American troops. It does, however, include the relatively peaceful country of Iran.

Trump’s Muslim ban has broken up families, even as it harmed American businesses and universities whose employees (or in the case of colleges, students) have been abruptly barred from the country. The restrictions on immigration from Syria and Yemen are particularly cruel, since those lands face the most extreme humanitarian crises on the planet and the United States has been deeply implicated in the violence in both of them. Moreover, Iranians who do emigrate to the U.S. are, for the most part, members of minorities or political dissidents. In fact, no nationals from any of those five banned states have committed lethal acts of terrorism in the United States in the last 40 years.

The Islamophobia of President Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and others in the administration, aided and abetted by the megaphone that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News offers, has had a distinct impact on public opinion. Attacks on Muslim-Americans have, for instance, spiked back to 2001 levels. A recent poll found that some 16% of Americans want to deny the vote to Muslim-Americans, 47% support Trump’s visa restrictions, and a majority would like all mosques to be kept under surveillance. (A frequent, if completely false, talking point of the Islamophobes is that Muslims here have a single ideology and are focused on a secret plan to take over the United States.) You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that such unhinged conspiracy theories are far more prevalent among Republicans than Democrats and independents.

Similarly unsurprising is the fact that Americans in the Trump era give a lower favorability rating to Muslim-Americans (a little over 1% of the U.S. population) than to virtually any other religious or ethnic group (though feminists and evangelicals are runners-up). By a spread of about 20 points, they believe that Muslim-Americans are both more religious than Christian Americans and less likely to respect the country’s ideals and laws. They slam Muslims for according women and gays low status, though a majority of Muslim-Americans say that homosexuals should be accepted in society, a belief that Muslim-American women hold in the same percentages as the rest of the American public. As for those women, they are among the best educated of any faith group in the country, suggesting extremely supportive families.

In reality, Muslim-Americans are remarkably well integrated into this country and have committed little terrorism here. In the past decade and a half, on average, 28 Muslim-Americans a year were associated with acts of violent extremism out of a population of 3.5 million and most of those “acts” involved traveling abroad to join radical movements. Muslim-American extremists killed 17 people in 2017, a year in which white gunmen killed 267 Americans in mass shootings.

Changing Bogeymen

The Islamophobia that Donald Trump has made his own arose in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, once the bogeyman of Communism was removed from the quiver of the American Right. The 1990s were hard on the Republican Party and its plutocrats (with a popular Clinton in the White House), and on the arms manufacturers facing a public increasingly uninterested in foreign adventurism with no sense of threat from abroad. The Pentagon budget was even briefly cut in those years, producing what was then called a “peace dividend.” (It wasn’t.) And though it’s now hard to imagine, in 1995 the United States was not involved in a conventional hot war anywhere in the world.

In this no-longer-so-new century, the Republican Party, like the Trump presidency, did, however, find the bogeyman it needed and it looks remarkably like a modernized version of the rabidly anti-Communist McCarthyism of the 1950s. In fact, the endless demonization of Muslims may be less a cudgel to wield against the small Muslim-American community than against Democratic opponents who can be lambasted as “soft on terrorism” if they resist demands to demonize Muslims and their religion.

In my own state of Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, an acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Obama years and a former CIA analyst, is running as a Democrat in the 8th District against Congressman Mike Bishop. Slotkin played a role in developing the anti-ISIL strategies that Trump adopted when he came into office. Nonetheless, our airwaves are now saturated with pro-Bishop ads smearing Slotkin, a third-generation Michigander, for her supposed involvement in President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and so for being little short of a Shiite terrorist herself. Similarly, in San Diego, California’s 50th district, the scandal-ridden campaign of Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter (indicted for embezzling $250,000 in campaign funds) continues to broadly intimate that his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Christian American of Palestinian and Mexican descent, is a Muslim Brotherhood infiltrator seeking to enter Congress.

Still, despite all the sound and fury from the White House, the U.S. Muslim population continues to grow because of immigration and natural increase. Over the past 30 years, between 3,000 and 13,000 immigrants have arrived annually from Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, and a handful of other countries. Their governments are close geopolitical allies of the U.S. and to interdict their nationals would be politically embarrassing, as Trump discovered when he attempted to include Iraq on his list of banned countries and was persuaded to change his mind by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

Of course, not all Americans share Trump’s bigotry. Two-thirds of us actually disapprove of politicians engaging in hate speech toward Muslims. Some 55% of us believe that Muslim-Americans are committed to the welfare of the country, a statistic that would break the 60% mark if it weren’t for evangelicals. Two Muslim-American politicians, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, won Democratic primaries in Detroit and Minneapolis and so are poised to become the first Muslim-American women in the House of Representatives.

Such an outcome would be one way in which Americans could begin to reply to the wave of Islamophobia that helped lift Donald Trump into office in 2016 and has only intensified since then. The decency of Middle America has certainly been tarnished, but as the polls indicate, not lost. Not yet anyway.

More Than 70 Years Later, a Marine Comes Home

WASHINGTON — Gerard Murphy never met his uncle Richard. But the Potomac, Maryland, native grew up hearing stories of the former journalist who enlisted in the Marines during World War II and disappeared during the Jan. 15, 1944, amphibious assault on the Pacific island of Saipan.

“This was a mystery in our family for basically my entire life,” said Gerard Murphy, a lawyer. “It’s bad enough to lose someone in a war. Having them missing in action is an added burden and grief to carry.”

That all changed in 2015, when Gerard Murphy was contacted by Ted Darcy, an independent researcher specializing in identifying World War II-era military remains. Darcy, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant, believed he had made a match between Richard Murphy’s dental records and the remains of an unidentified Saipan casualty buried in the Philippines as unknown soldier X-15.

Three years and many steps later Richard Murphy’s remains are finally coming home. Darcy’s efforts resulted in the military disinterring the remains in the X-15 grave and bringing them to Hawaii for genetic testing. Gerard Murphy and one of his cousins provided DNA samples — “basically we spit in a bag” — and the military was able to make a positive match.

Richard Murphy’s remains are expected to arrive in late November, where they will be reburied in a cemetery in Silver Spring, Maryland, “right next to his mother,” Gerard Murphy said.

A native of Washington, D.C., Richard Murphy graduated from Georgetown University and worked for several years for the Washington Evening Star, an afternoon newspaper that ceased publication in 1981. When the U.S. entered World War II, Murphy enlisted in the Marines as a combat correspondent, island hopping through the Pacific with American troops.

“He carried his M-1 rifle and his typewriter,” Gerard Murphy said. “All my life we heard about Uncle Richard. Having his remains brought home feels really amazing — very spiritual.”

Working from his home in Florida, Darcy was able to make the match by comparing dental records from Richard Murphy’s enlistment with those of unknown soldier X-15, all supplied for a fee by the National Archives and Records Administration. Darcy said he has dealt with dozens of such cases and often ends up dealing directly with family members — sometimes with divergent reactions to news of a long-dead relative.

“Some are very, very grateful,” he said. “Some don’t want to be bothered.”

Darcy said he has personally helped complete 15 such unknown soldier cases from World War II, a small fraction of the nearly 9,000 unknown soldier cases from that conflict.

His work frequently brings him in contact with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA. Darcy expressed some frustration with the pace of the process on the military’s end.

“It took three years for them to decide to disinter (Murphy), go get the body and ship it to Hawaii for DNA testing,” Darcy said. “I’ve got 48 more on my desk right now. How long is it going to take to get them through those?”

Hattie Johnson, a service casualty officer for the Marine Corps, has been handling the Murphy case and said there’s a renewed sense of urgency surrounding the World War II cases because “the family members of these soldiers are starting to die off.”

The situation is complicated by the relatively primitive nature of the medical and dental records back then, Johnson said. For example, the dental records on file for each American soldier and Marine were essentially done by hand instead of with an X-ray machine.

“Back then, the dentist would literally look into your mouth and manually fill out a chart,” she said.

Still, Darcy was able to make that connection using the same records.

“The military said they tried but they couldn’t figure it out,” he said. “I think they’re just overwhelmed.”