Chris Hedges's Blog, page 65

Elizabeth Warren Urges Voters to Imagine a Better World

Marking the end of the year and the one-year anniversary of the day she began her 2020 presidential campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren challenged voters to imagine a country that puts the needs and priorities of working people ahead of corporate profits in an hour-long speech in Boston.

The Massachusetts Democrat offered voters a message of optimism as the country heads toward the first Democratic primaries in the coming weeks while conveying the damage done to the country by decades of corruption and by the Republican Party under the Trump administration.

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At the historic Old South Meeting House, Warren asked her supporters to imagine the opportunities that could await them in a country without skyrocketing levels of wealth inequality, a $1.5 trillion student debt crisis, and a for-profit healthcare system which bankrupts hundreds of thousands of Americans per year:

If you were no longer tied to your job in order to pay off student loan debt, where would you go? Try a different job? Move back to your hometown? Start your own business?

[…]

If you were no longer stretched to make ends meet, who would you be?  A coach? A volunteer? A parent?

And if you could make these changes, what opportunities would it open up, for you? For your children? For your grandchildren?

Watch the whole speech below:

A year ago today, we launched this campaign for big, structural change. In just a few minutes, I’ll be speaking live about the optimism I’ll be carrying into 2020. #Warren2020 https://t.co/cN5FfQAtUP

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) December 31, 2019

Warren lambasted congressional Republicans as “fawning, spineless defenders” of Trump’s crimes, enabling the president’s attempt to bribe the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden, which led to Trump’s impeachment by the House earlier this month.

“It brought no one any joy, but the House Democrats upheld their sworn duty to the Constitution and impeached the president of the United States,” Warren said. “Soon I will return to the Senate to do my sworn duty as well. But unless some Senate Republicans choose truth over politics, Donald Trump will be emboldened to try to cheat his way through yet another election.”

With Trump as president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pledging to coordinate with the White House as the Senate begins its impeachment trial, and many centrist Democrats unwilling to enact bold structural reforms to the economy and political system, the senator said, “democracy hangs in the balance.”

“We fought back against a king and an empire to form a new republic. We fought back against the scourge of slavery even after it was written into our constitution,” Warren said. “Those moments in American history define us. And at each one of them, if our leaders had approached the moment thinking small, we would not have made it through.”

Warren’s call for Americans to look beyond not only the Trump White House but also the claims by her centrist primary opponents—who have called bold policy proposals by Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unrealistic—and imagine a country in which “big, structural change” has taken hold won praise on social media.

The speech overall was “less about the fight alone, more about visualizing life after the fight,” tweeted author Anand Giridharadas.

This @ewarren speech felt like a revelation and a fresh approach to the progressive cause.

With a refrain of “Imagine an America…”, it was less about the fight alone, more about visualizing life after the fight.

Candidates at all levels should watch. https://t.co/3V2AEe5GBA

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 31, 2019

This @ewarren speech felt like a revelation and a fresh approach to the progressive cause.

With a refrain of “Imagine an America…”, it was less about the fight alone, more about visualizing life after the fight.

Candidates at all levels should watch. https://t.co/3V2AEe5GBA

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) December 31, 2019

Critics of the U.S. political system in which corporate lobbyists have sway over how lawmakers legislate, corporate donors contribute huge sums of money to their preferred candidates, and working people are left struggling to support their families also applauded the speech.

Stocks Close Out Best Year Since 2013; S&P 500 Soars 28.9%

Wall Street closed the books Tuesday on a blockbuster 2019 for stock investors, with the broader market delivering its best returns in six years.

The S&P 500 finished with a gain of 28.9% for the year , while the Nasdaq composite rose 35.3%. For both indexes it was the best annual performance since 2013. Technology stocks helped power those gains by vaulting 48%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 22.3%, led by Apple.

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Along the way, the three major indexes set more record highs than in 2018 and kept the longest bull market for stocks going.

“We had a remarkable year of returns in the stock market,” said Keith Buchanan, portfolio manager at Globalt Investments. “Things are much different going into 2020 than they were going into 2019.”

Wall Street’s record-shattering ride in 2019 was not without its bumps.

The market got off to a roaring start in January after Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell said the central bank would be “patient” with its interest rate policy following four increases in 2018. That encouraged investors who had been worried the Fed would continue hiking rates. Those concerns helped fuel a sell-off in the final quarter of 2018 that knocked the S&P 500 nearly 20% lower by December of that year.

January’s rally helped set the tone for a year in which the market responded to every downturn with a more sustained upswing. Along the way, stocks kept setting records — 35 of them for the S&P 500 index, 22 for the Dow and 31 for the Nasdaq.

By the end of the year, the Fed had completely reversed course and cut rates three times in what Powell called a pre-emptive move against any impact a sluggish global economy and the U.S.-China trade war might have on U.S. economic growth.

The market also overcame a late-summer slump caused by fears that the U.S. economy could be headed for a recession. Those concerns eased as investors drew encouragement from surprisingly good third-quarter corporate earnings and data showing the economy was not slowing as much as economists had feared.

“You fast-forward 12 months and now we’re going into 2020 and the sentiment seems like it’s fairly the opposite,” Buchanan said. ”There are fairly rosy expectations and there’s not a consensus that a recession is coming in a very near term.”

A truce in the 17-month U.S.-China trade war helped keep investors in a buying mood through the end of the year. Washington and Beijing announced in December they reached an agreement over a “Phase 1” trade deal that calls for the U.S. to reduce tariffs and China to buy larger quantities of U.S. farm products.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump tweeted that he will sign the initial trade deal with China at the White House next month. He also said he plans to travel to Beijing at a later date to open talks on other sticking points in the U.S.-China trade relationship that remain to be worked out, including Chinese practices the U.S. complains unfairly favor its own companies.

A last-minute burst of buying reversed an early dip the major indexes Tuesday. Stocks ended the day broadly higher, led by gains in technology, health care and financial companies. Industrial stocks and household goods makers lagged the most. Bond prices fell, sending yields higher. Gold rose and crude oil fell.

The S&P 500 rose 9.49 points, or 0.3%, to 3,230.78. The Dow gained 76.30 points, or 0.3%, to 28,538.44. The Nasdaq climbed 26.61 points, or 0.3%, to 8,972.60.

Smaller company stocks fared better than the rest of the market. The Russell 2000 index picked up 4.32 points, or 0.3%, to 1,668.47. The index ended the year with a gain of 23.7%.

Trading volume was lighter than usual ahead of the New Year’s Day holiday. U.S. markets will be closed Wednesday and reopen on Thursday.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.92% from 1.89% late Thursday.

In a year when most of the 11 sectors in the S&P 500 finished with gain of more than 20%, technology stocks led the way higher.

“Technology performed well,” said J.J. Kinahan, chief strategist with TD Ameritrade. “There was a huge fear going into the year that technology was going to suffer considerably because of tariffs, yet at the end of the year Apple is the leading stock in the Dow.”

Apple did in fact precipitate one of the biggest sell-offs of the year on Jan. 3 with a warning of slowing demand for iPhones. After that, however, it was mostly good news for Apple shareholders and the stock finished with an annual gain of 86%, its best year since 2009.

Financial sector stocks, especially big banks, also posted strong gains in 2019, despite a sharp pullback in interest rates.

The sector ended with a 29.2% gain for the year, while JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup climbed over 40%.

Benchmark U.S. crude oil lost 62 cents to settle at $61.06 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, gave up 67 cents to close at $66 per barrel.

In other commodities trading, wholesale gasoline fell 3 cents to $1.70 per gallon. Heating oil slipped a penny to $2.03 per gallon. Natural gas was little changed at $2.19 per 1,000 cubic feet.

The price of gold rose $5 to $1,519.50 per ounce. Silver fell 8 cents to $17.83 per ounce. Copper dropped 3 cents to $2.79 per pound.

The dollar fell to 108.64 Japanese yen from 108.83 yen on Monday. The euro strengthened to $1.1217 from $1.1202.

European markets closed mostly lower. In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index lost 0.5%.

Final Goodbye: Recalling Influential People Who Died in 2019

A lauded writer who brought to light stories overshadowed by prejudice. An actress and singer who helped embody the manufactured innocence of the 1950s. A self-made billionaire who rose from a childhood of Depression-era poverty and twice ran for president.

This year saw the deaths of people who shifted culture through prose, pragmatism and persistence. It also witnessed tragedy, in talent struck down in its prime.

In 2019, the political world lost a giant in U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings. He was born the son of a sharecropper, became a lawyer, then an influential congressman and champion of civil rights.

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Cummings, who died in October, was chairman of one of the U.S. House committees that led an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump and was a formidable advocate for the poor in his Maryland district.

Another influential political figure, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, died in July. Stevens was appointed to the high court as a Republican but became the leader of its liberal wing and a proponent of abortion rights and consumer protections.

Wealth, fame and a confident prescription for the nation’s economic ills propelled H. Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign against President George H.W. Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. He recorded the highest percentage for an independent or third-party candidate since 1912. He died in July.

The death of Toni Morrison in August left a chasm in the publishing world, where she was a “literary mother” to countless writers. She helped elevate multiculturalism to the world stage and unearthed the lives of the unknown and unwanted. She became the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize for “Beloved” and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Among those in the scientific world who died in 2019 was Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space. Leonov died in October. Others include scientist Wallace Smith Broecker, who died in February and popularized the term “global warming” as he raised early alarms about climate change.

In April, Hollywood lost director John Singleton, whose 1991 film “Boyz N the Hood” was praised as a realistic and compassionate take on race, class, peer pressure and family. He became the first black director to receive an Oscar nomination and the youngest at 24.

Doris Day, a top box-office draw and recording artist who died in May, stood for the 1950s ideal of innocence and G-rated love, a parallel world to her contemporary Marilyn Monroe. She received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

The year also saw the untimely deaths of two young rappers, leaving a feeling of accomplishments unfulfilled. Grammy-nominated Nipsey Hussle was killed in a shooting in Los Angeles in March. Juice WRLD, who launched his career on SoundCloud before becoming a streaming juggernaut, died in December after being treated for opioid use during a police search.

Here is a roll call of some influential figures who died in 2019 (cause of death cited for younger people, if available):

JANUARY

Eugene “Mean Gene” Okerlund, 76. His deadpan interviews of pro wrestling superstars like “Macho Man” Randy Savage, the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan made him a ringside fixture in his own right. Jan. 2.

Bob Einstein, 76. The veteran comedy writer and performer known for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and his spoof daredevil character Super Dave Osborne. Jan. 2.

Daryl Dragon, 76. The cap-wearing “Captain” of Captain & Tennille who teamed with then-wife Toni Tennille on such easy listening hits as “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Muskrat Love.” Jan. 2.

Harold Brown, 91. As defense secretary in the Carter administration, he championed cutting-edge fighting technology during a tenure that included the failed rescue of hostages in Iran. Jan 4.

Jakiw Palij, 95. A former Nazi concentration camp guard who spent decades leading an unassuming life in New York City until his past was revealed. Jan. 9.

Carol Channing, 97. The ebullient musical comedy star who delighted American audiences in almost 5,000 performances as the scheming Dolly Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway and beyond. Jan. 15.

John C. Bogle, 89. He simplified investing for the masses by launching the first index mutual fund and founded Vanguard Group. Jan. 16.

Lamia al-Gailani, 80. An Iraqi archaeologist who lent her expertise to rebuilding the National Museum’s collection after it was looted in 2003. Jan. 18.

Nathan Glazer, 95. A prominent sociologist and intellectual who assisted on a classic study of conformity, “The Lonely Crowd,” and co-authored a groundbreaking document of non-conformity, “Beyond the Melting Pot.” Jan. 19.

Antonio Mendez, 78. A former CIA technical operations officer who helped rescue six U.S. diplomats from Iran in 1980 and was portrayed by Ben Affleck in the film “Argo.” Jan. 19.

Harris Wofford, 92. A former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and longtime civil rights activist who helped persuade John F. Kennedy to make a crucial phone call to the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960 presidential campaign. Jan. 21.

Russell Baker, 93. The genial but sharp-witted writer who won Pulitzer Prizes for his humorous columns in The New York Times and a moving autobiography of his impoverished Baltimore childhood. He later hosted television’s “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS. Jan 21. Complications after a fall.

Michel Legrand, 86. An Oscar-winning composer and pianist whose hits included the score for the ’60s romance “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and the song “The Windmills of Your Mind” and who worked with some of biggest singers of the 20th century. Jan. 26.

Kim Bok-dong, 92. A South Korean woman who was forced as a girl into a brothel and sexually enslaved by the Japanese military during World War II, becoming a vocal leader at rallies that were held every Wednesday in Seoul for nearly 30 years. Jan. 28.

James Ingram, 66. The Grammy-winning singer who launched multiple hits on the R&B and pop charts and earned two Oscar nominations for his songwriting. Jan. 29.

Donald S. Smith, 94. He produced the controversial anti-abortion film “The Silent Scream” and, with help from Ronald Reagan’s White House, distributed copies to every member of Congress and the Supreme Court. Jan. 30.

Harold Bradley, 93. A Country Music Hall of Fame guitarist who played on hundreds of hit country records and along with his brother, famed producer Owen Bradley, helped craft “The Nashville Sound.” Jan. 31.

FEBRUARY

Kristoff St. John, 52. An actor best known for playing Neil Winters on the CBS soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” Feb. 4. Heart disease.

Anne Firor Scott, 97. A prize-winning historian and esteemed professor who upended the male-dominated field of Southern scholarship by pioneering the study of Southern women. Feb. 5.

Frank Robinson, 83. The Hall of Famer was the first black manager in Major League Baseball and the only player to win the MVP award in both leagues. Feb. 7.

John Dingell, 92. The former congressman was the longest-serving member of Congress in American history at 59 years and a master of legislative deal-making who was fiercely protective of Detroit’s auto industry. Feb. 7.

Albert Finney, 82. The British actor was the Academy Award-nominated star of films from “Tom Jones” to “Skyfall.” Feb. 8.

Jan-Michael Vincent, 73. The “Airwolf” television star whose sleek good looks belied a troubled personal life. Feb. 10.

Gordon Banks, 81. The World Cup-winning England goalkeeper who was also known for blocking a header from Pele that many consider the greatest save in soccer history. Feb. 12.

Betty Ballantine, 99. She was half of a groundbreaking husband-and-wife publishing team that helped invent the modern paperback and vastly expand the market for science fiction and other genres through such blockbusters as “The Hobbit” and “Fahrenheit 451.” Feb. 12.

Lyndon LaRouche Jr., 96. The political extremist who ran for president in every election from 1976 to 2004, including a campaign waged from federal prison. Feb. 12.

Andrea Levy, 62. A prize-winning novelist who chronicled the hopes and horrors experienced by the post-World War II generation of Jamaican immigrants in Britain. Feb. 14.

Lee Radziwill, 85. She was the stylish jet setter and socialite who found friends, lovers and other adventures worldwide while bonding and competing with her sister Jacqueline Kennedy. Feb. 15.

Armando M. Rodriguez, 97. A Mexican immigrant and World War II veteran who served in the administrations of four U.S. presidents while pressing for civil rights and education reforms. Feb. 17.

Wallace Smith Broecker, 87. A scientist who raised early alarms about climate change and popularized the term “global warming.” Feb. 18.

Karl Lagerfeld, 85. Chanel’s iconic couturier whose accomplished designs and trademark white ponytail, high starched collars and dark enigmatic glasses dominated high fashion for the past 50 years. Feb. 19.

David Horowitz, 81. His “Fight Back!” syndicated program made him perhaps the best-known consumer reporter in the U.S. Feb. 21.

Peter Tork, 77. A talented singer-songwriter and instrumentalist whose musical skills were often overshadowed by his role as the goofy, lovable bass guitarist in the made-for-television rock band The Monkees. Feb. 21.

Stanley Donen, 94. A giant of the Hollywood musical who, through such classics as “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Funny Face,” helped provide some of the most joyous sounds and images in movie history. Feb. 21.

Jackie Shane, 78. A black transgender soul singer who became a pioneering musician in Toronto where she packed nightclubs in the 1960s. Feb. 21.

Katherine Helmond, 89. An Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actress who played two very different matriarchs on the ABC sitcoms “Who’s the Boss?” and “Soap.” Feb. 23.

Charles McCarry, 88. An admired and prescient spy novelist who foresaw passenger jets as terrorist weapons in “The Better Angels” and devised a compelling theory for JFK’s assassination in “The Tears of Autumn.” Feb. 26.

Jerry Merryman, 86. He was one of the inventors of the handheld electronic calculator. Feb. 27. Complications of heart and kidney failure.

Ed Nixon, 88. The youngest brother of President Richard Nixon who was a Navy aviator and geologist and spent years promoting his brother’s legacy. Feb. 27.

Andre Previn, 89. The pianist, composer and conductor whose broad reach took in the worlds of Hollywood, jazz and classical music. Feb. 28.

MARCH

John Shafer, 94. The legendary Northern California vintner was part of a generation that helped elevate sleepy Napa Valley into the international wine powerhouse it is today. March 2.

Keith Flint, 49. The fiery frontman of British dance-electronic band The Prodigy. March 4. Found dead by hanging in his home.

Luke Perry, 52. He gained instant heartthrob status as wealthy rebel Dylan McKay on “Beverly Hills, 90210.” March 4. Stroke.

Juan Corona, 85. He gained the nickname “The Machete Murderer” for hacking to death dozens of migrant farm laborers in California in the early 1970s. March 4.

Ralph Hall, 95. The former Texas congressman was the oldest-ever member of the U.S. House and a man who claimed to have once sold cigarettes and Coca-Cola to the bank-robbing duo of Bonnie and Clyde in Dallas. March 7.

Carmine “the Snake” Persico, 85. The longtime boss of the infamous Colombo crime family. March 7.

Vera Bila, 64. A Czech singer dubbed the Ella Fitzgerald of Gypsy music or the Queen of Romany. March 12. Heart attack.

Birch Bayh, 91. A former U.S. senator who championed the federal law banning discrimination against women in college admissions and sports. March 14.

Dick Dale, 83. His pounding, blaringly loud power-chord instrumentals on songs like “Miserlou” and “Let’s Go Trippin'” earned him the title King of the Surf Guitar. March 16.

Jerrie Cobb, 88. America’s first female astronaut candidate, the pilot pushed for equality in space but never reached its heights. March 18.

Scott Walker, 76. An influential singer, songwriter and producer whose hits with the Walker Brothers in the 1960s included “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.” March 22.

Rafi Eitan, 92. A legendary Israeli Mossad spy who led the capture of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann. March 23.

Larry Cohen, 77. The maverick B-movie director of cult horror films “It’s Alive” and “God Told Me To.” March 23.

Michel Bacos, 95. A French pilot who’s remembered as a hero for his actions in the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane to Uganda’s Entebbe airport. March 26.

Valery Bykovsky, 84. A pioneering Soviet-era cosmonaut who made the first of his three flights to space in 1963. March 27.

Agnes Varda, 90. The French New Wave pioneer who for decades beguiled, challenged and charmed moviegoers in films that inspired generations of filmmakers. March 29. Cancer.

Ken Gibson, 86. He became the first black mayor of a major Northeast city when he ascended to power in riot-torn Newark, New Jersey, about five decades ago. March 29.

Billy Adams, 79. A Rockabilly Hall of Famer who wrote and recorded the rockabilly staple “Rock, Pretty Mama.” March 30.

Nipsey Hussle, 33. A Grammy-nominated rapper. March 31. Killed in a shooting.

APRIL

Sydney Brenner, 92. A Nobel Prize-winning biologist who helped decipher the genetic code and whose research on a roundworm sparked a new field of human disease research. April 5.

Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings, 97. The silver-haired Democrat who helped shepherd South Carolina through desegregation as governor and went on to serve six terms in the U.S. Senate. April 6.

Cho Yang-ho, 70. Korean Air’s chairman, whose leadership included scandals such as his daughter’s infamous incident of “nut rage.” April 7.

Marilynn Smith, 89. One of the 13 founders of the LPGA Tour whose 21 victories, two majors and endless support of her tour led to her induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame. April 9.

Richard “Dick” Cole, 103. The last of the 80 Doolittle Tokyo Raiders who carried out the daring U.S. attack on Japan during World War II. April 9.

Charles Van Doren, 93. The dashing young academic whose meteoric rise and fall as a corrupt game show contestant in the 1950s inspired the movie “Quiz Show” and served as a cautionary tale about the staged competitions of early television. April 9.

Monkey Punch, 81. A cartoonist best known as the creator of the Japanese megahit comic series Lupin III. April 11.

Georgia Engel, 70. She played the charmingly innocent, small-voiced Georgette on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and amassed a string of other TV and stage credits. April 12.

Bibi Andersson, 83. The Swedish actress who starred in classic films by compatriot Ingmar Bergman, including “The Seventh Seal” and “Persona.” April 14.

Owen Garriott, 88. A former astronaut who flew on America’s first space station, Skylab, and whose son followed him into orbit. April 15.

Alan García, 69. A former Peruvian president whose first term in the 1980s was marred by financial chaos and rebel violence and who was recently targeted in Latin America’s biggest corruption scandal. April 17. Apparent suicide.

Lorraine Warren, 92. A world-wide paranormal investigator and author whose decades of ghost-hunting cases with her late husband inspired such frightening films as “The Conjuring” series and “The Amityville Horror.” April 18.

Mark Medoff, 79. A provocative playwright whose “Children of a Lesser God” won Tony and Olivier awards and whose screen adaptation of his play earned an Oscar nomination. April 23.

John Havlicek, 79. The Boston Celtics great whose steal of Hal Greer’s inbounds pass in the final seconds of the 1965 Eastern Conference final against the Philadelphia 76ers remains one of the most famous plays in NBA history. April 25.

Damon J. Keith, 96. A grandson of slaves and figure in the civil rights movement who as a federal judge was sued by President Richard Nixon over a ruling against warrantless wiretaps. April 28.

Richard Lugar, 87. A former U.S. senator and foreign policy sage known for leading efforts to help the former Soviet states dismantle and secure much of their nuclear arsenal but whose reputation for working with Democrats cost him his final campaign. April 28.

John Singleton, 51. A director who made one of Hollywood’s most memorable debuts with the Oscar-nominated “Boyz N the Hood” and continued over the following decades to probe the lives of black communities in his native Los Angeles and beyond. April 29. Taken off life support after a stroke.

Ellen Tauscher, 67. A trailblazer for women in the world of finance who served in Congress for more than a decade before joining the Obama administration. April 29. Complications from pneumonia.

Peter Mayhew, 74. The towering actor who donned a huge, furry costume to give life to the rugged-and-beloved character of Chewbacca in the original “Star Wars” trilogy and two other films. April 30.

MAY

John Lukacs, 95. The Hungarian-born historian and iconoclast who brooded over the future of Western civilization, wrote a best-selling tribute to Winston Churchill, and produced a substantial and often despairing body of writings on the politics and culture of Europe and the United States. May 6.

Peggy Lipton, 72. A star of the groundbreaking late 1960s TV show “The Mod Squad” and the 1990s show “Twin Peaks.” May 11. Cancer.

Leonard Bailey, 76. The doctor who in 1984 transplanted a baboon heart into a tiny newborn dubbed “Baby Fae” in a pioneering operation that sparked both worldwide acclaim and condemnation. May 12.

Cardinal Nasrallah Butros Sfeir, 98. The former patriarch of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian church who served as spiritual leader of Lebanon’s largest Christian community through some of the worst days of the country’s 1975-1990 civil war. May 12.

Doris Day, 97. The sunny blond actress and singer whose frothy comedic roles opposite the likes of Rock Hudson and Cary Grant made her one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 1950s and ’60s and a symbol of wholesome American womanhood. May 13.

Tim Conway, 85. The impish second banana to Carol Burnett who won four Emmy Awards on her TV variety show, starred in “McHale’s Navy” and later voiced the role of Barnacle Boy for “Spongebob Squarepants.” May 14.

I.M. Pei, 102. The versatile, globe-trotting architect who revived the Louvre with a giant glass pyramid and captured the spirit of rebellion at the multi-shaped Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. May 16.

Niki Lauda, 70. A Formula One great who won two of his world titles after a horrific crash that left him with serious burns and went on to become a prominent figure in the aviation industry. May 20.

Binyavanga Wainaina, 48. One of Africa’s best-known authors and gay rights activists. May 21. Illness.

Judith Kerr, 95. A refugee from Nazi Germany who wrote and illustrated the best-selling “The Tiger Who Came to Tea” and other beloved children’s books. May 22.

Murray Gell-Mann, 89. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist who brought order to the universe by helping discover and classify subatomic particles. May 24.

Claus von Bulow, 92. A Danish-born socialite who was convicted but later acquitted of trying to kill his wealthy wife in two trials that drew intense international attention in the 1980s. May 25.

Prem Tinsulanonda, 98. As an army commander, prime minister and adviser to the royal palace, he was one of Thailand’s most influential political figures over four decades. May 26.

Richard Matsch, 88. A federal judge who ruled his courtroom with a firm gavel and a short temper and gained national respect in the 1990s for his handling of the Oklahoma City bombing trials. May 26.

Bill Buckner, 69. A star hitter who made one of the biggest blunders in baseball history when he let Mookie Wilson’s trickler roll through his legs in the 1986 World Series. May 27.

Thad Cochran, 81. A former U.S. senator who served 45 years in Washington and used seniority to steer billions of dollars to his home state of Mississippi. May 30.

Patricia Bath, 76. A pioneering ophthalmologist who became the first African American female doctor to receive a medical patent after she invented a more precise treatment of cataracts. May 30. Complications of cancer.

Leon Redbone, 69. The blues and jazz artist whose growly voice, Panama hat and cultivated air of mystery made him seem like a character out of the ragtime era or the Depression-era Mississippi Delta. May 30.

Frank Lucas, 88. The former Harlem drug kingpin whose life and lore inspired the 2007 film “American Gangster.” May 30.

JUNE

Leah Chase, 96. A New Orleans chef and civil rights icon who created the city’s first white-tablecloth restaurant for black patrons, broke the city’s segregation laws by seating white and black customers, and introduced countless tourists to Southern Louisiana Creole cooking. June 1.

Dr. John, 77. The New Orleans singer and piano player who blended black and white musical styles with a hoodoo-infused stage persona and gravelly bayou drawl. June 6.

John Gunther Dean, 93. A veteran American diplomat and five-time ambassador forever haunted by his role in the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia during the dying days of the Khmer Republic. June 6.

Sylvia Miles, 94. An actress and Manhattan socialite whose brief, scene-stealing appearances in the films “Midnight Cowboy” and “Farewell, My Lovely” earned her two Academy Award nominations. June 12.

Lew Klein, 91. A broadcast pioneer who helped create “American Bandstand” and launched the careers of Dick Clark and Bob Saget. June 12.

Pat Bowlen, 75. The Denver Broncos owner who transformed the team from also-rans into NFL champions and helped the league usher in billion-dollar television deals. June 13.

Charles Reich, 91. The author and Ivy League academic whose “The Greening of America” blessed the counterculture of the 1960s and became a million-selling manifesto for a new and euphoric way of life. June 15.

Gloria Vanderbilt, 95. The intrepid heiress, artist and romantic who began her extraordinary life as the “poor little rich girl” of the Great Depression, survived family tragedy and multiple marriages and reigned during the 1970s and ’80s as a designer jeans pioneer. June 17.

Jim Taricani, 69. An award-winning TV reporter who exposed corruption and served a federal sentence for refusing to disclose a source. June 21. Kidney failure.

Judith Krantz, 91. A writer whose million-selling novels such as “Scruples” and “Princess Daisy” engrossed readers worldwide with their steamy tales of the rich and beautiful. June 22.

Dave Bartholomew, 100. A giant of New Orleans music and a rock n’ roll pioneer who, with Fats Domino, co-wrote and produced such classics as “Ain’t That a Shame,” “I’m Walkin'” and “Let the Four Winds Blow.” June 23.

Beth Chapman, 51. The wife and co-star of “Dog the Bounty Hunter” reality TV star Duane “Dog” Chapman. June 26.

JULY

Tyler Skaggs, 27. The left-handed pitcher who was a regular in the Los Angeles Angels’ starting rotation since late 2016 and struggled with injuries repeatedly in that time. July 1. Choked on his own vomit and had a toxic mix of alcohol and painkillers fentanyl and oxycodone in his system.

Lee Iacocca, 94. The auto executive and master pitchman who put the Mustang in Ford’s lineup in the 1960s and became a corporate folk hero when he resurrected Chrysler 20 years later. July 2.

Eva Kor, 85. A Holocaust survivor who championed forgiveness even for those who carried out the Holocaust atrocities. July 4.

Joao Gilberto, 88. A Brazilian singer, guitarist and songwriter considered one of the fathers of the bossa nova genre that gained global popularity in the 1960s and became an iconic sound of the South American nation. July 6.

Cameron Boyce, 20. An actor best known for his role as the teenage son of Cruella de Vil in the Disney Channel franchise “Descendants.” July 6. Seizure.

Martin Charnin, 84. He made his Broadway debut playing a Jet in the original “West Side Story” and went on to become a Broadway director and a lyricist who won a Tony Award for the score of the eternal hit “Annie.” July 6.

Artur Brauner, 100. A Polish-born Holocaust survivor who became one of post-World War II Germany’s most prominent film producers. July 7.

Rosie Ruiz, 66. The Boston Marathon course-cutter who was stripped of her victory in the 1980 race and went on to become an enduring symbol of cheating in sports. July 8. Cancer.

H. Ross Perot, 89. The colorful, self-made Texas billionaire who rose from delivering newspapers as a boy to building his own information technology company and twice mounted outsider campaigns for president. July 9. Leukemia.

Rip Torn, 88. The free-spirited Texan who overcame his quirky name to become a distinguished actor in television, theater and movies, such as “Men in Black,” and win an Emmy in his 60s for “The Larry Sanders Show.” July 9.

Fernando De la Rúa, 81. A former Argentine president who attracted voters with his image as an honest statesman and later left as the country plunged into its worst economic crisis. July 9.

Johnny Kitagawa, 87. Better known as Johnny-san, he was a kingpin of Japan’s entertainment industry for more than half a century who produced famous boy bands including Arashi, Tokio and SMAP. July 9.

Jim Bouton, 80. The former New York Yankees pitcher who shocked and angered the conservative baseball world with the tell-all book “Ball Four.” July 10.

Jerry Lawson, 75. For four decades, he was the lead singer of the eclectic cult favorite a cappella group the Persuasions. July 10.

Pernell Whitaker, 55. An Olympic gold medalist and four-division boxing champion who was regarded as one of the greatest defensive fighters ever. July 14. Hit by a car.

L. Bruce Laingen, 96. The top American diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran when it was overrun by Iranian protesters in 1979 and one of 52 Americans held hostage for more than a year. July 15.

Edith Irby Jones, 91. The first black student to enroll at an all-white medical school in the South and later the first female president of the National Medical Association. July 15.

John Paul Stevens, 99. The bow-tied, independent-thinking, Republican-nominated justice who unexpectedly emerged as the Supreme Court’s leading liberal. July 16.

Johnny Clegg, 66. A South African musician who performed in defiance of racial barriers imposed under the country’s apartheid system decades ago and celebrated its new democracy under Nelson Mandela. July 16.

Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, 85. The former Boston Red Sox infielder was the first black player on the last major league team to field one. July 17.

Rutger Hauer, 75. A Dutch film actor who specialized in menacing roles, including a memorable turn as a murderous android in “Blade Runner” opposite Harrison Ford. July 19.

Paul Krassner, 87. The publisher, author and radical political activist on the front lines of 1960s counterculture who helped tie together his loose-knit prankster group by naming them the Yippies. July 21.

Robert M. Morgenthau, 99. A former Manhattan district attorney who spent more than three decades jailing criminals from mob kingpins and drug-dealing killers to a tax-dodging Harvard dean. July 21.

Li Peng, 90. A former hard-line Chinese premier best known for announcing martial law during the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests that ended with a bloody crackdown by troops. July 22.

Art Neville, 81. A member of one of New Orleans’ storied musical families, the Neville Brothers, and a founding member of the groundbreaking funk band The Meters. July 22.

Chris Kraft, 95. The founder of NASA’s mission control. July 22.

Mike Moulin, 70. A former Los Angeles police lieutenant who came under fire for failing to quell the first outbreak of rioting after the Rodney King beating verdict. July 30.

Harold Prince, 91. A Broadway director and producer who pushed the boundaries of musical theater with such groundbreaking shows as “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Cabaret,” “Company” and “Sweeney Todd” and won a staggering 21 Tony Awards. July 31.

AUGUST

D.A. Pennebaker, 94. The Oscar-winning documentary maker whose historic contributions to American culture and politics included immortalizing a young Bob Dylan in “Don’t Look Back” and capturing the spin behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign in “The War Room.” Aug. 1.

Henri Belolo, 82. He co-founded the Village People and co-wrote their classic hits “YMCA,” “Macho Man” and “In the Navy.” Aug. 3.

Nuon Chea, 93. The chief ideologue of the communist Khmer Rouge regime that destroyed a generation of Cambodians. Aug. 4.

Toni Morrison, 88. A pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon” and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race. Aug. 5.

Sushma Swaraj, 67. She was India’s former external affairs minister and a leader of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Aug. 6.

Peter Fonda, 79. The actor was the son of a Hollywood legend who became a movie star in his own right after both writing and starring in the counterculture classic “Easy Rider.” Aug. 16.

Richard Williams, 86. A Canadian-British animator whose work on the bouncing cartoon bunny in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” helped blur the boundaries between the animated world and our own. Aug. 16. Cancer.

Cedric Benson, 36. A former NFL running back who was one of the most prolific rushers in NCAA and University of Texas history. Aug. 17. Motorcycle crash.

Kathleen Blanco, 76. She became Louisiana’s first female elected governor only to see her political career derailed by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Aug. 18.

David H. Koch, 79. A billionaire industrialist who, with his older brother Charles, was both celebrated and demonized for transforming American politics by pouring their riches into conservative causes. Aug. 23.

Ferdinand Piech, 82. The German auto industry power broker was the longtime patriarch of Volkswagen AG and the key engineer of its takeover of Porsche. Aug. 25.

Baxter Leach, 79. A prominent member of the Memphis, Tennessee, sanitation workers union whose historic strike drew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city where he was assassinated. Aug. 27.

Jim Leavelle, 99. The longtime Dallas lawman who was captured in one of history’s most iconic photographs escorting President John F. Kennedy’s assassin as he was fatally shot. Aug. 29.

Valerie Harper, 80. She scored guffaws, stole hearts and busted TV taboos as the brash, self-deprecating Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s. Aug. 30.

SEPTEMBER

Jimmy Johnson, 76. A founder of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios and guitarist with the famed studio musicians “The Swampers.” Sept. 5.

Robert Mugabe, 95. The former Zimbabwean leader was an ex-guerrilla chief who took power when the African country shook off white minority rule and presided for decades while economic turmoil and human rights violations eroded its early promise. Sept. 6.

Robert Frank, 94. A giant of 20th-century photography whose seminal book “The Americans” captured singular, candid moments of the 1950s and helped free picture-taking from the boundaries of clean lighting and linear composition. Sept. 9.

T. Boone Pickens, 91. A brash and quotable oil tycoon who grew even wealthier through corporate takeover attempts. Sept. 11.

Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, 83. A former Indonesian president who allowed democratic reforms and an independence referendum for East Timor following the ouster of the dictator Suharto. Sept. 11.

Eddie Money, 70. The rock star known for such hits as “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Take Me Home Tonight.” Sept. 13. Esophageal cancer.

Phyllis Newman, 86. A Tony Award-winning Broadway veteran who became the first woman to host “The Tonight Show” before turning her attention to fight for women’s health. Sept. 15.

Ric Ocasek, 75. The Cars frontman whose deadpan vocal delivery and lanky, sunglassed look defined a rock era with chart-topping hits like “Just What I Needed.” Sept. 15.

Cokie Roberts, 75. The daughter of politicians and a pioneering journalist who chronicled Washington from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump for NPR and ABC News. Sept. 17. Complications from breast cancer.

David A. Jones Sr., 88. He invested $1,000 to start a nursing home company that eventually became the $37 billion health insurance giant Humana Inc. Sept. 18.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, 83. The former Tunisian president was an autocrat who led his small North African country for 23 years before being toppled by nationwide protests that unleashed revolt across the Arab world. Sept. 19.

John Keenan, 99. He was the police official who led New York City’s manhunt for the “Son of Sam” killer and eventually took a case-solving confession from David Berkowitz. Sept. 19.

Barron Hilton, 91. A hotel magnate who expanded his father’s chain and became a founding owner in the American Football League. Sept. 19.

Howard “Hopalong” Cassady, 85. The 1955 Heisman Trophy winner at Ohio State and running back for the Detroit Lions. Sept. 20.

Karl Muenter, 96. A former SS soldier who was convicted in France of a wartime massacre but who never served any time for his crimes. Sept. 20.

Sigmund Jaehn, 82. He became the first German in space at the height of the Cold War during the 1970s and was promoted as a hero by communist authorities in East Germany. Sept. 21.

Jacques Chirac, 86. A two-term French president who was the first leader to acknowledge France’s role in the Holocaust and defiantly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Sept. 26.

Joseph Wilson, 69. The former ambassador who set off a political firestorm by disputing U.S. intelligence used to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion. Sept. 27.

José José, 71. The Mexican crooner was an elegant dresser who moved audiences to tears with melancholic love ballads and was known as the “Prince of Song.” Sept. 28.

Jessye Norman, 74. The renowned international opera star whose passionate soprano voice won her four Grammy Awards, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honor. Sept. 30.

Samuel Mayerson, 97. The prosecutor who took newspaper heiress Patty Hearst to court for shooting up a Southern California sporting goods store in 1974 and then successfully argued for probation, not prison, for the kidnapping victim-turned terrorist. Sept. 30.

OCTOBER

Karel Gott, 80. A Czech pop singer who became a star behind the Iron Curtain. Oct. 1.

Diogo Freitas do Amaral, 78. A conservative Portuguese politician who played a leading role in cementing the country’s democracy after its 1974 Carnation Revolution and later became president of the U.N. General Assembly. Oct. 3.

Diahann Carroll, 84. The Oscar-nominated actress and singer who won critical acclaim as the first black woman to star in a non-servant role in a TV series as “Julia.” Oct. 4. Cancer.

Ginger Baker, 80. The volatile and propulsive drummer for Cream and other bands who wielded blues power and jazz finesse and helped shatter boundaries of time, tempo and style in popular music. Oct. 6.

Rip Taylor, 88. The madcap, mustached comedian with a fondness for confetti-throwing who became a television game show mainstay in the 1970s. Oct. 6.

Robert Forster, 78. The handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in “Jackie Brown.” Oct. 11. Brain cancer.

James Stern, 55. A black activist who took control of one of the nation’s largest neo-Nazi groups — and vowed to dismantle it. Oct. 11. Cancer.

Alexei Leonov, 85. The legendary Soviet cosmonaut who became the first person to walk in space. Oct. 11.

Scotty Bowers, 96. A self-described Hollywood “fixer” whose memoir offered sensational accounts of the sex lives of such celebrities as Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Oct. 13.

Harold Bloom, 89. The eminent critic and Yale professor whose seminal “The Anxiety of Influence” and melancholy regard for literature’s old masters made him a popular author and standard-bearer of Western civilization amid modern trends. Oct. 14.

Elijah E. Cummings, 68. A sharecropper’s son who rose to become a civil rights champion and the chairman of one of the U.S. House committees leading an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. Oct. 17. Complications from longstanding health problems.

Alicia Alonso, 98. The revered ballerina and choreographer whose nearly 75-year career made her an icon of artistic loyalty to Cuba’s socialist system. Oct. 17.

Bill Macy, 97. The character actor whose hangdog expression was a perfect match for his role as the long-suffering foil to Bea Arthur’s unyielding feminist on the daring 1970s sitcom “Maude.” Oct. 17.

Marieke Vervoort, 40. A Paralympian who won gold and silver medals in 2012 at the London Paralympics in wheelchair racing and two more medals in Rio de Janeiro. Oct. 22. Took her own life after living with pain from a degenerative spinal disease.

Sadako Ogata, 92. She led the U.N. refugee agency for a decade and became one of the first Japanese to hold a top job at an international organization. Oct. 22.

Kathryn Johnson, 93. A trailblazing reporter for The Associated Press whose intrepid coverage of the civil rights movement and other major stories led to a string of legendary scoops. Oct. 23.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, believed to be 48. He sought to establish an Islamic “caliphate” across Syria and Iraq, but he might be remembered more as the ruthless leader of the Islamic State group who brought terror to the heart of Europe. Oct. 26. Detonated a suicide vest during a raid by U.S. forces.

John Conyers, 90. The former congressman was one of the longest-serving members of Congress whose resolutely liberal stance on civil rights made him a political institution in Washington and back home in Detroit despite several scandals. Oct. 27.

Ivan Milat, 74. His grisly serial killings of seven European and Australian backpackers horrified Australia in the early ’90s. Oct. 27.

Vladimir Bukovsky, 76. A prominent Soviet-era dissident who became internationally known for exposing Soviet abuse of psychiatry. Oct. 27.

Kay Hagan, 66. A former bank executive who rose from a budget writer in the North Carolina Legislature to a seat in the U.S. Senate. Oct. 28. Illness.

John Walker, 82. An Arkansas lawmaker and civil rights attorney who represented black students in a long-running court fight over the desegregation of Little Rock-area schools. Oct. 28.

John Witherspoon, 77. An actor-comedian who memorably played Ice Cube’s father in the “Friday” films. Oct. 29.

NOVEMBER

Walter Mercado, 88. A television astrologer whose glamorous persona made him a star in Latin media and a cherished icon for gay people in most of the Spanish-speaking world. Nov. 2. Kidney failure.

Gert Boyle, 95. The colorful chairwoman of Oregon-based Columbia Sportswear Co. who starred in ads proclaiming her “One Tough Mother.” Nov. 3.

Ernest J. Gaines, 86. A novelist whose poor childhood on a small Louisiana plantation germinated stories of black struggles that grew into universal tales of grace and beauty. Nov. 5.

Werner Gustav Doehner, 90. He was the last remaining survivor of the Hindenburg disaster, who suffered severe burns to his face, arms and legs before his mother managed to toss him and his brother from the burning airship. Nov. 8.

Charles Rogers, 38. The former Michigan State star and Detroit Lions receiver was an All-American wide receiver who was the school’s all-time leader in touchdown catches. Nov. 11.

Raymond Poulidor, 83. The “eternal runner-up” whose repeated failure to win the Tour de France helped him conquer French hearts and become the country’s all-time favorite cyclist. Nov. 13.

Walter J. Minton, 96. A publishing scion and risk taker with a self-described “nasty streak” who as head of G.P. Putnam’s Sons released works by Norman Mailer and Terry Southern, among others, and signed up Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous “Lolita.” Nov. 19.

Jake Burton Carpenter, 65. The man who changed the game on the mountain by fulfilling a grand vision of what a snowboard could be. Nov. 20. Complications stemming from a relapse of testicular cancer.

Gahan Wilson, 89. His humorous and often macabre cartoons were a mainstay in magazines including Playboy, the New Yorker and National Lampoon. Nov. 21.

Cathy Long, 95. A Louisiana Democrat who won her husband’s U.S. House seat after his sudden death in 1985 and served one term. Nov. 23.

John Simon, 94. A theater and film critic known for his lacerating reviews and often withering assessment of performers’ physical appearance. Nov. 24.

William Doyle Ruckelshaus, 87. He famously quit his job in the Justice Department rather than carry out President Richard Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. Nov. 27.

Yasuhiro Nakasone, 101. The former Japanese prime minister was a giant of his country’s post-World War II politics who pushed for a more assertive Japan while strengthening military ties with the United States. Nov. 29.

Irving Burgie, 95. A composer who helped popularize Caribbean music and co-wrote the enduring Harry Belafonte hit “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).” Nov. 29.

DECEMBER

Allan Gerson, 74. A lawyer who pursued Nazi war criminals and pioneered the practice of suing foreign governments in U.S. courts for complicity to terrorism. Dec. 1.

Juice WRLD, 21. A rapper who launched his career on SoundCloud before becoming a streaming juggernaut and rose to the top of the charts with the Sting-sampled hit “Lucid Dreams.” Dec. 8. Died after being treated for opioid use during a police search.

René Auberjonois, 79. A prolific actor best known for his roles on the television shows “Benson” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and his part in the 1970 film “M.A.S.H.” playing Father Mulcahy. Dec. 8.

Caroll Spinney, 85. He gave Big Bird his warmth and Oscar the Grouch his growl for nearly 50 years on “Sesame Street.” Dec. 8.

Paul Volcker, 92. The former Federal Reserve chairman who in the early 1980s raised interest rates to historic highs and triggered a recession as the price of quashing double-digit inflation. Dec. 8.

Pete Frates, 34. A former college baseball player whose battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease helped inspire the ALS ice bucket challenge that has raised more than $200 million worldwide. Dec. 9.

Marie Fredriksson, 61. The female half of the Swedish pop duo Roxette that achieve international success in the late 1980s and 1990s. Dec. 9.

Kim Woo-choong, 82. The disgraced founder of the now-collapsed Daewoo business group whose rise and fall symbolized South Korea’s turbulent rapid economic growth in the 1970s. Dec. 9. Pneumonia.

Danny Aiello, 86. The blue-collar character actor whose long career playing tough guys included roles in “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” “Moonstruck” and “Once Upon a Time in America” and his Oscar-nominated performance as a pizza man in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” Dec. 12.

Robert Glenn “Junior” Johnson, 88. The moonshine runner turned NASCAR driver who won 50 races as a driver and 132 as an owner and was part of the inaugural class inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2010. Dec. 20.

Elizabeth Spencer, 98. A grande dame of Southern literature who bravely navigated between the Jim Crow past and open-ended present in her novels and stories, including the celebrated novella “Light In the Piazza.” Dec. 22.

Lee Mendelson, 86. The producer who changed the face of the holidays when he brought “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to television in 1965 and wrote the lyrics to its signature song, “Christmas Time Is Here.” Dec. 25. Congestive heart failure.

Jerry Herman, 88. The Tony Award-winning composer who wrote the cheerful, good-natured music and lyrics for such classic shows as “Mame,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Folles.” Dec. 26.

Don Imus, 79. The disc jockey whose career was made and then undone by his acid tongue during a decadeslong rise to radio stardom and abrupt plunge after a nationally broadcast racial slur. Dec. 27. Complications from lung disease.

Minister: Gunman Angered by Church’s Refusal to Give Him Money

DALLAS — The man who fatally shot two people at a Texas church was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial in 2012 and was repeatedly fed by the congregation before he grew angry because church officials refused to give him money, according to court records and the pastor.

It’s unclear whether Keith Thomas Kinnunen’s extensive criminal record and psychological history would have barred him from legally buying the shotgun he used during Sunday’s attack at the West Freeway Church of Christ in the Fort Worth-area town of White Settlement.

Kinnunen, 43, shot worshipers Richard White and Anton “Tony” Wallace in the sanctuary before a member of the church’s volunteer security team shot and killed him, according to police and witnesses.

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Minister Britt Farmer told The Christian Chronicle that he recognized Kinnunen after seeing a photo of him without the fake beard, wig, hat and long coat he was wearing as a disguise. Kinnunen visited the congregation several other times this year and was given food, the minister said.

“We’ve helped him on several occasions with food,” Farmer said in the interview. “He gets mad when we won’t give him cash.”

Authorities have said Kinnunen’s motive remains under investigation and they declined to comment on how he obtained the gun he used, although a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it had successfully traced the weapon.

Court records portray Kinnunen as being deeply troubled long before Sunday’s attack.

In 2012, a district judge in Oklahoma ruled him mentally incompetent to stand trial and ordered him committed to a psychiatric facility for treatment.

Kinnunen was charged with felony assault and battery with a dangerous weapon after he attacked the owner of a Chickasha, Okla., doughnut shop in 2011, court records state. He was separately charged with arson that year after allegedly starting a fire in a cotton field by tying tampons soaked in lamp oil to the crop.

Earlier on the day of that fire, Kinnunen soaked a football in the accelerant, lit it on fire and then threw it back and forth with his son, who was a minor, according to the arrest affidavit. The boy told police he was afraid his father would get mad if he asked to stop.

A forensic psychologist who examined him in 2012 for both cases wrote that “Kinnunen currently evidences signs that are consistent with a substantial mental illness and that meet the inpatient criteria of a ‘person requiring treatment.’”

Records show Kinnunen was found competent to stand trial in February 2013, however both criminal cases were ultimately reduced to misdemeanors, to which he pleaded guilty.

One of Kinnunen’s ex-wives, Cynthia L. Glasgow-Voegle, also filed for a protective order against him in 2012, Oklahoma records show.

“Keith is a violent, paranoid person with a long line of assault and battery w/ and without firearms,” Glasgow-Voegle said in the petition. She also wrote that Kinnunen was prone to religious fanaticism and “says he’s battling a demon.”

Kinnunen got “more and more” into drugs and “it messed with his head” during his second marriage, said Angela Holloway, whose divorce from him was finalized in 2011.

Holloway, a 44-year-old Fort Worth resident, said she hadn’t spoken to Kinnunen in years and learned from news reports that he was the church attacker. She said she and Kinnunen used to attend church together and that there were times he appeared to be off drugs, but that he was frightening by the end of their six-year marriage.

“He was really disturbed,” Holloway told The Associated Press.

Holloway said she doesn’t know whether Kinnunen was ever diagnosed with a mental illness and that she wasn’t sure if he could legally have guns, but that he consistently did.

“I don’t know how he got them, I just know that he did have them,” she said.

Seconds after Kinnunen opened fire in the church Sunday, Jack Wilson, a 71-year-old firearms instructor, shot him once in the head.

The actions of Wilson and other armed churchgoers quickly drew praise from some Texas lawmakers and gun-rights advocates. Texas officials hailed the state’s gun laws, including a measure enacted this year that affirmed the right of licensed handgun holders to carry a weapon inside places of worship unless a facility bans them.

“We can’t prevent every incident, we can’t prevent mental illness from occurring, and we can’t prevent every crazy person from pulling a gun, but we can be prepared like this church was,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told reporters Monday.

President Donald Trump tweeted Monday night and Tuesday morning about the attack, both times highlighting the role of armed citizens in stopping the shooter. “If it were not for the fact that there were people inside of the church that were both armed, and highly proficient in using their weapon, the end result would have been catastrophic. A big THANK YOU to them!” Trump tweeted Tuesday.

But other Texas lawmakers, while praising the churchgoers’ actions, called for a special legislative session to address gun violence after a devastating year that included mass shootings in El Paso and the West Texas cities of Odessa and Midland.

“As lawmakers, we must come together to address the rise in gun violence we have seen in Texas,” state Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Fort Worth, said in a statement Monday. “Yesterday’s gunman had a long criminal record, including charges of aggravated assault and possession of an illegal weapon. We must respect the Second Amendment while also working together to keep guns out of the hands of those who wish to do harm to Texans worshiping in a church, attending school or shopping for their children.”

___

Associated Press writers Paul J. Weber in Austin, Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.

Alex Jones’ Victims Find a Measure of Justice

Radio show host Alex Jones has made a career out of peddling conspiracy theories. On Infowars, the right-wing digital media outlet Jones founded, he’s claimed that Muslims cheered the Sept. 11 attacks; that the government has “weather weapons” responsible for floods and tornadoes; and that thousands of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election. Among the most hurtful of his conspiracy theories, however, was his assertion that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 children and six teachers were murdered, never happened.

On Monday, a Texas judge fined Jones and Infowars just over $100,000 for seven years of promoting the idea that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. The lawsuit was brought by Neil Heslin, whose six-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was killed in the shooting.

As The New York Times reported earlier this month, “Mr. Jones cast doubt on Mr. Heslin’s account of holding his son after his death, playing a video in which an Infowars contributor, Owen Shroyer, says of Mr. Heslin, “He’s claiming that he held his son and saw the bullet hole in his head. That is not possible.”

Now, a judge is forcing Jones to pay for his lies. Per The Daily Beast:

On Dec. 20, Travis County Judge Scott Jenkins granted a motion for sanctions and legal expenses against Jones and InfoWars, ordering them to pay $65,825 for ignoring a court order about providing documents and witnesses. In another ruling issued that same day in Heslin’s case, Jenkins denied an InfoWars motion to dismiss the case and ordered Jones and InfoWars to pay an additional $34,323.80, for a combined total of $100,148.80 levied against Jones and InfoWars in a single day.

Added to an earlier October order against InfoWars, Jones and his outlet have been ordered to pay $126,023.80 over the case, even before it reaches trial.

Mark Bankston, one of Heslin’s attorneys, said in an email to The Daily Beast: “It’s hardly a surprise that someone like Alex Jones would soon find himself in contempt of court, but now he is learning there are severe consequences to his utter disrespect for this process.”

Infowars remains unrepentant about its actions. “I think our reporting stopped what was going to be a lot of anti-gun legislation that was coming down,” Infowars News Director Rob Dew said in a deposition obtained by BuzzFeed News in December. He added, “I am proud of that.”

According to BuzzFeed, “Dew claimed he did not remember how he and Jones obtained evidence used to support narratives in videos like ‘Sandy Hook was a DHS Illusion’ and ‘Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed,’ and said he was proud of Infowars’ coverage and never meant to “hurt families.”

Jones and Infowars did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment. Jones is still facing pending lawsuits from other Sandy Hook families, including a case in Connecticut where Jones is accused of interfering in the discovery process.

Raging Wildfires Trap 4,000 at Australian Town’s Waterfront

PERTH, Australia — Wildfires burning across Australia’s two most populous states Tuesday trapped residents of a seaside town in apocalyptic conditions and killed at least two people while more property along the country’s east coast fell victim to a devastating fire season.

About 4,000 residents in the southeastern town of Mallacoota in Victoria state fled toward the water Tuesday morning as winds pushed an emergency-level wildfire toward their homes. The smoke-filled sky shrouded the town in darkness before turning an unnerving shade of bright red.

Australia’s annual wildfire season, which peaks during the Southern Hemisphere summer, started early after an unusually warm and dry winter. Record-breaking heat and windy conditions triggered devastating wildfires in New South Wales and Queensland states in September.

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About 5 million hectares (12.35 million acres) of land have burned nationwide over the past few months, with 12 people confirmed dead and more than 1,000 homes destroyed. Nearly 100 fires were burning across the state of New South Wales, which is home to Sydney.

New South Wales state Rural Fire Services Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said this wildfire season is the worst on record and painted a bleak long-term picture.

“We’ve seen extraordinary fire behavior,” he said Tuesday. “What we really need is meaningful rain, and we haven’t got anything in the forecast at the moment that says we’re going to get drought-breaking or fire-quenching rainfall.”

The wildfire crisis has reignited debate about whether Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s conservative government has taken enough action on climate change. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and liquefied natural gas.

Morrison, whom critics have deemed a climate change skeptic, conceded earlier this month that “climate change along with many other factors” has contributed to the wildfires.

The prime minister took criticism for going on a family vacation to Hawaii in December during the crisis. He eventually cut his trip short and publicly apologized.

Late Tuesday, Mallacoota was saved by changes of wind direction, but authorities said “numerous” homes were lost. Residents returning home were urged to boil tap water before drinking it. Forest Fire Management Victoria said the wildfires had put heavy demands on tap water that is affecting the supply of water.

Stranded residents and vacationers were reported to be sleeping in cars on New Year’s Eve, while gas stations and surf clubs transformed into evacuation areas.

Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews had earlier announced plans to evacuate the trapped people by sea. There were grave fears for four missing people. “We can’t confirm their whereabouts,” Andrews told reporters Tuesday.

Andrews has requested assistance from 70 firefighters from the United States and Canada, while Australia’s military sent air and sea reinforcements.

Victoria Emergency Services Commissioner Andrew Crisp confirmed “significant” property losses across the region. More than 115 communities across Victoria remained under emergency warnings Tuesday night.

Some communities canceled New Year’s fireworks celebrations, but Sydney’s popular display over its iconic harbor controversially went ahead in front of more than a million revelers. The city was granted an exemption to a total fireworks ban in place there and elsewhere to prevent new wildfires.

Fire conditions in Victoria and New South Wales worsened after oppressive heat Monday mixed with strong winds and lightning.

Police in New South Wales said Tuesday that two men — a 63-year-old father and 29-year-old son — died in a house in the wildfire-ravaged southeast town of Cobargo, and a 72-year-old man remained missing.

“They were obviously trying to do their best with the fire as it came through in the early hours of the morning,” New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner Gary Worboys said. “The other person that we are trying to get to, we think that person was trying to defend their property in the early hours of the morning.”

On Monday, a firefighter was killed when extreme winds flipped his truck. Samuel McPaul, 28, was the third volunteer firefighter in New South Wales to have died in the past two weeks. He was an expectant father.

More than 130 fires remain burning across New South Wales, with five at an emergency level. Authorities warned that power would be out for 24 hours along the fire-ravaged south coast of the state.

Chelsea Manning’s Detention Amounts to ‘Torture’: U.N. Expert

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer shared on social media Tuesday a letter he sent to the United States government last month expressing concerns that the continued detention of whistleblower Chelsea Manning amounts to torture.

The Geneva-based expert tweeted in the early hours of Tuesday:

Just out: My official letter to #USGovt of 1 Nov 2019 explaining why continued detention of @xychelsea is not a lawful sanction but an open-ended, progressively severe coercive measure amounting to torture & should be discontinued & abolished without delay https://t.co/uhqKoFSQSq pic.twitter.com/J662CtVAA7

— Nils Melzer (@NilsMelzer) December 31, 2019

Manning, a former U.S. Army soldier, was initially detained in 2010, then convicted under the Espionage Act in 2013, for sending hundreds of thousands of U.S. government and military documents and classified materials to WikiLeaks. In January 2017, outgoing President Barack Obama commuted much of her 35-year sentence, and she was released in May of that year.

Since March 8, 2019—with the exception of a one-week period in May—Manning has been held in contempt of court at the William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Manning has been imprisoned—sometimes in solitary confinement—for her refusal to testify to a grand jury about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in a London prison as the U.S. government seeks his extradition.

Melzer, who also has publicly condemned the U.S. prosecution of Assange and the conditions of his detention, wrote in the letter (pdf) dated Nov. 1, 2019 that “I express serious concern at the reported use of coercive measures against Ms. Manning, particularly given the history of her previous conviction and ill-treatment in detention.”

Citing his obligations under the Human Rights Council, Melzer included in the letter a list of requests for more information about the detention conditions of Manning—who has made clear she has no intention of testifying, regardless of how long she is held and the massive fines she is racking up. He noted that his message and any response from the U.S. government would be made public within 60 days.

Melzer added:

While awaiting a reply, I recommend that Ms. Manning’s current deprivation of liberty be promptly reviewed in light of the United States’ international human rights obligations. Should my assessment regarding its purely coercive purpose be accurate, I recommend that Ms. Manning be released without further delay, and that any fines disproportionate to the gravity of any offense she may have committed be cancelled or reimbursed.

I intend to publicly express my concerns in the near future as, in my view, the information upon which my concerns are based is sufficiently reliable to indicate a matter warranting prompt attention. I also believe that the wider public should be alerted to the potential human rights implications of these allegations. Any public expression of concern on my part will indicate that I have been in contact with [the U.S. government] to clarify the issue/s in question.

The special rapporteur acknowledged that in 2010 and 2011 his predecessor expressed concerns to the U.S. government about how Manning—who was at that point publicly known as Bradley—was treated in detention.

The U.S.-based digital rights groups Fight for the Future welcomed Melzer’s letter in a statement which pointed out that the special rapporteur’s message “comes as thousands of people have already taken action on a new petition effort at FreeChelsea.com, backed by groups like Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Daily Kos, Roots Action, Media Alliance, and Defending Rights, and Dissent.”

The groups plan to deliver the signatures demanding Manning’s immediate release to District Judge Anthony Trenga of the the Eastern District of Virginia next month. Manning, who already has served about nine months in jail, can be held for a total of 18 months.

“The U.S. government’s treatment of Chelsea Manning amounts to a coordinated campaign of harassment and psychological torture,” said Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer. “Coercive confinement is widely seen as a violation of human rights. Congress should ban this practice, and Judge Anthony Trenga should release Chelsea immediately, in accordance with international law and basic human decency.”

“If Chelsea is not immediately released, U.S. lawmakers should launch investigations into her ongoing detention,” added Greer. “Individuals who want to support Chelsea should sign the petition and spread the word about FreeChelsea.com.”

India Is Teetering on the Brink of Fascism

India’s Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu made a curious comment on 28 December. ‘Express dissent in a democratic way,’ he said. Before he became the Vice President – a largely symbolic role – Naidu was the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the far-right political organization that now governs India. Naidu made his comment in the context of nation-wide protests against an exclusionary set of laws and policies pushed by his party. These laws and policies include the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Population Register (NPR), and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). These laws and policies deeply discriminate against India’s 200 million Muslims.

Peaceful protests have been taking place across the country. Every public event seems to be transformed into a demonstration against not only these laws, but the government itself. In Kolkata – from where I write these words – the annual Rainbow Pride Walk combined Gay Pride with opposition to these laws. Signs at the march read, ‘No CAA’ and ‘No to Fascism.’ The Indian flag – not often seen at these events – was everywhere, a symbol of the fight over how ‘India’ should be understood.

Street signs indicate widespread opposition to these laws and policies from a range of political parties: everyone, except the BJP, seems to be against them. It has invigorated a serious debate about whether India’s State remains secular, and whether Indian society contains resources for secularism.

Secularism

Secularism in the Indian context means that the State should respect and tolerate all religions; Indian society should equally be tolerant of religious diversity.

What secularism has not meant is that the State should drive a policy for the secularization of society, which would include promotion of rationality over mysticism and the taxation of religious institutions.

Even the weak form of Indian secularism is in dispute now with the BJP pushing for the Indian State and Indian society to be dominated by their own rigid and narrow view of Hinduism. The BJP’s divisive politics threatens the secular compact with India’s large non-Hindu population, particularly the 200 million Muslims who live scattered across this vast country. The BJP’s political and cultural logic is against the respect and toleration of Islam and of Muslims. It is a politics of cultural suffocation, impracticable for India’s social and cultural diversity.

BJP leaders – including Prime Minister Narendra Modi – continue to use the language of secularism to justify their political agenda. Over the course of the past decade, the Indian State and the courts have formulated policies that accommodate the demands of minority groups, including on regressive grounds (such as laws of marriage and divorce).

In the name of secularism, the BJP has gone after these laws, using their existence to suggest that it is not the BJP but Muslims who are not secular; an illustration of this is the BJP’s attempt to undercut the Muslim Personal Law by a Uniform Civil Code. By this sleight of hand, the BJP masquerades as a defender of the Indian compact even as it undermines it. This confusion now seems to be over. The BJP’s strong anti-Muslim agenda over the definition of citizenship cannot be easily defended as the BJP’s commitment to secularism; it is seen for what it is – far-right bigotry.

Federalism.

One mechanism to preserve the diversity of India has been to emphasize the federal system over a central State. India is divided into twenty-eight regional states and nine union territories. One of these states – Jharkhand – had a provincial election as these protests cascaded. The ruling BJP state government was defeated, and a coalition of a regional party – the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha – and the Congress Party won the election. At the swearing in of the new chief minister – Hemant Soren – political leaders from a range of non-BJP parties came to make the ceremony into a political rally. These leaders – chief ministers of states and leaders of political parties, including the Communists – argued that this election was a mandate against the BJP.

By March 2018, the BJP (with its allies) ruled over 21 states, which account for 70% of India’s population. It appeared as if the BJP was unassailable. Then the BJP’s fortunes at the state level fell, with the BJP losing power in five important states – Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand.

Many of the non-BJP ruled states have said that they will not honor the slate of discriminatory laws. This is a direct political challenge to the BJP. If the non-BJP opposition parties which gathered to celebrate Soren’s victory in Jharkhand are able to form a principled alliance, then it is likely that they will weaken the BJP’s political power.

Federalism is a defensive barrier against the authoritarianism of the BJP. So too is the attempt by opposition parties to isolate the BJP. A combination of the BJP’s arrogance and its failure to subordinate India’s diversity has shown that its authority is not derived from public acceptance of its agenda but from money and muscle power.

Muscle.

Unable to defend its discriminatory agenda, the BJP has taken recourse to raw police power. BJP leader Yogi Adityanath, who is the Chief Minister of India’s largest state – Uttar Pradesh (population: 200 million) – has shut off the internet in key areas and used the full force of the police to beat, arrest, and intimidate anyone who opposes the BJP policy. Of the twenty-seven people killed across India over these protests, nineteen were killed in Uttar Pradesh. A fact-finding team found that Yogi was running a “reign of terror” in the state against protestors.

When five women drew chalk drawings (kolam) with slogans against the discriminatory laws in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), they were arrested; when three lawyers went to the police on behalf of the women, the police arrested the lawyers. They join the thousands who have been arrested or held in preventative detention. Meanwhile, the internet has been cut off for large parts of the country. Two foreign nationals who had protested the laws – including a German student – have been deported. A fact-finding team found that the Delhi Police – which is controlled by the BJP government – was ‘unrelenting and cruel’ in its behavior at Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia University.

Vice President Naidu warned that dissent should be expressed in a democratic way. He was merely reflecting reality, since the protests have all been extraordinarily peaceful and respectful; the protestors have reclaimed the Indian flag and its Constitution and are holding fast to the view that they have the law and the public sentiment on their side.

It is the documented behavior of the BJP officials and of the police that needs to be chastised by the Indian Vice President. The violence that has taken place is the violence of the BJP’s hooligans and of the police, not the violence of the dissenters (as noted by many observers, including Human Rights Watch). It has become formulaic for the BJP to accuse its opponents of being “anti-national”; now public sentiment suggests that it is the BJP which is anti-national.

In January, the trade unions and the left parties have called for a week of protests from 1 January onwards, which will culminate in a general strike on 8 January. Last year’s trade union strike brought 180 million people onto the streets. If the momentum of these protests remains, then this strike on 8 January will be enormous; it could weaken the BJP’s political power fatally.

This article was produced by Globetrotter , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün.

The Decade Republicans Hijacked American Democracy

This article originally appeared on Salon.

As this decade comes to a close, 59 million Americans live in a state where one or both chambers of the state legislature is controlled by the party that got fewer votes in the 2018 election.

In Wisconsin in 2018, voters elected a Democratic U.S. senator, defeated an incumbent Republican governor, picked Democrats for every statewide office, and favored Democratic candidates for the state assembly by more than 200,000 ballots. Republicans nevertheless controlled more than 63 percent of the seats.

We end the 2020s with voter purges in Ohio, Wisconsin and Georgia, with precinct closures weaponized to lower voter participation across the South, with Texas, Tennessee and Florida making it harder to register new voters. The ball drops on the 2010s with state legislatures in Florida, Michigan and Missouri willing to undo voting reforms approved by upwards of 60 percent of the people via initiative.

One of our final images of the U.S. House will be the floor debate over impeachment, with its dueling images of older, white men defending the president’s actions over Ukraine and younger members, largely women and people of color, insisting that no one, even a president, stand above the law.

White men make up a smaller slice of the American electorate with each election. Yet they maintain outsized power in Congress and state legislatures. A new decade dawns with a crisis of representation that threatens the integrity of representative democracy itself.

We’re in this mess, in many ways, because of gerrymandering. This was the decade that the gerrymander — perhaps the oldest political trick in the book — pushed American politics into a dangerous state of anti-majoritarianism, grounded in racial fear and identity politics, that may take at least another decade to overcome, assuming we ever do so.

It’s worth remembering how we got here. After all, the decade began with the likelihood that changing American demographics might push the nation in a very different direction.

* * *

As thousands celebrated America’s first black president in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008, the smartest analysts on every network, left and right, watched Barack Obama defeat John McCain and wondered whether an increasingly diverse nation might render Republicans a minority party for decades.

Top Republican strategists had a different idea. The 2008 election might have been historic, they understood, but 2010 had the potential to be transformative. Every state legislative and congressional district in the nation would be redrawn after the 2010 census. State legislatures would draw most of the lines. If Obama and the Democrats suffered a difficult midterm election, as new presidents often do, Republicans could quickly change their fortunes, dominate redistricting, and draw themselves an enduring advantage, even in competitive states they’d lost in 2008, such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The GOP plan — known as REDMAP, or the Redistricting Majority Project — was headquartered at the Republican State Leadership Committee, led by former party chairman Ed Gillespie. It was announced on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal by no less than GOP mastermind Karl Rove. The RSLC’s key benefactors included Koch Industries, Walmart, Reynolds American and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The RSLC identified just over 100 state legislative races in crucial states, and drowned Democratic incumbents in waves of sophisticated negative advertisements in the final weeks of the 2010 race. (It helped that cocky Democrats snoozed on the importance of redistricting and barely put up any fight.) And when it came time to remap these states in 2011, using the most exacting voter data and sophisticated mapping technology ever deployed on redistricting, the political operations of new House Speaker John Boehner, Paul Ryan and many other establishment figures would play key roles.

It worked. In 2012, the first election held under these lines, Democratic U.S. House candidates won 1.4 million more votes than Republicans nationwide. Republicans held the chambers nevertheless, decisively, 234-201. In targeted swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, Democratic candidates would earn tens of thousands more votes, but the Republican-drawn districts packed and cracked those votes so precisely that the GOP would win 13 of the 18 seats from Pennsylvania and nine of 14 from Michigan. Democratic state legislative candidates would routinely win more votes in these states as well; Republicans would hold both chambers in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin regardless.

So yes, it worked. But it also contained the seeds of the party’s unraveling, placed a frustrated and impossible-to-please base in charge, and set the stage for an outsider to sweep up the pieces four years later.

* * *

But first, something else would happen in 2012: Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney, and shaken Republicans realized they’d lost the popular vote in five out of six presidential elections, GOP leaders commissioned a warts-and-all diagnosis of the party’s brand. It wasn’t pretty. One-time Republican voters now described the party as “scary,” “out of touch,” “narrow-minded,” even “stuffy old men.”

Its authors named the report the Growth and Opportunity Project but it soon became known by everyone as something catchier and more urgent: the Republican autopsy. Among the causes of death? Republicans had “lost their way with younger voters.” Many minorities “think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

It recommended that the party modernize itself, learn how to persuade and appeal to a wider variety of people, champion policies that make life better for working Americans rather than the rich, then head to communities Republicans had tended to avoid and make their case. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate that we care about them, too,” the autopsy concluded.

When Donald Trump captured the GOP nomination in 2016, many Republicans bemoaned not following this advice from the autopsy and more, such as championing immigration reform and becoming genuinely welcoming and inclusive on social issues. But it was already too late. The autopsy itself had been dead on arrival, and long before Trump descended his gilded Manhattan escalator and joined the Republican race. It had already been smothered, unaware, by the very Republican establishment who commissioned the report.

REDMAP made it impossible.

The new districts drawn by Republicans made their districts older, whiter, and more conservative. These new districts — where the Republican primary was the only race that mattered — produced a different kind of congressman (and most of them were men), incentivized against compromise, insulated from the ballot box, interested in listening only to their base.

These members also didn’t much care for the Republican establishment in Washington. They would bring a much different tone and tenor to Congress. Boehner, now the House speaker, learned this right quick. In summer 2013, a first-term congressman from North Carolina’s 11th district wrote Boehner a letter, suggesting that the GOP look to defund Obamacare by threatening a government shutdown. Boehner knew it was folly. Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate. It was a strategy doomed to fail. Rove blasted it in the Wall Street Journal.

But Mark Meadows enlisted 79 other Republicans in this quest. His own district, previously a swing district that most recently produced a conservative Democrat, had been redrawn so that he captured it by more than 15 percentage points. It was 87 percent white.

In the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza and David Wasserman looked at the districts of the 80 signatories. They were, on average, 75 percent white and just 9 percent Latino, compared to an average district that’s 63 percent white and 17 percent Latino. In 2012, Obama won the national popular vote by 4 percentage points. In those districts, Romney won by an average of 23. The Republican members exceeded even that landslide margin: They won their seats by an average of 34 percentage points. As the nation changed, redistricting not only held back demographic change, but it turned back the clock and solidified conservative white power. As Lizza concluded, “these 80 members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.”

Boehner, given little choice, followed the “suicide caucus” over the cliff. Predictably, disaster ensued and he had to change course. And predictably, the “suicide caucus” saw no reason to compromise or change its own. This was just one of more than four dozen battles to repeal Obamacare in the House, none of which stood any greater likelihood of victory. Immigration reform, one of the only policy options the autopsy’s authors saw as crucial for the party’s future, stood no chance in this climate.

Neither did the GOP leadership. A year later, Meadows would turn on Boehner, filing a parliamentary motion to “vacate the chair” that would ultimately lead to the speaker’s resignation.

The House had been set on a dangerous new course. REDMAP, like some Frankenstein’s monster, would not only devour Boehner, but the new members empowered by these toxic, technology-driven gerrymanders would accelerate all of the worst polarizing trends in our politics. The Freedom Caucus, legislators created and empowered by REDMAP, would run the House. Ryan, Boehner’s successor, would later step aside in frustration as well, proven ineffective despite GOP control of Congress and the White House. The autopsy wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on. The GOP establishment hoped that controlling redistricting would buy themselves time to set a new course. Instead, the party’s course, and our nation’s history, would beset by the new leaders that their gerrymandering rendered unbeatable and uncontrollable.

Did Boehner learn any lesson from his unholy creation? Well, earlier this month he and Ryan signed on as chairs of a Speakers Advisory Council generated to fundraise for the REDMAP creators’ 2020 redistricting strategy.

* * *

Here’s the thing: When you’re trying to ensure that the side with less support continues to hold power, when you’re trying to maintain control without talking to a changing nation, your tactics aren’t likely to end with redistricting. Indeed, efforts to make it harder for citizens to vote were among the very first actions by gerrymandered state legislatures, especially in Wisconsin and North Carolina, where a federal court found that those barriers were “surgically” crafted to target blacks. Gerrymandered legislatures can take such anti-democratic actions because the people’s representatives need not fear the judgement of the people. And after the U.S. Supreme Court undid essential protections within the Voting Rights Act, in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, states and other entities didn’t have to fear the courts, either, when they wanted to change the rules around voting. Across much of the nation, but especially in the South, as well as in states with one-party control and newly gerrymandered legislatures, came a flood of voter ID bills, cutbacks in absentee and early voting, voter roll purges, precinct closures and more.

Gerrymandered legislatures felt free to ignore the will of the people. Other legislatures followed along. In Florida, for example, where 64 percent of voters approved a 2018 state constitutional amendment ending felony disenfranchisement, lawmakers added an additional burden instead — complete repayment of any fines and fees connected to the sentence or prison term — that many critics compared to a poll tax. Legislators also undermined a legal victory allowing campus sites to be used for early voting with a sneaky provision that requires something always at a premium on colleges: Easy parking.

Texas would make it a felony for anyone to cast an ineligible ballot, even by accident. Arizona looked to dial back early voting and expand voter ID requirements. Tennessee passed legislation that would make it put those who run voter registration drives in jeopardy of massive fines if they submitted too many incomplete applications. Indiana made it harder to sue in state court to extend voting hours, often necessary when machines malfunction or when lines are long. Legislatures in Missouri, Utah, Michigan and Idaho worked to unwind popular 2018 initiatives won by citizens demanding reforms politicians had refused to make.

And so we end this decade with the water in Flint still undrinkable, thanks to gerrymandering.

In 2011, Michigan’s GOP-controlled legislature dramatically expanded the state’s power to take over financially struggling municipalities and place them under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager. Angry voters toppled the law in a November 2012 ballot initiative, concluding that it gave the state too much power to usurp local control and run roughshod over elected officials. One month later, lawmakers ignored the public and reinstated the program.

Then, in 2014, the emergency manager appointed to run Flint changed the city’s water supply to the Flint River and decided against installing corrosion inhibitors to properly treat the water, saving an estimated $140 a day. It sparked a lead contamination crisis and an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease that killed 12 people and sickened hundreds of children.

And so we end this decade with fetal heartbeat laws on the march in aggressively gerrymandered states like Ohio, Georgia and Alabama, that would enact abortion restrictions dramatically out of sync with the wishes of voters even in these red states.

And so we end this decade with a national consensus on gun control and putting an end to the horrifically numbing routine of mass shootings, but an anti-majoritarian and broken political system where large majorities are ever-stymied and unable, again and again, to translate the will of the people into action. The decade closes with consensus on climate change, but progress and agreements being rolled back.

We stand on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, which will begin in 2021, without the prospect of intervention from the federal courts, with the gerrymander wars headed south and the prospect of states using citizen population, rather than total population, to draw state legislative districts, all, again, with the goal of standing athwart demographic change and shouting “stop.”

These wars will be fought with Democrats, at last, fully awakened and focused on state legislatures. They’ll take place with dramatically more public awareness and media attention paid to the importance of structural voting issues that once made eyes glaze over. And they’ll be undertaken with solid majorities of Americans of all ideologies backing rules and reforms enshrine the best promises of our democracy.

But the damage that has done is severe and will be long-lasting. Forty years ago, when Raymond Donovan, the labor secretary under Ronald Reagan, was acquitted on fraud and larceny charges, he famously asked “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back.” We should all pose the same question about the way urgent issues went unaddressed during this bitter and polarized decade, stolen from us, in part, by the gerrymander.

It may require a generation to repair the damage to our civic fabric from this decade’s cynical and corrosive festival of partisan gerrymandering. It helped heightened and accelerated polarization, extremism and our dysfunctional politics. It’s incumbent on all of us to ensure it doesn’t get worse before it gets better. There may not be any battle in the next decade that’s more urgent.

Ex-Nissan Boss Ghosn in Lebanon, Left Japan Over ‘Injustice’

TOKYO — Nissan’s former Chairman Carlos Ghosn said Tuesday from Lebanon that he was not fleeing justice but instead left Japan to avoid “injustice and political persecution” over financial misconduct allegations during his tenure leading the automaker.

Ghosn had been released on bail by a Tokyo court while awaiting trial but was not allowed to travel overseas. He disclosed his location in a statement through his representatives that did not describe how he left Japan, where he had been under surveillance. He promised to talk to reporters next week.

“I am now in Lebanon and will no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant, and basic human rights are denied, in flagrant disregard of Japan’s legal obligations under international law and treaties it is bound to uphold,” the statement said.

Japanese media quoted prosecutors speaking anonymously who said they did not know how Ghosn had left.

Ghosn, who is of Lebanese origin and holds French, Lebanese and Brazilian passports, was arrested in November 2018 and was expected to face trial in April 2020.

Prosecutors fought his release, but a court granted him bail with conditions that he be monitored and he could not meet with his wife, Carole, who is also of Lebanese origin. Recently the court allowed them to speak by video calls.

Japan does not have an extradition treaty with Lebanon. It is unclear what steps authorities might take.

Ghosn has repeatedly asserted his innocence, saying authorities trumped up charges to prevent a possible fuller merger between Nissan Motor Co. and alliance partner Renault SA.

He has been charged with under-reporting his future compensation and breach of trust.

During his release on bail, Ghosn had been going daily to the office of his main lawyer, Junichiro Hironaka, to work on his case, except on weekends and holidays.

Hironaka told reporters Tuesday afternoon that he was stunned that Ghosn had jumped bail and denied any involvement in or knowledge of the escape. He said the lawyers had all of Ghosn’s three passports and was puzzled by how he could have left the country.

The last time he spoke to Ghosn was on Christmas Day, and he has never been consulted about leaving for Lebanon, Hironaka told reporters outside his law office in Tokyo.

He said the lawyers still need to decide on their next action, besides filing a required report to the judicial authorities. His office was closed for the New Year’s holiday in Japan.

“Maybe he thought he won’t get a fair trial,” Hironaka said, stressing that he continues to believe Ghosn is innocent. “I can’t blame him for thinking that way.”

He called the circumstances of Ghosn’s arrest, the seizure of evidence and the strict bail conditions unfair.

In the first official Lebanese comment on Ghosn’s arrival, state minister for presidential affairs Selim Jreissati told the An-Nahar newspaper that Ghosn entered Lebanon legally through the airport with his French passport and his Lebanese ID.

Jreissati told the paper that in a meeting with Japan’s deputy foreign minister, he presented a file to the Japanese authorities asking for Ghosn to be handed over to be tried in Lebanon according to international anti-corruption laws, of which Lebanon is a signatory. He added that since there was no official word from Japan and it was not yet clear how Ghosn came to Lebanon, the government there will take no formal stance.

Jreissati did not immediately respond to calls from The Associated Press.

The Lebanese General Security, which is in charge of border crossings and foreigners, said Ghosn had entered the country legally and there was no reason to take any action against him.

Ghosn had posted 1.5 billion yen ($14 million) bail on two separate releases. He had been rearrested on additional charges after an earlier release.

Earlier, Ricardo Karam, a television host and friend of Ghosn, told The Associated Press that Ghosn arrived in Lebanon on Monday morning.

“He is home,” Karam said in a message. “It’s a big adventure.”

Karam declined to elaborate.

The Lebanon-based newspaper Al-Joumhouriya said Ghosn arrived in Beirut from Turkey aboard a private jet.

The French government reacted with both surprise and confusion.

“Mr. Carlos Ghosn is not above the laws, be they French or Japanese,” said Agnes Pannier-Runacher, a junior finance minister. But she added that “he has French nationality and we owe him consular support, as we owe all French nationals.”

Speaking to broadcaster BFM-TV, she said, “I was surprised as you when I learned about this escape.”

Ghosn was credited with leading a spectacular turnaround at Nissan beginning in the late 1990s, rescuing the automaker from near-bankruptcy.

People in Lebanon took special pride in the auto industry icon, who speaks fluent Arabic and visited the country regularly. Born in Brazil, where his Lebanese grandfather had sought his fortune, Ghosn grew up in Beirut, where he spent part of his childhood at a Jesuit school.

Before his fall from grace, Ghosn was also a celebrity in Japan, revered for his managerial acumen.

Nissan did not have immediate comment Tuesday. The Japanese automaker of the March subcompact, Leaf electric car and Infiniti luxury models has also been charged as a company in relation to Ghosn’s alleged financial crimes.

Japanese securities regulators recently recommended Nissan be fined 2.4 billion yen ($22 million) over disclosure documents from 2014 to 2017. Nissan has said it accepted the penalty and had corrected its securities documents in May.

The company’s sales and profits have tumbled and its brand image is tarnished. It has acknowledged lapses in its governance and has promised to improve its transparency.

Another former Nissan executive, Greg Kelly, an American, was arrested at the same time as Ghosn and is awaiting trial. He has said he is innocent.

Hiroto Saikawa, who replaced Ghosn as head of Nissan, announced his resignation in September after financial misconduct allegations surfaced against him related to dubious income. He has not been charged with any crime.

The conviction rate in Japan exceeds 99% and winning an acquittal through a lengthy appeals process could take years. Rights activists in Japan and abroad say Japan’s judicial system does not presume innocence enough and relies heavily on long detentions that lead to false confessions.

The charges Ghosn faces carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.

He is accused of under-reporting his post-retirement compensation and breach of trust in diverting Nissan money and allegedly having it shoulder his personal investment losses. The other allegations against him involve payments to a Saudi dealership, as well as funds paid to an Oman business that purportedly were diverted to entities run by Ghosn.

Ghosn has said that the compensation was never decided, that Nissan never suffered losses from the investments and that all the payments were for legitimate business services.

Ghosn’s case has drawn intense media attention in Japan. When he was released from custody in March, the former executive normally seen in luxury suits wore a surgical mask and dressed like a construction worker to avoid media scrutiny under the advice of one of his lawyers. Japanese media still spotted him and followed his car.

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Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb and Zeina Karam in Beirut and John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report.