Chris Hedges's Blog, page 480

Facebook, Twitter Vow to Combat Foreign Intrusion

WASHINGTON—Facebook and Twitter executives pledged on Wednesday to better protect their social media platforms in the 2018 elections and beyond, and told Congress of aggressive efforts to root out foreign intrusions aimed at sowing divisions in American democracy.

Facebook’s No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, and Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, testified before the Senate intelligence committee, but there was an empty chair for Google’s parent Alphabet, which refused to send its top executive.

Senators had sharp words for Alphabet CEO Larry Page, who oversees Google. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., suggested the company might have bailed because it was “arrogant” while Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, expressed outrage over the absence.

Sandberg’s appearance came several months after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in highly publicized Capitol Hill hearings. Like Zuckerberg, she acknowledged Facebook’s lag in recognizing Russian efforts to manipulate Facebook during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Sandberg detailed Facebook’s efforts to fight the problem with new technologies and manpower.

“We are even more determined than our adversaries, and we will continue to fight back,” Sandberg said.

Dorsey, far less of a public figure than Sandberg, acknowledged that he is “typically pretty shy.” But he was forthcoming with the committee about what his company needs to improve.

Holding his phone at the witness table, he tweeted some of his opening statement: “We aren’t proud of how that free and open exchange has been weaponized and used to distract and divide people, and our nation. We found ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for the immensity of the problems we’ve acknowledged,” Dorsey wrote.

He added: “Abuse, harassment, troll armies, propaganda through bots and human coordination, misinformation campaigns, and divisive filter bubbles — that’s not a healthy public square. Worse, a relatively small number of bad-faith actors were able to game Twitter to have an outsized impact.”

Dorsey was headed later Wednesday to a House committee focused on GOP complaints that social media companies have shown evidence of bias against conservatives. In testimony released before that hearing, Dorsey denied that Twitter uses political ideology to make decisions.

Sandberg, 49, has extensive Washington experience, typically acts as the company’s public face and clearly felt comfortable answering to the senators. In contrast, the bearded and tieless Dorsey, 41, was quiet but respectful in his answers. Both contrasted with Zuckerberg’s sometimes awkward defiance at the April hearings as he fielded questions from skeptical lawmakers.

The companies have laid out differing approaches in response to the Russian interference. Thirteen Russians were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller this year on charges of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 election by creating fake accounts that pushed divisive issues on social media.

Facebook and Twitter are using increasingly sophisticated technology and artificial intelligence to combat the misuse. But their approaches are different because their platforms are also different, as are their resources, where Twitter is far behind.

Facebook is going after “inauthenticity,” or fake accounts. Twitter is focusing on analyzing behavior patterns to find suspicious activity because Twitter technically allows “fake” accounts in the form of spoofs, for example.

The companies have made many policy changes, and have caught and banned malicious accounts over the past year. Still, their business models — free services that rely on attracting as many users as possible for as long as possible and finding out as much about them as possible — remain the same, and that posed challenges.

GOP Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee chairman, commended the companies for their efforts but said Congress was concerned that not enough has been done.

“Clearly, this problem is not going away,” Burr said. “I’m not even sure it’s trending in the right direction.”

Dorsey said Twitter has continued to identify accounts that may be linked to the same Russian internet agency as identified in Mueller’s indictment. He said Twitter has so far suspended 3,843 accounts the company believes are linked to that agency and has seen recent activity. Facebook has also taken down pages this year that they believed were tied to the agency.

Congress has criticized the companies over the past year as Russia’s interference became clear. That scrutiny has led to additional criticism over the companies’ respect for user privacy and whether conservatives are being censored.

The afternoon hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee was to focus on bias and Twitter’s algorithms. Some Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have pushed the idea that Twitter is “shadow banning” some in the GOP because of the ways search results have appeared. Twitter denies that’s happening.

Twitter came under fire from some on the far right after temporarily suspending conspiracy theorist Alex Jones last month. Facebook temporarily suspended his account. Jones made an angry appearance outside the hearing room, telling reporters that he was there to “face my accusers.” Jones railed on the government, media and social media companies for more than 40 minutes in the hallway as the hearing began, and later took a seat in the hearing room.

Dorsey, in prepared testimony for the House hearing, said “Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.”

Only Dorsey was invited to the House hearing after specific Republican concerns about bias on Twitter. While all three tech companies have been accused of political bias against conservatives, the more public-facing nature of Twitter has made it an especially easy target.

Twin Attacks in Afghan Capital Kill 20, Wound 70

KABUL, Afghanistan—Twin bombings at a wrestling training center in a Shiite neighborhood of Afghanistan’s capital on Wednesday killed at least 20 people, including two reporters, and wounded 70, Afghan officials said.

Interior Ministry spokesman Najib Danish said a suicide bomber struck at the center and then a car bomb went off nearby.

Sediqullah Tawhidi, a senior member of the Afghan journalists federation, said a reporter and a cameraman working for Tolo TV were among those killed, and that another local TV reporter was wounded.

No one immediately claimed the attacks, but they bore the hallmarks of the country’s Islamic State affiliate, which has carried out a wave of deadly bombings against minority Shiites. The Sunni extremists of IS view Shiites as apostates deserving of death.

Gen. Daud Amin, the Kabul police chief, said at least seven police were among those wounded in the car bomb explosion.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, a roadside bomb killed a district police chief and another policeman in the northern Badghis province, according to Jamshid Shahabi, spokesman for the provincial governor.

No one claimed the attack, but Shahabi said it was likely carried out by the Taliban, who are active in the province and frequently target security forces and government officials.

Afghan forces have struggled to combat both the Taliban and IS since the U.S. and NATO formally ended their combat mission in 2014.

Bernie Sanders Introduces Bill to Kick Billionaires Off Welfare

Taking aim at Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and other ultra-profitable corporations that pay workers so little that they’re forced to rely on food stamps and other federal programs to survive, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced legislation on Wednesday that would impose a 100 percent “corporate welfare tax” on large companies equal to the amount of public assistance their employees receive.

“Let us be very clear: We believe that the government has a moral responsibility to provide for the vulnerable—the children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled,” Sanders said in a statement. “But we do not believe that taxpayers should have to expend huge sums of money subsidizing profitable corporations owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country. That’s what a rigged economy is about.”

Officially titled The Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS) Act—an explicit dig at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world—the goal of Sanders and Khanna’s bill is to draw attention to the fact that taxpayers are effectively subsidizing corporations’ starvation wages and pressure these companies to pay a living wage.

“If employers in this country simply paid workers a living wage, taxpayers would save about $150 billion a year on federal assistance programs, and millions of workers would live in dignity and security,” Sanders explained at a press conference unveiling the Stop Bezos Act on Wednesday.

Watch the full press conference:

Under the Stop Bezos Act, all companies with over 500 employees—including part-time workers and so-called independent contractors—would be hit with a tax if they don’t pay their workers enough to get by without federal assistance.

“This bill would establish a corporate welfare tax on large employers equal to the amount of federal benefits received by their low-wage workers,” a summary of Sanders and Khanna’s bill notes. “For example, if a worker at a large employer receives $300 in food stamps, the employer would be taxed $300.”

Sanders and Khanna unveiled the Stop Bezos Act just 24 hours after Amazon became America’s second trillion-dollar company. During his press conference on Wednesday, Sanders noted that Bezos’ personal wealth grew by $2 billion on Tuesday alone.

While some have openly questioned whether Sanders’ bill is the best way to address the issue of corporate malfeasance and worker inequality epitomized by Amazon, the Huffington Post‘s Arthur Delaney and Dave Jamieson, who interviewed Sanders ahead of its release, argue that the proposal “isn’t really about collecting funds for food stamps or Medicaid ― it’s about making a spectacle of the low pay and bad working conditions at profitable businesses.”

According to public data obtained by the New Food Economy, thousands of Amazon workers are paid such low wages that they are forced to rely on food stamps to provide for themselves and their families.

“It’s time to get Jeff Bezos, the Waltons, and other billionaires who won’t pay a living wage off of welfare,” Sanders tweeted on Wednesday.

How Economic Inequality Fuels Starvation Throughout the World

It was a very hot day at the outskirts of Ahmedabad, India, where I met with a group of men and women at a local bus stand. They were itinerant laborers, people who move from one part of India to another in search of work. The city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat has a population of about six million people; among them are about 1.5 million migrants. Official figures from the Indian government suggest that there are 139 million internal migrants in India. This is likely a low figure.

Rural distress brings these men and women to the city, where work in construction and light manufacturing as well as domestic service is their lifeline. Many of the migrants struggle to find work each day. One of them, a man from Bihar, tells me that the situation for him and his friends is dire. “Hunger,” he says, “is a constant sound inside [our] head.”

Inequality and Starvation

It’s impossible to ignore the growth of economic inequality in each corner of the planet. Vulgarity is the order of the day, with the very rich hoarding vast amounts of wealth while the poor scratch the earth for their livelihood. The British-based charity group Oxfam has done an important service by offering an annual indication of the gravity of inequality. This year, Oxfam noted that a mere 42 rich people have as much wealth as 3.7 billion poor people. What is most astounding is that in 2017, 82 percent of the social wealth produced by the world’s people was vacuumed into the bank accounts of the wealthiest 1 percent among us. This is not an ancient problem, in other words, but a current problem posed by the structure of capitalism: goods and services are produced socially, but profit is sequestered privately—and with fewer and fewer hands able to seize this profit.

What is less digested is that increased inequality compounds not only poverty—which is obvious—but hunger. It is true that war and climate change are major factors that leave people without access to food. Starvation follows aerial bombardment and rising tides. But, it is even more important to focus on the much wider problem of inequality and poverty that make hunger a normal part of life—the constant sound in the heads of the impoverished.

Data on poverty should make any sensitive person pause. The United Nations and the World Bank keep track of poverty figures. There is always some disagreement about the methodology followed by the analysts. But, there is near consensus that half of the world’s peoples—in excess of three billion people—live on less than $2.50 a day, the benchmark for poverty. Of these people, at least 1.3 billion live on less than $1.25 a day, the standard of extreme poverty. Hunger in this part of the planet is a normal part of life. As food costs rise, notes the World Bank, hunger increases. The rise of food prices in 2010 itself pushed 44 million people into poverty. UNICEF calculates that each day 22,000 children die due to poverty—most of them from malnutrition and starvation.

Poverty in the Farms

The majority of the poor live in rural areas or else migrate from rural areas to join the vast numbers of people who come into cities in search of a livelihood. Work and wages in rural areas have declined quite sharply. Blame for this rests on the domination by monopoly firms over agriculture—from seeds to supermarket shelves. Three monopoly firms—DuPont, Monsanto and Syngenta—control the global seed market, while an additional three monopoly firms—ADM, Bunge and Cargill—control the grain trade. Most of the processed food trade is controlled by a handful of monopoly firms, with only 10 firms owning every single major food brand—Associated British Foods, Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever. These corporations, which make fabulous profits, suffocate those who work the land. These firms have forced down the prices paid to farmers and agricultural workers as well as increased the costs of processed foods. If you live in the countryside and work on the fields, neither are you getting paid enough nor are you able to afford to eat. No wonder that 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the past 15 years and that millions of farmers are on the move in search of any work at all.

The United Nations has made a pledge to end hunger by 2030—Zero Hunger. This is an important standard. A decade remains before this task must be accomplished. But, all signs point in the opposite direction. There is simply no political will to constrain the power of the agri-business sector, none to provide a just economic foundation for farmers to survive as capitalism transforms the countryside into dystopia. The phrase “Zero Hunger” mirrors “Fome Zero” (Zero Hunger), a key policy of the Brazilian government led by Lula. It was under Lula and his Workers’ Party (PT) that Brazil almost entirely abolished hunger. The policies that Lula drove to do so are what earned him the blinding hatred of the oligarchy and its Western allies. The ruling bloc that conducted the “judiciary coup” against the PT now presides over an increase in hunger. Sugary rhetoric at the UN to end hunger means nothing if little is done against the agri-business sector and if the political war against the Left (in this case, Lula) continues without challenge.

Two Roads

Two roads lie ahead before humanity.

The first road leads to annihilation, with more and more people drifting into the arms of hunger, more and more people attempting to migrate to places where they believe they can survive. Rapacious growth of the power of agri-business, lack of state initiative to provide an alternative foundation for farmers and agricultural workers, inflation of food prices—all this will lead to more farmer suicides, more migration, more desolation. It could also lead to the food riot, the uprising of the hungry that erupts when prices of food rise. Examples of such uprisings are legion, from the bread riots of Egypt to the fuel riots of Haiti. These riots do not necessarily open the door to an alternative history. They are, as often as not, the last gasp of a desperate people before history closes in around them.

The second road leads to a new history. This week, in New Delhi, two major marches—organized by the Left—took place. The first (on September 4) brought women to the city. They demanded jobs and dignity, an end to violence against women and an end to hunger. The second (on September 5) brought industrial and agricultural workers as well as farmers to the city—many of those in the crowd having been to the September 4 march as well. They demanded much the same thing, with an emphasis on pushing the state to manage prices and to produce a new basis for Indian agriculture. The agricultural workers and farmers ask a simple question: shouldn’t the state provide land, credit and fair prices to protect those who work the land from the irrational destruction of agriculture by monopoly firms?

What will end hunger? Not an empty pledge by the United Nations nor the expansion further of monopoly firms into the countryside. Onus is on the people’s movements, whose slowly growing political power must change the terms of the conversation about starvation. Fixation on efficiency and markets—the code words that mask the power of monopoly firms—rather than on an economic policy that understands the rhythms of agriculture will create profits for the large firms, but not food for people.

Hunger, that constant sound inside the head of the poor, has to be silenced. Human beings who can come to terms with the prevalence of hunger have lost their humanity.

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

Trump Rages Over Portrayal in New Woodward Book

President Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that he’s “the exact opposite” of Bob Woodward’s portrayal of him in a new book that has set off a firestorm in the White House with its descriptions of current and former aides calling Trump an “idiot” and a “liar.”

Trump complained on Twitter that people can “get away with” such depictions and again suggested changing libel laws. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Fox News she hasn’t spoken with Trump about filing any libel lawsuit.

The tell-all book by a reporter who helped bring down President Richard Nixon quotes Trump aides disparaging the president’s judgment and claiming they plucked papers off his desk to prevent him from withdrawing from a pair of trade agreements.

Woodward’s book is the latest to throw the Trump administration into damage-control mode with explosive anecdotes and concerns about the commander in chief. The Associated Press obtained a copy of “Fear: Trump in the White House” on Tuesday, a week before its official release.

Trump decried the quotes and stories in the book on Twitter as “frauds, a con on the public,” adding that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and chief of staff John Kelly had denied uttering quoted criticisms of the president in the book. On accounts in the book that senior aides snatched sensitive documents off his desk to keep him from making impulsive decisions, Trump told The Daily Caller, “There was nobody taking anything from me.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders staunchly disputed the portrayal of President Trump in Bob Woodward’s new book that has set off a firestorm with its reporting that current and former aides called Trump an “idiot” and a “liar.” (Sept. 5)

On Twitter Wednesday, Trump appeared to defend himself further, saying: “I’m tough as hell on people & if I weren’t, nothing would get done.”

In a statement to The Post, Woodward said, “I stand by my reporting.”

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Sanders said the book did not accurately depict the administration, adding that it had been “pretty widely pushed back on.”

On Twitter Wednesday, Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani pushed back on his portrayal in the book, saying the “incident about me entirely false” and Woodward “never called me.”

In the book, Trump blasts Giuliani after he appears on Sunday talk shows to defend then-candidate Trump in the wake of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape. Calling Giuliani a “baby,” Trump says: “I’ve never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?”

Late Tuesday, Trump was on Twitter denying the book’s claim that he had called Attorney General Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded” and “a dumb southerner.”

Trump insisted he “never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff,” adding that “being a southerner is a GREAT thing.” Sessions has been a target of the president’s wrath since recusing himself from the Russia investigation.

The publication of Woodward’s book has been anticipated for weeks, and current and former White House officials estimate that nearly all their colleagues cooperated with the famed Watergate journalist. The White House, in a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, dismissed the book as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad.”

The book quotes Kelly as having doubts about Trump’s mental faculties, declaring during one meeting, “We’re in Crazytown.” It also says he called Trump an “idiot,” an account Kelly denied Tuesday.

The book says Trump’s former lawyer in the Russia probe, John Dowd, doubted the president’s ability to avoid perjuring himself should he be interviewed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and potential coordination with Trump’s campaign. Dowd, who stepped down in January, resigned after the mock interview, the book says.

“Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit,” Dowd is quoted telling the president.

Dowd, in a statement Tuesday, said “no so-called ‘practice session’ or ‘re-enactment’” took place and denied saying Trump was likely to end up in an orange jumpsuit.

Mattis is quoted explaining to Trump why the U.S. maintains troops on the Korean Peninsula to monitor North Korea’s missile activities. “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Mattis said, according to the book.

The book recounts that Mattis told “close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’”

Mattis said in a statement, “The contemptuous words about the President attributed to me in Woodward’s book were never uttered by me or in my presence.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Rob Manning, said Mattis was never interviewed by Woodward.

“Mr. Woodward never discussed or verified the alleged quotes included in his book with Secretary Mattis” or anyone within the Defense Department, Manning said.

Woodward reported that after Syria’s Bashar Assad launched a chemical weapons attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted the Syrian leader taken out, saying: “Kill him! Let’s go in.” Mattis assured Trump he would get right on it but then told a senior aide they’d do nothing of the kind, Woodward wrote. National security advisers instead developed options for the airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley denied Tuesday that Trump had ever planned to assassinate Assad. She told reporters at U.N. headquarters that she had been privy to conversations about the Syrian chemical weapons attacks, “and I have not once ever heard the president talk about assassinating Assad.”

She said people should take what is written in books about the president with “a grain of salt.”

Woodward also claims that Gary Cohn, the former director of the National Economic Council, boasted of removing papers from the president’s desk to prevent Trump from signing them into law, including efforts to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement and from a deal with South Korea.

Trump did not speak to Woodward until after the book’s manuscript was completed. The Post released audio of Trump expressing surprise about the book in an August conversation with Woodward and dismay that he did not have an opportunity to contribute. Woodward tells Trump he had contacted multiple officials to attempt to interview Trump and was rebuffed.

“I never spoke to him,” Trump told The Daily Caller. “Maybe I wasn’t given messages that he called. I probably would have spoken to him if he’d called, if he’d gotten through.”

The book follows the January release of author Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” which led to a rift between Trump and Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who spoke with Wolff in terms that were highly critical of the president and his family. Wolff’s book attracted attention with its vivid anecdotes but suffered from numerous factual inaccuracies.

Woodward’s work also comes weeks after former White House aide and “Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman published an expose on her time in the West Wing, including audio recordings of her firing by Kelly and a follow-up conversation with the president in which he claimed to have been unaware of Kelly’s decision.

Woodward had has been among the best-selling political writers for more than 40 years, going back to his best-selling Watergate classic “All the President’s Men,” co-authored by fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein. “Fear” renews a Woodward tradition of releasing a news-making account of a sitting president in the fall of an election season, with previous works including “The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House” and “Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq,” about President George W. Bush.

On Amazon, Woodward’s new book was ranked as the top-selling book on Tuesday.

Tropical Storm Gordon Blacks Out Parts of Alabama

GULFPORT, Miss. — Thousands of people were without power as Tropical Storm Gordon made landfall late Tuesday just west of the Alabama-Mississippi border.

The National Hurricane center said Gordon struck about 10 p.m. and the storm is forecast to quickly weaken as it moves inland across Mississippi, Louisiana and into Arkansas through Thursday. It did not reach hurricane status.

Gordon strengthened some in the final hours as it neared the central Gulf Coast, clocking top sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph). The National Hurricane Center said Gordon’s tight core was about 30 miles (30 kilometers) southeast of Biloxi, Mississippi, or about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of Mobile, Alabama, where heavy rains and winds picked up shortly before nightfall.

More than 27,000 customers are without power Tuesday night as Tropical Storm Gordon began pushing ashore. Those outages are mostly in coastal Alabama and include the western tip of the Florida Panhandle around Pensacola, with a few hundred in southeastern Mississippi. The number of outages has been rising rapidly after dark Tuesday night as Tropical Storm Gordon’s wind and rain began to take a toll on the Gulf Coast’s power grid.

Pensacola International Airport has reported more than 4 inches of rain, the heaviest total reported so far along the Gulf Coast.

Skies quickly turned dark gray as storms overshadowed Mobile, a port city. Metal chairs were lashed together atop tables outside a restaurant in what’s normally a busy entertainment district, and a street musician played to an empty sidewalk just before the rain began. Conditions were expected to deteriorate westward to New Orleans as the storm closed in on the coast, possibly becoming the second hurricane to hit the region in less than a year.

Families along the coast filled sandbags, took patio furniture inside and stocked up on batteries and bottled water ahead of Gordon.

John and Robin Berry, vacationing on Dauphin Island, Alabama, went to the beach to see the roaring surf before the rain began. Accompanied by their dog Bentley, the couple had to evacuate the beachfront home they had rented for the week because of Gordon, but they didn’t go very far.

“There are no dunes and there’s no protection, so the realty company we rented from moved us across the street and down so that we would be safe,” said Robin Berry.

Visiting from Nashville, Tennessee, the couple planned to stay on the island despite the storm. Katrina cut the narrow island in half more than a decade ago, but John Berry wasn’t very worried about Gordon.

“It’s awesome. It’s so beautiful,” he said of the pounding waves.

About 20 miles away on the mainland, dozens of brightly colored shrimp boats were tied up to docks in Bayou La Batre, a seafood town that processes oysters, shrimp and crabs from across the Gulf of Mexico.

The staff at The Hotel Whiskey in Pass Christian, Mississippi — only about a block from the Gulf of Mexico — were among those carrying out pre-storm preparation rituals. The hotel restaurant planned to stay open Tuesday evening as usual, fortified by sandbags to keep out torrential rains, the manager said.

Gulfport was among communities providing sand and bags to residents, and Kenny Macdonald filled them for himself and older residents. MacDonald said that while such preparations become all too routine, one must remain wary.

“You don’t know what the intensity of the storm is going to be. You don’t want to take it lightly, of course,” MacDonald said.

A hurricane warning was in effect for the entire Mississippi and Alabama coasts with the possibility Gordon would become a Category 1 storm. The National Hurricane Center predicted a “life-threatening” storm surge of 3 to 5 feet (0.9 to 1.5 meters) along parts of the central Gulf Coast.

Flooding also was a risk. As much as 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain could fall in some parts of the Gulf states through late Thursday as the tropical weather moves inland toward Arkansas.

Forecasters said it was possible Gordon’s winds might meet the 74 mph (120 kph) threshold to be a hurricane before making landfall later Tuesday. The last hurricane to strike the U.S. was Nate last October, coming ashore in Biloxi with 75 mph (120 kph) winds.

Governors in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana all declared states of emergency to better mobilize state resources and National Guard troops for the storm. Mississippi shut down a dozen Gulf Coast casinos. Workers on at least 54 oil and gas production platforms were evacuated.

Gordon became a tropical storm Monday near the Florida Keys.

Mayors of barrier islands in the storm’s path warned that their communities might get cut off from the mainland.

“When you get the higher waves, water starts splashing across. Sometimes it starts pushing not only water across but debris, logs and things of that nature, which makes it very treacherous to get across,” said Jeff Collier, mayor of Dauphin Island, Alabama.

Gordon was poised for only a glancing blow to New Orleans, where Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city has “the pumps and the power” needed to protect residents.

Authorities issued a voluntary evacuation order for areas outside the city’s levee protection system.

Gordon was not the only storm being watched by forecasters. Hurricane Florence was some 2,400 miles (3,900 kilometers) away from the U.S., and another potential storm was likely to form not far off the coast of Africa and head east.

The National Hurricane Center said it is way too early to know if either of those storms will have any impact on land.

“It’s the peak of hurricane season. Now is the time to get your plans all set,” Hurricane Director Ken Graham said.

___

McGill reported from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Associated Press writers Jeff Martin and Ben Nadler in Atlanta; Jay Reeves in Dauphin Island, Alabama; Emily Wagster Pettus and Jeff Amy in Jackson, Mississippi; Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama; Rebecca Santana in New Orleans; Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

Contemporary Liberalism’s Worst Idea Yet

Ideas are dumb. Not ideas generally; people have good ones all the time. You probably have a few yourself. I mean Ideas, the product, often capitalized, wrapped individually like apples in an airport coffee shop, sold in books with one-word titles and in lecture series and at festivals. Ideas that are gawped at by the nouveau riche in Aspen and hoovered up by the wannabe nouveau riche at TED talks.

Ideas are the homeopathy of the mind. Through an infinite distillation of actual thought, we arrive at an overpriced bottle of water.

This weekend’s imbroglio is the perfect metaphor for the Ideas industry as a whole.

David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker. He is most notable for his vociferous belief that George W. Bush—whom he assured us that he, David Remnick, understood to be an absolute idiot—nevertheless should have been given the green light to blow up Iraq. “The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable,” he wrote at the time.

In a better world, we would carve these words on a placard and hang it around Remick’s neck, as a warning to those who may encounter him among the herds of migrating thought leaders. In this fallen one, he is still running a prestigious magazine and organizing popular symposiums. For this year’s New Yorker Festival, he invited, and was then forced to disinvite, Steve Bannon, the president’s former campaign manager and the most malignant pile of week-old polo shirts this side of a flood-damaged Brooks Brothers.

The invitation was as confounding as the disinvitation was inevitable. Surely Remick must have expected it? Bannon is a notorious white nationalist and narcissist, as well as a colossal bore. I suppose, in keeping with the general tenor of middlebrow intellectualism so prevalent at these sorts of confabs, the latter two qualities outweighed the first.

In all likelihood, Remnick did not actually anticipate the backlash. He may have genuinely believed that his genteel audience was unaware of one of the most profiled and interviewed political figures on the planet. And he may have really thought that if he assiduously peppered Bannon with how-dare-you-sirs, then Bannon would emerge diminished, and the audience elevated.

Remnick conducts weekly interviews on The New Yorker Radio Hour. I’ve listened to it on NPR. It’s a perfectly pleasant show. A crucible, it is not.

Bannon is a dummy himself, cunning and learned only in comparison to his foolish media interlocutors, who imagine that reading anything older or more complex than the latest Malcolm Gladwell tome makes a person some kind of scholar. His interviews are a mess; his ideas about history and philosophy are cribbed from the same three sources as the weird guy in your freshman dorm with the katanas on his wall and the Elvish inscription on his whiteboard.

Everyone on earth is familiar with his ideas, a wet omelet of Sun Tzu, Bartlett’s, and some half-remembered Will and Ariel Durant. We’re occasionally reminded that he’s heard of the fascist intellectual Julius Evola. So has every reactionary country-club Knight of Columbus who dreams of being inducted into Opus Dei. History dealt with Bannon’s “ideas” when it dumped their corpses in the Piazzale Loreto to be abused by a crowd. His political genius is likewise a figment; the half-century-old Southern Strategy defeated—barely, and only through quirks of America’s harebrained Constitution—an inept and deeply unpopular opponent.

But neither Remnick alone, nor The New Yorker nor its silly festival are wholly to blame here, since they are just a part of this broader ecosystem of self-congratulatory fatuity masquerading as inquiry and thought. It is a brainless ecumenicism that has convinced itself that ideology is extinct and that politics, the struggle for and application of power in society, is a sort of clever salon.

The indefatigably incorrect popularizer of the most counterintuitive ideas that mere common sense has already intuited, Malcolm Gladwell, regretfully tweeted in the wake of the whole fiasco: “If you only invite your friends over, it’s called a dinner party.” But to the Gladwells and Remnicks, that’s precisely what it is. Well, I have dinner parties with some frequency and fill them with all sorts of people with whom I disagree, but I have not yet invited the Nazi from the town down the river to share brisket and bring a dessert.

It points to contemporary liberalism’s fatal flaw. It has affect and etiquette but no content. It will disapprove if you use the wrong spoon, and it would not stand for hearing the N-word aloud, but it will politely ask Steve Bannon, or Richard Spencer if they really believe what they avowedly and publicly really believe. It still bleeps profanity, but it will permit an accessory to a murderous demonstration to literally list the “races” by relative intelligence on the air. The only thing that arouses its righteous fury and martial instinct is criticism of its own worst impulses. It howls with dismay when criticized for befriending its own executioners.

Ironically, what people like Remnick or Gladwell—or Jeffrey Goldberg, Remnick’s counterpart at The Atlantic, who waded into his own easily anticipated controversy by hiring an overt racist and misogynist in Kevin Williamson—absolutely cannot abide is being discomfited. They love the idea that censorious leftists should be shocked out of their complacency and insularity by the public promotion of actual, dyed-in-the-wool, by-God, 20th-century fascism, but one sarcastic tweet by an anonymous account with 60 followers can send them into days-long meltdowns about The Discourse.

They’re comfortable nihilists, and they just can’t believe that anyone—the leftists they sneer at or the violent authoritarians they accidentally promote—can believe anything at all.

Wrong yet again.

Chris Hedges: America Is Entering Its ‘Final Phase’ (Video)

“If any of you came here this evening with the idea of hearing how well we’re all doing in America these days, you want to leave now.” So began Bradley Graham, owner of Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., introducing Chris Hedges during a recent talk and book-signing event.

Hedges, a veteran journalist and Truthdig columnist, spent much of his early career as a foreign correspondent but in recent years has turned his incisive eye toward the United States. His new book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” details a nation destroying itself through an array of ills: xenophobia, the opioid epidemic, economic inequality and the rise of the far right, among them.

“Civilizations, over the past 6,000 years, have a habit of eventually squandering their futures through acts of colossal stupidity and hubris. We are not an exception. We are entering this final phase of civilization,” Hedges writes of America. At his Aug. 22 book talk in Washington, he described the reporting process that led him to this conclusion and discussed interviewing Americans in every region as he traveled the country to write the book.

Hedges spoke to workers in an Indiana town who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and then backed Trump in the general election because they remembered Bill Clinton’s support of NAFTA, which took away their union jobs. They are among millions living in towns decimated by decades of globalization.

He also described his interviews with Americans whose families and towns were wrecked by opioid addiction, and told of being around a bonfire with members of the alt-right, a gathering where he and his research assistant felt so unsafe they eventually fled.

Hedges said reporting and traveling around the country keep him “intellectually honest” and challenge his long-held beliefs. He urged those in the audience to get out of their own comfort zones.

Watch the video of Hedges’ appearance at Politics and Prose below.

America’s Rigged Economy, in a Single Statistic

Thirty trillion dollars.

That’s nearly a third of ALL our current wealth, newly created and distributed to the richest 10%, who are mostly white millionaires. These fortunate takers profited mainly from the stock market, which has more than tripled in value since the end of 2008.

The Stunning Numbers 

Wealth statistics since the recession are provided in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. A summary of relevant data can be found here.

Post-recession data shows that about $33 trillion went to the richest 10%, who are overwhelmingly millionaires (13 million millionaires, 12.6 million U.S. households!). That nearly doubled the wealth of each member of the richest 10%. Average net worth is now $14 million for each 1% household, and the greater part of a million for even the ‘poorest’ household in the top 10%.

In comparison, average net worth for the poorest half of America decreased from $11,000 to $8,000 since the recession.

A Gift to Rich White (and Asian) Households 

The conclusion that $30 trillion went to white households is based on various reliable sources. The Washington Post references Federal Reserve data that estimates combined Black/Hispanic households as about 7% of all millionaire households (about 2% of 40 million Hispanic and Black households), and thus accruing about $2.5 trillion of that total $33 trillion decade-long gain. Statista, on the other hand, estimates that Black/Hispanic households make up 15% of all millionaires, which would represent a $5 trillion gain since the recession. Asian-Americans, with just 7 million households, are millionaires at about the same rate as white Americans. By the best estimates, the ten-year gains by White/Asian households is close to $30 trillion.

Instead of Reparations, an Economic Lynching 

About halfway through the post-recession decade, in 2013, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers estimated that African-Americans had lost over HALF their wealth because of the sub-prime mortgage scandal and the loss of jobs. Although a Federal Reserve survey found that Black and Hispanic households had regained up to half their losses by 2016, Pew Research concluded that the median net worth in 2016 for middle-income Blacks and Hispanics and lower-income whites was still only half as much as in 2007. Other sources make it clear that the wealth gap between whites and the two main minority groups have grown significantly since 2008.

There’s no question that Blacks and Hispanics have lost more than white families since the recession. And it’s getting worse. A shocking recent report from Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy studies calculates that based on current trends median wealth for black Americans will HIT ZERO in the next 35 years — Latino Americans two decades later.

A USA Today story says it best: “A century and a half of progress wiped out.”

How Did It Happen? 

At least since Ronald Reagan the emphasis has been on individual gains, and on blaming poor people for being poor. Rich white Americans have continued to redistribute wealth to themselves through the stock market. People who relied on middle-income home ownership and savings accounts went backwards.

There is considerable evidence for the correlation between increasing wealth and decreasing empathy for less fortunate people. Privileged white Americans generally believe they deserve everything they have, because they feel they’ve worked harder than others; thus they’ve steadily lost the ability to see the great disparity in opportunity that has drained wealth from the bottom half of America.

What Do We Do? 

Elect progressive candidates in November. Get Sanders and/or Warren in the White House in 2020. Help non-white and poor white Americans to understand that this is the only path to opportunity, and eventually to greater equality.

EPA Watchdog Faults Agency for Pruitt’s 24/7 Security Costs

WASHINGTON—The Environmental Protection Agency failed to properly justify spending more than $3.5 million on around-the-clock security for former head Scott Pruitt, including nearly $1 million in travel costs for his bodyguards, the agency’s internal watchdog concluded on Tuesday.

The EPA allowed Pruitt and his team to increase the security detail to 19 agents, up from six for Pruitt’s predecessor, without proving the need, “an undocumented decision (that) represents an inefficient use of agency resources,” the inspector general concluded.

Pruitt left the EPA in July after less than 1½ years and amid unending revelations of scandals over his spending and other allegations of abuses of office. The new acting EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, ended the unprecedented full-time security detail that same month.

The inspector general’s report said Pruitt’s security costs were more than double those of his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, during her last year. It also cited $106,507 in overtime — some of it in 2016, before the Trump administration — for security that lacked proper authorization.

Travel costs for Pruitt’s bodyguards more than tripled, to $739,580, from February 2017 to December 2017, owing to Pruitt’s insistence on 24-hour-a-day security and on premium-class travel for himself and a bodyguard, the report said.

Sen. Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware and a vocal critic as ethics allegations mounted against Pruitt, called the agency’s security spending “simply unacceptable.”

“This report confirms what we suspected — Mr. Pruitt’s excessive, 24/7 security detail and the costs it incurred while Pruitt traveled the world first-class on the taxpayers’ dime was not properly justified and was not based on a security threat analysis on risks to Pruitt,” Carper said Tuesday.

Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said Pruitt — an avid enforcer of President Donald Trump’s mission to roll back regulation that the Trump administration deems unfriendly to business — “not only held the EPA’s mission in contempt, but saw his post as a chance to pamper himself on the American taxpayer’s dime.”

The EPA did not immediately comment on the inspector general’s findings.

The inspector general’s report says the agency contended “the level of protection is an administration decision, informed by the awareness of risks and the potential impact of those risks to the efficient functioning of the agency.”

In testimony before a Senate committee in May, Pruitt sought to shift responsibility for the decision to expand his security detail to subordinates, testifying that EPA security officials made the decision to go to around-the-clock protection before his arrival at the agency in response to an assessment of threats.

He then read aloud from an internal report, compiled months after the decision was made, of negative statements made against him through social media posts. None of the perceived threats he cited resulted in any arrests.

“Those decisions are made by current law enforcement officials at the agency,” Pruitt said. Asked whether he had directed that his security to be increased, Pruitt demurred: “I was aware of communications taking place. I was not at the agency at the time. I was actually — that was before confirmation.”

The Associated Press first reported in April that Pruitt’s preoccupation with his safety cost taxpayers more than $3 million in his first year as his swollen security detail blew through overtime budgets and at times diverted officers away from investigating environmental crimes.

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Michael Biesecker contributed to this report.