Chris Hedges's Blog, page 515

Immigrant Youth Shelters: ‘If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine’

Just five days after he reached the United States, the 15-year-old Honduran boy awoke in his Tucson, Arizona, immigrant shelter one morning in 2015 to find a youth care worker in his room, tickling his chest and stomach.

When he asked the man, who was 46, what he was doing, the man left. But he returned two more times, rubbing the teen’s penis through his clothing and then trying to reach under his boxers. “I know what you want, I can give you anything you need,” said the worker, who was later convicted of molestation.

In 2017, a 17-year-old from Honduras was recovering from surgery at the shelter when he woke up to find a male staff member standing by his bed. “You have it very big,” the man said, referring to the teen’s penis. Days later, that same employee brushed the teen with his hand while he was playing video games. When the staff member approached him again, the boy locked himself in a bathroom.

And in January of this year, a security guard at the shelter found notes in a minor’s jacket that suggested an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.

Pulled from police reports, incidents like these at Southwest Key’s Tucson shelter provide a snapshot of what has largely been kept from the public as well as members of Congress — a view, uncolored by politics, of troubling incidents inside the facilities housing immigrant children.

Using state public records laws, ProPublica has obtained police reports and call logs concerning more than 70 of the approximately 100 immigrant youth shelters run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. While not a comprehensive assessment of the conditions at these shelters, the records challenge the Trump administration’s assertion that the shelters are safe havens for children. The reports document hundreds of allegations of sexual offenses, fights and missing children.

The recently discontinued practice of separating children from their parents has thrust the youth shelters into the national spotlight. But, with little public scrutiny, they have long cared for thousands of immigrant children, most of them teenagers, although last year 17 percent were under 13. On any given day, the shelters in 17 states across the country house around 10,000 adolescents.

The more than 1,000 pages of police reports and logs detail incidents dating back to the surge of unaccompanied minors from Central America in 2014 during the Obama administration. But immigrant advocates, psychologists and officials who formerly oversaw the shelters say the Trump administration’s harsh new policies have only increased pressures on the facilities, which often are hard-pressed to provide adequate staffing for kids who suffer from untold traumas and who now exist in a legal limbo that could shape the rest of their lives.

“If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine,” said Lisa Fortuna, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. “You have full access and then you have kids that have already had this history of being victimized.”

Southwest Key wouldn’t discuss specific incidents, but said in a statement that the company has a strict policy on abuse and neglect and takes every allegation seriously. HHS declined ProPublica’s requests to interview the refugee resettlement program’s director, Scott Lloyd. The agency released a statement saying it “treats its responsibility for each child with the utmost care” and has a “zero-tolerance policy for all forms of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior” at the shelters.

But the reports collected by ProPublica so far show that in the past five years, police have responded to at least 125 calls reporting sex offenses at shelters that primarily serve immigrant children. That number doesn’t include another 200 such calls from more than a dozen shelters that also care for at-risk youth residing in the U.S. Call records for those facilities don’t distinguish which reports related to unaccompanied immigrants and which to other youth housed on the property.

Psychologists who’ve worked with immigrant youth said the records likely undercount the problems because many kids might not report abuse for fear of affecting their immigration cases.

It’s unclear whether any of the children mentioned as victims in the reports were separated from their parents at the border, but the reports include several children as young as 6 years old. The government faced a court deadline Thursday to reunite the nearly 3,000 children who were separated from their parents. But the administration told the court that more than 700 of those children remain in shelters or foster care because their parents have already been deported or have been deemed ineligible for reunification for various reasons.

Not all the reports reveal abuse. The shelters are required to report any sexual allegation to the police and many reports detail minor incidents and horseplay not uncommon in American schools. For example, the BCFS International Children’s Shelter in Harlingen, Texas, called the police in February after one minor entered another’s room and rubbed a small styrofoam ball on the juvenile’s buttocks.

And, once secure in the shelters, some immigrant children report assaults that occurred not at the shelters, but in their home countries. Last November, a 14-year-old girl staying in a shelter in Irvington, New York, told staff she had been raped in Honduras by a man who was now in immigration custody.

But the reports show that the allegations of staff abuse and inappropriate relationships that occurred in Tucson aren’t isolated. In February, a 24-year-old youth care worker at KidsPeace in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was placed on administrative leave after kissing a teenage boy in the laundry room. Just over a year earlier, a 21-year-old staff member there was accused of kissing a 16-year-old girl in the hallway. The BCFS shelter in Harlingen was written up by state regulators in 2017 after a staff member flew to New York to visit a former resident. And at a Southwest Key shelter outside San Diego, reports show, a female employee who had been accused of kissing a juvenile quit after being confronted with information that the teenager had the woman’s Snapchat account written on a piece of paper.

KidsPeace wouldn’t discuss personnel matters but said “the safety and well-being of our young clients are our top priority.”

BCFS said the staff member was terminated for violating agency policy and that it has “very strict and clear boundaries for our staff.”

The reports also reveal dozens of incidents of unwanted groping and indecent exposure among children and teenagers at the facilities. Some kids fleeing threats and violence in their home countries arrived in the United States only to be placed in shelters where they faced similar dangers. In March, a 15-year-old boy at the Southwest Key shelter in Tucson reported that his roommate lifted up his legs as he was trying to go to sleep, made thrusting motions and said, “I’m going rape you.” And in late 2016, a 15-year-old at KidsPeace told police that another boy there had been forcing him to have oral sex. After an investigation, one teen was transferred to a more secure facility. (KidsPeace said it wouldn’t discuss specific information about kids in its care.)

While it’s difficult to get a complete count, the police reports show that children go missing or run away from the shelters roughly once a week. Several shelters, including Southwest Key’s Tucson facility, have seen a significant increase in missing person and runaway calls since the start of 2018. St. PJ’s Children’s Home in San Antonio, which primarily cares for immigrant children, has had 26 such calls in the first half of the year, records show, compared to 14 for all of last year and nine for 2016.

St. PJ’s Children’s Home responded after publication and said its spike in runaways involves U.S. children, not immigrant youth.

The police reports also raise questions about how Southwest Key, the largest operator of immigrant shelters, handles such incidents. In the molestation case involving the 46-year-old staffer, police had obtained edited surveillance footage but later sought a complete, unedited version. Southwest Key, however, had taped over the footage. And in another case, police noted that Southwest Key refused to give officers records from an internal investigation.

Southwest Key CEO Juan Sánchez declined an interview. The Texas-based nonprofit has received more than $1.3 billion in federal grants and contracts in the past five years for the shelters and other services. Jeff Eller, a spokesman, said, “We cooperate with all investigations.”

Government officials and advocates say most immigrant youth shelters were never intended to house children long-term. But in recent weeks, the average length of stay has climbed to 57 days from 34 days just two years ago.

Maria Cancian, deputy assistant secretary for policy at HHS’s Administration for Children and Families from 2015 to 2016, said typically the shelters only housed immigrant kids for the “honeymoon period” when they first arrived in the U.S.

“The kids didn’t have a chance to get bored and ornery,” she said. “The longer kids are there, the more trouble you’re going to have, and the more opportunities there are for relationships to evolve in ways that are more challenging.”

Cancian, who served under President Obama, said the shelters were well run when she was there. “But if you’re serving 65,000 children in a year,” she said, “there are going to be some bad incidents.”

The network of federally funded shelters sprang up after HHS took over the responsibility of caring for unaccompanied children arriving at the border in 2003. For most of their existence, the shelters received little attention, serving fewer than 8,000 children a year. But in 2014, that number surged to nearly 60,000 as a flood of teenagers fleeing gang violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador sought asylum in the U.S.

The shelters — whose operators have been paid about $4 billion over the past five years — were designed as temporary way stations, where new arrivals could get acclimated while staffers tried to locate family members who could care for them while their immigration cases wound through the courts.

There are now approximately 100 shelters scattered from Seattle to suburban New York, but concentrated in Texas and Arizona. They range from old motels to stand-alone homes, from a converted Walmart to a former estate set amid mansions, where on a recent day a deer could be seen prancing through the leafy grounds.

The children arrive with a host of needs, said Nayeli Chavez-Dueñas, a clinical psychologist who helped develop shelter guidelines on behalf of the National Latina/o Psychological Association.

Many children have experienced traumatic events in their home countries, are desperate for stability after the long journey, and have little understanding of American laws — all things that make them particularly vulnerable.

“When a perpetrator is trying to pick a victim they’re picking somebody that they think is less likely to report the abuse,” Chavez-Dueñas said. “Children and youth that are coming from outside of the country, that have no legal status here, that don’t speak English, that don’t have access to lawyers or people who can protect them — they already might think they’re not going to be believed.”

In the back of their minds, she said, is the fear that speaking up could ultimately hurt their immigration case.

The worker who was convicted of molesting the boy in Tucson isn’t the only shelter employee to face criminal charges. Last year, according to court records, a youth care worker at a Homestead, Florida, shelter was sentenced to 10 years in prison after she sent nude photos of herself to a 15-year-old boy who had recently left the shelter and asked him for sex. In 2012, a case manager at a Fullerton, California, shelter was convicted of molesting several teenage boys when they went into his office for regular calls with family, court records show.

The shelters must complete background checks complying with both federal standards and state licensing requirements. They are overseen by an overlapping system of regulators that ostensibly provides a lot of enforcement tools. When incidents occur, shelters are required to alert the police and the ORR. They may also have to notify state agencies that license child-care facilities.

Bob Carey, who was director of ORR from 2015 to 2017, said each week he read through a stack of significant incident reports submitted by the shelters, summarizing everything from behavior problems to allegations of sex between staff and minors. Looking at them over several years, he said, there weren’t many serious incidents that stood out.

“When I was there, the overwhelming majority of what was reported was one kid slapping the butt of another kid in the cafeteria line,” he said. “But you want to make sure that when the more serious incident does happen, that people know what do.”

When there were serious problems, he said, the agency would initiate an investigation that could result in “corrective actions,” ranging from increased monitoring to the termination of the grant. Field staff assigned to the regions where the shelters are located can make unannounced visits day or night. In Texas, licensing officials can also issue fines, order shelters to make changes and ultimately revoke a shelter’s operating license. But in practice, the harshest tools have rarely been used.

Monitoring the shelters can be extremely difficult as the number of unaccompanied children can fluctuate wildly from year to year.

The rise and fall means the shelters are in a constant state of flux, making it difficult to retain and train staff. Last spring, Southwest Key laid off almost 1,000 employees — only to have to ramp up several months later. Current and former employees describe a stressful environment where overstretched and underpaid care workers do the best they can with little training to handle kids in crisis.

“It’s really hard to imagine how difficult it is to quickly ramp up appropriate care for children,” Cancian said. “The more people you have to bring in fast and the less experienced your staff, the more challenges there are to maintain standards.”

In response to the influx in 2014, Carey and other officials developed a plan to restructure the ORR to improve oversight of the unaccompanied minor program by increasing staff and supervision, shifting field employees to regions where new shelters had popped up and trying to resolve longstanding data problems. The plan began to take shape at the end of 2016.

But it’s unclear what happened when the Trump administration took over and initiated a hiring freeze. An HHS spokeswoman would only say that the plan “was never implemented by the last administration” and that “today, operations are constantly reviewed and improved on an ongoing basis.”

Several police reports obtained by ProPublica raise questions about how serious incidents were handled by shelters.

In one case in Tucson in 2015, two female employees told managers that a maintenance supervisor had groped them, tried to pull one of them into a room, and then made a sexual gesture with a broom handle. When no action was taken, an assistant shift leader notified the police.

The employees told police that the assistant program director said he had lost one of women’s statements while another manager told them to “drop it and leave it alone.” The assistant director told police that the company held a sexual harassment class and suspended the maintenance supervisor while it investigated, but couldn’t prove or disprove the allegations because the supervisor denied them. When a police detective asked for copies of the employees’ statements, police records say, a lawyer for Southwest Key refused to provide them.

According to the police report, the employees said they feared that if the maintenance supervisor was “doing this to female employees, who’s to say he’s not doing this or worse to the several hundred female refugees staying at the center.” The man had full access to the building, they told police, and the minors might be hesitant to speak up.

The reports also show that when inappropriate touching or abuse occurred among residents at the Tucson shelter, the staff and police often left it up to minor victims to decide whether to file charges against other children.

The process for reporting and investigating incidents was inconsistent at other shelters as well.

A former employee at KidsPeace in Pennsylvania said that staff members frequently attended police interviews of residents who reported misconduct, potentially creating a conflict of interest. KidsPeace spokesman Bob Martin said the agency’s interactions with police and other governmental entities are “scrupulously conducted” to ensure that neither kids’ “personal well-being nor their legal rights are put at risk while they are in our care.”

At a Southwest Key shelter in Conroe, Texas, in May, a boy told a youth care worker that his mental health counselor brushed his shoulders, rubbed his arm and caressed his face while continually peeking out of the office’s blinds “as if he was checking to see if someone was coming.” The counselor began to unbuckle his own pants, but stopped, the police report said.

The boy later repeated the story to a state child welfare worker. The counselor was suspended during the investigation. But a more formal forensic interview didn’t take place until six days after the incident.

At that point, the police report said, the boy “made no outcry regarding any criminal offense” and the case was closed.

Waiting six days for a forensic interview is not on its face unusual, said David Palmiter, a psychology professor at Marywood University who has conducted forensic interviews of abused children. But he noted that the interview should be done sooner rather than later.

“Everything from legitimate confusion to some calculation of what the consequences could be or whether they would please or hurt the adults around them could impact the child,” he said. “There could be any number of reasons why the story changes.”

A large part of the current pressure on the shelters stems from a series of changes made by the Trump administration in how it handles unaccompanied minors, immigrant advocates say.

As part of an information-sharing agreement, the ORR is now required to provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement with potential sponsors’ names, dates of birth, addresses and fingerprints so that ICE can pull criminal and immigration history information on the sponsor, usually a family member, and all adult members of the sponsor’s household.

Officials say the vetting is being done to protect children. In one case a few years ago, the agency unintentionally turned teenagers over to a smuggling network that forced them to work on an egg farm to pay off their debts.

But immigrant advocates say the policy is deterring family members who are often undocumented from coming forward, leaving children to languish in shelters where they may become increasingly desperate.

The police reports detail repeated calls about runaways.

“It wouldn’t be that difficult for kids to run away from these facilities if they really wanted to,” said Carey, the former ORR director. “But they were expecting to be pretty quickly reunited with a parent or sponsor. That didn’t create a big incentive for them to try to run away.”

As the lengths of stay increase with sponsors less likely to come forward, he said, “that might conceivably create an incentive to voluntarily depart.”

For many of the teens, who may have already run away from gangs in their home countries, as well as predators along the route and the Border Patrol, bolting from the shelters is unsurprising.

In February, a recent arrival at Southwest Key’s Tucson shelter, whom staff and ICE believed was older than he claimed, jumped off a second-floor balcony into the parking lot, climbed a light pole and bounded over the fence.

At the Lincoln Hall Boys’ Haven in the New York suburbs, four boys disappeared in 2016 after being taken to a clinic for X-rays and other medical treatment. Last summer, two boys who were awaiting deportation at the Southwest Key shelter in Conroe, Texas, took off running as a large group of students was being escorted to a class.

According to ORR’s policy guide, agency staff are supposed to assess whether a child is an “escape risk” in deciding whether to place him or her in a more secure setting.

But in most facilities, the kids can’t be forcibly restrained from leaving.

“We are not a detention center,” said Eller, the Southwest Key spokesman. “If a child leaves the property, we cannot force them to stay, but we talk to them and we work with law enforcement to ensure their continued safety.”

Court records describe the Honduran teen by the initials M.A.C. He’d crossed the border in McAllen, Texas, and was taken to the Southwest Key facility in Tucson, where he was told caseworkers would help reunite him with his father in South Carolina. He’d been in the U.S. just five days and the next day was his 16th birthday.

In the dim morning hours that Saturday, a man M.A.C. knew only as Oscar walked into his room, wearing a Southwest Key T-shirt that read “I Love My Job.”

Oscar Trujillo, 46, was one of the first people M.A.C. met when he arrived at the facility on Friday, April 10, 2015. He viewed Oscar as an adult he could trust.

Standing at the boy’s bedside, Trujillo lifted M.A.C.’s blanket and began tickling him on the chest and stomach, according to transcripts of his 2017 trial. The boy testified that he was confused, but he didn’t shout or pull away because he saw Trujillo as a grownup and a teacher.

M.A.C. didn’t know that Trujillo had already violated one of Southwest Key’s major rules by entering the child’s room alone.

“That is something that is instilled in our minds day one,” said Jeff Cotton, a former Southwest Key employee who was the shift supervisor the day Trujillo entered the boy’s room. “Do not be alone with these kids because there could be an instance where you are accused and if you are accused, you want to have a witness.”

Trujillo left the boy’s room, but returned a short time later and lifted the child’s blanket again. He resumed the tickling, but this time he also rubbed M.A.C.’s penis through his clothing, court records show. The boy moved Trujillo’s hand.

“I know what you want, I can give you anything you need,” Trujillo told the boy, according to police records.

Trujillo left the room, and again returned a short time later. Surveillance cameras caught Trujillo entering and exiting M.A.C.’s room alone each time. On his third trip into the boy’s room, Trujillo attempted to lift the child’s boxers and slip his hand in the boy’s underwear, according to trial records.

This time M.A.C. pulled away. Trujillo asked the child not to tell anyone or else his job could be at risk, the records show. The boy, feeling violated and confused, got dressed and stood in line at the cafeteria.

“I felt uncomfortable over everything that had happened,” M.A.C. told a jury last year. “I knew it was something that shouldn’t be happening in a place like that, and I knew that I needed to say something to someone about that, because it was something that was serious. So I asked to speak to my counselor.”

After M.A.C. was interviewed by police and a psychologist, Trujillo was arrested and never returned to the Southwest Key facility.

Trujillo could not be reached for this story, but in court he testified that he went in and out of M.A.C.’s room to give him toiletries and to teach him how to make his bed.  Trujillo’s attorneys also claimed that M.A.C. concocted the abuse claim in order to become a candidate for a U-Visa, which allows immigrants who are victims of crimes to remain in the country.

The jury wasn’t convinced. Trujillo was convicted of one count of molestation and sentenced to three years of probation.

“It’s hard for me to imagine that children and youth that are coming from other countries are arriving here and trying to play the system and apply for things that even people that have been here for years don’t know about,” said Chavez-Dueñas, the clinical psychologist, who is also an associate professor at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association, said the problems revealed in the police and court records are to be expected given the “very significant needs” of the children and the staff’s lack of specialized training. His organization has offered its membership’s expertise to assist the facilities.

With such a mismatch in needs and capacity, he said, “You’re more likely to have kids running away. You’re more likely to have incidents of sexual and physical abuse.”

Such a result, Evans said, is “not surprising.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

‘Medicare for All’ Would Save a ‘Whopping $2 Trillion’ Over 10 Years

If the billionaire Koch brothers really want to undermine the economic case for Medicare for All, they have a funny way of showing it.

Judging by the headlines alone, it would appear that the newly published study projecting that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) widely popular Medicare for All plan would cost $32.6 trillion over the next decade was conducted by an official, neutral body seeking the facts, not pushing an agenda.

Read a bit further, though, and you’ll discover that the analysis—released Monday morning—was produced by the George Mason University-based Mercatus Center, which has received millions of dollars in funding from the right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch, who have previously expressed support for abolishing Medicare and Medicaid entirely.

“This grossly misleading and biased report is the Koch brothers’ response to the growing support in our country for a ‘Medicare for All’ program,” Sanders said in response to the study, which was penned by Charles Blahous, who previously worked as a senior economic adviser to former President George W. Bush.

But as Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project notes—though absent or buried in much of the initial reporting—even the Koch brothers’ numbers, which Sanders says are vastly inflated, demonstrate that the “U.S. could insure 30 million more Americans and virtually eliminate out-of-pocket healthcare expenses” while saving “a whopping $2 trillion” in the process.*

“At first glance, it is strange that the Mercatus center…would publish a report this positive about Medicare for All,” writes Bruenig.

“The claim that ‘even the Koch organizations say it will save money while covering everyone’ provides a useful bit of rhetoric for proponents of the policy,” he adds. “But the real game here for Mercatus is to bury the money-saving finding in the report’s tables while headlining the incomprehensibly large $32.6 trillion number in order to trick dim reporters into splashing that number everywhere and freaking out.”

This “strategy,” Bruenig notes, was quite successful.

While most outlets don’t even mention the buried cost-saving conclusion of the Mercatus report, Axios—whose headline reads “Bernie’s ‘Medicare for All’ predicted to cost nearly $33 trillion”—includes this line at the very bottom of its piece, in the “worth noting” section: “All told, ‘Medicare for All’ would actually slightly reduce the total amount we pay for health care.”

Even a Koch brothers-funded attempt to trash Medicare for All can’t hide the truth: Medicare for All will lead to a $2 TRILLION REDUCTION in national health expenditures over 10 years.

That’s trillion with a “T.” https://t.co/eOfd29cDoa

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 30, 2018

It’s not research, it’s Koch-funded propaganda that STILL says it’s a net SAVINGS. https://t.co/1tNCKShuxq

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) July 30, 2018

“Even if you take the report’s headline figures at face value, the picture it paints is that of an enormous bargain,” Bruenig concludes. “We get to insure every single person in the country, virtually eliminate cost-sharing, and save everyone from the hell of constantly changing health insurance all while saving money. You would have to be a fool to pass that offer up.”

In 2016, the United States spent $3.4 trillion on healthcare; projected over ten years—and assuming costs don’t rise, as they’re expected to—that’s $34 trillion. By 2025, the current for-profit healthcare system is expected to cost a staggering $5.5 trillion per year.

Additionally, America spends far more on healthcare per capita than other industrialized nations—most of which have some form of government-funded universal healthcare—and achieves worse outcomes.

These soaring costs are a major reason most Americans—and even a growing number of Republicans—now support a Medicare for All-type system, according to recent surveys.

As Common Dreams reported, Medicare for All is also gaining steam on Capitol Hill, with more than 70 House Democrats joining the newly formed Medicare for All Caucus, which will devote significant energy and resources to studying what it would take to implement a single-payer system in the U.S. and guarantee healthcare to all Americans as a right.

As Sanders said Monday in response to the Mercatus study, “If every major country on Earth can guarantee healthcare to all, and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States cannot do the same.”

*Correction: This post, based largely on the analysis of Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project, initially stated that savings from Medicare for All would be $303 billion over ten years. Bruenig subsequently changed this number due to a miscalculation. The correct number is actually $2 trillion.

Thousands More Flee California Wildfires as Deadliest Blaze Slows

REDDING, Calif. — Thousands more people fled their homes after wildfires surged near a small lake town in Northern California, and the advance of the state’s largest, deadliest blaze slowed slightly after days of explosive growth, authorities said.

In all, more than 10,000 people were under mandatory evacuation orders from the two blazes in Mendocino and Lake counties. Those fires were among 17 burning across the state, where fire crews were stretched to the limit.

A man whose wife and two great-grandchildren were among the six people who perished in the so-called Carr Fire, near Redding, California, said he did not receive any warning to evacuate.

Ed Bledsoe told CBS News he did not know his home was in danger when he left his wife, Melody, and the 4- and 5-year-old children to run an errand on Thursday.

Bledsoe said he received a phone call from his wife 15 minutes later saying he needed to get home because the fire was approaching. He said one of the children told him the blaze was at the back door. When he tried to return, the road was blocked with cars, and flames prevented him from returning on foot.

Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko told the network there’s an investigation into whether the Bledsoe home received a warning call or a knock on the home’s door. The sheriff says there is evidence that door-to-door notifications were made in the area.

The latest evacuations included about 1,000 people in Mendocino County, Undersherriff Matthew Kendall said Monday.

The rest are in Lake County, where residents of the town of Lakeport, population 5,000, were ordered to leave Sunday night. Two other towns with about 5,000 people are also under mandatory evacuation.

The two blazes have destroyed six homes and are threatening 10,000 others. The fires had blackened 87 square miles (225 square kilometers), with minimal containment.

The wildfires that started Friday are about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Redding.

Crews handling the blaze near Redding struck a hopeful tone for the first time in days as the massive fire slowed after days of rapid expansion.

“We’re feeling a lot more optimistic today as we’re starting to gain some ground rather than being in a defensive mode on this fire all the time,” said Bret Gouvea, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s incident commander on the blaze around Redding, a city about 230 miles (370 kilometers) north of San Francisco.

As of Monday, the Redding fire had destroyed 723 homes, up from a previous count of 657 homes.

Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said authorities found a sixth victim of the blaze at a home that was consumed by flames, though he declined to say where. The victim’s identity was not released.

Authorities were also investigating at least 18 missing-persons reports, though many of them may simply be people who have not checked in with friends or family, police said.

The Carr Fire that threatened Redding — a city of about 92,000 people — was ignited by a vehicle problem a week ago about 10 miles (16 kilometers) west of the city. On Thursday, it swept through the historic Gold Rush town of Shasta and nearby Keswick, fueled by gusty winds and dry vegetation. It then jumped the Sacramento River and took out subdivisions on the western edge of Redding.

Redding Police Chief Roger Moore kept up a round-the-clock work schedule despite learning that his home was one of those destroyed. He was finally able to shave on Saturday when his wife brought him a razor, he said.

Moore was helping evacuate people from his River Ridge neighborhood in western Redding when the flames became unbearable.

“I saw everything around it ignite, and I go, ‘It’s gone,'” Moore said.

At least one person was arrested on suspicion of stealing from evacuated homes and authorities were keeping watch for other potential looters, said Deputy Travis Ridenour, whose home also burned.

“Lost our house like so many others,” Ridenour wrote on Facebook. “Still out watching over the ones still standing. No looting on my watch.”

After days of fortifying the areas around Redding, fire crews were increasingly confident that the city would escape further damage. The fire had not grown inside the city limits since Saturday, Gouvea said.

Some of the 38,000 people forced to evacuate said they were frustrated because they didn’t know whether their homes were standing or were destroyed. Authorities had not reopened any evacuated neighborhoods where fires raged due to safety and ongoing investigations and urged people to be patient.

Fed up, on Sunday morning Tim Bollman hiked 4 miles (6 kilometers) to check on the Redding home he built for his wife and two sons 13 years ago. He found rubble.

“There’s not even anything to pick up,” he said. “It’s completely gone.”

Keswick, a mountain town of about 450 people, was reduced to an ashy moonscape of blackened trees and smoldering rubble.

The terrain surrounding nearby Whiskeytown Lake — usually filled in July with vacationers swimming in the clear water — was burned, burning or seemingly about to burn Sunday. A heavy haze hung low over the water, where some of the docked boats had melted.

Firefighters and utility repair crews drove up and down the once-scenic highway, while California Department of Transportation water trucks sprayed roadsides in hopes of preventing potential wildfires from burning across the road, which can cost several million dollars to repair.

Meanwhile, officials said a second firefighter died fighting a huge blaze to the south near Yosemite National Park. Brian Hughes, 33, was struck by a tree while removing brush and other fuel near the so-called Ferguson Fire’s front lines, officials said.

Originally from Hawaii, Hughes had been with California’s Arrowhead Interagency Hotshots for four years and reached the rank of captain. Earlier this month, firefighter Braden Varney was killed when the bulldozer he was operating overturned while he was fighting the flames near the national park.

Some evacuations were lifted, but officials said Yosemite Valley, the heart of tourism in the park, will remain closed until Aug. 3.

___

Thanawala reported from San Francisco. Associated Press writers Martha Mendoza in Redding and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

After #MeToo Comes #MeTwo: Germans Take On Everyday Racism

BERLIN — After #MeToo comes #MeTwo.

The hashtag has become a rallying point for scores of second- and third-generation immigrants in Germany, who have taken to Twitter to share their accounts of everyday racism and how they still struggle to be accepted as Germans.

The hashtag, which echoes the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment, was created by Ali Can, a 24-year-old journalist of Turkish descent, following the furor over Turkish-German soccer star Mesut Ozil’s recent resignation from the German national team.

Ozil, the son of Turkish immigrants, quit earlier this month after fierce criticism of his decision to pose for a picture with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In reaction, Ozil attacked the German soccer federation, its president, fans and the media, criticizing what he said was racism and double standards in the treatment of people with Turkish roots. “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose,” he said.

Can used the #MeTwo hashtag because he wanted to show that ethnic minorities in Germany often feel connected to two cultures or places at the same time: Germany and the country of their or their ancestors’ origin. By Monday, some 153,000 tweets recounting instances of discrimination had been posted to Twitter, according to the German news agency dpa.

Germany is home to more than 4 million people of Turkish origin, who were invited in the 1960s to help rebuild the country after World War II.

The debate also reflects divisions in Germany over the recent influx of many Muslim asylum-seekers. Since 2015, more than 1 million migrants, mostly from war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, have come to Germany.

A backlash has helped fuel the rise of the anti-migrant and nationalist Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which won seats in the German parliament for the first time last year.

All in all, about 20 percent of the more than 82 million people living in Germany have immigrant roots.

“We need to redefine what it means to be German,” Can, who kicked off the #MeTwo debate, told The Associated Press on Monday.

“No matter how much immigrants want to integrate into German society, they will not be able to do it on their own,” he said. “Everyone here needs to help with integration.”

Among the #MeTwo tweets, many complained about discrimination based on skin color or wearing a headscarf. Others denounced some ethnic Germans’ assumption that even third-generation immigrant children do not fully belong as “Germans.”

Twitter user Moorni recounted her school experience: “Despite good grades no recommendation for comprehensive secondary school. Quote class teacher: Your daughter will anyway wear a hijab and get married early.”

Abeneezer Negussie tweeted, “When a stranger says to you after a nice conversation on a train, ‘your skin color is not your fault, I mean, you unfortunately can’t change it,’ and you understand that he perceives your skin color as something that went wrong.”

Some wrote that despite the pain and humiliation they have suffered through racism, the #MeTwo outcry had important and positive elements.

“The good thing about the racism debate 2018 is, that migrants have finally joined the conversation,” said Turkish-German author Hatice Akyun. “Our parents pretended they didn’t understand and looked away in shame.”

On Twitter, anti-migrant comments soon followed the #MeTwo movement. But some migrants also posted about their positive experiences in the country using the hashtag #MyGermanDream.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas chipped in as well, writing Sunday on Twitter: “It is damaging the image of Germany if there’s the impression that racism is socially acceptable again. We cannot allow that people with migrant roots feel threatened. Together, we have to stand up decisively for diversity and tolerance.”

Trump Golf Course Partly Destroyed Historic Sand Dunes, Scotland Charges

LONDON — U.S. President Donald Trump’s family business partially destroyed legally protected sand dunes in Scotland when it built a golf course north of Aberdeen, according to government reports released in response to a freedom of information request.

Scottish Natural Heritage, which monitors the country’s sensitive and scientifically important sites, said that construction of Trump International Golf Links Scotland “led to the direct loss” of up to 68 hectares (168 acres) of the 205-hectare [506-acre] Foveran Links site. [Editor’s note: The figures given by the agency indicate that up to 33 percent of the historic site was lost.]

The damaged and destroyed drifts, one of the best examples of moving sand dunes in Britain, developed over 4,000 years, according to the agency.

“The construction has removed the vast majority of the geomorphological interest within the vicinity of the golf course,” Scottish Natural Heritage said in the documents.

The documents were released following a public records request made by Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Britain’s Observer newspaper first reported the studies.

Trump International Executive Vice President Sarah Malone said the company owned less than 5 percent of the site of special scientific interest, or SSSI, most of which remains untouched.

“As for the small portion that we do own, no other SSSI site in the land has seen more environmental care or investment,” Malone said in a statement. “The site was ignored until Trump took ownership, and is now celebrated and enjoyed by many.”

As for the land developed for the golf course, “it has changed in parts because we have sown grass, but our environmental consultants and (Scottish Natural Heritage) can confirm that many of the special attributes of the land remains and the wildlife is flourishing.”

The golf course was completed in 2012 and is part of what the Trump Organization envisions as a larger project that could include two golf courses, a 450-room hotel and as many as 1,500 homes.

Scottish authorities approved the outlines of the project in 2008, though each phase will require additional review. The company last week unveiled plans to invest 150 million pounds ($196 million) in the second phase of development.

During the original approval process, Trump promised to minimize any environmental damage, saying he was “fully committed to mitigating the effects of the course on the environment.”

Ward said the Scottish government should consider Trump’s failure to live up to the commitment when it reviews future building plans for the site.

“I think the problem here is the disregard they’ve shown and the way in which they made promises which he has not kept,” Ward said. “I think personally that the Scottish government here has not been as strong as it should have been in holding Mr. Trump to account, and I hope that they will now see the need to do that.”

Critics in Scotland previously accused the Trump Organization of failing to deliver the jobs and investment it promised when the project first came up for review.

The Trump Organization says it has already invested 100 million pounds ($131 million) in what is expected to be a “multi-phased development” costing 750 million pounds ($983 million.)

The proposed second phase will support nearly 2,000 jobs during construction and some 300 permanent jobs after it is completed, the company said last week.

Foveran Links is one of the “least disturbed and most dynamic” dune systems in Britain, which makes it important for studying the natural features of the coastline, according to Scottish Natural Heritage.

“Essentially, what has happened now is that future generations of geologists and geographers won’t be able to go and visit the site,” Ward said. “I find that inexplicable.”

The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat

This is a repost of a Dec. 17, 2017, column by Chris Hedges, who is on vacation. His new articles will return Aug. 19.

The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.

Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of “fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is “going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit—only there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.”

Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that “public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a false narrative.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end have been proven wrong. … We have a free internet going forward.” And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based” and “science-based” are banned.

The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.

“The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”

When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics are abolished.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire warned.

The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.

“Thus all our dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”

We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.

Trump Says He’s Willing to Shut Down Government Over Border Security

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump said Sunday that he would consider shutting down the government if Democrats refuse to vote for his immigration proposals, including a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Republicans, trying to protect their majority in Congress, are playing down the chance of a shutdown as the November election nears. Trump, however, isn’t backing away from the idea.

“I would be willing to ‘shut down’ government if the Democrats do not give us the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall!” Trump tweeted. “Must get rid of Lottery, Catch & Release etc. and finally go to system of Immigration based on MERIT!

“We need great people coming into our Country!” Trump said.

Trump returned to the idea of shutting down the government over the border wall after meeting at the White House last week with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to discuss the fall legislative agenda.

McConnell, asked about a shutdown during a Kentucky radio interview, said it was not going to happen. He did acknowledge, however, that the border funding issue was unlikely to be resolved before the midterm elections.

Ryan said after the meeting: “The president’s willing to be patient to make sure that we get what we need so that we can get that done.” He added that money for the wall was “not a question of if, it’s a question of when.”

Trump campaigned on the promise of building a border wall to deter illegal immigration and making Mexico pay for it. Mexico has refused.

Congress has given the president some wall funding but far from the $25 billion he has requested. Trump wants changes to legal immigration, including scrapping a visa lottery program. In addition, he wants to end the practice of releasing immigrants caught entering the country illegally on the condition that they show up for court hearings.

Trump has also demanded that the U.S. shift to an immigration system based more on merit and less on family ties.

Democrats and some Republicans have objected to some of the changes Trump seeks.

The federal budget year ends Sept. 30, and lawmakers will spend much of August in their states campaigning for re-election. The House is now in recess, returning after Labor Day. The Senate remains in session and is set to go on break the week of Aug. 6 before returning for the rest of the month. McConnell canceled most of the Senate’s recess to give senators time to work on the annual spending bills that fund government operations.

Both chambers will have a short window to approve a spending bill before government funding expires.

Trump would be taking a political risk if he does allow most government functions to lapse on Oct. 1 — the first day of the new budget year — roughly a month before the Nov. 6 elections, when Republican control of both the House and Senate is at stake.

Some Republican lawmakers doubted the government would be forced to shut down.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that he didn’t think shutting down the government just before the elections would be helpful “so let’s try and avoid it.”

Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm for GOP House candidates, agreed.

“I think we’re going to make sure we keep the government open, but we’re going to get better policies on immigration,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” ”The president, I think, wants us to have policies that work for America and work for Americans, and I think that’s what we are going to move forward with.”

House Republicans released a spending bill this month that provides $5 billion next year to build Trump’s wall, a plan he supports.

Democrats have long opposed financing Trump’s wall but lack the votes by themselves to block House approval of that amount. They do, however, have the strength to derail legislation in the closely divided Senate.

The $5 billion is well above the $1.6 billion in the Senate version of the bill, which would finance the Department of Homeland Security. The higher amount matches what Trump has privately sought in conversations with Republican lawmakers, according to a GOP congressional aide who wasn’t authorized to publicly talk about private discussions and spoke on condition of anonymity.

At the White House meeting last week, Trump, Ryan and McConnell agreed that Congress is on track to enact more than half of federal spending before the new budget year begins Oct. 1, but that DHS funding, including the border wall money, doesn’t have to be settled before then, according to a person familiar with the meeting who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Two leading Democrats — Reps. Nita Lowey of New York and California’s Lucille Roybal-Allard — called the $5 billion a waste that “only further enables this administration’s obsession with cruel attacks on immigrants.”

Trump also tweeted on Sunday that there are “consequences when people cross our Border illegally” and claimed many who do so are “using children for their own sinister purposes.”

Trump’s tweet came several days after the government said more than 1,800 children separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy have been reunited with parents and sponsors. A federal judge had ordered the reunions to be completed by last Thursday, but hundreds of children remain separated. The administration says some of their parents have criminal histories.

“Please understand, there are consequences when people cross our Border illegally, whether they have children or not – and many are just using children for their own sinister purposes,” Trump said.

___

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro and Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.

Our ‘Rentier Capitalism’ Is One More Nail in Earth’s Coffin

Paul Street’s column will appear in Truthdig each Sunday through Aug. 12. Its regular schedule will resume when Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges returns from vacation.

“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” This famous socialist slogan, adapted from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” struck Noam Chomsky as a poor fit for most people in the world’s rich nations almost half a century ago.

“There is no doubt,” Chomsky wrote in August 1969 (when I was a sixth-grader mourning the Chicago Cubs’ collapse before the onrushing New York “Miracle Mets”), “that we can learn from the achievements and failures of revolutionary struggles in the less-developed countries. …” But, Chomsky added, “In an advanced industrial society, it is, obviously, far from true that the mass of population have nothing to lose but their chains … [since] they have a considerable stake in preserving the existing social order.”

Chomsky’s statement came at the peak of the post-WWII “golden age” of U.S.-led Western capitalism. As the liberal U.S. economist Paul Krugman has noted:

[Post-World War II America] was a middle-class society, to a far greater extent than it had been in the 1920s—or than it is today. … Ordinary workers and their families had good reason to feel that they were sharing in the nation’s prosperity as never before. And, on the other side, the rich were a lot less rich than they had been a generation earlier. … The postwar generation was a time when almost everyone in America felt that living standards were rising rapidly, a time in which ordinary Americans felt that they were achieving a level of prosperity beyond their parents’ wildest dreams.

Similar developments occurred in Western Europe, where les trentes glorieuses (the “30 golden years” of 1945 to 1975) brought unprecedented middle-class expansion and prosperity combined with a significant reduction in inequality and poverty. Things have changed. Inequality has resurged significantly in the “advanced” nations (what one academic calls “the affluent capitalist democracies”), bringing depressing expansions of poverty.

After four-plus decades of neoliberalism, we now live under the rule of a rentier capitalism, in which the top 10th of the upper U.S. 1 percent owns as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. CNBC reported last fall that 57 percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings; 39 percent have no savings at all. Last January, the same network reported that more than a third (36 percent) of Americans would have to go into debt to pay for a major unexpected expense like a trip to the hospital or a car repair.

Four basic underpinnings of the more broadly shared prosperity in the post-World War II years have been undone inside the “advanced” nations, helping to create such shocking inequality and poverty in the U.S.

First, rising productivity used to be matched by rising wages. However, beginning in the 1980s, U.S. wages stagnated while productivity continued to soar.

Second, rising employment used to generate corresponding wage hikes. This is no longer the case. Today, when employment rises, wages stay stagnant or fall because the new jobs pay worse than the old jobs. The long Obama-Trump “recovery” is biased toward—one might even say contingent upon—the expansion of low-paid jobs, as has been most job growth in the long neoliberal era.

Third, rising employment used to produce more tax revenue for the public sector. Again, this isn’t true today, because so many new jobs pay too little and governments have raised the threshold for paying income tax.

Fourth, rising company profits used to lead to higher average pay. That, too, has gone away. As the British economist Guy Standing noted in his indispensable 2016 book, “The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay”: “Profits are more concentrated in [largely high-tech] firms that don’t employ many workers. Employment has grown mainly in low-tech sectors, weakening the link between profits, employment, and wages.”

These four reversals are most evident in the U.S. and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Britain, but they are global in nature and hold across most if not all the world’s rich nations.

The renascent disparity and want in the “advanced” world is direr than the standard economic data indicate. It’s also about the decline of “social income”—the totality of social and environmental resources we rely upon—and the rising insecurity of that income. As Standing observed:

Social income includes non-wage company benefits and perks such as paid holidays and sick leave, maternity and paternity benefits, company pension schemes and subsidized transport. And it includes community benefits—informal support from family, neighbors, and friends, and access to public services and the commons … an important source of income for those lacking other resources. … Conventional income statistics also fail to reflect the fact that the same money income is worth more to the recipient if predictable and certain than if unpredictable and uncertain. For example, guaranteed access to state benefits is worth more than access to benefits of equivalent amount that depend on means testing, behavior testing or the discretion of bureaucratic officials. Income security has a value in itself.

Beyond economic discrepancies, the population is sorted also by related inequalities of health and life quality. The well-off live in better neighborhoods and experience far less exposure to crime and pollution than do the nonaffluent majority in “developed” as well as in “developing” nations. They and their children attend better schools and have more access to greenspace, quality food and good medical care. They travel and exercise more, enjoy cultural resources on a greater scale, marry better-off spouses (“selective mating”) and pass on pronounced inherited advantages to their progeny.

As the author and philosopher Matthew Stewart recently reported in an essay in The Atlantic, the “winners” are getting healthier while “people in the lower deciles are actually getting less healthy in many respects.” White U.S. working-class life expectancy has declined in recent years—an unprecedented development outside wartime—largely due to the collapse of the labor market and social safety net for lesser-skilled workers.

As the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam showed in his chilling book “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” (2016), the white lower and working (and ex-working) classes are increasingly plagued by many of the same characteristics that 20th-century social scientists identified with the nation’s black urban “underclass”: addiction, high rates of school dropout, fragile and single-parent families, rampant mental illness, domestic and child abuse, and high crime and violence rates.

It isn’t about the dualistic division between “the 1 percent” and everyone else that the Occupy Movement turned into a populist catchphrase—or between Marx’s “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat.” Those dichotomous categories don’t do justice to the multiple lines of class stratification found in contemporary capitalism.

Across the “rich” nations, Standing found, a new “global class structure” has been “superimposed on preceding class structures.” It consists of six core constituent elements defined largely by their ability or inability to garner income from the ownership of property and from the political power and policy influence that flow from that possession: “a tiny plutocracy (perhaps 0.001 percent) atop a bigger elite, a ‘salariat’ (in relatively secure salaried jobs), ‘proficians’ (freelance professionals), a core working class, a precariat, and a ‘lumpen-precariat’ at the bottom.”

The top three groups, Standing determined, “gain most (or an increasing part) of their income from capital and rental income” while the bottom three “gain nothing in rent” and “increasingly … pay rent in some form to the classes above them” (emphasis added). As wealth concentrates primarily in the hands of the rentier plutocracy (the United States’ richest three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—now possess as much net worth among them as the bottom half of the U.S. populace) and the better-off sections of the salariat and professional class (a “9.9 percent” that Stewart in his Atlantic piece finds to have at least “kept pace” with “the top 0.1 percent”), it is the “precariat” and the “lumpen-precariat” that have most dramatically expanded both in the “advanced” (rich) nations and across the world.

The precariat is composed of “millions of people obliged to accept a life of unstable labor and living, without an occupational identity or corporate narrative to give to their lives,” Standing said. “Their employers come and go, or are expected to do so. Many in the precariat are over-qualified for the jobs they must accept. They rely on money wages, which are often inadequate, volatile, and unpredictable.”

The “remorselessly” growing “lumpen-precariat” is “the underclass”: destitute, often homeless and reliant on charity, “suffering from social illnesses including drug addiction and depression,” and especially subject to mass incarceration and criminal marking in the United States.

The classic working class, or proletariat—people working in stable, full-time wage positions usually with schooling that matches the skills their jobs require—is fading, except in China and India. It has been shrinking dramatically in the “developed” world throughout the neoliberal era, a period of savage deindustrialization in the rich nations. That’s because big capital and the better-off salaried and professional “elites” have increasingly relied less on the production of goods and services for their wealth and income as they make more money on the parasitic extraction of rents rooted in the monopolistic ownership of assets.

This rentier extraction reflects and furthers a panoply of corrupt and oligarchic state-capitalist government policies that reflect a revolving door between politics and big business that is ubiquitous across world governments. These include patent, trademark and copyright laws that monopolize profitable knowledge; multiple and many-sided direct and indirect subsidies; ubiquitous regressive tax breaks, credit shelters and loopholes; regressive austerity measures; multiple and often complex debt mechanisms; economic, environmental and social deregulation, and ubiquitous privatization.

Along the way, traditional “Fordist”-era labor markets have been swept into history’s dustbin by outsourcing, automation and the “flexible,” “on-demand” industry trailblazed by such new regional, national and global “labor brokers” as Uber, Lyft and the aptly named company PeoplePerHour.

Rents have not declined in modern society with the disappearance of feudal landlordism. They are more central to ruling-class incomes than ever before. As Standing explains:

[A] tiny minority … across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. “Rentiers” of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed. … Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. … They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of “intellectual property” (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; “above normal” company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.

Especially disturbing is Standing’s discussion of how advanced- and developing-nation governments have been induced to escalate “the plunder of the commons”—the “giving away” (policy-mediated plutocratic taking) of what was once publicly owned and commonly shared to private owners, who garner rental income streams from natural and social resources formerly owned by whole societies on behalf of all, regardless of wealth and other invidious distinctions. Examples of this ongoing enclosure and dispossession include “the confiscation and usurpation of native land, for mining”; the selling off of formerly public oil reserves to multinational corporations at “fire-sale prices”; the handing over of national parks and other public lands to fracking firms; the relentless governmental privatization and commodification of water, city streets, town squares, community and public gardens (and garden allotments), public transport, public housing, social services, health care, the arts, public libraries, museums, concert halls, the educational system and even fresh air and the criminal justice system.

It has nothing to do with the mythical “free market” capitalism that neoliberal politicians claim to uphold. It’s about the rich using the state to make themselves richer and to thereby—since wealth is power and pull—deepen their grip on politics and policy.

This plutocratic, even now oligarchic rentier capitalism’s concentration of wealth and power into ever fewer hands has plunged ever more of us into the precariat and lumpen-precariat (this writer has spent the bulk of his adult life in the neoliberal U.S. shifting among the proficiat, the proletariat and precariat). It saddles us with unsustainable and nerve-wracking multiple debt and rental payments that drain and negate our wages. It heightens violence, racism, anxiety, depression, desperation, scapegoating, illness, addiction, irrationality and suicide. It turns millions of upended people into confused and angry fodder for dangerous demagogues who focus working people’s ire on immigrants fleeing social, political and environmental nightmares created in poor (“developing”) nations by the same global system that engenders widespread insecurity within rich (“advanced”) nations.

And these are not even neoliberal capitalism’s worst sins. The “plunder of the commons” has put humanity on the path to ecological self-extinction as we march to the plainly fatal mark of 500 carbon parts per atmospheric million by 2050, if not sooner. As a young opponent of the planet-cooking Dakota Access pipeline screamed in futility through the glass walls separating environmental activists from the Iowa Utilities Board in the late summer of 2016, “We’ve got nothing to lose but a livable planet.” The walled-off protester cried out in Des Moines, Iowa, situated in the agricultural heartland of the world’s richest and most powerful nation.

While those most vulnerable and exposed to the climate and broader environmental crises today are found in the poorest parts of the world, the “advanced” states ultimately have no special exemption from the lethal consequences of the melting of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets and the permafrost layers of Alaska and Siberia. There’s “no planet B,” even for Bezos and his four children.

In light of the ecological peril, it is interesting to note a change of sorts since Chomsky’s take on what the wealthy world has to learn from what used to be called the Third World. As he noted five years ago, “Trying to mitigate or overcome these threats [to the planet] are the least developed societies, the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them, tribal societies and first nations in Canada,” Chomsky wrote. “So, at one extreme, you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. Unlike Ecuador, and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed.”

These are the most important questions of the current historical moment: economic hyper-disparity, rentier-capitalist plutocracy and, last but not least, the biggest issue of our or any time, environmental ruin. It has been the role of the Twitter-addicted monstrosity President Donald Trump and the Trump-addicted corporate media to (among other things) keep the eyes of citizens and the news cycle off these and other critical matters (see Chomsky’s brilliant reflections last March on Trump’s central role of constant distraction) and recurrently focused instead on his latest insane outrage.

The irony is that the leading climate change denier, Trump himself, is an epitome of precisely the parasitic, aristocratic and plutocratic rentier capitalism that Standing described in his book, published before Trump’s election. The Fortune 400 billionaire Trump is the ultimate bloodsucking rentier. He’s never contributed to the production of any useful goods or services. The vast personal wealth he relied on to leapfrog over the more traditional Wall Street Republicans he defeated in the 2016 presidential primaries by absurdly posing as a champion of the “forgotten” blue-collar working class (especially its white members) was rooted in inherited wealth, landlordism, epic debt manipulation, public subsidy and branding gone wild. Regarding the last rentier attribute, the Chicago Tribune reported three months ago:

Before he ran for office, Donald Trump made millions by selling his name to adorn other people’s products. There was Trump deodorant. Trump ties. Trump steaks. Trump underwear. Trump furniture. … In 2015, Trump listed 19 companies that were paying him to produce or distribute Trump-branded consumer goods. … “It’s ties, shirts, cufflinks, everything sold at Macy’s. And they’re doing great,” Trump told David Letterman in 2012, during an interview in which he’d also complained that China was overtaking the United States as an economic power. “Number-one-selling tie anywhere in the world. …” “The ties are made in China,” Letterman said. Then Trump ran for president.

It was the wealth garnered from anti-worker rentier and global capitalism—including the brazen trademarking of ties manufactured in China and real estate deals made with corrupt investors, politicos and policymakers the world over—and his related extreme media visibility that ironically put Trump in position to mockingly masquerade as a hero of the fading American proletariat in its ongoing struggle with parasitic global and neoliberal capitalism. Even after he spearheaded a massive tax cut for the already absurdly rich 0.1 percent last Christmas, Trump clings to this pose effectively enough to maintain an approval rating in the low 40s, including support from 90 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of union members.

How much longer Trump can keep his distance from the parasitic rentier capitalism that has made his fortune—and whose aristocratic wealth he has expanded with tax cuts and deregulation advanced in the deceptive name of free market capitalism? Probably as long as the U.S. job market continues to grow, pushing the official unemployment rate down closer to 3 percent.

But it’s not about the endless distraction Trump provides. He’s just a symptom—a noxious and maddening one, to be sure, but a symptom nonetheless. It is the class and profits system on which his and other rentier capitalists’ wealth and power rest that we must ultimately fight against and overcome. Millions upon millions of Americans for decades have been losing middle- and even working-class status, income and security and getting knocked down into the precariat, or having to work twice as hard to avoid falling. And it’s all so the already super-rich can get more absurdly prosperous, not through the production of goods and services, but through rents garnered from their monopolistic ownership of artificially scarce assets and their related control of politics and government.

The main thing we have to lose under the current system is a livable earth. As Marx (a great devotee of science) would certainly recognize if he were granted a posthumous research trip into the 21st century, capitalism has not produced its own working-class “gravediggers” (the “revolutionary” industrial proletariat he thought he saw coming into being in his time). The profits system is not the “dialectical” midwife of socialism. It is an environmental as well as social, political and spiritual cancer—an exterminist endgame wired to take us beyond mere precarity to full-on extinction. If all of us—from the bottom up and top down—don’t figure out how to become the undertakers of this commons-plundering rentier regime, the insight of onetime leading neoconservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama will be borne out, though not in the sense he meant: Capitalism will indeed mark “the end of history and the last man,” through literal extinction.

New York Times Publisher Asks Trump to Reconsider Anti-Media Rhetoric

BRIDGEWATER, N.J.—The publisher of the New York Times said Sunday he “implored” President Donald Trump at a private White House meeting this month to reconsider his broad attacks on journalists, calling the president’s anti-press rhetoric “not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.”

In a statement, publisher A.G. Sulzberger said he decided to comment publicly after Trump revealed their off-the-record meeting to his more than 53 million Twitter followers on Sunday. Trump’s aides had requested that the July 20 meeting not be made public, Sulzberger said.

“Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!” Trump wrote.

Sulzberger, who succeeded his father as publisher on Jan. 1, said his main purpose for accepting the meeting was to “raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.”

“I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” he said.

Sulzberger said he told Trump that while the phrase “fake news” is untrue and harmful, “I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists ‘the enemy of the people.’ I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”

Sulzberger, who attended the meeting with James Bennet, the Times’ editorial page editor, said he stressed that leaders outside the U.S. are already using Trump’s rhetoric to justify cracking down on journalists.

“I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press,” the publisher said.

Sulzberger added that he made clear that he was not asking Trump to soften his attacks against the Times if he thinks the newspaper’s coverage is unfair. “Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country,” he said.

Trump reads the Times and gives interviews to its reporters. But the president — who, like all politicians, is concerned about his image — also regularly derides the newspaper as the “failing New York Times.” However, the Times’ ownership company in May reported a 3.8 percent increase in first-quarter revenue compared to the same period in 2017.

The president, who lashes out over media coverage of him and the administration that he deems unfair, has broadly labeled the news media the “enemy of the people” and regularly accuses reporters of spreading “fake news” — the term he often uses for stories he dislikes.

Last week, Trump told hundreds of people attending the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Missouri: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” as he gestured toward journalists at the back of the room and the crowd erupted.

He also told them to remember “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Sulzberger said he accepted the meeting because Times publishers have a history of meeting with presidential administrations and other public figures who have concerns with the publication’s coverage of them.

After Sulzberger took charge, Trump tweeted that his ascension gave the paper a “last chance” to fulfill its founder’s vision of impartiality.

In the tweet, Trump urged the new publisher to “Get impartial journalists of a much higher standard, lose all of your phony and non-existent ‘sources,’ and treat the President of the United States FAIRLY, so that the next time I (and the people) win, you won’t have to write an apology to your readers for a job poorly done!”

Trump’s tweet about his meeting with Sulzberger highlighted tensions that exist between the administration and the news media.

That issue was put on display last week after the White House told one of CNN’s White House reporters she could not attend a Rose Garden event that was open to all credentialed media.

The correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, said she was barred because she asked Trump questions he did not like at a press event in the Oval Office earlier that day. The White House said Collins was barred because she refused to leave the Oval Office after being repeatedly asked to do so. Other journalists who were in the room at the time disputed the White House account.

Anthony Scaramucci, who spent 11 days as White House communications director before he was fired over an obscenity-laced tirade against other staffers in an interview, said he disagreed with the decision to put Collins in the “penalty box.”

Scaramucci told CNN’s “State of the Union” the order likely came from Trump because “he likes to be respected.” But Scaramucci, who said after he joined the White House last year that he wanted to improve relations with the media, added: “Having a war declaration or having that level of antagonism with the press does not help the president, does not serve his interests going into the midterms or the re-election.”

Vice President Mike Pence, in a separate interview, said the administration believes in freedom of the press.

“But maintaining the decorum that is due at the White House I think is an issue that we’ll continue to work for,” he said in a taped interview broadcast Sunday on Fox Business Network.

Warming Climate Is Driving Species Loss

The warming climate is driving species loss, say British  scientists who have researched how the heating of the planet and changes in land use are affecting wildlife.

Evidence abounds that the Earth’s climate is warming fast – faster than expected. At the same time, the threat of extinction is coming closer to many species. But establishing how the two are linked has so far been problematic.

Now, though, the rate at which the globe is warming has been found to be a critical factor in explaining the decline of birds and mammals, according to research by the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Best Explanation

The researchers studied 987 populations of 481 species across the globe, to find out how the rate of climate change and land-use change (from natural to human-dominated landscapes) interact to affect the rate of decline of mammals and birds, and also to see whether species’ body size and location in protected areas  make any difference.

They conclude that the best explanation for the rate of population declines which scientists are seeing is the rate at which the climate is warming.

The study highlights the black-tailed godwit (Limosa limosa) in Germany and Senegal, pink-footed geese (Anser brachyrhynchus) in Canada, cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) in Uganda and black-backed jackals (Canis mesomelas) in Tanzania as among species in decline.

Birds are one of the groups worst affected by rapid climate warming, the researchers say, with effects twice as strong as in mammals. They also find that bird populations living outside protected areas are more severely affected.

In areas where the rate of climate warming is worse, we see more rapid bird and mammal population declines.

The study’s lead author, Fiona Spooner from the Institute of Zoology and the UCL Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, said birds might be more vulnerable because their breeding seasons were particularly sensitive to temperature changes.

This could be leading to the loss of a link between their reproduction cycles and stable temperatures. “Mammal breeding seasons are a lot more flexible, and this is reflected in the data”, she said. A recent study found that birds’ unique vulnerabilities can also include their choice of diet.

The finding on avian reproduction patterns is crucial, because if the rate at which the climate warms exceeds animals’ maximum ability to adapt to environmental changes, local extinctions will start to become more prominent. The research stresses the urgency of understanding the vulnerability of animals to temperature increases and offers a snapshot of what may happen if climate change is not slowed.

The study’s senior co-author, Robin Freeman, head of the Indicators and Assessment Unit at the Institute of Zoology, said: “Our research shows that in areas where the rate of climate warming is worse, we see more rapid bird and mammal population declines. Unless we can find ways to reduce future warming, we can expect these declines to be much worse”.

Problem for Today

But he added: “Importantly, our finding does not suggest that human land-use changes, such as for agriculture, development or deforestation, do not play a role in the decline of birds and mammals, or that because the decline is climate change-related, it’s somehow something for future generations to deal with.

“Rather, this finding suggests that additional data, including higher resolution landscape data, is needed to understand the mechanisms driving these declines”.

Gareth Redmond-King, head of climate and energy at WWF-UK, said: “This report provides further evidence of the growing threat that climate change poses to our wildlife, not only around the world but also right here on our doorsteps.

“That’s why we urgently need the UK government to take action to meet current targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but also to increase ambition to build a sustainable, climate-resilient future in which we restore nature, not destroy it”. WWF and ZSL jointly publish the Living Planet Index Report every two years.