Chris Hedges's Blog, page 527

Poll: Trump Voters Worry They or Family Will Be Attacked by MS-13

President Trump can’t stop talking about the Central American gang MS-13. He has done so at campaign rallies, on Twitter and even during his 2016 Time Magazine Person of the Year interview, when he told writer Michael Scherer, “They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met. They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal.”

This consistent messaging has paid off. According to a new HuffPost/YouGov Poll, 85 percent of Trump supporters surveyed believe, as Dana Liebelson and Ariel Edwards-Levy write in HuffPost, that the gang “is a very serious or somewhat serious threat to the United States as a whole.” Approximately half of those supporters “are worried a great deal or somewhat that they or a family member will fall victim to MS-13 violence.”

By contrast, “Among Hillary Clinton voters, only 32 percent consider MS-13 a very serious or somewhat serious threat to the country, and 13 percent are worried about the gang’s violence affecting themselves or a family member.”

The poll results, as Liebelson and Edwards-Levy write, indicate that “the Trump administration may be succeeding in inflating the perception of the gang’s national risk.” While the gang’s influence has expanded beyond its 1980s Los Angeles roots, it owes much of that strength to U.S. immigration policies.

As J. Weston Phippen explains in The Atlantic, MS-13 began when Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles became affiliated with the city’s gangs. After a 1987 Los Angeles police initiative called Operation Hammer put many gang members in prison, the Clinton administration decided to reduce the prison population by sending incarcerated immigrants back to El Salvador, which was in the midst of a civil war.

As Phippen writes, “In one four-year period, the U.S. deported more than 20,000 criminals to El Salvador, and with them they brought tactics learned from U.S gangs.”

El Salvador borrowed the LAPD’s strategy of jailing gang members. Phippen says that “the approach backfired.” Incarcerating gang members may have made MS-13 stronger.

Liebelson and Edwards-Levy explain that gang activity flourished in Central America after the U.S. deported gang members back there. Now, unaccompanied minors are coming to the United States fleeing that violence.

Nonetheless, Trump continues to overstate the influence of MS-13. Liebelson and Edwards-Levy write that the gang is “less a sophisticated international organization than a collection of cliques engaging in violence, small-scale drug-dealing and other crimes. It has about 10,000 members nationwide, according to the Justice Department ― roughly the same as a decade ago.” Gang members are concentrated in Los Angeles, New York and outside Washington, D.C.

These nuances haven’t trickled down to many Trump voters, at least not the ones who responded to the latest HuffPost/YouGov poll. In fact, Trump’s speeches about MS-13 have also influenced his voters’ views on immigration. “Overall,” HuffPost reports, “87 percent of Trump voters want stricter immigration policies, compared with 15 percent of Clinton voters.

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Your Personal Information

This story was co-published with NPR.

To an outsider, the fancy booths at last month’s health insurance industry gathering in San Diego aren’t very compelling. A handful of companies pitching “lifestyle” data and salespeople touting jargony phrases like “social determinants of health.”

But dig deeper and the implications of what they’re selling might give many patients pause: A future in which everything you do — the things you buy, the food you eat, the time you spend watching TV — may help determine how much you pay for health insurance.

With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.

Are you a woman who recently changed your name? You could be newly married and have a pricey pregnancy pending. Or maybe you’re stressed and anxious from a recent divorce. That, too, the computer models predict, may run up your medical bills.

Are you a woman who’s purchased plus-size clothing? You’re considered at risk of depression. Mental health care can be expensive.

Low-income and a minority? That means, the data brokers say, you are more likely to live in a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood, increasing your health risks.

“We sit on oceans of data,” said Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, during a conversation at the data firm’s booth. And he isn’t apologetic about using it. “The fact is, our data is in the public domain,” he said. “We didn’t put it out there.”

Insurers contend they use the information to spot health issues in their clients — and flag them so they get services they need. And companies like LexisNexis say the data shouldn’t be used to set prices. But as a research scientist from one company told me: “I can’t say it hasn’t happened.”

At a time when every week brings a new privacy scandal and worries abound about the misuse of personal information, patient advocates and privacy scholars say the insurance industry’s data gathering runs counter to its touted, and federally required, allegiance to patients’ medical privacy. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, only protects medical information.

“We have a health privacy machine that’s in crisis,” said Frank Pasquale, a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law who specializes in issues related to machine learning and algorithms. “We have a law that only covers one source of health information. They are rapidly developing another source.”

Patient advocates warn that using unverified, error-prone “lifestyle” data to make medical assumptions could lead insurers to improperly price plans — for instance raising rates based on false information — or discriminate against anyone tagged as high cost. And, they say, the use of the data raises thorny questions that should be debated publicly, such as: Should a person’s rates be raised because algorithms say they are more likely to run up medical bills? Such questions would be moot in Europe, where a strict law took effect in May that bans trading in personal data.

This year, ProPublica and NPR are investigating the various tactics the health insurance industry uses to maximize its profits. Understanding these strategies is important because patients — through taxes, cash payments and insurance premiums — are the ones funding the entire health care system. Yet the industry’s bewildering web of strategies and inside deals often have little to do with patients’ needs. As the series’ first story showed, contrary to popular belief, lower bills aren’t health insurers’ top priority.

Inside the San Diego Convention Center last month, there were few qualms about the way insurance companies were mining Americans’ lives for information — or what they planned to do with the data.

The sprawling convention center was a balmy draw for one of America’s Health Insurance Plans’ marquee gatherings. Insurance executives and managers wandered through the exhibit hall, sampling chocolate-covered strawberries, champagne and other delectables designed to encourage deal-making.

Up front, the prime real estate belonged to the big guns in health data: The booths of Optum, IBM Watson Health and LexisNexis stretched toward the ceiling, with flat screen monitors and some comfy seating. (NPR collaborates with IBM Watson Health on national polls about consumer health topics.)

To understand the scope of what they were offering, consider Optum. The company, owned by the massive UnitedHealth Group, has collected the medical diagnoses, tests, prescriptions, costs and socioeconomic data of 150 million Americans going back to 1993, according to its marketing materials. (UnitedHealth Group provides financial support to NPR.) The company says it uses the information to link patients’ medical outcomes and costs to details like their level of education, net worth, family structure and race. An Optum spokesman said the socioeconomic data is de-identified and is not used for pricing health plans.

Optum’s marketing materials also boast that it now has access to even more. In 2016, the company filed a patent application to gather what people share on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and link this material to the person’s clinical and payment information. A company spokesman said in an email that the patent application never went anywhere. But the company’s current marketing materials say it combines claims and clinical information with social media interactions.

I had a lot of questions about this and first reached out to Optum in May, but the company didn’t connect me with any of its experts as promised. At the conference, Optum salespeople said they weren’t allowed to talk to me about how the company uses this information.

It isn’t hard to understand the appeal of all this data to insurers. Merging information from data brokers with people’s clinical and payment records is a no-brainer if you overlook potential patient concerns. Electronic medical records now make it easy for insurers to analyze massive amounts of information and combine it with the personal details scooped up by data brokers.

It also makes sense given the shifts in how providers are getting paid. Doctors and hospitals have typically been paid based on the quantity of care they provide. But the industry is moving toward paying them in lump sums for caring for a patient, or for an event, like a knee surgery. In those cases, the medical providers can profit more when patients stay healthy. More money at stake means more interest in the social factors that might affect a patient’s health.

Some insurance companies are already using socioeconomic data to help patients get appropriate care, such as programs to help patients with chronic diseases stay healthy. Studies show social and economic aspects of people’s lives play an important role in their health. Knowing these personal details can help them identify those who may need help paying for medication or help getting to the doctor.

But patient advocates are skeptical health insurers have altruistic designs on people’s personal information.

The industry has a history of boosting profits by signing up healthy people and finding ways to avoid sick people — called “cherry-picking” and “lemon-dropping,” experts say. Among the classic examples: A company was accused of putting its enrollment office on the third floor of a building without an elevator, so only healthy patients could make the trek to sign up. Another tried to appeal to spry seniors by holding square dances.

The Affordable Care Act prohibits insurers from denying people coverage based on pre-existing health conditions or charging sick people more for individual or small group plans. But experts said patients’ personal information could still be used for marketing, and to assess risks and determine the prices of certain plans. And the Trump administration is promoting short-term health plans, which do allow insurers to deny coverage to sick patients.

Robert Greenwald, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, said insurance companies still cherry-pick, but now they’re subtler. The center analyzes health insurance plans to see if they discriminate. He said insurers will do things like failing to include enough information about which drugs a plan covers — which pushes sick people who need specific medications elsewhere. Or they may change the things a plan covers, or how much a patient has to pay for a type of care, after a patient has enrolled. Or, Greenwald added, they might exclude or limit certain types of providers from their networks — like those who have skill caring for patients with HIV or hepatitis C.

If there were concerns that personal data might be used to cherry-pick or lemon-drop, they weren’t raised at the conference.

At the IBM Watson Health booth, Kevin Ruane, a senior consulting scientist, told me that the company surveys 80,000 Americans a year to assess lifestyle, attitudes and behaviors that could relate to health care. Participants are asked whether they trust their doctor, have financial problems, go online, or own a Fitbit and similar questions. The responses of hundreds of adjacent households are analyzed together to identify social and economic factors for an area.

Ruane said he has used IBM Watson Health’s socioeconomic analysis to help insurance companies assess a potential market. The ACA increased the value of such assessments, experts say, because companies often don’t know the medical history of people seeking coverage. A region with too many sick people, or with patients who don’t take care of themselves, might not be worth the risk.

Ruane acknowledged that the information his company gathers may not be accurate for every person. “We talk to our clients and tell them to be careful about this,” he said. “Use it as a data insight. But it’s not necessarily a fact.”

In a separate conversation, a salesman from a different company joked about the potential for error. “God forbid you live on the wrong street these days,” he said. “You’re going to get lumped in with a lot of bad things.”

The LexisNexis booth was emblazoned with the slogan “Data. Insight. Action.” The company said it uses 442 non-medical personal attributes to predict a person’s medical costs. Its cache includes more than 78 billion records from more than 10,000 public and proprietary sources, including people’s cellphone numbers, criminal records, bankruptcies, property records, neighborhood safety and more. The information is used to predict patients’ health risks and costs in eight areas, including how often they are likely to visit emergency rooms, their total cost, their pharmacy costs, their motivation to stay healthy and their stress levels.

People who downsize their homes tend to have higher health care costs, the company says. As do those whose parents didn’t finish high school. Patients who own more valuable homes are less likely to land back in the hospital within 30 days of their discharge. The company says it has validated its scores against insurance claims and clinical data. But it won’t share its methods and hasn’t published the work in peer-reviewed journals.

McCulley, LexisNexis’ director of strategic solutions, said predictions made by the algorithms about patients are based on the combination of the personal attributes. He gave a hypothetical example: A high school dropout who had a recent income loss and doesn’t have a relative nearby might have higher than expected health costs.

But couldn’t that same type of person be healthy? I asked.

“Sure,” McCulley said, with no apparent dismay at the possibility that the predictions could be wrong.

McCulley and others at LexisNexis insist the scores are only used to help patients get the care they need and not to determine how much someone would pay for their health insurance. The company cited three different federal laws that restricted them and their clients from using the scores in that way. But privacy experts said none of the laws cited by the company bar the practice. The company backed off the assertions when I pointed that the laws did not seem to apply.

LexisNexis officials also said the company’s contracts expressly prohibit using the analysis to help price insurance plans. They would not provide a contract. But I knew that in at least one instance a company was already testing whether the scores could be used as a pricing tool.

Before the conference, I’d seen a press release announcing that the largest health actuarial firm in the world, Milliman, was now using the LexisNexis scores. I tracked down Marcos Dachary, who works in business development for Milliman. Actuaries calculate health care risks and help set the price of premiums for insurers. I asked Dachary if Milliman was using the LexisNexis scores to price health plans and he said: “There could be an opportunity.”

The scores could allow an insurance company to assess the risks posed by individual patients and make adjustments to protect themselves from losses, he said. For example, he said, the company could raise premiums, or revise contracts with providers.

It’s too early to tell whether the LexisNexis scores will actually be useful for pricing, he said. But he was excited about the possibilities. “One thing about social determinants data — it piques your mind,” he said.

Dachary acknowledged the scores could also be used to discriminate. Others, he said, have raised that concern. As much as there could be positive potential, he said, “there could also be negative potential.”

It’s that negative potential that still bothers data analyst Erin Kaufman, who left the health insurance industry in January. The 35-year-old from Atlanta had earned her doctorate in public health because she wanted to help people, but one day at Aetna, her boss told her to work with a new data set.

To her surprise, the company had obtained personal information from a data broker on millions of Americans. The data contained each person’s habits and hobbies, like whether they owned a gun, and if so, what type, she said. It included whether they had magazine subscriptions, liked to ride bikes or run marathons. It had hundreds of personal details about each person.

The Aetna data team merged the data with the information it had on patients it insured. The goal was to see how people’s personal interests and hobbies might relate to their health care costs. But Kaufman said it felt wrong: The information about the people who knitted or crocheted made her think of her grandmother. And the details about individuals who liked camping made her think of herself. What business did the insurance company have looking at this information? “It was a dataset that really dug into our clients’ lives,” she said. “No one gave anyone permission to do this.”

In a statement, Aetna said it uses consumer marketing information to supplement its claims and clinical information. The combined data helps predict the risk of repeat emergency room visits or hospital admissions. The information is used to reach out to members and help them and plays no role in pricing plans or underwriting, the statement said.

Kaufman said she had concerns about the accuracy of drawing inferences about an individual’s health from an analysis of a group of people with similar traits. Health scores generated from arrest records, home ownership and similar material may be wrong, she said.

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit that advocates for privacy in the digital age, shares Kaufman’s concerns. She points to a study by the analytics company SAS, which worked in 2012 with an unnamed major health insurance company to predict a person’s health care costs using 1,500 data elements, including the investments and types of cars people owned.

The SAS study said higher health care costs could be predicted by looking at things like ethnicity, watching TV and mail order purchases.

“I find that enormously offensive as a list,” Dixon said. “This is not health data. This is inferred data.”

Data scientist Cathy O’Neil said drawing conclusions about health risks on such data could lead to a bias against some poor people. It would be easy to infer they are prone to costly illnesses based on their backgrounds and living conditions, said O’Neil, author of the book “Weapons of Math Destruction,” which looked at how algorithms can increase inequality. That could lead to poor people being charged more, making it harder for them to get the care they need, she said. Employers, she said, could even decide not to hire people with data points that could indicate high medical costs in the future.

O’Neil said the companies should also measure how the scores might discriminate against the poor, sick or minorities.

American policymakers could do more to protect people’s information, experts said. In the United States, companies can harvest personal data unless a specific law bans it, although California just passed legislation that could create restrictions, said William McGeveran, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. Europe, in contrast, passed a strict law called the General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in May.

“In Europe, data protection is a constitutional right,” McGeveran said.

Pasquale, the University of Maryland law professor, said health scores should be treated like credit scores. Federal law gives people the right to know their credit scores and how they’re calculated. If people are going to be rated by whether they listen to sad songs on Spotify or look up information about AIDS online, they should know, Pasquale said. “The risk of improper use is extremely high. And data scores are not properly vetted and validated and available for scrutiny.”

As I reported this story I wondered how the data vendors might be using my personal information to score my potential health costs. So, I filled out a request on the LexisNexis website for the company to send me some of the personal information it has on me. A week later a somewhat creepy, 182-page walk down memory lane arrived in the mail. Federal law only requires the company to provide a subset of the information it collected about me. So that’s all I got.

LexisNexis had captured details about my life going back 25 years, many that I’d forgotten. It had my phone numbers going back decades and my home addresses going back to my childhood in Golden, Colorado. Each location had a field to show whether the address was “high risk.” Mine were all blank. The company also collects records of any liens and criminal activity, which, thankfully, I didn’t have.

My report was boring, which isn’t a surprise. I’ve lived a middle-class life and grown up in good neighborhoods. But it made me wonder: What if I had lived in “high risk” neighborhoods? Could that ever be used by insurers to jack up my rates — or to avoid me altogether?

I wanted to see more. If LexisNexis had health risk scores on me, I wanted to see how they were calculated and, more importantly, whether they were accurate. But the company told me that if it had calculated my scores it would have done so on behalf of their client, my insurance company. So, I couldn’t have them.

Senior research fellow Claire Perlman contributed to this story.

Trump Corrects His Quote, Says He Misspoke on Russian Meddling

WASHINGTON — Blistered by bipartisan condemnation of his embrace of a longtime U.S. enemy, President Trump sought Tuesday to “clarify” his public undermining of American intelligence agencies, saying he had misspoken when he said he saw no reason to believe Russia had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.

“The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t, or why it wouldn’t be Russia” instead of “why it would,” Trump said, in a rare admission of error by the bombastic U.S. leader. His comment came — amid rising rebuke by his own party — about 27 hours after his original, widely reported statement, which he made at a Monday summit in Helsinki standing alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place,” Trump said Tuesday. But he added, as he usually does, “It could be other people also. A lot of people out there. There was no collusion at all.”

Moments earlier, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell issued a public reassurance to U.S. allies in NATO and Europe with whom Trump clashed during his frenzied Europe trip last week.

“The European countries are our friends, and the Russians are not,” McConnell said.

The scripted cleanup dealt with only the latest of Trump’s problematic statements during his week-long trip, in which he sent the NATO alliance into emergency session and assailed British Prime Minister Theresa May as she was hosting him for an official visit.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Trump was trying to “squirm away” from his comments alongside Putin. “It’s 24 hours too late and in the wrong place,” he said.

Trump still maintained that his meetings with NATO allies went well and his summit with Putin “even better.”

This reference to diplomatic success carried an edge, too, since the barrage of criticism and insults he delivered in Brussels and London was hardly well-received.

And the reaction back home has been immediate and visceral, among fellow Republicans as well as usual Trump critics. “Shameful,” ”disgraceful,” ”weak,” were a few of the comments. Makes the U.S. “look like a pushover,” said GOP Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee.

On Capitol Hill, top Republican leaders said they were open to slapping fresh sanctions on Russia but showed no signs of acting any time soon.

“Let’s be very clear, just so everybody knows: Russia did meddle with our elections,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan. “What we intend to do is make sure they don’t get away with it again and also to help our allies.”

In the Senate, Schumer called for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top officials to appear before Congress and tell exactly what happened during Trump’s two-hour private session with Putin.

Schumer also urged the Senate to take up legislation to boost security for U.S. elections and to revive a measure passed earlier by the Judiciary Committee to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.

But minority Democrats have few tools to push their priorities.

In the House, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi planned a vote Tuesday in support of the intelligence committee’s findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Senators had floated a similar idea earlier, but The No. 2 Republican, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, said sanctions may be preferable to a nonbinding resolution that amounts to “just some messaging exercise.”

Corker, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the first step was to get Pompeo to appear, “hopefully” next week.

Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki was his first time sharing the international stage with a man he has described as an important U.S. competitor — but whom he has also praised a strong, effective leader.

His remarks, siding with a foe on foreign soil over his own government, was a stark illustration of Trump’s willingness to upend decades of U.S. foreign policy and rattle Western allies in service of his political concerns. A wary and robust stance toward Russia has been a bedrock of his party’s world view. But Trump made clear he feels that any acknowledgement of Russia’s election involvement would undermine the legitimacy of his election.

Standing alongside Putin, Trump steered clear of any confrontation with the Russian, going so far as to question American intelligence and last week’s federal indictments that accused 12 Russians of hacking into Democratic email accounts to hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

“He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be,” Trump said. That’s the part he corrected on Tuesday.

His Monday statement drew a quick rebuttal from his director of national Intelligence, Dan Coats.

“We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security,” Coats said.

After his walkback on Tuesday, Trump said his administration will “move aggressively” to repel efforts to interfere in American elections.

“We are doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018,” he said. “And we have a lot of power.”

Fellow GOP politicians have generally stuck with Trump during a year and a half of turmoil, but he was assailed as seldom before as he returned home Monday night from what he had hoped would be a proud summit with Putin.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona was most outspoken, declaring that Trump made a “conscious choice to defend a tyrant” and achieved “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul emerged as one of the president’s few defenders from his own party. He defended Trump’s skepticism to CBS News Tuesday citing the president’s experience on the receiving end of “partisan investigations.”

Back at the White House, Paul’s comments drew a presidential tweet of gratitude. “Thank you @RandPaul, you really get it!” Trump tweeted.

In all, Trump’s remarks amounted to an unprecedented embrace of a man who for years has been isolated by the U.S. and Western allies for actions in Ukraine, Syria and beyond. And it came at the end of an extraordinary trip to Europe in which Trump had already berated allies, questioned the value of the NATO alliance and demeaned leaders including Germany’s Angela Merkel and Britain’s Theresa May.

In Helsinki, Putin said he had indeed wanted Trump to win the election — a revelation that might have made more headlines if not for Trump’s performance — but had taken no action to make it happen.

“Yes, I wanted him to win because he spoke of normalization of Russian-U.S. ties,” Putin said. “Isn’t it natural to feel sympathy to a person who wanted to develop relations with our country? It’s normal.”

___

Associated Press writers Ken Thomas and Darlene Superville in Washington, and Jill Colvin, Jonathan Lemire, and Vladimir Isachenkov in Helsinki contributed to this report.

Amazon Workers Mark #PrimeDay With Strikes Against Low Pay, Harsh Conditions

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has just become the richest man in recorded history—surpassing $150 billion in net worth—thanks to his business model of subjecting employees to low wages, brutal working conditions, and scant benefits, and on Tuesday Amazon workers throughout Europe are marking “Prime Day” by walking off the job in massive numbers to call attention to their plight.

In addition to walkouts by 80 percent of the workers at Amazon’s largest distribution center in Spain—nearly 1,800 workers—employees of the retailer are also launching strikes in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom to demand higher wages and denounce Amazon’s union-busting efforts.

“The message is clear—while the online giant gets rich, it is saving money on the health of its workers,” Stefanie Nutzenberger, spokesperson for the German services union Verdi, said in a statement.

Tres días de #HuelgaAmazon, en San Fernando de Henares #Madrid, coincidiendo con el #PrimeDay. La multinacional pretende crear varias categorías salariales para un mismo trabajo @AmazonEnLucha pic.twitter.com/dgw8It803X

— CCOO de Madrid (@CCOOMadrid) July 16, 2018

Strikes against Amazon’s notoriously appalling working conditions—which include forcing warehouse employees to skip bathroom breaks and urinate in bottles to meet the company’s unrealistic performance expectations—come as Bezos is coming under growing pressure to address his treatment of employees.

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pointed out in his “CEOs vs. Workers” town hall Monday night—which Bezos declined to attend—the Amazon chief earns around $275 million each day while refusing to pay his workers enough to get by without food stamps.

Seth King, a former Amazon employee who participated in the town hall, described Amazon’s business model as “a revolving door of bodies” and said workers are “not allowed to sit down” or “talk to other people” on the job.

This is the reality of working at Amazon. #CEOsvsWorkers #PrimeDay pic.twitter.com/osJJRjNoTJ

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 17, 2018

Jeff Bezo’s newly renovated home in Washington DC will have 25 bathrooms. Meanwhile, Amazon workers skip bathroom breaks in order to meet their grueling work targets. #CEOsvsWorkers

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 16, 2018

Jeff Bezos has become the 1st person in recorded history worth $150 billion.

Just with what he’s made in the last 24 hours, Bezos could buy every house for sale in Seattle right now ($709M) & house every homeless person in the city for 1 monthhttps://t.co/pGqASOFcS0

— Mike Rosenberg (@ByRosenberg) July 16, 2018

In solidarity with striking workers throughout Europe, many in the U.S. and throughout the world are calling for boycotts of “Prime Day,” which lasts 36 hours.

Never cross the picket line! Stand in solidarity with Amazon’s underpaid, undervalued workers, and boycott #PrimeDay2018 https://t.co/o1ZahWYRu0

— Kim Kelly (@GrimKim) July 16, 2018

Amazon employees are on STRIKE! Workers are calling for a #PrimeDay2018 boycott through July 16th.#AmazonStrike workers experience exhaustion, dehydration & workplace injuries.

Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. His workers deserve better! #UnionStrong #FridayThe13th pic.twitter.com/0gW1zbPLeL

— Bonnie Castillo (@NNUBonnie) July 13, 2018

If you’re staying off Amazon in solidarity with workers for the #amazonstrike, remember to keep away from all their subsidiaries as well! That includes the following: pic.twitter.com/suSrdBgYAz

— Richard Sajor (@richardsajor) July 11, 2018

Goldman Sachs’ Profits Up 44 Percent; CEO Blankfein to Retire

NEW YORK—Goldman Sachs’ profits jumped 44 percent in the second quarter compared with a year ago, driven by the investment bank’s core franchises: advising companies on mergers, acquisitions and other deals, and its trading business.

Goldman also said Tuesday that Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein will retire on Sept. 30 and be replaced by David Solomon, the president and chief operating officer. Blankfein has been CEO since 2006.

The New York-based bank said earnings reached $2.35 billion in the second quarter, compared with $1.63 billion a year earlier. On a per-share basis, Goldman earned $5.98 a share, compared with $3.95 a share a year earlier, beating analysts’ forecasts of $4.65 a share.

Nearly all of Goldman’s businesses saw double-digit growth in the second quarter. Trading was particularly strong. Goldman’s institutional client services division, which contains the firm’s trading operations, posted net revenues of $3.57 billion in the quarter, up 17 percent from a year earlier.

Goldman’s trading performance can be fickle, driven by whether the market was volatile that quarter and whether the right sort of securities saw the right sort of movement. Like its competitor Morgan Stanley, which will report results Wednesday, Goldman has been looking to diversify its businesses, moving in recent years into consumer lending and consumer banking.

Goldman’s investment banking business also had a solid quarter, posting net revenues of $2.05 billion, which is up 18 percent from a year earlier. The firm saw both higher underwriting revenue, as well as revenue for advisory services.

The firm’s return on equity ratio, a closely watched performance gauge for banks like Goldman Sachs which measures how much money the bank earned with the money investors have lent it, was 12.8 percent in the quarter. Banks like Goldman try to keep that figure above 10 percent.

Company-wide net revenues were $9.4 billion in the quarter, also beating analysts’ expectations.

Goldman shares rose 0.6 percent to $232.60 in premarket trading.

Russia’s Post-Summit View: Praise for Putin, Pity for Trump

MOSCOW—For Vladimir Putin, holding a summit with Donald Trump was a victory in itself.

While the U.S. leader went home to widespread criticism after their Monday meeting, the Russian president came home to universal praise in Moscow — even though there were no major breakthroughs.

Yet most Russians aren’t saying Putin vanquished Trump. Instead, they’re sympathizing with the U.S. president, portraying Trump as a victim of irrational domestic critics and aggressive journalists, because they are pinning hopes on him for improving relations over the long haul.

With U.S.-Russia tensions exceptionally high, the Kremlin set low expectations for the summit.

“Nobody in Moscow who is realistic had any illusions that this one meeting can produce any breakthroughs,” said Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “The hope was at least we can start talking to each other.”

And in that, Putin got what he went for. Gabuev said Putin ably won over his domestic audiences, notably by pushing back at accusations of Russian election meddling with his own accusations against the U.S.

Russians welcomed Putin’s offer to allow the FBI to interrogate Russian military intelligence officials accused of hacking the 2016 U.S. election campaign. And they especially welcomed Putin’s insistence on a tit-for-tat deal aimed at discrediting U.S. sanctions against rich and powerful Russians.

And unsurprisingly, Russians welcomed Trump’s suggestion that he trusts Putin more than U.S. intelligence agencies.

Russian officialdom “will be super-cautious in order not to damage Donald Trump any more than he did himself,” Gabuev said.

Instead of being portrayed as a duel on the world stage, the summit was viewed in Russia as a meeting of two powerful men who discussed global problems and then had to face down a crowd of pesky journalists.

“Those who opposed the meeting will try to devalue the agreements made,” said Vladimir Olenchenko of Russia’s Institute of Global Economics and International Relations. “We hope that Trump will have enough political will and patience to overcome the resistance and continue dialogue with Russia.”

Putin sought to emphasize areas where Moscow and Washington could find some common ground, such as the Syrian crisis.

“What makes you think that President Trump trusts me and I fully trust him?” Putin said. “He defends the interests of the United States, and I defend the interests of the Russian Federation. We are looking for ways how to narrow our differences and make our work constructive.”

Observers in Moscow remain cautious about what all this means for the long term.

But the Kremlin didn’t expect one meeting to bring an end to Western sanctions and a pullback of NATO forces deployed near Russia’s borders. Putin is hoping the summit took a first step toward normalizing relations — and most importantly, persuading the U.S. to recognize Russia as a global player whose interests must be taken into account.

The main result of the summit “is that it happened, despite the collapse that Russian-American relations are in,” Valery Garbuzov, head of the USA and Canada Institute in Moscow, told Komsomoskaya Pravda newspaper. “You can say it’s not much, but neither Putin nor Trump could do more.”

23 Hurt as Molten Rock Crashes Into Hawaii Tour Boat

HONOLULU — An explosion caused by lava oozing into the ocean sent molten rock crashing through the roof of a sightseeing boat off Hawaii’s Big Island, injuring 23 people Monday, officials said.

They were aboard a tour boat that takes visitors to see lava plunging into the ocean from the long-erupting Kilauea volcano that has been vigorously shooting lava from a new vent in the ground for the past two months.

The U.S. Geological Survey says explosions of varying sizes happen whenever 2,000-degree (1,093-degree Celsius) lava enters much colder seawater. Some of those explosions can be so tiny they are hard to see. But when the conditions are just right, much larger explosions send molten rock and other debris high into the air, according to USGS geologist Janet Babb.

The lava punctured the boat’s roof, leaving a gaping hole, firefighters said.

A woman in her 20s was in serious condition with a broken thigh bone, the Hawaii County Fire Department said. She was transported to Honolulu for further treatment, said Hilo Medical Center spokeswoman Elena Cabatu.

Twenty-two others suffered burns and scrapes, including 12 that were treated at the Hilo hospital and released.

Shane Turpin, the owner and captain of the vessel that was hit, said he never saw the explosion that rained molten rock down on top of his boat.

He and his tour group had been in the area for about 20 minutes making passes of the ocean entry about 500 yards offshore, Turpin said.

He didn’t observe “any major explosions,” so he navigated his vessel closer, to about 250 yards away from the lava.

“As we were exiting the zone, all of a sudden everything around us exploded,” he said. “It was everywhere.”

Turpin said he had no idea just how big the blast was until he saw video of the event later on shore.

“It was immense,” he said. “I had no idea. We didn’t see it.”

Monday’s large blast may also be related to the undersea landscape and the amount of lava being produced by a fissure miles from the coast.

Babb said sometimes molten rock can become encrusted underwater, and when that crust breaks large amounts of lava hit the water and create huge steam explosions.

“How high and how far really depends on the vigor of the steam explosion, and that depends on the amount of lava going into the ocean,” Babb said. “Based on a lot of years of observations of ocean entries,” USGS estimates these explosions can send debris up to 300 meters in any direction.

In a flow that reached the ocean in 2016, the lava “hit a steep slope and was very quickly carried down to deeper parts of the ocean,” Babb said. But the offshore topography of the new ocean entry is shallow, meaning explosions could occur much closer to the surface.

And the volume of lava now entering the ocean is much higher than in previous eruptions, Babb said. The active eruption site is sending as much as 100 cubic meters of lava per second snaking down to the sea. In the 2016-2017 flow to the south, there was only about 4 cubic meters per second being erupted.

Turpin, who has lived on the Big Island since 1983, said that he has been observing and documenting these explosions and that this type of activity is new to him. There were no warning signs before the blast, he said.

“There’s something new. There’s something really new,” he said. “And I’ve been documenting them a bit.”

He said he had visited one woman who sustained serious injuries in the hospital.

“They’re unbelievable people,” he said of the woman and her family, who are visiting the island. “Just really good people.”

The others in the tour group quickly pulled together helped one another, Turpin said.

“What I saw in humanity this morning was amazing. I mean this was a group of people that never met before, and they were brought together,” he said. “In all honesty, we definitely evaded a catastrophic event today.”

Officials have warned of the danger of getting close to lava entering the ocean, saying the interaction can create clouds of acid and fine glass. Despite the hazards, several companies operate such tours. The Coast Guard said tour vessels have operated in the area going back at least 20 years.

The U.S. Coast Guard in May instituted a safety zone where lava flows into the ocean off the Big Island. It prohibits vessels from getting closer than 984 feet (300 meters) from ocean-entry points.

The agency allows experienced boat operators to apply for a special license to get up to 164 feet (50 meters) from where lava sizzles into the sea.

Kilauea volcano has destroyed more than 700 homes since it entered a new phase in May. But the only serious injury over the past two months was to a man who was hit by flying lava that broke his leg.

Officials were interviewing injured passengers at a hospital.

Pussy Riot Takes the Field, Gets a 15-Day Penalty

Truthdig editor’s note: The Associated Press is reporting that four protesters who entered the field of play at the World Cup final on Sunday have been sentenced to 15 days in jail. Beneath that update is an earlier AP article on the incident.

The AP writes in the latest article:

“The protesters, members of the Pussy Riot punk collective, ran onto the pitch at Luzhniki Stadium dressed as police officers during the second half of Sunday’s match between France and Croatia. They called for the release of political prisoners and for more open political competition.

“A court on Monday sentenced them after finding them guilty of violating the law on behavior of sports events spectators. They were also banned from attending sports events for three years.”

MOSCOW — Protest group Pussy Riot, long a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side, claimed responsibility Sunday for four people who brought the World Cup final to a brief halt by running onto the field dressed in police uniforms as the Russian president and a global audience watched.

Stewards tackled the three women and one man who charged onto the field simultaneously in the 52nd minute of one of the world’s most viewed sporting events.

Croatia defender Dejan Lovren pushed the man, helping a steward to detain him, and suggested the incident put Croatia off its game. The team was 2-1 down when the protest happened, and eventually lost 4-2.

“I really was mad because we’d been playing at that moment in good shape,” he said. “We’d been playing good football and then some interruption came. I just lost my head and I grabbed the guy and I wished I could throw him away from the stadium.”

Before being hauled away, one of the women reached the center of the field and shared a double high-five with France forward Kylian Mbappe.

“Hello everyone from the Luzhniki field, it’s great here,” the heavily political punk performance group said on Twitter, and released a statement calling for the freeing of political prisoners, an end to “illegal arrests” of protesters and to “allow political competition” in Russia.

The four were charged with violation of spectators’ rights and illegal wearing of law enforcement symbols and could face penalties of up to 11,500 rubles ($185) or 160 hours of community service, the Interfax news agency reported.

Pussy Riot’s statement also referenced the case of Oleg Sentsov, a vocal opponent of Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, who was sentenced in 2015 to 20 years for conspiracy to commit terror acts. He denies the charges and has been on a hunger strike since mid-May.

The group said the police uniforms symbolized how Russian police’s actions fall short of their “heavenly” depiction in literature and called for reforms. It wasn’t clear if they used the uniforms as a ruse to enter Luzhniki Stadium amid tight security, and the group couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

“The citizens in question were taken to the local police station,” the Moscow branch of the Russian Interior Ministry said, without providing further details.

A video circulated on Russian social media after the match appeared to show two of the protesters, still in police uniforms, being harshly interrogated at a police station. The Internet TV channel Dozhd identified one of them as Pyotr Verzilov, one of the group’s most prominent members.

Under barking queries from a man off camera, Verzilov says, “I am for Russia, just like you — if you are for Russia.”

“I sometimes wish it was 1937,” the man off screen says, referring to the year in which Stalinist purges were at their height.

Pussy Riot rose to global prominence after several balaclava-covered female members sang a raucous song denouncing Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral. Two of them, including Verzilov’s wife, served nearly two years in prison for the protest.

Putin was watching the game alongside his French and Croatian counterparts and FIFA President Gianni Infantino, among other dignitaries.

Pussy Riot was previously known for wearing brightly colored balaclavas, though those who protested Sunday did so with their faces uncovered. The group posted a second statement later with three women, one wearing a pink balaclava, reading a statement acknowledging police had relaxed somewhat during the tournament but calling for greater restrictions on their powers .

“The World Cup has shown very well how well Russian policemen can behave,” one of the unmasked women said in the video. “But what will happen when it ends?”

FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The protest was briefly shown on international TV broadcasts, even though FIFA policy is usually to cut away when fans and others run onto the field.

Gun-Rights Activist Is Charged as a Secret Agent for Russia

WASHINGTON — A 29-year-old gun-rights activist served as a covert Russian agent while living in Washington, gathering intelligence on American officials and political organizations and working to establish back-channel lines of communications for the Kremlin, federal prosecutors charged Monday.

The announcement of the arrest of Maria Butina came just hours after President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and just days after special counsel Robert Mueller charged 12 Russian intelligence officials with directing a sprawling hacking effort aimed at swaying the 2016 election.

Mueller didn’t file the charge against Butina, but court papers show her activities revolved around American politics during the 2016 campaign and included efforts to use contacts with the National Rifle Association to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather intelligence for Russia.

Court papers also reveal that an unnamed American who worked with Butina claimed to have been involved in setting up a “private line of communication” ahead of the 2016 election between the Kremlin and “key” officials in an American political party through the NRA.

The court papers do not name the political party mentioned in the October 2016 message, but they contain details that appear to refer to the Republican Party. The documents don’t say whether the back channel was ever established.

The NRA, which has previously been connected to Butina in public reporting and information released by members of Congress, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Butina, a Russian national who has been living in the U.S., was charged with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of the Russian government. A federal judge in Washington ordered her jailed until a hearing set for Wednesday, according to a statement from the Justice Department and Jessie Liu, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

In a statement, Butina’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, called the allegations “overblown” and said prosecutors had criminalized mundane networking opportunities. Driscoll said Butina was not an agent of the Russian Federation but was instead in the U.S. on a student visa, graduating from American University with a master’s degree in international relations.

“There is simply no indication of Ms. Butina seeking to influence or undermine any specific policy or law or the United States — only at most to promote a better relationship between the two nations,” Driscoll said in a statement. “The complaint is simply a misuse of the Foreign Agent statute, which is designed to punish covert propaganda, not open and public networking by foreign students.”

He said Butina’s Washington apartment was raided by the FBI in April, and said she had offered to answer questions from the Justice Department and Mueller’s team but the special counsel’s office “has not expressed interest.”

Court papers filed in support of Butina’s arrest accuse her of participating in a conspiracy that began in 2015 in which an unnamed senior Russian official “tasked” her with working to infiltrate American political organizations with the goal of “reporting back to Moscow” what she had learned.

The charging documents include several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which she refers to the need to keep her work secret or, in one case, “incognito.”

Authorities did not name the Kremlin official accused of directing Butina’s efforts, but details in the court papers match the description of Alexander Torshin, a Russian official who has been publicly connected to her.

Torshin, who became an NRA life member in 2012, was among a group of Russian oligarchs and officials targeted in April with Treasury Department sanctions for their associations with Putin and their roles in “advancing Russia’s malign activities.” Torshin, who was listed as “State Secretary-deputy Governor of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation,” was designated under the sanctions as a Russian official.

The sanctions affect the targeted Russians by freezing all of their assets subject to U.S. jurisdiction and banning Americans and U.S. businesses from conducting transactions with them.

Prosecutors say Butina, at the official’s direction, met with U.S. politicians and candidates, attended events sponsored by special interest groups — including two National Prayer Breakfast events — and organized Russian-American “friendship and dialogue” dinners in Washington as part of her work.

Court papers also show that after the 2016 election, Butina worked to set up a Russian delegation’s visit to the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast, describing it in an email as an effort to “establish a back channel of communication.” After the visit, Butina emailed the organizer of the breakfast thanking him for a gift and “for the very private meeting” that followed the breakfast.

“A new relationship between two countries always begins better when it begins in faith,” Butina wrote, saying she had “important information” that would further the new relationship.

Two days later, she emailed another American who had been involved in some of the email communication surrounding the prayer breakfast and her efforts to arrange several dinners between Russians and people involved in U.S. politics.

“Our delegation cannot stop chatting about your wonderful dinner,” Butina wrote. “My dearest President has received ‘the message’ about your group initiatives and your constructive and kind attention to the Russians.”

Butina has previously surfaced in U.S. media reports related to her gun-rights advocacy.

In 2011, she founded a pro-gun organization in Russia, the Right to Bear Arms, and she has been involved in coordinating between American gun rights activists and their Russian counterparts, according to reports in The New York Times, Time and the Daily Beast.

Butina hosted several leading NRA executives and pro-gun conservatives at her group’s annual meeting in 2015, according to those reports. Among those who attended were former NRA President David Keene, conservative political operative Paul Erickson and former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, later a strong Trump supporter.

Butina also says she met with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at his presidential campaign launch event in 2015, according to a report by Mother Jones magazine earlier this year.

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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Stephen Braun, Scott Bauer and Desmond Butler contributed to this report.

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Read the criminal complaint: http://apne.ws/fqKOKjU

Israel Is Divided Over a Bill to Establish Jewish-Only Communities

The Israeli parliament is considering a bill that would legalize Jewish-only communities and codify the existing de facto segregation of the country’s Jewish and Muslim communities. It’s a move that, as The Guardian reports, has earned comparisons to South African apartheid.

The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been arguing over what’s been dubbed the “nation-state bill” for the past five years. As Haaretz points out, “Israel has always understood itself to be a Jewish state,” but “politicians – specifically those on the right – have been pushing for legislation that would make that fact irrefutable.”

The delay is partly due to Israel’s coalition-style government. Although the current governing coalition is fairly conservative, its political parties take differing positions on the bill.

The parties have argued over several issues—whether Arabic can be a national language, whether Jewish-only communities would be ruled by Jewish law, and, now, a new clause, Section 7B, that says, “The state sees developing Jewish communities as a national value and will act to encourage, promote and establish them.”

Originally, Haaretz writes, Section 7B “stated that the state would allow groups to establish separate communities, ‘on the basis of religion and nationality,’ thus enabling the establishment of Jews-only communities.”

Now the bill allows the government to “authorize a community composed of people having the same faith and nationality to maintain the exclusive character of that community,” according to its latest text.

Opponents of the bill say that development would happen at the expense of Palestinians and other non-Jewish residents, because, as The Guardian reports, within these proposed communities, the law “would also permit Jewish religious law to be implemented in certain cases and remove Arabic as an official language.”

Tamar Zandberg, a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, said, “The basic law that advanced today is not a basic law on nationality but a basic law of racism. This is a law that was born in sin and advanced through arm-twisting among the extremist and nationalist elements in the coalition.” Haaretz reports that another Knesset member, Dov Khenin, has called the bill “a model of undisguised racism, suited only to corrupt rulers who have lost all shame.”

The bill’s staunchest defenders include Netanyahu and members of his Likud Party. When Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, said that the bill would harm Israel’s international reputation, and “even be used as a weapon by our enemies,” Likud member Miki Zohar responded, “Unfortunately, President Rivlin has lost it,” and suggested the president had “forgotten his DNA.”

Netanyahu himself, The Guardian writes, “has lashed out at domestic and international critics, ordering the foreign ministry to reprimand the EU envoy Emanuele Giaufret after he was reported as saying the bill was discriminatory.”

In a speech last week, Netanyahu defended the bill: “In the Israeli democracy, we will continue to protect the rights of both the individual and the group, this is guaranteed. But the majority have rights too, and the majority rules.”

Parliament is scheduled to vote on the bill next week.