Chris Hedges's Blog, page 493

Big Oil Wants Taxpayers to Shield It From Climate Change

PORT ARTHUR, Texas—As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile “spine” of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Like other oceanfront projects, this one would protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also has another priority — to shield some of the crown jewels of the petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it.

The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of Houston that are home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas’ 30 refineries, which represent 30 percent of the nation’s refining capacity.

Texas is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities.

That followed Hurricane Harvey, which roared ashore last Aug. 25 and swamped Houston and parts of the coast, temporarily knocking out a quarter of the area’s oil refining capacity and causing average gasoline prices to jump 28 cents a gallon nationwide. Many Republicans argue that the Texas oil projects belong at the top of Washington’s spending list.

“Our overall economy, not only in Texas but in the entire country, is so much at risk from a high storm surge,” said Matt Sebesta, a Republican who as Brazoria County judge oversees a swath of Gulf Coast.

But the idea of taxpayers around the country paying to protect refineries worth billions, and in a state where top politicians still dispute climate change’s validity, doesn’t sit well with some.

“The oil and gas industry is getting a free ride,” said Brandt Mannchen, a member of the Sierra Club’s executive committee in Houston. “You don’t hear the industry making a peep about paying for any of this and why should they? There’s all this push like, ‘Please Senator Cornyn, Please Senator Cruz, we need money for this and that.'”

Normally outspoken critics of federal spending, Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz both backed using taxpayer funds to fortify the oil facilities’ protections and the Texas coast. Cruz called it “a tremendous step forward.”

Federal, state and local money is also bolstering defenses elsewhere, including on New York’s Staten Island, around Atlantic City, New Jersey, and in other communities hammered by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Construction in Texas could begin in several months on the three sections of storm barrier. While plans are still being finalized, some dirt levees will be raised to about 17 feet high, and 6 miles of 19-foot-tall floodwalls would be built or strengthened around Port Arthur, a Texas-Louisiana border locale of pungent chemical smells and towering knots of steel pipes.

The town of 55,000 includes the Saudi-controlled Motiva oil refinery, the nation’s largest, as well as refineries owned by oil giants Valero Energy Corp. and Total S.A. There are also almost a dozen petrochemical facilities.

“You’re looking at a lot of people, a lot of homes, but really a lot of industry,” said Steve Sherrill, an Army Corps of Engineers resident engineer in Port Arthur, as he peered over a Gulf tributary lined with chunks of granite and metal gates, much of which is set to be reinforced.

The second barrier project features around 25 miles of new levees and seawalls in nearby Orange County, where Chevron, DuPont and other companies have facilities. The third would extend and heighten seawalls around Freeport, home to a Phillips 66 export terminal for liquefied natural gas and nearby refinery, as well as several chemical facilities.

The proposals approved for funding originally called for building more protections along larger swaths of the Texas coast, but they were scaled back and now deliberately focus on refineries.

“That was one of the main reasons we looked at some of those areas,” said Tony Williams, environmental review coordinator for the Texas Land Commissioner’s Office.

Oil and chemical companies also pushed for more protection for surrounding communities to shield their workforces, but “not every property can be protected,” said Sheri Willey, deputy chief of project management for the Army Corps of Engineers’ upper Texas district.

“Our regulations tell us what benefits we need to include, and they have to be national economic benefits,” Willey said.

Once work is complete on the three sections, they could eventually be integrated into a larger coastal spine system. In some places along Texas’ 370-mile Gulf Coast, 18 feet is lost annually to erosion, threatening to suck more wetlands, roads and buildings into rising seas.

Protecting a wide expanse will be expensive. After Harvey, a special Texas commission prepared a report seeking $61 billion from Congress to “future proof” the state against such natural disasters, without mentioning climate change, which scientists say will cause heavier rains and stronger storms.

Texas has not tapped its own rainy day fund of around $11 billion. According to federal rules, 35 percent of funds spent by the Army Corps of Engineers must be matched by local jurisdictions, and the GOP-controlled state Legislature could help cover such costs. But such spending may be tough for many conservatives to swallow.

Texas “should be funding things like this itself,” said Chris Edwards, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Texans are proud of their conservatism, but, unfortunately, when decisions get made in Washington, that frugality goes out the door.”

State officials counter that protecting the oil facilities is a matter of national security.

“The effects of the next devastating storm could be felt nationwide,” Rep. Randy Weber, a fiercely conservative Republican from suburban Houston who has nonetheless authored legislation backing the coastal spine.

Major oil companies did not return messages seeking comment on funding for the projects. But Suzanne Lemieux, midstream group manager for the American Petroleum Institute, said the industry already pays into programs such as the federal Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund and the Waterways Trust Fund, only to see Congress divert that money elsewhere.

“Do we want to pay again, when we’ve already paid a tax without it getting used? I’d say the answer is no,” she said.

Phillips 66 and other energy firms spent money last year lobbying Congress on storm-related funding post-Harvey, campaign finance records show, and Houston’s Lyondell Chemical Co. PAC lobbied for building a coastal spine.

“The coastal spine benefits more than just our industry,” Bob Patel, CEO of LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest plastics, chemicals and refining companies, said in March. “It really needs to be a regional effort.”

Off-the-Radar Tax Case Flips Script for Democrats, GOP

In a dispute between states’ rights and the congressional power to tax, you would expect conservatives to line up with the states and liberals with Congress. As the battle lines are drawn in State of New York v. Mnuchin, a lawsuit filed last month by the states of Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and New York, it will be Republicans defending the power of Congress and Democrats rallying to the cause of the states.

While well off most people’s radar, the case has the potential to disrupt President Donald Trump’s signature legislative achievement: last year’s massive tax cut. What remains to be seen — and will largely determine the outcome — is whether judicial conservatives align with Republicans (as they usually do) or defend the states’ rights doctrine at the heart of their legal thinking.

The lawsuit attacks the tax cut passed at the end of last year by the Republican-controlled Congress, specifically its limits on the deductibility of state and local taxes. The law resulted in much higher federal taxes for many residents of high-tax states, most of which are governed by Democrats. Last month, the states brought suit in federal court in Manhattan challenging the constitutionality of this provision of the new law. The legal consensus is that the lawsuit is unlikely to prevail. But the strange bedfellows of this issue may be causing legal analysts to underestimate its chances.

The new tax law breaks sharply with the past. Every federal income tax law since 1861 (and, more relevant, every one since the enactment of the 16th Amendment in 1913 giving Congress the specific power to levy income taxes after the Supreme Court limited that power in 1895) has permitted unlimited deductions of state and local tax payments when calculating federal income tax. Nearly 30 percent of all taxpayers took advantage of this provision in recent years; it was available only to those who itemize deductions. The 2017 law limited deductions for state and local taxes to $10,000.

The central argument of the lawsuit is that the new law amounts to the federal government illegally usurping a core power of the states — deciding how to raise and spend money. Specifically, the states contend, the law makes it harder for them to maintain high tax rates to fund government programs, from the New York subway system to public schooling. One way to think about the law, which could yet prove important to the courts, is that it strong-arms liberal states into adopting conservative fiscal policies against their will. In fact, the lawsuit contends, that’s exactly what Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration had in mind.

Another way to think about the new law is that it effectively legalizes taxation of more than 100 percent of income for high earners in high-tax states. If the law were upheld, and, say, California or New York (both states where progressives dominate politics) decided to enact very high income-tax rates for the highest earners — for example, those receiving over $10 million annually — these people could be on the hook for a combined federal and state marginal rate of more than 100 percent. Such a policy would be literally “confiscatory,” conservatives’ favorite epithet in opposing higher taxes.

And this illustrates the rub of the matter: It is — or has been — a basic conservative principle for decades in the United States that confiscatory taxation is anathema. At the same time, conservatives have also traditionally sought to maximize the freedom states have to chart their own course in many realms, very much including taxation.

Liberals, conversely, traditionally express solicitude for progressive taxation, especially for the highest earners. (Bernie Sanders, for instance, in his 2016 campaign proposed a 52 percent marginal federal income tax rate for those earning $10 million or more.) But liberals have also often sought to constrain the ability of states to place effective limits on federal policy.

Put another way, if the Constitution forbids a combination of state and local federal tax levies in excess of 100 percent of income — which many conservatives and some liberals would agree it does — it would be the classic conservative position that the burden of this limit must be borne by the federal government, while many liberals might be inclined to limit state power.

Should the case ultimately reach the Supreme Court, the question will be whether conservative jurists take the side of conservative politicians, which would accord with their policy preference for the tax bill, or whether they will hew more closely to their usual judicial principles, at the risk of dealing Republicans a significant policy defeat. (Ruling the limitation on state-tax deductibility unconstitutional would likely not invalidate the tax bill as a whole, but it would blow a much larger hole in the federal budget, which is already running record trillion-dollar deficits.) Those taking a longer view might also worry whether upholding the expansion of effective federal power over state taxation embodied in the new law might, in some future liberal congress, be used to compel states to raise taxes instead of lower them.

Liberals, too, face a difficult moment. Liberal legal scholars, many of them normally sympathetic to high-tax arguments (and many themselves residents of high-tax states), are deeply uncomfortable with both limitations on Congress’ 16th Amendment taxing power and with arguments favoring states’ rights under the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, as are central to the new case. (The 10th Amendment declares that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It is a favorite subject of academic legal conservatives, and something of a bugaboo for liberals.) This may help explain why the lawsuit has received so little attention in the press, which often relies on these same scholars for constitutional analysis.

Of course, it is possible that politics will trump law, even in the courts. That is essentially what happened in perhaps the most consequential Supreme Court case of recent times, Bush v. Gore, which decided the disputed presidential election of 2000. In that case, in legal terms, the central issue was also one of states’ rights, or at least deference to a state’s conduct of its own affairs, in particular Florida’s approach to counting ballots cast there. One way to read the result in Bush v. Gore is to observe that every single justice on the court voted their politics over their usual judicial principles, with “conservatives” adopting the pro-federal government legal position usually favored by liberals while judges named to the bench by Democratic presidents took the opposite view.

For those who feel certain the states’ case on the tax law will be quickly brushed aside, it’s worth recalling the legal maneuvering that followed the enactment of Obamacare. For the first 10 months after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in March 2010, the consensus in much of the legal community was that constitutional challenges to the landmark law bordered on frivolous and were going nowhere. Two federal district courts upheld the law, and the legal theory in a third case, where a judge had said the law was unconstitutional, was suspect — and was ultimately rejected by appellate courts.

Then yet another district court opinion came in against the statute, and it was taken much more seriously. For the next 17 months, Obamacare hung by a legal thread, before finally being largely upheld by the Supreme Court by the narrowest of margins, 5-4.

The result in the challenge to last year’s tax law is impossible to predict. But it seems easy to credit the notion that lots of people will find themselves squirming before State of New York v. Mnuchin is concluded.

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Lawmaker, Wife Accused of Diverting $250,000 in Campaign Funds

SAN DIEGO — U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter and his wife were charged Tuesday with using more than $250,000 in campaign funds to finance family trips to Italy and Hawaii, golf outings, school tuition, theater tickets — even fast food purchases — and attempting to disguise the illegal spending in federal records, prosecutors said.

A 48-page federal grand jury indictment depicts the couple as binge spenders who over eight years pocketed a steady stream of dollars intended for campaign purposes, while their household budget was awash in red ink.

Prosecutors said the couple tried to conceal the spending, which ranged from the banal to lavish, by falsifying records.

In March 2015, Hunter told his wife he wanted to buy “Hawaii shorts” but ran out of money, the indictment said. She told him he should buy them at a golf pro shop so they could later describe the purchase as “some (golf) balls for the wounded warriors,” according to court documents.

“The Hunters spent substantially more than they earned,” the indictment said. “They overdrew their bank account more than 1,100 times in a 7-year period resulting in approximately $37,761 in ‘overdraft’ and ‘insufficient funds’ bank fees.”

Asked for comment, a spokesman for Hunter sent an Aug. 6 letter from Hunter’s attorney, Gregory A. Vega, to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein asking him to postpone the indictment.

Vega contended that there was a “rush to indict.”

There was “politically motivated” pressure to wrap up the investigation in order to tarnish Hunter before the general election after he handily won a June primary, Vega contended.

Hunter was among the earliest Republican members of Congress to endorse President Donald Trump and Vega’s letter suggested his outspoken support made him a target for what he described as politically biased prosecutors.

Hunter, 41, the son of a longtime congressman, represents the strongly Republican 50th Congressional District in San Diego and Riverside counties. He faces the prospect of campaigning under the shadow of a federal indictment in a year when Democrats have targeted several Republican-held House seats across the state.

University of California, San Diego political scientist Thad Kousser said Hunter would be on safe ground if the race centered on the Trump agenda.

Now, the indictment “makes it a race about (Hunter), about corruption and in some ways ties him to Donald Trump’s biggest vulnerabilities,” Kousser said, referring to the guilty plea Tuesday of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, on campaign-finance violations and other charges, on the same day Trump former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of eight financial crimes.

Another early Trump supporter, Republican U.S. Rep. Chris Collins of New York, ended his re-election bid this month, days after his indictment on insider trading charges.

Hunter’s Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, stopped short of calling on the congressman to resign.

“I think justice should run its course,” he said.

Campa-Najjar said Hunter was “in it for his own interests” and that it is time to “get rid of the corruption and greed that has held Washington captive for too long.”

The California secretary of state’s office says there is no process in the elections code for Hunter to remove his name from the ballot, and there can be no write-in candidates for the November election.

In a statement, House Speaker Paul Ryan called the charges “deeply serious” and said Hunter will be removed from his committee assignments, pending resolution of the case. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said Ryan should call on Hunter to resign.

In a statement, California Republican Party Chairman Jim Brulte said “individuals are presumed innocent” until a jury convicts them.

“The congressman and his wife have a constitutional promise to their day in court and we will not prejudge the outcome,” Brulte said.

The House Ethics panel had investigated allegations that Hunter improperly used campaign funds to pay for tens of thousands of dollars in personal expenses. The panel said in March that it was delaying the inquiry at the request of the Justice Department.

According to the indictment, in 2015 Hunter attempted to set up a day tour of a U.S. naval facility in Italy in order to justify the use of campaign funds during a vacation with his family. When the proposed date didn’t work out, he told his chief of staff, “Tell the Navy to go (expletive) themselves,” the documents said.

The couple spent more than $1,500 on video games in 2015; and spent $6,288.74 to take his family on a vacation to a resort in Lahaina, Hawaii, the same year, the indictment said. Other spending included dental work, lavish dinners and movie tickets, prosecutors said.

In April 2015, Margaret Hunter spent nearly $1,000 in campaign funds to fly her mother and her mother’s boyfriend to Poland and later told the campaign treasurer they were campaign trips to New Orleans and Kentucky.

His lawyers said in 2017 that Hunter and his wife repaid the campaign about $60,000.

Hunter’s office said at the time that one of the charges he repaid was a $600 fee for flying a pet bunny with his family. There was no intent to stick donors with the cost, then-Hunter spokesman Joe Kasper said at the time.

___

Blood reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Christopher Weber, Robert Jablon and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report from Los Angeles.

Prisoners Strike Nationwide, Citing Conditions Akin to ‘Modern-Day Slavery’

On Tuesday, 47 years to the day after African-American activist and inmate George Jackson was gunned down while attempting to escape San Quentin State Prison in California, prisoners across the country declared a two-week strike to protest conditions they liken to “modern-day slavery.” According to USA Today, they plan to “abstain from reporting to their assigned jobs, halt commissary spending, hold peaceful sit-in protests and refuse to eat” during the protest.

“Fundamentally, it’s a human issue,” read an Aug. 10 statement from Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, the prisoners’ rights group that organized the demonstration. “Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. We know that our conditions are causing physical harm and deaths that could be avoided if prison policy makers actually gave a damn. … Prisons in America are a war zone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us, it’s as if we are already dead, so what do we have to lose?”

The call to action followed a riot in April at Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina that left seven inmates dead and dozens more injured. At the time, the Department of Corrections blamed a conflict between opposing gangs over territory and contraband such as proscribed cellphones. But as Raven Rakia writes for The Nation, prisoners at the facility “painted a more complicated picture,” citing inhumane conditions and guards’ hours-long delay before intervening in the melee.

“Let this nationwide strike be a wake up; prisoners will destroy the crops,” the statement concluded. “We will not comply. We will not allow you to exploit our families’ hard-earned dollars anymore. Striking the match let it go up in a blaze. We are humans!”

Jailhouse Lawyers Speak has published a list of 10 demands, among them the repeal of the Prison Litigation Reform Act—a holdover from President Bill Clinton’s tough-on-crime agenda that forces inmates to clear an array of legal hurdles before filing a federal lawsuit. Others include the immediate improvement of prison conditions; the restoration of voting rights for all confined citizens; and the establishment of rehabilitation services for violent and nonviolent offenders alike.

“If the strike is widespread enough, it could be effective,” Lea Johnson, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, told USA Today. “These circumstances like poor labor conditions, poor prison conditions, unpaid labor, and lack of access to mental health treatment exist seemingly behind closed doors. By going on national strike, you pull back the curtain and it can force legislators to act.”

So far, inmates in 17 states have participated in the strike. The demonstration is scheduled to end Sept. 9, on the 47th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising.

Read more about the strike at The Nation.

EPA Coal Plan Could Cause Up to 1,400 Premature Deaths Annually

The Environmental Protection Agency released new rules regulating pollution levels for coal-burning power plants this week, and buried beneath its complex policies is a troubling statistic. As The New York Times reported Tuesday, “The plan would increase carbon emissions and lead to up to 1,400 premature deaths annually.”

Called the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, the new standards are a Trump administration update of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The latter, as the Times writes, was “an aggressive effort to speed up the closures of coal-burning plants, one of the main producers of greenhouse gases.”

By contrast, the Trump plan makes minor adjustments on emissions and operations for individual plants, and, on a broader level, “[lets] states relax pollution rules for power plants that need upgrades, keeping them active longer.”

Administration officials touted the plan’s flexibility and ease for businesses, claiming that the Obama administration’s plan illegally forced utility companies to use more sustainable and environmentally friendly energy sources.

It’s an unsurprising move for President Trump, who has long denied the existence of climate change, claiming in a 2012 tweet that “[t]he concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

What is surprising however, are the hundreds of pages of analysis accompanying the new rules, detailing the dangers they pose. The plan includes, the Times reports, “a section called ‘foregone’ climate and human health benefits,” which describes “the effect of the Trump plan as benefits lost.”

The analysis describes the different methods states might use to regulate coal-powered plants, and the health effects of each option.

The mostly likely option, the EPA analysis reveals, “will see between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 because of increased rates of microscopic airborne particulates known as PM 2.5, which are dangerous because of their link to heart and lung disease as well as their ability to trigger chronic problems like asthma and bronchitis.”

The analysis was done using a three-part modeling system reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences. The estimated number of premature deaths also were informed by a Harvard University study linking polluted air to premature deaths.

William Wehrum, acting administrator of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, called the premature deaths “collateral effects,” according to the Times. He defended the new rules, saying, “We have abundant legal authority to deal with those other pollutants directly, and we have aggressive programs in place that directly target emissions of those pollutants.”

The response from environmental advocates was quick and blunt. “With the Trump dirty power plan we see again that the Trump administration cares more about extending the lives of coal plants than the American people,” Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental nonprofit, told the Times.

Some experts, according to a Charleston Gazette-Mail report on the new plan, believe that no matter how hard the Trump administration works to protect the coal industry, it’s not economically feasible for power plants to continue burning coal. The new plan, the Gazette-Mail notes, gives plants an “incentive to stay open longer,” but that won’t last long.

“All it does is to delay the closure or conversion of some existing coal plants,” Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law and energy regulation at Columbia Law School, told the Gazette-Mail.

“If they had to comply with the Clean Power Plan as released by the Obama administration, many utilities would be required to go to more use of natural gas and renewables, so this will delay that impact,” Gerrard said.

West Virginia University law professor James Van Nostrand concurred, telling the Gazette-Mail, “Killing the Clean Power Plan will not bring coal back, because the Clean Power Plan did not kill coal. It’s still economics.”

Trump is expected to announce details of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule at a political rally in Charleston, W.Va., Tuesday night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The #Resistance Has a New Grift, and Liberals Are the Perfect Mark

The rapid transubstantiation of security-state apparatchiks into hashtag de Gaulles is one of the miracles of our age. One moment you’re presiding over America’s domestic security apparatus, digging into the scandal of Hillary Clinton aides trying to ignore Sydney Blumenthal’s emails and entrapping stupid young men in made-up terrorism plots; the next, you’re tweeting the kind of nature photos that are typically paired with a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr.

The president of the United States strings together a series of English-adjacent phrases calling you a big jerk and a loser. A Macmillan imprint offers you seven figures to reiterate in print what you’ve already said in a zillion interviews and even in testimony before Congress. Not that anyone is going to read the thing; your book is a book in the sense that Warhol’s Brillo boxes are Brillo boxes: the perfect aesthetic earnestness of its imitation is the greatest artifice of all. You will speak about Honor and Duty on cable news, despite all available evidence you nudged Donald Trump into the presidency.

James Comey, welcome to the resistance.

Comey, to be fair, came by it honestly. His prissy, self-serving moralism seems as genuine as it is hypocritical, and that makes him a perfect foil for the louche, amoral Trump. His handling of the Clinton email affair was pure bureaucratic ass-covering, and his post-hoc move to explicit anti-Trumpism has the zealous air of a true convert. His tales of an unbalanced Trump cajoling him to swear an oath to some kind of gold-plated, Epcot version of the Führerprinzip align perfectly with the mythology of the online resistance, whose most assiduous writers favor 100-tweet threads drawing from History Channel accounts of the rise of fascism and the authoritarian tendency. His book may be a scam, but at least the suckers who bought it can stop a door or steady a wobbly table with it long after the thrill of displaying its cover at an airport gate or subway seat fades.

Scammier by far are the crowdfunded “legal defense funds” of subsequent martyrs of the Freedom-Fries French Forces, Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok. Unable to wait for the advance check to clear or just too lazy to come up with a two-sentence pitch that any fifth-rate agent with a pulse and a Gmail address could immediately convert into a book deal, these former G-men—McCabe was Comey’s deputy; Strzok a senior special agent who worked on the so-called Russia investigation until he got bunged off the case for a few intemperate texts to his office girlfriend—flew straight to the gig economy’s newest pyramid scheme and set up GoFundMe pages. Crowdsourcing is like Amway without the draining pretense of pretending that there is anything to sell. Money just flows in and up. McCabe quickly raised $500,000. As of this writing, Strzok is just shy of the same himself.

These funds are ostensibly to defray the current and future costs of legal representation, but the whole thing has the air of a grift. The Resistance, at least in its extremely online incarnation, is not populated by the most stable or reflective people. After all, it made stars of conspiracists like Louise Mensch; former Sarah Palin partisans like Amy Siskind; self-styled game theorist Eric Garland; and the Krassenstein brothers. Brian and Ed Krassenstein are listed on Strzok’s GoFundMe as having raised the most money through sharing—that is to say, by promoting it to their credulous followers.

There’s a precedent for this phenomenon. During the last presidential election, a GOP headquarters in Orange County, N.C., was firebombed. A group of out-of-state Democrats led an online effort to fundraise for a new headquarters, casting it in terms of common humanity or Americanness that supersedes the grotty partisanship of electioneering. Online liberals raised over $10,000 in less than an hour. The GOP showed its deep appreciation by trying to strip the voting rights of the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic African-American population, packing the state Supreme Court and stripping what little power belonged to the Democratic governor.

If the circumstances were different, the underlying moral silliness was much the same: throwing money into the wind to prove some kind of ethical point for less than nothing in return. The GOP will take the money and stand on everyone’s neck if it wins; the new ex-FBI heroes will take the money and either join a white-shoe law firm or hit the lecture circuit for the rest of their lives.

We have already begun to move on. Among other harsh critics of the president to emerge from the fluorescent hallways of our three-letter agencies is John Brennan, a stone-cold supporter of unregulated killing and torture abroad, who does not like the cut of Trump’s jib. He did the rounds, saying Trump is unfit for office, whatever that can mean for an office that’s held such paragons of dignity as Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and James Buchanan, to name a few among a grab bag of fools, slaveholders, Indian killers, nonentities and straight crooks.

Brennan is a man who lied to Congress and the public by claiming that America’s drones have never, ever killed a civilian. Only bad guys, you can be sure! But that will be forgotten because Donald Trump stripped him of his security clearance, which will make it incrementally harder for Brennan to convert his retirement into a sinecure fooling various northern Virginia defense contractors into paying him for copy-and-pasting the CIA World Factbook into a PowerPoint.

On Thursday, Brennan’s brass was polished by William H. McRaven, a retired Navy admiral who oversaw Operation Neptune Spear, the nebulous operation to kill Osama bin Laden that has spawned thousands of bar-stool tall tales by guys who claim they were the trigger man. He did the “I am Spartacus” routine and praised Brennan as “a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question.” Brennan, again, is a documented liar and prevaricator who used those very sacrosanct codicils of classification and security clearance to mislead the entire nation about America’s conduct of war. Surely he meant well.

The liberals who fall for this sort of thing, who abandon all skepticism of the military and intelligence entities in America as soon as the wrong party gets into the White House, are only partly to blame. They are victims, really, of our deranged national culture of politics as consumer choice, party as lifestyle and preference. They now find themselves atomized, without any route for collective action beyond chipping 10 bucks into the crowdfunding bucket; they can evaluate politics only superficially, and so anyone who says bad things about bad guy number one is good enough.

Trump—for all his obvious intellectual deficiency—is a far sharper judge of character. He is a con man, and he can spot a con. He has judged these men with an almost admirable precision. He knows how badly they want to be on TV.

Former Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort Guilty of 8 Crimes

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Paul Manafort, the longtime political operative who for months led Donald Trump’s winning presidential campaign, was found guilty of eight financial crimes Tuesday in the first trial victory of the special counsel investigation into the president’s associates. A judge declared a mistrial on 10 other counts the jury could not agree on.

The verdict was part a stunning one-two punch of bad news for the White House, coming as the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was pleading guilty in New York as part of a separate deal with prosecutors.

The jury returned the decision after deliberating four days on the charges of tax evasion and bank fraud against the former Trump campaign chairman.

The outcome almost certainly guarantees years of prison for Manafort and established the ability of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team to persuade a jury of average citizens despite months of partisan attacks — including from Trump — on the investigation’s integrity.

The verdict raised immediate questions of whether the president would seek to pardon Manafort, the lone American charged by Mueller to opt for trial instead of cooperate. The president has not revealed his thinking but spoke sympathetically throughout the trial of his onetime aide, at one point suggesting he had been treated worse than gangster Al Capone.

The more-than-two-week trial, presided over by the colorful and impatient U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III, has captured Trump’s attention as he works to undermine Mueller’s investigation through a constant Twitter barrage and increasingly antagonistic statements from his lawyer-spokesman, Rudy Giuliani.

But Trump and his campaign were only a small part of Manafort’s trial, as jurors instead heard days of testimony about Manafort’s finances and what prosecutors say was a years-long tax-evasion and fraud scheme.

Manafort decided not to put on any witnesses or testify himself in the trial. His attorneys said he made the decision because he didn’t believe the government had met its burden of proof.

Michael Cohen Pleads Guilty in Hush-Money Scheme

NEW YORK—Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and “fixer,” pleaded guilty Tuesday to campaign-finance violations and other charges, saying he and Trump arranged the payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels and a former Playboy model to influence the election.

The guilty plea came almost at the same moment former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted in Alexandria, Virginia, of eight financial crimes in the first trial to come out of special counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling Russia investigation.

In a plea bargain reached with federal prosecutors, Cohen, 51, pleaded guilty to eight counts in all, including tax evasion and making a false statement to a financial institution. He could get about four to five years in prison at sentencing Dec. 12.

In entering the plea, Cohen did not specifically name the two women or even Trump, recounting instead that he worked with an “unnamed candidate.” But the amounts and the dates all lined up with the payments made to Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.

Cohen said the first payment was “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” and the second payment was made “under direction of the same candidate.”

As cable networks were showing split-screen coverage of the dueling conviction and plea bargain by two former loyalists, Trump boarded Air Force One in the afternoon on the way to a rally in West Virginia. He ignored shouted questions to reporters about both former aides, retreating to his private stateroom on the airliner.

Cohen’s plea follows months of scrutiny from federal investigations and a falling-out with the president, whom he previously said he would “take a bullet” for.

The FBI raided Cohen’s hotel room, home and office in April and seized more than 4 million items. The search sought bank records, communications with Trump’s campaign and information on a $130,000 payment to Daniels and a $150,000 one to McDougal. Both women claimed Trump had affairs with them, which he denies.

Trump denied to reporters in April that he knew anything about Cohen’s payments to Daniels, though the explanation from the president and his attorney Rudy Giuliani have shifted multiples times since.

The president has fumed publicly about what he felt was government overreach, while privately worrying about what material Cohen may have after working for the Trump Organization for a decade. Trump branded the raid “a witch hunt,” an assault on attorney-client privilege and a politically motivated attack by enemies in the FBI.

Mueller’s team is looking into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The team referred the case involving Cohen’s financial dealings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan.

Before the election, Cohen had been a trusted member of the Trump organization, working out of an office in Trump Tower next to one used by his boss.

He raised millions for Trump’s campaign and, after being interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee last year, told Vanity Fair that Trump had no part in the suspected Russian conspiracy to tamper with the election.

The president’s initial support for Cohen after the raid has since degenerated into a public feud, prompting speculation that, to save himself, Cohen might be willing to tell prosecutors some of the secrets he helped Trump keep.

When Cohen’s team produced a recording he had made of Trump discussing one of the hush-money payments, Trump tweeted: “What kind of lawyer would tape a client? So sad!”

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Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this report. Lemire reported from Washington.

Uri Avnery, Israeli Journalist and Palestinian Rights Champion, Dies at 94

Uri Avnery, a veteran politician and journalist, and one of the first Israeli advocates for a Palestinian state, died Monday at 94 in Tel Aviv, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports.

He was, as Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev writes in his own separate Haaretz remembrance, “first and foremost, a dissident,” and a singular figure in Israeli society. Shalev explains, “It’s hard to convey the full scope of Avnery’s omnipresence on the Israeli scene.”

Avnery, Shalev writes, was a “trailblazing journalist, radical politician one-man resistance movement and towering Jeremiah rolled up into one. He was part Edward Murrow, part Che Guevara, part William Randolph Hearst and part Larry Flynt.”

Avnery’s family moved to Israel from Germany in 1933, when Avnery was 10. At 15, he fought in the Irgun, an underground militia fighting both Arab and British forces in a push to establish the state of Israel.

By the 1948 war for independence, however, Avnery had a change of heart. As he explained in a 2014 interview with Haaretz: “What in my eyes is the great success is that I and my friends raised for the first time the principle that there is a Palestinian people with whom we have to make peace at the end of the 1948 war. … I don’t think there were 10 people in the world that believed in this. Today it is a world consensus.”

After being wounded in the 1948 war, Avnery purchased HaOlam Hazeh, turning the weekly news magazine into an independent, anti-establishment publication. This was at a time, as his New York Times obituary points out, “when party newspapers were the norm.”

HaOlam Hazeh pulled no editorial punches. As the Times obituary notes, the publication:

Attacked the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and his socialist Mapai party; exposed corruption; flouted censorship rules; and, according to the National Library of Israel, “spoke out emphatically against the security services, which it felt acted in a manner unworthy of a democratic state.”

Not content to be simply a journalist, Avnery also served two terms in the Knesset, Israeli’s parliament. He resigned in 1981 in the middle of a third term, to become a founding member of two small left-wing parties. He made contact with members of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1974 while still a Knesset member.

He met PLO founder Yasser Arafat in Beirut in 1982, when, the Times writes, “It [the city] was under siege at the height of Israel’s first war in Lebanon. At the time, most Jewish Israelis reviled Mr. Arafat as an archterrorist.” Avnery was always ahead of his time, as the Israeli government eventually signed peace accords with the PLO in 1993.

In 1993, Avnery also started Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), an Israeli movement in support of the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, with Jerusalem as the capital of both, as well as dismantling the Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, part of the two-state solution still being sought today.

At the end, Avnery had “mixed feelings” about the progress of his life’s work, Haaretz concludes.

“On the one hand,” the obituary reports, “he was convinced he had turned his political ideas—first and foremost his support for establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel—into a “global consensus.” On the other, he admitted he had failed to realize these ideas politically.”

Read the full obituaries in Haaretz and The New York Times.

States Blast Move to Dismantle Rule on Coal Plant Emissions

HARTFORD, Conn.—States with a history of fighting air pollution generated by coal-fired power plants on Tuesday criticized a move by President Donald Trump’s administration to scale back federal restrictions on emissions, with some threatening court challenges.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan was among those who pledged to “take legal action to ensure the federal government does its job” to protect the environment and people’s health. She warned the Republican administration’s move will have “disastrous consequences.” New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood also vowed to sue the Environmental Protection Agency if the plan is approved. Both are Democrats.

“If the Trump administration’s proposal to dismantle the Clean Power Plan is adopted, we will work with our state and local partners to file suit to block it — in order to protect New Yorkers, and all Americans, from the increasingly devastating impacts of climate change,” Underwood said.

Both attorneys general are part of a coalition that includes officials from 15 other states, the District of Columbia, four cities and one county who defend former President Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which requires reductions in climate-changing emissions from fossil-fuel-burning plants. Two other states and the city of Los Angeles also joined in comments the coalition filed in April opposing the repeal of the Clean Power Plan. The Trump administration’s proposed plan would give states more discretion in regulating coal power plants.

“This is a declaration of war against America and all of humanity — it will not stand,” said Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Trump critic.

But some states welcomed the move on Tuesday.

West Virginia U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, called the Clean Power Plan “a complete overreach” by the federal government that was “disastrous” for her state’s coal industry.

“I’m encouraged the EPA’s newly proposed Affordable Clean Energy plan allows state input and clearly signals the ‘War on Coal’ is over,” she said in a written statement.

Republican U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi predicted the president’s proposal should protect her constituents from threatened power plant closings and electricity rate hikes.

In Connecticut, where there is only one coal-fired plant left, Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Rob Klee called it “mind-boggling” that the administration would take steps to protect a “dying technology” over the health of citizens. He noted how the jet stream pushes the polluted air emitted from the coal plant smokestacks west to east, adversely impacting northeastern states.

“We’re downwind from everyone and that’s one of our major challenges,” Klee said. “And that’s bad air that our citizens and residents, particularly in urban areas, have to breathe.”

Klee said he hopes Connecticut eventually takes legal action as a state or as part of a group, after the various comment periods for this proposed rule change are exhausted. In 2013, the owners of a Pennsylvania coal-fired power plan agreed to stop burning coal in two generating units and provide $1 million toward environmental mitigation in Connecticut and New Jersey, following a lawsuit filed by the two states seeking to enforce the federal Clean Air Act. Klee said Connecticut also has challenged other states for “not being good neighbors” when it comes to regulating air emissions.

He said the fact this new proposal gives some of those same coal states “the flexibility to do nothing or next to nothing” gives him the most concern.

Some critics of the administration’s plan to scale back the limits on climate change emissions noted the timing of the proposal. Colorado Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper tweeted: “Wildfires burning all over the world — smoke everywhere — and President Trump wants to burn more coal with fewer clean air protections by dropping the Clean Power Plan.” He said Colorado is “staying the course” and working to improve air quality.