Chris Hedges's Blog, page 449

Case of Missing Pakistani Children Is Also About Corruption

Editor’s note: This article, originally published Sept. 28 in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, was written by Truthdig contributor and leading Pakistani journalist Zubeida Mustafa. Read a collection of Mustafa’s work, including her pieces in the series Global Voices: Truthdig Women Reporting, here. 

The police force in Pakistan’s Sindh province is under fire, which is not something unusual as its performance can hardly be described as satisfactory. It is also alleged to be notoriously corrupt.

A fortnight ago, the Sindh chief justice rebuked the defenders of the law for their failure to recover 22 children who had been missing for several years. An NGO, Roshni Helpline, had filed a petition in the Sindh High Court on behalf of their parents.

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Pompeo’s Five Hours in Islamabad



by Zubeida Mustafa

In spite of the directive, the police had not set up a team to look into each case.

This news report touched a raw nerve and pained me immensely. My experience with the police in the last six months has been similarly frustrating. We (the widowed mother of two kidnapped minor girls and I) have been running from pillar to post to get justice.

It is our tragedy that people generally tend to turn away when they learn of a case of young girls being trafficked for prostitution. In the absence of any clue, I fear this might be the fate of the two girls mentioned above as well.

Is it embarrassment at anything to do with sex? Or a patriarchal mindset that perceives sex as a man’s right? Or the belief that all women who are trapped in such a situation are evil and that they deserve their terrible fate? Many might call this a national trait.

There has been no uproar when such cases have been exposed as on the present occasion by Roshni Helpline. In rare cases, men and women of conscience have spoken up especially when they had something to narrate from their own experience, as described in my last column on this subject on Aug 3.

Today, I will quote Nasreen Azhar, our well-known feminist and human rights activist and former member of the National Commission on the Status of Women.

This is what she has to say: “A young man, a friend, phoned me a year ago to ask for help in a case where a girl of 16 had been kidnapped from the bus stop and forced to work for a brothel. She had been picked up by a woman pretending to be helpful and had been handed over to another woman in a house in the adjoining rural area.

“As can be expected, she was locked up and beaten every time she tried to escape. She was forced to service clients who were sent to her. Luckily, a client felt sorry for her when he heard her story. He phoned her brother who came with several relatives and rescued her. But her family did not want to pursue the case because of their ‘izzat’.

“I had been given the girl’s phone number so I called her up. I assured her that I was a friend and would not disclose her identity to anyone. My aim was to have the people who ran the brothel punished. She hesitantly told me what had happened and offered to give the location and address of the place where she had been held captive, along with two or three other girls at the time.

“So I phoned my young friend who had told me about this case, and he promised to speak to a senior police officer who he knew. I kept following up with phone calls but nothing came of it. The police officer was transferred and I was told that the girl herself would have to lodge the FIR [first information report].

“When I insisted that the police had at times raided brothels in posh Islamabad areas when only neighbors had complained, there was no response except for vague promises. It is obvious that raids in posh areas are lucrative for the police in terms of the payments they receive. But where poor women and girls are concerned it is not considered worthwhile. I still feel guilty that I was not able to do more for this poor child.”

What Nasreen narrates is the sad story repea­ted day after day all over the country when someone with a little clout gets invol­ved. The U.S. secretary of state’s Report on Trafficking in Persons (Pakistan) speaks of police complicity with the criminals. When poor girls have been picked up, in most cases the families lack the clout or even the will to have their daughters rescued.

These girls become a rich source of earning for the pimps and also their protectors, the police, who are handsomely tipped to “make vague promises and do nothing”, as happened in the case Nasreen narrates.

Telephones remain unanswered and sooner rather than later the rare police officer who is trying to be helpful is transferred. The story sounds familiar. It is repeated in every case taken up. I can almost hear the sigh when Nasreen concludes her email with these words, “Tragic, the things that go on in our country!”

Historian Howard Zinn Warned Us About the Supreme Court

These are the facts. The Senate majority, which the Republican Party currently holds with 51 seats, presently represents 18 percent of the country’s population. Following Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, four of the Supreme Court’s nine justices have been appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Two of those justices attended the same D.C.-area prep school.

If the United States government faces a legitimacy crisis, it’s one that has been building for 18 years, if not longer than that. In 2000’s Bush v. Gore decision, five conservative justices determined that Florida could not conduct a recount of its heavily disputed election results—a decision that effectively handed the presidency to the Republican candidate. “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear,” John Paul Stevens, who was appointed by Gerald Ford, wrote in his dissent. “It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

The naked politicization of the judiciary did not escape historian Howard Zinn. In 2005, after another former member of the Federalist Society, John Roberts, became the 17th chief justice of the United States, the activist and professor issued a warning to progressives about the power of the high court—one they might be wise to revisit on the heels of Kavanaugh’s ascension.

“It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds,” he wrote. “Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”

Zinn also took aim at Democrats and Republicans’ collective fetishization of the “rule of law,” a phrase that Kavanaugh invoked more than once while rebutting multiple allegations of sexual assault before the Senate Judiciary Committee. As America’s own history reveals, no law is inherently just, nor is it deserving of the divine right of kings.

“The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions,” he continued. “Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance.”

The piece concludes with a call to action, one entirely true to Zinn’s canonical “A People’s History of the United States.” The legal system cannot determine our country’s trajectory, and we have more power than either we realize or acknowledge.

“The courts have never been on the side of justice, only moving a few degrees one way or the other, unless pushed by the people,” he observed. “Those words engraved in the marble of the Supreme Court, ‘Equal Justice Before the Law,’ have always been a sham.”

“No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the war in Iraq, or redistribute the wealth of this country, or establish free medical care for every human being. Such fundamental change will depend, the experience of the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused citizenry, demanding that the promise of the Declaration of Independence—an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—be fulfilled.”

Read Zinn’s piece in its entirety at The Progressive.

USDA Uses Algorithm to Target Small-Business Owners in Its Crusade Against SNAP

Since the 2008 recession, the cost of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits has nearly doubled, to $70 billion. The rise has made the federal nutrition program a frequent target of conservative politicians, including President Trump, who are convinced there is an epidemic of SNAP fraud. Never mind that the rise was “largely because the economic upheaval caused more Americans to need the help of food stamps to feed their families,” as Emelyn Rude wrote in Time in 2017.

In February, Trump suggested that most recipients should receive half of those benefits not in money they can spend as they see fit but in the form of a box of shelf-stable packaged foods, which the administration said would reduce the overall cost of the program by $129 billion over the next 10 years.

While neither the budget for SNAP nor the future of Trump’s “box proposal” has yet to be determined, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has found other ways to punish both SNAP users and the stores at which they shop.

On Monday, in collaboration with the nonprofit newsroom, New Food Economy, The Intercept published a report on a USDA algorithm, part of the department’s ALERT system, that in 2017 disqualified over 1,600 retailers from accepting SNAP benefits:

The ALERT system analyzes millions of SNAP transactions and assigns ratings to businesses based on the number of unusual transactions they process. Unusual transactions can include sales volumes that are much higher than those at neighboring stores, multiple withdrawals from the same card over a short period of time, multiple purchases that end in the same number of cents, or very frequent or large purchases.

“Over 90 percent of those businesses,” the Intercept writes, “are convenience stores or small groceries.”

The Intercept profiles one of those retailers, 128 P&L Deli Grocery, whose owner, Porfirio Mejia, found himself to be a target of the USDA because he accepted IOUs from several of his regular, SNAP-eligible customers. The practice, the Intercept writes, allowed him “to deliver food to elderly neighbors and settle up after they received their benefits.”

Unfortunately, as reported by the Intercept, it also “triggered a suspicious activity flag in the system. By allowing customers to rack up a few weeks’ worth of grocery bills before paying with their benefit cards, Mejia violated the agency’s rules, which prohibit retailers from establishing informal credit systems with their customers.”

The USDA suspected him of having committed fraud by trading food stamps for cash. Mejia collected letters from customers and produced reams of receipts but was unable to produce the exact itemized lists the USDA requested to absolve him. Mejia is now permanently banned from accepting food stamps, costing him from 35 percent to 40 percent of his income.

“Over 90 percent of those businesses are convenience stores or small groceries,” the Intercept reports. “And while some of them almost certainly engaged in the cash-for-food-stamps fraud that the system is designed to detect, many of them, like P&L, were probably unjustly caught in the crosshairs.”

“It’s a jerry-rigged system against small retailers unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” Stewart Fried, an attorney who has represented store owners flagged by the algorithm, told the Intercept.

What hampers retailers’ ability to prove they are not committing fraud is that the USDA does not explain what sales figures, thresholds or ranges trigger their algorithms. One USDA official the Intercept cites, Douglas Edward Wilson, a program analyst, testified in 2017 “that he had no idea who originally set the parameters for flagging fraudulent transactions.”

The USDA defends its actions, claiming the ALERT system is merely one tool in a broader, more thorough fraud investigation.

Still, reversal rates are low, and the burden of proof is on the store. Unless they can afford an attorney, most store owners are stuck with the results. For his part, Mejia is cutting employee hours and working 14- to 15-hour days in an effort to stave off selling his business.

Read the entire article here.

Alleged Killing of Journalist Puts U.S.-Saudi Relationship Under Microscope

Spurring fresh outrage among those who criticize the cozy relationship between the U.S. government and the Saudi monarchy—with emphasis on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS)—political dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabia national living in self-imposed exile abroad, was tortured and killed last week by a Saudi government ‘murder team,’ according to Turkish sources, while inside the Saudi consulate building in Istanbul, Turkey.

“The initial assessment of the Turkish police is that Mr. Khashoggi has been killed at the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. We believe that the murder was premeditated and the body was subsequently moved out of the consulate,” one of the two Turkish officials told Reuters on Saturday. The writer, the news agency reported, entered the consulate last Tuesday to secure documents for his forthcoming marriage while his fiancee waited outside. He never came back out, she said, and has not been seen or heard from since.

Citing two people with knowledge of Turkey’s probe, the Post’s reporting says that the 15-member Saudi hit team was sent “specifically for the murder” and that the entire thing was “pre-planned.” According to the Post:

The killing, if confirmed, would mark a startling escalation of Saudi Arabia’s effort to silence dissent. Under direction from the crown prince, Saudi authorities have carried out hundreds of arrests under the banner of national security, rounding up clerics, business executives and even women’s rights advocates.

“If the reports of Jamal’s murder are true, it is a monstrous and unfathomable act,” Fred Hiatt, the director of The Post’s editorial page, said in a statement. “Jamal was — or, as we hope, is — a committed, courageous journalist. He writes out of a sense of love for his country and deep faith in human dignity and freedom. He is respected in his country, in the Middle East and throughout the world. We have been enormously proud to publish his writings.”

Khashoggi may have been considered especially dangerous by the Saudi leadership, analysts said. His criticisms of the royal family and its vast powers were delivered from his self-imposed exile in the United States and could not be dismissed as the complaints of a longtime dissident.

“Unbelievable” and “WTF!!!” declared CodePink’s Medea Benjamin, a U.S. peace activist and expert on the Saudi’s human rights record, after reading the news.

If the murder happened as is being reported, Benjamin told Commons Dreams, it is “beyond belief,” but also quite easy to believe given the country’s record and that of MbS.

“It exposes the horrific nature of the Saudi regime,” she explained, “and it has the fingerprints of the crown prince all over it.  MbS, who was feted as a refreshing young reformist when he visited the United States, bombs children in Yemen with impunity. He jails women human rights activists and then declares himself a liberator of women. He imprisons and shakes down his internal rivals in an ‘anti-corruption’ drive. He kidnaps the Lebanese head of state and creates a Gulf-wide crisis by attacking Qatar. And now he has a journalist who was living in the United States, a journalist who was a mild critic, murdered on Turkish soil?”

MbS, she concluded, “is out of control and this should be the long-awaited moment for the US to totally recalibrate its relationship with this criminal regime.”

Benjamin wasn’t the only one arguing the murder should force a reckoning in terms of U.S.-Saudi relations. “If this is true—that the Saudis lured a U.S. resident into their consulate and murdered him—it should represent a fundamental break in our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” declared Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in response.

“If true, this would be an abysmal new low,” said Amnesty International’s Middle East Research Director Lynn Maalouf. “Such an assassination within the grounds of the consulate, which is territory under Saudi Arabian jurisdiction, would amount to an extrajudicial execution. This case sends a shockwave among Saudi Arabian human rights defenders and dissidents everywhere, eroding any notion of seeking safe haven abroad.”

And journalist Shane Bauer tweeted:

For anyone who wasn’t convinced of MBS’ ruthlessness after the crucifictions and the torture of political opponents and the imprisonment of women’s rights activists and the war in Yemen, here is another gruesome piece of evidence. https://t.co/mXxDm2PZ5i

— Shane Bauer (@shane_bauer) October 6, 2018

“I’m devastated, shocked and enraged at this news that Turkish authorities believe that my colleague Jamal Khashoggi has been killed in the consulate of Saudia Arabia in Istanbul,” declared Jason Rezaian, a writer for the Global Opinions section of the Post. Khashoggi has been an opinion contributor to the Post since 2017 as well as an outspoken critic of the Saudi government and the Royal Family.

Here is some of the powerful commentary Jamal Khashoggi contributed to the Washington Post during the last year. He was calling for greater freedom in Saudi Arabia, including for women. Is that a capital offense? https://t.co/bEnFxhTq5I

— Jackson Diehl (@JacksonDiehl) October 7, 2018

Days ago, after Khashoggi went into the consulate but never came out, allies in Turkey who believed he was being detained against his will began rallying outside the building to demand his release. In the midst of those demands, MbS told Bloomberg News that Khashoggi had left the consulate shortly after he arrived, though neither the crown prince nor the Saudi government provided any evidence to substantiate their claims.

Having consolidated his power within the Kingdom in recent years, MbS has not only been the driving force behind the devastating war against neighboring Yemen, he has also moved aggressively to crush dissent in his own country while simultaneously presenting himself to western governments—none more conspicuously than the United States—as a “reformer” of the notoriously corrupt, abusive, and anti-democratic Saudi government.

In March of this year, the prince travelled to the U.S., as Common Dreams reported at the time, for a whirlwind “whitewash tour” where the “socially acceptable war criminal” met with political and wealthy elites as well as Hollywood celebrities in an overt effort to polish his image and ingratiate himself to the American ruling class.

As Jon Schwarz of The Intercept expressed in a series of tweets overnight, the possible murder of Khashoggi—likely ordered by MbS himself—only highlights the corrupt, violent, and insidious result of the backing and support given to the Saudis by the U.S. government and some of its most powerful people:

Here’s a short, four-part story about how the world actually works: pic.twitter.com/ydD7a53mLL

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) October 6, 2018

Here’s Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, yukking it up back in March with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose government appears to have just murdered a Washington Post columnist. pic.twitter.com/G0CIGOYeun

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) October 6, 2018

Here’s Jared Kushner with his good buddy and collaborator Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It’s maybe not surprising that journalists feel negatively toward a worldwide political movement that murders journalists. pic.twitter.com/qCYxNXMp8d

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) October 6, 2018

As Amnesty’s Maalouf stated, “The international community’s deafening silence on Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on freedom of expression must end and it must demand an immediate explanation from Saudi Arabia’s authorities about Jamal Khashoggi’s fate or whereabouts. If the reports are true, they must immediately launch an independent investigation and those responsible, however high their rank or status, must face justice.”

This piece was updated from its original to include statements from Amnesty International.

5 Truths Exposed by Kavanaugh’s Rise to the Supreme Court

The ballots have been cast and the verdict is in: By a vote of 50-48, the Senate on Saturday confirmed Brett Kavanaugh as the 114th justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Here are five key takeaways from the confirmation battle:

Kavanaugh’s confirmation proves once again that the courts, especially the Supreme Court, are political.

One of the dominant myths of our political culture holds that the courts are nonpartisan. As Chief Justice John Roberts declared by way of an analogy to the role of baseball umpires in his 2005 confirmation hearing, the “job” of judges “is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

Cute, but not so.

The myth of judicial impartiality dates back to the earliest days of the republic, more than two centuries before Roberts was elevated to the court. Writing in 1788 on the “Judiciary Department” during the debates on the ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton described the proposed judicial branch of government in Federalist Paper No. 78 thusly:

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them.

The judiciary … has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment…

Hamilton went on in No. 78 to advocate for lifetime judicial tenure so as to ensure the “independence of the judges,” which he reasoned “is requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals.”

These are fine words, penned by one of the most gifted of the Founding Fathers. Believing in them is essential to accepting the court’s legitimacy.

Sadly, in practice, the country has only occasionally lived up to Hamilton’s lofty ideals. Armed with the power of judicial review—the authority to declare acts of the executive, Congress and the states unconstitutional (or conversely, to uphold them), established by Marbury v. Madison in 1803—the Supreme Court has assumed enormous political power.

According to a joint analysis prepared by the Congressional Research Service and the Library of Congress, the high court had declared 182 acts of Congress and 1094 state statutes and ordinances unconstitutional as of Aug. 26, 2017. In addition, the court had overruled, in whole or in part, 236 of its prior decisions. The analysis did not include an aggregate tally of the number of presidential executive orders the court had nixed.

In and of itself, power is neither good nor evil. The issue, always, is how power is wielded.

In its finest moments, the court has exercised the power of judicial review on behalf of minorities, the weak and the disenfranchised. In its Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, for example, the court repudiated the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public schools. In 1973, it recognized the right of women to have abortions in Roe v. Wade. In 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, it invalidated state prohibitions on same-sex marriage.

More commonly, however, the court has wielded its power to further the aims and interests of dominant elites. To cite just five examples from the distant and recent past: In 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford, the court nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820, holding that African-Americans could never become U.S. citizens. In 1894, in Plessy v. Ferguson, it upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine ultimately overturned in Brown. In 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign spending. Five years ago, it gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. And earlier this year, it upheld the president’s Muslim travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii.

It’s small wonder, then, that presidents in every era have attempted to stack the bench with justices who share their ideological biases. Kavanaugh’s nomination is by no means the first to expose the ugly partisan underbelly of the process.

We’ve been here before, and not long ago. In 1969 and 1970, respectively, the Senate rejected Nixon nominees Clement Haynsworth and G. Harold Carswell because of their regressive views on segregation and civil rights. In 1987, the Senate turned aside Robert Bork, one of the chief architects of the legal theory of “originalism,” who in 1973 as solicitor general fired special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.” In 1991, the Senate barely confirmed Clarence Thomas in the face of sexual harassment allegations brought by law professor Anita Hill and several other women.

In Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump selected a longtime GOP operative, who before his initial appointment as a district court judge in 2004 had worked as Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr’s right-hand assistant, helping to draft the 1998 report to Congress that led to the impeachment of President Clinton. Following his stint with Starr, he joined George W. Bush’s White House, eventually becoming the president’s staff secretary. Since his elevation to the Court of Appeals in 2006, he has amassed a record that shows extreme hostility to the rights of consumers, voters, women, the LGBTQ community, workers and immigrants.

Even more attractive to Trump are Kavanaugh’s expansive views on presidential prerogatives and powers. In a 2009 article for the Minnesota Law Review, in an apparent about-face from his service on Starr’s legal team, Kavanaugh argued that sitting presidents should be immune from both civil suits and criminal prosecutions. Who better than Kavanaugh to protect Trump against special counsel Robert Mueller should proceedings involving the Russia investigation reach the Supreme Court?

Any pretense that Kavanaugh would bring the kind of independence and measured demeanor to the high court envisioned by Hamilton was laid to rest on Sept. 27, when he appeared before the judiciary committee to rebut the allegations of attempted rape lodged by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Red-faced, lips curled into an angry snarl, he barked out an unhinged conspiracy theory worthy of Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh:

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons, and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

The remarks prompted The New York Times to publish an open letter signed by over 2,400 law professors, announcing their opposition to Kavanaugh. “Judge Brett Kavanaugh,” the letter asserted, “displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court, and certainly for elevation to the highest court of this land.”

The Republican-controlled Senate, willing to consolidate political power at all cost, disregarded the letter.

Kavanaugh’s confirmation signals the triumph of a judicial counterrevolution.

Kavanaugh’s confirmation represents the culmination of a multi-decade effort by the most revanchist sectors of the right to seize control of the justice system and neutralize the use of law as an instrument of progressive social and economic reform.

Beginning in the early 1970s in reaction to the liberal—and historically atypical—work of the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the right has organized to place conservative ideologues on both the bench and in influential teaching positions in America’s elite law schools.

Within the counterrevolution, no group has been more influential than the Federalist Society. From its founding in 1981 by three law students at Yale and the University of Chicago, the society has grown to include more than 200 chapters at law schools across the United States, with a total student membership of more than 10,000. From its base in Washington, D.C., today, the society also operates a “lawyers division” with more than 60,000 attorneys in chapters and “practice groups” in 80 cities.

Kavanaugh’s ascension was engineered in large part by the society’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, who took a leave of absence from his post to serve as an outside adviser to Trump on judicial nominations. With Kavanaugh now on board, the Supreme Court includes five former or current Federalist Society members. The others are Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Thomas.

Ideologically, the Federalist Society embraces a spectrum of economic, social and Christian conservatives as well as right-wing libertarians. While the various constituencies may differ on a few issues like gay marriage, they are united by an overriding belief in originalism as the only bona fide method of constitutional interpretation, and an unwavering endorsement of deregulatory “free-market” principles that harken back to the jurisprudence of the Gilded Age. Both beliefs are routinely deployed to yield result-oriented, business-friendly outcomes.

With Kavanaugh giving the right a solid five-vote majority, and the conservative Roberts thrust into the role of the “median, swing” justice, a host of liberal precedents will be in grave jeopardy. Roe v. Wade will likely be overruled; affirmative action will stop; environmental protections will be dismantled; wage and hour laws will be diminished; voter suppression techniques will be approved at an accelerating clip; while gun rights will be expanded.

Not even Social Security and Medicare will be safe. On the fringes of the counterrevolution today, right-wing scholars are reviving long-dormant attacks on both programs, contending that each is unconstitutional from an originalist perspective.

If the rise of the right in Trump’s America has established anything, it is that constitutional norms are fragile. Today’s political fringe is tomorrow’s ruling bloc.

For the time being, white male privilege has trumped the rights of women.

When I last considered Kavanaugh in this column, well before Dr. Ford had come forward, I wrote that it would take “a miracle bordering on the Immaculate Conception” to derail the nomination.

The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements nearly proved me wrong. For a brief few days, while the FBI conducted what has now been exposed as a woefully incomplete investigation of Ford’s allegations and those of Deborah Ramirez, one of Kavanaugh’s Yale undergraduate classmates, it seemed that Kavanaugh might be stopped.

The very fact that the nomination was ever thrown into doubt is a testament to the growing power of women. Eventually, that power will prevail, and we will have no more Kavanaughs or Thomases on the court, or in any other prominent position of government.

This time, however, the power of hypermasculinity and white privilege won out, in keeping with the president’s omnipresent neofascist slogan—“Make America Great Again”—and the false promise it offers to return the country to a fictional past, when successful white Christian men held all posts of authority, and women and racial minorities happily accepted their second-class citizenship.

As Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore summed up the unfolding nightmare the day before the final confirmation vote:

If #MeToo and Time’s Up have been about women as survivors of everyday sexual abuse finding a collective voice, what this circus has been about is the pretense that this voice matters. This is not about whether women tell the truth, but whether that truth actually changes anything. Ford stood there shouldering the burden of having to represent every woman who has been violated. No one can do that and as we now know her testimony was not good enough.

What was preferred was the ruddy-face ranting of an entitled man who became aggressive when he felt his privilege under question. No wonder that Trump saw something of himself in this performance, something that he wanted on his side.”

Trump and his enablers will eventually pay a heavy price for placing Kavanaugh on the court and, more generally, demeaning women and scapegoating minorities. The only question is when.

Elections matter.

In an unusual display of honesty following Saturday’s Senate vote, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted:

“Congratulations Judge Kavanaugh! Instead of a 6-3 liberal Supreme Court under Hillary Clinton, we now have a 5-4 conservative Supreme Court under President @realDonaldTrump, cementing a tremendous legacy for the President and a better future for America.”

The right understands the critical importance of the courts. The left doesn’t. That will have to change if the conservative counterrevolution is ever to be defeated.

If the Democrats take back the House, Kavanaugh will face further investigations and possible impeachment.

It is by no means certain that the Democrats will retake the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections. But if they do, it’s virtually assured that they will investigate Kavanaugh for lying during his confirmation hearing, not only about his history of sexual misconduct and abuse of alcohol, but also on a variety of other pivotal subjects.

These include—but are by no means limited to—his suspected lies and cover-ups about his role in the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic spying program and post 9/11 detention and torture policies; his efforts in the Bush White House preparing ultraconservative federal appeals court judges William Pryor and Charles Pickering for their confirmation hearings; and his knowledge of the theft of emails from Senate Democrats in 2002-03, which set forth their strategy for opposing Bush’s judicial nominations.

If the investigations prove fruitful, they could lead to a call for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. In our history, the House has impeached 19 federal officials, including 15 judges. The Senate has conducted 16 impeachment trials, convicting eight individuals—all judges—of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” most notably for lying under oath.

Should Kavanaugh ever face the crucible of impeachment, it is hoped that Congress will hold him to the standards urged by none other than Kavanaugh himself roughly 20 years ago.

On August 15, 1998, two days before President Clinton testified before a federal grand jury in the Whitewater/Lewinsky scandal, Kavanaugh dashed off a memo urging independent counsel Starr to take the president apart “piece by painful piece.”

“After reflecting this evening,” Kavanaugh wrote, “I am strongly opposed to giving the President any ‘break’ in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship—unless before his questioning … he either (i) resigns or (ii) confesses perjury and issues a public apology to you. I have tried hard to bend over backwards and to be fair to him and to think of all reasonable defenses to his pattern of behavior. In the end, I am convinced that there really are none. The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me.”

As Kavanaugh warned in his Sept. 27 testimony, “What goes around, comes around.”

Robert Reich: There’s Only One Way to Contain This Catastrophe

Anyone still unsure of how (or even whether) they’ll vote in the midterms should consider this: All three branches of government are now under the control of one party, and that party is under the control of Donald J. Trump.

With the addition of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court is as firmly Republican as are the House and Senate.

Kavanaugh was revealed as a fierce partisan—not only the legal adviser who helped Kenneth Starr prosecute Bill Clinton and almost certainly guided George W. Bush’s use of torture, but also a nominee who believes “leftists” and Clinton sympathizers are out to get him.

He joins four other Republican-appointed jurists, almost as partisan. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts have never wavered from Republican orthodoxy. Neil Gorsuch, although without much track record on the Supreme Court to date, was a predictable conservative Republican vote on the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit—which is why the Heritage Foundation pushed for him and Trump appointed him.

Even under normal circumstances, when all three branches are under the control of the same party, we get a lopsided government that doesn’t respond to the values of a large portion of the electorate.

But these are not normal circumstances. Donald Trump is president.

Need I remind you? Trump is a demagogue who doesn’t give a fig for democracy—who continuously and viciously attacks the free press, Democrats, immigrants, Muslims, black athletes exercising First Amendment rights, women claiming sexual harassment, anyone who criticizes or counters him; who treats the executive branch, including the Justice Department, like his own fiefdom, and brazenly profits off his office; who tells lies like other people breathe; and who might well have conspired with Russian President Vladimir Putin to swing the 2016 election his way.

Trump doesn’t even pretend to be the president of all the people. As he repeatedly makes clear in rallies and tweets, he is president of his “base.”

And his demagoguery is by now unconstrained in the White House. Having fired the few “adults” in his Cabinet, Trump is now on the loose (but for a few advisers who reportedly are trying to protect the nation from him).

All this would be bad enough even if the two other branches of government behaved as the framers of the Constitution expected, as checks and balances on a president. But under Republican leadership, they refuse to play this role when it comes to Trump.

House and Senate Republicans have morphed into Trump sycophants and toadies—intimidated, spineless, opportunistic. The few who have dared call him on his outrages aren’t running for reelection.

Some have distanced themselves from a few of his most incendiary tweets or racist rantings, but most are obedient lapdogs on everything else—including Trump’s reluctance to protect the integrity of our election system, his moves to prevent an investigation into Russian meddling, his trade wars, his attacks on NATO and the leaders of other democracies, his swooning over dictators, his cruelty toward asylum-seekers, and, in the Senate, his Supreme Court nominees.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has emerged as Trump’s most shameless lackey who puts party above nation and Trump above party. The House leadership is no better. House intelligence chair Devin Nunes is Trump’s chief flunky and apologist, but there are many others.

Now that Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court, you can forget about the court constraining Trump, either.

Kavanaugh’s views of presidential power and executive privilege are so expansive he’d likely allow Trump to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, shield himself from criminal prosecution, and even pardon himself. Kavanaugh’s Republican brethren on the Supreme Court would probably go along.

So how is the constitutional imperative of checks and balances to be salvaged, especially when it is so urgently needed?

The only remedy is for voters to flip the House or Senate, or ideally both, on Nov. 6.

The likelihood of this happening is higher now with Kavanaugh on the court and Trump so manifestly unchecked. Unless, that is, enough voters have become so demoralized and disillusioned they just give up.

If cynicism wins the day, Trump and those who would delight in the demise of American democracy (including, not incidentally, Putin) will get everything they want. They will have broken America.

For the sake of the values we hold dear—and of the institutions of our democracy that our forbearers relied on and our descendants will need—this cannot be allowed.

It is now time to place a firm check on this most unbalanced of presidents, and vote accordingly.

China Tells U.S. to Stop Criticism, Says Relations Suffering

BEIJING — Chinese officials appealed to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday to repair relations they said have been damaged by U.S. tariff hikes and support for Taiwan, as their governments press North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

Pompeo said at the start of his talks with Foreign Minister Wang Yi that Washington has a “fundamental disagreement” and “great concerns” about Chinese actions and looked forward to discussing them. Reporters were then ushered from the room.

The polite but edgy tone underscored the plunge in U.S.-Chinese relations as the administration of President Donald Trump confronts Beijing over its technology policies and territorial claims in the South China Sea. Trump also approved a weapons sale to Taiwan, the self-ruled island the Communist mainland claims as its own territory, and sanctioned a Chinese company and its leader over an arms purchase from Russia.

Those developments came as the countries have raised tariffs on tens of billions of dollars of each other’s goods in a dispute over U.S. complaints that Beijing steals or pressures companies to hand over technology.

At the same time, the United States and China are cooperating on efforts to pressure North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to give up his country’s nuclear weapons and long-range missile programs.

Pompeo met Wang and Yang Jiechi, a senior Cabinet official and former foreign minister, after talks Sunday with Kim in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang. Pompeo also visited Japan and South Korea, where he said Monday in Seoul that there had been “significant progress” toward an agreement for the North to give up its nuclear weapons.

Wang appealed to Pompeo to cease actions that Beijing sees as threatening its interests in order to avoid disrupting cooperation over North Korea and other issues.

“While the U.S. side has constantly escalated trade frictions with China, it has also taken actions regarding Taiwan that harm China’s core interests,” Wang said.

In their later meeting, Yang expressed Chinese frustration with Washington while avoiding specifics, telling Pompeo relations are “facing challenges.” Washington and Beijing “should and must make the correct choices,” Yang said.

“We hope the United States and China can meet each other halfway and conscientiously fulfill the important consensus reached by the leaders of both countries,” Yang said.

In Seoul, Pompeo said he and Kim had agreed to soon begin working-level talks on details of denuclearization and placement of international inspectors at one of North Korea’s main nuclear facilities.

Pompeo said they came close to finalizing a date and venue for the next Kim-Trump meeting.

“It’s a long process,” Pompeo told reporters. “We made significant progress. We’ll continue to make significant progress and we are further along in making that progress than any administration in an awfully long time.”

Trump, tweeting from Washington shortly after Pompeo left North Korea, cited progress Pompeo had made on agreements Trump and Kim reached at their June summit in Singapore and said, “I look forward to seeing Chairman Kim again, in the near future.”

Pompeo said he and Kim had gotten “pretty close” to fixing the logistics for the summit but stressed that “sometimes that last inch is hard to close.”

“Most importantly, both the leaders believe there is real progress that can be made, substantive progress that can be made at the next summit and so we are going to get it at a time that works for each of the two leaders and at a place that works for both of them,” he said.

North Korea’s state-run news agency KCNA, meanwhile, said Monday that Kim had “expressed his will and conviction that a great progress would surely be made in solving the issues of utmost concern of the world.”

In an early Monday dispatch, KCNA called the talks “productive and wonderful” and said that “mutual stands were fully understood and opinions exchanged.”

In Seoul, Pompeo said Kim is expected soon to name Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui as a counterpart for his new special envoy for North Korea, former Ford executive Stephen Biegun, who accompanied him on the trip. He and Biegun both said they expected meetings at the working level to begin soon and become quite frequent before the next summit.

“We are starting to see a first wave of actions we can take on all four pillars of the Singapore communique,” said Biegun. He is to work with South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and other countries that have an interest in the talks.

In Pyongyang on Sunday, Pompeo and Kim met for about 3 1/2 hours, first in a business session and then in a 90-minute luncheon that the North Korean leader hosted at a state guesthouse.

Before visiting Pyongyang, Pompeo held talks in Tokyo with Japan’s prime minister. He pledged the Trump administration would coordinate and unify its strategy for denuclearization with its allies. Japan has been wary of the initiative, but South Korea has embraced it.

Pompeo has refused to discuss details of negotiations, including a U.S. position on North Korea’s demand for a formal end to the Korean War and a proposal from Seoul for such a declaration to be accompanied by a shutdown of the North’s main known nuclear facility.

The United States and Japan have pushed for the North to turn over a list of its nuclear sites to be dismantled as a next step in the process. The North has rejected that and South Korea has suggested it may not be a necessary next step.

Pompeo, however, played down the differences.

“I’ve never been involved in an international discussion where there weren’t differences of view, not only between governments but inside of governments,” he said. “But if you look at the approach, we are in lockstep with each of those two countries in terms of how we approach achieving the results that everyone is aimed at. And so there’ll be tactical places where we’ll have debates and disagreements. That is a necessary component of getting to the best deliverable.”

“But with respect to our relationship with the Republic of Korea and Japan on this issue, I have found that we are in lockstep on the most important issues and how to approach them,” Pompeo said.

Since the denuclearization effort got underway with a secret visit to the North by then-CIA chief Pompeo in April, there has been only limited progress, even since the June 12 Trump-Kim summit that many had hoped would jump-start the effort.

North Korea so far has suspended nuclear and missile tests, freed three American prisoners and dismantled parts of a missile engine facility and tunnel entrances at a nuclear test site. It has not taken any steps to halt nuclear weapons or missile development.

The North has accused Washington of making “unilateral and gangster-like” demands on denuclearization and has insisted that sanctions should be lifted before any progress in nuclear talks. U.S. officials have thus far said the penalties will remain in place until the North’s denuclearization is fully verified.

Also on Monday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said he expects Kim to travel to Russia and for Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit North Korea soon amid a global diplomatic push to resolve the nuclear crisis.

Moon said a second Trump-Kim summit could be accompanied by major diplomatic developments that could contribute to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and stabilizing peace.

Moon also said there was a possibility of Kim holding a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

California’s Almond Harvest Is a Bee Thief’s Dream

The crime scene was a mess of boxes, some half-assembled, others scattered across patches of dried grass and partially gouged to raw wood. The victims scrambled about looking for food and water. There were thousands of them. Maybe millions.

Detective Isaac Torres watched the action from the air-conditioned safety of his unmarked truck. In five years investigating rural farm crime, he’s seen a lot: Stolen construction equipment and copper wire. Hay thieves. Cargo heists.

“You name it, we pretty much cover it, if there’s any type of ag nexus to it,” he said.

But what he was looking at now, in this scrubby field 10 miles southeast of downtown Fresno, was something else entirely.

“What we had here was a chop shop, but of beehives,” Torres said. “You had some beehives that were alive, and you had some hives that were dead. You had hives that were basically cut up: Tops of boxes were over here on this side of the field, and the other parts of the box are on the other side.”

As a member of the Agricultural Crimes Task Force for the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office, Torres knew that bees have become big business in California – that they are an essential ingredient in the state’s yearly almond harvest; that three-quarters of America’s domesticated supply is trucked into the state each winter and rented out. He knew how valuable the insects have become – to farmers, yes, but especially to thieves, who in recent years have grown bolder, greedier.

On this hot afternoon in April 2017, he also knew to keep his distance. It’s one thing to inspect stolen property; it’s quite another to get mobbed by it and pumped with venom. And this property was zipping chaotically through the cloudless sky, unhealthy and irate. Even cracking a window surely would have spelled disaster, he said – “like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.”

Torres had been summoned here by Alexa Pavlov, a Missouri-based beekeeper who sat in her own rental car nearby. Two days earlier, she’d learned that a $50,000 cluster of her hives, recently stolen from a neighboring county, might well be sitting in this very field. She’d dropped everything, boarded a red-eye to California and driven straight from the airport into the state’s agricultural epicenter. She couldn’t afford not to.

Groggy and impatient, she stepped out of her car and set off toward the boxes. Torres watched in horror as she marched into a haze of bees, poking through hives and snapping photos. Before long, she returned with shots of her initials etched onto the bottom of a pallet – proof that her property was here.

Nearby, Pavel Tveretinov, a thin 51-year-old Sacramento man, was moving through the field, tending to hives in a protective suit. Pavlov confronted him, she later said, and he denied stealing anything. Before long, deputies from Madera County, where Pavlov’s bees had first gone missing, arrived on the scene. They doubted Tveretinov’s account and put him in jail that evening.

Word of the discovery, and the arrest, spread quickly through America’s small commercial beekeeping community. In the days that followed, Torres’ department received dozens of calls from across the country. Beekeepers wanted to know whether their hives were among those recovered – at this chop shop or at three others authorities found later, connected to Tveretinov and alleged accomplice Vitaliy Yeroshenko.

“Some of them were like, ‘Well, I had beehives that were stolen three years ago.’ ” Torres said. “Some five years ago.”

By the time Torres and his team got a handle on the totals, they were dealing with 2,500 hives, worth nearly $1 million, some stolen from orchards hundreds of miles apart. This was much more than an impulsive theft: It was the largest bee heist any of them had ever heard of. Perhaps the largest in U.S. history.

Leave any city in the Central Valley, heading in essentially any direction, and it won’t be long before you hit the almond orchards. They stretch for miles, in neat rows of alien emerald, butting up against dust-beaten truck stops and boxy McMansions. Some host campaign signs for local politicians; others are cross-hatched by roads whose names are simply letters because no one, evidently, had the time to get fancy.

California’s total almond acreage has nearly tripled in the past 20 years, a spike due in large part to foreign demand. At the moment, there are about 1 million acres of nut-bearing trees in the state, with an additional 330,000 on track to start producing over the next four years. The trees produce well over 2 billion pounds of nuts per year, and they’re sucking down the valley’s aquifers at a rapid pace.

Such growth has driven a near-manic demand for honeybees, which are crucial for what has become the largest managed annual pollination event in the world.

Hives have never been more valuable. Every almond farmer needs two healthy colonies per acre of trees at an average seasonal rental price of around $185 per colony, and that number is expected to climb in the coming years. When everything goes right for a beekeeper, especially one with thousands of well-maintained hives, winter in California presents an enormous money-making opportunity.

The rental process works like this: Toward the end of January, millions of hives arrive in California from all over the country. The bees live in boxes, which themselves are stored in stacks and covered with finely woven mesh during transit. By the time they reach a staging area – sometimes a large field not far from where the bees will be put to work – they’ve been bumping around on the back of a flatbed for several days. Almond farmers inspect the hives, which are then moved into orchards by beekeepers and “brokers” who help manage the transaction.

There are inherent perils to hanging a business on the collective health of a fragile and disease-prone insect. Bee populations are notoriously unstable, and the animals’ health and population strength are constantly under threat. Even though the total population of domesticated honeybees has increased around 45 percent worldwide since 1961,  the proportion of agricultural crops that depend on pollinators is growing at a rate closer to 300 percent, stoking fears in certain scientific circles of a global pollination crisis. Wild bee populations, too, are facing steep declines.

In California, “we’ve had a sufficient supply” of bees thus far for each almond harvest, said Bob Curtis, the Almond Board of California’s associate director of agricultural affairs. “But every year before the bloom, I am personally concerned. Are we walking a fine line here?”

Beekeepers certainly do. On top of larger environmental concerns, the price of maintaining healthy hives can fluctuate wildly, depending on a host of risks, including pesticide exposure, mites, drought and colony collapse disorder, a mysterious epidemic in which worker bees suddenly abandon their queen, leaving her to die. Dealing with these issues means incurring unexpected, sometimes astronomical costs. During a drought year, when pollen and nectar are in short supply and must be artificially supplemented, it’s possible to spend $200,000 more than anticipated just to keep the bees alive.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” said David Bradshaw, a lifelong beekeeper in the San Joaquin Valley. His base of operations, in a lot behind his home in Visalia, is typical for a commercial apiarist: There’s a small fleet of trucks, tankers of man-made sugar mixtures and dozens of bee boxes stacked under a patch of sparse shade. Hundreds more, he said, are deposited across the state.

“My wife comes from a background of a CFO of a school district,” he said. “They have budgets, and they have things that tell where you’re supposed to end up at the end of the year. She asked me, ‘So what’s your budget?’ Like I have one!”

Many of the beekeepers who bring hives to California from Louisiana, Florida and elsewhere live nomadic lives. Their entire year is spent preparing hundreds of thousands of delicate insects for a nonstop, cross-country trek, followed by a monthlong bonanza of hard labor in an unfamiliar environment. The trips are difficult on the animals, which are especially susceptible to heat and sickness during transit. An unexpected fire or truck tipover (of which there are surprisingly many) can wipe out millions of them – along with a beekeeper’s entire livelihood.

The one certainty: “You can’t just leave your bees in one place anymore,” said Denise Qualls, a bee broker who connects apiarists and almond farmers. “The bees come to California for the almonds. They stay for a month or two, then they go to Oregon and Washington for apples. They’ll go to Texas for whatever honey flow is there. They’ll go to Louisiana. They’ll go up to Maine. They’ll end up in North or South Dakota.”

The whole process can be exhausting, repetitive and expensive.

“You get out of almond pollination, then your major goal for the next 11 and a half months is making sure your bees are healthy enough to go into almond pollination again,” said Charley Nye, manager of UC Davis’ Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility.

The almond harvest, he added, is “a weird driver” of market forces – one “that’s kind of pushing everything in one direction. We’re trying to bend the honeybees around it.”

The economics of stealing beehives is a lot like the economics of stealing any high-value item, such as jewelry or electronics, with the main difference being accessibility. During the almond harvest, hives in California’s orchards rarely are protected by alarms or even fences, and equipping individual boxes with GPS trackers is prohibitively expensive for most. To ensure the best pollination results, beekeepers usually place their boxes just off remote roads, hidden by trees, miles from so much as a streetlight. It’s perfectly common for thousands of dollars’ worth of bees to sit largely unattended for weeks at a time.

The theft itself requires a peculiar combination of nihilism and finicky care. You must be the sort of person who’s willing to disregard a generations-old edict, invoked ceaselessly by lifelong apiarists, that “you don’t steal another man’s bees.” Yet pulling it off perfectly is also a dainty affair. You work quietly, gently, usually at night. You cannot jostle the hives too much, lest you damage the queen, which can cause the bees to lose interest in pollination. And it’s not enough to place the bees in a warehouse somewhere; they need access to a water source and all the typical treatments and feedings (sugar water, pollen patties) a doting keeper would provide.

Their value, after all, lies in their apparent health at the point of delivery to a farmer. Sick bees don’t sell.

It’s for these reasons that many of California’s most lurid and notorious bee heists have been perpetrated by apiarists gone rogue. In 1977, beekeeper David Allred was sentenced to a minimum of three years in prison for lifting $10,000 worth of hives from another keeper in Tracy, California – and using stolen trucks to move them. A deputy district attorney told the presiding judge that Allred “wanted to be known as the Jesse James of the beehive industry,” according to The Press-Enterprise in Riverside.

It wasn’t Allred’s first brush with the law. The year before, he’d gone to jail for helping another beekeeper, David Graves, poison 15 million bees that belonged to a man who’d recently married Graves’ ex-wife and subsequently kicked Graves’ ass after an escalating series of vandalisms. And a few years ago, Allred was sued for taking $30,000 worth of bees that weren’t his – and tricking local sheriff’s deputies into helping him pull off the score.

In 2012, the owner of Tauzer Apiaries, not far from Sacramento, noticed that about 80 of his hives were missing. He pulled together a search party, which soon found parts of the bee boxes scattered along a nearby highway; they also found a bucket of green paint. The clues eventually led them to beekeeper Viktor Zhdamirov, who had mixed the stolen bees in with his own – and painted the boxes the same shade of green that had stained the bucket. He got three years in prison and was forced to pay more than $60,000.

And in early 2014, Bakersfield-area beekeeper Joe Romance hatched a plan to recover nearly 200 hives that recently had been taken from him. Shortly after his property went missing, an unknown beekeeper arrived in town and began conducting business from Starbucks, a location most locals agreed was profoundly weird and suspicious. Romance asked a friend to pose as an almond farmer interested in leasing bees. Sure enough, his property was found sitting in a chop shop surrounded by razor wire.

This sort of theft has been an intermittent phenomenon across California for years. But recently, the numbers have started to climb. More than 2,700 hives were reported stolen from 2016 to 2017, according to an analysis of police records by Rowdy Jay Freeman, a sheriff’s deputy in Butte County and a beekeeper himself. In the three years before that, the average number of annual reported thefts was closer to 100.

“It’s very lucrative business,” said Isaac Torres, the agriculture detective. Yet at the same time, “it’s not just some guys who are breaking into cars, or deciding, ‘I’m going to go steal some bees!’ ”

The thieves were cautious and methodical. They likely skipped from orchard to orchard, stacking boxes quickly onto a truck at night. They were familiar with the ins and outs of transporting bees – and keeping them healthy enough to rent out later.

Little else is known about how the thefts were conducted. The 2017 Fresno County case is still working its way through the court system, and officials are limited in how much they can discuss it. Alexa Pavlov, the beekeeper who confronted Pavel Tveretinov last year, has stopped answering calls.

But some have expressed doubt that Tveretinov and alleged accomplice Vitaliy Yeroshenko will face penalties commensurate to the volume of bees stolen. Without an abundance of eyewitness accounts or physical evidence, the two are being charged with 10 counts of receiving stolen property exceeding $950. In July, the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office added two grand theft charges.

“They always say in law enforcement, ‘What you know is one thing; what you can prove is another,’ ” said Andres Solis, a Fresno County sheriff’s deputy who has worked on the case. The evening he first saw the field where Tveretinov was arrested, he’d been on the job roughly a month. Today, he has a deep understanding of what bees, and bee theft, mean to California.

“It’s not just the property itself that they’re out,” Solis said. “It’s also the man hours spent bringing these bees up and making the hive healthy. … You get your bees back and they’re nothing like they were before.”

One morning before leaving Fresno, I drove an hour east, to one of the sites where authorities discovered hundreds of boxes of stolen hives. I wanted to see firsthand what an illicit bee operation looks like and, a year after the arrest of Tveretinov and Yeroshenko, what had become of the insects they’re accused of stealing.

The field was so remote that it didn’t have a proper address. To point me there, Torres dropped a pin on Google Maps, then recited from memory a short soliloquy of landmarks. I left early in the morning, hoping to evade the heat. But by the time I arrived, it was close to 100 degrees.

The spot was perfect for keeping bees: an overgrown field, about an acre long, nestled between an orchard and a man-made canal. It was close to a main road, but completely hidden if you’re speeding by at 60 mph.

Inside a perimeter of rusty barbed wire, hundreds of bee boxes sat in squat stacks. Just like the ones Torres described, these were painted a variety of colors. I stood near the perimeter, watching as thousands of bees launched from their hives, cutting through the scorching air.

Near the boxes was an abandoned van, a couple of bicycles, a flatbed and an old Coachmen RV. A year after Tveretinov’s arrest, some beekeepers still had not retrieved their hives. It is, after all, quite costly to ship bees across the country with no guarantee they’ll arrive in the condition you’d delivered them. For some, getting their property back wasn’t worth the gamble.

Up an embankment just yards away, cars roared past on a two-lane highway. A curious driver could easily have pulled over and peered into the field, spotted the makings of an alleged criminal enterprise whose size and peculiarity would be virtually unprecedented in California. One deputy said he’d sped past this field dozens of times on his way to headquarters. He’d never stopped.

“There’s bees there,” he said. “But you don’t think nothing of it. It’s bees. It’s pretty common to see beehives.”

I got as close as any bee novice probably should. Watched the stolen property zip through the air, folding in and out of kaleidoscopic clouds. Then I headed back to my rental car and began the long drive home, through miles and miles of almond trees.

This story was published in collaboration with The Journal of Alta California. Read more at altaonline.com.

U.N. Report on Climate Change Carries Life-or-Death Warning

Preventing an extra single degree of heat could make a life-or-death difference in the next few decades for multitudes of people and ecosystems on this fast-warming planet, an international panel of scientists reported Sunday. But they provide little hope the world will rise to the challenge.

The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its gloomy report at a meeting in Incheon, South Korea.

In the 728-page document, the U.N. organization detailed how Earth’s weather, health and ecosystems would be in better shape if the world’s leaders could somehow limit future human-caused warming to just 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (a half degree Celsius) from now, instead of the globally agreed-upon goal of 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C). Among other things:

— Half as many people would suffer from lack of water.

— There would be fewer deaths and illnesses from heat, smog and infectious diseases.

— Seas would rise nearly 4 inches (0.1 meters) less.

— Half as many animals with back bones and plants would lose the majority of their habitats.

— There would be substantially fewer heat waves, downpours and droughts.

— The West Antarctic ice sheet might not kick into irreversible melting.

— And it just may be enough to save most of the world’s coral reefs from dying.

“For some people this is a life-or-death situation without a doubt,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, a lead author on the report.

Limiting warming to 0.9 degrees from now means the world can keep “a semblance” of the ecosystems we have. Adding another 0.9 degrees on top of that — the looser global goal — essentially means a different and more challenging Earth for people and species, said another of the report’s lead authors, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia.

But meeting the more ambitious goal of slightly less warming would require immediate, draconian cuts in emissions of heat-trapping gases and dramatic changes in the energy field. While the U.N. panel says technically that’s possible, it saw little chance of the needed adjustments happening.

In 2010, international negotiators adopted a goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) since pre-industrial times. It’s called the 2-degree goal. In 2015, when the nations of the world agreed to the historic Paris climate agreement, they set dual goals: 2 degrees C and a more demanding target of 1.5 degrees C from pre-industrial times. The 1.5 was at the urging of vulnerable countries that called 2 degrees a death sentence.

The world has already warmed 1 degree C since pre-industrial times, so the talk is really about the difference of another half-degree C or 0.9 degrees F from now.

“There is no definitive way to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 above pre-industrial levels,” the U.N.-requested report said. More than 90 scientists wrote the report, which is based on more than 6,000 peer reviews.

“Global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate,” the report states.

Deep in the report, scientists say less than 2 percent of 529 of their calculated possible future scenarios kept warming below the 1.5 goal without the temperature going above that and somehow coming back down in the future.

The pledges nations made in the Paris agreement in 2015 are “clearly insufficient to limit warming to 1.5 in any way,” one of the study’s lead authors, Joerj Roeglj of the Imperial College in London, said.

“I just don’t see the possibility of doing the one and a half” and even 2 degrees looks unlikely, said Appalachian State University environmental scientist Gregg Marland, who isn’t part of the U.N. panel but has tracked global emissions for decades for the U.S. Energy Department. He likened the report to an academic exercise wondering what would happen if a frog had wings.

Yet report authors said they remain optimistic.

Limiting warming to the lower goal is “not impossible but will require unprecedented changes,” U.N. panel chief Hoesung Lee said in a news conference in which scientists repeatedly declined to spell out just how feasible that goal is. They said it is up to governments to decide whether those unprecedented changes are acted upon.

“We have a monumental task in front of us, but it is not impossible,” Mahowald said earlier. “This is our chance to decide what the world is going to look like.”

To limit warming to the lower temperature goal, the world needs “rapid and far-reaching” changes in energy systems, land use, city and industrial design, transportation and building use, the report said. Annual carbon dioxide pollution levels that are still rising now would have to drop by about half by 2030 and then be near zero by 2050. Emissions of other greenhouse gases, such as methane, also will have to drop. Switching away rapidly from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas to do this could be more expensive than the less ambitious goal, but it would clean the air of other pollutants. And that would have the side benefit of avoiding more than 100 million premature deaths through this century, the report said.

“Climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming” the report said, adding that the world’s poor are more likely to get hit hardest.

Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said extreme weather, especially heat waves, will be deadlier if the lower goal is passed.

Meeting the tougher-to-reach goal “could result in around 420 million fewer people being frequently exposed to extreme heat waves, and about 65 million fewer people being exposed to exceptional heat waves,” the report said. The deadly heat waves that hit India and Pakistan in 2015 will become practically yearly events if the world reaches the hotter of the two goals, the report said.

Coral and other ecosystems are also at risk. The report said warmer water coral reefs “will largely disappear.”

The outcome will determine whether “my grandchildren would get to see beautiful coral reefs,” Princeton’s Oppenheimer said.

For scientists there is a bit of “wishful thinking” that the report will spur governments and people to act quickly and strongly, one of the panel’s leaders, German biologist Hans-Otto Portner, said. “If action is not taken it will take the planet into an unprecedented climate future.”

5 Ways Brazil’s Bolsonaro Followed Trump’s Playbook

Long before Sunday’s election that saw Jair Bolsonaro get 46 percent the vote in the first round of the presidential race, many observers flirted with the idea that the far-right congressman was a “tropical” U.S. President Donald Trump. Bolsonaro, who will now compete in a second-round runoff on Oct. 28, presented himself as someone who tells it like it is while promising to dismantle a dysfunctional political system and seeking to capture the imagination of many citizens afraid of losing their place in an increasingly diverse and inclusive society.

While Trump and Bolsonaro have many differences — before running, Trump was a billionaire businessman while Bolsonaro was a long-time congressman with few legislative victories — many tactics used in their campaigns were remarkably similar.

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‘STRAIGHT TALK’

Perhaps the biggest similarity and likely the one that initially gave rise to the comparisons between Bolsonaro and Trump is that neither man appears to measure his words. In the 2016 U.S. elections, Trump often billed himself as the man who wasn’t afraid to say what everyone else was thinking. Bolsonaro shares the same lack of filter. Some of the comments that have gotten him in trouble reflect longstanding ideological positions, like his repeated praise for Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. Other comments may be more off the cuff and a wink at his reputation for shunning the “politically correct,” like when he told an audience that he had a daughter “in a moment of weakness” after four sons. Both men “enjoy being outrageous and making statements for shock value,” said Paulo Sotero, the director of the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington.

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BASH MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Bolsonaro and his three oldest sons, who are also politicians, have hammered away at Brazil’s main media organizations, accusing them of everything from telling outright lies about the candidate to ignoring his rise in the polls and endorsements from other politicians. Like Trump, they accuse the media of propping up the country’s traditional elite and of trying to derail a campaign that might threaten it. Carlos Bolsonaro, who is a city councilman in Rio de Janeiro, recently tweeted that the media and a major pollster “ignore growing rallies in favor of Bolsonaro, including in the farthest corners of Brazil, and they try to create a narrative of Bolsonaro’s stagnation (in the polls). They really believe the population is blind and stupid!”

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SOCIAL MEDIA MESSAGING

For candidates who don’t trust the media, social networks provide the perfect outlet. Bolsonaro, like Trump, has made heavy use of Twitter and Facebook to talk directly to voters. That became especially important after the candidate was stabbed on Sept. 6 and confined to the hospital for more than three weeks. Last week, even after being released from the hospital, Bolsonaro skipped the most important televised debate on major network Globo, citing his doctors’ orders. Instead he held nightly Facebook live sessions with political allies and did interviews with friendly stations. “The idea that you would skip the debate on health grounds but then have three 10-minute interviews with friendly TV networks is very Trumpian at its core,” said Matthew Taylor, associated professor of Latin American politics at American University, adding that for both men such a heavy reliance on social media helped them overcome initial resistance to their candidacies.

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FLOATING FRAUD

Bolsonaro has raised the specter of fraud and said it could rob him of the election. A week before the vote, he told a television station he would not accept any result but his own victory, implying that the size of support he had seen at street rallies indicated he would win, even though the polls were close. A few days later, he backed off those comments, saying he would accept the election results but wouldn’t call his rival to concede. Sound familiar? Trump trod a very similar path. “Bolsonaro is essentially saying, ‘Fairness means that I win. Anything else is fraud,’” said Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works: The politics of us and them.”

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USE OF PROXIES

Similar to how Trump’s campaign had Donald Trump Jr. and other children sometimes speak for their dad, Bolsonaro has often depended on his three eldest sons to float ideas, deny critical press reports and make outlandish claims. The latest example: On Sunday, while Brazilians were going to the polls, Flavio Bolsonaro, who is running for the Senate, shared a video on Twitter that purportedly appeared to show a voting machine that had been tampered with. Within hours, the country’s electoral court announced that it was a false report. However, by then it had surely been seen by millions of people on Twitter and the messaging group WhatsApp. “The technique is to use people who speak for you but don’t speak for you,” said Taylor. “Trump or Bolsonaro can always say, ‘I didn’t or would never say that.’”