Chris Hedges's Blog, page 83

The Trump Administration Continues to Rip Children From Their Families

Forced separation of undocumented migrants and their children, supposedly over in 2018, is alive and well, The Intercept reported Monday.

At least 5,000 migrant children were separated from their families under the Trump Administration’s Zero Tolerance immigration policy. The policy stipulated, as the Southern Poverty Law Center explains, that “all migrants who cross the border without permission, including those seeking asylum, be referred to the DOJ for prosecution.”

According to The Intercept, “The focus on families was part of a distinct effort by the Department of Homeland Security and the White House to try and dissuade — by subjecting parents and children to the terror of separation — more people from coming to the United States.”

After nationwide mass protests against the family separation policy, media reports of the horrific conditions at the government immigration centers housing the migrants, and an injunction from a federal judge, President Trump signed an executive order in June 2018 that supposedly mandated an end family separation.

As reported by The Intercept, however, “Since the supposed end of family separation … more than 1,100 children have been taken from their parents, according to the government’s own data.” The article continues: “There may be more, since that data has been plagued by bad record keeping and inconsistencies.”

This is hardly the first sign of the government not being true to its word. In July 2019, a little over a year after Trump signed the executive order supposedly ending the policy, NBC News reported that the government was taking advantage of what NBC calls “a narrow exception to the order … that the parent poses a danger to the child, or has a serious criminal record or gang affiliation.”

“The government is trying to drive a truck through what was supposed to be a very narrow exception,” Leo Gelernt, of the American Civil Liberties Union, told NBC News, referring to the use of the exception.

Intercept writer John Washington points out that Border Patrol agents are “untrained in child welfare,” leading them to “make decisions that some parents are unfit to stay with their children based solely on brief interactions with them while they are held in custody.”

The lack of training and high level of disorganization among the Border Patrol in particular and the U.S. immigration system in general makes reuniting families needlessly complicated, as Time Magazine reported in October:

Court records show that family separation has become increasingly complex as thousands of children’s reunification now depend on factors including when they were separated, where their parents are now, and if they are considered plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against the Trump Administration. 

Washington interviewed a Honduran man named Dennis (he declined to give his last name), who was separated from his daughter for five months after they traveled from Honduras to Mexico and then crossed the border into the United States. “You can’t imagine the pain,” Dennis told Washington, adding, “If you’re not a dad, you don’t know what it’s like.”

Dennis and his 11-year-old daughter Sonia turned themselves in at the U.S.-Mexico border entry point in McAllen, Texas, asking for asylum. Instead, after a month Dennis was deported back to Honduras, while Sonia was sent to a shelter in New York. (Dennis deemed his other two children too young to travel, and they stayed in Honduras.)

The reason for the separation relates to the aforementioned narrow exception. Dennis had been charged with forgery the last time he crossed the border into the United States, 11 years ago. Seeking work, he obtained fake identification papers in Minnesota before being caught, sent to prison and then deported back to Honduras. He was separated from Sonia because of his record.

Many other parents continue to be separated from their children—for the most minor offenses. Efrén Olivares, a Texas immigration attorney, explained to Time: “We’ve had instances of fathers separated from their children because the last time the father was in the U.S. years ago, he got a ticket for driving with an expired license.” Olivares added, “He was arrested, and therefore now has a criminal conviction on his record, and that is the justification for the separation.”

Many of these parents never get a chance to talk to their children, let alone obtain information on their location and safety. While in federal custody, Dennis repeatedly asked about Sonia’s whereabouts, but Border Patrol agents gave him no answers. Father and daughter were finally reunited after five months, when Sonia was also sent back to Honduras. The family told Washington they are debating whether to risk crossing the border once again.

The ACLU has issued a legal challenge to the continued separations, specifically to the exception that allowed the government to separate Dennis and Sonia. A judge has yet to rule.

Read the full story from The Intercept here.

Barr: FBI’s Russia Investigation Based on ‘Bogus Narrative’

WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr leveled blistering criticism at how the Russia investigation was conducted, saying Tuesday that it was based on a “bogus narrative” that the Trump campaign might have conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

Barr spoke to NBC News one day after the release of a Justice Department inspector general report that found problems with the FBI’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, but also concluded that there was a proper basis for opening the probe and that it was free of political bias.

Barr, a vocal defender of President Donald Trump, said he disagreed with the inspector general that the FBI had enough information to open the investigation and particularly to use surveillance on a former Trump campaign aide. He said that law enforcement officials in applying for those warrants had withheld from judges what he said was key exculpatory information that they had received.

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He also blamed the Obama administration for telling Russia not to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and not sharing the same warnings or concerns with the Trump campaign. The FBI discussed whether to give a so-called “defensive briefing” to the Trump campaign, but ultimately concluded that if someone in the campaign was working with Russians they could be tipped off and cover-up their potential criminal behavior, the report said.

“I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a bogus narrative that was largely framed and hyped by an irresponsible press,” Barr said.

Barr’s disparagement and dismissal of a key finding of the inspector general’s report is likely to deepen the criticism from Democrats that he acts more like the president’s personal lawyer than the attorney general. Barr has enthusiastically embraced Trump’s political agenda and faced intense criticism after he cast special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as a vindication for the president and launched a probe to investigate the investigators— something Trump has repeatedly said should happen.

During an appearance at a Wall Street Journal event in Washington, Barr said he thought the evidence used to open the Russia investigation was “very flimsy.” He also criticized the FBI for not briefing the Trump campaign about its investigation and for withholding exculpatory information from the court that issued secret surveillance warrants.

The long-awaited report issued Monday rejected theories and criticism spread by Trump and his supporters, though it also found “serious performance failures” up the bureau’s chain of command that Republicans are citing as evidence that Trump was targeted by an unfair investigation.

The review by Inspector General Michael Horowitz knocked down multiple lines of attack against the Russia investigation, finding that it was properly opened and that law enforcement leaders were not motivated by political bias. Contrary to the claims of Trump and other critics, it said that opposition research compiled by an ex-British spy named Christopher Steele had no bearing on the decision to open the investigation known as Crossfire Hurricane. And it rejected allegations that a former Trump campaign aide at the center of the probe was set up by the FBI.

Barr, echoing Trump’s comments from earlier this month, suggested that Americans should wait for the findings of John Durham, the prosecutor Barr selected to investigate how intelligence was gathered in the Russia probe. Both Barr and Durham have rejected the inspector general’s conclusion that there was sufficient evidence to open the FBI investigation

Durham, in a brief statement Monday, suggested his own investigation would back up his disagreement.

“I think he will have a broader appreciation of all the facts and a determination can be made,” Barr said of Durham. “I don’t know what the motivations were and I’m not saying there was an improper motivation, but I think it is premature to rule definitively there wasn’t.”

The inspector general’s report found that the FBI had an “authorized purpose” when it opened its investigation in July 2016 into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to tip the election in his favor. The report said the FBI had cause to investigate a potential national security threat.

The inspector general identified 17 “significant inaccuracies or omissions” in applications for a warrant and later renewals from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The research compiled by Steele, colloquially known as the Steele Dossier, which the FBI used as part of its application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was “garbage,” Barr said.

“I think it was a gross abuse,” he added.

The report also details that the FBI used an informant to set up and record a September 2016 meeting with a high-level Trump campaign official. The official wasn’t identified by name, but was not a subject of the Russia investigation, the report said. While the information collected wasn’t used during the Russia probe, it does lend support to the assertions by Trump and Barr that the Trump campaign was spied upon.

FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that the report had identified significant problems with how agents conducted the investigation and that it was “important” the inspector general found the investigation was properly opened and not affected by political bias.

Trump lashed out at Wray on Twitter, saying he would never be able to fix the FBI.

“I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me,” Trump tweeted. “With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!”

The tweet was a rare direct attack on Wray, who has largely been spared the public ire Trump vented at former FBI Director James Comey — whom he fired in May 2017 — and at Andrew McCabe, who temporarily replaced Comey but was later fired by the Justice Department. Wray inherited a year-old Russia investigation when he was installed in August 2017 and, by that point, the probe was already in the hands of Mueller.

Is the Pentagon Prepared for the Hellish Climate Future It Created?

It was Monday, March 1, 2032, and the top uniformed officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps were poised, as they are every year around this time, to deliver their annual “posture statement” on military readiness before the Senate Armed Services Committee. As the officers waited for the committee members to take their seats, journalists covering the event conferred among themselves on the meaning of all the badges and insignia worn by the top brass. Each of the officers testifying that day — Generals Richard Sheldon of the Army, Roberto Gonzalez of the Marine Corps, and Shalaya Wright of the Air Force, along with Admiral Daniel Brixton of the Navy — sported chestfuls of multicolored ribbons and medals. What did all those emblems signify?

Easy to spot were the Defense Distinguished Service and Legion of Merit medals worn by all four officers. No less obvious was the parachutist badge worn by General Sheldon and the submarine warfare insignia sported by Admiral Brixton. As young officers, all four had, of course, served in the “Forever Wars” of the earlier years of this century and so each displayed the Global War on Terror Service Medal. But all four also bore service ribbons — those small horizontal bars worn over the left pocket — for campaigns of more recent vintage, and these required closer examination.

Although similar in appearance to the service ribbons of previous decades, the more recent ones worn by these commanders were for an entirely new set of military operations, reflecting a changing global environment: disaster-relief missions occasioned by extreme climate events, critical infrastructure protection and repair, domestic firefighting activities, and police operations in foreign countries ruptured by fighting over increasingly scarce food and water supplies. All four of the officers testifying that day displayed emblems signifying their engagement in multiple operations of those types at home and abroad.

Several, for example, wore the red-black-yellow-and-blue ribbon signifying their participation in relief operations following the staggering one-two punch of Hurricanes Geraldo and Helene in August 2027. Those back-to-back storms, as few present in 2032 could forget, had inundated the coasts of Virginia and Maryland (from whose state flags the colors were derived), causing catastrophic damage and killing hundreds of people. Transportation and communication infrastructure throughout the mid-Atlantic region had been shattered by the two hurricanes, which also caused widespread flooding in Washington, D.C. itself. In response, more than 100,000 active-duty troops had been committed to relief operations across the region, often performing heroic measures to clear roads and restore power.

Also displayed on their heavily decorated uniforms were patches attesting to their membership in elite units and squadrons. General Sheldon, for example, had spent part of his military career as a member of the Army’s Rangers and so wore that unit’s distinctive insignia. But Sheldon, along with General Wright of the Air Force, also sported the bright red patch signifying membership in the military’s elite Firefighting Brigade, established in 2026 to counter the annual conflagrations erupting across California and the Pacific Northwest. Similarly, both General Gonzalez and Admiral Brixton sported the dark-blue patch of the Coastal Relief and Rescue Command, created in 2028 for military support of disaster-relief operations along America’s increasingly storm-ravaged coastlines.

Medal Mania

The media, politicians, and the general public have always been fascinated by the medals and badges worn by the nation’s military leaders. This obsession intensified in November 2019 when two events received national attention.

The first was the testimony on President Donald Trump’s possible impeachable offenses before the House Intelligence Committee by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the top expert on Ukraine at the National Security Council. During that testimony — which confirmed some of the claims made by an unnamed whistle-blower that the president had conditioned the release of U.S. military aid to Ukraine on an investigation of the alleged financial wrongdoing of his presumed electoral rival, Joe Biden (and his son) — Vindman wore a full-dress uniform. It bore a purple heart (awarded for a combat wound received in Iraq) and other ribbons signifying his participation in the war on terror and the defense of South Korea. Following his appearance, Trump supporters promptly challenged his patriotism, while many other observers affirmed that his calm assertions of loyalty in response to such charges and all those medals on his uniform accorded him unusual credibility.

The second episode occurred just a few weeks later when President Trump intervened in a formal Navy proceeding to allow Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher — once on trial for serious war crimes — to retain his “Trident” pin, the symbol of his membership in the Navy’s elite SEAL commando unit. Gallagher had served multiple tours of duty in the country’s twenty-first-century “forever wars.” He had also been accused by fellow SEALs of murdering a wounded and unconscious enemy combatant and then having himself photographed while proudly holding the dead body up by the hair.

When tried by fellow officers last June, Gallagher was acquitted of the murder charge after a key witness changed his story. He was, however, found guilty of taking a “trophy” photo of a dead enemy, a violation of military rules. When, on this basis, the Navy sought to eject Gallagher from the SEALs and strip him of his Trident pin, President Trump, egged on by conservative pundits, overruled the top brass and allowed him to keep that insignia. “The Navy will NOT be taking away Warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin,” Trump tweeted on November 21st.

Like Lt. Col. Vindman, Chief Petty Officer Gallagher wore numerous service ribbons in his courtroom and public appearances and, in his case, too, they signified participation in the forever wars of the twenty-teens. A quick look at the badges borne by most other senior officers today would similarly reveal participation in those conflicts, as almost every senior commander has been obliged to serve several tours of duty in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

By 2019, however, public support for engagement in those conflicts had largely evaporated and — to again peer into the future — during the 2020s, U.S. military involvement in such seemingly endless and futile contests would diminish sharply. Defense against China and Russia would remain a major military concern, but it would generate relatively little actual military activity, other than an ever-growing investment in high-tech weaponry. Instead, in those years, on a distinctly changing planet, the military mission would begin to change radically as well. Protecting the homeland from climate disasters and providing support to climate-ravaged allies abroad would become the main focus of American military operations and so the medals and ribbons awarded to those who displayed meritorious service in performing such duties would only multiply.

Medals for a Climate-Wracked Century

I can only speculate, of course, about the particular contingencies that will lead to the designation of special military insignia for participation in the climate battles of the decades ahead. Nevertheless, it’s possible, by extrapolating from recent events, to imagine what these might look like, even though the Department of Defense (DoD) does not yet award such ribbons.

Consider, for example, the Pentagon’s response to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, all of which hit parts of the United States between August and September 2017. In reaction to those mega-storms, which battered eastern Texas, southern Florida, and virtually all of Puerto Rico, the DoD deployed tens of thousands of active-duty troops to assist relief operations, along with a flotilla of naval vessels and a slew of helicopters and cargo aircraft. In addition, to help restore power and water supplies in Puerto Rico, it mobilized 11,400 active-duty and National Guard troops — many of whom were still engaged in such activities six months after Maria’s disastrous passage across that island. Given the extent of the military’s involvement in such rescue-and-relief operations — often conducted under hazardous conditions — it would certainly have been fitting had the Pentagon awarded a special service ribbon for participation in those triple-hurricane responses, using colors drawn from the Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rican flags.

Another example would have been Super Typhoon Haiyan inNovember 2013, which pulverized parts of the Philippines, a long-time ally, killing more than 6,000 people and destroying a million homes. With the Filipino government essentially immobilized by the scale of the disaster, President Barack Obama ordered the U.S. military to mount a massive relief operation, which it called Damayan. At its peak, it involved some 14,000 U.S. military personnel, a dozen major warships — including the carrier USS George Washington — and 66 aircraft. This effort, too, deserved recognition in the form of a distinctive service ribbon.

Now, let’s jump a decade or more into the future. By the early 2030s, with global temperatures significantly higher than they are today, extreme storms like Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Haiyan are likely to be occurring more frequently and to be even more powerful. With sea levels rising worldwide and ever more people livingin low-lying coastal areas around the globe, the damage caused by such extreme weather is bound to increase exponentially, regularly overwhelming the response capabilities of civilian authorities. The result: ever increasing calls on the armed forces to provide relief-and-rescue services. “More frequent and/or more severe extreme weather events… may require substantial involvement of DoD units, personnel, and assets in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) abroad and in Defense Support of Civil Authorities (DSCA) at home,” the Pentagon was already informing Congress back in 2015.

Historically, it has viewed such activities as a “lesser included case”; that is, the military has not allocated specific troops or equipment for HA/DR and DSCA operations ahead of time, but used whatever combat forces it had on hand for such missions. Typical, for instance, was the use of an aircraft carrier already in the region to deal with the results of Super Typhoon Haiyan. As such events only grow in intensity and frequency, however, the Pentagon will find it increasingly necessary to establish dedicated units like the hypothetical “Coastal Relief and Rescue Command” (whose insignia General Gonzalez and Admiral Brixton were wearing in “2032”).

This will become essential as multiple coastal storms coincide with other extreme events, including massive wildfires or severe inland flooding, creating a “complex catastrophe” that could someday threaten the economy and political cohesion of the United States itself.

“Complex Catastrophes”

The DoD first envisioned the possibility of a “complex catastrophe” in 2012, after Superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast that October. Sandy, as many readers will recall, knocked out power in lower Manhattan and disrupted commerce and transportation throughout the New York Metropolitan Area. On that occasion, the DoD mobilized more than 14,000 military personnel for relief-and-rescue operations and provided a variety of critical support services. In the wake of that storm, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta commanded his staff to consider the possibility of even more damaging versions of the same and how these might affect the military’s future roles and mission.

The Pentagon’s response came in a 2013 handbook, Strategy for Homeland Defense and Defense Support of Civil Authorities, warning the military to start anticipating and preparing for “complex catastrophes,” which, in an ominous breathful, it defined as “cascading failures of multiple, interdependent, critical, life-sustaining infrastructure sectors [causing] extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, environment, economy, public health, national morale, response efforts, and/or government functions.” While recognizing that civil authorities must remain the first line of defense in such calamities, the handbook indicated that, if civil institutions are overwhelmed — an increasingly likely reality — the armed forces must be prepared to assume many key governmental functions, possibly for an extended period of time.

In the future, in other words, all senior commanders and other officers can expect to participate in major HA/DR and DSCA operations during their careers, possibly involving extended deployments and hazardous missions. In 2017, for instance, many soldiers were deployed in Houston for rescue operations after Hurricane Harvey had drenched the region and, in the process, were exposed to toxic chemicals in the knee-deep floodwaters because some of the area’s petrochemical plants had been inundated. Looting has also been a recurring feature of major weather disasters, sometimes involving gunfire or other threats to life.

Increasingly frequent and savage wildfires in the American West are another climate-related peril likely to impinge on the military’s future operational posture. As temperatures rise and forests dry out, fires, once started, often spread with a daunting rapidity, overpowering firefighters and other local defenses. California and the Pacific Northwest are at particular risk, as severe drought has been a persistent problem in the region, while people have moved their homes ever deeper into the forests. In recent years, the National Guard in those states has been called up on numerous occasions to help battle such fires and active-duty troops have increasingly been deployed on the fire lines as well.

The proliferation of ever more severe wildfires in the American West — combined with similar devastating outbreaks in Australia and the rainforests of Indonesia and the Amazon — have led to a global shortage of the giant air tankers used to fight them. In November 2019, for example, Australia was pleading for the loan of water tankers still needed in California to cope with a deadly fire season that had lasted far longer than usual. It’s easy to imagine, then, that the U.S. Air Force will one day be compelled by Congress to establish a dedicated fleet of water tankers to fight fires around the country — what I chose to call the U.S. Firefighting Brigade in my own futuristic imaginings.

Foreign Climate Wars

Yet another climate-related mission likely to be undertaken by U.S. forces in the years ahead will be armed intervention in foreign civil conflicts triggered by severe drought, food shortages, or other resource scarcities. American military and intelligence analysts believe that rising world temperatures will result in widespread shortages of food and water in crucial areas of the planet like the Middle East, only exacerbating preexisting hostilities to the breaking point. When governments fail to respond in an efficient and equitable manner, conflict is likely to erupt, possibly resulting in state collapse, warlordism, and mass migrations — outcomes that could pose a significant threat to global stability. (Keep in mind, for instance, that the horrific Syrian civil war, still ongoing, was preceded by an “extreme drought,” the worst in modern times and believed to be climate-change induced.)

“Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security,” the DoD stated in its 2015 report to Congress, “contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.”

One area where these forces can be witnessed today is the Lake Chad region of northern Nigeria, where severe drought conditions have produced widespread hardship and discontent that a variety of insurgent groups have sought to exploit. Once a thriving locale for fishing and irrigated agriculture, Lake Chad has shrunk to less than a fifth of its original size due to global warming and water mismanagement. With people’s livelihoods in jeopardy and the central government providing little reliable assistance, the terror group Boko Haram has been able to attract significant local support.

“Economic conditions in the region have become increasingly dire, creating resentment, grievances, and tensions within and among populations,” the CNA Corporation, a Pentagon-funded think tank, noted as early as 2017. “Boko Haram exploits this situation to recruit followers, offering them economic opportunity and secured livelihoods.”

Given Nigeria’s strategic importance as a major oil producer and bulwark of African Union peacekeeping forces, the United States has long assisted the Nigerian military with arms and training support. Were Boko Haram to begin to attack Abuja, the capital, or pose a threat to the survival of the Nigerian government, it’s entirely plausible that the Pentagon would be called upon to deploy forces there.

Were such a thing to happen, a service ribbon for participation in “Operation Yanci” (Hausa for “freedom”), the 2024 mission to crush Boko Haram and save the Nigerian state, might have the green and white bands of the Nigerian flag and be worn — at least in my imaginings — by two of the generals present at that hearing in 2032.

Another plausible future mission for the U.S. military: to help the government of the Philippines reassert control over its southern island of Mindanao after a typhoon even more destructive than 2013’s Haiyan struck the region in 2026. With the government in nearly complete disarray, as after Haiyan’s landfall, militant separatists that year seized control of the country’s second largest island. Unable to overcome the rebels on its own, Manila called on Washington to bolster its forces. Mindanao has long experienced revolts focused on a central government widely viewed as prejudiced against the island’s 20 million people, a significant number of them Muslim. In May 2017, for instance, radical Islamist groups seized control of Marawi, a Muslim-majority city of about 200,000 in western Mindanao. Only after five months of fighting in which 168 government soldiers died and 1,400 were wounded was the city completely retaken. The United States aided Filipino forces with arms and intelligence during that struggle and has continued to provide them with counterinsurgency training ever since.

As global warming advances and Pacific typhoons grow more intense, the Philippines will be hit again and again by catastrophic, Haiyan-level storms like Kammuri this December. So it’s not hard to envision a future storm severe enough to completely paralyze government services and provide an opening for another Marawi-style event on an even larger scale. For those American soldiers who will participate in Operation Kalayaan (Tagalog for “Liberty”), the 2026 campaign to liberate Mindinao from rebel forces, there will undoubtedly be a ribbon of red, blue, white, and gold, the colors of the Filipino flag.

The Military on a New Planet

All this, of course, is speculation, but given how rapidly the planetary environment is being altered by global warming and its disruptive effects, climate change will become a major factor in U.S. strategic planning. That, in turn, will mean the setting up of specialized commands to deal with such contingencies and the earmarking of specific resources — troops and equipment — for domestic and foreign disaster-relief missions.

The Department of Defense will similarly have to step up its efforts to harden its own domestic and foreign bases against severe storms and flooding, while beginning to develop plans to relocate those that will be inundated as sea levels rise. In a similar fashion, count on fire protection becoming a major concern for base commanders across the American West. Efforts now under way at significant installations to reduce the U.S. military’s prodigious consumption of fossil fuels and to increase reliance on renewables will undoubtedly be part of the package as well. And with all of this will surely go plans to devise new medals and honors for military personnel who exhibit meritorious service in protecting the nation against the extreme climate perils to come. In a world in which all hell is going to break loose, everything will change and the military will be no exception.

Toys ‘R’ Us Might Just Make a Holiday Comeback

For many years, Giovanna De La Rosa enjoyed working at Toys ‘R’ Us — especially during the holiday shopping season. “I loved bringing joy to families and to children,” she shared at a recent congressional hearing. “I watched so many of the local kids grow up over the years while shopping in our store.”

De La Rosa’s 20-year career with Toys ‘R’ Us came to an abrupt end in 2018 when the bankrupt company shuttered all of its 700 U.S. outlets, leaving more than 30,000 employees jobless.

Now Toys ‘R’ Us is trying to make a comeback. It re-opened its first U.S. store in New Jersey just in time for Black Friday, and it’s planning to open another in Texas before Christmas.

But the company is a shadow of its former self, and many former Toys ‘R’ Us employees are still struggling to get back on their feet. De La Rosa, an assistant store manager at the time of the layoffs, searched for a year and a half to find another full-time position before having to settle for a seasonal job.

Who does she blame for her employer’s collapse? Greedy Wall Street firms.

Toys ‘R’ Us was still profitable in 2005 when three private equity funds — KKR, Bain, and Vornado — acquired the retailer and loaded it up with billions of dollars in debt. This level of indebtedness “served no rational business need for Toys ‘R Us,” according to Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The buyout forced the company to pay more than $400 million per year in interest, on top of hundreds of millions of dollars in “advisory” fees to the private equity funds who’d purchased it. All these extra costs drove the company to ruin.

This is the typical M.O. for private equity funds that specialize in highly leveraged buyouts. They take out massive loans to finance corporate takeovers, quickly suck out whatever value they can, and then stick the companies with the IOUs.

ShopKo, Payless ShoeSource, Gymboree, The Limited, and Sports Authority have all collapsed under the weight of their debts after being taken over by private equity funds. Over the past decade, nearly 600,000 retail jobs in private-equity backed companies have been lost.

De La Rosa traveled from her home near San Diego, California, to Washington, D.C. recently to advocate for legislation that would crack down on this Wall Street recklessness. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act would make private equity firms jointly liable for repaying debts they burden companies with in leveraged buyouts.

The bill also aims to prevent executives from lining their pockets while workers suffer. The kinds of ridiculous fees that private equity fund managers extracted from Toys ‘R’ Us would face a 100 percent tax.

The bill would also help protect workers in a bankruptcy by banning special executive payouts until employees receive promised severance payments.

After filing for bankruptcy, Toys ‘R’ Us initially gave its workers zero severance, despite a longstanding policy of giving a week of pay for every year of service. Meanwhile, the co-founders of just one of the private equity firms that took over the company — KKR — both made about $100 million in 2018.

Toys ‘R’ Us has new owners now, and De La Rosa is encouraged by the fact that they have asked her and two other former employees to serve on an advisory group. But what makes her even more optimistic is seeing more and more workers standing together to fight for Wall Street accountability.

She’s now a leader in United for Respect, a retail worker advocacy group that has pressured the private equity funds to provide some financial support for laid off Toys ‘R’ Us workers.

Her bigger goal: to regulate private equity so they can no longer make money by putting people out of work.

Who Invited Michael Bloomberg to the Primary?

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s diminutive, billionaire ex-mayor, is running for president—a project with which he has publicly and privately flirted for years. With Joe Biden’s underfunded and uninspiring campaign flagging in early primary states and the prospect of even Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., winning the nomination too much to bear, the ever-skittish establishment wing of the Democratic Party has reportedly recruited Bloomberg to enter the race.

It’s become something of a cliché, but the idea that a stupidly rich New Yorker who once tried to ban Big Gulps is going to wow ’em at the Iowa state fair is how we got Trump in the first place—this enduring delusion that the great interior of America longs for a corner-office calorie scold who once reportedly told an executive at his own company, “Kill it!” upon learning that she was pregnant. Truly a fellow with his finger on the pulse of the heartland.

To be fair, Bloomberg is not actually running in Iowa or in any of the first three primaries. His campaign so far has consisted of a giant $30 million ad buy with no discernible focus, although it’s safe to say that the campaign’s objective is to have a strong showing on so-called Super Tuesday in March, when voters from more than a dozen states—from giants like California, Texas and Virginia to minor prizes like Arkansas and Oklahoma—will cast their ballots. His late entry means he has yet to appear in many statewide polls, but he is viewed unfavorably by a plurality of the Democratic electorate. The one issue on which he has any popular credibility is gun control, which proved a loser for the younger, handsomer, cussier, now-ex-candidate Beto O’Rourke. In the bitingly dispassionate words of the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg seems “uniquely ill-equipped to break into the mix.” So what is he doing here?

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In the early 2000s, writer Michael Wolff reported on a privately compiled, limited-edition booklet called “The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg.” Compiled as a gag gift from his staff, the 32-page text featured real-life Bloomberg quotations  collected by former executive Elisabeth DeMarse and others who knew the mogul in the 1980s, before his run for mayor. Among its more prescient gems: “A good salesperson asks for the order. It’s like the guy who goes into a bar, and walks up to every gorgeous girl there, and says ‘Do you want to fuck?’ He gets turned down a lot—but he gets fucked a lot, too!”

This kind of caddish vulgarism is just another way in which the billionaire is ill-suited to the current political moment. Biden may have his cringe-inducing weaknesses when it comes to interactions with women—the hair-sniffing, the shoulder rubs, the patronizing erasure of them from the history of political protest—but his avuncular charm is undeniable, even at his most dissipated and incoherent, and I suspect a significant number of primary voters are willing to forgive, or at least accept, these slip-ups under the broad guise of “the product of another era.”

Bloomberg has a more troublesome history, and for years he has been dogged by persistent rumors of sexual harassment and hostile work environments. In a late-1990s lawsuit settled under undisclosed terms in 2000, four former employees sued him for workplace discrimination, and he is allegedly notorious for making comments of the “look-at-the-ass-on-her” variety. He is by no means a predator on par with President Trump, against whom there are numerous, credible allegations of actual rape and assault, but it is also unimaginable that a man with this reputation will survive the scrutiny of nationwide primary campaigns in 2020.

Bloomberg has only belatedly and opportunistically apologized for the New York Police Department’s racist “Stop and Frisk” policy, claiming that he’d never been asked about it until he began his latest run for president. (He has.) He went out of his way to issue a hairsplitting defense of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party from charges of autocracy, musing that all rulers require some manner of popular sufferance in order to remain in power. (The point is at once true in a narrow sense and spectacularly tone-deaf—not so much because the American electorate has strong feelings about the Chinese government’s specific claims to democratic legitimacy, but because of what it suggests about a plutocratic CEO’s understanding of executive power.) As long as the shareholders get their little dividends and their annual proxy form, he reasons, they should let the bosses run things unmolested and without too many questions.

Being that Bloomberg appears doomed, some have theorized that his run is part of a larger stratagem to spoil things for Sanders or Warren, at least before the latter’s most recent tack toward the moderate center. But then, how would that work? If he steals votes, it will surely not be from either of them, but rather from established centrists like Biden or Pete Buttigieg. Is it blackmail, a gesture toward a future third-party run if the Democrats don’t get their shit together and nominate a sufficiently moderate candidate? That, too, seems like an awfully elaborate path from point A to B.

In all likelihood, there is nothing more to his run than ego and the kind of bland stupidity that convinces itself it is genius as soon as it acquires enough assets. Bloomberg believes his own story: up by the bootstraps from a working-class childhood to the stratosphere of global wealth and financial influence, a figure whose name is virtually synonymous with a whole industry, a shark and an entrepreneur, a three-term mayor who presided over the sparkling reinvention of New York City, never mind that that reinvention involved converting giant swaths of the island of Manhattan into decommercialized landing strips for absentee millionaire condo owners and storeless streetscapes of bank branches and glassed-in lobbies. He has wanted this for a long time, and who will tell him no? Bloomberg believes he can win.

He cannot, of course, and while I know many timorous lefties worry that he could be a spoiler, siphoning Democratic energy and ultimately handing another election to Trump, I can’t really imagine even that. His constituency is a narrow slice of the broadcast and news media that has an ever-diminishing purchase on American life, and $50 billion worth of TV ads won’t buy him a primary. He’s spent his life surrounded by sycophants who tell him his often-bad behavior makes him funny and his money makes him strong. I absolutely cannot wait to watch him get his ass kicked.

I Knew the War in Afghanistan Was a Lie

Nightmares still haunt me. Sometimes it’s the standard stuff associated with classic post-traumatic stress disorder: flashbacks of horrible attacks and images of my mutilated troopers. More often, though, peculiar as it may sound, I dream that my sociopathic, career-obsessed colonel calls to give me another late-night order to do something unnecessary—usually dangerous, always absurd—the next day.

We never got along; the man distrusted me from the start. To him, my plainly ironclad loyalty to my young soldiers was suspicious. Given his own deep-seated predilection to climb the ranks on the backs of his exhausted subordinates, he assumed I must have ulterior motives. I didn’t. Nonetheless, he kept me around because I knew the region better than most and was capable of impressing visiting generals with tactical briefings. And because, in the main, he found me useful.

It’s not that that lieutenant colonel believed in anything, even the mission in Afghanistan. Deployment was a means to an end for the guy. That said, nearly two decades as an unapologetic climber through the officer ranks had imbued him, not with any real competence—he could hardly spell “Kandahar”—but with an uncanny knack for mind-melding with his bosses. If they fancied a particular mission, he loved it. So in 2011-2012, out in the sticks southwest of the city of Kandahar, when his brigade commander championed democracy-building in the district, my colonel was all in.

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For the entirety of our unit’s year in country, the colonel and I battled over the efficacy of imposing democracy (at the tip of a bayonet, of course) in rural Afghanistan. Nevertheless, my repeated and often detailed assertions to him that what the Army euphemistically titled our “governance” operations was doomed to fail were always ignored. After all, the colonel had a career to advance. In the prevailing acquiescence-over-effectiveness Army culture, questioning the basis of his given mission wouldn’t play. Thus it was that this captain would tirelessly toil to implement the boss’s fruitless attempts at promoting democracy in the very district where the Taliban had been birthed. It was a hell of a futile hoot of a year.

So, for the better part of a year, I pretended to promote “democracy” in rural Kandahar, my dense squadron commander pretended to know what that entailed, his commander pretended the endeavor was possible in the first place, and on and up it went—straight to the top, to the White House. Everyone up and down the chain of command put on a show and presented the illusion of “progress.” I knew this, viscerally, as a young captain. Heck, I was complicit in a way. Thus, I found the recent release by The Washington Post of what it titled The Afghanistan Papers equal parts astonishing and unsurprising. The documents—consider them the Pentagon Papers of my generation—present proof-positive that the generals and various U.S. officials misled the public for decades about supposed progress in what they knew was a failing, unwinnable war. The reports left me feeling partially vindicated, but mostly morose. Still, in the vein of the dark humor that helps soldiers survive absurd combat tours, let me recall some true episodes seen from a micro level that substantiate the Post’s macro scoop.

There were times that the war in southern Afghanistan, though horrifically bloody—a 40% casualty rate for our troop of about 100 kids—was incredibly funny. It was tragicomic, really. Though I knew my objections to the colonel were destined to fail, I just couldn’t resist pinging him with flippant pleas of why establishing a Jeffersonian-style representative democracy in the Arghandab Valley was an absurd crusade. Somehow, running sarcastic intellectual circles around the obtuse, knuckle-dragging colonel assuaged my admittedly arrogant and angry tendencies. My evidentiary examples were so farcical that they bordered on fiction.

I thought back on four such vignettes over Thanksgiving weekend, during lunch in a Middle Eastern restaurant on Staten Island shared with my former interpreter from Iraq and two of his Arab friends. They loved my stories about the mad, medieval nature of rural southern Afghanistan. I suppose they found some comfort in knowing their home country, for all its ongoing problems, is wildly modern compared to my former stomping grounds in rural Kandahar.

We had been discussing the prospects for democracy across the post-Arab Spring Greater Middle East. But a few beers deep, sensing that the table needed a bit of levity, I started riffing about the buffoonery of bringing “democracy” to Afghanistan. The stories I told were the very ones I’d once used to pointlessly advise my former boss about the hopelessness of our mission.

Like this one time: I was chatting over some tea with an old man in a nearby, dusty, mud-hut village. I asked the elder his age. He didn’t know; few did. I pressed, asking if he had any sense of what year he’d been born. His reply—“I was birthed during a full moon in the year before the Emir Habibullah Khan was murdered”—wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. I realized that the man didn’t even know what year it was right then, nor did he likely adhere to our Western Gregorian calendar.

Still, being the history geek I am, I returned to base and googled the lineage of various Afghan monarchs. I figured out, based on the information the elder had provided, that he was probably born in 1918, making him, at that point, around 94 years old. In a country with an average life expectancy of about 46 years, this was profound.

The next day, I returned to the village to inform the old man of his actual age. He seemed equal parts surprised and pleased. A few minutes later, he demonstrated that he still had the libido to flagrantly hit on, even offer to buy, one of my handsome young male lieutenants as a sex slave of sorts. I politely declined. (And who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)

Then there’s this memory: My troop ran a program we called “cash for work,” through which we’d pay tens of thousands in U.S. dollars per week to put some 1,500 local Afghans to work on small public works projects. The idea was that if we gave the chronically unemployed men jobs, they’d eschew the Taliban’s own version of our program—call it “cash for planting IEDs”—and thus violence would lessen. I knew the inherent limitations of the scheme. It was utterly temporal and unsustainable, would distort the local economy and empower corrupt tribal leaders. I also knew that the Taliban would inevitably skim off the top of the laborers’ salaries. Nevertheless, I was on board; by then, all I cared about was keeping my troops as safe as possible.

The tasks the Afghans did for us weren’t particularly useful. I had to manufacture much of the work, telling them to clean out irrigation canals, paint yellow divider lines on the district’s one paved road, and paint Afghan flags on the hundreds of concrete barrier walls surrounding the hopelessly indefensible nearby police station. The absurdity of the program was perhaps best illustrated by my troop’s favorite laborer-mascots: “backpack man” and “the ride.” The former was a triple amputee with just one arm. The latter had no arms but carried his one-armed friend on his back to work each day. Both had lost their limbs by stepping on errant, ubiquitous IEDs. Despite their physical limitations, we paid them the same salaries as the other workers. “The ride” would carry “backpack man” to the canal, where that one-armed go-getter would grab a pickax and start digging. The whole scene was a macabre inspiration for us all.

Friday was payday for the cash-for-workers. The Army, bureaucratic beast that it is, insisted that we adhere to regulations stipulating that each and every Afghan line up each week and “sign” their names on a standardized form prior to cashing in. (This is despite the fact that it had no qualms about handing out a backpack full of cash.) No one seemed to care when I reminded the bosses that 95% of these guys were illiterate; they had to sign, I was told. So, some Afghans would scribble something random, others would make a thumbprint in ink. One drew a marvelous little chicken next to his name each week. (And who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)

Another time, the colonel informed me that the time had come to update the local Afghans’ farming techniques. The brigade sent me a nice fellow from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—an agriculture expert from Kansas—to revitalize husbandry in rural Kandahar. I asked my boss not to bother. Better for the USAID guy to earn his bloated salary from the safety of headquarters than risk his life down in my sector, where soldiers got killed on the regular.

The USAID expert’s plan was to introduce PVC pipe-based irrigation to the district. To that end, he built what he called a “model farm” outside my combat outpost as an example for the Afghans to follow. The local farmers were going to ignore the new technology, or steal the materials, I’d told my colonel. These people were content with their 13th-century-era but fairly functional irrigation methods, I’d emphasized.

As expected, the colonel ignored me. When some locals stripped the “model farm” of its materials one dark night, the colonel summoned the Kansan to headquarters. We never heard from him again, the poor, well-meaning guy. (And who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)

More ludicrous still, my senior commanders decided that our stuck-in-the-Middle-Ages district was ready for some third-wave feminism. In the Army way, they came up with an acronym for a new unit: the Female Engagement Team (FET). The idea was to pluck one of the handful of female staff officers in our male-dominated cavalry reconnaissance squadron and assign her to go on combat patrols and “engage” with local Afghan women, to assess their concerns, and … well, it was never clear what the squadron would actually do after that. In a bit of particularly ironic slapstick, the young West Point-trained officer chosen was—wait for it!—a New York Jew. The whole charade dovetailed with the preposterous fiction that establishment elites have bandied about: that the original purpose of America’s post-9/11 foray into Afghanistan had anything to do with women’s rights.

When I heard about the new FETs, I felt obliged to remind my colonel that after nine months spent in the villages of the sector, I hadn’t seen a grown woman, given that the local men cloistered their wives as if the entire district were a Catholic convent. I reminded him of the maybe 12-year-old girl in the nearest village I’d taken a shine to months before. She had piercing green eyes, a boisterous personality and had impressively held her own while playing rough games with the village boys.

For months, I’d given her candy, dolls and anything else I could scrounge up. My mother started sending toys and snacks specifically for this girl. Then one day, she disappeared. I started asking around about her. Finally, one of the local elders told me what had happened. She’d had her period, he explained, and, as per local tradition, she was immediately clothed in a full-length burka and stashed indoors until her parents could arrange a marriage with, inevitably, some older man. I never saw her again.

Oh, and nothing useful ever transpired from the squadron’s FET experiment. (Who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?)

I can’t help but surmise that the original sin of America’s Afghan war, particularly after the initial 2001 invasion, was the reflexive assumption that within this landlocked Central Asian country, an imposed, Western-style representative democracy could take root. Seen from the relatively cosmopolitan capital city of Kabul, where most American generals and diplomats resided, that might have seemed plausible. However, the “view from Kabul” was different from my perspective from the Afghan version of Appalachian Kentucky.

My vignettes are admittedly personal, local, area-specific and, one might argue, the equivalent of viewing a complex war from 30,000 feet through a soda straw. But humility be damned—I’m also a scholar, and I’m confident in my widely shared assessment that on a macro level, Afghanistan as it stands today remains a mess. And now I’ve got The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers in my evidentiary corner. Fact: Nineteen years into America’s longest war, Afghanistan is in a worse state than at any time since the U.S. military invasion.

More of the country is contested or controlled by the Taliban than ever before (to such an extent that the U.S. military has decided to stop measuring that inconvenient data). The Afghan government’s revenues can’t pay for its security forces without foreign aid. Local police and army casualties are unsustainable, and the country’s opium crop has had another record bumper crop of a year.

None of this bodes well, yet American troops remain and still die there. Worse, this year, no doubt, one of the dead will be a young man or woman born after Sept. 11, 2001.

To ask one final time: Who says rural Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy?

I do.

U.S. Misled Public on Progress in Afghanistan, Documents Show

WASHINGTON—The U.S. government across three White House administrations misled the public about failures in the Afghanistan war, often suggesting success where it didn’t exist, according to thousands of pages of documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The documents reveal deep frustrations about America’s conduct of the Afghanistan war, including the ever-changing U.S. strategy, the struggles to develop an effective Afghan fighting force and persistent failures to defeat the Taliban and combat corruption throughout the government.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015.

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The interviews were conducted as part of a “Lessons Learned” project by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction over the past several years. SIGAR has produced seven reports so far from the more than 400 interviews, and several more are in the works. The Post sought and received raw interview data through the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits.

The documents quote officials close to the 18-year war effort describing a campaign by the U.S. government to distort the grim reality of the war.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers, according to the Post. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

The Pentagon released a statement Monday saying there has been “no intent” by the department to mislead Congress or the public.

Defense Department officials “have consistently briefed the progress and challenges associated with our efforts in Afghanistan, and DoD provides regular reports to Congress that highlight these challenges,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell, a department spokesman. “Most of the individuals interviewed spoke with the benefit of hindsight. Hindsight has also enabled the department to evaluate previous approaches and revise our strategy, as we did in 2017 with the launch of the president’s South Asia strategy.”

SIGAR has frequently been vocal about the war’s failures in reports going back more than a decade, including extensive questions about vast waste in the nearly $1 trillion spent on the conflict.

The Post said that John Sopko, the head of SIGAR, acknowledged that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.” SIGAR was created by Congress in 2008 to conduct audits and investigations into waste of government spending on the war in Afghanistan.

Democrats on Capitol Hill were quick to endorse the story’s findings.

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., tweeted: “The war in Afghanistan is an epic bipartisan failure. I have long called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that quagmire. Now it appears U.S. officials misled the American public about the war. It is time to leave Afghanistan. Now.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said in a tweet: “775,000 of our troops deployed. 2,400 American lives lost. Over 20,000 Americans wounded. 38,000 civilians killed. Trillions spent. Rumsfeld in 2003: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.’”

Sarah Kreps, professor of government and international relations at Cornell University said the interviews reveal the enormous disconnect between what civilian and military leaders knew about the war and what the public knew, particularly about its costs.

The Post said that while the interviews contain few revelations about military operations in the war, they include a lot of criticism that refutes the narrative that officials often touted about progress being made.

James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama was blunt in his assessment of the war in his interview.

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” The Post quoted Dobbins as saying in one of the interviews. “We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

Proof That the Rich Have Won America’s Class War

Throughout the year, a barrage of studies has uncovered the breathtaking scope of wealth inequality all over the world. Among them was “Public Good or Private Wealth,” the British charity Oxfam’s annual study of global inequality that revealed, among other disheartening statistics, that the fortunes of billionaires increased by 12% in 2018—or $2.5 billion a day. In the same year, the wealth of the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity dropped by 11%. In America, the Federal Reserve and the Government Accountability Office released similarly grim reports.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent refers to the situation as “the triumph of the rich … one of the defining stories of our time.” He concludes that at least one cause of this massive inequality is the rapid rise of the individual incomes of America’s top earners. Another cause, he hypothesizes, is the declining progressivity of the tax code—that is, the rich are not only earning more money but paying less in taxes, while wages for the middle class and the poor aren’t rising at the same rate, but they either pay the same in taxes or, in some cases, even more.

While some of us might be stuck in despair mode, willing the numbers on our bank statements to increase or wondering whether it’s time to break out the guillotine, Sargent is proactive, digging deeper into the numbers and finding out what they mean those of us without trust funds. He contacted Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and an adviser to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. At Sargent’s request, Zucman prepared an analysis to explain Sargent’s theory.

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Among Zucman’s findings: “Among the bottom 50% of earners, average real annual income even after taxes and transfers has edged up a meager $8,000 since 1970, rising from just over $19,000 to just over $27,000 in 2018.

“By contrast, among the top 1% of earners, average income even after taxes and transfers has tripled since 1970, rising by more than $800,000, from just over $300,000 to over $1 million in 2018.

“Among the top 0.1%, average after-tax-and-transfer income has increased fivefold, from just over $1 million in 1970 to over $5 million in 2018. And among the top .01%, it has increased nearly sevenfold, from just over $3.5 million to over $24 million.”

Sargent elaborates on the taxes and transfers Zucman refers to: “The idea is to show the combined impact of both the explosion of pretax income at the top and the decline in the effective tax rate paid by those same earners—in one result.” Basically, the rich are both earning more in pre-tax income and keeping more of it when tax time comes around.

Zucman and fellow UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez demonstrate this declining effective tax rate trend since the 1960s in their new book, “The Triumph of Injustice.” As Sargent notes, the tax code was actually fairly progressive in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, the top 400 richest Americans pay less than the American working class.

These results are in line with Zucman’s recent study revealing that the wealth of the 400 richest Americans has tripled since the 1980s.

As Christopher Ingraham writes in The Washington Post, those lucky 400 “own more of the country’s riches than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution, who saw their share of the nation’s wealth fall from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014, according to the World Inequality Database maintained by Zucman and others.”

Adding insult to injury, in addition to the studies showing that the rich are getting richer, 2019 also brought us at least one study showing that the rich actually live longer. According to a report from the Government Accountability Office released in September, the benefits for the wealthy in America are accruing not just in their bank accounts, but in their life expectancy. As  The New York Times coverage of the report explained, “almost three-quarters of rich Americans who were in their 50s and 60s in 1992 were still alive in 2014. Just over half of poor Americans in their 50s and 60s in 1992 made it to 2014.”

Read Sargent’s full analysis here.

In Kurdistan, Women Are Coming Into Their Own

In a restaurant off a busy road in Sulaymaniyah, in the south of Kurdistan, dozens of women sit in a group, talking animatedly and drinking glasses of black, sweet tea. The women, some wearing headscarves, others in jeans and colorful nail polish, are part of a feminist organization called the Sofia Society.

Ranging in age from 16 to 60, the women are there to talk about raising awareness about sexual violence and harassment of girls in school. It is a tall order, but the Sofia Society women are used to challenges—they have even received death threats from men who consider it an act of dishonor merely to speak up against male violence.

The Sofia Society was founded by a small group of women in 2016, with the primary aim of increasing literacy among girls and young women in small towns and villages in the area. The activists travel on bicycles, sometimes for dozens of miles, to reach the most secluded areas.

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Females in Kurdistan are seen as significantly inferior to males, but are better off compared to those in the rest of Iraq. This is little consolation to the feminists I met during my time there. Kurdish women face horrendous challenges and misogynistic attitudes toward their involvement in social, political and economic life. For women in Kurdistan, the public sphere is forbidden, unless accompanied by a male family member, and “honor” killings, rape and female genital mutilation are daily realities for women and girls.

I was in Iraqi Kurdistan—or, as my hosts prefer, South Kurdistan—to speak at a momentous gathering: The very first conference on sexual violence toward women and girls in the region, held in the iconic Kurdish cultural center.

“I want everyone to know that we are not accepting the fate of women in Kurdistan,” Lanja Khawe, one of the founding members of the Sofia Society, tells me during the group discussion in the restaurant.

One of the society’s undertakings is a book-loan project.

“There are two reasons why we consider taking books to women [by bicycle] a revolutionary act,” Khawe says. “Firstly, in our society, riding bicycles by women is still considered shameful. We wanted to change this and, thus, break the taboo, and anyway, bicycles are environmentally friendly. Secondly, unless girls become literate, we cannot learn, and education is key to our liberation.”

Group members say that libraries in Kurdistan are considered a largely male environment and are far from female-friendly. “Many families forbid the girls to read in libraries because they think we will rebel against patriarchal norms,” says Ferah, a new member. “Therefore, many young girls are desperate for books. We are keen to meet this demand, because we know that many will read in secret. How can we be free when this basic right is denied us?”

Many urgent and pressing issues in the region are hidden and taboo, such as sexual violence toward women and girls. Abortion is treated as a sin and is forbidden. I heard about girls who were raped by their fathers, uncles or brothers and who became pregnant but were refused an abortion, often ending up with a child as a reminder of the brutality.

I met with Houzan Mahmoud, a Kurdish women’s rights and anti-war activist who travelled to Sulaymaniyah for the conference. Mahmoud currently lives in Germany and is founder of the Culture Project, a platform for Kurdish writers, feminists, artists and activists. Over tahini, pickles and black, bitter olives, she explains that women’s organizations and those running domestic violence shelters often avoid confronting male violence or men as the problem, because of the intense controversy such debates would cause. But most importantly, she tells me, the major problems facing feminists in Kurdistan are what is called the NGO-ization, or professionalization, of women’s organizations, and dependence on foreign funding, which often leads to inadequate responses and limited impact. According to Mahmoud, there is much “window dressing” within mainstream political parties, as each one has created a women’s organization and appointed its own chosen leaders.

“In my view, both the [nongovernmental organizations] and party-led women’s organizations often act as foot soldiers of patriarchy in South Kurdistan,” Mahmoud says. “Women’s struggles and issues are stagnant because of this, but I am hopeful that the new generation will step in and provide new autonomous alternatives which are feminist, anti-capitalist and pro-women’s rights only.”

During the conference, the Kurdish cultural center was full to bursting with over 300 delegates, mostly women, but also a smattering of male government officials, including the deputy prime minister. I spoke about how to combat the trafficking of women and girls into prostitution, both in and out of the region, and about the misogyny underpinning the global sex trade. Other presentations covered rape, domestic violence and homicide, sexual harassment in schools, the workplace and other public arenas, and harmful cultural practices such as “honor” killings. The final session was on legislation: the need to develop laws that deter perpetrators and support victims. In time-honored fashion, as soon as the Q&A started, all the raised hands were male.

“One of the reasons that men are so dominant, even in feminist conferences, is because [women] are invisible: We are not there, we don’t speak up, we don’t question. Women are reluctant to show their faces,” Khawe says. “We grow up with shame, and are taught to be shy, not to talk and not to speak out and not to stand up for ourselves.” I hear from several activists that they often feel scared of reprisals from religious patriarchs for campaigning against male violence, and also from some of the deeply traditional women who feel nervous about endorsing the Sofia Society’s messages. “We want to create a feeling of solidarity between women, but sometimes they come in between and turn you into enemies. Divide and rule,” one woman says.

In the new year, society members plan to talk to secondary school students about sexual violence, including how to protect themselves from harassment. “It is about what kind of language do we use, and what should the girls be aware of,” Khawe says. “We want to talk to other girls about how to raise their awareness about sexual violence, because we have no sex education whatsoever in Kurdistan. We need to raise the issues of [sexually transmitted infections] and sexual health.”

I am told about male bus drivers who were discovered sexually abusing kindergarten and primary school children. They were sacked and replaced with women, and no further action was taken by the authorities.

Society members plan to work with young women in shelters, as well as with women who have allegedly committed crimes. “There is a lot of sexual harassment in prisons from male staff,” says Khawe, who once visited a juvenile prison for girls under 18.

Mahmoud is aware of how much must be done before the patriarchy in Kurdistan is replaced by a culture of equality. “In my last visit here, I was invited to attend a young group’s discussion on abortion,” she tells me. “The group was mainly [university] graduates, as well as university students who wanted to share their views with me on the subject, and what to do. Such groups are the future of activism in Kurdistan, and their work can leave an impact on the society. It is important to support independent and politically aware groups who have a vision for women’s emancipation.”

On my final evening in Sulaymaniyah, I go for a long walk around the center, smelling the pungent herbs and spices from the many food carts lining the busy streets. Men pulling carts heaving with pomegranate seeds, nuts and pastries dripping in honey weave in and out of the crowds. Lines form to buy shawarma from the makeshift stalls, and a cluster of men sitting on tiny plastic stools drink fresh mint tea. The colorful lights on the stalls and shop windows and the music from the popular 24-hour coffee kiosk make it feel like a party. But there are no women among the hundreds of boys and men in the crowds. Eventually, I see a woman with two young children coming out of a shawarma kiosk, carrying heavy bags while ensuring that her children keep close.

“There is little space for women in public life,” Khawe says when I ask why women are not visible at night.

As I leave for the airport, Aza, one of the young Sofia Society members, tells me something. “This conference helped me to take off my veil,” she says as she shakes her loose hair from side to side. “For me it is a big step. Things are slowly changing here.”

Even Insurance Companies Are Turning Their Backs on Coal

It’s rapidly running out of friends in the financial world: coal is now too hot for many big insurers to want anything more to do with it. The burning of coal is one of the key factors behind rising emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases.

Now insurance companies, which play a vital role in the financing of coal plants, are announcing plans to withdraw from the sector, saying that backing organisations seeking to expand coal operations is incompatible with the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

AXA, the French insurance and financial services conglomerate, is the latest to announce its withdrawal from coal projects, though this divesting programme will in some cases be phased in over a number of years.

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“The fight against climate change requires engagement in a global collective action”, says Thomas Buberl, AXA’s chief executive officer.

“A plus 4°C world is not insurable. As a global insurer and investor, we know that we have a key role to play. In the spirit of the Paris Agreement, we want to accelerate our commitment and confirm our leadership in the fight against global warming”.

European Phase-Out

AXA says it will stop insuring any new coal construction projects. It will also totally phase out its existing insurance and investments in coal in the European Union countries by 2030, and by 2040 everywhere else.

It’s estimated that approximately 400 companies with coal plant and mine expansion plans will be affected by AXA’s action.

In 2015 AXA announced it would begin withdrawing its investments and insurance from coal projects. Two years later it said it was divesting and ending insurance in oil tar sands projects in Canada, and withdrawing insurance from a number of pipelines in the US transporting tar sands-derived oil.

A number of other large insurance and investment companies have made similar moves on coal. Allianz, the Germany-based company which is Europe’s largest insurer, announced last year that it would end insurance for all coal-fuelled power plants and for coal mines: it would also completely withdraw from the sector by 2040.

“Banks, investors and insurers are now under great pressure to up their game on climate with new coal policy announcements”, says Kaarina Kolle of Europe Beyond Coal, a group linking various non-governmental organisations across the EU.

“This is the minimum standard for any financial institution committed to the Paris Climate Agreement’s 1.5°C warming limit.”

While climate scientists have welcomed moves to limit coal use, many nations are still heavily dependent on what is the most polluting of fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that coal accounts for nearly 40% of electricity at present generated worldwide.

The IEA says demand rose by 1% in 2017, with a similar rise last year.  Latest statistics indicate coal use worldwide has dropped slightly this year, though total greenhouse gas emissions are still rising.

Economic Slowdown

Coal consumption is forecast to drop by 11% in the US in 2019 while China, which accounts for half of total world coal consumption, is expected to use about 1% less of the fuel this year, mainly due to a slowdown in its economy.

Coal use within the EU dropped by nearly 20% in the first six months of this year.

Germany is responsible for about a third of total coal-generated power in the EU. Lignite, the most polluting coal, forms a substantial part of Germany’s energy mix.

Many countries in eastern Europe, including Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, are still heavily dependent on coal for power generation.

Eight EU countries have pledged to phase out coal use by 2030: industry analysts say other heavy coal users in the EU have to follow suit. If not, EU emissions reductions targets set under the Paris Agreement will not be met.