Chris Hedges's Blog, page 474

We Can No Longer Afford Fossil Fuels

The Global #RiseForClimate actions are just one example of many that the climate justice movement is building the power needed to transform the economy and put in place policies to confront climate change.  The ingredients exist for the climate justice movement to rapidly succeed. A challenge is not knowing how much time we have. Scientists have been conservative in their estimates, and feedback loops could rapidly increase the impacts of climate change.

The costs of not acting are high. The benefits of investing in a clean energy economy would be widespread. We need to keep building the movement.

New Climate Economy

The Climate Crisis Is Already Devastating

The urgency of the climate crisis is obvious and cannot be reasonably denied. ABC News reported about the horrific California wildfires, saying there is an “undeniable link to climate change.” They wrote, “Experts have said that rising temperatures linked to climate change are making the fires larger, more dangerous and more expensive to fight.” This year’s fires broke records set by last year’s fires, leading Governor Jerry Brown to describe them as the “new normal” caused by years of drought and rising temperatures.

Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Idaho reported in 2017 that human-caused warming was drying out forests, causing peak fire seasons across the West to expand every year by an average of nine days since 2000. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the 2017 fire season cost more than $2 billion, making it the most expensive fire season on record.

Extreme heat is becoming more common because of climate change. Since 2001, 17 of the 18 warmest years on record have occurred. Records were broken all over the world this year. Record heat is also contributing to more ferocious storms. Storms with heavy rain and high winds are increasing, as the Union of Concerned Scientists warns.

Michael Mann, an atmospheric science professor at Penn State University, clarifies the science:

“What we can conclude with a great deal of confidence now is that climate change is making these events more extreme. And its not rocket science, you warm the atmosphere it’s going to hold more moisture, you get larger flooding events, you get more rainfall. You warm the planet, you’re going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worse drought. You bring all that together and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.”

Economic Cost of Climate Impacts Is Rising

Global warming will hit the US economy hard, particularly in the South. The Richmond branch of the Federal Reserve Bank cites a study that finds refusing to combat climate change could utterly devastate the South’s entire economy. The Fed notes, “higher summer temperatures could reduce overall U.S. economic growth by as much as one-third over the next century, with Southern states accounting for a disproportionate share of that potential reduction.”

There is a correlation between higher temperatures and lower factory production, lower worker productivity and lower economic growth. An August 2018 report found: “The occurrence of six or more days with temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit reduces the weekly production of U.S. automobile manufacturing plants by an average of 8 percent.”

Ironically, the oil and gas industry, which is accused of undermining climate science, is now asking government to protect it from the impacts of climate change. When Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, swamping Houston, it caused an immediate 28 cents per gallon increase in the price of oil. After Harvey a Texas commission report sought $61 billion from Congress to protect Texas from future storms. Joel N. Myers, of AccuWeather, predicted in 2017 that the total losses from Harvey “would reach $190 billion or one percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.” The cost of a 60 mile seawall along the Texas coast is initially projected to be $12 billion.

Harvey broke the record set by Hurricane Katrina, which cost $160 billion.  The 10 most destructive hurricanes caused an estimated $442 billion in losses. Out of 27 extreme weather events in 2016, researchers for the American Meteorological Society have correlated 21 of them to human-caused climate change.

A 2018 Climate Change Assessment report for  California estimated climate change:

“could soon cost us $200 million a year in increased energy bills to keep homes air conditioned, $3 billion from the effects of a long drought and $18 billion to replace buildings inundated by rising seas, just to cite a few projections. Not to mention the loss of life from killer heat waves, which could add more than 11,000 heat-related deaths a year by 2050 in California, and carry an estimated $50 billion annual price tag.”

Impacts are seen throughout the United States. A report found that “since 2005, Virginia has lost $280 million in home values because of sea-level rise.” A 2018 study found coastal properties in five Southeastern states have lost $7.4 billion in potential value since 2005. The 2017 Hawaii Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report estimates the lost value of flooded structures and land at over $19 billion. Additionally, Hawaii’s roadways, bridges and infrastructure will cost $15 billion to repair and replace. The National Flood Insurance Program is losing $1.4 billion annually largely due to claims in 284 coastal counties. The Congressional Budget Office  finds the program is already $20.5 billion in the red even after the government forgave $16 billion in debt last fall.

These are just some of the many costs — food, agriculture, fishing, oceans, storms, fires, droughts, heat, flooding and more are going to worsen significantly.

Climate change could be the cause of the next economic collapse due to the cost of climate damage, an insurance industry crisis, or stranded assets, as over-investing in carbon energy has caused a fragile carbon bubble.

The US Can Transform To A Climate Justice Economy Now

While there has been progress on clean energy, it is inadequate and sporadic compared to the urgent needs. We need dramatic escalation with clear goals — keep fossil fuels in the ground, use agriculture and wetlands to sequester carbon, deploy renewable energy, build climate justice infrastructure and transition to a new economy based on sustainability, democracy and equity.

This week, the world’s largest wind farm opened. It can power 590,000 homes in the UK. Another planned wind farm could provide the power for 2 million homes. The world is only scratching the surface of the potential of wind and solar.

We can no longer afford the old carbon energy economy. A new climate economy would add $26 trillion to the global economy by 2030, a conservative estimate. It will create 65 million new jobs and prevent 700,000 premature deaths. This transformation provides an opportunity to create the future we want based on economic, racial and environmental justice.

Just as we are underestimating the high costs of climate change, we have also “grossly underestimated the benefits and opportunities unlocked by smart, connected, distributed energy technologies,” David Roberts writes in Vox. We will look back after the transition and wonder why we waited as we will see “the benefit of quieter, safer, more livable cities and better respiratory health, we’ll wonder why we ever put up with anything else — why we nickel-and-dimed the transition to electric buses, long-haul trucks, and passenger vehicles; why we fought over every bike lane and rail line.” We can also implement Solutionary Rail – a network of electrified railroads that also serves as an energy grid serving rural areas and relieving roads of trucks.

The 2018 New Climate Economy Report reports time is running out; extreme damage from climate change is being locked in. We need a sustainable trajectory by 2030. The developing world needs infrastructure and much of the developed world’s infrastructure is failing. The report finds, “The world is expected to spend about US$90 trillion on infrastructure in the period up to 2030, more than the entire current stock today. Much of this investment will be programmed in the next few years.” We need to spend this on creating a new sustainable economy.

Adele Peters quotes Helen Mountford, lead author of the Global Commission project, “If we get that infrastructure right, we’re going to put ourselves on the right path. If we get it wrong, we’ll be very much stuck on that wrong pathway.”

The report examined five areas: cities, energy, food and land use, water, and industry. Building sustainable, efficient, clean energy infrastructure will reduce health costs, and increase productivity and innovation. This requires policy based on equity, cutting fossil fuel subsidies while increasing the price of carbon, and investing in sustainable infrastructure.

The good news is we have the ability and technology to make the transition. We know what works. We lack the leadership, but this leadership void can be filled by the people. When we lead, the leaders will follow.

As the crisis hits and national consensus solidifies, people will need to demand a new economy based on equity, fairness, democratized energy and serving the necessities of the people and planet. This new democratized economy could include a federal buyout of the top US-based, publicly-traded fossil fuel companies. It could include the reversal of disastrous privatization with nationalization of key industries and public ownership of energy utilities to serve the public interest, rather than private interests.

Polling on risks of climate change. Yale Program on Climate Communication, 2018.

National Consensus Is Solidifying For Climate Action

Despite mis-leadership by power holders and lack of commercial media coverage, people know climate change is having major negative impacts and want to action taken to confront it. Yale reports that polls show 83% want research funded on alternative energy, 77% want CO2 regulated as a pollutant, 70% want strict limits on CO2 from coal-fired power plants, and 68% even favor a carbon tax on polluters.

Obama’s policies on climate were inadequate, and he led massive building of oil and gas infrastructure. The current administration denies climate change exists, hides research on climate, is reversing Obama’s positive steps and opposes the national consensus. This is going to lead to a climate justice boomerang. More storms and the cost of climate change will cause people to rebel and demand the transformation political elites have refused.

There is an impressive mobilized movement; not just the Global #RiseForClimate, but people putting their bodies on the line and risking arrestto stop carbon infrastructure. Activists are successfully delaying the approval of pipelines, often with Indigenous leadership as their rights are crucial for climate justice. Activists are arguing their resistance against polluters is being done out of climate necessity and are sometimes succeeding.

Oil companies are being sued for hiding the truth about climate change – former scientists are exposing them – and are now being forced to disclose climate change risks to shareholders. Activists are confronting investors of carbon infrastructure and insurance companies on coal. Workers are confronting unions on the issue. Youth are suing for a livable climate future.

The movement is building power. The path needed is clear, but escalation is urgent.

A TV Show About Nazis Tackles Tough Questions

The most widely acclaimed TV series ever about the Nazi occupation of France is a relentless epic with little use for the familiar images of craven collaborators and selfless resisters. Un village français focuses on a fictional rural community that endures a tightening vise of German control for more than four years. The villagers live far away from black-and-white tropes. Even a ruthless Nazi official eludes the usual monochrome. The humans are all too human.

Un village averaged about 3.4 million French viewers during 72 episodes between 2009 and 2017. The dramatic series has also aired in upward of 40 countries, according to producers. Now gaining an audience in the United States via online platforms (under its English title A French Village), Un village is far afield from routine US media assumptions about bright lines between good and evil.

From the start of the series, when German troops suddenly arrive in mid-June 1940, the choices for locals are bad and keep getting worse. Un village is riddled with dilemmas that often go from painful to insoluble. The drama’s creators aimed “to bring some shades of grey to the public memory of World War 2 in France,” historian Marjolaine Boutet wrote; they had “the ambition to evoke an empathetic response from the audience towards every character”—while bypassing the timeworn formula of “collaborators as villains and Resistance fighters as heroes.” Based on solid historical research, the poignant and often heartbreaking script comes alive with a superb ensemble cast in more than 20 major roles. The result is a dramatic tour de force that undermines Manichean views of the world.

After watching the 63 hours of Un village français, I was eager to interview its head scriptwriter, Frédéric Krivine. We met on a rainy Paris morning at a café not far from Place de la République. My first question: “How and why did you want to make a Nazi human?”

Krivine, who is Jewish, responded with a fleeting quip—“It’s a good Jewish story”—and quickly turned serious. “A good show, especially a show to last for a while, needs to have characters who are really representative of the complexity of human nature,” he said. “Otherwise, you mustn’t use them.” Nazis, he went on, “were human beings, with desires and problems,” at the same time that “in another point of view, they were kind of monsters.”

The main Nazi character in Un village is a powerful intelligence officer whose romantic charm and steely wit coexist with willingness to torture and execute if necessary to get the job done. I asked Krivine whether there was a message in the mixture.

“People who do horrible things are human beings,” he said. “We have to find a way to talk about them without hiding what they do and without treating them as nonhuman people, nonhuman beings. They are human beings; like us they belong to, we are in, the same species, human species…. It’s humans who kill now everywhere in the world where people are killed. It’s because they are human beings that we have problems—because if they were just extraterrestrial or monsters we could just erase them.”

Un village is an intricate counterpoint to Marcel Ophüls’s landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which left many viewers with the broad-brush impression that occupied France was virtually a nation of collaborators, except for a few heroes. Krivine balks at such sweeping categories. In his script, some of the resisters are unable to resist their own egotism, opportunism, dogmatism, or lethally displaced rage. The purpose of the plot points is to engender not cynicism but realism.

Overall, Krivine commented, most people are apt to remain bystanders. In the case of wartime France, an overwhelming majority of the population were neither resisters nor collaborators and didn’t do anything, “bad or good.” (Meanwhile, many more French citizens cooperated with the occupiers than resisted them.) When I asked about human tendencies to go along with evils, Krivine replied that “it’s a very complex matter,” and then swiftly reframed my question this way: “Of what is made indifference, and what are the consequences of indifference?”

Krivine brought up two current examples. He pointed out that several million people have died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade—yet life-saving medicines exist and could be delivered for use in a far-reaching program. “But we don’t do it.” Krivine then spoke of how snipers in the Israeli military had recently been killing Palestinians along the Gaza border. Yet scant opposition came from the Israeli public.

When I remarked that such cases are forms of collaboration by the majority, Krivine demurred. “I don’t feel it as collaboration,” he said. “But it’s not nothing.” When I suggested the word “complicity,” he differed again, and said: “People don’t react when they don’t have the horror in their eyes.”

During the first year of the occupation, the tightening repression of Jews caused little critical response from the French public, he said. It was only when police began to separate Jewish parents and their children in 1942 that a widespread negative reaction from the population set in. German authorities took note and started to implement similar policies more discreetly; the public concern dissipated.

Near the close of Un village français, two scenes notably bring the past into the present.

After barely eluding the dragnets of Vichy and German forces, Rita and Ezechiel escape to Palestine. But, contrary to boilerplate story lines, the Jewish couple doesn’t get a happy ending in the Promised Land. On a desert road one day in 1948, they come under attack from Palestinians; when Rita expresses bafflement at the ambush, Ezechiel tells her that Jewish settlers have recently massacred Palestinian families in a village called Deir Yassin. More than one layer of tragedy hangs in the air.

The postwar trajectory of the central Nazi character—Heinrich Müller, the top SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) intelligence official in the town—also goes against the familiar grain. As German forces retreat from advancing Allies in the late summer of 1944, Müller deserts with his French lover in an unsuccessful effort to reach Switzerland. Soon the American military captures Müller and discovers his identity. Later, when he resurfaces in the series, the year is 1960, the country is Paraguay, and—as a CIA operative—Müller is overseeing a torture session. The goal is to extract information from a woman who is part of a guerrilla insurgency against a fascistic regime being propped up by the US government.

With both narrative twists, so different than what we’re apt to see in US mass entertainment, I asked Krivine: What’s the big idea?

“The idea was,” he said, “we need to show the long-distance consequences of an event like occupation. And it was interesting to show one guy in Paraguay in the sixties. And the Jews who escaped—it was so for Rita and Ezechiel a narrow escape, they were survivors, and then they’re in another place, in another story. The idea was to say: there is no ending to that kind of story.”

The next day, I crossed a bridge over the Seine and kept walking toward an appointment with the Nazi intelligence officer Heinrich Müller—or so it almost seemed, against all rational thought, because the chilling portrayal of that character in Un village français demands the suspension of disbelief, willing or otherwise. As I hurried toward our rendezvous, there were moments when I couldn’t help wondering whether Müller’s icy fascist gaze might confront me at the little café where we were to meet.

Richard Sammel greeted me with a smile and a wave as he came through the door, carrying a motorcycle helmet in the other hand. I’d read that (like Krivine) he was born about 15 years after the end of the Second World War, that he speaks several languages fluently in addition to his native German, and that he has acted widely since the early 1990s. Concentrating on his big role in Un village for much of a decade must have absorbed a lot of psychological energy. I wondered what insights he might share after “being” a Nazi for so long.

Early in our conversation, I mentioned the assumption that there’s nothing human about really bad people like Nazi officials.

“That’s the biggest mistake you can make,” Sammel said. Moments later he was citing Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, “where you actually found out that Eichmann was a completely normal guy.” High-ranking Nazi officers “were wonderful fathers and wonderful husbands and actually very tender,” he added, “which would not fit at all with this common idea that they’re all brutal sadists.” Nazis were “normal people who turned into murder machines.”

Soon Sammel brought up the famous experiment that Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram began in 1961 (the same year as Adolf Eichmann’s trial for overseeing large-scale Nazi crimes against humanity). The professor found it easy to “make people torture other people, for the benefit of science. And they go until three times administrating a potential lethal electrical charge on another person, who is an actor who mimes the pain, but still—those people do not know it.”

What about mass entertainment that, like so much nationalist rhetoric in the United States, thrives on depicting people as all good or all bad? “I guess in terms of catharsis, I get the Hollywood recipe,” Sammel said. “It’s complete crap. But it’s an ideology that pumps us up. It will not help society grow.”

“If we come to understand that people who are ‘bad’ have some good qualities,” I said, “then maybe also we would be confronted that people who we know are ‘us’ and good might have some really bad qualities.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly it,” he replied. “Isn’t it like that in America? You are the only society in the world who have only good guys. How amazing for you. But then explain to me how come that you are the very nation who have the biggest rate of people imprisoned. Tell me about that—if you are so good, how come? You tell me. You are believing in shit. Excuse me, to say that.”

He went on: “How come that you do not understand—I mean, it’s not [only] you, it’s even Europe—you bomb the Middle East 30 years and then you are kind of surprised that there is a refugee movement, people go out, or a terrorist movement even. Every fucking terrorist movement that was born in the Middle East was funded primarily in the beginning initially from us. They have our weapons because we gave them to them. So we play the fucking game and then it gets out of control. So the bad game is not started by them, it’s started by us. And now we blame it on them.”

Sammel grew up in West Germany, near Heidelberg. During childhood, he saw horrific footage from concentration camps. “I got to know all those documentaries the American soldiers filmed when they discovered the camps…. It traumatized me for the rest of my life. But I tell you what—you get your lesson…. Never ever again. That’s how you learn from history.”

An imperative is “understanding human behavior,” Sammel said. “How the hell could that happen? And you will not understand how this has happened if you say, ‘They’re all bad, we killed them all, let’s kill them all as quickly as possible, done, good job.’ … In a historical analysis, you have to go deep into society to find out where it started, how was the process of indoctrination, how a whole nation turned into believing an ideology completely disconnected from reality, and how this collective fury or enthusiasm could have happened—in order to prevent it.”

The German official whom Sammel portrayed for eight years “took the ideology of the Nazis because it’s the most powerful, the best way to make a career and a good living. And that’s what he did. So, he’s not a convinced Nazi, he’s a convinced Darwinist.” When his capture by the US military leads to a new career with US intelligence, “he’s very happy that the Americans take him over. Very happy—perfect—safe.”

The café was closing, so we found a quiet spot in a bar around the corner. “Know your biggest enemy most,” Sammel said as we sat down. “All kind of caricature doesn’t help you understand the other side.”

He added: “Don’t put the Nazis in a place where you think it has nothing to do with yourself. That’s the biggest danger, historical danger, I think we can make.”

“A historical series, like a historical book, speaks of the period that it talks about and also of the period it was made,” Frédéric Krivine told me. In the current era, his deeply nuanced scripting of Un village français is at odds with countless tales of sheer goodness in the fight against evildoers—the kind of narratives that have retained huge power in spite of diminished credibility. Shaking off a propagandized worldview requires seeing not only what we abhor in others but also what others abhor in us—a sharp departure from outlooks that have dominated the US political culture. Facile accusations about the crimes of others beg the questions about our own. In such light, Un village français can be viewed (with English subtitles) as particularly relevant for Americans, whose country—while never experiencing a successful invasion by a foreign power—has often occupied other lands.

Psychologists Say No to Torture

Sometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The APA’s decision is important — and not just symbolically. Today we have a president who has promised to bring back torture and “load up” Guantánamo “with some bad dudes.” When healing professionals refuse to work there, they are standing up for human rights and against torture.

It wasn’t always so. In the early days of Guantánamo, military psychologists contributed to detainee interrogations there. It was for Guantánamo that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved multiple torture methods, including among others excruciating stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced nudity. Military psychologists advised on which techniques would take advantage of the weaknesses of individual detainees. And it was two psychologists, one an APA member, who designed the CIA’s whole “enhanced interrogation program.”

Here’s a disclaimer of sorts: ever since I witnessed the effects of U.S. torture policy firsthand in Central America in the 1980s, I’ve had a deep personal interest in American torture practices. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I wrote two books focused on the subject, the latest being American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes.

For a year and a half, I also served on a special ethics commission established by the APA after ugly revelations came out about how that organization’s officials had, in the Bush years, maneuvered to allow its members to collude with the U.S. government in settings where torture was used. In fact, an independent review it commissioned in 2015 concluded that “some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies.” Indeed, those leaders colluded “with important DoD officials to have [the] APA issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain [the] DoD in any greater fashion than existing DoD interrogation guidelines.”

In the wake of that independent review, the APA’s Council of Representatives voted that same year to keep psychologists out of national security interrogation settings.

It’s modestly encouraging that this August two-thirds of its governing body voted against a resolution that would have returned psychologists to sites like Gitmo.

What makes the new vote less than completely satisfying, however, is this: the 2015 vote establishing that policy was 157-to-1. This year, a third of the council was ready to send psychologists back to Guantánamo. Like much of the rest of Donald Trump’s United States, the APA seems to be in the process of backsliding on torture.

The details of the parliamentary wrangling at the August meeting are undoubtedly of little interest to outsiders. The actual motion under consideration was important, however, because it would have rescinded part of the organization’s historic 2015 decision, prohibiting its members from providing psychological treatment, as it put it,

“at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, ‘black sites,’ vessels in international waters, or sites where detainees are interrogated under foreign jurisdiction unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights or providing treatment to military personnel.”

Proponents of the new motion argued that keeping psychologists out of places like Guantánamo deprives detainees of much needed psychological treatment. If the association really cared about detainees, they claimed, it would not deny them the treatment they need.

Opponents argued that allowing psychologists to work at Guantánamo gives ethical cover to an illegal detention site where detainees are still being tortured with painful forced feedings, solitary confinement, and the hopelessness induced by indefinite detention without charges. It’s worth noting that the military still refuses to allow the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture to speak privately with detainees at Gitmo. In addition, at such a detention and interrogation site, any psychologist who was a member of, or employed by, the U.S. military would face an inevitable conflict of interest between the desires of his or her employers and the needs of detainee clients.

The 2015 resolution also prevented APA members from participating in national security interrogations, declaring that they

“shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation.”

Military psychologists within the APA were not happy in 2015 about being shut out of national security interrogations and they’d still like to see psychologists back in the interrogation business. This time around, they strategically chose to focus their rhetoric on treatment rather than interrogation. However, the long-term goals are clear. Indeed, in response to a request from those military psychologists, the APA’s Committee on Legal Issues recommended to the board of directors “broadening” the resolution “to allow psychologists to be involved in the practice and policy of humane interrogation.” The board declined — this time, anyway.

Here’s the problem with “humane interrogation”: no one ever admits to using inhumane methods. Unfortunately, there’s a recent and sordid history of U.S. officials claiming that torture is actually humane — albeit “enhanced” — interrogation. In the George W. Bush administration, John Woo and Jay Bybee, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office ofLegal Counsel, were among those who wrote memos justifying torture. As Bybee explained in an August 2002 memo to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “real” physicaltorture must involve pain similar to that experienced during “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” And the effects of psychological interrogation must last “months or even years” to constitute mental torture — obviously an impossible standard to meet, since no one knows for sure what will happen in the future. In that way, they essentially redefined any form of cruelty, including waterboarding, in any of the CIA’s black sites then scattered around the world or at Guantánamo, as anything but torture.

As it happened, even as defined by the Bush administration, much of what was done in those years would have qualified as torture. Certainly, isolating people, depriving them of sleep, bombarding them with heat, cold, light, and endless loud noise, beating them, and providing them with no hope of eventual release were not exactly acts conducive to long-term mental health. In fact, in 2016 the New York Times interviewed several freed Guantánamo detainees, who reported that the effects of their abuse had indeed lasted “months or even years.”

A Bit of History

The role of American psychologists in designing torture programs goes back at least to the 1950s, as historian Alfred McCoy documented so graphically in his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. At that time, research psychologists at elite universities in the U.S. and Canada experimented on unwitting subjects — including mental patients — in an effort to develop techniques to produce a condition of compliancy in future prisoners, a condition that the CIA called “DDD” (for debility, dependency, and dread).

Much of this research culminated in that Agency’s now-infamous 1963 KUBARK manual on interrogation, which the United States used to train the police and military forces of client states. That manual would be resurrected in 1983 and used in the CIA’s training of the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua’s civil war. Many of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that became so familiar to us in the George W. Bush years — sensory bombardment, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, sexual humiliation — were first laid out in that manual. But the CIA evidently misplaced it somewhere in their voluminous files because, after 9/11, instead of hauling it out yet again, they paid $80 million to two psychologists to reinvent the torture wheel. Those two, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, repackaged DDD as “learned helplessness” (borrowing a concept developed by another psychologist, Martin Seligman).

Seligman’s role in developing the CIA torture program has been in dispute ever since. At most, he seems to have willingly discussed his theories with CIA personnel. In December 2001, he met at his home with both James Mitchell and Kirk Hubbard, who was then the chief of research and analysis in the CIA’s Operational Division, among others. In 2002, at the invitation of CIA personnel, he lectured on learned helplessness at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school where U.S. military are trained to resist torture. Seligman claims he had no idea how his work was being used until “years later,” when he read a New Yorker article byJane Mayer (perhaps this one) about CIA torture practices in the post-9/11 era. “If I had known about the methods employed,” says Seligman, “I would not have discussed learned helplessness with” Agency officials.

Mitchell and Jessen, however, had no such compunctions. They cheerfully designed an interrogation program for the CIA that included such “enhanced techniques” as slamming detainees against walls and locking them in tiny boxes.  As no one is likely to forget, they also retrieved waterboarding from history. This practice had bluntly been called “the water torture” in Medieval Europe and American soldiers were using it in the Philippines, where it was referred to ironically as “the water cure,” as the twentieth century began. To waterboard is essentially to drown a prisoner to the point of unconsciousness, a “technique” the CIA used 83 times on one man (who didn’t even turn out to be an al-Qaeda leader). The whole program was implemented at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and Romania, among other places.

For part of this time, Mitchell was a member of the APA and so presumably subject to its code of ethics, which, theoretically at least, prohibited involvement in interrogations involving torture. When concerned APA members tried to bring an ethics claim against him to the group (whose only real sanction would have been to publicly expel him), they got nowhere. Eventually, Mitchell quietly resigned from the association.

Meanwhile, military psychologists were also working on interrogation matters for the Department of Defense. At Guantánamo, they participated in behavioral science control teams (BSCTs, pronounced “biscuits”). Despite the homey-sounding name, those BSCTs were anything but benign. Staffed by psychologists and psychiatrists, the teams, according to a 2005 New England Journal of Medicine op-ed by knowledgeable insiders, “prepared psychological profiles for use by interrogators; they also sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators.”

Guantánamo’s BSCTs, the Journal piece continues, favored an approach to behavioral control taught at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which “builds on the premise that acute, uncontrollable stress erodes established behavior (e.g., resistance to questioning), creating opportunities to reshape behavior.” This was to be achieved by introducing “stressors tailored to the psychological and cultural vulnerabilities of individual detainees (e.g., phobias, personality features, and religious beliefs).”

But where did the BSCTs get their information about the vulnerabilities of those individual detainees? The International Committee of the Red Cross discovered that it came from their medical records at the detention center, which, according to generalmedical ethics and the Geneva Conventions, are supposed to be kept confidential.

Those APA members who continue to argue for bringing military psychologists back to Guantánamo insist that it’s possible to keep a firewall between their work as clinicians and the role of interrogator. But how realistic is this, especially within an organization like the military, where obedience and hierarchical loyalty are key values? As the New England Journal of Medicine concludes,

“[The] proximity of health professionals to interrogation settings, even when they act as caregivers, carries risk. It may invite interrogators to be more aggressive, because they imagine that these professionals will set needed limits. The logic of caregiver involvement as a safeguard also risks pulling health professionals in ever more deeply. Once caregivers share information with interrogators, why should they refrain from giving advice about how to best use the data? Won’t such advice better protect detainees, while furthering the intelligence-gathering mission? And if so, why not oversee isolation and sleep deprivation or monitor beatings to make sure nothing terrible happens?”

Who Cares What the American Psychological Association Does?

When it comes to torture, why should the internal politics of one professional association with relatively little power matter? The answer is: because what happens there offers a vivid illustration of how organizations (or even entire nations) can be deformed once torture gains an institutional home.

And as in the APA, in the United States, too, the fight over torture has not ended. On the first day of his presidency, Barack Obama issued two executive orders. One de-authorized the use of those “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and closed the CIA’s black sites. The other was meant to shut Guantánamo as well (but the fervent opposition of most congressional Republicans ultimately prevented this).

Obama also argued that nothing would be “gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Had America’s elected officials spent their time and energy that way, those in George W. Bush’s administration who authorized widespread acts of torture and those who committed them might have been held legally responsible — which is exactly what the U.N. Convention Against Torture (of which the U.S. is a signatory) requires. As a nation, minimally we would have gotten a much fuller accounting of the many cruel and illegal acts committed in our names by top officials, intelligence agencies, and the military after September 11, 2001.

And had all of that happened, we might not be backsliding on torture the way we are. It’s just possible that this country might not have elected a man who campaigned on the promise that he would bring back “waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and who, on entering the Oval Office, signed an executive order keeping Guantánamo open.

In addition, the Senate would probably not have approved Gina Haspel who oversaw a CIA black site in Thailand (where acts of torture did take place) to run the Agency. She might have been prosecuted, not promoted to CIA director. And perhaps the president wouldn’t have nominated a Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who worked as staff secretary in the George W. Bush White House and was involved in detainee policy. The Washington Post reports that he attended more than one meeting on the treatment of detainees, suggested that they weren’t entitled to legal counsel and strategized about how to keep the Supreme Court from granting them habeas corpus rights. Now, President Trump, citing “executive privilege,” is even withholding 100,000 pages of records from Kavanaugh’s service in the Bush White House — and who knows what they might contain on the subject.

How Did They Do It?

What happened at the APA convention recently also matters because it illustrates the power of organized ethical action. Association members who were determined to keep psychologists out of the torture business formed the APA Watch: Alliance for an Ethical APA. They consulted thoughtfully with each other and allies (including Veterans for Peace), developed and distributed materials aimed at persuading APA members in general, and made personal phone calls to most of the 170 members of the association’s governing Council of Representatives. They combined the wisdom and values of their profession — including the all-important Hippocratic injunction not to harm one’s patients — with energetic, organized action.

It’s an encouraging example for the rest of us, as we enter this crucial election cycle. When we’re smart, committed, and organized, the good guys can win.

The Underbelly of the Sex-Trade Industry

  Amelia Tiganus is a sex-trade survivor, originally from Romania. She was prostituted in Spain, where she still lives. Tiganus is involved in a campaign to end the sex trade, working since 2015 with Feminicidio as coordinator of its online training platform and projects for the prevention and awareness of prostitution, trafficking and other forms of violence against women. She is currently documenting the number of murdered prostituted women in Spain.

Tiganus has published several articles on the sexual exploitation of women and girls. In the past two years, she has given more than 100 lectures and workshops throughout Spain and Argentina.

I spoke to Tiganus about being trafficked and abused in state-sanctioned brothels, and about her life and activism after escaping prostitution. Here is her story:

When I was 17, I was sold by a Romanian pimp to a Spanish pimp for 300 pounds [roughly $350]. But the total debt I was told I owed my new pimp was 3,000 pounds, after he had bought me and paid for my travel, documentation, clothes and the “facilities” that they put me in. Like many Romanian girls, I was totally vulnerable, not only because of economic poverty but also because of social exclusion, and being stigmatized for suffering multiple rapes at the age of 13.

I left school at 14, and at 16 I left my family and started working in a factory. The society I grew up in was deeply patriarchal, so to them I was already human waste; a bad woman.

When the pimps captured me, they talked about the virtues of being a prostitute in Spain. They told me I would earn a fortune in a short time. I didn’t know that what awaited me would not look anything like [what] they told me.

Psychological Breakdown

It was very easy to deceive me because they had already stripped me of my humanity by telling me I was a “bitch,” and by sexually violating me. I could not aspire to anything else. The pimps are expert manipulators and psychological abusers. The worst punishment is usually not physical. They didn’t put a gun to my head or threaten me or put me in chains—they broke me down psychologically, and that is how I became a victim.

Like other survivors of prostitution, I define the brothel as a concentration camp. During the day, we were forced to watch pornographic films, to eat and to sleep under a strict regime of control. We were expected to be loving and smiling, since that gave the place and the pimp a good reputation. We had to play a role all the time, and had to do what the johns demanded, such as dressing as they wished, or to [go by] another name. We had to sleep in the same bed that we had been sexually tortured in by johns.

The pimps know that Spanish johns want the “merchandise” in good condition and without obvious signs of violence. They want “happy whores” because, thanks to the media and awareness campaigns that directly relate physical violence to trafficking, the [sex buyers] do not want to feel like part of the mafia that sexually exploits women. But the johns also don’t want to give up their privilege of sexually accessing women’s bodies. So they prefer to deceive themselves, with the support of the institutions, the media, the political class and society in general, into believing that the prostitutes inside the brothels are happy and there by choice.

When I was taken to the first brothel in Alicante, a big tourist area, I was amazed that the place was full of girls from my home city. I was also surprised by the endless 12-hour days to which we were subjected. Between opening at 5 p.m. and closing at 5 a.m., there was no possibility of rest, and this was seven days a week. If we stopped work, we were fined, and this was added to our debt.

The pimps told us that once the debt was paid we would get 50 percent of the profits. They told us we shouldn’t complain, because we were going to earn a lot of money in a short time, and then retire early. I realized after three weeks of being there that that would not happen when I had already paid my debt.

In prostitution, everything is set up to take money away from the women. They are left with just enough to send to their families and not raise suspicion. We were fined and charged for lodging and maintenance at exorbitant prices, despite sleeping in crowded rooms and eating badly. We were sold expensive clothes and makeup, and they made us buy drugs, supposedly to offer to the johns and earn more money.

They hooked us on drugs as soon as they could. First it was alcohol, then cocaine. Drugs and alcohol were always available. At first, we were pressured to do it, but then we complied in an attempt to mentally escape the torture.

We were willing to endure the cruelty because we believed in the false promise of the freedom and autonomy that money would give us. In the brothel you lose your identity: You are interchangeable and usable, without any individual characteristics.

Men Who Pay for Sex

From my experiences, I identified three types of johns:

The “putero majo” [“putero” is a word commonly used by prostituted women to mean “sex buyer” or “john”] was the one who would talk to me a lot. I had to be very kind to him and smile, listen and approve, with love and admiration. For me, that situation was one of the most maddening. He forced me to be there, not only in body but also mentally. That was torture for me and the majority of prostitutes. This type of john not only wants to buy a body but also the soul, the feelings and the affection. They want to buy what cannot be sold. They don’t mind self-deception. I cannot describe the impotence and anger that that made me feel. He felt I should be grateful to him because he supposedly treated me well. This john went from being the most loving “boyfriend” to calling me “disgusting bitch,” “liar” and “swindler” in the most violent ways if I was not good at the role he was paying for.

The “macho putero” was to the point. He paid, penetrated and left. At least that way I could be mentally where I wanted to be. For that type of john, the whores are only a body with holes to penetrate. They don’t care what we are thinking. We must perform for him just like in the movies: moan, smile and pretend that we are participating. Then he leaves and we are left with our bodies violated and in pain. On more than one occasion, this type of john would turn up to the brothel in a pack with his friends and ask for group sex, usually with only one woman. Most of the time he got what he asked for, because the women who were still in debt to the pimp were particularly bound to obey them and accede to more brutal practices.

If the pimps don’t kill us, the third type of john does: the “misogynist putero.” The physical and mental torture that this sadist performs are difficult to narrate. Being bitten, pinched, beaten, insulted, humiliated, reduced to nothing. The more pain, humiliation and fear they inflict, the more they enjoy it.

The johns are macho men who think that women exist to satisfy their desires. They are politicians, judges, police, prosecutors, journalists, trade unionists, workers, businessmen, doctors, teachers, athletes, married, single, young or old. They come from all social classes. There is no place where these men feel more united than in the brothel.

Follow the Money

I was trapped in the prostitution system for five years. The money we earned was taken by the pimps, and that money then benefits municipalities, the treasury and the state prosecutor. The money from the prostitution system ends up benefiting the state economy. This is money literally from the backs of women.

That is why I speak of the “prostitution system.” It is the “community” in which you live. It is the state and its institutions that allow it, because it brings economic benefits to the country—don’t forget that Romania is an important provider of women for sexual exploitation within the European Union.

Every time a prostituted woman retires, at least three new women are forced into the brothels. Whores are “made” on an industrial scale because the sex industry needs them. The pimps invest a lot of money into making young women believe that their best chance is to be a whore.

Spain has recently become a paradise for sex tourists. Here you can easily access all types of prostitution: street, brothels, private apartments, online advertising. It is a safe haven for johns from all over the world. In 2017, 82 million tourists visited Spain, and they contribute significantly to the economy. Much of that money comes from trafficking and prostitution. Sex tourism feeds and sustains trafficking. The Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands and Catalonia, for example, are destinations for sex tourism. The income from prostitution and trafficking in Spain are part of the GDP [gross domestic product].

Counting Murdered and Missing Women

In the database of Feminicidio.net, we have documented 42 femicides of prostituted women between 2010 and 2018, not including those who have disappeared during the trafficking process.

I survived and I can tell my story, but imagine all those who are not able to speak—those who die from addiction, abuse and torture; those who will be killed … the prostituted victims of femicide are the forgotten victims of male violence. They are seen as disposable women. They are brutally killed—their broken bodies are often found in vacant lots, or in containers or in garbage bags. Although they are sexual crimes, they are not recognized as such by laws or people.

In Spain, there is much talk and action amongst feminists about gang rape and abuse of women, which is a good thing. The social perception is changing. However, sexual violence that takes place in brothels does not seem to matter so much. The double morality is still there, with the myth that there are “good” and “bad” women— the women who matter and those who do not. This is reinforcing the inequality between men and women and makes our liberation impossible.

Spain is the third biggest consumer of prostitution in the world, after Thailand and Puerto Rico. In Spain, the sex industry is widespread and standardized. Prostitution is not a crime, but it is not regulated as a professional activity either. However, the “prostitution of others” or sexual exploitation itself is a crime, despite rarely being prosecuted.

In addition, Spain has been a magnet for immigrants in recent years. The racist policies of migratory control have helped the traffickers, because they offer to help those who need to cross borders illegally. They often become traffickers of young women.

Many migrants are caught by traffickers and exploited in Spain through force and coercion. The traffickers take advantage of women in dire poverty, who then end up in debt bondage.

How Do We Fight the Sex Trade?

At Feminicidio.net, we have several proposals to combat trafficking and sexual exploitation:

● We ask for the adoption of a comprehensive law against trafficking based on three elements: the identification of victims, protection and reparation.

● We propose a reform of the criminal code that incorporates the criminalization and punitive punishment of the crimes of “rufianismo [pimping],” “localia terceria [third party exploitation]” and “proxenetismo noncoercitivo [non-coercive pimping],” because if sexual exploitation in brothels is not allowed, some experts claim that would eradicate 90 percent of trafficking.

● The awareness and prevention of trafficking and prostitution should be incorporated into the school curriculum.

● The media should give femicide in the prostitution system the same coverage as other types of femicide so that it is recognized in official figures. We want trafficking and prostitution cases to be followed from a human rights perspective so they avoid misrepresentation, manipulation, morbidity and sensationalism in the treatment of information. We also want to develop campaigns aimed at consumers of prostitution and young people to discourage or inform about the risks of consumption of prostitution.

Our new project, Sexual Geo-violence, documents the different types of sexual violence. There is a link between sexual violence, prostitution and pornography.

● The development of training plans for the police is urgent, and needs to incorporate multidisciplinary treatment from clinical psychology, anthropology, sociology and criminology.

The feminist movement is indebted to the victims of femicide in the prostitution system, who have shown how the end result can be a loss of life. We must find a way to reach a common purpose, and to tackle this at the root cause, which means, of course, penalizing the johns.

Public Policies and Public Support for Prostituted Women

I fully support the Nordic model. I support it as a woman, as a feminist, as a survivor of prostitution and trafficking and as a member of an abolitionist NGO [nongovernmental organization], La Sur. At Feminicidio.net, we understand that we cannot achieve real equality while countries are profiting from the sexual exploitation of women; while men can, for payment, access the bodies of women; and while profiting from our sexuality and our reproductive capacity.

It is necessary to create public policies that go beyond economic aid for women escaping trafficking and prostitution. As a survivor, I know that many more things are needed than money. Women who have been prostituted need therapy, education and training to help them find jobs and become financially independent. Often, the uprooting, loneliness and stigma of having been prostituted means that we need an entire society to welcome us as we are. We are brave survivors of a system created to enslave and dehumanize us. We deserve to live a life free of patriarchal violence.

I was able to get out of the prostitution system after five years, when I understood that I had been cheated. That was what saved me and allowed me to continue pursuing my dream. I wanted to live a quiet life, have a home, to create a family, to study, be “someone,” because I had been “nobody” for too long.

In the countries where the sex trade has been legalized, trafficking has increased, pimps have become entrepreneurs and men receive the message that nothing happens to them if they pay to penetrate women’s bodies. At the same time, the demand for increasingly brutal and degrading sexual practices is on the rise. I always wonder how someone can fight against women becoming free of prostitution. What world do we want to leave our daughters?

The Way Forward

The abolitionist movement is growing because every day there are more diverse women (politicians, judges, police, journalists, businesswomen, workers, students) who understand that the existence of prostitution makes it impossible to achieve real equality. They are not willing to accept that prostitutes are “the others,” but that we are all women.

There are also some men who refuse to comply with what masculinity imposes on them. As Laura Segato says in her book, “Counter-Pedagogies of Cruelty,” “Many men today are withdrawing from the corporate pact, marking a path that will transform society.”

What people do not see is that the legalization and normalization of prostitution does not reify or dehumanize some women but all women. The fact that men have [monetary] access to the bodies of some women strengthens their abuse and humiliation toward other women in their lives. One of the myths is that the johns have a conventional life, but the truth is that johns are still abusers and misogynists, even when they are at home with their wives and daughters.

Abolitionists will win this war. That is why we speak out, risking [the danger of] facing a perverse, powerful millionaire industry that claims our destiny is to serve men sexually. It is a long and hard battle, and perhaps many of us will not be alive when the abolition of prostitution has been achieved. But we will be proud to know that we have been part of a movement that has created a world without prostitution. A world without prostitution is a world where care, mutual desire, shared pleasure, ethics, love, recognition, good treatment and equal opportunities occupy the center of life.

U.S. Expanding Tent Shelter for Detained Immigrant Minors

HOUSTON—The U.S. government will expand its tent shelter for immigrant minors crossing the southwest border to 3,600 beds and keep it open through the end of this year, an agency spokesman said Tuesday.

The facility at Tornillo, Texas, which originally opened with a 360-bed capacity for 30 days, is being expanded based on how many children are in the care of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, agency spokesman Kenneth Wolfe said in a statement.

Wolfe said the announced expansion was not due to the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, which led to the separations of more than 2,500 children from their parents. Three months after enforcement of the policy officially ended, more than 400 children remain in government care, away from their parents, many of whom were deported.

Those previous family separations “are not driving this need,” Wolfe said. He said 1,400 of the beds will be placed “on reserve status.”

Department officials have visited military bases and other properties in Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona that could host more beds for immigrant children, but “no decision to use any of these properties has been made,” Wolfe said.

While the government has stopped large-scale separations, thousands of immigrants continue to arrive at the southwest border each month, mostly from Central American countries roiled by gang violence and poverty.

The U.S. Border Patrol said it apprehended nearly 4,000 children unaccompanied by an adult at the southwest border in July, the most recent month for which figures are available. That represented a decrease from May and June, but border crossings historically tend to rise as the summer heat gives way to cooler temperatures in fall.

In Texas, the state with the longest segment of the U.S.-Mexico border, 5,168 children were being held in government facilities in early August, about 500 children short of capacity, according to figures released by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.

The Tornillo facility is at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection port of entry about 40 miles (64 kilometers) southeast of El Paso. The Tornillo port of entry had previously been used to shelter children in 2016.

Reporters were allowed to tour the facility in June , shortly after it was re-opened in the wake of family separations.

At the time, more than 320 children ages 13 to 17 were being held in air-conditioned tents. A facility administrator told reporters that the main complaint he hears from children on site is that the tents sometimes get too cold.

Reporters were not allowed to enter any tents holding children. Two girls who stopped briefly in front of reporters said that they were doing well.

When Timothy Geithner Defied Barack Obama

Less than a week after The New York Times ran an op-ed by an anonymous Trump administration official openly challenging the president’s fitness for office, the question of who wrote the piece continues to vex and the White House alike. But Donald Trump is hardly the first president to face insubordination, potentially from somebody in his inner circle. As The New Republic’s David Dayen reminds us, Timothy Geithner’s “refusal to obey his boss” altered the course of the Great Recession—and likely set us on a path toward Trump’s election.

In March 2009, the U.S. economy was imploding. Citigroup had reported losses in excess of $8 billion the previous quarter, and two government bailouts totaling $45 billion, along with an additional $306 billion in loan guarantees, had proved insufficient to right the ship. While President Barack Obama had publicly dismissed nationalizing the country’s most distressed banks, Larry Summer—then National Economic Council director—was intrigued by the idea, so Obama ordered the Treasury Department to explore a radical restructuring of Citigroup.

“Geithner simply didn’t follow the request,” writes Dayen, citing “Confidence Men” author Ron Suskind. “It was a classic Washington move: When your boss asks for something you don’t like, just ignore it and hope that the request isn’t necessary when the boss follows up.”

Geithner adamantly rejected this account, telling Suskind, “I don’t slow-walk the president on anything.” But as Dayen notes, Obama tacitly admitted that that was what happened, expressing his frustration with “the speed with which the bureaucracy could exercise my decision.”

“The Citibank incident, and others like it, reflected a more pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration,” Suskind wrote at the time, “that the young president’s authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers.”

The rest is history. Using guarantees and Federal Reserve loans, Geithner helped orchestrate a third bailout for Citigroup, and the bank avoided anything even resembling a downsizing. Today, the former treasury secretary heads a private equity firm that appears to specialize in scamming the poor. From The New Republic:

Any objective look at Geithner’s actions in response to the financial crisis confirms that he would maximize his power on behalf of big banks, even if it meant going around his colleagues and his president. That included paying off AIG’s investment bank counter-parties at 100 percent instead of forcing a discount, or blocking [Sheila] Bair, the FDIC chair, from forcing higher capital rules on banks. Every action fit Geithner’s worldview: The financial system must be stabilized at all costs, as the only way to heal the economy so real people benefit.

Since the Great Recession kicked off 10 years ago this week, upward of $33 trillion in wealth has flowed to the top 10 percent, while the average net worth of the bottom half of the country has dipped from $11,000 to $8,000. A new report released by Public Citizen on Tuesday finds that the country’s five largest banks have raked in more than $580 billion during that time, beneficiaries of a taxpayer-funded bailout, a trillion-dollar tax cut and industrywide deregulation.

Overseeing it all is a far-right demagogue—an established birther and an alleged sexual abuser whose political campaign centered on a pledge to “drain the swamp.”

Happy anniversary.

Read more at The New Republic.

17 Years Later, Almost 10,000 People Are Living With Cancers Related to 9/11

A shiny new tower, One World Trade Center, looms over Manhattan 17 years after the 9/11 attacks, 104 stories of glass and steel, forming a triangle pointed at the sky. Aside from the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the neighborhood bears few physical markers of what happened that day, including the smells that lingered for weeks, and the yawning hole in the ground that was visible for years.

For the thousands of residents, workers, students, first responders and others who lived and worked in the area, however, the scars are far from hidden, and not as grand as a memorial. According to a report in The Guardian Tuesday, nearly 10,000 people are suffering from cancer as a result of exposure to fumes from the destroyed towers.

As The Guardian reports, these workers, students and residents were “breathing in air thick with toxic fumes and particles from the pulverized, burning skyscrapers. Many have since become sick, many have died and new cases are still occurring all the time that are linked back to the poisons that were in the air around the wreckage.”

The latest cluster of cases includes a number of men diagnosed with breast cancer. Joe Mormando, a 51-year-old who worked in the Mercantile Exchange just a block from the World Trade Center, “was floored” when he received the diagnosis, given after he felt a lump on his chest this past March. Less than 1 percent of breast cancer patients are men, and he had no family history of the disease.

“We went back to work exactly one week after 9/11, while the towers were still burning and everything else crumbled around us,” Mormando told The Guardian, “we were told that the air was fine, and we needed to get back to work.”

Christine Todd-Whitman, then the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, admitted in 2016 that she was wrong when she told the public, just three days after the attack, that the air around ground zero was safe.

Mormando is one of at least 15 men currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer related to 9/11 exposure, according to their attorney, Michael Barasch. Michael Guedes, an NYPD officer who rushed to the scene at ground zero before spending months digging and sorting through debris at a landfill, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. His girlfriend found his lump. “Had she not found it, I would have died of it, I’m sure,” he said.

The World Trade Center Health Program estimates that 9,375 people are currently living with 9/11-related cancer; an additional 420 people have died. In total, The Guardian reports, “more than 43,000 people have been certified with a 9/11-related health condition.”

The impact on first responders has been well-documented, but researchers are still grappling with the extent of health damage on those living, working and going to school in the area at the time. Barasch, the lawyer representing the men with breast cancer, says, “This is very democratic toxic dust. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a student or a firefighter or a gazillionaire at Goldman Sachs. It is affecting everybody and killing everybody.”

Though the health care services for 9/11 victims are funded for another 75 years under the Zadroga Act, survivors and advocates are preparing for another fight, this time to save the victim compensation fund, set to expire in 2020, which covers expenses beyond health care and has already paid out more than $4.3 billion to more than 19,000 first responders and survivors.

“Cancer has no deadline. It’s not going to stop magically in December of 2020,” Barasch told The Guardian. “There’s no statute of limitations on cancer.”

Read the full Guardian story here.

A Million Told to Flee S. Carolina Coast as Florence Menaces

RALEIGH, N.C.—Florence exploded into a potentially catastrophic Category 4 hurricane Monday as it closed in on North and South Carolina, carrying winds up to 130 mph and water that could wreak havoc over a wide stretch of the eastern United States later this week.

Communities along a stretch of coastline that’s vulnerable to rising sea levels due to climate change prepared to evacuate. The South Carolina governor ordered the state’s entire coastline to be evacuated starting at noon Tuesday and predicted that 1 million people would flee. And Virginia’s governor ordered a mandatory evacuation for some residents of low-lying coastal areas.

The storm’s first effects were already apparent on barrier islands as dangerous rip currents hit beaches and seawater flowed over a state highway.

For many people, the challenge could be finding a safe refuge: If Florence slows to a crawl just off the coast, it could bring torrential rains to the Appalachian mountains and as far away as West Virginia, causing flash floods, mudslides and other dangerous conditions.

The storm’s potential path also includes half a dozen nuclear power plants, pits holding coal-ash and other industrial waste, and numerous hog farms that store animal waste in massive open-air lagoons.

Airlines, including American and Southwest, have started letting passengers change travel plans that take them into the hurricane’s possible path.

National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham warned that Florence was forecast to linger over the Carolinas once it reaches shore. People living well inland should prepare to lose power and endure flooding and other hazards, he warned.

“It’s not just the coast,” Graham said. “When you stall a system like this and it moves real slow, some of that rainfall can extend well away from the center.”

A warm ocean is the fuel that powers hurricanes, and Florence will be moving over waters where temperatures are peaking near 85 degrees (30 Celsius), hurricane specialist Eric Blake wrote. And with little wind shear to pull the storm apart, Florence’s hurricane wind field was expected to expand over the coming days, increasing its storm surge and inland wind threats.

By noon Monday, Florence was centered about 1,230 miles (1,985 kilometers) east-southeast of Cape Fear, North Carolina, and moving west at 13 mph (20 kph). Its center will move between Bermuda and the Bahamas on Tuesday and Wednesday and approach the coast of South Carolina or North Carolina on Thursday, the National Hurricane Center said.

Two other storms were spinning in the Atlantic. Hurricane Isaac was expected to lose strength as it reaches the Caribbean, and Helene, much farther out to sea, may veer northward into the open ocean as the 2018 hurricane season reaches its peak.

In the Pacific, Hurricane Olivia triggered warnings for multiple Hawaiian islands as it blew west toward an arrival over the state as soon as late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

Preparations for Florence were intensifying up and down the densely populated coast. Since reliable record-keeping began more than 150 years ago, North Carolina has been hit by only one Category 4 hurricane: Hazel, with 130 mph winds, in 1954.

The parking lot has been full for three days at the Ace Hardware store in coastal Calabash, North Carolina, where manager Tom Roberts said he sold 150 gas cans in two hours Monday, along with generators, plywood, rope, manual can openers, sand bags and a plethora of other items.

“I’ve been doing this since 1983,” Roberts said as he completed an order for another 18-wheeler full of supplies. “This is the craziest one.”

Many newcomers have moved to the coast in the nearly 19 years since the last strong hurricane — Floyd — threatened the area. Roberts said he’s telling them to get out of town.

“I’m telling them to go inland, but I’m worried about the rain and tornadoes too,” Roberts said.

Several meteorologists said Florence could do what Hurricane Harvey did last year over Texas, dumping days of rain, although not quite as bad.

“I think this is very Harvey-esque,” said University of Miami hurricane expert Brian McNoldy. “Normally, a landfalling tropical cyclone just keeps on going inland, gradually dissipating and raining itself out. But on rare occasions, the steering patterns can line up such that a storm slips into a dead zone between troughs and ridges.”

On North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Dawn Farrow Taylor, 50, was gathering photos and important documents and filling prescriptions Monday before heading inland. She grew up on the island chain, and says this will be only the second time she’s evacuated.

“I don’t think many of us have ever been through a Category 4. And out here we’re so fragile. We’re just a strip of land — we’re a barrier island,” she said.

In the village of Buxton, Liz Browning Fox plans to ride the storm out in her house on top of a ridge. She believes her home, built in 2009, will be secure, but it’s hard to foresee all potential hazards.

“You never know, there could be tree missiles coming from any direction,” she said. “There is no way to be completely safe.”

In announcing his evacuation order, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said an estimated 1 million people would be fleeing the coast. Eastbound lanes of Interstate 26 heading into Charleston and U.S. 501 heading into Myrtle Beach will be reversed when the order takes effect.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said his state was “in the bullseye” of the storm and urged people to “get ready now.”

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Associated Press writers Jennifer Kay in Miami; Jeffrey Collins and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Seth Borenstein in Washington; and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Could This Unknown Academic Help Break Up Amazon?

No one can accuse Bernie Sanders of not knowing his audience. Last week, alongside Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., the Vermont senator unveiled the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act, better known as Stop BEZOS—an ambitious piece of legislation that aims, in its sponsors’ words, to kick billionaires off federal welfare.

With an unabashedly corporatist Republican Party in control of Congress and the White House, the bill is all but dead on arrival. Still, it nonetheless represents a bold if imperfect attempt to rein in runaway corporate power, a trend perhaps best exemplified by the recent trillion-dollar valuation of Amazon.

Until recently, legislators have largely overlooked the anti-competitive tendencies of the online retailer, at least in part due to its competitive pricing. Enter Lina Khan, an obscure law student who, in the words of The New York Times’ David Streitfeld, aims to “reframe decades of monopoly law.”

Khan first captured the legal community’s attention, if not its imagination, last year with “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”—a 93-page treatise in the Yale Law Journal that earned 146,255 hits, or citations. The paper’s thesis was simple: Amazon’s influence over the U.S. economy has far outpaced its market share. In this way, she contends, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has come to resemble John D. Rockefeller, who presided over the greatest oil monopoly the country has ever known.

“The issue Ms. Khan’s article really brought to the fore is this,” Streitfeld writes. “Do we trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future?”

More than a year after its publication, the paper continues to reverberate across American academia. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, antitrust expert Herbert Hovenkamp has written that breaking up corporations like Amazon would “quickly drive the economy back into the Stone Age, imposing hysterical costs on everyone.” Konstantin Medvedovsky, an antitrust lawyer in New York, has called Khan’s thesis “antitrust hipsterism,” as though trustbusting were a charming practice of yore.

Perhaps more tellingly, Khan’s research has earned the dismissal of Timothy Muris and Jonathan Nuechterlein, who served as Federal Trade Commission chairman and general counsel respectively. In June, the pair challenged Khan’s findings in a paper for the Social Science Research Network, arguing that Amazon has “added hundreds of billions of dollars of value to the U.S. economy” and that its innovations have provided “great benefit [to] consumers.”

Amazon couldn’t have asked for a more favorable analysis, and perhaps it didn’t. As the Times notes, both Muris and Nuechterlein acknowledge that they sought funding from the corporation for their research, and that they have advised Amazon on “a variety of antitrust issues.”

But Khan’s work has also caught the attention Rohit Chopra, the new Democratic commissioner at the FTC. In July, he asked her to be a temporary adviser to the commission ahead of hearings this fall, the first since 1995, to help determine the scope of its antitrust pursuits in an evolving economy. With Khan’s assistance, Chopra filed an official comment urging the FTC to “make rules and regulations” in order to better fulfill its mission.

“This is a moment in time that invites a movement,” Khan tells the Times. “It’s bigger than antitrust, bigger than Big Tech. It’s about whether the laws serve democratic ends.”

Slowly but surely, the Democratic Party appears to be getting the message.

 

 

Far-Right Election Gains Upset Sweden’s Political Order

STOCKHOLM—Sweden has become the latest European country to have its political order shaken by a backlash against large-scale immigration, with voters giving a boost to a far-right party and weakening the more established ones.

Sunday’s election left the two rival blocs—a center-left group and a center-right alliance—with roughly 40 percent of the vote each, portending what is likely to be weeks of uncertainty and complex coalition talks before a new government can be formed.

The Sweden Democrats, which has roots in a neo-Nazi movement but has worked to soften its image, won 17.6 percent, up from 13 percent in 2014, for a third-place finish. That showing is not strong enough for it to lead a government, but it reflects how deeply that Sweden, famous for its progressive policies, is being transformed by migration.

The country that is home to the Nobel prizes and militarily neutral policies for the better part of two centuries has been known for its comparatively open doors to migrants and refugees.

Sunday’s general election was the first since Sweden, with a population of 10 million, took in a record 163,000 migrants in 2015 — the highest per capita of any European country.

That had followed the earlier arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.

Since 2015, the center-left government has sharply restricted immigration, but many Swedes complain that society cannot cope with integrating so many newcomers, many of them Muslims from Africa and the Middle East.

The growing strength of the Sweden Democrats also reflects how old taboos are collapsing.

Only a few years ago, Swedes would be shunned as racist for suggesting the country had limits on how many migrants it should take, or for expressing the view that it is hard to integrate Africans and Arabs. But people increasingly are expressing such ideas more freely — adding to the support for the party.

While the result is a boost for the Sweden Democrats, the party fell short of pre-election predictions.

The Expressen tabloid said in editorial that “it all pointed at the Sweden Democrats taking over the position as Sweden’s second-biggest party. But the expected … bang didn’t happen.”

The election came after populist and anti-migrant parties made significant political gains in Germany, Austria and Italy since 2015 — the other countries that have shouldered the heaviest burden of accommodating those fleeing war and conflict or simply searching for a better life elsewhere.

Sweden also gained international scrutiny after U.S. President Donald Trump portrayed the country as place where multiculturalism has brought crime and insecurity.

In early 2017, Trump claimed that a terrorist attack had happened the previous night in Sweden. The night, in fact, had been quiet, but Trump had seen a Fox News report about crime by immigrants in Sweden. He has insisted that he is still right about the general picture of the country as one where large-scale migration has brought security threats.

That narrative of Sweden as a failed multicultural experiment is also pushed by some on the right in Europe. While some Swedes say there is some truth to that, others feel it is too exaggerated and ignores the fact that Sweden is a place with a strong economy where many things work very well.

Both the left-leaning bloc led by the Social Democrats and the center-right bloc, in which the Moderates is the largest of four parties, have said they would refuse to consider the Sweden Democrats as a coalition partner.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, who brought the Social Democrats to power in 2014, said he intended to remain in the job. His party emerged with the greatest share of the vote — 28.4 percent as the count neared completion — yet is looking at holding fewer seats in parliament than four years ago.

Lofven told his supporters the election presented “a situation that all responsible parties must deal with,” adding that “a party with roots in Nazism” would “never ever offer anything responsible but hatred.”

“We have a moral responsibility. We must gather all forces for good. We won’t mourn, we will organize ourselves,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, Frank Jordans in Berlin and Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland, contributed.