Chris Hedges's Blog, page 536

Electric Car Sales Promise Shock for Big Oil

Oil and gas companies have underestimated probable electric vehicle sales and the effect they will have on their own businesses and profits, a new report says.

If the car manufacturers’ projections of future sales of electric cars are correct, then demand for oil will have peaked by 2027 or even earlier, sending the price of oil in a downward spiral as supply exceeds demand, says Carbon Tracker (CT), an independent financial think-tank carrying out in-depth analysis on the impact of the energy transition on capital markets.

It says fossil fuel companies have taken into account some engine fuel efficiencies and the effect they would have on oil demand, but not the expected increase in electric vehicles themselves. There is a big mismatch between forecasts of EV market penetration from vehicle manufacturers and from oil majors, says Laurence Watson, a CT data scientist.

“The oil industry is underestimating the disruptive potential of electric vehicles, which could reduce oil demand by millions of barrels a day. Increases in fuel efficiency will also eat into oil demand and the industry’s profits. The oil majors’ myopic position presents a serious investor risk,” he told the Climate News Network.

Expectations Far Lower

The report looks at all the projections of the major oil companies, including Exxon and BP, and says their figures for electric vehicle growth in the 2020s are 75 percent to 250 percent smaller than those expected by the global car manufacturers that have announced targets.

Electric vehicle sales in China alone, a figure bolstered by government intervention, are expected to be seven million a year by 2025. These, plus the three million a year aim of Volkswagen by the same date, would exceed oil industry estimates for sales for the whole world.

There are immense variables taken into account in the report. These include the number of miles driven by the average electric vehicle and the sort of car it replaces.

These variables depend on the influence of various governments’ policies to reduce oil in transportation in order to keep global temperature rise below 2°C beyond pre-industrial levels. The need to reduce air pollution also strongly favors the introduction of electric vehicles in cities.

More Demand Reduction

Another of the imponderables is the increasing efficiency of the internal combustion engine, which in itself also reduces demand for oil. It follows a growing trend already well-established in several countries, including Sweden, which from 2019 will produce no more vehicles powered by internal combustion alone.

The take-up of electric vehicles is crucial to the future of the oil industry because transportation takes up 50 percent of total oil demand. About half of the demand from transport is from light passenger vehicles, those that are most likely in the short term to switch to electricity.

Heavy-duty transport, aviation and shipping are also beginning to switch, but it is cars that will make the early difference.

The report argues that it is not total oil demand that matters but the difference between supply and demand. The 2014 crash in the oil price was caused by a surplus of 2 million barrels of oil a day, mainly because of a boom in US shale production.

To get the price back up to improve oil company profits took the combined efforts of the OPEC oil countries and the Russian government in cutting production, a process that needed three years.

According to the CT report, demand for oil will fall by 8 million barrels of oil a day by 2030 because of the expected deployment of electric vehicles, meaning that the oil-producing countries will have to constantly reduce their production in order to keep prices up.

The report argues that although oil demand will continue to be very large, the peak demand will have been reached around 2025. Demand displacement by electric vehicles “will significantly disrupt oil and gas company business models. Furthermore, we believe that when global oil demand peaks this will fundamentally alter investors’ approach to the industry.”

Trump Administration Takes Another Swipe at Obamacare

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration said Saturday it’s freezing payments under an “Obamacare” program that protects insurers with sicker patients from financial losses, a move expected to add to premium increases next year.

At stake are billions in payments to insurers with sicker customers.

In a weekend announcement, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the administration is acting because of conflicting court ruling in lawsuits filed by some smaller insurers who question whether they are being fairly treated under the program.

The so-called “risk adjustment” program takes payments from insurers with healthier customers and redistributes that money to companies with sicker enrollees. Payments for 2017 are $10.4 billion. No taxpayer subsidies are involved.

The idea behind the program is to remove the financial incentive for insurers to “cherry pick” healthier customers. The government uses a similar approach with Medicare private insurance plans and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Major insurer groups said Saturday the administration’s action interferes with a program that’s working well.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, whose members are a mainstay of Affordable Care Act coverage said it was “extremely disappointed” with the administration’s action.

The Trump administration’s move “will significantly increase 2019 premiums for millions of individuals and small business owners and could result in far fewer health plan choices,” association president Scott Serota said in a statement. “It will undermine Americans’ access to affordable coverage, particularly those who need medical care the most.”

Serota noted that the payments are required by law, and said he believes the administration has the legal authority to continue making them despite the court cases. He warned of “turmoil” as insurers finalize their rates for 2019.

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main health insurance industry trade group, said in a statement that it is “very discouraged” by the Trump administration’s decision to freeze payments.

“Costs for taxpayers will rise as the federal government spends more on premium subsidies,” the group said.

Rumors that the Trump administration would freeze payments were circulating late last week. But the Saturday announcement via email was unusual for such a major step.

The administration argued in its announcement that its hands were tied by conflicting court rulings in New Mexico and Massachusetts.

Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Seema Verma said the Trump administration was disappointed by a New Mexico court ruling that questioned the workings of the risk program for insurers.

The administration “has asked the court to reconsider its ruling, and hopes for a prompt resolution that allows (the government) to prevent more adverse impacts on Americans who receive their insurance in the individual and small group markets,” she said.

More than 10 million people currently buy individual health insurance plans through HealthCare.gov and state insurance marketplaces. The vast majority of those customers receive taxpayer subsidies under the Obama-era health law and would be shielded from premium increases next year.

The brunt of higher prices would fall on solid middle-class consumers who are not eligible for the income-based subsidies. Many of those are self-employed people and small business owners, generally seen as a Republican constituency.

The latest “Obamacare” flare-up does not affect most people with employer coverage.

Taxpayers Hit When Local Newspapers Shutter Presses

Newspapers are the watchdogs of government. When the pooch gets put down, taxpayers pay the price.

In a recent study, researchers from the University of Illinois and University of Notre Dame found that local newspaper closures result in higher costs for taxpayers.

University of Illinois at Chicago professor of finance Dermot Murphy, one of the study’s co-authors, spoke with NPR’s Lisa Mullins about the finding.

“When a local newspaper closes, then they are no longer providing a crucial watchdog role for us. When a local government isn’t being watched, they are more likely to engage in bad behavior and just be more inefficient in general.”

Multiple studies support Murphy’s claims. When local newspapers stop their presses, civic engagement and political accountability decline.

Lenders to municipal governments take notice of the decreased governmental accountability. When local governments then seek loans to attain public goods—such as schools, roadways or public buildings—lenders take the lack of accountability into consideration.

“We thought, if a government is engaging in bad behaviors, than someone who is lending to a local government might have to ask for a higher interest rate to compensate for the risk of lending to an irresponsible government,” Murphy said in the NPR interview.

The study, titled “Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance,” finds that “following a newspaper closure, we find municipal borrowing costs increase by 5 to 11 basis points in the long run.”

What does this mean for the average taxpayer whose city or town has lost a local newspaper? “This can cost the average taxpayer about $70 per person, ” Murphy says. The study finds that the average municipal bond value is $63.67 million within a county with a closure. This results in $650,000 in total cost of interest paid by taxpayers.

In addition to the financial costs of newspaper closures, municipalities pay through lack of voter turnout.  One study, by  professors Danny Hayes of George Washington University and Jennifer Lawless of American University, found districts served large-circulation news outlets “see significantly less, and less substantive, coverage than hotly contested districts and those served by smaller outlets.” Voters then have lower exposure to candidates and are less likely to vote. Another study looked into the effects of the closure of The Cincinnati Post and found that “fewer people voted in elections for city council, city commission, and school board.”

A recent study by the Newspaper Research Journal found a net loss of 1,800 newspapers between 2004 to 2015 due to mergers and closures. As more local papers go under, voters should understand that their concerns about losing local publications should extend to their wallets.

Listen to the full NPR podcast here.

All Charges Dropped Against Trump Inauguration Protesters

More than three dozen defendants in the year-long #DisruptJ20 trial celebrated Friday evening after prosecutors dismissed all remaining charges against them, following a number of failures to prove the protesters were guilty of wrongdoing.

“The state failed at silencing dissent and today our movement is stronger than it was on #J20,” tweeted Dylan Petrohilos, who was charged with conspiracy, rioting, and destruction due to his participation in planning to protest—even though he did not attend. “I’m proud of all my co-defendants, and everyone in the streets who resisted fascism and state violence.”

Aaaaannnnd the #J20 trials are over. Government has dismissed charges against remaining 38 defendants. After charging more than 200 people with felonies, they got one single felony guilty plea. Pretty epic failure! pic.twitter.com/xQ9jBsEGfr

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) July 6, 2018

The Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped charges against 38 people who were among the 234 arrested on January 20, 2017 at a protest against President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Some of the charges had carried sentences of more than 60 years in prison.

The government initially charged the protesters with felony rioting, but were able to secure only one guilty plea to the charge. Twenty pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges.

The protesters have been tried in groups, with six defendants acquitted late last year after prosecutors failed to convince a jury that the protesters were responsible for the property damage they were accused of committing.

Prosecutors also came under scrutiny for relying on videos shot by the right-wing group Project Veritas to build their case—leading to a judge’s ruling in the trial of 10 protesters in May, that the government had withheld evidence.

“I do think it’s a serious violation,” Wasington D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Robert Morin said of the prosecution’s failure to disclose the entirely of Project Veritas’s undercover video of a meeting about the protests.

The protesters and their supporters posted on social media about their victory in court on Friday.

BREAKING: the District Attorney’s office just dropped 38 of the last 39 #J20 defendants.

THIS IS HUGE #DefendJ20

But people will still need to cover legal fees so please get at this https://t.co/aoeMP6OdAR

— Dylan Petrohilos

Kimberly Reed and John S. Adams on Dark Money in Montana (Audio and Transcript)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer talks to filmmaker Kimberly Reed, director of the new documentary “Dark Money,” and John S. Adams, a journalist and key figure in the film who broke a story about the influence of money in politics in Montana and how Montanans fought back against that influence.

Reed, Adams and Scheer discuss the making of the film, how the Citizens United court ruling played out in Montana and the growth of corporate money in local elections. Reed, a native of Montana, discusses why she thinks Montana is an excellent example of how ordinary citizens can fight back against well-paid lobbyists, and why Montana’s history of battling copper barons prepared it for this current fight.

Adams first discovered the impact of outside funders when John Ward, a Republican incumbent running for re-election for the state legislature, found that voters in his district were bombarded with mail accusing him of being friends with serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

“For years and years, we didn’t know where it was coming from,” Adams tells Scheer. He goes on to explain how, through FOIA requests and some help from a whistleblower, he traced the name on these postcards, Western Partnership Tradition, back to a Washington, D.C.-based anti-union group called the National Right to Work Committee. After publishing the story, local politicians and voters came together to fight the dark-money influence and vote against candidates who were affected by it.

It is, as Scheer and Reed observe, a rare instance of hope in a politically bleak time. As Reed says, “I hope that our film shows–and I think it does–that by engaging in that system and taking it back over from this corporate influence, [power can be put] back into the hands of people.”

Listen to the interview in the player above and read the transcript below. Find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

RS: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Kimberley Reed, who is a director of a really interesting new movie called Dark Money, set in Montana. People don’t think of Montana as a center of great debate and social issues and progressive politics, but they’re wrong, as the film points out. Montana actually has a long history, going back to the Anaconda Copper Mine a century ago, and the fight for people over environmental issues as well as working conditions. And the film Dark Money, while hooked to the issue of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that made it easier for corporations to put a lot of money into local politics, and that money ran up against Montana’s own tradition of controlling corporate spending, had probably the most serious restraint because of its experience with Anaconda Copper. The other interesting part of the construction of this film is not only how did Citizens United play out in Montana, and the resistance–I say most people will find that rather improbable–the resistance in Montana to it; it centers around a very interesting journalist, John S. Adams, who worked for a small paper, although maybe not small in Montana, I don’t know, called The Great Falls Tribune. And I don’t want to give away the whole movie, but the Capitol bureau of that paper and others gets closed, and even though he breaks a really great, important, big story and proves the importance of journalism, he ends up, at the end of this film, having to invent his own publication called The Montana Free Press, and continue his work. I don’t want to give away the movie, but it ends with a pretty happy ending. It’s an example, really, of the vitality of journalism and how it can make a difference, how it’s endangered in today’s world by big money. Let me turn to you, Kimberley Reed. What do you think the takeaway of this film is, and what brought you to this subject?

KR: A lot of projects that I launch into, I don’t really want to know where they’re going, and that’s especially true with documentaries. I think the roots of this project happened when I heard a news story on the radio about the passage of Citizens United, where the U.S. Supreme Court stated that corporations are people, and that money is speech, and that therefore, if you follow that logic, in order not to violate the free speech rights of these corporations, they should be able to spend unlimited money in political campaigns. And if you just look at that on its face, it doesn’t take you too long to realize that elections, that our government, the reins of our government in the U.S., are going to be turned over to fewer and fewer people who have more and more money. That that power is just going to be consolidated. And, you know, I’m pretty skeptical of slippery-slope arguments, but that’s a pretty slippery slope.

RS: Your film opens with a history lesson. So why don’t you give me that history lesson?

KR: Yeah, in a lot of ways, you know, I’m from Montana, and I think that going back there and telling this story that is really rooted in history was a very natural thing for me to do, because I could see so much clash, so much dramatic clash happening over this issue of campaign finance. And when you grow up and you go to school there, you learn about the copper kings. And the copper kings was just all about a couple rich dudes in Butte, Montana, known as the richest hill on earth, fighting over who’s going to control this wealth. Not really worrying about what the long-term effects are of kind of opening up this beautiful mountainside in Montana. That’s something that people live with in Montana, something that’s really cherished. Because of that, it’s a wound that is felt, that is seen continuously. I mean, you’re constantly reminded of what the effects are of corporate domination.

RS: When Anaconda was this enormously powerful company, what years were those?

KR: The late 1800s, early 1900s, right at the turn of the century.

RS: And yet the reminder is there. Your film opens, and actually ends also, with a very powerful scene involving birds landing on a lake and dying. And that’s the legacy of Anaconda Copper, isn’t it?

KR: Yeah. I mean, when I was growing up, you always heard these stories about, like, you could stir the water in the Berkeley Pit with a teaspoon, and then the teaspoon would dissolve. And that was kind of apocryphal; nobody really believed that, but then one day in 1995, a big flock of snow geese accidentally landed in the Berkeley Pit; they thought it was a nice pond, a place they could rest during their migration; and a bunch of them died. Hundreds of them died. And it was, it was tragic. That happened again a couple decades later, and the effects were even greater.

RS: The point of your movie is that Montana is in the forefront of this battle against Citizens United because they have this incredible, historical example of the power of a rapacious corporation. And as you make the point in your film, because it’s a lesser populated state, with a great deal of mineral resources, the temptation there is just to rip it apart, grab the, you know, the minerals, and to heck with the consequences.

KR: It’s a cheap date. That’s the line you hear again, and again, and again. Montana is a cheap date. Like, if you have a lot of money, and you want to develop resources, you want to make money from those resources, you have a state where there’s a lot of resources and not many people there. If you can control the politics, you can control all of the wealth coming out of that state. And that’s a story that’s a century old in Montana. It’s a story that the populace is really attuned to, is really looking out for, and is frankly, I think, by and large really sick of. And so people were really paying attention.

RS: What’s great about your film, for my money as a journalist, is–and I didn’t know you were Montana raised, born and raised–I just thought, wow. This film is made without the usual elitism of, you know, we’re going to go see these folk out there, and you know, yes, they do some interesting things, but we’re going to bring New York wisdom, or you know, LA wisdom, or something. And your film has a great sense of respect for the folks who live there. And they end up being the heroes of the piece.

KR: Yeah, yeah. There’s, our film is full of everyday heroes, like the people who work in the–Montana has a citizen legislature, it’s a part-time legislature; it meets every two years for 90 days, that’s hardly anything. And the people who go there, who are the elected officials, are farmers and ranchers, and you know, outfitters and lawyers, and moms and, you know, every–you know, every occupation you can think of. I think that really harkens back to the way that our country was originally devised, that we would have people who represented us, and it wouldn’t be their full-time job just to be politicians.

RS: Yeah, it was also thought that the press, which was given absolute protection in the First Amendment, the freedom of the press, would also be pretty much a citizen press–town crier, wall posters, pamphleteers, small papers. So let me introduce your colleague here, the subject of your film, John S. Adams. You’re the local reporter, and you come across the story, and that’s really the story of this documentary; your struggle to alert people to it. So you’re this journalist that we hope we can still have, but we’re afraid is a disappearing breed.

JA: Yeah, I started my reporting career at a small town–you know, speaking of the citizen press–I started my reporting career in Montana at a small-town, the Missoula Independent, which is an alternative weekly. Alternative weeklies used to be a really vibrant form of printed press throughout the country; the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, you know, are some that come to mind; Phoenix New Times. You know, people throughout the country have been picking up those weekly rags, you know, in cities all across America. And those started disappearing in my time when I was in Montana. The Missoula Independent stuck around for a while, but I did some reporting there that got noticed, and I was hired by the Great Falls Tribune to take over their Capitol bureau. And at one time, I think there were two or three folks in that Capitol bureau, including at one point Chuck Johnson, who is a character that you see in the film, Charles Johnson; Mike Dennison, another person who you see in the film, both were in that same bureau before I was. So it was kind of a tradition that the Great Falls Tribune–which, I should also point out, the Great Falls Tribune was the one major daily paper in the state of Montana that wasn’t at one time owned by the Anaconda Copper company. All the other paper, all the other major papers in the state had been owned by the very company that Kim’s film explores in those opening scenes. So I was really proud to work for the Great Falls Tribune and be in their Capitol bureau; it was a real honor. And I did that for many years, covering the legislature, covering state government, and just kind of watchdogging our elected officials and agencies and corporations.

RS: So when you come there, you’re working, you’re covering the legislature–which, by the way, they are a citizen legislature, as you point out; they’re, you know, it’s not like in Sacramento here in California where, my goodness, you have professional lobbyists that are entrenched, and the legislature’s entrenched, and you’re lucky if they ever go home to talk to anybody. As you’re, in the movie you indicate, they’re out there tilling the field; they’re out fixing the fences; no, now it’s time to go and legislate, every other year. What alerts you to this story?

JA: There’s a scene in the film where I’m speaking to a legislator who I regretfully admit in the movie that I, you know, that I kind of ignored his early warning signs. When I first started at the Great Falls Tribune in 2007, it was shortly after that, there had just been an election, and there was a republican legislator who I had known about, but I hadn’t been there covering the legislature on a regular basis, so I didn’t know him personally, I didn’t have a relationship with him. But he popped into my office, and he told me–he, you know, he talked to me about these fliers. And the story that we’re talking about here, and one of the symptoms, I guess, of dark money, which is really the underlying issue that we’re talking about here–unaccounted-for money influencing voters in races all the way down to city council races in this country. John Ward had noticed just days before his election that his district–which, you know, you might only have, in a primary election in a district like that in Montana, you might only have a few hundred voters that actually show up at the polls–I mean, literally, it might be the difference of one or two hundred people that elects that representative to that seat. And just a few days before that election, the voters in John Ward’s district got absolutely papered, their mailboxes were stuffed full of these mailers accusing him of being friends with John Wayne Gacy, who is a notorious mass-murderer. Now, what was the connection to John Wayne Gacy? Well, what it boiled down to was John Ward, who is a Catholic, voted to bring a bill to the floor for debate over whether to abolish the death penalty in Montana. So he didn’t even vote, it wasn’t even a vote on the bill itself, it was a motion to bring the bill to the floor for debate. That vote, according to these dark money groups, equated him to wanting John Wayne Gacy to live; therefore it must be true that John Ward is a friend of John Wayne Gacy. These kinds of mailers started showing up in people’s mailboxes.

RS: Was he a republican?

JA: He was a republican. He was targeted because he was part of a group of, I would call them “business oriented” republicans; I don’t like to use the term “moderate,” because I think it’s too bland and it’s not nuanced enough to really categorize these folks who, in my view, are very conservative individuals, very conservative in their political thinking, but independent. And John Ward was among a group of people who believed that the government did actually have to pass a budget in the previous session, and so they worked with the democratic governor to do that. And they hammered out a deal with the governor, and they passed a budget, and the folks on the far right of the party didn’t appreciate that. And so these individuals were targeted in subsequent elections, and John Ward was among the first wave of those who got hit.

KR: And it’s important to keep the scale in mind. I mean, I think what happened to John Ward, that he was flagging, was that, you know, kind of the usual back-and-forth of political campaigns was happening, and then all of a sudden he got swamped by something that was 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 times as much traffic, and money behind it. And he just didn’t know where it was coming from.

JA: He didn’t have the ability to respond, and he didn’t have the time to respond. There was nothing he could do. And so he was summarily taken out. And I will also say, he didn’t run again. I mean, that’s the other really disappointing thing about this, is a lot of these folks who get targeted by these dark money groups, it’s so painful for them and their families to have these lies spread about them throughout these small-town communities, that they don’t want to go through that process again. And they leave politics.

KR: And there’s a couple important things to note: that this attack was happening in the primaries, and it was happening with republicans on the far-right attacking other republicans.

JA: Incumbent republicans.

KR: Incumbent republicans. So it’s not an issue in a primary where everybody’s paying attention, it’s in a–an issue in a general election where everybody’s paying attention; it’s in a primary with republican against republican. So you have to realize that the ultimate goal of this is not to get this republican vs. that democrat in office; it’s an effort to get this republican vs. that republican into office. It’s an effort to purify the party.

RS: So tell us about the dark money. Where was this dark money coming from, and why did they want the far right rather than the more moderate?

JA: For years and years, we didn’t know where it was coming from. And that was the thing. I mean, we knew it was from groups called American–well, it started out Western Tradition Partnership. Their name was on all of these postcards. But nobody really knew who Western Tradition Partnership was; we didn’t know who was funding it, we didn’t know how much funding they had, and we didn’t really know what their agenda was, because their, ostensibly their message was about, you know, resource development, and about creating good-paying jobs, you know, based on developing Montana’s vast mining wealth, timber wealth, et cetera. That was really a red herring, because what we ended up finding out–thanks to the discovery of a series of several boxes of documents that showed up in another state and were mailed to Montana–our elections regulator in Montana, the commissioner of political practices, over the course of many years of investigation and litigation, opened up this trove of documents to the public. I put in a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request, to the commissioner’s office to inspect these documents that they had obtained. And it was through that, those records, that we were able to really find out who was behind it. And to answer your question, it was basically a group out of Washington, D.C., the National Right to Work Committee, an anti-union outfit whose goals is basically to end public-sector unions in this country. The same groups that were very active in Wisconsin undermining the unions in Wisconsin under Scott Walker, those same groups were operating in Colorado, in Montana, and elsewhere.

RS: You have a wonderful young woman in your film who worked for this group. And she becomes a whistleblower. And she says: I believe in Right to Work; I’m not pro-union, but I’m offended by the chicanery here. Why–

KR: Yeah, she said, “You can’t fight evil by becoming evil.” And while working at this organization that was essentially running campaigns on behalf of candidates, which is illegal, she saw this illegality going on, and she saw that they were intentionally breaking the rules, and she became a whistleblower. And she wanted to do something about it. And becomes a, you know, a big revelation in the trial that our film ultimately arrives at, and has some really surprising things to say.

RS: [omission for station break] I’m talking to John Adams, who is the courageous journalist, intrepid journalist, who helped break the story of dark money in Montana, and Kimberley Reed, the director of the film Dark Money. You know, first of all, one of the things, the response to this film, Kenny Turan, the film critic for the LA Times–I forget exactly the way he put it, but this is the least disheartening film you’ll watch about [the] political situation. And it is, it really is heartening. Because all sorts of people step forward and support honesty, and getting at the truth of the matter. Former district attorneys, and the attorney general–I forget all their titles, but–and they’re regular Montana folks, they’re not do-gooders who’ve come in from out of state. They’re–right? People like our film director here, who were actually born there. I think that’s one of the liberating notions, that there’s something in the–you know, this whole podcast thing I’m doing is a sort of exploration of the crazy-quilt of American life. And I usually say when I introduce it, out of this different mixture of immigration and backgrounds and religions and everything, we actually have heroic figures who emerge.

KR: Oh, yeah.

RS: You know, that don’t only come from one cut of cloth. And your film has that. I mean, these are local Montana people who are stepping up and doing the right thing, and challenging powerful interests who are mostly from out of state.

KR: That’s right. And in a lot of ways, you know, telling this story in our film of Montana being a microcosm, being this kind of perfect case study where you can really see what goes on with this massive shell game of money and politics, which has been rigged in many ways. So we can kind of get our arms around the story of Montana, and I think in a lot of ways, because there aren’t a lot of people living there, because you got to depend on your neighbors to pull you out of a ditch, you know, when you end up in a snowbank, regardless of what political party they’re in, I think, you know, there is a larger sense of community responsibility, perhaps. I don’t want to be too rosy, I don’t want to make it too, you know, idealistic. But I think that because of that sense of kind of a smaller sense of community, more people were paying attention. More people were paying attention to the chicanery that was going on, to use your word; more people were reading reporting that was coming from people like John Adams and Chuck Johnson and Mike Dennison, who were covering this issue. And that helps you clamp down on this corruption that happens due to the dark money loophole. And I hope that with our film, we inspire people in other states to make their community as small as it was in Montana, to pay as much attention as people can there, and to follow the money through individual citizens who are really curious about the issue, or journalists like John Adams who are fulfilling the role of watchdog reporters, or citizens who are supporting watchdog reporters, right? I mean, this is a really important aspect of how we’re going to break this problem down and solve it.

RS: I want to swing into what I think is an optimistic message from this film, that here is a case where powerful interests with a lot of money are pouring into a state; now they’re empowered. And John, you are great with the blackboard in this film; you get up on the blackboard and you show, you got this money here, and it comes from this corporation, then it goes to this group you know nothing about, and then it goes here, and blah blah blah. And it’s really a story, and the critique of the Citizens United decision is it just makes it all that more difficult to follow where this money is coming from. And again, what I think is terrific about this film is you show that in the state of Montana, through its history, there is a tradition of accountability and transparency, and suspicion of corporate money. And what turns out–and tell me how this happened, your film describes it–you end up having a lot of allies, even though your own paper pulls back, right? The Great Falls–well, they close their bureau or something.

JA: Well, yeah. I mean, what happened with the Great Falls Tribune is what happened with Gannett-owned newspapers throughout the country. I mean, the Great Falls Tribune wasn’t–I want to be clear about that, because the publisher who just retired from the Great Falls Tribune, Jim Strauss, this was a guy who, in my view, went out of his way for many, many years to do everything that he could to keep the newsroom together in the wake of what was large-scale, nationally driven corporate downsizing of newsrooms. So I don’t believe that the Great Falls Tribune went, you know, that they were pulling back from the coverage; I think they would have been more than happy to have me continue to do the coverage. What happened in that case is the Great Falls Tribune–what Gannett required was that all of us who worked for Gannett at that time had to basically get laid off from our jobs, and then reapply for new positions that involved all kinds of things like website analytics and metrics–I mean, basically, it was, they wanted us to be writing clickbait for their website. And that wasn’t what I was interested in; my stories never have been, you know, the hot, Buzzfeed-type clickbait stories, because they require a lot of focus and attention. And you know, most readers who are skimming their iPhones aren’t reading 2,000-word stories on their phone. So anyway, with that out of the way, I think this was able to happen, and I think I was able to do what I was able to do in Montana, partly because of scale, and partly because we had people in places like the Commission of Political Practices who truly believed in the public’s right to know. Montana has a very progressive constitution that was passed in the seventies–

RS: When you say in the seventies–

JA: The 1972 constitution–

RS: Ah.

JA: –the very first clause of the constitution is the right to a clean and healthful environment. And that is the bane of a lot of these corporations, and one of the reasons why they can, you know, continue to try to push through the legislature to pull everything further and further to their favor. Because the constitution and the courts are a tougher battleground for them. So–

RS: I didn’t know that Montana got a new constitution in 1972.

KR: In 1972, in the wake of Watergate–

RS: A-ha.

KR: –and kind of a, kind of widespread repulsion with the Nixon administration, Montana convened a constitutional convention. Again, somewhat similar to the citizen legislature that Montana has. The minister of the church that I went to was on the constitutional convention; it was made up of everyday folks, who rewrote the constitution in 1972. And as John says, the first clause of it provided a clean and healthful environment.

RS: The conventional wisdom now is you can’t do the old gumshoe kind of journalism that you do, that you did. And you know, really dig, and find things out, and confront people about what’s happening. And yet as your film demonstrates, this thing that the nation has had trouble comprehending, Citizens United–it’s in the air, there’s a buzz about it. But watching your film, I got a clearer sense of what Citizens United is about, that I had got–I personally was not a big opponent of Citizens United, you know. I, you know, I have a little bit of a libertarian leaning in me, and boy, your movie really challenges that. And until I saw it operating in Montana, ignoring the wisdom of Montana’s history and the role of corporate money in that state–I must say, I wasn’t in favor of it; I underestimated it. And I think your movie really captured it that way.

JA: I wanted to weigh in on the issue about the future–you know, the current state of journalism and the future of journalism. And I think, I’m one of these people who by circumstance found myself trying to make a decision like the decision that a lot of people make in this situation, which is do I try to stick with it, or do I do what a lot of folks do and go into public relations or go into some other, you know, communications field, which a lot of journalists really thrive at and make good money at and make good careers at. And I respect that. I wasn’t ready to do that yet, and I by circumstance decided that if I couldn’t find a place that was going to employ me to do it, I would try to figure out a way to do it myself. And what I’ve learned over the course of the last few years while doing that is that I think that there is still a place, and there is still a desire, and there is still a way for that kind of journalism to thrive in our current environment, our digitally driven, information-fueled environment. But it requires new ways of thinking about it than the old systems. The old systems of, you know, owning a huge operation with a printing press and a distribution network and everything else, you know, the overhead that it takes for that–those systems worked well for a long time in an era where people didn’t get their information instantly on their phones. And so we have to just find new, innovative ways to continue to tell the stories, but people still want to hear the stories; those stories still have impact. And what we’re trying to do at the Montana Free Press is just find new and innovative ways to keep doing that kind of journalism, but deliver it to people in the ways that they are now accustomed to receiving it.

RS: So let me bring in the Montana Free Press, and our director Kimberley Reed. I thought one of the terrific things about your film is it’s not a downer. And you have this scene which I think, oh, this movie’s going to end, it’s going to be really depressing, because John here–

KR: [Laughs] Because it’s a documentary.

RS: gets in his pickup, you know–well, because it’s a documentary, right. [Laughs] But he gets in his pickup truck, you know, with his dog, and puts all his possessions in. And he says, oh, I’ll find some friends who got cabins I can stay in, you know, and I’ll figure something out, but I’m going to still keep this writing going. And then here we have the introduction of the Montana Free Press. And there you are, you’ve got a little board of directors meeting to try to raise some money. And so tell us about this reincarnation of journalism.

JA: I haven’t figured it out yet. It’s not–you know, we’re still a long way from being financially sustainable–

RS: You’re never going to, you’re never going to–I’m here to tell you, the myth about the internet is that content providers are ever going to do well. No. Google and Facebook and these people are going to get, you know, most of the profit, and you’re going to have chump change. But–

JA: But what we’re doing, we’re finding that there are people that, they believe in what we’re doing. And I’ve found that if you are, if they believe in you and they believe in what you’re doing, then they’ll support you. And those are the folks that we’re looking for. You know, it was obviously fortunate for me that while all of this was unfolding, you know, this thing that I was just thinking about as my life, there happened to be this documentary filmmaker who would pop in from time to time with her camera and record chunks of it. You know, and I didn’t know at the time–I never really realized until very late in the game, you know, the significant role I was going to play in the film. I thought I was just helping Kim tell a story; I didn’t know that she was going to make me part of it. [Laughs]

RS: What this documentary not only shows the value of a guy like John here, that you need that dogged investigative reporter, you just need ‘em, you know. And if we lose them, we got to find some other way of reinventing them, and maybe the Montana Free Press is the new model. I also want to take my hat off to the role of the documentary filmmaker. I think that your film–and people should go see it if they really want to understand why Citizens United is a big deal, and what it unleashes, and what the danger of it is in trampling over the sensibility of ordinary folks in a place like Montana. That state had great rules, great law, preventing corporate influence from once again raping the environment, you know, and destroying the lives of people. And what undermined that sensible restraint, coming from the state–which after all, used to be a conservative value, you know; states having a say, that’s why we have a senate and so forth. And what your film shows is big money can come in and just wipe out the power of the citizens.

KR: Yeah, and hopefully it shows the citizens pushing back against that, and paying attention to it, and having a strong press that’s in place that’s following it, and having not only the laws on the books, but enforcement mechanisms that are going to hold that accountable. Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of hopelessness when it comes to these issues of money and politics, and a lot of people throw their hands up and feel like they can’t do anything about it as voters. They certainly don’t want to get involved in the whole system by running for it. There’s just a lot of, like, disaffection. And I hope that our film shows–and I think it does–that by engaging in that system and taking it back over from this corporate influence, can really put power back into the hands of people.

RS: That’s it. I want to thank you folks for coming in, Kimberley Reed and John Adams. Our producers for Scheer Intelligence are Rebecca Mooney and Joshua Scheer. Our engineers at KCRW are Mario Diaz and Kat Yore. And Sebastian Grubaugh here at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has done stellar work in engineering this particular session.

Defense Contractor Detained Migrant Kids in Vacant Phoenix Office Building

A major U.S. defense contractor quietly detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with dark windows, no kitchen and only a few toilets during three weeks of the Trump administration’s family separation effort, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has learned.

Videos shot by an alarmed neighbor show children dressed in sweatsuits being led – one so young she was carried – into the 3,200-square-foot building in early June. The building is not licensed by Arizona to hold children, and the contractor, MVM Inc., has claimed publicly that it does not operate “shelters or any other type of housing” for children.

Defending the administration’s policy to separate families at the border in a May interview with NPR, White House chief of staff John Kelly promised: “The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.”

Whether or not these children were taken from their parents, that “whatever” for them was the vacant building tucked away in a midtown Phoenix neighborhood. It is not listed among shelters operating through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement or on the state child care licensing website.

There are new cameras on the building, extra locks on the doors and a paper shredder bin directly outside the building’s side door. Neighbor Lianna Dunlap’s videos show workers pulling up in white vans and leading dazed children into the building. When she asked questions, she said the workers responded with silence or terse answers.

A cellphone video shows immigrant children being led into a vacant office building in Phoenix. The defense contractor leasing the building, MVM Inc., claims publicly that it does not operate “shelters or any other type of housing for minors.” Credit: Lianna Dunlap

“There’s been times where I drive by and I just start crying because, you know, it’s right behind my house,” said Dunlap, her voice wavering. “I don’t know and I think that’s the worst part – not knowing what’s actually going on in there and just hoping that they’re OK.”

The building was leased in March by MVM, a Virginia-based defense contractor that has received contracts worth up to $248 million to transport immigrant children since 2014, records show. The company, which once provided guards for CIA facilities in Iraq, was founded by three former Secret Service agents. One of its vice presidents is a former CIA special agent and former acting director of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Company President and CEO Kevin Marquez signed a five-year lease for the building March 9, one month before U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Reveal has confirmed that the lease says the building is not allowed to be used for sleeping or cooking and can be used only for “general business office purposes.” It also prohibits tenants from making “disturbing noises,” including whistling and singing, that would “interfere with occupants of this or neighboring buildings.”

When Reveal asked MVM about the Phoenix office building, the company initially pointed to its earlier statement that it does not operate housing for immigrant children. After learning that neighbors had recorded video of children entering the building, an MVM spokesperson said the building “is not a shelter or a child care facility. … It’s a temporary holding place” for children being flown out of the Phoenix airport to other locations.

Asked whether the children were kept there overnight, the spokesperson said the building is intended to hold them for a few hours before flights but was unsure how long children actually ended up staying.

An inflatable mattress, a box marked “baby shampoo,” a medication schedule and other items spotted inside the building last week indicate that children could have been held there for an extended period. Dunlap and other neighbors say they never saw the children taken outside to play. They watched as pallets of water and boxes of food were brought in.

Three weeks later, the neighbors say they saw five unmarked white vans that hold about 12 passengers each pull up to take children away. It was June 22, two days after Trump signed an executive order to end his administration’s policy of separating families.

Items inside the Phoenix office building where immigrant children were detained in June – as seen through a window recently – include a child’s booster seat, a box labeled “baby shampoo,” an inflatable mattress and a medication schedule. Credit: Aura Bogado/Reveal

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to Reveal that it had entered into a contract with MVM. ICE spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said the company “is authorized to use their office spaces as waiting areas for minors awaiting same-day transportation between U.S. Customs and Border Protection custody and U.S. Health and Human Services custody.”

Transporting ‘humans’

Dunlap, a 25-year-old teaching assistant for children with autism, lives next door to the office building. When she saw vanloads of dark-haired kids speaking Spanish being ushered out of vans and into the previously vacant building for a second day in early June, she grabbed her cellphone and started recording.

“That’s when I was like, ‘OK, they’re definitely doing something they shouldn’t be doing,’ ” Dunlap said. “It looked very secretive.”

Dunlap, a 25-year-old teaching assistant for children with autism, lives next door to the office building. When she saw vanloads of dark-haired kids speaking Spanish being ushered out of vans and into the previously vacant building for a second day in early June, she grabbed her cellphone and started recording.

“That’s when I was like, ‘OK, they’re definitely doing something they shouldn’t be doing,’ ” Dunlap said. “It looked very secretive.”

At first, Dunlap worried that the children were being trafficked. Then, as news of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy began to spread, she thought they could be among the thousands taken from their parents at the border.

Other neighbors became aware of the situation as well. And they, too, were upset.

Lianna Dunlap started seeing white vans filled with immigrant children pulling up to the vacant office building behind her house June 4. The next day, she videotaped more children being led into the building. Dunlap says she never saw children leave or go outside during the next three weeks. Credit: Aura Bogado/Reveal

Kristen Brown, a behavioral therapist who lives next to Dunlap with her 2-year-old son, was concerned about the lack of space and facilities for children inside the MVM office building.

“My kid has the ability to run around and play, and there are 40 kids in that place that I don’t know what you’re doing with,” she recalled telling one on-site worker. “That, as a mom, it doesn’t feel right.”

Dunlap said she never saw any children leave the building until nearly three weeks after they arrived. When Dunlap tried to take video of that departure, she said workers spotted her watching from her kitchen window and blocked her view with vehicles. She said she watched children’s feet as they filed out of the building.

That’s when Dunlap and her husband, Juan Carlos Larios, confronted the adults, one of whom suggested they could call police. So they did.

Phoenix police Sgt. Vince Lewis, public information officer for the department, told Reveal that when police arrived at the building, “ICE confirmed that it (MVM) was contracted to perform that transport.”

Since dozens of children were removed from the office building two weeks ago, the neighbors have observed more deliveries of water and quizzed workers about what’s going on. Dunlap says one worker told her that they were fixing the air conditioning.

With temperatures in Phoenix hitting 111 degrees in June, Dunlap said she hoped the air conditioning was working when the children were inside.

Brown asked a worker what kind of business the employees were conducting. The business of transportation, she was told.

“Transporting what?” Brown asked.

“Humans,” the worker replied.

We’re not ‘housing’ kids, MVM says

MVM was awarded an $8 million five-year contract in 2017 to “maintain readiness” and provide “emergency support services” to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency in charge of  housing unaccompanied immigrant children in shelters and other facilities across the country.

The office building where immigrant children were detained in June is on a main street just outside downtown Phoenix. Defense contractor MVM Inc., which leased the building in March, calls it a “temporary holding place” for children being flown out of the Phoenix airport to other locations. Credit: Aura Bogado/Reveal

A statement posted on the company’s website June 18 states: “MVM has tremendous empathy for the families and children arriving at the U.S. border. … The current services MVM provides consist of transporting undocumented families and unaccompanied children to Department of Health and Human Services designated facilities – we have not and currently do not operate shelters or any other type of housing for minors.”

By the time that statement was posted, MVM had signed the lease for the Phoenix office building and begun taking children there.

ICE’s Elzea also said the office is not an overnight housing facility: “The offices are outfitted to provide minors awaiting same-day transport with a more comfortable and private atmosphere than they might otherwise have at a public transportation hub.”

But even shorter-term accommodations for children could trigger a different requirement: licensing by the state of Arizona.

The office building is not licensed as a child care facility, according to Chris Minnick, a spokesman for the Arizona Health Services Department. Licenses are required for any place “where children are unaccompanied by a parent or guardian on a regular basis for periods of less than 24 hours a day other than the child’s home,” he said.

When told that ICE claims children are being held in the building for at least several hours before boarding flights, Minnick said: “I’m not on the legal side of this, but from what I understand, that would fall under that definition.”

Minnick said the department had no complaints on file for operation of an unlicensed child care facility at that address. But a license would require qualified staff, outdoor play areas, age-appropriate toys, smoke detectors, a food establishment permit and other government health and safety inspections.

Whether a facility must be licensed is a determination made by the state health department. State law requires facilities found to be operating without a license to shut down within 10 days of receiving notice or face criminal prosecution. Operating without a child care license is a misdemeanor in Arizona.

The MVM spokesperson would not answer questions about whether the Phoenix office building should be licensed as a child care center. The spokesperson also would not say how many other facilities like it the company operates nationwide. Elzea, the ICE spokeswoman, also would not estimate how many temporary detention facilities for children operate nationwide under agency contracts with MVM or other companies.

Neighbor Kristen Brown says a worker told her that the company has another location, but she said the worker would not share its address for fear of losing her job. The worker indicated that children would be returning to the Phoenix office building near Brown’s house.

Brown said she has been upset by news of children “being ripped away from their parents” at the border, but watching immigrant children being shuffled into the office next door “is a whole new level of upsetting.”

MVM came under fire recently after it posted jobs for “bilingual youth care workers” at the height of the controversy over family separation.

Today, the company’s website states: “At the direction of the company’s leadership, we have removed job postings related to readiness operations under the current zero tolerance policy.”

But part-time MVM job opportunities for Phoenix-based bilingual travel youth care workers remain active. “You will make it your mission to provide humble care and service to unaccompanied children and teens, while you are accompanying them on domestic flights and via ground transportation to shelters all over the country,” the posting reads.

MVM is among a handful of large defense contractors that operate in a lucrative, shadowy business in which former intelligence officers could be vying for private security jobs or running prisons in war zones one day and managing transportation for immigrant children the next.

The company’s employees have provided protection for former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Guantanamo Bay Migrant Operations Center. According to federal records, MVM is listed as a “Hispanic American Owned Business,” a designation that can give potential contractors a leg up in the bidding process.

The company has been awarded contracts worth $1.5 billion since 2007 from government clients including law enforcement agencies such as ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration; the National Institutes of Health; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the Smithsonian Institution.

While it has kept a lower profile than some defense contractors, MVM has not escaped controversy. Lawsuits have alleged gender discrimination and national origin discrimination. In August 2008, the CIA curtailed its contract with MVM after the company failed to provide a sufficient number of armed guards.

 

 

 

The King of Chaos

Donald Trump heads to Europe next week, where he will meet with NATO leaders in Brussels before heading to Helsinki for a much-anticipated summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The NATO meeting comes on the heels of Trump’s bull-in-a-china shop presence at last month’s G-7 gathering in Canada, where the president alienated and angered longtime European allies (and his Canadian host, Justin Trudeau) with his “America first” approach to trade and tariffs. That resulted in a three-front trade war with Canada, Europe and China that benefits American steel manufacturers and few others.

At the NATO conference, Trump is expected to continue to bang the drum over the issue of defense spending, lambasting his European partners who have failed to meet an agreed-upon contribution target of 2 percent gross domestic product per year while decrying what he believes is the exorbitant burden placed on the U.S. for securing the defense of the trans-Atlantic alliance.

“We’re paying on anywhere between 70 and 90 percent to protect Europe and that’s fine,” Trump told a crowd of supporters in Montana this week. “Of course,” he added, “they kill us on trade.”

This Jekyll and Hyde approach toward Europe has heads spinning on both sides of the Atlantic.  The trade tariffs Trump is imposing on his European and Canadian allies are derived from executive authority, which allow him to act in the interest of American national security. In short, in Trump’s world, America’s NATO allies represent a threat worthy of sanctions.  At the same time, Trump has pressured NATO into increasing its spending by $33 billion to bolster its defensive capabilities in the face of a resurgent Russia, whose actions in the Ukraine have Poland and the Baltic nations fearing for their security.

And now Trump is going to head to Helsinki, where he seeks to cement a burgeoning friendship with Putin. In Finland, Russia is seeking an easing of sanctions, which would require Trump to turn a blind eye to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. For its part, the U.S. hopes to get Russian cooperation on nuclear proliferation issues, including North Korea and Iran, security assurances regarding both Syria and the Ukraine (sans Crimea), and some progress on bringing a halt to what Trump has called “an arms race” between Moscow and Washington.

If you’re Angela Merkel, Trump’s words and actions must have you scratching your head. He told the crowd in Montana this about the German chancellor: “We’re protecting you and it means a lot more to you than protecting us, because I don’t know how much protection we get by protecting you.” She could only wish to have the kind of substantive discussions Trump is preparing for with his Russian counterpart.

The timing of the Helsinki Trump-Putin summit is odd on two grounds. The first is the competing meeting with NATO. At best, the meetings in Brussels and Helsinki will cancel each other out. At worst, Helsinki will trump Brussels, with all that portends for the future of a NATO alliance already reeling from Trump’s criticism and talk of a trade war.

Perhaps even more stunning is Trump’s utter disregard for the hostile domestic political environment in Washington that under normal circumstances would seem to have made it impossible for him to move forward with plans to meet with Putin. Just this past week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence accused the Russian leader of trying to tip the scale in favor of Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

It is the legal and political realities bearing down on Trump at home, however, that may have provided the catalyst for this summit to take place at this time. He is under tremendous political pressure because of special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between members of the Trump campaign and Russian government officials in the 2016 U.S. election.

Trump’s legal team has implied Mueller’s probe harms U.S. national security by interfering with the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy. The Helsinki summit will lend credibility to this argument, and in doing so increase the pressure on Mueller to bring his investigation to an end. The Trump team can claim that with U.S.-Russia relations back on track, the Mueller probe is little more than politically motivated interference in legitimate affairs of state. Midterm elections are looming in November, and Trump’s relationship with Russia will certainly be an issue.  Even if little of substance emerges from it, the Helsinki summit could very well help turn the Russia problem to Trump’s advantage.

The Helsinki summit is but the latest iteration of the wrecking ball for what passes as American diplomacy under Trump.  To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the U.S. has confirmed its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), “a cesspool of political bias,” according to the U.S. envoy to the U.N., Nikki Haley, employing language more vitriolic than even that which accompanied Washington’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal a few weeks earlier.

The U.S. has hardly been alone in its criticism of the UNHRC, and there is certainly a separate debate to be had about the council’s effectiveness. But the more important dimension to the decision to leave the UNHRC, flagged last year when Haley announced the U.S. would be reviewing its membership, is that it marks another step in America’s disengagement under Trump from multilateral organizations and agreements that his administration thinks do nothing to advance U.S. interests.

These are not auspicious times for multilateral organizations, or for multilateralism more generally. The story of the seven decades since the end of the Second World War is, from a Western perspective, the story of the establishment of a rules-based international order and an array of multilateral international bodies, such as the U.N. and the World Trade Organization, aimed at enforcing those rules and peacefully resolving disputes and crises, and alliances such as NATO, to deter aggression from the Soviet Union and Russia. The U.S. has played the leading role in that system, but that leadership has been taken for granted by America’s allies, according to Trump, hence his aggressively revisionist approach to virtually every aspect of trade and foreign policy.

Caught in the crossfire of Trump’s trade policy is the World Trade Organization (WTO), which the U.S. seems not only to be ignoring, in its pursuit of trade sanctions and tariffs that fall outside the organization’s framework of rules and regulations, but also undermining by blocking the appointment of replacement members of the seven-member panel that oversees resolution of trade disputes. Trump seems hellbent on destroying the WTO’s core function, the means by which the rules and principles laid out when the organization was established in 1994 can be enforced. This provides a level of certainty in international trade relations from which the global economy has broadly benefited. That certainty has now been destroyed, with the U.S. simultaneously embarking on a policy of imposing unilateral trade sanctions under the guise of obscure U.S. trade law, thereby providing a pretext for the imposition of protectionist tariffs in contravention of WTO principles.

The actions of the Trump administration in this regard have potentially huge consequences.  If the WTO, its rules and its dispute resolution mechanism become meaningless, there really is nothing to prevent an all-out trade war between the U.S. and China, with all that would portend for the global economy. Nor, in this eventuality, would recourse to the WTO be an option for the European Union to blunt the impact of any extraterritorial sanctions the U.S. imposes in connection with its anticipated withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.

Whether through his simultaneous critique of NATO and embrace of Russia, or the policy of withdrawal and disruption that governs America’s multilateral relationships in the U.N. and WTO,  Trump seems to relish his role as the “King of Chaos,” challenging the established world order by simply tearing it apart.  This “my way or the highway” approach plays exceptionally well to Trump’s domestic political base and seems timed in part to influence the upcoming midterm elections.

The Helsinki summit is but the latest manifestation of what has become a trend in unilateralist, protectionist “America First” policies. In the short term, these policies seem to be playing to Trump’s advantage both on the domestic front, where the Democrats struggle to cobble together a political response to the president’s words and deeds, and globally, as America under Trump rewrites the rules of the game that have governed global interaction for more than 70 years.

For the moment, it looks like advantage Trump. The risk, however, is that at some point people, organizations and governments will choose structure over chaos and build a new framework of global interaction that does not include the United States in the singular leadership position it enjoys today.

In his effort to “Make America Great Again,” Trump is transforming what was once an  indispensable nation on the international stage into something the world will learn to ignore. Ever the domestic political animal, living for the moment with no true sense of history or strategic vision, Trump may see his approach get him through one or even two terms in office. But America is far greater than one man, and when his time is up, the “King of Chaos” will have left a trail of destroyed relationships and bad feelings from which his successor, or successors, may never be able to fully recover.

 

North Korea Says Talks With Pompeo Were ‘Regrettable’

PYONGYANG, North Korea—North Korea said Saturday that high-level talks with a U.S. delegation led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were “regrettable” and accused Washington of trying to unilaterally pressure the country into abandoning its nukes.

The North’s statement came hours after Pompeo wrapped up two days of talks with senior North Korean officials without meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but with commitments for new discussions on denuclearization and the repatriation of the remains of American soldiers killed during the Korean War.

Before departing Pyongyang, Pompeo told reporters that his conversations with senior North Korean official Kim Yong Chol had been “productive,” conducted “in good faith” and that “a great deal of progress” had been made in some areas. He stressed that “there’s still more work to be done” in other areas, much of which would be done by working groups that the two sides have set up to deal with specific issues.

The North provided a much harsher assessment of the talks. In a statement released by an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman, the North accused the United States of betraying the spirit of last month’s summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim by making “one-sided and robber-like” demands on “CVID,” or the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea.

It said the outcome of the follow-up talks was “very concerning” because it has led to a “dangerous phase that might rattle our willingness for denuclearization that had been firm.”

“We had expected that the U.S. side would offer constructive measures that would help build trust based on the spirit of the leaders’ summit … we were also thinking about providing reciprocal measures,” said the statement, carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

“However, the attitude and stance the United States showed in the first high-level meeting (between the countries) was no doubt regrettable,” the spokesman said. “Our expectations and hopes were so naive it could be called foolish.”

According to the spokesman, during the talks with Pompeo the North raised the issue of a possible declaration to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War, which concluded with an armistice and not a peace treaty. It also offered to discuss the closure of a missile engine test site that would “physically affirm” a move to halt the production of intercontinental range ballistic missiles and setting up working-level discussions for the return of U.S. war remains.

However, the spokesman said the United States came up with a variety of “conditions and excuses” to delay a declaration on ending the war. The spokesman also downplayed the significance of the United States suspending its military exercises with South Korea, saying the North made a larger concession by blowing up the tunnels at its nuclear test site.

In criticizing the talks with Pompeo, however, the North carefully avoided attacking Trump, saying “we wholly maintain our trust toward President Trump,” but also that Washington must not allow “headwinds” against the “wills of the leaders.”

Pompeo said that a Pentagon team would be meeting with North Korean officials on or about July 12 at the border between North and South Korea to discuss the repatriation of remains and that working-level talks would be held soon on the destruction of North Korea’s missile engine testing facility.

In the days following his historic June 12 summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Trump had announced that the return of the remains and the destruction of the missile facility had been completed or were in progress.

Pompeo, however, said more talks were needed on both.

“We now have a meeting set up for July 12—it could move by one day or two—where there will be discussions between the folks responsible for the repatriation of remains. (It) will take place at the border and that process will begin to develop over the days that follow,” he said as he boarded his plane for Tokyo.

On the destruction of the missile engine plant, Pompeo said, “We talked about what the modalities would look like for the destruction of that facility as well, and some progress there as well, and then we have laid out a path for further negotiation at the working level so the two teams can get together and continue these discussions.”

Earlier, Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol both said they needed clarity on the parameters of an agreement to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula that Trump and Kim Jong Un agreed to in Singapore. The trip was Pompeo’s third to Pyongyang since April and his first since the summit.

Unlike his previous visits, which have been one-day affairs during which he has met with Kim Jong Un, Pompeo spent the night at a government guesthouse in Pyongyang and did not see the North Korean leader, although U.S. officials had suggested such a meeting was expected. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said no meeting with Kim Jong Un had been planned.

As they began their talks on Saturday, Kim Yong Chol alluded to the fact that Pompeo and his delegation had stayed overnight in Pyongyang.

“We did have very serious discussions on very important matters yesterday,” Kim said. “So, thinking about those discussions you might have not slept well last night.”

Pompeo, who spoke with Trump, national security adviser John Bolton and White House chief of staff John Kelly by secure phone before starting Saturday’s session, replied that he “slept just fine.” He added that the Trump administration was committed to reaching a deal under which North Korea would denuclearize and realize economic benefits in return.

Kim later said that “there are things that I have to clarify” to which Pompeo responded that “there are things that I have to clarify as well.”

There was no immediate explanation of what needed to be clarified, but the two sides have been struggling to specify what exactly “denuclearization” would entail and how it could be verified to the satisfaction of the United States.

Pompeo and Kim met for nearly three hours Friday and then had dinner amid growing skepticism over how serious Kim Jong Un is about giving up his nuclear arsenal and translating the upbeat rhetoric following his summit with Trump into concrete action.

On his flight to Pyongyang, Pompeo said both sides made commitments at the Singapore summit on the complete denuclearization of North Korea and on what a transformed relationship between their two countries might look like.

One hoped-for breakthrough on this trip would have been the return of the remains of U.S. troops killed during the 1950-53 Korean War. North Korea committed at last month’s summit to the “immediate repatriation” of remains already identified, but that hasn’t happened yet.

___

Lee reported from Tokyo. Kim Tong-Hyung in Seoul contributed.

The Media Needs to Radically Change the Way It Covers ‘Foiled Terror Plots’

This holiday week, we saw yet another high-profile “foiled” terror plot. And once again, when one looks closely at the government’s case, it consists of an FBI ruse, driven largely by the government itself. According to The Washington Post, the suspect, Demetrius Pitts, “indicated to [an] FBI employee he did not want to detonate any bombs himself” and the FBI special agent in charge “conceded it was unclear whether Pitts had the means to carry out an attack by himself.” The FBI even gave Pitts a bus pass and a cellphone so he could “carry out” the entirely theoretical attack on an Independence Day parade in Cleveland.

But right on cue, the average American was met with the routine barrage of sexed-up headlines, giving one the distinct impression an organic, al-Qaida-driven plot had been stopped at the eleventh hour. Since 9/11, the chasm between the reality of so-called Islamic State or al-Qaida plots and the way the public perceives the threat is light-years apart. The media should—and can—work to reduce this chasm if it chooses to use the slightest bit of critical reasoning and political context.

Human rights groups and independent researchers have found between 67 percent and 99 percent of nominal terror cases involve varying degrees of FBI involvement, often with the bureau acting as the primary engine—providing materials, plans and encouragement to a “suspect,” often after he or she merely expresses pro-jihadist sympathies online. The gap between idle internet musing and actual acts of violence is a wide one, and one the FBI routinely helps close by constructing these Potemkin plots. Frequently, informants or agents working for the FBI outnumber the suspects being targeted by three, four or five to one and provide the funding and targets for the attack. The FBI and its 15,000-strong network of informants particularly enjoy constructing those plots involving major holidays and new, previously unthinkable targets—presumably in an effort to raise the stakes and get an increasingly terror-fatigued public to notice.

Yet one wouldn’t know there was no actual imminent threat by scanning the headlines, which only 40 percent of Americans read past. Often, the fact that the FBI is a driving force behind these “plots” is buried deep in the story, as is the case again this week with coverage from CNN, Forbes, Fox News and CBS News on the alleged Cleveland attack.

But headlines are the most important element of stories, and cable news—which is little more than headlines being yelled at the public on a loop—engages in the same type of shallow, government-parroting fear-mongering. The vast majority of Americans are simply unaware of the degree to which these are not plots that would otherwise be carried out, but creations of a network of informants and agents building a trap for a target, very often one that’s poor, black and suffering from a history of mental illness.

None of this, of course, is to say that every plot is cooked up in some FBI whiteboarding session. Often the line between organic and contrived terror plot is difficult to distinguish, and statistically speaking, it’s almost certain some percentage of those caught in the FBI’s crosshairs would have committed an act of violence at some point. But the most basic reading of many of these high-profile cases would leave any reasonable person with the impression these are not actual terror plots in any real sense. And the public has a right to know this, without having to get into the weeds of obscure, difficult-to-read government affidavits.

The media doesn’t simply report the news. It shapes our perception of it. To simply repeat the FBI “foiled a plot” without noting in the headline that the FBI was responsible for creating the plot is intellectual malpractice.

Take the case of Emanuel Lutchman of Rochester, N.Y. A similar holiday-themed “thwarted attack” occurred on New Year’s Day 2016. It involved a mentally unwell indigent man. An FBI informant drove him to Walmart to buy supplies for the attack and provided the $40 for the “terror” materials because the man didn’t have a car or enough money for his own murder-suicide. The headlines at the time screamed “News Year’s Eve terror plot” over and over, but every detail of the case showed how exploitative and thin it was, up to and including the FBI’s informant talking Lutchman into the attack after he wanted to back out at the last minute.

Or look at the case of the “Draw Muhammad Contest” plot in Garland, Texas—an actual terror attack that involved live fire and the main suspect, Elton Simpson, being killed in a hail of bullets in 2015. This too involved undercover FBI agents telling the suspect to “tear up Texas” days before the attack and a mysterious FBI agent who was present when the attack took place, standing just feet behind Simpson. Even the security guard injured in the attack, to this day, blames the FBI for letting the plot spiral out of control.

Now compare this with the hyperventilating coverage of Garland, which gave the impression that Islamic State cells were everywhere in our midst. It wasn’t until months later, after court documents came to light, that we learned the level of FBI involvement. This is a consistent pattern: Initial reports—based solely on an FBI press release and statements—downplay government influence and make the plot seem like the work of an elaborate Islamic State or al-Qaida sleeper cell network. Then, when the case (or related cases) go to trial, the extent to which informants or agents advanced the plot becomes too glaring to ignore.

To what extent the FBI has a hand in creating the image of perma-terror that it and it alone can stop is rarely centered in coverage of these so-called plots. The fact is it’s essential. Anyone who studies these cases with any degree of skepticism knows this. The idea that the FBI eggs on, provides inert weapons for and helps map out these plots is not a controversial point. It’s a key element to the bureau’s “proactive” approach to stopping what it views, fairly or not, as emerging threats.

But the public has a right to know the deceptive nature of these sensationalist stories, and how often and how much the FBI itself is driving the impression that terror threats lurk around every corner.

The Trump Administration’s Family Reunification Plan Is a Fiasco

When the Trump administration instituted its “zero tolerance policy,” which prosecutes immigrants for entering the country illegally and separates parents from their children as a means of deterrence, critics argued it was not simply cruel and immoral but ill-conceived. Less than two weeks after the president used an executive order to formally end the practice of family separation, and days after a federal judge imposed multiple deadlines for reunification, their worst fears have come to fruition.

According to a New York Times report published Thursday, administration officials are scrambling to meet the court’s demands, with as many as 3,000 children’s lives hanging in the balance. Overseeing the gargantuan undertaking is the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has relied on identification bracelets, registration numbers and “careful logs” to track the movements of those detained. But as the Times reveals, the office has been routinely subverted by Customs and Border Protection.

“In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a ‘family identification number,’ according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on a condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process,” writes the Times’ Caitlin Dickerson. “As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.”

For its part, HHS maintains that these measures were, in Dickerson’s words, not part of a “deliberate attempt to obfuscate, but a belief that it made more sense to track cases separately once a group of migrants was no longer in custody as a family unit.” Similarly, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman insists that “[n]ot only is it categorically false that DHS destroyed records, but the opposite is true: DHS personnel has worked hand-in-hand with HHS personnel to share clear data in the most useful formats possible for HHS.”

Nonetheless, multiple HHS officials claim that these records have been trashed or otherwise have disappeared, and that they are vital to identifying family members who are sometimes thousands of miles apart.

Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, appears all too ready to blame anybody but the administration for its self-inflicted crisis. “Any confusion is due to a broken immigration system and court orders,” he told the Times. “It’s not here.”

On Friday, lawyers for the Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of the Southern District of California to extend his court-imposed deadlines, arguing that federal DNA testing, along with the necessary research into a parent’s fitness as a legal guardian, could delay the reunification process. Officials had responded to Sabraw’s original order by instructing Border Patrol agents to present migrants seeking asylum with one of two options: “Leave the country with your kids—or leave the country without them,” per an NBC report.

The Trump administration has until July 26 to reunite the children it forcibly separated from their parents. However, for boys and girls 5 and under, of which there are approximately 100, the deadline is this Tuesday.