Chris Hedges's Blog, page 82

The Scariest Climate Stories Emerging From the Arctic

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

NOAA has issued its annual report on the Arctic. It is a big report, but there are some terrifying findings.

Because this point is not always made in journalism, it is important to underline why these monstrous things are happening. It is because you are driving your gasoline-fueled automobile and heating your house with coal and voting for politicians like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. The wrecking of our beautiful earth is on us.

NASA/GSFC/Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen

1. “The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing nearly 267 billion metric tons of ice per year and currently contributing to global average sea-level rise at a rate of about 0.7 mm yr.” That means the ice sheet is radically shrinking, and the seas are rising.

As Emma Gatten at the Telegraph puts it, the ice is melting 7 times faster than in the 1990s, yielding a rate of sea level rise that could put 40 million people at risk of flooding.

h/t PBS

Nsikan Akpan of PBS quotes Dartmouth’s Eric Osterberg;

“Two hundred sixty-seven billion tons of ice is really hard to put into context, but you could start by imagining a herd of elephants charging into the ocean from Greenland,” Osterberg said. “If you imagine that, we’re talking about 2,000 elephants charging into the ocean every second. That’s how much mass is going from Greenland into the ocean.”

As a journalist, let me just suggest you’d get more mileage from the imagery if you said it was like 7.2 million elephants charging into the ocean from Greenland every hour of the day, every day of the year.

2019 melt season on Greenland rivaled 2012’s record-melt year.

2. “Thawing permafrost throughout the Arctic could be releasing an estimated 300-600 million tons of net carbon per year to the atmosphere.”

The permafrost had been a carbon sink in the summer, but now it may be tipping over to releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the winter than it takes in during the growing season. So it is a net producer of C02, alongside humankind, which is spewing out the stuff like 7.7 billion active volcanoes. We didn’t need the help, and this tipping point was supposed to be in the far future.

Bruce Johansen at the University of Nebraska Omaha explains:

“In a study published in Nature Climate Change, scientists estimated that 1.7 billion metric tons of carbon were lost from Arctic permafrost regions during each winter from 2003 to 2017. Over the same span, an average of 1 billion metric tons of carbon were taken up by vegetation during summer growing seasons. This changes the region from being a net “sink” of carbon dioxide — where it is captured from the atmosphere and stored — into being a net source of emissions.”

3. “August mean sea surface temperatures in 2019 were 3° F. (1.7° C. ) warmer than the 1982-2010 August mean in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, the Laptev Sea, and Baffin Bay.”

Warm surface water means less ice. In fact, the result came too late for the report, but it turns out that October, 2019, saw the lowest extent of Arctic sea ice on record.

In general, 2019 will likely be the second hottest year on record over-all, rivaling the blistering year of 2016.

4. “Wildlife populations are showing signs of stress. For example, the breeding population of the ivory gull in the Canadian Arctic has declined by 70% since the 1980s.”

If you’re up there, apparently you can see the dead birds littering the beaches.

Christina Larson at AP reports,

“Birds are migrating to the Arctic and not finding the food they need,” said Matthew Druckenmiller, a scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center and one of the NOAA report editors. “They are showing up with empty stomachs on the beaches. The indigenous communities are reporting seeing seabirds dead on beaches in numbers they haven’t seen before.” Arctic Canada’s breeding population of ivory gulls has declined 70% since the 1980s, the report found. This is likely due to loss of sea ice as well contamination in the food chain.

Waleed Abdalati, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado -Boulder, one of Larson’s interviewees, compared the ivory gull to a canary in the mine.

5. “Loss of sea ice and changes in bottom water temperature caused Arctic fish species to shift to more northern waters between 2010 and 2018. Commercially valuable southern species are expanding their range north to take advantage of changing conditions.”

As Timothy Gardner and Yereth Rosen at Reuters point out, the Bering Sea is one of the United States’ largest fisheries.

I didn’t know this, but they say more than 40% of the yearly American fish and shellfish catch comes from the Bering Sea. If some of those species migrate north out of reach of the US trawlers, that will affect the American protein stock.

As a historian, I have taught courses on climate change and history, and one thing I can tell you, it is very unusual during the past million years for the Arctic to be hot.

 

Plutocrats Are Trying to Buy the Democratic Nomination

From three different vectors, the oligarchy is on the march to capture the Democratic presidential nomination. Pete Buttigieg has made big gains. A timeworn ally of corporate power, Joe Biden, is on a campaign for his last hurrah. And Michael Bloomberg is swooping down from plutocratic heights.

Those three men are a team of rivals—each fiercely competitive for an individual triumph, yet arrayed against common ideological foes named Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The obvious differences between Buttigieg, Biden and Bloomberg are apt to distract from their underlying political similarities. Fundamentally, they’re all aligned with the nation’s economic power structure—two as corporate servants, one as a corporate master.

For Buttigieg, the gaps between current rhetoric and career realities are now gaping. On Tuesday, hours after the collapse of the “nondisclosure agreement” that had concealed key information about his work for McKinsey & Company, the New York Times concluded that “the most politically troubling element of his client list” might be what he did a dozen years ago for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan—“a health care firm that at the time was in the process of reducing its work force.”

The newspaper reported that “his work appeared to come at about the same time the insurer announced that it would cut up to 1,000 jobs—or nearly 10 percent of its work force—and request rate increases.”

This year, Buttigieg’s vaguely progressive rhetoric has become more and more unreliable, most notably with his U-turn away from supporting Medicare for All. Meanwhile, wealthy donors have flocked to him. Forbes reports that 39 billionaires have donated to the Buttigieg campaign, thus providing ultra-elite seals of approval. (Meanwhile, Biden has 44 billionaire donors and Warren has six. Forbes couldn’t find any billionaires who’ve donated to Sanders; he did receive one contribution from a billionaire’s spouse—though that donation was later returned.)

Not surprisingly, the political orientations of the leading candidates match up with the spread of average donations. The latest figures reflect candidates’ proximity to the class interests of donors, with wealthier ones naturally tending to give more sizable amounts. Nearly two-thirds (64.9 percent) of Biden’s donations were upwards of $200 each, while such donations accounted for a bit more than half (52.5 percent) of the contributions to Buttigieg. Compare those numbers to 29.6 percent for Elizabeth Warren and 24.9 percent for Bernie Sanders.

Buttigieg’s affinity for corporate Democrats—and how it tracks with his donor base—should get a lot more critical scrutiny. For example, Washington Post reporter David Weigel tweeted in early November: “Asked Buttigieg if he agreed w Pelosi that PAYGO should stay in place if a Dem wins. ‘We might want to look at a modification to the rules, but the philosophical premise, I think, does need to be there… we’ve got to be able to balance the revenue of what we’re proposing.’”

But the entire “philosophical premise” of PAYGO amounts to a straightjacket for constraining progressive options. To support it is to endorse the ongoing grip of corporate power on the Democratic Party. As Buttigieg surely knows, PAYGO—requiring budget cuts to offset any spending increases—is a beloved cause for the farthest-right congressional Democrats. The 26 House members of the corporatist Blue Dog Coalition continue to be enthralled with PAYGO.

As for Joe Biden, since the launch of his campaign almost eight months ago, progressives have increasingly learned that his five-decade political record is filled with one repugnant aspect after another after another after another. Any support for him from progressives in the primaries and caucuses next year will likely come from low-information voters.

In sharp contrast to Sanders and Warren, who refuse to do high-dollar fundraising events, Biden routinely speaks at private gatherings where wealthy admirers donate large sums. His campaign outreach consists largely of making beelines to audiences of extraordinarily rich people around the country—as if to underscore his declaration in May 2018 that “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble… The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

One of those folks who presumably isn’t a “bad guy” is Bloomberg, who—with an estimated net worth of $54 billion—has chosen to pursue a presidential quest by spending an astronomical amount of money on advertisements. Writing for The Nation magazine this week, Jeet Heer aptly noted that Bloomberg “is utterly devoid of charisma, has no real organic base in the Democratic Party, and is a viable candidate only because he’s filthy rich and is willing to inundate the race by opening up his nearly limitless money pit.”

More powerfully than any words, Bloomberg’s brandishing of vast amounts of ad dollars is conveying his belief that enormous wealth is an entitlement to rule. The former New York mayor’s campaign is now an extreme effort to buy the presidency. Yet what he’s doing tracks with more standard assumptions about the legitimacy of allowing very rich people to dominate the political process.

Earlier this week, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir summed up the BBB approach this way: “Today, Joe Biden’s super PAC went on the air with a massive television ad buy. Mike Bloomberg is blanketing the airwaves almost everywhere with the largest ad buy in primary history. And Pete Buttigieg is taking time off the trail for a trio of private, high-dollar fundraisers in New York City.”

Thanks to grassroots low-dollar donations, Warren and Sanders (whom I support) have been able to shatter the corrupt paradigm that gave presidential campaign dominance to candidates bankrolled by the rich. That’s why Bloomberg has stepped in to save oligarchy from democracy.

As Frederick Douglass said with timeless truth, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Continual denunciations of anti-democratic power are necessary and insufficient. It’s far from enough to assert endlessly that the system is rigged and always will be.

Power concedes nothing. Fatalism is a poison that gets us nowhere. Constant organizing—outside and inside the electoral arena—is the antidote to powerlessness.

With the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination up for grabs, this chance will not come again.

McKinsey’s Monstrous Stint on Rikers Island

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In April 2017, partners from McKinsey & Company sent a confidential final report to the New York City corrections commissioner. They had spent almost three years leading an unusual project for a white-shoe corporate consulting firm like McKinsey: Attempting to stem the tide of inmate brawls, gang slashings and assaults by guards that threatened to overwhelm the jail complex on Rikers Island.

The report recounted that McKinsey had tested its new anti-violence strategy in what the firm called “Restart” housing units at Rikers. The results were striking. Violence had dropped more than 50% in the Restart facilities, the McKinsey partners wrote.

The number was bogus. Jail officials and McKinsey consultants had jointly rigged the Restart program in its earliest phase to all but guarantee there would be few violent episodes, according to documents and interviews. They stacked the units with inmates they believed to be compliant and unlikely to get into fights or to attack staff.

Publicly, McKinsey and top corrections officials touted the drop in violence in these units as an early sign of their project’s success — without disclosing that they had tilted the scale in favor of that result. After McKinsey handed off the inmate selection process, about a year into the firm’s work at Rikers, jail officials continued to manipulate the population of the Restart units to keep their violence numbers low.

In October of this year, the New York City Council voted to approve Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to close Rikers. The vote occurred during the same month that a federal monitor, appointed by a court to oversee reform at Rikers, revealed that violence by jail guards there continues to worsen. Overall, using the metrics employed by McKinsey, jailhouse violence has risen nearly 50% since the firm began its assignment.

The full story of how New York City came to pay McKinsey $27.5 million only to abandon many of the firm’s recommendations and decide to shut Rikers has never been told. A ProPublica investigation, based on interviews with 36 people, half of whom worked directly on the project, as well as more than 10,000 pages of project documents, internal emails and other records, reveals that problems dogged the project at every stage.

Among the issues that plagued the project: McKinsey, which had never before advised a jail or prison system, made data errors that further undercut the results it reported from Restart units. The firm also persuaded the Department of Correction to spend millions on the sorts of advanced data analytics favored by McKinsey’s corporate clients. The department never ended up using many of the those data products, some of which simply did not work very well.

What happened at Rikers is a cautionary tale of a public-sector consulting boom that has emerged over the past decade. In recent years, government agencies across the United States have entrusted management consultants with more and more facets of public administration, from designing school systems to shaping Medicaid policy. Public-sector consulting in North America is a more than $9 billion industry, with an average yearly growth rate of about half a billion dollars, according to ALM Intelligence, which monitors the consulting business. McKinsey was anxious to expand into a potentially lucrative branch of public-sector work, corrections consulting, according to a former McKinsey consultant who worked on the project.

A McKinsey spokesman defended the firm’s work. “The Restart program had a significantly positive impact in the housing areas of the jails in which the program was piloted,” he said. “These units experienced substantial reductions in violence as measured against comparably classified inmate populations.” He added that morale among corrections staff assigned to the Restart units improved.

The spokesman denied that McKinsey’s consultants were involved in or aware of efforts to “improperly skew or reduce the reported levels of violence in the Restarts.” He added, “We stand behind our team’s professionalism and integrity, and the results of their work.”

The Department of Correction referred a request for comment to the mayor’s office. A spokeswoman there, Avery Cohen, maintained that the decision to hire McKinsey was sound and denied that city officials were involved in manipulating Restart units. “We sought the help of an outside firm for a singular purpose: to reduce the level of violence against staff and inmates and improve the safety of our overall facilities,” Cohen wrote in a statement. “We stand by the reduced rates of violence we saw in our Restart Units.”

But the gaming of the Restart units was confirmed by Joseph Ponte, who was the corrections commissioner from 2014 to 2017 and trumpeted the Restart results in public hearings. In a deposition last year, Ponte was asked whether he had been told that the teams running the Restart units “were cherry-picking docile inmates” to ensure that rates of violence would fall.

“We did that, so that wasn’t news,” Ponte testified. “I was well aware of how we were selecting inmates in the Restarts — very carefully. It was a new process for us, and we wanted it to be successful.”

McKinsey was hired in the wake of media reports in early 2014 that revealed an alarming rise in violence at Rikers. In just two years, the most serious inmate violence and use of force by guards had both jumped more than 50%. The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan began threatening to take legal action to force reforms.

De Blasio, then just a few months into his first term as mayor, faced a groundswell of outrage. His top deputy, Anthony Shorris, and other aides decided to hire a consulting firm. They solicited proposals from firms on a pre-approved list from the previous administration. Despite its lack of corrections experience, McKinsey won the contract.

The mayor’s aides saw hiring a firm like McKinsey as a way to stave off the need for a federal jail monitor, three current and former corrections officials recall from meetings with them. Hiring McKinsey also offered political cover, those sources said, and the imprimatur of having a respected firm tackle the problem.

McKinsey was selected because of its reputation for “dealing with complex organizations” and its history of working with New York City government, according to Shorris, who left the de Blasio administration in late 2017. McKinsey, for example, had previously prepared a report on 9/11 emergency preparedness and, during the administration of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had consulted for the New York Police Department on a reorganization and modernization.

The mayor’s office denied that McKinsey was hired partly to provide political or legal cover, as did Shorris, who is now a senior adviser to McKinsey and teaches at Princeton University.

Early on, the consultants took steps to avoid transparency. At McKinsey’s behest, a few top consultants and corrections officials communicated using Wickr, an encrypted messaging app that automatically deletes messages within hours or days. Ponte and his chief of staff, Jeff Thamkittikasem, downloaded Wickr, a spokeswoman for the mayor said, but neither could recall using it “in any significant way.”

But one person with direct knowledge of the practice said corrections officials and McKinsey consultants exchanged project documents over Wickr. That shielded portions of McKinsey’s work from government oversight bodies and public records requests. “It seems like there’s an intentional act to evade that system of accountability,” said Douglas Cox, an expert on public records law at the City University of New York School of Law. (A spokesman for McKinsey did not dispute that Wickr was used, adding, “our policies require colleagues to adhere to all relevant laws and regulations.”)

McKinsey’s work began in September 2014 with a $1.8 million contract and an ambitious mission: to determine the causes of violence at Rikers and propose solutions.

Almost immediately, signs emerged that McKinsey’s corporate orientation made for an awkward fit. When the consultants pitched Ponte on a proprietary workplace survey, they spotlighted how it helped lift output at a strip mine. “Productivity increased by 50%,” McKinsey’s pitch deck crowed. “~$180MM in annual run rate savings.”

As they formulated a reform plan, the consultants did not solicit the views of inmates, clinic staff or others with direct insights into drivers of violence. The closest the consultants came to interacting with the inmates during this stage was to watch them through Plexiglas from inside guard booths.

McKinsey began adopting the mindset of the correction officers, according to one of its consultants. The firm’s initiatives included facilitating the expanded use of Tasers, shotguns and K9 patrol dogs (“aggressive dogs,” in the words of one McKinsey presentation) at Rikers, a stance that seemed at odds with de Blasio’s claims of wanting to foster a more humane jail system. A McKinsey spokesman said these tactics were intended for use only in extreme situations and were designed to minimize injury while protecting inmate and staff safety.

At a 2015 meeting, a group of McKinsey consultants grew heated reviewing video of a jailhouse assault. There was talk of wanting to beat inmates to get the situation under control, according to a former McKinsey consultant with direct knowledge of the meeting.

Finally, Anish Melwani, a senior McKinsey partner, grew exasperated by the tough-guy posturing. “Guys, you’ve gone native,” the former consultant recalls him saying. “I think you’ve been spending too much time with the correctional officers.” A McKinsey spokesman said its team had no recollection of such a conversation. Melwani, who has since become CEO of luxury retailer LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s North American operations, said he did not recall the specific meeting or comment but “reviewing footage of incidents was a routine part of the work while I was involved, so such a meeting would not have been unique.”

By March 2015, McKinsey and corrections officials had settled on a strategy to curb jail violence, which they called the “14-Point Plan.”

The provisions were straightforward. They ranged from adding educational opportunities for inmates to improving staff training to revamping the internal affairs division.

Some observers thought the recommendations were obvious. “A lot of the points were things the department was saying before they had McKinsey say it,” said Elizabeth Crowley, who at the time chaired the City Council committee that oversaw the Department of Correction.

McKinsey “contributed” to the development of the 14-Point Plan, a spokeswoman for the mayor said, but corrections officials primarily drove its creation and its tenets pre-dated McKinsey.

Top city officials, pleased to have a reform strategy to present to the public, were untroubled. In the spring of 2015, the city extended McKinsey’s engagement, assigning the consultants a long-term task: to help Ponte implement the 14-Point Plan. The firm’s original $1.8 million contract had now grown to more than $6 million.

The Restart units were conceived in early 2015. Outside pressure to fix the city’s jails had increased. The United States attorney’s office had joined a lawsuit over civil rights abuses at Rikers, and city officials were embroiled in often contentious settlement negotiations. The mayor’s top deputy, Shorris, was impatient for signs of improvement.

A series of tense meetings with Shorris in February and March created a sense of urgency for Ponte and his staff. After one particularly stressful meeting, a handful of Ponte’s aides met Benjamin Cheatham, a senior McKinsey partner who was heading up the project, at a bar near City Hall. Known by colleagues as the “little gray tornado” — a reference to his diminutive stature, muted color palette and overcaffeinated style — Cheatham had previously worked on McKinsey’s assignment for the New York Police Department.

Over margaritas, a person familiar with the meeting said, the group spent several hours sketching out what reform initiatives to test in the Restart units. A McKinsey spokesperson said it was one among many discussions about how to design the new program.

Shorris said his interactions with top corrections officials were generally “cordial and supportive.” His impatience, he said, was impelled by his desire to reduce jail violence, not by any pressure to resolve the civil rights lawsuit concerning Rikers.

Ponte and his staff would come to embrace the Restart program as their best bet for demonstrating impact quickly. The Restart units would also serve as a proving ground for the centerpiece of McKinsey’s work, an algorithm called the Housing Unit Balancer, or HUB. The HUB was designed to predict each inmate’s propensity for violence and then calculate how to distribute inmates across housing units to minimize the risk of conflict.

By July 2015, eight Restart units, housing a total of about 250 inmates, were in place at the George Motchan Detention Center, one of the 10 jails on Rikers Island at the time and known as GMDC.

Within weeks, the data showed violence far below the norm. Restart units for higher-security inmates, for example, experienced only a single incident in their first few months. Unreformed housing units, by contrast, saw 32 violent episodes over a similar period.

But for each Restart unit, jail officials had replaced inmates selected by the HUB but considered troublesome with alternates, believed to be more accommodating, chosen from a list provided by McKinsey. One email, forwarded to several consultants and obtained by ProPublica, shows a jail guard carefully curating the gang members on McKinsey’s initial list. One inmate was a Blood “but acceptable for program,” the guard wrote. The two other gang members on the list — a Latin King and a Crip — were “not acceptable.”

Today, McKinsey acknowledges that potentially unruly inmates were intentionally excluded from the earliest Restart units, but says it was done only to give the consultants time to fine-tune their approach. Yet neither they nor their clients disclosed that caveat when Ponte used a McKinsey PowerPoint to plug the violence levels at initial Restart units as “lower than GMDC and DOC overall” during a November 2015 hearing before the Correction Department’s oversight board.

Ponte began expanding the Restart program to other Rikers facilities. In time, according to Ponte’s deposition and McKinsey, the filtering of problematic inmates stopped. But seven current and former senior corrections officials interviewed by ProPublica said the practice persisted. (These sources did not know whether the McKinsey consultants were aware that the practice continued.)

A 2017 department analysis supports the contention that the manipulation continued. The analysis showed that, in one facility, inmates selected for Restart units had a significantly lower rate of violent run-ins with guards than inmates placed in other units.

On top of simply swapping out difficult inmates assigned to a Restart unit, jail officials began manually overriding some inmates’ HUB-generated risk scores to steer them toward or away from an available spot in a Restart unit.

A McKinsey spokesman said the firm’s consultants were not aware of these practices. In depositions last year, Ponte and Thamkittikasem also denied knowledge of them. Ponte did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article. A City Hall spokeswoman said that, while McKinsey continued to monitor the HUB and its underlying algorithm, its consultants were not involved in final inmate housing decisions.

Top corrections officials, relying on data provided by McKinsey, continued to sell the Restart program’s success to the public by heralding dramatic reductions in violence within those units.

When there were flare-ups in the Restart units, the consultants and jail officials took action to stamp them out. After one jump in violence, jail managers barred a demographic prone to violence, inmates aged 18 to 21, from Restart units. “Effective immediately, no Young Adult shall be placed in any Restart Program Housing Units within the facility,” Chantelle Johnson, a deputy warden at GMDC, wrote in a memorandum in November 2016. “Failure to comply with this memorandum will result in disciplinary action.” A McKinsey consultant had a hand in producing the memorandum, metadata shows. (A City Hall spokesperson said the directive on young adults was part of a broader shift in how to handle young inmates and the Restart process was useful in demonstrating the need for a different approach.)

“They were trying to say that this model will work,” said Greg Kuczinski, a deputy corrections commissioner at the time who later sued the city for wrongful termination in an ongoing case that is unrelated to the McKinsey project. “But if you started with ideal inmates, if you will, how is that going to translate into real change when you throw it into the general population?”

For the mayor’s office, showing progress was crucial. The Restart units seemed successful, which led the mayor’s office to approve another contract extension in November 2015. The city committed to pay McKinsey $7.5 million on top of the $6 million already billed.

But the stakes for McKinsey extended far beyond Rikers. Data-analytics products, such as the HUB, offered a way for McKinsey to distinguish itself from the competition as consultants vied for fees in the corrections-consulting field. “The HUB was definitely driving a lot,” Kuczinski said.

McKinsey pushed the city to pay it to develop data-analytics software aimed at everything from “workforce optimization” and “workforce absenteeism” to “phone monitoring applications” and “decryption systems,” project documents show. Ultimately, the city’s bill from McKinsey would include $5.5 million for data analytics.

These tools, however, proved ill-suited to the Department of Correction. Many cellblocks lacked computer access, and the department’s antiquated IT system froze constantly. Jail guards and supervisors were unused to recording data electronically, let alone making sense of it.

Some of the McKinsey analytics products simply didn’t work very well. “IntelWatch,” for example, was an algorithm designed to predict gang affiliation and future violence. It was part of a broader McKinsey effort to import surveillance and analysis methods “widely used in the intelligence community,” as one PowerPoint slide put it.

IntelWatch, according to McKinsey slide decks, was designed to map each inmate’s social network by analyzing data from inmates’ phone calls, visitors and commissary deposits. The slides seemed detached from reality: As stand-ins for real inmates, they used the names of characters from “Gangs of New York,” Martin Scorsese’s movie about a battle for dominance among the Irish-immigrant underclass in Civil War-era Manhattan slums.

The surveillance algorithm’s effect on real-life inmates was never tested. IntelWatch, finalized in a rush at the end of McKinsey’s engagement, was riddled with bugs and errors, current and former corrections officials say. Today, McKinsey defends the program as version 1.0, a tool the Correction Department was meant to adjust and improve. But as one former consultant concedes, the department lacked the capacity to do so. The Correction Department paid for IntelWatch but never used it.

By the fall of 2016, McKinsey’s days at Rikers were starting to look numbered. Oversight bodies and the city comptroller were starting to question, in increasingly strident tones, what the city was getting for its money, even as the city was poised to extend McKinsey’s contract again, bringing the total cost to city taxpayers to $27.5 million.

By then, McKinsey had given officials a firm violence-reduction figure to quote, project documents show. In Restart units, “violence is down by over 70 percent when compared to other similar units,” the Correction Department’s chief of staff, Thamkittikasem, told the oversight board in October 2016. Over the next several months, he and Ponte would cite that figure repeatedly at City Council hearings.

Yet systemwide, inmates and jail staff were at significantly greater risk than when McKinsey’s engagement began. Inmate-on-inmate attacks had jumped by 25% compared with 2014 and assaults on jail staff and use of force by guards were up by, respectively, 15% and 25%, according to city data.

“You’re trying to paint a rosy picture, and so is the mayor,” Crowley, the councilwoman, told top corrections officials at a City Council oversight hearing that November. But “if I’m an inmate, I’m more likely to be hurt seriously.”

By the start of 2017, the city had decided to give McKinsey an end date: April 30. McKinsey’s mounting cost and a sense that the partnership had run its course prompted the decision, Ponte recalled in his deposition last year. “How much money you’re spending — eventually that’s really your job, so to speak,” he testified. “So you’ve got to wean yourself off of that.”

As the firm handed off its work, corrections officials at department headquarters were disturbed to receive documents that cast doubt on the integrity of the data provided by McKinsey. Officials discovered coding errors in spreadsheets used to collect violence data from Restart units. The flaws were significant. They inflated the baseline rate of violence, against which Restart units were measured, by 10% to 15%, according to City Hall. That had the effect of increasing the seeming drop in violence in the units. The officials, emails and interviews show, lost confidence in the violence-reduction figures McKinsey had provided them, figures that department leaders for months had touted publicly as evidence the Restart process was working.

“Validity of currently reported data is questionable, and is not liable to stand up to audit,” Kyle McDonnell, a Correction Department project specialist, wrote to his supervisors in a June 2 email, just over a month after McKinsey’s last day. (The New York Daily News first reported aspects of these concerns.)

Cohen, the City Hall spokeswoman, said McKinsey consultants helped corrections officials fix the problem. But internal Correction Department emails show that the fix was only partial, with some flaws remaining unresolved nearly six months after the consulting firm left Rikers.

In March 2017, de Blasio announced that he intended to close Rikers, and a little over a year later, GMDC, where McKinsey had pioneered the Restart units, became the first jail on Rikers to be shut. The Correction Department abandoned the Restart process altogether. Cohen said the city plans to export a limited subset of reforms McKinsey worked on, among them the HUB, to the jails that will replace Rikers.

McKinsey never stopped soliciting projects at Rikers, even after de Blasio announced his plan to close the jail complex. In its final report, the firm recommended redesigning Rikers to streamline jail operations and save the city money. It was an area, McKinsey asserted, where it could help.

Food Stamps Saved My Life

You may have heard about the Trump administration’s latest attack on very poor Americans: a punitive new restriction that will cut SNAP benefits for 688,000 people. SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, is our country’s most popular and effective nutrition assistance program.

Growing up, my family got food stamps — and oh, I hated it. I hated standing in line at the grocery store, knowing we’d be paying with coupons that would brand us as “poor” to anyone who noticed.

And yet I loved the fact that we had food. As a growing kid, I knew what it was like to come home to a bare kitchen. Those dreaded vouchers meant we got cheese, milk, fruit, eggs, cereal, beans, tortillas, and yes, sometimes even ice cream.

That food — and the stability that came with it — sent me on my way. Because I wasn’t hungry in school, I could pay attention. And I excelled.

I scored in the top few percentiles on every standardized test I ever took. I got into college, where I scraped by with some low-interest loans, scholarships, and waitressing jobs. And now I make a good living for myself.

In fact, I’ve paid more in taxes over the past 25 years than my family ever got in government assistance. But I haven’t forgotten our past, and that’s why I strongly support making SNAP available to all families who need it. They deserve the same leg up we got.

That’s why threats to SNAP — from the latest attack on “work-capable adults” without kids to other changes that would throw kids off school lunch assistance — make my blood boil.

We don’t know what hardships these people targeted by the latest rule face. We do know they are very, very poor, earning less than $2,200 a year, according to Feeding America.

The stereotype floated by Trump is that adults without children are freeloaders, but how do we know that? How do we know they didn’t get laid off from their jobs six months ago? How do we know they are not in school? How can we presume to make assumptions about them or walk in their shoes?

Taking food away from very poor people doesn’t promote work — it just makes them hungrier.

Think about it. Could you go out every day looking for work if your stomach was empty? Would you hire someone whose belly growled at you from the other side of the interview desk?

This is just one in a series of efforts by the administration to literally take food off the table for millions of Americans. A recent analysis by the Urban Institute found that if all of Trump’s attempts to restrict SNAP had been in place in 2018, 3.7 million would have lost SNAP benefits.

You’d be looking at all sorts of Americans being harmed — the elderly, the disabled, low-income women. And, sadly, children. Children like me.

SNAP is as an investment. As my mother-in-law used to say, “First feed the face, then teach right from wrong.”

How can we expect kids who are hungry, ignored, or penalized for being poor to succeed? How can we expect under-nourished adults to lead productive lives, or seek self-improvement, when they’re scrounging through dumpsters looking for lunch?

My plea to anyone reading this is to lend your support to continued funding of anti-hunger programs. My brothers and I were worth that small investment 40 years ago. Don’t we owe the same to the kids and adults who are worth it today?

Britain Could Be the First Domino in a Left-Wing Revolution

Just like that, we’re hours away from the Dec. 12 U.K. general election that will decide the nation’s direction at a crucial time in its history and in the wider global context, what with the rise of the far-right in the West and the worsening climate crisis. Although U.K. political campaigns are happily much shorter than those in America, a lot has transpired over the course of the past month since a snap election was called by Boris Johnson.

Several debates have taken place, one entirely dedicated to climate change in which an absent Johnson was replaced with a melting block of ice; an attack on London Bridge left several dead, including the attacker, and raised questions about the underfunding of police forces under conservative rule; and world leaders convened in London for a NATO meeting that led to more than a few embarrassing moments for Johnson, Donald Trump and others.

At the true heart of the election, however, are two topics that are deceivingly interlinked: Brexit and the U.K.’s National Health Service. Johnson has desperately tried to make the election another referendum on Brexit, promising vaguely to fund the many social programs his own party has ruthlessly cut over the past decade. The current prime minister famously led the pro-Leave campaign in 2016 with an empty promise emblazoned on a red London bus that said he’d take the £350 million ($455 million) he claimed were sent to the European Union weekly and spending them on the U.K.’s beloved National Health Service. Even so, in 2019 he’s been wholly unprepared to fight an election with the NHS as the central topic.

It’s no doubt easier to wax on about a hard Brexit, whatever that even means to a tired electorate, than answer questions about hospital bed and nurse shortages, or the fact that Donald Trump, a man who has essentially endorsed Johnson, has openly expressed his interest in getting his (and American corporations’) grubby hands on Britons’ universal health care. While Johnson was ultimately sued for the made-up bus figure, he seems to think the British public will still trust a word he says (which, unfortunately, some do).

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, however, has smartly seized on the slogan “NHS not for sale!” from the outset of his campaign, and he recently revealed a leaked document that showed talks between Johnson’s government and Trump’s have already begun and include the health service, despite insistence from both leaders—two known liars—that this isn’t the case.

Johnson seems to have conveniently forgotten an op-ed he wrote in 1995 in which he advocated for keeping the NHS “free at the point of service” only “for those who are genuinely sick, and for the elderly.” He claimed then that health care services were being “abused” and “If people have to pay for them, they will value them more.” This of course ignores the fact that the British people do pay for the service—with their taxes. The Tory leader is far from the only member of his party to believe in the privatization of the NHS, and over nearly 10 years of conservative rule, this approach has become painfully apparent as “billions of pounds of contracts [have been] handed out to private providers.”

To top it off, Johnson is so unwilling to face what his party has done to the NHS, he refused to look at a photograph of a boy sleeping on a hospital floor when questioned about it by a reporter.

Tried to show @BorisJohnson the picture of Jack Williment-Barr. The 4-year-old with suspected pneumonia forced to lie on a pile of coats on the floor of a Leeds hospital.

The PM grabbed my phone and put it in his pocket: @itvcalendar | #GE19 pic.twitter.com/hv9mk4xrNJ

— Joe Pike (@joepike) December 9, 2019

Labour, on the other hand, has promised to properly fund the NHS with a 4.3% increase in spending annually and reverse its privatization. While this is already an important promise from a party that has proven under Corbyn to prioritize working people over the elites, that’s not the only thing the left-wing party has in mind for the future of the U.K. Building on the wildly popular anti-austerity manifesto it ran on in 2017, Labour has outdone itself with its latest plan, which, if carried out, would radically transform not just the U.K., but the global political landscape.

Some of the most interesting ideas in the 2019 Labour manifesto could easily serve as a progessive blueprint for other nations (yes, I’m looking at you, America). The left-wing party promises to nationalize essential services—water and national rail services are two sectors on the agenda that have been neglected and overpriced under private management. It also promises to ensure free full-fibre broadband WiFi to every person in the country by 2030; to offer government funded childcare for all children ages 2-4; to extend maternity leave to 12 months; to abolish public university fees, which are reaching American college tuition levels; and to implement a Green New Deal that would tackle climate change while creating jobs.

These are just some of the many policies Labour proposed that clearly put the needs of the British people ahead of the wealthy ruling class who have found pliant allies in the Tories (not least because many Tory politicians are themselves among the richest in the U.K.)

Of course, as with any progressive plans, there’s a lot of “How are we going to pay for this?” going around. Let Grace Blakeley’s recent piece in the New Statesman put that question to rest, once and for all:

Responding to [concerns about paying for Labour’s proposals] – rooted in real experience – with abstract economic arguments will fall on deaf ears. Rather than focusing on the narrative of “borrowing to invest”, an opaque concept to most people, Labour has opted to frame its response in class terms: the rich will pay for it.

Labour has developed a programme of radical tax plans that would generate revenues from corporations and the wealthy. The income tax policy of 2017 – limiting tax increases to the top 5 per cent of earners, those who earn £80,000 or more – has been retained. But this has been combined with a transformative set of proposals on corporation tax.

Labour would not only reverse the Conservatives’ corporate tax cuts, increasing the headline rate from 19 per cent to 26 per cent, it would also reform the way tax is levied by moving towards a system of unitary taxation. Such a model would prevent multinational corporations from shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions in order to avoid corporation tax.

Unitary taxation has been endorsed by a swathe of tax experts and the free-market OECD is now co-ordinating countries across the world in an attempt to implement the policy. Should it succeed, the traditional warning that corporations will flee the UK in order to avoid tax will be moot.

If that’s not convincing, have a look at Corbyn’s tongue-in-cheek explanation about where he’ll find a “money tree”:

This was surprisingly fun. pic.twitter.com/Tjl60l70bl

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 9, 2019

In terms of a Labour government’s foreign policy outlook, Corbyn has proven himself to be an ally of the global left time and again. He’s openly criticized the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, spoken out against the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, opposed the right-wing coup against Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and has garnered the backing of Bernie Sanders and his supporters—a fact that points to a promising future progressive alliance should Sanders become the U.S. president. Corbyn has also notably criticized President Trump and his policies, as well as his possible designs for a U.K.-U.S. trade deal, when both Johnson and his predecessor, Theresa May, proved too cowardly to oppose the American leader. Labour’s manifesto effectively reflects Corbyn’s views in its proposal to revise the country’s entire foreign policy based on a review of the harrowing legacy its empire has left around the world.

One of the most promising things about Corbyn is his belief in the importance of grassroots politics. Momentum, the activist wing of the Labour Party which was formed in 2015, has been hard at work during this election, and could prove to be the party’s “secret weapon,” as it was during the 2017 campaign, which saw the largest increase in Labour votes in decades. Having a self-proclaimed socialist leader who understands that his power comes from the people, not monied interests, could change the until-now-elitist course of U.K. history and set a crucial example for other countries grappling with the devastating effects of capitalism.

The leader’s acknowledgement of the urgent need to address the climate crisis will also have a global impact, even if all it does is force the U.K to cut emissions faster. But having a progressive leader at the helm of a historically and economically significant nation like the U.K. will no doubt color the way other wealthy nations approach this urgent ongoing disaster.

The polls about Thursday’s elections are all over the place, as we’ve come to expect, but there’s ample evidence that the pollsters are underestimating the people power behind Corbyn and the widespread appeal of progressive policies, just as they did in 2017. As Ell Smith, the founder of the podcast “Stats for Lefties,” points out in a recent piece, the numbers look much like they did just two years ago when Corbyn sent shockwaves through the world with his electoral gains. Back then, May was able to cobble together a ghastly coalition with the Irish Democratic Unionist Party, one that Johnson blew up just a few weeks ago in the name of a hard Brexit. This time, as I’ve already written, the Tories will be hard pressed to find allies in Parliament delusional enough to join them in a coalition government. Meanwhile, Corbyn has continued planting progressive seeds, and, political climate permitting, we might just be about to witness a left-wing revolution in full bloom.

The Environmental Effort That Pays Trillions of Dollars

More than 400 scientists in Brazil have once again established that conservation pays: landscapes and people are richer for the native vegetation preserved on rural properties.

They calculate that 270 million hectares (667m acres) of natural forest, scrub, marsh and grassland contained in Brazil’s legal reserves are worth US$1.5 trillion (£1.7tn) a year to the nation.

Natural wilderness pays its way by providing a steady supply of natural crop pollinators and pest controls, by seamlessly managing rainfall and water run-off, and by maintaining soil quality, the researchers argue in a new study in the journal Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation.

“The paper is meant to show that preserving native vegetation isn’t an obstacle to social and economic development but part of the solution. It’s one of the drivers of sustainable development in Brazil and diverges from what was done in Europe 500 years ago, when the level of environmental awareness was different”, said Jean Paul Metzger, an ecologist at the University of São Paulo, who leads the signatories.

“Brazil conserves a great deal, protecting over 60% of its vegetation cover, and has strict legislation. It’s ranked 30th by the World Bank, behind Sweden and Finland, which protect approximately 70%. However, we must call attention to the fact that conservation isn’t bad,” said Professor Metzger.

Protection maintained

Brazilian law requires rural landowners to leave forest cover untouched on a percentage of their property: in the Amazon region as much as 80%; in other regions as little as 20%. But these protected areas shelter a third of the nation’s natural vegetation.

A bill that proposed to weaken or eliminate the Legal Reserve requirement went before the Brazilian Senate in 2019. Had it passed, it could have led to the loss altogether of 270 million hectares of native vegetation.

The bill has since been withdrawn, but a small army of scientists – including 371 researchers in 79 Brazilian laboratories, universities and institutions – have responded with a study that attempts to set a cash value to simply maintaining the natural capital of the wilderness.

Brazil is home to one of the world’s great tropical rainforests, and to one of the world’s richest centres of biodiversity. The global climate crisis is already taking its toll of the forest canopy in the form of drought and fire. But under new national leadership there have been fears that even more forest could be at risk.

“Preserving native vegetation isn’t an obstacle to social and economic development but part of the solution. It’s one of the drivers of sustainable development in Brazil”

The cash-value case for conservation has been made, and made repeatedly. Studies have confirmed that agribusiness monocultures – vast tracts devoted entirely to one crop and only one crop – are not sustainable: animal pollinators can make the best of the flowering season but then have no alternative sources of food for the rest of the year.

Other researchers have separately established that the loss of natural forest can be far more costly and economically damaging than anybody had expected; and that, conversely, conserved and undisturbed wilderness actually delivers wealth on a sustained basis for national and regional economies. But farmers concerned with immediate profits might not be so conscious of the long-term rewards of conservation.

“It’s an important paper because it presents sound information that can be used to refute the arguments of those who want to change the Brazilian Forest Code and do away with the legal reserve requirement”, said Carlos Joly of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation, and one of the signatories.

And his colleague Paulo Artaxo said: “Farmers sometimes take a short-term view that focuses on three or four years of personal profit, but the nation is left with enormous losses. This mindset should go. The paper makes that very clear.”

Pentagon Orders Review of International Student Vetting

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Tuesday ordered a broad review of vetting procedures for international students who participate in training on U.S. military installations and demanded the process be strengthened, in direct reaction to last week’s deadly shooting at a Pensacola Navy base by a Saudi aviation student.

The memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist also suspends flight and other operational training for all Saudi Arabian students in U.S. military programs. It follows a decision by the U.S. Navy to halt flight training for more than 300 Saudi Arabian students at the Pensacola Naval Air Station and two other bases in Florida.

The FBI confirmed Tuesday that the 21-year-old Saudi Air Force officer who killed three U.S. sailors and injured eight other people at the Pensacola base on Friday legally bought the 9mm Glock pistol he used. Investigators are digging into whether 2nd Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani acted alone, amid reports he hosted a party earlier last week where he and others watched videos of mass shootings.

Related Articles


[image error]







Terror Links Probed in Florida Naval Base Shooting; 10 Saudi Students Held



by








[image error]







U.S. Troops Are Back in Saudi Arabia—This Will End Badly



by Maj. Danny Sjursen








[image error]







Trump Will Live to Regret Sending Troops to Saudi Arabia



by Maj. Danny Sjursen

The incident has raised questions about how well international military students are screened before they attend training at American bases.

Norquist’s memo says the review of the vetting must be completed in 10 days, and the flight restrictions will continue throughout the review and until they are lifted by senior leaders.

“Äs we reaffirm our commitment to these critical military partnerships, so must we assess the efficacy of our security procedures in light of the tragic loss of life on December 6,” the memo says. “We will make every effort to ensure the safety of all personnel and their families on U.S. military installations.”

U.S. officials said the flight restrictions were not triggered because there are indications of any broader problems or conspiracy fears related to Saudi students or the shooting. They said it was more because the shooting suggested some possible vetting problems associated with Saudi Arabia that will be reviewed.

Norquist in the memo directed the defense undersecretary for intelligence to “take immediate steps to strengthen personnel vetting” for international students and to review “policies and procedures for screening foreign students and granting access to our bases.”

He said the U.S. is working closely with Saudi officials in the response to the shooting.

The Pentagon has said that about 850 Saudi students are currently in U.S. military training programs. U.S. officials told reporters on Tuesday that they aren’t sure how many of those would see some type of flight or other restriction, but many will. Overall there are about 5,000 international students in U.S. programs, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details about the review and the memo.

Currently international military students go through screening by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The U.S. mainly runs background and biometric checks on the students to determine if they are security risks.

The Navy’s more limited flight training restriction for Saudi students was ordered Monday night, according to Commander Clay Doss, a Navy spokesman. He said said classroom training is starting again this week, and flight training for other U.S. and international students will resume.

The Navy’s flight restriction affected 140 students at Pensacola Naval Air Station, where the shooting occurred, and 35 at nearby Whiting Field. Another 128 students at Naval Air Station Mayport, on the Atlantic seaboard, are also restricted. Doss said the stand-down is an effort to ensure the safety of the students, as they recover from the trauma of the shooting.

For the most part, military installation commanders have the authority to set their own security procedures, including base entry screenings and carry permits for guns. There is a baseline level of security that must be met, but commanders can make any of their procedures more stringent if they believe it’s necessary.

Under Defense Department guidelines, commanders can authorize personnel to carry government-issued or personal firearms as long as they have been screened, they meet qualifications, follow specific handling and storage conditions, and receive permission in writing. The permission is usually good for at least 90 days, and must be routinely reviewed in order to be renewed.

Under the Pentagon guidelines released in 2016, personnel participating in official training programs can not be authorized to carry weapons unless approved by the administrator prior to the training.

The current security level across all Defense Department facilities is force protection condition Bravo and that status is noted at the entry of all installations, including the Pentagon.

U.S. Northern Command ordered an increase in defense-wide security from condition Alpha to Bravo in May 2015 due to concerns about threats from the Islamic State group. IS militants had a considerable hold on territory in Iraq and Syria and threatening western targets.

Condition Bravo is when there is an ïncreased or more predictable threat of terrorism attack or hostile act, and that it is directed against Defense Department entities or personnel, according to the department. The levels go from Normal to FPCON Delta, which is the highest and applies when a terror attack has occurred or is anticipated.

6 People Killed in New Jersey Shooting, Including Officer

JERSEY CITY, N.J. — Six people, including a police officer and three bystanders, were killed in a furious gun battle Tuesday that filled the streets of Jersey City with the sound of heavy fire for hours, authorities said.

The dead included the two gunmen, Jersey City Police Chief Michael Kelly said.

The slain officer, Detective Joseph Seals, 40, was credited by his superiors with having led the department in the number of illegal guns removed from the streets in recent years, and might have been trying to stop an incident involving such weapons when he was cut down by gunfire that erupted near a cemetery, authorities said.

The shooting then continued at a kosher supermarket about a mile away, where five more bodies were found, Kelly said.

Related Articles


[image error]







The Biggest Hurdle to Gun Control May Be the Supreme Court



by Bill Blum








[image error]







Commonsense Gun Control, the U.S. Army Way



by Jason Hug








[image error]







Guns and Liberty



by Chris Hedges

“It’s a really tough day for the city of Jersey City,” Mayor Steven Fulop said. Seals “was one of the best officers for getting the most guns off the streets. He was a good cop.”

Two other officers were wounded but were later released from the hospital, authorities said.

The bullets started flying early in the afternoon in the city of about 270,000 people, situated across the Hudson River from New York City. Seals, who worked for a unit called Cease Fire, was shot around 12:30 p.m. The gunmen then traveled to another part of the city in a stolen rental van and engaged police in a protracted shootout.

“Our officers were under fire for hours,” the chief said.

Inside the grocery store, police found the bodies of what they were believed were the two gunmen and three other people who apparently happened to be in the place when the assailants rushed in, authorities said. Police said they were confident that all those killed were shot by the gunmen and not by police.

The kosher grocery is a central fixture in a growing community of Orthodox Jews who have been moving to Jersey City in recent years. Authorities were unable to say why the gunmen went there.

City Public Safety Director James Shea said that authorities believe the bloodshed was not an act of terrorism but that it was still under investigation.

The shooting spread fear through the neighborhood, and the nearby Sacred Heart School was put on lockdown as a precaution.

SWAT teams, state police and federal agents converged on the scene, and police blocked off the area, which in addition to the school and supermarket included a hair salon and other shops. Dozens of bystanders pressed against the police barrier to capture the action on their cellphones, some whooping when bursts of fire could be heard.

Video shot by residents recorded loud volleys of gunfire reverberating along one of the city’s main streets and showed a long line of law enforcement officers pointing guns as they advanced, yelling to bystanders, “Clear the street! Get out of the way!”

“It’s like firecrackers going off,” said Andy Patel, who works at a liquor store about three blocks away. “They were shooting like crazy. … The cops were clearing everyone off the streets.”

Seals had been on the Jersey City Police Department since 2006. In addition to his work with the illegal guns unit, he was cited for heroism in a Christmas Eve 2008 incident in which he and another officer burst through the window of a home and stopped a sexual assault that was being carried out against a 41-year-old woman.

Seventh grader Zamir Butler said his class was coming back inside from the playground at Sacred Heart, which sits across the street from the grocery store, when he heard the shots. At first he thought they were thunder, since it had rained earlier. “Everybody was running up the stairs to get to safety in the classroom,” he said. “A few of the kids were crying. They told us to stay behind the wall and stay down.”

Robert Reich: A Billionaire-Backed Moderate Will Hand Trump the 2020 Election

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich released a video Tuesday explaining his case for why Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren pose a far better chance of defeating President Donald Trump in 2020 than “some billionaire-backed milquetoast moderate.”

“These two have most of the grassroots energy, most of the enthusiasm, and most of the ideas that are critical for winning in 2020,” said Reich, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Most importantly, both Warren and Sanders understand that our system is rigged and that economic and political power must be reallocated from a corporate Wall Street elite to the vast majority,” Reich added. “This is why both Warren and Sanders are hated by the corporate Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.”

Calling the notion that Sanders and Warren are too far to the left “total rubbish,” Reich said the progressive senators stand the best chance to beat Trump in the general election.

Nominating a moderate like former Vice President Joe Biden or South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Reich argued, “will increase the odds Trump gets a second term.”

Watch:

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but our odds of beating Trump are best with @ewarren or @BernieSanders — not some billionaire-backed milquetoast moderate. pic.twitter.com/orHNmedOYe

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) December 10, 2019

The Battle Brewing Between Progressives and Pelosi Over Drug Pricing

A brewing standoff between the progressive and moderate wings of the majority Democratic party in the U.S. House of Representatives over a drug pricing bill is exposing a power struggle within the caucus and could preview larger ideological battles ahead.

That’s according to reporting Monday from The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim and The American Prospect‘s David Dayen on the potential for a blowout fight between the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her moderate allies on a drug pricing bill, H.R. 3, the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act.

There’s a huge pharma fight in the House this week. On one side is Sanders, Warren, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (@PramilaJayapal, @MarkPocan and @RoKhanna) & @AOC.

On the other side is Nancy Pelosi and her centrists up for reelection. https://t.co/n1hABmrQkU w @ddayen

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) December 9, 2019

According to Grim and Dayen, the CPC is interested in possibly using the caucus’ power in the Rules Committee to block the bill over centrist Democrats’ refusal to bend on the bill—a strategy reminiscent of the behavior of the GOP Freedom Caucus, which built itself into a force on the House floor due to ideological rigidity and a willingness to use procedure as a weapon.

As Bloomberg News reporter Sahil Kapur noted on Twitter, that behavior isn’t known as a CPC tactic—at least not in the past—and that’s had consequences.

“The Progressive Caucus doesn’t usually withhold votes as a bloc to twist Dem leaders’ arm, unlike the GOP’s Freedom Caucus,” said Kapur. “Hence this Congress the balance of power has remained where it usually is in the House Dem caucus: with moderates.”

At issue is the strength and scope of the bill, which at the moment would only give “authority to the government to negotiate lower prices for more than a mere 25 drugs.” Progressives want stronger legislation that would include an amendment from Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) that would prevent drug companies from spiking prices for profit and amendments from Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) which would have increased the number of drugs covered in the law and guaranteed the 30 million Americans without health insurance would benefit from the legislation.

The CPC began whipping members against the bill on Friday after it was gutted by Pelosi’s office, setting up Tuesday’s showdown.

As Dayen and Grim explain in their piece, the fight over H.R. 3 is part of an ongoing struggle in the Democratic caucus:

The relative weakness of the bill coming to the House floor makes a mockery of the health care debate unfolding on the presidential campaign trail. While 2020 Democratic hopefuls debate a sweeping, comprehensive reform of the health care system, Democrats in the House are having trouble giving authority to the government to negotiate lower prices for more than a mere 25 drugs. The gap between the two debates could hardly be greater, even though Democrats in the House have a free hand policy-wise: After all, the bill has little chance of passing the Senate and becoming law, so it’s largely a messaging exercise.

All year long, the relationship between the Progressive Caucus and House leadership has simmered behind the scenes, emerging only in fitful moments, like in July when Pelosi resigned to passing a border supplemental spending bill that added few checks to the Trump administration’s cruel caging-of-children policies. The impeachment fight has mostly created unity among House Democrats, against a common enemy’s efforts to abuse the power of the presidency by leveraging foreign aid in order to damage a domestic political opponent. But lingering in the background all year has been the drug-pricing fight.

Grim and Dayen wrote on Monday that the CPC’s decision could have ramifications on how the House decides on policy in the next year and beyond.

“It’s not hyperbole to call the fight a potential bend point in the history of the Democratic Party, with stakes much higher than they appear,” they wrote.

In comment to The Hill, a Pelosi aide sent a veiled warning to the CPC and expressed confidence that the moderates would win the day.

“Representatives Pocan and Jayapal are gravely misreading the situation if they try to stand in the way of the overwhelming hunger for HR3 within the House Democratic Caucus and among progressive Members,” said the aide. “The Lower Drug Costs Now Act will pass next week.”

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), however, told Politico he was “certainly” concerned progressives would stymie the bill.

The stronger legislation has the support of Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). While the pair are unlikely to get the chance to vote on H.R. 3—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is expected to let the legislation die in committee rather than bring it to a vote—a strong bill sends a message to party leaders and the public.

“The Lower Drug Costs Now Act goes after Big Pharma’s greed and makes important investments in community health centers and dental care for those on Medicare,” Sanders tweeted Monday evening. “@USProgressives are fighting to make this bill even stronger, and I support their efforts.”

The Lower Drug Costs Now Act goes after Big Pharma’s greed and makes important investments in community health centers and dental care for those on Medicare. @USProgressives are fighting to make this bill even stronger, and I support their efforts. https://t.co/4M2wXMMzaw

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 9, 2019

“A bill to fix this shouldn’t work for only some drugs or some people—it should help everyone afford lifesaving treatments,” Warren tweeted Saturday.