Chris Hedges's Blog, page 482

Brett Kavanaugh and the Triumph of the Conservative Counterrevolution

As much as we have dreaded this moment, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court are upon us. Barring a miracle bordering on the Immaculate Conception, the committee will vote along party lines to approve the nomination, and shortly thereafter, Kavanaugh will be confirmed in another close vote by the full Senate.

If the recent past is any prologue, before reaching their all-but-scripted conclusions, committee members in the coming weeks will spend a lot of time probing Kavanaugh’s record.  We’ll hear a good deal about Kavanaugh’s work as a young lawyer with Clinton-era independent counsel Ken Starr, his tenure as George W. Bush’s staff secretary, and his rulings as a judge on the federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where he has served since 2006.

Kavanaugh, for his part, will answer most questions with well-rehearsed clichés and evasions. He’ll give a nod or three to God and country, and praise the American legal system as the finest that mankind has ever devised. He’ll declare how proud he and his family are that he’s received the honor of being considered to join the country’s most powerful judicial body.

He will also politely decline to give expansive or unambiguous answers as to how he might approach the hot-button issues that will come before him as a member of the high tribunal. (To be fair, ever since Robert Bork helped torpedo his 1987 nomination by being too forthcoming about his originalist judicial philosophy, all nominees, regardless of political affiliation, have learned that when it comes to the judiciary committee, less is always more.)

Throughout the hearings, conservatives on the committee will portray Kavanaugh as eminently qualified to succeed the retiring Anthony Kennedy to become the nation’s 114th Supreme Court justice. By contrast, the committee’s liberals and centrists will paint Kavanaugh as a threat to civil rights and liberties who will tip the court’s balance to a hardened 5-4 right-wing majority on a variety of subjects, ranging from abortion, gun control and voting rights to presidential power, environmental protection and affirmative action.

Both sides will argue that the stakes posed by Kavanaugh’s ascension to the court could not be higher. In this respect, if in no other, both sides will be correct.

But what neither side is likely to mention is something even deeper and more vital to the future of American law than the elevation of a single justice—namely, that Kavanaugh’s confirmation will mark the triumph of a conservative legal counterrevolution aimed at neutralizing the use of law as an instrument of progressive social and economic reform.

The counterrevolution is real, longstanding and well-known to legal scholars and commentators. It isn’t a conspiracy theory, much less the equivalent of “QAnon,” “birtherism,” 9/11 “truth” or any of the other “deep state” quackeries that have gained currency in recent years.

Although it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when the movement began, many analysts cite as a seminal text a 6,400-word confidential memorandum written in 1971 for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by the late Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr. before his own ascension to the bench.

I’ve covered the Powell memo before in this column. Titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the memo urged the chamber and business leaders generally to get more involved in the legal system to reverse what Powell saw as a dangerous liberal drift in American constitutional law. Among other measures, Powell stressed the recruitment of lawyers of “the greatest skill” to represent business interests before the Supreme Court, which, under the stewardship of Chief Justice Earl Warren, had moved steadily to the left. Powell wrote: “Under our constitutional system … the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

It took a while for Powell’s message to sink in and for the counterrevolution to find its footing, but the right responded with the formation of the Business Roundtable and the Heritage, Koch, Castle Rock, Scaife, Bradley and Olin foundations, among other organizations, to fund conservative legal causes; and groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Federalist Society and the chamber’s own National Litigation Center to implement conservative causes by way of litigation.

Of all the groups to answer the right-wing summons, none has been more influential than the Federalist Society, especially in the age of Trump. From its founding by three law students in 1981 at Yale and the University of Chicago, the society has grown to include more than 200 chapters at law schools across the United States, with a total student membership of more than 10,000. From its base in Washington, D.C., today, the society also operates a “lawyers division” with more than 60,000 attorneys in chapters and “practice groups” in 80 cities.

The society’s membership also boasts a large number of judges, federal and state, including Kavanaugh. Four sitting members of the Supreme Court—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch—reportedly are current or former members.

Along with White House counsel Don McGahn, the guiding hand behind Trump’s judicial appointments—not only Kavanaugh and Gorsuch to the Supreme Court but also dozens of judges to the lower federal courts—has been the society’s executive vice president, Leo Leonard. Although McGahn, who has famously clashed with Trump over special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, is slated to leave his post in the fall, Leonard remains very much in favor. He is presently on leave from the society to facilitate his role as a Trump adviser.

Ideologically, the Federalist Society embraces a broad spectrum of economic, social and Christian conservatives as well as right-wing libertarians. While the various constituencies may differ on a few issues like gay marriage, they are united by two overriding beliefs: faith in originalism as the only bona fide method of constitutional interpretation, and an unwavering endorsement of  “free-market” principles (read: wide-scale deregulation).

No matter who expounds upon them, both beliefs are routinely deployed to yield result-oriented, business-friendly outcomes.

Originalism, as Fordham University history professor Saul Cornell has noted, posits that the Constitution should be read according to the meaning it had for the Founding Fathers rather than as a “living document” that should be interpreted not only in light of the document’s text but also in view of contemporary values and evolving traditions. Originalists contend that their approach minimizes the personal views of judges—what the late Antonin Scalia called “judicial subjectivism”—and prevents judges from acting as unelected legislators.

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), perhaps the most far-reaching majority opinion he wrote during his nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, Scalia used originalist methodology to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.  So, too, did Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion in the Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which held that under the First Amendment, as originally understood, corporations and unions have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.

Both Heller and Citizens United have proved to be a boon to commercial interests—Heller to gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association, and Citizens United to corporations and wealthy political campaign donors. Both decisions are fully in line with the free-market dogma of the judicial counterrevolution that with Kavanaugh’s elevation will complete its conquest of the Supreme Court.

According to several leading academics, even before Kavanaugh’s nomination, the court had displayed a pro-business bias rivaling that of the Gilded Age, when it struck down laws establishing minimum wages and maximum hours for working people, and overturned the first federal child labor act. Such measures, the court of that bygone era insisted, violated due process and the “liberty of contract.”

Far from being vestiges of a distant past, such rulings are harbingers of the future.

Just last term, the court issued two decisions that would make the justices of the Gilded Age proud: In Janus v. AFSCME, the court turned the nation’s entire public sector into a monolithic right-to-work jurisdiction, decreeing that public-employee unions that extract fees from non-union members to support collective bargaining violate non-members’ First Amendment rights. And in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, the court upheld the use of binding agreements in the private sector that require employees to press wage and hour claims through individual arbitration proceedings, prohibiting them from filing class-actions in court.

It took 50 years for the judicial counterrevolution to reach its ascendency. With the confirmation of Kavanaugh—a pro-business originalist cut from the cloth of the counterrevolution—it will take decades to turn the tide.

$30 Million Poured Into Effort to Energize Young Voters for Midterms

MADISON, Wis.—Democrats know who their voters are. They just have to figure out how to get them to the polls in November — and that’s where the puppies come in.

Students returning to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus this summer were greeted by therapy dogs for petting. Those lured by the chance to ruffle a dog’s ears were then asked to register to vote — a “Pups to the Polls” gimmick that was just one of several similar events being staged in 11 battleground states by the liberal group NextGen America.

Young people tend to vote for Democrats, but they also tend to stay away during midterm elections. It’s a perennial frustration for the party — one they are trying to overcome as they seek to take control of Congress.

NextGen America, formed by billionaire activist Tom Steyer, hopes to be a game changer. Steyer is investing more than $30 million in what’s believed to be the largest voter engagement effort of its kind in U.S. history.

The push to register and get pledges from college students to vote is focusing on states such as Wisconsin, Virginia, California and North Carolina with competitive races for Congress, U.S. Senate and other offices.

NextGen sees young voters such as Kellen Sharp as key to flipping targeted seats from red to blue.

“The outcome of this election definitely affects us,” said Sharp, an 18-year-old freshman from Milwaukee who stopped to register during the dog event the week before classes started. “I’m just excited to have a voice and say something.”

A poll this summer by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and MTV found that most Americans ages 15 to 34 think voting in the midterm elections gives their generation some say about how the government is run. The poll found young people eager to vote for someone who shared their political views on issues such as health care and immigration policy. They expressed far less excitement about voting for a candidate described as a lifelong politician.

“If we all vote, we can make a change,” said 20-year-old Grace Austin, who stopped to pet the dogs at the Wisconsin event and wound up registering to vote.

Austin and other college students who registered said they feel like their friends are more interested in politics than ever before — boosting hopes of Democrats trying to reverse the trend of declining youth participation in midterm elections.

“We want them to know they need to show up and when they do, we will win,” said NextGen’s Wisconsin director George Olufosoye. “We want them to know they have power.”

They certainly have the numbers.

Since the last midterm election in 2014, 15 million post-millennials — those from ages 18 to 21 — have become eligible to vote. But while Generation X, millennials and post-millennials make up the majority of voting-eligible adults nationwide, they are not expected to cast the most votes in November.

In the 2014 midterm, they cast 21 million fewer votes than voters over age 54, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. Turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds hit a 40-year low in 2014, bottoming out at 17.1 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, at Tufts University.

NextGen points to higher voter turnout on the University of Wisconsin campus for a spring state Supreme Court election won by a liberal, and spikes in turnout in other targeted races, to argue that their push to register 122,000 young people to vote is bearing fruit.

“We’re trying really hard to have this be much more of an infrastructure, organizational thing than a two-month campaign,” NextGen founder Tom Steyer said in an interview. “We’re trying to get the broadest possible democracy, the biggest representation.”

More media coverage of competitive races, combined with energy from the March for Our Lives movement that seeks stricter gun laws, has empowered young voters and made them “feel like it’s time to have their voice heard about what happens to their generation,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of CIRCLE.

That’s what NextGen hopes. It has nearly 800 organizers on 421 college campuses in Wisconsin, Arizona, California, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In Wisconsin alone, NextGen has 27 full-time workers and 40 student fellows registering voters on 26 campuses.

Republicans recognize the power that motivating young voters could have for Democrats, but they’re skeptical that participation will increase much. In Wisconsin, Republicans have been targeting college voters for years.

“Wisconsin Republicans win by connecting with voters directly where they are — and young voters are no different when it comes to that strategy,” said Wisconsin Republican Party spokesman Alec Zimmerman.

Wisconsin has two of the nation’s competitive and closely watched races. Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin is being challenged by GOP state Sen. Leah Vukmir, while Republican Gov. Scott Walker faces a challenge from Democratic state schools chief Tony Evers. Polls show the races to be a dead heat — just the kind of competitive elections research shows excite younger voters.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said NextGen worker and 2016 University of Wisconsin graduate Joe Waldman. “I’ve never seen the energy, passion and activism there is now.”

It’s Been 10 Years Since Banks Were Bailed Out and People Were Sold Out

Ten years ago, there was panic in Washington, D.C., New York City and financial centers around the world as the United States was in the midst of an economic collapse. The crash became the focus of the presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain and was followed by protests that created a popular movement, which continues to this day.

Banks: Bailed Out; The People: Sold Out

On the campaign trail, in March 2008, Obama blamed mismanagement of the economy on both Democrats and Republicans for rewarding financial manipulation rather than economic productivity. He called for funds to protect homeowners from foreclosure and to stabilize local governments and urged a 21st Century regulation of the financial system. John McCain opposed federal intervention, saying the country should not bail out banks or homeowners who knowingly took financial risks.

By September 2008, McCain and Obama met with President George W. Bush and together they called for a $700 billion bailout of the banks, not the people. Obama and McCain issued a joint statement that called the bank bailout plan “flawed,” but said, “the effort to protect the American economy must not fail.” Obama expressed “outrage” at the “crisis,” which was “a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years.”

By October 2008, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), or bank bailout, had recapitalized the banks, the Treasury had stabilized money market mutual funds and the FDIC had guaranteed the bank debts. The Federal Reserve began flowing money to banks, which would ultimately total almost twice the $16 trillion claimed in a federal audit. Researchers at the University of Missouri found that the Federal Reserve gave over $29 trillion to the banks.

This did not stop the loss of 9 million jobs, more than 4 million foreclosures and the deep reduction in wealth among the poor, working and middle classes. A complete banking collapse was averted, but a deep recession for most people was not.

The New Yorker described the 2008 crash as years in the making, writing:

“…the crisis took years to emerge. It was caused by reckless lending practices, Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W. Bush years, and deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into debt.”

Before his inauguration, Obama proposed an economic stimulus plan, but, as Paul Krugman wrote, “Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat.”

In the end, the stimulus was even smaller than what Obama proposed. Economist Dean Baker explained that it may have created 2 million jobs, but we needed 12 million. It was $300 billion in 2009, about the same in 2010, and the remaining $100 billion followed over several years — too small to offset the $1.4 trillion in annual lost spending.

New York Magazine reports the stimulus was “a spending stimulus bigger, by some measures than the entire New Deal.” But unlike the New Deal, which benefited people at the bottom and built a foundation for a long-term economy, the bi-partisan post-2008 stimulus bailed out Wall Street and left Main Street behind.

Wall Street executives were not prosecuted even though the financial crisis was in large part caused by their fraud. Bankers were given fines costing dimes on the dollar without being required to admit guilt or having their cases referred for prosecution. The fines were paid by shareholders, not the perpetrators.

Still at Risk

Many of the root causes of the crisis remain today, making another economic downturn or collapse possible. The New Yorker reports that little has changed since 2008, with Wall Street banks returning to risky behavior and the inadequate regulation of Dodd-Frank being weakened. Big finance is more concentrated and dominant than it was before the crash. Inequality and debt have expanded, and despite the capital class getting wealthier in a record stock market with corporate profits soaring, real wages are stuck at pre-crisis levels.

People are economically insecure in the US and live with growing despair, as measured by reports on well-being. The Federal Reserve reported in 2017 that “two in five Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.” Further, “more than one in five said they weren’t able to pay the current month’s bills in full, and more than one in four said they skipped necessary medical care last year because they couldn’t afford it.”

Positive Money writes: “Ten years on, big banks are still behaving in reckless, unfair and neglectful ways. The structural problems with our money and banking system still haven’t been fixed. And many experts fear that if we don’t change things soon, we’re going to sleepwalk into another crash.”

William Cohen, a former mergers and acquisitions banker on Wall Street, writes that the fundamentals of U.S. economy are still flawed. The Economist describes the current situation: “The patient is in remission, not cured.”

The Response Of the Popular Movement

Larry Eliott wrote in the Guardian, “Capitalism’s near-death experience with the banking crisis was a golden opportunity for progressives.” But the movement in the United States was not yet in a position to take advantage of it.

There were immediate protests. Democratic Party-aligned groups such as USAction, True Majority and others organized nationwide actions. Over 1,000 people demonstrated on Wall Street and phones in Congress were ringing wildly. While there was opposition to the bailout, there was a lack of national consensus over what to do.

Protests continued to grow. In late 2009, a “Move Your Money” campaign was started that urged people to take their money out of the big banks and put it in community banks and credit unions. The most visible anti-establishment rage in response to the bailout arose later in the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Both groups shared a consensus that we live in a rigged economy created by a corrupt political establishment. It was evident that the U.S. is an oligarchy, which serves the interests of the wealthy while ignoring the necessities of the people.

The anti-establishment consensus continues to grow and showed itself in the 2016 presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They were two sides of the same coin of populist anger that defeated Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Across the political spectrum, there is a political crisis with both mainstream, Wall Street-funded political parties being unpopular but staying in power due to a calcified political system that protects the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans.

Preparing for the Next Collapse

When the next financial crisis arrives, the movement is in a much stronger position to take advantage of the opportunity for significant changes that benefit people over Wall Street. The Occupy movement and other efforts since then have changed the national dialogue so that more people are aware of wealth inequality, the corruption of big banks and the failure of the political elites to represent the people’s interests.

There is also greater awareness of alternatives to the current economy. The Public Banking movement has grown significantly since 2008. Banks that need to be bailed out could be transformed into public banks that serve the people and are democratically controlled. And there are multiple platforms, including our People’s Agenda, that outline alternative solutions.

We also know the government can afford almost $30 trillion to bail out the banks. One sixth of this could provide a $12,000 annual basic income, which would cost $3.8 trillion annually, doubling Social Security payments to $22,000 annually, which would cost $662 billion, a $10,000 bonus for all U.S. public school teachers, which would cost $11 billion, free college for all high school graduates, which would cost $318 billion, and universal preschool, which would cost $38 billion. National improved Medicare for all would actually save the nation trillions of dollars over a decade. We can afford to provide for the necessities of the people.

We can look to Iceland for an example of how to handle the next crisis. In 2008, they jailed the bankers, let the banks fail without taking on their debt and put controls in place to protect the economy. They recovered more quickly than other countries and with less pain.

How did they do it? In part, through protest. They held sustained and noisy protests, banging pots and pans outside their parliament building for five months. The number of people participating in the protests grew over time. They created democratized platforms for gathering public input and sharing information widely. And they created new political parties, the Pirate Party and the Best Party, which offered agendas informed by that popular input.

So, when the next crash comes, we should be like Iceland and mobilize for policies that put people first. Collectively, we have the power to overcome the political elites and their donor class.

As #MeToo Unnerves China, a Student Fights to Tell Her Story

QINGDAO, China — The sight of five burly guards blocking the way out of her dorm filled Ren Liping with rage.

It was 3 a.m. on a recent Saturday and the thin, bespectacled 26-year-old Chinese graduate student was exhausted. Her mind raced back to earlier in the day when she had tried once again to publicly protest her alleged rape. Again, the police had stopped her and held her at a station for hours. Again, she was escorted back to campus.

Now this.

She pounded on the glass door with her fist, but the men ignored her. “This is illegal!” she shouted, to no response. She felt nauseous. Her face was numb. She picked up a bicycle pump in the corner and smashed it against the glass.

The door shattered.

“Whoever tries to suppress my case will end up like this door,” Ren said to the men.

More than a year after she accused an ex-boyfriend of raping her on the China University of Petroleum campus in the coastal city of Qingdao, this had become Ren’s life: a series of attempts to protest the university and authorities’ mishandling of the case.

At every turn, Ren has been stymied by the school’s guards or the police, who say there’s no evidence of a crime. She was even detained in a hotel for six days at one point.

Her efforts highlight at once the challenges of reporting sexual assault in China and the determination of a new generation of Chinese women pushing the country into its own #MeToo moment despite attempts to silence them.

The movement has gathered considerable steam in China, with dozens of men, including prominent media personalities, non-profit advocates and even a top monk, publicly accused of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in recent months.

But like any social campaign, #MeToo poses a challenge to President Xi Jinping’s administration, which has waged an unprecedented crackdown on civil society groups and activism that the ruling Communist Party deems as threats to its rule.

Ren accuses Liang Shengyu, her ex-boyfriend, of raping her on campus last summer. Liang denies the allegation. They are suing each other for defamation.

In an action that legal experts say is unprecedented, Ren is also suing the police — for what she’s described as a mishandling of the investigation and the use of force against her.

“She is a representative for the #MeToo movement,” said Lyu Xiaoquan, a Beijing lawyer who helped Ren prepare her initial complaints.

Ren and Liang met in 2013 when they were undergraduates at the university’s geosciences department. Liang says he was attracted to Ren’s strength and independence. They dated for two years, experiencing for the first time the freedom of a romance far from their parents’ scrutiny.

After a bitter breakup, Liang and Ren rarely spoke. But last summer they got back in touch, and on the evening of July 28, 2017, agreed to walk back to their dorms together after Liang completed an assignment in the lab.

Their accounts of the rest of the night diverge.

Ren said that Liang asked her if they could get back together, but that she said no because she liked someone else. Liang then cornered her in a bicycle parking lot, she said, pinned her against a concrete wall and put his hand inside her denim shorts.

Stunned and terrified, Ren tried to choke him but wasn’t strong enough.

“You’re dirty,” she told him.

“You’ve been with me before. You didn’t think I was dirty then,” he said, according to Ren.

Ren said Liang ignored her protests, pulled down her shorts and raped her. She was sobbing in pain, she said.

“Do you want to destroy me?” she cried at the time.

That’s when he stopped, picked his cap up off the ground, and walked away, Ren said.

According to Liang, however, Ren had been pestering him for weeks because she thought he had a new girlfriend.

Liang said Ren tried to convince him to break up with this woman and that all they did that night was argue.

“We did not have any physical contact whatsoever that night,” he said. “And there was no so-called rape or sexual assault or behavior of that kind.”

At first, Ren did not plan on reporting her alleged rape.

“I didn’t know what people would think of me,” she said.

When it continued to haunt her five days later, she told the school, but administrators encouraged her to keep quiet. Then she went to the local police station, where a female officer told her to drop her claim, saying that not all sexual experiences are pleasurable, according to Ren.

Frustrated, Ren filed lawsuits against the police and started holding protests.

But the authorities’ resolve to silence her only grew with her efforts. In June, after she shouted in the middle of a campus square about being raped, Ren said security detained her inside a hotel room in Qingdao for six days while the city hosted a major summit.

Her parents were also ordered to stay in the hotel with her. Her mother, a wheat farmer from rural Henan, said university officials dangled vague job offers and study abroad opportunities to get Ren to drop her case. Their promises to investigate Liang’s conduct never materialized, according to her mother, who requested that she only be identified by her surname, Zhang.

“Everyone lied to us,” Zhang said. “It’s because our family has no money or power — if we did, things wouldn’t have reached this stage.”

School officials declined repeated requests to comment. Police in a district in Qingdao that oversees the campus said investigators examined the case closely, interviewing Ren and Liang, their family members, teachers and classmates, and concluded that no crime had taken place. In a statement faxed to The Associated Press, the district police bureau said investigators asked Ren about the alleged rape multiple times but found inconsistencies in her description of the circumstances.

In July, Ren took a four-hour train ride to Beijing, joining the legions of petitioners who flock to the capital to seek help from the central government for what they believe are abuses of power by local officials that lead to personal losses such as home seizures or being laid off.

Ren submitted her documents to three petition offices. A security officer at one of the places remarked that she seemed too young to be among the more than 1,000 petitioners who come to the office every day. Two months later they would return to repeat the same cycle: line up, submit papers, wait, he said.

“Just like that, I was hit with a splash of cold water,” Ren wrote on her online blog that night. “Hope has pretty much been extinguished.”

The authorities have continued to monitor Ren’s movements, she said, more than a year after she first went to the police. On a recent trip to a neighboring city, one man whom she says was trailing her dragged her into a black car when she tried to depart for a third city where she planned to meet with a lawyer.

But Ren remains determined to hold the police, the university and Liang to account.

On the eve of the Aug. 3 protest that would end up being thwarted, Ren posted somber photos of herself wearing a black sun hat and sunglasses, holding up a sign with “#METOO#” scrawled on it.

Ren correctly predicted she would face punishment for her actions. Quoting a Chinese proverb, she declared: “I’d rather be a shattered jade than an unbroken piece of pottery.”

___

Associated Press reporter Dake Kang and researcher Fu Ting contributed to this report.

Trump Lashes Out at Union Leader on Labor Day

President Donald Trump started his Labor Day with an attack on a top union leader, lashing out after criticism from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Trump tweeted Monday that Trumka “represented his union poorly on television this weekend.” He added: “it is easy to see why unions are doing so poorly. A Dem!”

The president’s attack came after Trumka appeared on “Fox News Sunday” over the weekend where he said efforts to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement should include Canada. Trumka, whose organization is an umbrella group for most unions, said the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico are “integrated” and “it’s pretty hard to see how that would work without having Canada in the deal.”

Trump said Saturday on Twitter that there was “no political necessity” to keep Canada in NAFTA. But it’s questionable whether Trump can unilaterally exclude Canada from a deal to replace the three-nation NAFTA agreement, without the approval of Congress. Any such move would likely face lengthy legal and congressional challenges.

Trump administration negotiations to keep Canada in the reimagined trade bloc are to resume this week as Washington and Ottawa try to break a deadlock over issues such as Canada’s dairy market and U.S. efforts to shield drug companies from generic competition.

Trump wants to get a trade deal finalized by Dec. 1.

Trumka also said of Trump: “the things that he’s done to hurt workers outpace what he’s done to help workers,” arguing that Trump has not come through with an infrastructure program and has overturned regulations that “will hurt us on the job.”

Asked about the low unemployment rate and economic growth, Trumka said “those are good, but wages have been down since the first of the year. Gas prices have been up since the first of the year. So, overall, workers aren’t doing as well.”

On Monday, Trump touted the economy, saying, “Our country is doing better than ever before with unemployment setting record lows.” He added, “The Worker in America is doing better than ever before. Celebrate Labor Day!”

The unemployment rate of 3.9 percent is not at the best point ever — it is near the lowest in 18 years.

Fire Engulfs National Museum in Rio; ‘Sad Day’ for Brazil, Says President Temer

RIO DE JANEIRO — A huge fire engulfed Brazil’s 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, lighting up the night sky with towering flames as firefighters and museum workers raced to save historical relics from the blaze.

The esteemed museum, which houses artifacts from Egypt, Greco-Roman art and some of the first fossils found in Brazil, was closed to the public at the time of the fire, which broke out at 7:30 p.m. Sunday local time, it said in a statement.

There were no reports of injuries, the museum said, and it wasn’t immediately clear how the fire began.

Roberto Robadey, a spokesman for the fire department, said 80 firefighters were battling the blaze and that by midnight local time it was “just about under control” and should be out within a few hours.

President Michel Temer called it “a sad day for all Brazilians.”

“Two hundred years of work, investigation and knowledge have been lost,” Temer said in a statement.

According to its website, the museum has a vast collection related to the history of Brazil and other countries, and that many of its collections came from members of Brazil’s royal family.

Robadey said firefighters got off to a slow start fighting the blaze because the two fire hydrants closest to the museum were not functioning. Instead, trucks had to be sent to get water from a nearby lake.

But he added that some of the museum’s pieces had been spared.

“We were able to remove a lot of things from inside with the help of workers of the museum,” Robadey told Globo News.

Connected to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the museum has expositions that include anthropology, archaeology and paleontology, among others.

The vice director of the museum, Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte, told Globo news the museum suffered chronic underfunding.

“Everybody wants to be supportive now. We never had adequate support,” he said.

Latin America’s largest nation has struggled to emerge from its worst recession in decades. The state of Rio de Janeiro has been particularly hard hit in recent years thanks to a combination of falling world prices of oil, one of its major revenue sources, mismanagement and massive corruption.

Just over a month before national elections, even before the flames were put out, the fire was leading to recriminations about dilapidated infrastructure and budget deficits in the city that hosted the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“Unfortunately, given the financial straits of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and all the other public universities the last three years, this was a tragedy that could be seen coming,” Marina Silva, one of the leading presidential candidates, tweeted.

On Instagram, Rio Mayor Marcelo Crivella called on the country to rebuild.

“It’s a national obligation to reconstruct it from the ashes, recompose every eternal detail of the paintings and photos. Even if they are not original, they continue to be a reminder of the royal family that gave us independence, the (Portuguese) empire and the first constitution and national unity,” he said.

____

Associated Press video journalist Yesica Fisch contributed to this report from Rio. AP reporter Mauricio Savarese contributed from Recife, Brazil.

___

National Museum website: http://www.museunacional.ufrj.br/

U.N. Reports Fewer Refugees but Riskier Voyages

GENEVA—The U.N. refugee agency says people smugglers are taking greater risks to ferry their human cargo toward Europe as Libya’s coast guard intercepts more and more boats carrying migrants, increasing the likelihood that those on board may die during the Mediterranean journeys.

That’s one of the key findings from the latest UNHCR report about efforts to reach Europe. The report, released early Monday and titled “Desperate Journeys,” says that even though the number of crossings and deaths has plunged compared to recent years, the voyage is more deadly in percentage terms for those who venture across.

The report says 2,276 people died last year while trying to cross, or one death for every 42 arrivals.

This year, it’s 1,095 deaths, or one out of every 18 arrivals. In June alone, the proportion hit one death for every seven arrivals.

On the Central Mediterranean route so far this year, there have been 10 separate incidents in which 50 or more people died — most after departing from Libya. Seven of those incidents have been since June alone, UNHCR said.

“The reason the traffic has become more deadly is that the traffickers are taking more risk, because there is more surveillance exercised by the Libyan coast guards,” said Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR’s special envoy for the central Mediterranean. “They are trying to cut the costs: It costs them more to keep those people here longer in their warehouses, under captivity.”

Libyan authorities intercepted or rescued 18,400 people between August last year and July this year — a 38-percent increase from the same period of 2016 and 2017. Arrivals by sea from Libya to Europe plummeted 82 percent in those comparable periods, to 30,800 in the more recent one.

UNHCR says a growing worry these days is deaths on land by people trying to get to Libya in the first place, or getting stuck in squalid, overcrowded detention centers: Many get returned there after failing to cross by sea to Europe.

“The problems after disembarkation (is that) those people are sent back to detention centers, and many disappear,” Cochetel said. “Many are sold to militias, and to traffickers, and people employing them without paying them.”

He said the drop in departures means that traffickers attempt to “monetize their investment, which means they have to exploit more people. That results in more cases of slavery, forced labor, prostitution of those people — because they (smugglers) want to make money on those people.”

Would-be workers and migrants are still pouring into Libya: Some are fleeing injustice, abuse or autocrats in their home countries further south in Africa. Others are looking for work in the oil industry or agriculture.

“I think you have more deaths on land,” Cochetel said, referring to treks across the desert in Sudan, Algeria, Chad and Niger. “Many people in Libya are reporting having seeing people dead in the desert on the way to Libya.”

In Libya, instability continues even seven years after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi. French medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said Friday that fighting between rival militias in Tripoli, the capital, has endangered the lives of people trapped there and worsened humanitarian needs — especially at migrant detention centers.

Cochetel said Europe — where some countries have shown “appalling” squabbles about who would take in rescue ships carrying migrants — should look at the root causes of such journeys. European populations need to shun anti-migrant rhetoric and realize that figures are down sharply, and migrant flows are clearly manageable at current levels, he said.

“Europe has to show the lead, has to be exemplary in its response, but it’s quite clear that it’s already too late when the people are in Libya,” he said. “We need to work downstream in country of first asylum, in country of origin, and that takes time.”

As Wildfires Rage, Fatigue Puts Firefighters at Greater Risk

BOISE, Idaho—Randy Brooks’ son had a request three years ago: What could his dad do to make wildland firefighting safer?

To Brooks, a professor at the University of Idaho’s College of Natural Resources who deals with wildland firefighting, it was more of a command.

His son, Bo Brooks, is a wildland firefighter who a few days earlier during that 2015 fire season fled a wall of flames that killed three of his fellow firefighters in eastern Washington.

The result of the conversation was an online survey that drew some 400 firefighters who mostly identified mental and physical fatigue as the primary cause of injuries to firefighters who are often confronted with a changing, dangerous environment.

But a self-selecting online survey is not necessarily representative of what’s happening in the field. So Randy Brooks decided to apply some science.

That led to an ongoing health-monitoring study involving wrist-worn motion monitors and body composition measurements that last year found health declines and deteriorating reaction times among firefighters as the season progressed.

“A lot of them face peer pressure to perform all the time,” Brooks said. “Others feel pressured to protect natural resources and structures at all costs.”

[Truthdig editor’s note: The National Interagency Fire Center reports that 95 large wildfires have burned over 1.9 million acres across the West during the 2018 fire season. Four new large fires were reported Sunday: one each in California, Montana, Utah and Washington.]

The study last year found firefighters lost muscle mass but gained fat based on body-composition testing before and after the season.

The firefighters also wore a wrist device called a Readiband from a company called Fatigue Science. The device keeps track of how many hours of sleep a person gets. Formulas developed by the U.S. military then calculate fatigue, based on a lack of sleep. That’s used to predict alertness and reaction times, which get worse as fatigue levels rise.

Firefighters in the field can get as little as six hours of sleep or less each night. The devices found that not only did reaction times falter as firefighters remained longer on a fire before getting a mandatory break, Brooks said, but firefighters also tended to take longer to recover as the season progressed. Sometimes, fatigue levels reached a level that suggested reaction times slowed down so much it took firefighters twice as long to react.

Brooks said his initial thoughts are that wildland firefighters might need better nutrition to stay fit and mentally sharp. But last year’s study had only nine firefighters. Brooks this year has expanded the study to 18 firefighters, 16 men and two women. They’re smokejumpers, meaning they parachute from airplanes to fight fires.

Brooks said that next year he hopes to have about 100 firefighters and include hotshot crews, a ground-based wildland firefighter that can, like smokejumpers, be deployed on a national basis.

Smokejumpers in the study often eat pre-made meals. Brooks wants to find out if maybe those meals are behind some of the puzzling results from last year’s study, such as a loss in muscle mass.

Hotshots, meanwhile, can return to a central spot where they get prepared food supplied by the U.S. Forest Service. That agency has done extensive research on what it takes to keep wildland firefighters fueled, and contractors who supply the meals must meet Forest Service nutritional guidelines.

Forest Service health experts have even followed firefighting crews to take blood samples to check glucose levels, which can indicate alertness.

Joe Domitrovich, an exercise physiologist with the Forest Service’s National Technology and Development Program in Missoula, Montana, said that experiment led the agency to change gears and recommend firefighters snack during their shifts to keep glucose levels up.

“It’s critical for cognitive function as well as physical movement,” he said.

The agency declined to comment on the University of Idaho study.

Brooks said at this point in his study there are more questions than answers. For example, one question is why so many firefighter deaths are due to falling branches or trees. The deaths of three of the 14 firefighters who died last year were due to what are called hazard trees. At least one firefighter was killed by a falling tree this year, and several more have been injured.

“What I’m trying to figure out is what is causing these accidents,” Brooks said.

A fair number of wildland firefighters also die of heart attacks during the season. Brooks said he wants to know if there’s something about the demanding seasonal job that puts wildland firefighters at greater risk of heart attacks.

Brooks wonders about the smoke firefighters inhale while doing physically demanding work. Many cities in the Pacific Northwest this year issued health alerts due to smoky air.

Ultimately, firefighters themselves might be part of the problem when it comes to calculating risks while protecting natural resources and property.

“There’s a little bit of a hero culture,” said John Freemuth, a Boise State University environmental policy professor and public lands expert. “There is a bonding with everybody. It can create a culture of where you kind of collectively ignore things you shouldn’t ignore.”

The End of Work as We Know It

As automation increases and pointless jobs become obsolete, our work lives may finally become more enjoyable; Pew has a new way of looking at religion in the U.S.; meanwhile, an analysis reveals that the majority of civilians killed by police are young men of color. These discoveries and more below.

In the Future, Who Will Still Work for a Paycheck?

Many jobs are pointless. Others are being automated away.

Why Tourism Is Killing Barcelona – A Photo Essay

One of the coolest destinations in Europe just two decades ago, Barcelona is now so overcrowded it has become a tourist theme park – and is losing the character that made it so popular

Here’s How We’re Going to Pay for Single-Payer

The short answer is fairly simple: through taxation.

Are the Politics of ‘Incivility’ Paving the Road to an American Fascism?

Complaints about civility avoid the big questions of the Trump era: Why is America sliding into authoritarianism?

How Israel Spies on U.S. Citizens

A never-shown Al-Jazeera documentary on the pro-Israel lobby in the United States reveals possibly illegal Israeli spying on American citizens, and the lobby’s fear of a changing political mood.

The Religious Typology: A New Way to Categorize Americans by Religion

A new Pew Research Center analysis looks at beliefs and behaviors that cut across many denominations – important traits that unite people of different faiths, or that divide people who have the same religious affiliation – producing a new and revealing classification, or typology, of religion in America.

Who’s Afraid of a White Minority?

The battle over how to project the future population of the United States has profound political implications.

The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult

A wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics puts the world in grave danger.

I Helped Create Insider Political Journalism. Now It’s Time For It To Go Away.

Traditional political journalists were the last people to notice in 2016 that the world had changed.

How America Killed Transit

Streetcar, bus, and metro systems have been ignoring one lesson for 100 years: Service drives demand.

A Conservative Social Network Would Fail

Twitter and Facebook CEOs Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, in their wildest dreams, would love Donald Trump Jr.’s idea for “one of the two Silicon Valley conservatives” to start up a conservative social network.

We Gathered Data on Every Confirmed, Line-of-Duty Police Killing of a Civilian in 2014 and 2015. Here’s What We Found.

Officers of all races disproportionately kill black and brown young men. What will it take for that to change?

Abuse Claims Raise Pressure to Reunite Migrant Families

SAN DIEGO—The Trump administration is under increasing pressure to speed up the reunification of immigrant families it separated at the Mexican border, following allegations three youngsters were sexually abused while in U.S. custody.

The government of El Salvador said the three, ages 12 to 17, were victimized at shelters in Arizona, and it asked the U.S. to make their return a priority.

“May they leave the shelters as soon as possible, because it is there that they are the most vulnerable,” Deputy Foreign Relations Minister Liduvina Magarin said in San Salvador on Thursday.

The U.S. government already is facing heavy criticism over its slow pace in reuniting more than 2,600 children who were separated from their parents last spring before the Trump administration agreed to stop the practice. Most have since been reunited, but hundreds remain apart more than a month after the deadline set by a judge.

Before the Trump administration reversed course, many of the parents had been deported to their home countries while their children remained in shelters in the U.S.

Attorneys for the U.S. government and the immigrant families discussed how to accelerate the process at a hearing Friday in San Diego in front of U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, who set the deadline.

Magarin gave few details on the three cases other than to say they involved “sexual violations, sexual abuses.” She said her government is ready with lawyers and psychologists to help the families, adding: “The psychological and emotional impact is forever.”

“It’s unbelievable that children who were fleeing violence here were met in the United States with the worst violence a child could encounter,” said Cesar Rios, director of the Salvadoran Migrant Institute.

More information is needed to investigate, the U.S. Department Health and Human Services said in a statement Friday, that adding that “without additional details, we are unable to confirm or deny these allegations took place” at a facility overseen by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. It contracts with nonprofits and other third parties to run shelters for unaccompanied minors arriving at the border.

In trying to reunite families, the Trump administration has put the onus on the American Civil Liberties Union, asking that the organization use its “considerable resources” to find parents in their home countries, mostly Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

The governments of those countries and nonprofit organizations have been trying to locate the families. Those efforts have included posting public notices and putting hotline numbers on billboards in the hope a parent missing a child might see the signs and call.

“Every day that these children are separated and left in government facilities does more damage,” said Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney representing separated families. “Even if the facilities were palaces, the separation of young children from their parents causes potentially permanent trauma.”

The government and ACLU indicated in the hearing Friday that the process should start to speed up.

Gelernt told the judge as many as 200 cases could be resolved in the next week or two. Those include families who want to be reunited in their home countries and those who want to waive their right to reunification and keep their child in the United States to pursue asylum.

The judge also said the administration can expedite cases where families have expressed the desire for the child to be sent back and not worry about it violating a temporary halt on deportations of families seeking asylum.

Justice Department attorney Scott Stewart said the government wants to remove any roadblocks.

“There are a lot of folks that want to move forward with reunification,” he told the judge.

More than 300 parents who have been deported are waiting for their sons and daughters to be returned to them in their homelands. Many are growing increasingly anxious.

Among them is Evelin Roxana Meyer, whose 11-year-old son, Eduardo Almendarez Meyer, was told this week that he won’t be leaving the U.S. until Nov. 27. He has been held at a government-contracted shelter in Brownsville, Texas, since he was separated from his father in early June.

The boy’s mother said her husband was told when he signed his deportation papers that his son would be waiting for him in Honduras.

“Now it’ll be six months before we see him? Oh my God,” Meyer said Friday, crying during a telephone interview from her hometown of La Union. “I don’t know why it’s taking so long. My son is worried. He tells me, ‘More time here, Mommy? Oh, no. Why?’ I don’t know what to tell him.”

Child psychologist Barbara Van Dahlen, founder of Give an Hour, a network of mental health professions that is offering to counsel the separated families, said the reports of abuse are likely to worsen the immigrant parents’ anxieties.

“I can’t imagine the stress, the anxiety, the terror, if I was separated from my child, and then the thought that possibly some of these kids are being abused,” Van Dahlen said. “It would be so debilitating and destructive that it would be hard for some parents to function.”

___

Aleman reported from San Salvador, El Salvador.