Chris Hedges's Blog, page 524

Social Media Misinformation Campaigns Are ‘Big Business’ Worldwide, Study Finds

While much of the world’s attention is currently centered on efforts by Russian operatives to sow discord among the American electorate with fake social media posts and “troll farms” during the 2016 presidential election, an Oxford Internet Institute study published Friday found that use of social media by governments looking to “spread junk information and propaganda to voters” has become a global phenomenon.

“Social media manipulation is big business,” the researchers found. “We estimate that tens of millions of dollars are being spent on social media manipulation campaigns, involving tens of thousands of professional staff.”

While there is nothing new about political parties and governments using disinformation to manipulate elections at home and abroad, the Oxford researchers note that the massive, easily accessible, and lightly regulated platforms offered by Facebook and Twitter have become enormously powerful tools in the hands of political actors, who have used social media to kick their propaganda campaigns into overdrive and cast doubt on science and public institutions.

“Although closely related to some of the dirty tricks and negative campaigning we might expect in close races (and which have always played a part in political campaigning ), what makes this phenomenon unique is the deliberate use of computational propaganda to manipulate voters and shape the outcome of elections,” the study notes.

In 30 of the 48 countries examined, Oxford researchers discovered “evidence of political parties using computational propaganda during elections or referenda. In emerging and Western democracies, sophisticated data analytics and political bots are being used to poison the information environment, promote skepticism and distrust, polarize voting constituencies, and undermine the integrity of democratic processes.”

Despite recent efforts by Facebook, Twitter, and governments to rein in the proliferation of fake stories on social media, Oxford researchers found that the use of bots to quickly spread disinformation is growing exponentially.

“We actually found 38 countries used bots last year, compared with 17 in the year before,” Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute and co-author of the new study, told McClatchy.

“Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike,” the study concludes. “We cannot wait for national courts to sort out the technicalities of infractions after running an election or referendum. Protecting our democracies now means setting the rules of fair play before voting day, not after.”

White House Rejects Putin Idea for Ukraine Referendum

WASHINGTON — The White House rejected on Friday a Vladimir Putin-backed effort to hold a referendum in eastern Ukraine on the region’s future, distancing itself from the idea in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s controversial summit with the Russian leader.

Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, said the two leaders had discussed the possibility of a referendum in separatist-leaning eastern Ukraine during their Helsinki summit.

But Trump’s National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said agreements between Russia and the Ukrainian government for resolving the conflict in the Donbas region do not include any such option and any effort to organize a “so-called referendum” would have “no legitimacy.”

The back-and-forth came as the White House outlined the agenda for a proposed second summit between Trump and Putin — in Washington this fall — that would focus on national security. Moscow signaled its openness to a second formal meeting between the two leaders as criticism of Trump over his first major session with his Russian counterpart kept up in the U.S.

Trump left the White House for his New Jersey golf club for the weekend.

A White House official said the next Trump-Putin meeting would address national security concerns they discussed in Helsinki, including Russian meddling. The official did not specify if that meant Russia’s interference in U.S. elections. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss planning, said the talks would also cover nuclear proliferation, North Korea, Iran and Syria.

One stop Putin almost surely won’t make is Capitol Hill.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi urged House Speaker Paul Ryan to make clear that Putin wouldn’t be invited to address Congress if he visits Washington.

She said Trump’s “frightened fawning over Putin is an embarrassment and a grave threat to our democracy.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a sunnier view of the likely second get-together.

He said at the United Nations he was “happy that the two leaders of two very important countries are continuing to meet. If that meeting takes place in Washington, I think it is all to the good. Those conversations are incredibly important.”

It was not clear whether such a meeting would take place before or after the November congressional elections in the U.S.

A White House meeting would be a dramatic extension of legitimacy to the Russian leader, who has long been isolated by the West for activities in Ukraine, Syria and beyond and is believed to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election that sent Trump to the presidency. No Russian leader has visited the White House in nearly a decade.

U.S. officials have been mum on what, if anything, the two leaders agreed to in Helsinki during a two-hour, one-on-one meeting. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said Thursday he had yet to be briefed on the private session.

The Russian government has been somewhat more forthcoming.

“This issue (of a referendum) was discussed,” Antonov said, adding that Putin made “concrete proposals” to Trump on solutions for the four-year, Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, which has killed more than 10,000 people. He did not elaborate on what Putin’s solutions would be.

The move may be seen as an effort to sidestep European peace efforts for Ukraine and increase the pressure on the Ukrainian government in its protracted conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region.

In a sign of support for the Ukraine government, the Pentagon said Friday it would provide $200 million in additional training, equipment and advisory assistance to Ukraine’s military.

Trump tweeted Thursday that he looked forward a “second meeting” with Putin and defended his performance at Monday’s summit, in which the two leaders conferred on a range of issues including terrorism, Israeli security, nuclear proliferation and North Korea.

“There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems … but they can ALL be solved!” Trump tweeted.

In Moscow, Antonov said it is important to “deal with the results” of the first summit before jumping too fast into a new one. But he said, “Russia was always open to such proposals.”

The White House is still trying to clean up post-summit Trump statements on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s public doubting of Russia’s responsibility in a joint news conference with Putin on Monday provoked withering criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats and forced the president to make a rare public admission of error.

Then on Thursday, the White House said Trump “disagrees” with Putin’s offer to allow U.S. questioning of 12 Russians who have been indicted for election interference in exchange for Russian interviews with the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and other Americans the Kremlin accuses of unspecified crimes. Trump initially had described the idea as an “incredible offer.”

The White House backtrack came just before the Senate voted overwhelmingly against the idea.

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Associated Press writers Angela Charlton in Moscow, Deb Riechmann in Aspen, Colorado, and Lisa Mascaro, Matthew Daly, Darlene Superville and Susannah George in Washington contributed to this report.

The Birth of American Empire

“The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire”

A book by Stephen Kinzer

By the final decade of the 19th century, the American project sanctified as Manifest Destiny was complete. The western boundary of the United States now stretched to the Pacific Ocean, leaving in its wake the genocide of Native Americans, the purchase of Louisiana without the consent of the governed, and a war of aggression against Mexico. What next? Pursue the colonialist mandate beyond continental borders—or not?

Stephen Kinzer’s “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the Empire” is a compact, bracing history of the answer to What next? It features the drama and decisions of four years—1898-1902—that, in Kinzer’s thesis, set the course of American wars, military expansion and the overthrow of governments throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, interrupted with brief, impermanent periods of “isolationism.”  

Click here to read long excerpts from “The True Flag” at Google Books.

The author collates the eloquent rhetoric and caustic debates between expansionist members of Congress, including alpha male Theodore Roosevelt, aristocrat Henry Cabot Lodge, media giant William Randolph Hearst, and prominent anti-empire social critics and populist orators including Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan and steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to capture vividly the divided political passions and high stakes of the day.   

The empire builders used robust, positively coded terms like “the large policy” to label their aspirations for America’s pre-eminence among world powers and for the aggressive market ambitions of America’s capitalists. The anti-imperialists warned of the erosion of democracy at home, the rise of plutocracy and the blowback from military subordination of other peoples against their will, forecasting what, a century later, Chalmers Johnson incisively named the “sorrows of empire.”

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the spark that inflamed the U.S. quest for overseas colonies. It began with Cuba and quickly stole Puerto Rico, then the Philippines, Guam (seized en route to the Philippines) and Hawaii—all in nine months. In public, expansionists framed these takeovers as beneficent: rescuing oppressed and backward people to catechize and civilize them.  

Independence movements in Cuba, the Philippines and Hawaii were brutally suppressed. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, particularly in the Philippines, which waged guerrilla warfare until its defeat in 1902. While American soldiers tortured and assassinated prisoners, burned villages and killed farm animals (a precursor to the later American War in Vietnam), a pliant press followed military orders and carried no unfavorable coverage.

The war in the Philippines was intensely terrorizing for women in particular. The Anti-Imperialist Review reported that “American soldiers had turned Manila into a world center of prostitution.” Amplifying this too-brief reference to the extreme toll of U.S. militarism on women, Janice Raymond writes in “Not a Choice, Not a Job,” that “U.S. prostitution colonialism, especially during the Philippine-American War, created the model for the U.S. military–prostitution complex in all parts of the world.” The system “assured U.S. soldiers certified sexual access to Filipinas and … became an intrinsic part of colonial practice in Cuba and Puerto Rico.”

Meanwhile, the empire seekers rubbed their covetous hands over the prospect of new customers for manufactured goods, and, in the case of the Philippines, a springboard to the Chinese and Japanese markets. Military bases in the Philippines and Guam would follow to protect and project U.S. economic and military power in East Asia.

Kinzer’s considerable talent joins meticulous research and engaging stories with a canine ability to sniff out the lies beneath the platitudes that sold the public on war. What he foregrounds so credibly are the oversize male egos of “large policy” politicians with more morally grounded and prescient anti-imperialist crusaders. Among these are Booker T. Washington, who, in speaking against U.S. imperialism abroad, warned that the cancer in our midst—racism, the legacy of slavery—will prove to be as dangerous to the country’s well-being as an attack from without. Many African-American anti-imperialist groups emerged and assailed U.S. imperialism for its intrinsic white racist arrogance.

With much detail and nuance, Kinzer tracks the fatal flaws of the immensely talented and populist orator William Jennings Bryan who, for his contrarian vote that sealed the doom of the Philippines, helped determine the fate of our country’s future as an empire. Likewise, the seemingly passive-aggressive William McKinley, elected in 1896 and again in 1900, is unmasked as the imperialist he grew to be over the course of his presidency.  

The final chapter, “The Deep Hurt,” traces the arc of U.S. militarism across the 20th century and into the 21st—a long and unfinished arc that is neither moral nor bends toward justice. At each end of this ongoing arc, the words of two military veterans of U.S. foreign wars distill and corroborate Kinzer’s stateside exposé in “The True Flag.” Brig. Gen. Smedley Butler, born in 1881, began his career as a teenage Marine combat soldier assigned to Cuba and Puerto Rico during the U.S. invasion of those islands. He fought next in the U.S. war in the Philippines, ostensibly against Spanish imperialism but ultimately against the Philippine revolution for independence. Next he was assigned to fight against China during the Boxer Rebellion and was also stationed in Guam. He gained the highest rank and a host of medals during subsequent U.S. occupations and military interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, popularly known as the Banana Wars.

As Butler confessed in his iconoclastic book, “War Is a Racket,” he was “a bully boy for American corporations,” making countries safe for U.S. capitalism. More isolationist than anti-war, he nonetheless nailed the war profiteers—racketeers, in his unsparing lexicon—or the blood on their hands, as bracingly as any pacifist. War is the oldest, most profitable racket, he wrote—one in which billions of dollars are made for millions of lives destroyed.  

Making the world “safe for democracy” was, at its core, making the world safe for war profits. Of diplomacy Butler wrote, “The State Department … is always talking about peace but thinking about war.” He proposed an “Amendment for Peace”: In essence, keep the military (Army, Navy, Air Force) on the continental U.S. for the purpose of defense against military invasions here.   

And in the 21st century, Maj. Danny Sjursen, who served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan, proposes that the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of Offense. His reasons: American troops are deployed in 70 percent of the world’s countries; American pilots are currently bombing seven countries; and the U.S., alone among nations, has divided the six inhabited continents into six military commands. Our military operations exceed U.S. national interests and are “unmoored” from reasoned strategy and our society’s needs, Sjursen concludes.

For all of this book’s strengths, one glaring lacuna is the minimalist presence of women in Kinzer’s depiction of the early anti-imperialist movement. “The True Flag” is premised on history as made by “great men”—good and bad. A “great woman” of this era, Jane Addams, elected vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League after a brilliant speech, has only a bit part. Addams was renowned not only for her settlement house work at Hull House in Chicago, but also for speaking out unceasingly against imperialism and war. The FBI kept a file on her, and she was labeled among the most dangerous women in America. The author overlooked her influence in this era.

A second lacuna is omitting the original sins of imperial America: the genocide of Native Americans for their land, and the enslavement of Africans, which ultimately became the combustion engine of U.S. capitalism. Ironically, it was the pro-empire exhorters of 1898 who used the exploitative expansion within the early U.S. to defend extending Manifest Destiny to the Pacific region. “If we should not do this in the Philippines, why was it acceptable to do here?” challenged Henry Cabot Lodge, the imperialist senator from Massachusetts.  

The Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran could have penned these words from 1933 for our national dilemma today: Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. …

Trump on Tape About Paying Off Playboy Model, Report Says

NEW YORK—President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer secretly recorded Trump discussing a possible payment to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with him, a person familiar with an investigation into the attorney told The Associated Press on Friday.

The president’s current personal lawyer confirmed the conversation and said it showed Trump did nothing wrong, according to The New York Times, which first reported on the recording.

The FBI has the recording, which lawyer Michael Cohen made two months before Trump’s 2016 election, according to the person who spoke to the AP. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing inquiry, said the payment was never made.

The FBI raided Cohen’s office, home and hotel room in April amid an investigation into his business dealings, including any information on payments made in 2016 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. She says she had an affair with Trump in 2006. He denies it.

The Wall Street Journal revealed, days before the election, that the National Enquirer — run by Trump supporter David Pecker — had paid $150,000 to silence McDougal. At the time, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, “We have no knowledge of any of this.”

The Washington Post, citing a person familiar with the recording, said Friday the recording captured Trump and Cohen discussing an effort the attorney planned to make to buy the rights to McDougal’s story for roughly $150,000 from the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told the Times the Republican president did discuss the payments to McDougal with Cohen on the less than two-minute-long recording, but that the payment was never made.

Giuliani says Trump told Cohen that if he did make a payment, to do it by check so it could be documented.

“Nothing in that conversation suggests that he had any knowledge of it in advance,” Giuliani told the newspaper. “In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence.”

Giuliani and Cohen haven’t immediately responded to messages from The Associated Press. Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis declined to comment to the Times.

McDougal’s lawyer, Peter Stris, did not immediately respond to a message.

Cohen, a self-described fixer for Trump for more than a decade, said last year that he “would take a bullet” for Trump. But Cohen told an interviewer earlier this month that he now puts “family and country first” and won’t let anyone paint him as “a villain of this story.”

Hours before the Times published its story, Cohen met in New York Friday morning with the Rev. Al Sharpton, a frequent critic of Trump.

Cohen and Sharpton said in tweets they have known each other for 20 years. Cohen contacted the civil rights activist in recent weeks, longtime Sharpton spokeswoman Rachel Noerdlinger said.

She said the two revisited conversations they’d had over the years when Cohen was Sharpton’s conduit to Trump during clashes over race issues and over Trump’s years of questioning the authenticity of former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Cohen tweeted there’s “no one better to talk to!” than Sharpton, who used his own Twitter account to advise readers: “Stay tuned.”

___

Tucker reported from Washington.

Seymour Hersh Still Afflicting the Comfortable After 5 Decades of Investigative Journalism (Audio)

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has broken some of the biggest stories of the past 50 years. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the 1968 My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. His book “Reporter: A Memoir” delves into his reporting on My Lai, as well as on the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Hersh joins Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer to discuss his war reportage and how opposition to President Trump may be responsible for a resurgence in investigative journalism among young people.

As they ponder why other journalists were hesitant to report on the notorious My Lai case, Hersh tells how he was sensitized to incidents of “tyranny” he witnessed as a young police reporter in Chicago, adding that self-censorship is something he has fought against much of his career.

Before covering the war, he says, he made a point of reading about the history of the conflict and quickly learned that “the war was a bloodbath.”

His reporting on My Lai stunned readers.

The U.S. soldiers of Company C “didn’t just kill babies,” Hersh notes. “They were throwing infants up and catching them on their bayonets.”

But Hersh and Scheer dismiss the idea that the killers were a uniquely twisted band of monsters who just happened to coalesce at a certain point in time. In fact, Scheer notes the journalist’s sympathy for the perpetrators of the massacre. “They had been radicalized by the fact that they were in a foreign country and didn’t understand anything,” Hersh explains. “In a way, they were victims, too.”

As he reported the incident, which the military quickly attempted to cover up, Hersh recalls visiting Paul Meadlo, one of the soldiers involved. When he arrived for the interview, he spoke to Meadlo’s mother, who said, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.”

“God knows what made them do what they did,” Hersh says. But then he answers his own question. “They were trained to do that. In the Army, the first thing they did was take all social values away.”

Listen to their conversation below.

Trump Dials Up Tariff Threat on China

President Donald Trump has indicated that he’s willing to hit every product imported from China with tariffs and again criticized the Federal Reserve, as well as some of the nation’s biggest trading partners.

The comments sent U.S. markets sliding early Friday.

In a taped interview with the business channel CNBC, Trump said “I’m willing to go to 500,” referring roughly to the $505.5 billion in goods imported last year from China.

The administration to date has slapped tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese goods in a trade dispute over what it calls the nation’s predatory practices.

China has retaliated with duties of its own, hitting U.S. imports of soybeans and pork. The administration July 10 announced a second possible round targeting $200 billion worth of goods. Beijing vowed “firm and forceful measures” in response.

Beijing is targeting sectors, like agriculture, that could harm Trump politically at home, though he said in the CNBC interview that he is seeking to do only what is fair.

“I’m not doing this for politics, I’m doing this to do the right thing for our country,” Trump said. “We have been ripped off by China for a long time.”

China does not have the wherewithal to match the U.S. on tariffs, but it has other tools.

China’s central bank is allowing its tightly controlled currency to drift lower against the dollar, a move that could help Chinese exporters cope with U.S. tariff hikes. However, such a maneuver could also reignite an outflow of capital Beijing spent months trying to stanch.

On Friday, the yuan dipped to a 12-month low of 6.8 to the dollar, off by 7.6 percent since mid-February.

Over the past three years, Beijing has gradually widened the narrow band in which the yuan is allowed to fluctuate, though regulators intervene regularly to guide its movement.

With trade tensions rising, so is the pushback in the U.S. from private business that see potentially devastating ramifications, not only from China, but from Europe, Canada, and other countries in Asia.

Trump has ordered Commerce to investigate whether auto imports pose a threat to U.S. national security that would justify tariffs or other trade restrictions. Earlier this year, he used national security as a justification for taxing imported steel and aluminum.

Auto tariffs would escalate global trade tension dramatically: The U.S. last year imported $192 billion in vehicles and $143 billion in auto parts — figures that dwarf last year’s $29 billion in steel and $23 billion in aluminum imports.

Trump has told reporters before that the U.S. could target all of China’s imports.

For a second day, Trump criticized the Federal Reserve, breaking with a long-standing tradition at the White House in avoiding any influence, real or perceived, as to the actions of the nation’s central bank.

The White House on Thursday attempted to ensure markets that the Fed maintains its independence after the CNBC interview was aired. In Friday, however, Trump again attacked the Fed, which is led by Jerome Powell, Trump’s hand-picked choice.

In a Friday tweet, Trump said: “The United States should not be penalized because we are doing so well. Tightening now hurts all that we have done. The U.S. should be allowed to recapture what was lost due to illegal currency manipulation and BAD Trade Deals. Debt coming due & we are raising rates – Really?”

Last month, the Fed raised its benchmark rate for a second time this year and projected two more increases in 2018. Its rate hikes are meant to prevent the economy from overheating and igniting high inflation. But rate increases also make borrowing costlier for households and companies and can weaken the pace of growth. In particular, the Fed’s most recent rate hikes could dilute some of the benefit of the tax cuts Trump signed into law last year.

Rule on Hold as NFL, Players Union Hash Out Anthem Protests

The NFL’s two-month old national anthem policy is on hold.

Hours after The Associated Press reported that Miami Dolphins players who protest on the field during the anthem could be suspended for up to four games under a team policy issued this week, the league and the players union issued a joint statement late Thursday night saying the two sides are talking things out.

“The NFL and NFLPA, through recent discussions, have been working on a resolution to the anthem issue. In order to allow this constructive dialogue to continue, we have come to a standstill agreement on the NFLPA’s grievance and on the NFL’s anthem policy. No new rules relating to the anthem will be issued or enforced for the next several weeks while these confidential discussions are ongoing,” the statement read. “The NFL and NFLPA reflect the great values of America, which are repeatedly demonstrated by the many players doing extraordinary work in communities across our country to promote equality, fairness and justice. Our shared focus will remain on finding a solution to the anthem issue through mutual, good faith commitments, outside of litigation.”

The issue has dominated headlines over the past two seasons, caused division and alienated some fans.

The NFL rule that was passed in May forbid players from sitting or taking a knee if they are on the field or sidelines during “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but allowed them to stay in the locker room if they wish. The policy said teams would be fined if players didn’t stand during the anthem while on the field. The league left it up to teams on how to punish players.

None of the team policies had been made public until the AP obtained a copy of Miami’s nine-page discipline document. It included a one-sentence section on “Proper Anthem Conduct” and was provided to the AP by a person familiar with the policy who insisted on anonymity because the document is not public. It classifies anthem protests under a large list of “conduct detrimental to the club,” all of which could lead to a paid or unpaid suspension, a fine or both.

The Dolphins said in a statement: “The NFL required each team to submit their rules regarding the anthem before their players reported to training camp. We will address this issue once the season starts. All options are still open.”

Miami can choose not to issue any suspension nor fine any player guilty of “conduct detrimental to the club.” Other violations under that label include drug use or possession, gambling, breaking curfew and riding motorcycles as a driver or passenger from the start of camp until the last game of the season.

Jets acting owner Christopher Johnson said shortly after the league announced its policy that he will not punish his players for any peaceful protests — and would pay any potential fines incurred by the team as a result of his players’ actions.

The new league rules were challenged this month in a grievance by the players union. The NFLPA said the NFL policy, which the league imposed without consultation with the players union, is inconsistent with the collective bargaining agreement and infringes on player rights. Now, the two sides are hoping to reach a solution without litigation.

Dolphins veteran receiver Kenny Stills took a knee with a hand on his heart during the anthem throughout last season. Defensive tackle Jordan Phillips put his arm around Stills before one game. Two other players who knelt — safety Michael Thomas and tight end Julius Thomas — are no longer with the team.

Defensive end Robert Quinn, who raised his fist during the anthem while with the Rams, is now with the Dolphins.

“Players who are on the field during the Anthem performance must stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem,” says the 16th and final bullet point on Miami’s list of conduct considered detrimental, below disparaging teammates, coaches or officials including NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

The NFL started requiring players to be on the field for the anthem in 2009 — the year it signed a marketing deal with the military.

In 2016, then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began protesting police brutality, social injustice and racial inequality by kneeling during the national anthem, and the demonstration spread to other players and teams.

Critics led by President Donald Trump called the players unpatriotic and even said NFL owners should fire any player who refused to stand during the anthem. Some players countered that their actions were being misconstrued and that they are seeking social change rather than protesting the anthem itself.

Trump’s criticism led more than 200 players to protest during one weekend, and some kept it up throughout the season.

The league and a coalition of players have been working in tandem to support player initiatives for a variety of social issues. The NFL is committing $90 million over the next seven years to social justice causes in a three-segment plan that involves league players.

Kaepernick didn’t play at all last season and still hasn’t been picked up by another team. He threw 16 touchdown passes and four interceptions in his final season in 2016. Safety Eric Reid, one of Kaepernick’s former teammates and another protest leader, is also out of work.

Both have filed collusion grievances against the NFL.

___

AP Sports Writer Steven Wine in Miami, AP Sports Writer Dennis Waszak in New York and AP Pro Football Writer Barry Wilner in New York contributed to this report.

Filmmaker-Photographer Lauren Greenfield on Rise of ‘Generation Wealth’ and Fall of the Empire

While the crash of 2008 unleashed panic on Wall Street and in seats of power worldwide, not much has been done to remedy its causes. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act, expanding government oversight of the U.S. financial system, designed to safeguard against future collapse. But in May, President Donald Trump signed into law a partial rollback of Dodd-Frank, affecting banking regulations.

Although shady financial dealings and banking practices facilitated the crash, low-interest rates and the general public’s impractical desire to own houses and big-ticket items they could not afford drove it. This fact, to photographer and documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, pointed to something rotten at the core of American culture.

She goes in search of that rotten something in her new film, “Generation Wealth,” on Amazon and in New York and Los Angeles theaters starting Friday. What she finds are variations on the same issues she has examined throughout her career, beginning with “Thin,” her 2007 Emmy-nominated documentary looking at bulimia. Her short, “Kids + Money,” about the impact of too much cash on precocious children in Los Angeles, explores a theme mirrored in her 2012 breakout, “The Queen of Versailles,” about real estate and business tycoon David Siegel and his trophy wife, Jaqueline, whose plans to erect the largest private home in North America go bust when the 2008 crash hits.

“What was going on in this country in the ’80s and ’90s was a demarcation from what had come before,” Greenfield explains. “Materialism has always been a part of the American dream, but it was connected to a purpose. It was about making a contribution, being a part of a society, being part of a community, perpetuating certain values. Those things have kind of gone away, and it has just become about having more, and playing at celebrity and narcissism. I feel like over the past 25 years, it’s just gone on steroids.”

Greenfield’s parents are psychologist and professor Patricia Marks Greenfield and Dr. Sheldon Greenfield, both graduates of Harvard, where Lauren graduated magna cum laude in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in visual and environmental studies. Raised in Venice, Calif., she attended Santa Monica’s prestigious Crossroads School, alongside people like Kim Kardashian and actress Kate Hudson, both of whom appear as teenagers in photos in the film.

“Research shows that the more people see these images of luxury, the more they think that’s how most people live and the more they desire that. When Trump was elected, he was the apotheosis of generation wealth, not just about money but about image, about celebrity, about real estate, about fake it till you make it,” Greenfield says, noting how “keeping up with the Joneses” has literally become “keeping up with the Kardashians.”

“We have this crazy aspirational gap of what we want, which has not correlated to what we can afford. And I think that’s what led us to the buying that brought on the financial crisis. But it’s also what gives us vulnerability for capitalism. It’s a great driver for creating avid consumers.”

In the movie, Cathy Grant neglects her daughter and takes on debt to pay for multiple plastic surgeries. And Kacey Jordan, a porn star and former Charlie Sheen consort, ends up filming her own suicide attempt. The addictive need to literally remake themselves binds both.

“It resonates with what I have seen with eating-disorder patients, where they want to get to a number on the scale,” Greenfield says. “And when they did [reach their desired weight], it wasn’t enough. That really spoke to the addictive quality and pathology where we can’t stop, we won’t stop until we crash.”

Then there are the Siegels, featured in Greenfield’s “The Queen of Versailles,” who, years after the crash, return to resume their quest to build the biggest house of all in “Generation Wealth.”

“I thought the financial crash was going to teach us, that we had learned our lesson from that,” Greenfield says. “And yet a lot of people went right back to living the same way as they had before.”

It would all seem to precipitate the fall of the empire, as journalist Chris Hedges and others provide context to the grand bacchanalia at the end of American pre-eminence. Yet a 2013 Millennial Impact Report shows 73 percent of millennials volunteered for a cause they believe in and helped double the rate of volunteering in the U.S. from 1989 to 2005 among 16- to 24-year-olds. The same report indicates their low rate of disposable income and rejection of materialism undermines the very basis of capitalism, and they generally hold a leery view of government as a solution to anything.

“We see the children, in a way, being the redemption of the parents,”  Greenfield suggests. “Like the millennials, hopefully there is some possibility of getting out of that cycle of addiction and having agency.”

A Baby Was Separated From Her Uncle at the Border. Three Months Later, Her Mother Is Still Trying to Get Her Back.

Sendy Karina Ferrera Amaya opened her mouth, and a gloved hand gave each cheek a perfunctory brush with a cotton swab.

Fifteen seconds, and the $429 DNA test she’d paid for was over. “Eso es todo,” the lab technician said last Thursday. That was it. Ferrera, 25, gave a tentative smile and walked out to join her fiancé. Squeezing his hand as they drove away, she allowed herself to hope. To imagine her curly-haired 1-year-old daughter wrapped in her arms, much bigger and more wiggly than last time she held her. Maybe next week, she would finally be reunited with Liah, whose name she wore around her neck like a talisman.

Even though the Trump administration is under a court order to reunite children who were separated from their parents under the “zero tolerance” immigration policy, Ferrera has no idea what that means for her family. Liah had traveled from Honduras with her uncle in mid-April. Ferrera was in the U.S. already, having entered undetected months earlier.

She has spent the three months since Liah was taken into U.S. custody trying to get her daughter released from foster care for unaccompanied immigrant children — doing her best to prove to the U.S. government that she is Liah’s mother, and a good one.

She spoke with ProPublica about that experience, allowing a reporter to accompany her to a DNA test and sharing three months of daily communications over WhatsApp with her caseworker which catalogue what have felt to her like a never-ending list of requirements she needs to meet to see her daughter again.

They shed light on the bureaucratic maze that families encounter when trying to retrieve a child from the immigrant foster system run by the Department of Health and Human Services — a place where the rights of foreign parents collide with U.S. officials’ stated desire to protect the interests of children whose backgrounds are unknown to them.

Ferrera’s daughter is one of 11,800 unaccompanied minors in HHS care, many of whom are older kids who traveled alone to reunite with relatives or family friends here. Officials would not say how many more, like Liah, are under 5, but last year almost 7,000 kids under 12 passed through HHS shelters.

Like Ferrera, many of the relatives and friends trying to claim these kids are undocumented, presenting a conflict in which they have to submit to extensive background checks from one arm of the government, HHS, knowing that another arm of the government, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is combing the country to find and deport undocumented people. The fear of deportation has prompted some to avoid the process, leaving kids languishing in the system.

Ferrera was nervous about what could happen at first, but she knew this was the only way to get her daughter back. “If it’s my turn to leave, I’ll go,” Ferrera said. “But with my daughter. Not alone. And so I’m doing this for her.”

She has provided U.S. officials with her Honduran ID, birth certificates, passport, bank statements, proofs of address, fingerprints, extensive documentation for her fiancé, phone contacts and identification for family in Honduras, call logs of her past video calls with her daughter — even ultrasounds, doctors’ records and a photo of matching hospital bracelets from the day Liah was born.

So far, it hasn’t been enough.

HHS officials told ProPublica they would not comment on individual cases. Liah’s caseworkers did not respond to multiple interview requests.

In the past, HHS has come under fire for lax vetting standards: During a period in 2014 when the agency relaxed fingerprint requirements, eight teens were released to human traffickers and were forced to work in slave-like conditions on an egg farm. The agency has since beefed up requirements for reunification, and in recent weeks, HHS officials have defended the system, pointing out that stringent vetting is meant to ensure that children are kept safe.

“Our process may not be as quick as some might like, but there is no question that it is protecting children,” an HHS official said in a phone call with reporters last week. In the process of vetting the parents of 103 separated children under 5, the agency says it found 11 adults with serious criminal histories, one allegation of abuse, and one circumstance in which the adult planned to house a child with a pedophile.

After a judge found HHS was not reunifying separated families fast enough, HHS filed court papers Friday indicating it will loosen its vetting restrictions for the parents of children who fall under the court order.

To Ferrera, the process has felt maddeningly opaque. Each day that passes without an approval gives her a sick, sinking feeling. She has kept up a constant stream of WhatsApp messages to Liah’s caseworker, an employee for Southwest Key, the largest licensed nonprofit shelter provider for unaccompanied children who cross the border.

April 30: How is my daughter? … Do you think they’ll let you send me a photo? It’s been days since I’ve seen her…

May 14: Are we failing at something? … I’m sorry to insist so much but it seems like they aren’t going to give me my child and I feel so desperate, hasn’t the lady from the government given you a response?

May 30: Please, I ask you to help so they give me my baby. I feel that I will die if they do not … It’s unjust, I am her mother.

Sometimes the caseworker responded with mild placations. Other times, days passed without a response. She reminded Ferrera that resolving Liah’s case wasn’t up to her. She was beholden to a señora del gobierno — a government lady — to approve the reunification. And the señora seemed to always have another question or demand.

Ferrera’s fears continue to grow that the government will deem her unfit to receive her child and instead allow Liah to be adopted by someone else.

HHS officials sent ProPublica a general statement about this, saying, “(The) first preference, consistent with federal law, is to release the child to their parent or legal guardian … Reunification is the ultimate goal … and we are working toward that for those unaccompanied alien children currently in our custody.”

Ferrera has read the comments on articles about mothers who took their children on the dangerous journey to cross the American border.

“They say, ‘Why did you leave your country? You know that you can’t stay here because you are illegal.’ They judge you,” she said. “And maybe in this interview, and when you write this report, more people will judge me.”

Despite the potential for “cruel comments” and threat of deportation, she said she wanted ProPublica to tell her story. “While there are some people who criticize,” she said, “there are other people who understand.”

Liah was only two months old when Ferrera headed north with a smuggler, the wound from her C-section still healing. She hated leaving her newborn in her brother’s care, but felt she couldn’t wait any longer.

Liah’s father had turned aggressive when Ferrera told him she was pregnant, revealing he already had a family of his own, she said. He would show up at her house making threats, relatives recalled. Her 16-year-old cousin remembered him appearing one day when the two were alone and Ferrera was pregnant. “He said it would be best to abort Liah,” said Fany Noelia Funes Zaldivar. “I was crying because I did not know how to defend her, and he wanted to punch her in the stomach.”

While Ferrera was pregnant, a friend introduced her to Juan Barrera Bucio online. A Mexican citizen, he had been living undocumented in the U.S. for 15 years, and seemed to be doing well. He had steady work, a kind, calm demeanor, and had already raised two children of his own. They struck up a correspondence and fell in love. Ferrera realized she didn’t have much left for her in Honduras. Her job in construction paid little and was going nowhere. The streets of Olancho, her hometown, were filled with gangs and police who could beat anyone with impunity. “When someone else depends on you, then you start to think of your future, what you’ll offer,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to offer.”

Barrera, and America, had something to offer.

Her family agreed she should go and send for Liah later, when the infant was big enough to stand the grueling weekslong journey through Guatemala and Mexico. Ferrera left with smugglers in late June 2017, having paid $5,000, and entered the U.S. undetected a month later. Barrera, who recently obtained a special employment visa for helping the police catch a criminal, has supported her since she arrived, helping her find work, teaching her bits of English, and introducing her to his favorite chicken marsala dish at Olive Garden.

After Liah began taking her first steps, Ferrera decided it was time for her brother to bring her to the U.S. He sold many of his belongings to pay smugglers $5,000, but Ferrera said he saw it as an investment; if things went well, he could expect to stay with Ferrera and Barrera for a few years to work and save money.

Uncle and niece set out on April 5.

Liah was remarkably calm on the difficult journey, said Ferrera’s brother, Alexander Antonio Ferrera Amaya. They rode in the pitch-black darkness of trailer beds and crossed a river in a rubber boat. When they traveled through the desert for two days, she stayed tucked in his arms and almost never cried. If she began to fuss, he handed her a cookie from his supplies.

On April 14, they crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. The next day, Border Patrol caught them and took them to a detention center. Two days later, Ferrera’s brother’s name was called from a list, but not Liah’s. An agent came for the child. “When they took her from me, she cried,” Ferrera’s brother said. “She wanted to stay with me, and with no one else.” The agent didn’t explain where he was taking her.

The family had hoped that Ferrera’s brother and Liah would be guided by the smugglers and escape detection by immigration authorities. But even if they did get apprehended, they had reason to believe they’d be kept together and allowed to mount an asylum case. They had heard of cases in which young children who couldn’t speak were kept with relatives in family detention centers and then released. “We thought that since she was too small, they would let him stay with her until they brought her to us,” Ferrera said. “But no, they separated her.” Ferrera’s brother was deported three weeks later.

Ferrera and Barrera had planned a celebration with friends on April 21, expecting Liah would arrive by then. That day, Ferrera remained optimistic, thinking a reunion wouldn’t take longer than a month, telling everyone she knew that soon she’d have her baby back. They cooked carne asada. Friends brought gifts for the baby.

Now, Ferrera runs her fingers across those frilly shorts, dresses and onesies, and wonders if Liah will be too big to fit in them by the time they are reunited. Or, a more frightening thought — whether that reunion will happen at all.

The day she was taken from her uncle was Liah’s first birthday. Ferrera was notified the same day by a Southwest Key caseworker that the baby was in their care.

At first, Ferrera was relieved, glad to know Liah was safe and sure she would see her soon. The caseworker seemed businesslike, but also sympathetic. She sent Ferrera a manual and video about reunification, a list of documents she would need to provide, and a warning about potential scammers who target families of unaccompanied minors. She told Ferrera to start saving for the plane tickets for Liah and a government-contracted caretaker, who would fly with her. After Ferrera asked, the caseworker sent a photo of Liah in a high chair, wearing a bib. She was eating a banana, the caseworker said.

Messages show Ferrera begged the caseworker, almost daily, to schedule video calls. Do you think they’ll let me see her on a video call I miss her so much, she texted on May 15. When Liah was still in Honduras, Ferrera would call her sometimes three times a day. The caseworker told her it couldn’t become a weekly thing — her supervisor had to approve it every time.

When they did take place, the calls, while reassuring her of her daughter’s well-being, reminded Ferrera of what she did not know. She was told Liah was in foster care in Texas, but was not permitted to know where, exactly. Liah usually appeared in a nondescript office surrounded by computers, desks and papers. The video framed her tightly, as if she was inside a miniature painting. There were never any other children around, and the workers who accompanied Liah would not respond to questions. What was Liah eating? When does she sleep?, Ferrera tried to ask. But they were silent and only interacted with Liah, who, as time went on, became increasingly distracted during the calls.

All the while, Ferrera was sending the caseworker any shred of paper that could establish her identity as Liah’s mother and show she had a stable life.

“In the past, a parent who comes forward was almost certain to get cleared quickly (unless there was some valid concern the parent would put the child at risk),” said Greg Chen, a director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “But the new administration has erected all sorts of barriers blocking these children from release into these safe family settings. Even worse, ICE has begun targeting undocumented parents and guardians who have been living in the country and who come forward to take custody.”

The growing relationship between ICE and HHS under the Trump administration has alarmed advocates, who have accused the government of using kids as “bait” to get information about undocumented people in the U.S.

Ferrera shared her personal data with HHS at a moment when the Trump administration was preparing to further expand its information-sharing capabilities between the agency and ICE. On May 8, the Department of Homeland Security detailed changes to a system that allows ICE access to records of people seeking to claim children in HHS care.

The purpose, the public notice said, was partly to check their immigration history “and to identify and arrest those who may be subject to removal.”

But Ferrera’s largest fear remained that they wouldn’t give Liah back at all.

Do you think they will say something to me because we live in a trailer? Ferrera fretted to the caseworker on May 16. There are parks nearby, schools, clinics, shops…

And the trailer is in good condition. It’s really clean and the baby’s room has everything that it needs.

The first home visit happened in May. The woman told Ferrera and her fiancé they shouldn’t be worried, Ferrera said. This would be fast and was just a basic requirement. They welcomed her into their tidy trailer, painted white with green trim, with a porch swing out front. They showed her the baby’s pink-accented nursery, filled with toys and a crib with Peppa Pig sheets. She asked about their habits, their schedules, their experience with children. Did they have any guns?

Then, Ferrera says she was told the report came back pointing out some issues: The crib wasn’t big enough. They needed a car seat. Ferrera didn’t have an independent income or any way to get around.

To Ferrera and her fiancé, the questions and new requirements seemed arbitrary, increasingly absurd and even contradictory.

For example, Ferrera had been working a cleaning job when Liah first arrived, but this became a concern. In a phone call, Ferrera said she was asked, how she would reconnect with her child if she was working. Wouldn’t she need time to bond?

So Ferrera quit.

But at the home visit, a new caseworker asked why she didn’t have a job, Ferrera said. Even though they knew she didn’t have a legal work permit, what if she needed to break up with her fiancé?

So she became a babysitter, taking care of three children for $90 a day. She submitted evidence of a separate bank account and the names and IDs of people nearby who she could rely on in case of an emergency.

The caseworkers were also worried she couldn’t drive — what if there was an emergency? They knew she didn’t have a license. Ferrera said she knew how to call Uber and had a friend nearby who could drive her around. Barrera began to teach her after work, practicing turns in parking lots nearby.

On May 31, her caseworker told her she should go to a class run by Women, Infants and Children, which provides federal grants for low-income mothers with children under 5 who are at nutritional risk.

Ferrera looked up the program and expressed her doubts. Barrera was making good money at $28 an hour as an industrial painter, plus overtime now that he had a legal work permit. And she was also earning steadily. Is this obligatory? … It says this is a program for mothers of low economic resources, and so I don’t think I need it, she wrote to the caseworker. We don’t need the government. We can take care of her perfectly. I don’t understand.

But the caseworker appeared to believe parenting classes would bolster her case to her supervisor. I just want to put more appointments so that they can see that in reality you are doing the most possible to get your daughter back, the worker wrote. She pressed the mother to arrange one at a local parish and document it with photos. But when Ferrera showed up, she was told there were only classes in English. She said she would manage by bringing a friend with her to translate.

The caseworker asked for his information too. I want to put it in the file, she said.

Then, Ferrera said, she asked her why she was not taking English classes.

At the second home visit in June, the caseworker asked how Liah would relate to them after they had been separated for such a long time. “I said, ‘I don’t know. I will do everything I can so she gets used to me, and have patience for her because she’s my daughter and I’m her mom,’” Ferrera said. The caseworker said she needed to look for a place to take classes as a parent. So she and Barrera got a family therapist, paying $70 per session each week. She submitted the confirmation receipts to her caseworker.

Trying to find new ways to strengthen her case, Ferrera sometimes sent side-by-side pictures of Liah and herself as a baby, both cherub-faced with a mop of curly hair. She looks just the same as her mom when she was a baby, Ferrera said. At the end of May, Ferrera practically begged to take a DNA test if it would speed up the process. She heard no response.

Ferrera and her fiancé started getting seriously nervous at the end of June as it became clear that the administration was using family separation on the border as a deterrent. Barrera read articles saying immigrants were being told to surrender to deportation in order to get their kids back. Was Liah going to be used as a bargaining chip to make Ferrera return to Honduras? Friends speculated the authorities might be comparing Ferrera and Barrera to other prospective parents, deciding who was in the best interest of the child.

On June 29, the social worker texted she had “received very good news” from the second home visit. She would turn in the case next week.

Another week passed.

You still didn’t receive a response about Liah’s case? Ferrera wrote on July 9.

Yes I received an approval but now I am waiting for a second, she replied. I need two, I only have one for now.

Then on July 12, Ferrera got a sudden notification. She would need to take a DNA test the very next day. She felt blindsided.

What were all the interviews for and the runaround if, since the beginning, they could have done this [DNA test]? she texted the caseworker. Now, I’ll have to wait for more time to reunify with my baby. It’s like everything that we have done was in vain and didn’t serve anything, I feel totally offended. Barrera took the day off from work to drive her to get the DNA test last week.

Now, she prays and leans on Barrera’s words of comfort that everything will work out. The couple tries to focus on the best case scenario: That Liah will be returned, and her court case will go well — though the Trump administration has made it close to impossible to receive asylum based on domestic violence. Maybe, one day, Barrera can turn his U visa into a green card. Maybe then, once he marries Ferrera, he can help her get legal status and unite their family.

But that would be four or five years in the future. In the meantime, the deportation machine has revved up, and all of Ferrera’s information, down to her address and DNA, is in the government’s hands.

In the worst moments, Ferrera says she remembers the day Liah was born. “She was crying. Then, when she got near me, she became quiet. She stopped crying,” Ferrera said. “And then I realized that she knew that I was her mama and that she was with me and that she felt secure and protected. And this is what helped me keep going forward, to keep protecting her, always, keep going.

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House Democrats Launch ‘Medicare for All’ Caucus

With the enthusiastic backing of America’s largest nurses’ union, consumer advocates, sustainable business groups, and the majority of the American public, 62 House Democrats on Thursday officially launched the Medicare for All Caucus, which will be devoted to closely examining the gritty policy specifics of single-payer while working toward one straightforward moral goal: guaranteeing every American “healthcare from the day they’re born.”

“Healthcare cannot be a luxury that’s only available for the wealthy and well-connected—it is a human right,” declared Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who helped found the new caucus alongside Reps. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.). “Medicare for All is the way forward.”

Watch the full launch event:

Martese Chism, a registered nurse and member of National Nurses United, applauded the formation of the Medicare for All Caucus in a speech at Thursday’s event, calling it a necessary step toward the ultimate goal of rooting out America’s disastrous for-profit system that is “failing tens of millions of people.”

“I worked for eight years in the dialysis unit at [Chicago’s] Stroger hospital,” Chism said. “I saw firsthand how so many dialysis patients ended up in kidney failure because they were unable to afford the cost of healthcare. This is a disgrace, and does not need to happen in the richest country on the face of the earth.”

“It is time we have a system that treats healthcare as a right,” Chism concluded.

“As a dialysis nurse, I saw first hand how so many patients ended up in kidney failure because they could not afford the cost of healthcare. This is a disgrace,” Martese Chism RN, @NationalNurses

We urge Congress to pass #MedicareForAll & for all members to join the #M4ACaucus pic.twitter.com/9l1VJjVbd8

— The People's Summit (@pplsummit) July 19, 2018

According to recent polling data, most Americans—and more than 70 percent of Democratic voters—support Medicare for All.

As Public Citizen president Robert Weissman argued Thursday’s event, the primary obstacle in the way of achieving a single-payer is not public opinion, but the entrenched interests of insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

“The problem is not a lack of solutions. We know what the solution is: Medicare for All,” Weissman said. “The problem is the influence and power of the hospitals and the drug companies and the for-profit insurance companies. That’s the problem. And that is why the creation of this caucus is so vital. It’s vital because it represents a turning point in our politics, where people power is now poised to defeat corporate power in the halls of Congress.”

“Millennials will help us, older people will help us, two-year-olds if they can talk will help us,” Weissman added. “Everybody agrees on this, except the vested interests that benefit from a rigged, flawed, cruel, and immoral system.”

While just 62 House Democrats signed on as original members of the Medicare for All Caucus (view a full list of the members here), that number is expected to swell rapidlyin the coming weeks, given that 122 Democrats are currently co-sponsoring the House Medicare for All bill, reintroduced by Rep. Ellison earlier this year.

Outlining the central mission of the new caucus in a series of tweets on Thursday, Jayapal wrote, “We want to make sure that everyone has a practical understanding of how we can make this system work.”

Health care costs are skyrocketing and we must act now.@FamiliesUSA estimates that annually 26,000 adults die due to lack of access to care. In Washington state, one in 10 people report they've delayed necessary care because of its cost. This isn't how it should be.

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) July 19, 2018

“Our Medicare for All Caucus will help build the evidence base for Medicare for All,” Jayapal concluded. “We’ll spread the word on everything from Medicare for All basics to financing to information on healthcare around the world. We will make sure members of Congress and their staff have the resources to move Medicare for All forward.”