Chris Hedges's Blog, page 507

How Right-Wingers in High Places Are Keeping Racist Statues Standing

Perhaps nothing in decades has inflamed neo-Confederates more than two recent events: a vote last year by the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia, to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and the election of a vocal sympathizer, Donald Trump, to the White House. Emboldened by the latter and triggered by the former, pro-Confederates last August staged Unite the Right, the largest gathering of white supremacists in recent American history, which ended with the brutal slaying of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer, the vicious beating of DeAndre Harris and the injury of 35 others. The MAGA racists and alt-right mobs who wreaked murderous havoc on Charlottesville last summer are unquestionably the most visible and violent members of the neo-Confederacy, but they’re ultimately just the rearguard of the movement.

In many ways Charlottesville is a case study in how neo-Confederates of all stripes—from the thugs of Unite the Right to their more genteel allies in statehouses and in courtrooms—are using every available method toward their shared goal of protecting and safeguarding tangible odes to white supremacy. “I talk about white supremacy as having both a condensation moment and a dissipation moment,” says Jalane Schmidt, a religion professor at the University of Virginia and Black Lives Matter activist. “The condensation moment, it’s visibly apparent. You can see a monument sitting in your park. It dominates the space. You can see the fascists marching through your streets. It dominates the space. But the dissipation moment, it’s like an airborne toxin. It poisons the body, in this case the body politic. With the case of white supremacy, this dissipation moment is encoded into policy. That is also white supremacy. It is also deadly, but it’s so normalized for so many people, for white people especially, that they don’t see it as something dangerous. Why does it take the death of a white woman for white people to see that white supremacy is dangerous?”

Wreaking deadly terror in the streets is one historically successful way to literally beat back threats to white supremacy; advancing neo-Confederate agendas via civil institutions is another.

Roughly a month after the City Council’s 3-2 vote in February 2017 to take down the Lee monument, a collective of 13 Charlottesville monument preservationists—a quaint way of saying neo-Confederates—filed a not unexpected lawsuit that has effectively kept the Lee statue and a nearby bronze sculpture of fellow Confederate Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson standing. Complainants in the case include four prominent local lawyers, among them the former chairman of Charlottesville’s Republican Party, who was recently appointed the public defender for James Alex Fields Jr., the self-described Nazi who killed Heyer with his car. The Monument Fund, a nonprofit formed for the sole purpose of protecting Charlottesville’s homage to the most famous commander of the army that fought to defend black chattel slavery, is also a plaintiff. Described to me by one anti-racist activist as “an upscale crowd of seersucker suit and pearl-wearing preservationists,” the organization receives donations from supporters around the country and perhaps beyond. Attorney and Executive Director Jock Yellott has demurred when asked about fundraising totals, saying it would be like “telling the opposition how many cannonballs you have.” The IRS lists the group’s reported 2017 revenue as $118,907.

The neo-Confederates behind the Charlottesville lawsuit, who are currently pressing for civil remedies through the courts, are also affiliated with those engaging in uncivil violence in the streets. The list of plaintiffs includes the Virginia Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the state division of the national “heritage society” that has erected more than 30 Confederate monuments around the country since the year 2000. Members took pains to distance the group from the racists of Unite the Right, issuing a message after the event stating that “those who show up with torches and making inflammatory statements are in no way connected with or indorsed [sic] by the SCV.” Enter twin brothers George and Gregory Randall, highly visible members of Virginia’s neo-Confederate movement. Rewire notes that “in a 2015 Facebook post, Gregory Randall indicated he was a member of the League of the South,” described by the SPLC as a “neo-Confederate group that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by ‘European Americans.’” His brother George Randall has been photographed wearing League of the South garb and attended Unite the Right in the company of no other than David Duke. A local anti-racist activist shared with me a September 2017 email in which B. Frank Earnest, a prominent officer in the Virginia SCV and one of the individual plaintiffs named in the lawsuit, confirmed that George Randall was “an active member” of the Virginia group. And the Randalls may not be outliers. Harold Ray Crews, the white supremacist who weaponized the criminal justice system’s anti-black bias to have Unite the Right beating victim DeAndre Harris arrested, has publicly self-identified as a member of both the North Carolina chapter of SCV and chairman of the North Carolina League of the South.

At the heart of the pro-Confederates’ case is the argument that removing the Lee and Jackson statues violates a Virginia law prohibiting the removal of war monuments and memorials. When first entered into the law books in 1904, the legislation stated Virginia Confederate war memorials could not be removed by counties, a dictum that was changed to include all localities—including independent cities such as Charlottesville—in 1997. Unsurprisingly, the plaintiffs’ complaint leans into language of the Lost Cause, calling the statues monuments to the “War between the States,” a euphemistic phrasing favored by neo-Confederates because it downplays the South’s treason against the Union. Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard E. Moore’s statements from the bench, more troublingly, also display an open affinity for the same ahistorical telling of history. In a transcript from a May 2 hearing, Moore describes Lee as a “hero of the Confederacy,” and states that the “goal of the Confederacy was the preservation of the right to determine your own way of life,” which he then offhandedly notes, “included slavery.” (A footnote indicating the goal of the Confederacy was definitely not “the right to determine your own way of life” if you happened to be black at the time.) In the same breath, Moore delivered a soliloquy of textbook neo-Confederate mythology that suggests he’s both a jurist and a time-traveling mind reader:

“[T]here are just as many who think it’s an outrage to remove the statue that honors a man who was looked up to and revered by so many, and made a difficult choice to side with his state against that of the Union of States, and a more difficult decision to surrender his troops at the end of the war instead of continuing to fight. And he was an example to all, almost without dispute, of grace and submission in defeat.”

“That’s classic Lost Cause mythology, this idea that poor General Lee was in the midst of this very difficult situation and merely did what he thought was the right thing and sacrificed on behalf of the state of Virginia, and that we need to respect him for that,” says University of Virginia law librarian Ben Doherty, who has attended several hearings during which Moore lapsed into wistful bouts of Lost Cause sentimentality. “When you sit in the courtroom and watch these hearings, it’s almost incredible how much it feels like you’ve been brought back to the 1950s or even the 1920s in the way he talks about this stuff, and the things that he says about General Lee. It’s like, where am I? Is this a movie? You’ve got a judge who’s buying into Lost Cause mythology… and the judge should be conflicted out because he clearly has sympathies towards one of the sides in the case. It’s unbelievable.”

Attorneys for the city argue the amended legislation doesn’t apply to monuments erected before the law was altered, and thus has no bearing on two Confederate monuments dedicated in the early 1920s. The original turn-of-the-century version of the law was drafted by Virginia politicians keen to reverse African-American political progress—having recently stripped black citizens of the right to vote and in the lead-up to sanctioning racial segregation—who also wrote and endorsed Jim Crow laws that Confederate monuments were erected to symbolically reinforce. The expansion of Virginia’s heritage law as recently as 1998, when challenges to Confederate symbols were starting to gain volume, is itself an example of neo-Confederate lawmaking at work. As Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams notes, “state code on Confederate monuments” has been amended multiple times over the years, “[b]ut the protection of Confederate statues—which encountered resistance from day one—was the raison d’être.”

The strife surrounding Virginia’s Confederate monuments could have been settled by the General Assembly at the start of this year. In the aftermath of Unite the Right, Virginia’s Democratic legislators proposed at least four bills that would lift prohibitions on the removal or relocation of war monuments by localities, clarifying Virginia’s heritage law and clearing a path to take down what have proved to be imminent threats to public safety. All of those bills died rapid-fire deaths in Republican-dominated subcommittees before even hitting the statehouse floor. Neo-Confederate allies in the legislature such as Delegate Charles D. Poindexter regurgitated faux-earnest GOP lines about Confederate statue removal warping space and time to “change our history,” as if the monuments weren’t erected to do just that, and effectively continue to do so as long as they stand. Steve Heretick, the only Democratic member of the House to vote for the bill’s death, defied even the most superficial reading of history in imagining the monuments as the result of a consensus among Charlottesville citizens.

“There was community conversation when the statuary was erected,” Heretick told the Washington Times, “so to some extent I think there needs to be community involvement in discussion to move them or to change them. It is a tough call for me.”

This, too, is Lost Cause mythology stated so casually and confidently that it almost manages to masquerade as truth. The Jackson statue was dedicated in 1921, the same year Charlottesville’s local paper, The Daily Progress, announced that a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan had just “been organized in this city.” A few weeks later, the outlet reported on Klan recruitment signs posted around town, stating, “if you are a man, we respect you. If you are 100 percent American we want you. Only 100 percent white Americans” should apply for membership. In 1924, the year the Jackson statue went up, Virginia’s legislature passed “The Racial Integrity Act,” a law designed to prevent interracial relationships and race-mixing. Any  sexagenarian black resident of 1920s Charlottesville had been born into slavery, and younger African-American denizens were just a generation or two removed from the institution. These folks were never invited to weigh in on whether the city should dedicate statuary to those who fought to ensure they remained enslaved. Heretick is either willingly obtuse in suggesting that “there was community conversation” when the Lee and Jackson statues were erected, or he, like white denizens of Charlottesville of the 1920s, doesn’t consider black folks part of the Charlottesville community. At the very least, those who occupy the openly racist and violent wing of the neo-Confederacy acknowledge these statues for exactly what they are: tangible manifestations of white supremacy and power. Virginia’s lawmakers, regardless of party, who aid in historical whitewashing essentially bolster neo-Confederate efforts to keep up monuments that Unite the Right proved are literal threats to public safety.

Whatever the outcome of the Charlottesville lawsuit, the case will likely head to Virginia’s Supreme Court on appeal. But for opponents of the neo-Confederates’ goals, things don’t look great from here. Judge Moore has consistently ruled in favor of the plaintiffs as the case heads toward trial in October. In February, the court ordered that tarps covering the statues during a period of collective mourning over Heyer’s death and the horrific violence of Unite the Right be removed. In his decision, Moore wrote that members of the general public suffered “irreparable harm” by “not being able to view or enjoy” monuments to those who put their lives on the line to protect black enslavement. More recently, Moore issued a ruling that City Council members who voted for removal of the Lee and Jackson statues may be personally liable for damages and legal fees if the court ultimately rules in favor of the neo-Confederate plaintiffs. At an October 4 hearing, in a display of Trumpian bothsideism, Moore suggested the tragedy that defined Unite the Right could have been avoided if only anti-racist protesters had allowed neo-Nazis and white nationalists to storm the streets of Charlottesville unchallenged. “No one had to show up to confront those people,” the judge said. “The statues didn’t cause anything. People did.”

“It was really quite staggering for someone who not only lives in this community, but he’s also hearing cases,” UVA professor and Black Lives Matter organizer Lisa Woolfork told me. “It implied to me a type of bias, a willingness to support the status quo that we have Confederate monuments at the heart of our city, and the idea that we should rewrite their meaning to be nothing more than statuary. And anyone who sees them as more than statuary is just reading into things.”

Indeed, the FAQ on the Monument Fund website describes Confederate monuments as being “like mirrors” and outright states that acknowledging the facts of history is a sort of racialized delusion:

“They reflect back what you expect to see. If you are inclined to admire Lee or Jackson or the military you will see dignity and honor and valor. If you are angry, looking for reasons to be angry, then you will see only those who fought for slavery, and imagine a cheering crowd in KKK costumes.”

Considering the copious footage of white nationalists surrounding the statues during Unite the Right, YouTube videos of Richard Spencer and other white nationalists at the Jackson statue in May 2017 and at the Lee statue less than two months after Unite the Right, and photos of the Ku Klux Klan itself at a rally to “defend” the monuments in July 2017, the need to imagine “crowd[s] in KKK costumes” is rendered unnecessary, and the suggestion it’s a figment of anyone’s imagination feels like the most transparent form of gaslighting. As for taking a shot at those who “see only those who fought for slavery”—quite literally the reason why both Jackson and Lee’s names made the history books—there’s something to be said for facts and literal history.

“What I like to caution people is that we cannot allow fascists to co-opt our institutions for their own gain, and I believe we are indeed seeing that in the court through these hearings and these lawsuits, to force Confederate monuments on the public, to make us look at them,” Professor Woolfork told me. “And then they argue in court that to remove the monument or to change them or to re-contextualize them is a form of what they call ‘irreparable harm,’ and that there’s people there who love the monument and who enjoy them and who want to revere their Confederate ancestors, and all of that is supposed to matter more than the rights of black people to be free of the racial terror that they enshrine.”

Denied a permit for an anniversary rally in Charlottesville, the white nationalist perpetrator of Unite the Right has announced he is now plotting a sequel in Washington, D.C. Ahead of August 12, Charlottesville’s anti-racist activists are hoping for the best while strategically preparing for the very worst, as embodied in the various stripes of white racists some suspect may descend on the town despite the August rally’s involuntary relocation. History is a lesson, and the threat of racist violence is a constant as long as the monuments remain, their perpetuation at least temporarily ensured by neo-Confederates in positions of power.

“This isn’t your backwoods, poor, white, uneducated people,” says Grace Aheron, an organizer with the Charlottesville chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice. “That’s University of Virginia professors. That’s rich congressmen. Lee’s legacy is the one that they’re standing in.”

“Those monuments symbolize so much, and they have a shadow that’s being cast all the way up until the present that we need to take it seriously… It makes white supremacy seem like it’s just Nazis marching through the streets when, in fact, it’s heavily institutionalized in this place because of the legacy of people who make white supremacy look appealing. Or at least not that bad.”

This article was produced by Make It Right , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Tesla CEO Drops Bombshell With $72B Buyout Proposal

SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla CEO Elon Musk is considering leading a buyout of the electric car maker in a stunning move that would end the maverick company’s eight-year history trading on the stock market.

In his typically unorthodox fashion, the eccentric Musk dropped his bombshell on his Twitter account, which he has used as a platform for pranks, vitriol and now for a proposal to pull off one of the biggest buyouts in U.S. history.

Musk got the ball rolling Tuesday after the stock market had already been open more than three hours with a tweet announcing he might buy all of Tesla’s stock at $420 per share with no further details.

At that price, the buyout would cost nearly $72 billion, based on Tesla’s outstanding stock as of July 27, but it’s unlikely the deal would cost that much because Musk owns a roughly 20 percent stake in the Palo Alto, California, company. He also said he intends to give Tesla’s existing shareholders the option of retaining a stake in the company through a special fund, if they want.

“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk wrote in his first tweet, following up with “good morning” and a smiley emoji.

His tweet came hours after the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had built a significant stake in Tesla Inc., but it was unclear if that was the funding Musk was referring to. The Financial Times, citing unnamed people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had built a stake of between 3 and 5 percent of Telsa’s shares.

Musk’s announcement was initially met with widespread skepticism, with many people connecting the proposed $420-per-share offer with 420 being a common slang term for marijuana.

Musk also previously used his Twitter account to joke that Tesla was going bankrupt in an April Fool’s Day tweet and his stability was called into question last month after he called a British diver who helped rescue children from a Thailand cave a pedophile. That baseless tweet was quickly deleted and Musk apologized to the diver.

The confusion caused by Musk’s Tuesday announcement via Twitter also prompted regulators of the Nasdaq stock market to temporarily suspend trading in Tesla’s stock.

Musk later brought some clarity to the situation in an email to Tesla employees that was also posted on Tesla’s blog. Trading in Tesla’s stock resumed shortly after, and the stock climbed 11 percent to $379.57. Musk’s offer is 9 percent higher than Tesla’s peak closing price of $385 reached nearly a year ago.

By taking Tesla private, Musk believes that the company will be able to sharpen its long-term focus of revolutionizing an automobile industry dominated by fuel-combustion vehicles without having to cater to investors’ fixation on how the business is faring from one quarter to the next.

Making money has proven elusive for Tesla while it has been investing in electric car technology and ramping up production of its vehicle, including a sedan with a starting price of $35,000 to appeal to a broader audience.

The company has only posted a quarterly profit twice in its history and has never made money during an entire calendar year, something that Musk has been trying to change by cutting costs, including recent mass layoffs that trimmed Tesla’s workforce by 9 percent. Tesla lost another $717.5 million in its most recent quarter.

Despite its challenges, Tesla has remained a favorite among many investors, partly because of their faith in Musk, who made his initial fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and also is the CEO of a trail-blazing aerospace company, SpaceX, that’s already private.

But another substantial segment of investors are convinced Tesla is doomed to fail and are betting on the company’s eventual demise by becoming “short sellers” of its stock. Short sellers borrow shares from other investors and then immediately sell them on the premise that they will be able to buy them back at a lower price later to replace they stock they borrowed.

Musk has long raged against short sellers and mentioned his desire to be rid of them as one of his reasons for taking Tesla private. “Being public means that there are large numbers of people who have the incentive to attack the company,” he wrote.

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Alexandra Olson reported from New York.

Stephen Miller’s Sinister New Immigration Proposal

Donald Trump has been open about his hatred of immigrants. He began his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and saying that America needs to build a wall to keep them out. Previously, he and his supporters defended these policies by claiming that they were focusing on undocumented immigrants, and not legal immigrants, who they claim “came the right way.”

But the Trump administration has shattered this pretense by setting up a denaturalization task force, designed to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens convicted of even the most minor crimes. That hasn’t been enough, however, for vehemently anti-immigrant Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

NBC News reports that the administration is now planning a proposal “that would make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare.”

The move does not require congressional approval. Sources familiar with the situation told NBC that it is part of Miller’s grand plan. NBC points out that “Miller, along with several of his former congressional colleagues who now hold prominent positions in the Trump administration, have long sought to decrease the number of immigrants who obtain legal status in the U.S. each year.”

The news organization notes that the move “would fall particularly hard on immigrants working jobs that don’t pay enough to support their families,” since the plan in its current draft would apply to those who have benefited from such programs as the Affordable Care Act, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and SNAP (food stamps).

Louis Charles, a Haitian green card holder working toward citizenship, is an example. As NBC reports, “Despite working up to 80 hours a week as a nursing assistant, [Charles] has had to use public programs to support his disabled adult daughter.” Previously, this necessity would not have affected his citizenship application; under Miller’s plan, it would prevent him from attaining naturalization.

Immigration lawyers and advocates call the plan “the biggest change to the legal immigration system in decades and estimate that more than 20 million immigrants could be affected.”

NBC says that Trump administration policies are already having an effect:

Data from the first quarter of fiscal year 2018 indicates that the administration is on track for a decline in immigrants granted green cards by 20 percent. Data for the first two quarters of fiscal year 2018 for immigrants obtaining naturalized citizenship shows little change compared to the same period of 2016. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says they expect naturalization numbers to rise in the latter half of the year based on previous trends.

U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials are rejecting accusations of discrimination. Spokesman Michael Bars told NBC that “USCIS has not changed the manner in which applications for naturalization have been adjudicated.”

Immigration advocates are preparing for a fight.

How a Far-Right Supreme Court Could Haunt the GOP

WASHINGTON—Be careful what you wish for.

That’s the history lesson for Republicans eagerly anticipating Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court, which could cement conservative control of the court for a generation.

The GOP may ultimately pay a political price.

When and how steep? That depends on how momentous the issues and how jolting the decisions, according to legal scholars who’ve studied the high court’s impact on electoral politics.

The past century is replete with cautionary tales for political parties that rejoice when the Supreme Court’s ideology turns their way. That track record, coupled with today’s intensifying partisanship, suggests that when it comes to high court nomination fights, both sides should be careful what they wish for.

“In a democracy, what matters is winning votes,” said Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor who has studied constitutional history. “And you shouldn’t trust the courts to win your battles for you, because there’s going to be a backlash if they go too far, too fast.”

Such words of caution won’t have a discernible impact on senators, who have little incentive to abandon their own or their parties’ ideological preferences.

“I’ll vote to confirm Kavanaugh and I’ll take my chances,” said No. 2 Senate GOP leader John Cornyn of Texas.

But since Kavanaugh’s confirmation could tip the court decisively to the right for years, the past consequences of some such shifts are instructive.

In the 1930s, a conservative Supreme Court knocked down many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs aimed at hoisting the country out of the Depression. Statutes letting industries and unions set wages and prices, raising farm income and regulating the coal industry were declared unconstitutional, as was a New York minimum wage law.

That helped fuel a 1936 FDR landslide that also gave Democrats 76 Senate and 334 House seats, Election Day majorities neither party has ever matched. The triumph paved the way for congressional control that Democrats didn’t relinquish until after World War II.

The Warren Court’s liberal decisions of the 1960s helped power Richard Nixon’s law-and-order rise to the White House in 1968. Rulings buttressing criminals’ rights, like the Miranda vs. Arizona decision requiring authorities to inform arrested people of their rights, provided potent ammunition for Nixon at a time of racial unrest and growing crime rates.

“Some of our courts in their decisions have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in this country and we must act to restore that balance,” Nixon said in his acceptance speech 50 years ago this week at the Republican national convention in Miami Beach, Florida.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade case legalizing abortion has been backed by strong majorities of Americans but spurred the rise of the anti-abortion movement and helped galvanize political involvement by Christian conservatives. Both remain vital factors in American politics and a driving force for the GOP.

The disconnect between the court’s ideological leanings and voters’ preferences occurs because justices are appointed for life. With turnover on the bench infrequent, the court’s views often lag behind the election results of the presidents and senators who pick them.

“Over the long course of time, the court follows broader political trends,” said Thomas Keck, a Syracuse University political scientist who studies the Supreme Court and political movements. “But it doesn’t tend to turn as quickly as the elected branches” of government.

Kavanaugh’s nomination could be pivotal. He would replace the retiring Anthony Kennedy, who’s been the nine-member court’s swing vote on issues including same-sex marriage, corporate campaign contributions and gun rights.

Yet Kavanaugh’s confirmation wouldn’t guarantee that the court would veer firmly rightward because forecasting justices’ long-term viewpoints is historically tricky.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, a GOP California governor appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower, steered one of the most liberal courts in history. Anthony Kennedy was appointed by conservative icon President Ronald Reagan but protected abortion rights. Chief Justice John Roberts was selected by President George W. Bush but cast the decisive tally preserving Obama’s health care law.

But there will inevitably be numerous opportunities for the court to address politically searing issues.

In its coming term alone, the justices might face cases about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian intrusion in the 2016 presidential race, religious liberty and sexual orientation. Future cases could emerge over curtailing Obama’s health care statute, revoking protections against deporting young immigrants and curbing abortion rights — issues that galvanize conservative and liberal voters alike.

Joseph Ura, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, says the impact of a sharp, rightward court shift could be felt quickly enough to affect a Trump re-election bid in 2020, if not sooner.

In a 2014 study, Ura used computer modeling to compare five decades of important court decisions to the public mood. He concluded that there is a quick backlash against shifts in the court’s ideology that lasts about two years before eroding, followed by a slight, longer-term swing toward the justices’ viewpoints.

Ura’s guidance to Democrats, should a Kavanaugh confirmation produce high-profile court decisions invalidating liberal programs?

“My advice to them is to campaign on this,” he said.

Tech Companies Put Brakes on InfoWars Owner Over Hate Speech

NEW YORK—Major tech companies have begun to ban right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their services, reflecting a more aggressive enforcement of policies against hate speech following protests on social media.

Facebook has taken down four pages belonging to Jones, including two featuring his “Infowars” show, for violating its hate speech and bullying policies. Over the past several days, Apple, YouTube and Spotify have also removed material published by Jones. Twitter, which hasn’t banned Jones, has also faced similar calls.

Facebook has also suspended Jones’ account for 30 days because he repeatedly violated the company’s community standards against hate speech that “attacks or dehumanizes others,” it said in a statement Monday. Facebook did not immediately respond Monday asking what would happen after the 30 days are up, and why it hadn’t taken action earlier. The 30-day suspension of Jones himself appears to have gone into effect in late July.

Twitter would not comment on Jones.

“We’ve been banned completely on Facebook, Apple, & Spotify,” Jones wrote on Twitter. “What conservative news outlet will be next?”

Jones has amassed a large following on the right while promulgating conspiracy theories that claim terror attacks such as 9/11 were actually carried out by the government. Among his claims is that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, which left 20 children and six adults dead, was a hoax.

It’s unclear why the companies are cracking down on Jones now, after allowing him to publish for years. Facebook has been under fire recently for not banning Jones, but as recently as July 12 it tweeted that it sees pages “on both the left and right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis — but others call fake news.”

“We believe banning these Pages would be contrary to the basic principles of free speech,” Facebook posted in response to a question from CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, who had been pressing the company on why it continued to allow “Infowars” on its platform.

On Monday, the company said that it “unpublished” the four pages after receiving reports that they contained content “glorifying violence” and used “dehumanizing language” to describe Muslims, immigrants and transgender people.

“While much of the discussion around Infowars has been related to false news … none of the violations that spurred today’s removals were related to this,” Facebook said on Monday.

Facebook is the latest tech company to take action against Jones following social-media backlash. BuzzFeed News reported Sunday that Apple has removed five of Infowars’ six podcasts from its iTunes and Podcast apps for violating hate speech guidelines.

In response to a query from the Associated Press, Apple said only that it “does not tolerate hate speech” and referenced its guidelines for creators and developers, but did not name Jones or comment further. As of Monday, iTunes searches for “Infowars” or “Alex Jones” turned up no podcasts created by Jones. Entering the web addresses for specific shows brought up a notice that the content is not available.

Last week, music streaming service Spotify removed some episodes of “The Alex Jones Show” podcast for breaching its hate content policy.

And as of Monday, Alex Jones’s channel was not available on YouTube, with a notice that the account “has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.” The Infowars YouTube channel was also labeled as “terminated.”

Jones says his shows, which are broadcast on radio, and online platforms, reach at least 70 million people a week. It’s unclear how the latest bans have affected his reach.

YouTube said in a statement that when users violate its policies against hate speech and harassment, “we terminate their accounts.” But the company did not give specifics on Jones or Infowars.

“What it reflects is a slow realization that the platforms are megaphones to fuel extremist ideas,” said Keegan Hankes, research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, who focuses on far right extremist propaganda online. The decision to enforce policies, he added, “has been a long time coming.”

Hankes added that he is “not surprised” that Twitter continues to allow Jones on its platform.

“If they were to ban Alex Jones,” he said, he’d question why the company doesn’t ban “outright white supremacists, including those who have participated in violent rallies.”

Families of some Sandy Hook victims have sued Jones for defamation, and he now acknowledges that the shooting occurred but says his claims were free speech.

Last month, the parents of one of the children killed in the shooting wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling on him to ban “conspiracy groups and anti-government provocateurs” that use social media to call the massacre a hoax and harass and threaten the families of the victims.

“Our families are in danger as a direct result of the hundreds of thousands of people who see and believe the lies and hate speech, which you have decided should be protected,” wrote Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of Noah, who was six years old when he died at Sandy Hook.

Brent Bozell, the president of the nonprofit Media Research Council, whose stated mission is to “to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media,” called the crackdown in Infowars a “slippery slope.”

“(It’s) a dangerous cliff that these social media companies are jumping off to satisfy CNN and other liberal outlets,” Bozell said in a statement. “Social media sites are supposedly neutral platforms, but they are increasingly becoming opportunities for the left and major media to censor any content that they don’t like.”

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AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this story from London.

Earth Could Be Less Than 2 Degrees From Catastrophe, New Study Finds

Warning of a possible domino effect as multiple climate feedback loops are triggered within a dynamic cascade of rising temperatures and warming oceans, scientists behind a frightening new study say that for the sake of humanity’s future they hope scenarios explored in their new models do not come to pass.

“I do hope we are wrong, but as scientists we have a responsibility to explore whether this is real,” Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where the research was done, told the Guardian. “We need to know now. It’s so urgent. This is one of the most existential questions in science.”

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new study, while not conclusive in its findings, warns that humanity may be just 1°C [1.8 F] away from creating a series of dynamic feedback loops that could push the world into a climate scenario not seen since the dawn of the Helocene Period, nearly 12,000 years ago.

The research, according to its abstract, explores “the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene.”

As Rockström explains, the “tipping elements” examined in the research “can potentially act like a row of dominoes. Once one is pushed over, it pushes Earth towards another.” And in an interview with the BBC, he added, “What we are saying is that when we reach 2 degrees of warming, we may be at a point where we hand over the control mechanism to Planet Earth herself. We are the ones in control right now, but once we go past 2 degrees, we see that the Earth system tips over from being a friend to a foe. We totally hand over our fate to an Earth system that starts rolling out of equilibrium.”

Such feedback occurences, the authors of the study write, would pose “severe risks for health, economies, political stability, and ultimately, the habitability of the planet for humans.”

With Arctic ice and glaciers melting away; increasingly powerful and frequent storms in the Atlantic and Pacific; coral reefs dying from warming oceans; record-setting wildfires in the U.S.; unprecedented heatwaves in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere—climate researchers have been at the forefront of sounding the alarms about the frightening path humanity is now following.

“In the context of the summer of 2018, this is definitely not a case of crying wolf, raising a false alarm: the wolves are now in sight,” said Dr. Phil Williamson, a climate researcher at the University of East Anglia, about the latest study. “The authors argue that we need to be much more proactive in that regard, not just ending greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible, but also building resilience in the context of complex Earth system processes that we might not fully understand until it is too late.”

This is, by far, the biggest political issue in the world. It is the one thing that will affect everyone on the planet for centuries to come. Why isn’t everyone shouting it from the rooftops? https://t.co/HwP4sMMmoA

— Nick_Swindon (@nick_swindon) August 6, 2018

In order to avoid the worst-case scenarios, the researchers behind the study say that “collective human action is required” to steer planet’s systems away from dangerous tipping points. “Such action,” they write, “entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.”

Bankruptcies Soar Among Elder Americans, Study Reveals

A study of rising bankruptcy rates among older Americans places blame squarely at the feet of a hollowed-out safety net and policy changes that have left people without adequate retirement savings, paying huge out-of-pocket medical expenses, and seeing their funds dwindle due to the student loan crisis that many people mistakenly believe affects only younger generations.

When comparing the rate of bankruptcy filing among Americans 65 and older now versus in 1991, “the only explanation that makes any sense are structural shifts,” Deborah Thorne, lead author of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project’s recent study, told the New York Times.

Entitled “Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy: Fallout from Life in a Risk Society,” the group’s report found that older Americans filed for bankruptcy three times as often from 2013 to 2016 as they did a quarter of a century before.

Those surveyed for the study blamed multiple factors beyond their control for their decision to file. According to the Times, “About three in five said unmanageable medical expenses played a role. A little more than two-thirds cited a drop in income. Nearly three-quarters put some blame on hounding by debt collectors.”

Many large U.S. employers have suspended or reduced contributions to 401K savings plans in recent years—already having shifted away from traditional, more secure pensions—while out-of pocket healthcare costs have risen faster than incomes.

The student loan crisis has also played a role for many filers, with more than a third saying they were driven into bankruptcy after shelling out huge sums of money for family members. With college costing many families tens of thousands of dollars, bankruptcy lawyers are encountering parents who have guaranteed loans that they are no longer able to pay back.

“I never saw parents with student loans 20 or 30 years ago,” Marc Stern, a lawyer in Seattle, told the Times. “When you are living on $2,000 a month and that includes Social Security—and you have rent and savings are minuscule—it is extremely difficult to recover from something like that.”

Norm Eisen, chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, blamed the Republican Party for pushing many policies that force working Americans to shoulder economic burdens that in previous generations were more often the responsibility of the government.

Trump & the GOP are to blame for doing nothing to address the underlying causes of this mess, especially healthcare costs— and indeed making them worse by unwinding Obama’s and the D’s healthcare fixes. Mr. Trump,stop driving seniors into bankruptcy. https://t.co/XeAATYOxdX

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) August 6, 2018

Since President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration and Republicans in Congress have pushed to offer short-term health insurance plans that leave patients responsible for the cost of prescriptions; limit the amount of income Americans can save each year in retirement accounts; and made it harder for defrauded students to get loan relief.

While some may point to a larger population of older Americans as the reason behind more people filing for bankruptcy, the study dismisses the notion.

“The magnitude of growth in older Americans in bankruptcy is so large that the broader trend of an aging U.S. population can explain only a small portion of the effect,” wrote the authors.

Instead, a “three-decade shift in financial risk from government and employers to individuals” is to blame “as the social safety net shrinks,” wrote Tara Siegel Bernard at the Times.

Fayrouz Saad, a progressive running for Congress in Michigan’s 11th district, wrote on Twitter that reports like the one published by the Consumer Bankruptcy Project should serve as a reminder to all Americans that bold progressive action and political will are what will strengthen the social safety net.

Why elect progressives? THIS.

The *majority* of Americans are being left behind by our leaders. Why, in the wealthiest county on earth, should our parents’ generation lapse into poverty? 1/

‘Too Little Too Late’: Bankruptcy Booms Among Older Americans https://t.co/Pk0Al9L6BA

— Fayrouz Saad for Congress (@SaadforCongress) August 6, 2018

Why should a *majority* of our people be one bad accident or illness away from bankruptcy?

Why should our students be saddled with six-figure debt for getting a degree?

Why should women earn less, and retire with less savings, than men?

— Fayrouz Saad for Congress (@SaadforCongress) August 6, 2018

None of this is a bug. These are FEATURES of an economy that transfers massive wealth to the very top, by hollowing out the middle class.

But we have the vote.

And if we get serious about taking on those for whom our politics DOES work, we CAN make it work for the rest of us.

— Fayrouz Saad for Congress (@SaadforCongress) August 6, 2018

The Trump Administration’s Crackdown on Legal Immigrants Exposes Its Racism

Lost amid the harrowing stories of children separated from their families is another xenophobic aspect of President Trump’s immigration policy. That’s his effort to sharply limit the number of legal immigrants, who are increasingly from Asia, from entering the United States.

Yes, I said “legal.” These are not undocumented immigrants—the usual Trump target. On the contrary, they are women, men and children who have followed all the rules and laws of the complex immigration process. They deserve recognition. But to Trump and his base of older right-wing white men, they are the enemy, making America less white every year.

Some are refugees, forced to flee from natural disaster, political oppression and gang violence. Others are immigrants, wanting to come to the United States. Some seek temporary visas their employers use to bring in highly skilled employees and their dependent spouses. Other immigrants seek admission to this country because relatives or fiancés have filed petitions asking that they be admitted to this country. Some are orphans.

What most have in common is that an increasing number are not white.

According to the website Stateline, published by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the largest number of immigrants are beginning to come from Asia, especially China and India. Neither of these countries is covered by the Trump administration’s efforts to ban immigration from Muslim majority countries. India is 80 percent Hindu. China is home to the world’s largest Buddhist population.

So, as it turns out, Trump is not just worried about Muslim terrorists or Central American gang members, as he claims. It’s racial difference that apparently bugs him and his most devoted followers.

The Pew Research Center said lawful immigrants account for about three quarters of the foreign-born population of the United States.

They have applied, been vetted and then wait for permission to immigrate for six years or more. Once in the United States, after a period of time, they can become citizens, taking their oath to support the country in ceremonies often covered by the media. These ceremonies are usually hailed with pride as reminders that we are a nation of immigrants.

But President Trump and his crew have a different view. They don’t want us to be that kind of nation.

Trump is considering reducing the number of refugees—those forced to flee their native lands—from 45,000 a year to between 20,000 to 25,000, according to The Daily Beast and The New York Times.

In addition, the administration has made it increasingly difficult for nonrefugee immigrants, who choose to resettle here, to gain entry into the country. The Migration Policy Institute outlined the restrictive steps in a report last month.

“Some applicants … must provide 15 years’ worth of travel and employment histories and residential addresses,” the report said. “Some are also asked for the usernames they have used on all social media accounts in the last five years. While many applicants are not currently required to provide this information, the administration has signaled it eventually plans to make it mandatory for most.” These provisions, the report said, have likely slowed down the processing of legal immigrants.

“All of these actions move the United States toward the administration’s ultimate goals of decreasing immigrant admissions and expanding deportations,” the Migration Policy Institute said.

Journalist Ezra Klein explored this last month in Vox. He wrote that America’s black, Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race populations are expected to grow—indeed, the Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to roughly double, and the mixed-race population to triple.

The Migration Policy Institute said, “The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is at its highest level since 1910, with the approximately 44 million immigrants living in the United States representing 13.5 percent of the overall population. With U.S. fertility rates at a historic low, the Census Bureau projects that net international migration will be the main driver behind U.S. population growth between 2027 and 2038.”

The Brookings Institution projects that the nation will become “minority white” in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.9 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.8 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.

The liberal Klein saw a downside for progressives in all this in his Vox article. He wrote: “Demographic change, and the fears and hopes it evokes, is one of the tectonic forces shaping this era in American life, joining income inequality and political polarization in transforming every aspect of our politics and culture. …”

Klein said this could help the Republicans. “Even gentle, unconscious exposure to reminders that America is diversifying—and particularly to the idea that America is becoming a majority-minority nation—pushes whites toward more conservative policy opinions and more support of the Republican Party.”

Immigration will be a big issue in the fall election. Pew found that out of 2,002 Republican and Democratic adults surveyed from June 5 to 12, immigration emerged as the top issue they most wanted to hear 2018 candidates talk about. In fact, about one in five voters mentioned immigration—more than mentioned either health care or the economy.

If Klein is right, this is not good news for the Democrats. But, as is often the case with us journalist-columnists, Klein equivocates. “To say American politics is in for turbulence is not to say we are in for dissolution. “A majority of Americans—though not of Republicans—believe the browning of America is a good thing for the country. And we have watched states like California and Texas transition into majority-minority status without falling to pieces.”

That’s how I see it. Spanish is the language I hear on the streets and in businesses as I pursue my days in Los Angeles—except when it is Farsi, Mandarin or something else. Our mayor, Eric Garcetti, who is considering running for president, is Jewish, Latino and Italian. The new owner of our biggest newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, is Asian-American, welcomed to L.A. by a city council member representing the fast-growing Korean-American community, David Ryu. And so it goes.

I’m betting on people like them, rather than Trump’s minority older white base. And I’d say so-called base. I imagine there are people who voted for Trump who are now sick of the racist, dishonest Trump administration.

So take your 30 to 35 percent “base,” Trump, and refill its tanks with more hate. I’ll take the better America I see every day.

Longtime Manafort Deputy Rick Gates Admits Embezzlement

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The government’s star witness in the financial fraud trial of Paul Manafort testified Monday that he embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the former Trump campaign chairman — and told jurors he and Manafort committed crimes together.

Rick Gates has been regarded as a crucial witness for the government ever since he pleaded guilty this year to two felony charges and agreed to cooperate in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.

In the beginning of a hugely anticipated courtroom showdown, Gates told jurors that he siphoned off the money without Manafort’s knowledge by filing false expense reports. He also admitted to concealing millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts on Manafort’s behalf and to falsifying loan applications and other documents to help Manafort obtain more in bank loans.

Manafort’s defense has sought to blame Gates, described by witnesses as his “right-hand man,” for any illegal conduct and accused him of embezzling millions of dollars from Manafort.

Gates, who also served in a senior role in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, is expected to face aggressive cross-examination once prosecutors are finished questioning him. Gates pleaded guilty to financial fraud and to lying to investigators as he negotiated a plea agreement, something defense lawyers will no doubt seize on to try to undercut his credibility.

He is awaiting sentencing and his ability to secure leniency from the government depends on him being cooperative and forthcoming with the jury.

The criminal case has nothing to do with either man’s work for the Trump campaign and there’s been no discussion during the trial about whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia — the central question Mueller’s team has tried to answer. But Trump has shown interest in the proceedings, tweeting support for Manafort and suggesting that he had been treated worse than gangster Al Capone.

The trial opened last week with a display of Manafort’s opulent lifestyle, then progressed into testimony about what prosecutors say were years of financial deception. In calling Gates, the government will present jurors with the firsthand account of a co-conspirator expected to say Manafort was knee-deep in an alleged scheme to hide millions of dollars from the IRS and defraud several banks.

During the questioning, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III will be both referee and wild card. He has played those roles throughout the trial, repeatedly scolding prosecutors to rein in their depictions of Manafort’s lavish lifestyle and demanding that they “move it along.” It is not a crime, he has said several times, to be rich and to spend ostentatiously.

Nonetheless, jurors were told of more than $900,000 in expensive suits, a $15,000 ostrich jacket and lavish properties replete with expensive audio and video systems, a tennis court encircled by hundreds of flowers and, as one witness put it, “one of the bigger ponds in the Hamptons.”

One by one, a retired carpenter, a natty clothier and a high-end landscaper detailed how Manafort paid them in international wire transfers from offshore companies.

Prosecutors say Manafort used those companies to stash millions of dollars from his Ukrainian consulting work, proceeds he omitted year-after-year from his income tax returns. Later, they say, when that income dwindled, Manafort launched a different scheme, shoring up his struggling finances by using doctored documents to obtain millions more in bank loans.

On Friday, a tax preparer named Cindy Laporta admitted that she helped disguise $900,000 in foreign income as a loan in order to reduce Manafort’s tax burden. Laporta, who testified under an immunity deal with the government, acknowledged that she agreed under pressure from Gates to alter a tax document for one of Manafort’s businesses.

Under cross examination, she said at the time she believed Manafort was directing Gates’ actions and “knew what was going on.”

All told, prosecutors allege that Manafort failed to report a “significant percentage” of the more than $60 million they say he received from Ukrainian oligarchs. They sought to show jurors how that money flowed from more than a dozen shell companies used to stash the income in Cyprus.

Though the names of those companies appeared on wire transfers and at times on his bookkeeper’s ledger, both Manafort’s accountants and his bookkeeper say they never knew that the companies — and corresponding offshore bank accounts — were controlled by Manafort.

When they appeared, the bookkeeper and accountants said, they thought the companies were clients or, in some cases, lenders.

But defense lawyers are trying to convince the jury that Manafort was consumed by his consulting business and left the particulars of his finances to professionals and, in particular, to Gates.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Stephen Braun contributed to this report.

Donald Trump Has America’s Gravest Threats Exactly Backward

What’s the most worrisome foreign intrusion into the United States – unauthorized immigrants, Chinese imports, or interference in our democracy?

For Trump, it’s immigrants and imports. He doesn’t care much about the third.

“Border security is national security,” Trump said last week, as he threatened a government shutdown if Congress didn’t come up with money to build a wall along the Mexican border (at an estimated cost at least $25 billion).

Meanwhile, Trump has ordered his administration to consider raising tariff rates on $200 billion of Chinese goods, prompting China to threaten higher tariffs on $60 billion more of American goods.

Yet Trump continues to assert that talk of Russian meddling in American elections is “a big hoax.” And his White House still has no coordinated plan for dealing with it.

Trump has it backward.

Illegal immigration isn’t the problem he makes it out to be. Illegal border crossings have been declining for years.

And if the Chinese want to continue to send us cheap imports that we pay for with U.S. dollars and our own IOUs, that’s as much of a potential problem for them as it is for us.

But Russian attacks on our democracy are a clear and present threat aimed at the heart of America.

Facebook recently announced it uncovered a major disinformation campaign with the hallmarks of the same Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency responsible for election interference in 2016.

Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security found that in that 2016 election, Russian hackers tried to breach election systems in at least 21 states, likely scanned systems in all 50 states, stole the private information of hundreds of thousands of people, and infiltrated a company that supplies voting software across the nation. These findings led to the July indictment of 12 Russian Intelligence Officers.

Russian hackers are likely planning the same sort of intervention in this November’s midterm elections. Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security, worries about Russia’s ongoing “willingness and a capability” to hack into the American election infrastructure, including voter rolls and voting machines.

FBI Director Christopher Wray warns that “Russia … continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.” Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence, says “Russians are looking for every opportunity … to continue their pervasive efforts to undermine our fundamental values.”

Trump himself has admitted that his campaign aides met with Kremlin-linked Russian nationals on June 9, 2016 “to get information on” Hillary Clinton – even though federal law prohibits soliciting help from foreign nationals in connection with a federal election.

Russia isn’t the only foreign danger to our democracy.

The trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, reveals another. It shows that Manafort hired a small army of American lawyers and lobbyists from both parties to influence U.S. lawmakers on behalf of Kremlin-connected former Ukrainian strongman, Viktor F. Yanukovych,

These were essentially laundered bribes – from Yanukovych through Washington-based influence peddlers, then on to U.S. politicians through the political action committees run by those influence peddlers.

A similar kind of laundered bribe from abroad occurred recently after the Chinese telecom giant ZTE was caught red-handed violating international sanctions on Iran. When the Commerce Department imposed penalties on the firm, ZTE hired the big Washington firm Hogan Lovells – which got Trump to lift the sanctions.

The timing was curious. Just before Trump came to ZTE’s rescue, Chinese state enterprises agreed to give $500 million in loans to a project in Indonesia that included Trump-branded hotels, residences and golf courses – funneling millions of dollars into Trump’s pockets.

When Congress threatened to reinstate the penalties on ZTE nonetheless, Hogan Lovells turned its sights on lawmakers. The firm’s political action committee made fat donations to legislators who had the power to reduce the penalties.

The strategy paid off. Last Wednesday, the Senate passed a bill containing far weaker sanctions on ZTE than lawmakers originally intended.

The Trump administration is also ending the requirement that nonprofit groups that engage in political activity disclose the names of their large donors – another loophole through which foreign money can stream in to influence American politics.

All this raises the fundamental question of what we mean by national security.

Yes, our borders should be secure, and, yes, our trading partners should play fair.

But the essence of America – the attribute we must hold most secure because it defines who we are and what we strive for – is a system of government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln put it.

If Putin or a Kremlin-connected Ukrainian strongman or even a giant Chinese company undermines this, they rob us of our most precious legacy.

Trump cares more about unauthorized immigrants and Chinese imports than about the sanctity of our democracy. This is a tragic mistake.