Chris Hedges's Blog, page 89

How Loan Companies Prey on an Unsuspecting Public

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Cecila Avila was finishing a work shift at a Walmart. David Gordon was at church. Darrell Reese was watching his granddaughter at home. Jessica Albritton had pulled into the parking lot at her job, where she packed and shipped bike parts.

All four were arrested by an armed constable, handcuffed and booked into jail. They spent anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days behind bars before being released after paying a few hundred dollars in bail or promising to appear in court.

None of the four, who live in northern Utah and were detained last year, had committed a crime. They had each borrowed money at high interest rates from a local lender called Loans for Less and were sued for owing sums that ranged from $800 to $3,600. When they missed a court date, the company obtained a warrant for their arrest.

Avila was handcuffed and marched down the main aisle in the Walmart in front of customers and co-workers. “It was the most embarrassing thing,” said Avila, 30, who has worked at the store for eight years. At the time of the arrest, Loans for Less had applied to garnish her wages. “It just didn’t make any sense to me,” she said. “Why am I being arrested for it?”

It’s against the law to jail someone because of an unpaid debt. Congress banned debtors prisons in 1833. Yet, across the country, debtors are routinely threatened with arrest and sometimes jailed, and the practices are particularly aggressive in Utah. (ProPublica recently chronicled how medical debt collectors are wielding similar powers in Kansas.)

Technically, debtors are arrested for not responding to a court summons requested by the creditor. But for many low-income people, who are not familiar with court proceedings, lack access to transportation, child care options or time off, or move frequently and thus may not receive notifications, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Reese, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran, said he missed a hearing because he couldn’t afford to put gas in his car. Gordon, 46, said he was never personally notified of the court date. Avila and Albritton, 32, said they couldn’t take time off work.

In Utah, payday lenders and similar companies that offer high-interest, small-dollar loans dominate small claims court. Loans for Less, for example, filed 95% of the small claims cases in South Ogden, a suburban city of 17,000 about a half-hour north of Salt Lake City on the interstate, in fiscal year 2018, according to state data.

Across Utah, high-interest lenders filed 66% of all small claims cases heard between September 2017 and September 2018, according to a new analysis of court records conducted by a team led by Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah and the financial services director at the Consumer Federation of America, and David McNeill, a legal data consultant and CEO of Docket Reminder.

Companies can sue for up to $11,000 in Utah’s small claims courts, which are stripped of certain formalities: There are rarely lawyers, judges are not always legally trained and the rules of evidence don’t apply.

Lenders file thousands of cases every year. When defendants don’t show up — and they often don’t — the lenders win by default. Once a judgment is entered, companies can garnish borrowers’ paychecks and seize their property. If borrowers fail to attend a supplemental hearing to answer questions about their income and assets, companies can ask the court to issue a bench warrant for their arrest.

Arrest warrants were issued in an estimated 3,100 small claims cases during the period studied by Peterson’s team. Almost all of the warrants — 91% — were issued in cases filed by payday, auto title or other high-interest lenders. The number of people who are jailed appears to be small. The state does not track the information, but ProPublica examined a sampling of court records and identified at least 17 people who were jailed over the course of 12 months.

Most people scramble to meet bail to avoid being incarcerated. Others, like Avila, Gordon and Albritton, are booked into jail and held until they pay. They often borrow from friends, family, bail bonds companies and even take on new payday loans.

“Bail” has a different meaning in Utah than it does in other states — one that tilts the power even more in the direction of lenders and other creditors. In 2014, state legislators passed a law that made it possible for creditors to get access to bail money posted in civil cases. Prior to that, bail money would return to the defendant. Now, it is routinely transferred to high-interest lenders. The law has transformed the state’s power to incarcerate into a powerful tool to guarantee that loan companies get paid.

As Peterson put it, “They’re handcuffing and incarcerating people in order to get money out of them and apply it towards insanely high interest rate loans.”

Small claims cases are heard once a month at City Hall in South Ogden, a former frontier town nestled between Hill Air Force Base and the Wasatch Mountains. On a sunny Monday morning in July, I walked past black-and-white portraits of City Council members and paused in front of a metal detector outside the courtroom on the ground floor.

“Are you here for small claims court?” a bailiff asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You can check in with her,” he said, pointing at a makeshift station in a hallway in front of the courtroom. “You probably won’t need to go inside to see the judge.”

The person standing at a high-top post office-style table a few feet from a wall decal that read “Welcome to the South Ogden City Kiosk” was not a court official.

She was Valerie Stauffer, 44, a senior collections officer with Loans for Less. Reddish-brown hair tied back, the bespectacled Stauffer clutched dozens of beige and blue file folders, one for each borrower whose case was on the docket that day. She then piled them into a foot-high stack on the table next to her car keys and phone.

Loans for Less offers auto title and installment loans, which are higher-stakes versions of payday loans. Traditional payday loans, often for sums in the low hundreds of dollars, are typically due on the borrower’s next payday. The loans carry interest with annual percentage rates that run into triple digits. Borrowers provide postdated checks or access to their bank account as collateral. Auto title loans involve similarly stratospheric interest rates — Loans for Less charges up to a 300% APR — and larger sums of money, since the money is secured by the title to a borrower’s car. The loans are then paid back within a month, or in installments that might stretch over several months.

Loans for Less has six employees across two branches in Salt Lake City and Ogden. More than half of its borrowers, the company said, are repeat customers. The company’s website promises to help borrowers “get the cash you need” for the “lowest possible rates.” Loans for Less, the website says, is “up-front, fair, and honest with everyone.”

At 9 in the morning, there were already a handful of defendants lining up to meet with Stauffer. She quickly leafed through the stack to identify a borrower’s case and spoke to each one in a hushed voice. Stauffer handed out questionnaires requesting details of each person’s financial life: employer’s name, bank account numbers, whether the defendant rents or owns a home.

I spoke to Stauffer in between her meetings. She said that Loans for Less is “a little more aggressive than most.” Not all lenders will take borrowers to court, garnish their wages or request bench warrants, she said. Stauffer quickly added that she tackles the “more extreme” cases: “The ones that have taken the money and ran,” she said. “The ones who have no intention of paying their money back.”

Zachery Limas and his wife, Amber Greer, both 24, waited in the lobby area for their audience with Stauffer. Limas had borrowed $700 from Loans for Less last summer for a down payment on a 2012 Hyundai Santa Fe, an SUV with enough space to accommodate car seats for three children, one of whom was then on the way. (Limas and Greer had another loan with a different company to cover the balance of the purchase price.) Since the $700 loan came with a 180% APR, Limas would have to pay back around $1,400 — double the amount borrowed — within 10 months. At the time, he earned $16.87 an hour driving a forklift at a warehouse; she worked at Subway.

Limas said he made a few payments before a new owner took over his employer and he was laid off. By the time he found a new job, Greer had given birth to their child and stopped working. With his entire paycheck going toward basic expenses like rent and electricity, they could no longer afford to pay back the loan. In March, Loans for Less won a default judgment against Limas for $1,671.23, which included the outstanding balance plus court fees. “We can’t catch up. We can’t do this,” Greer said. “There’s no way we’re ever going to catch up, especially not with the interest rate that they have.”

After Limas missed a court date for the second time, a constable came to their home, threatening to take him to jail unless he paid $200 in bail at the door. “Obviously, we don’t have extra money like that lying around,” he said. Greer called a friend of her mother’s and borrowed the money, jotting down her card details over the phone.

Standing outside the courtroom, the couple told Stauffer they had met with a lawyer and planned to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would put the lawsuit on hold and eventually discharge their debts. Stauffer was not sympathetic and tried to persuade them to agree to a payment plan. “Even if they’re broke,” Stauffer said later, “we’ll set up $25 a month.” The couple refused.

Limas and Greer say they went to court planning to speak to a judge. After addressing their case with Stauffer, they asked her if they were “good to go.” When she said yes, according to Greer, they took that to mean that they had fulfilled their obligations at the courthouse. Limas and Greer left. They were absent when their case was heard before a judge an hour later.

These hallway negotiations between payday lenders and borrowers are ubiquitous in small claims courts across Utah. They raise red flags, according to consumer advocates. Borrowers are typically unfamiliar with the courts and can’t afford to hire lawyers; collectors deal with dozens of cases every month. Consumers might not understand that they are meeting with a representative from a payday loan company rather than a court-appointed official, said April Kuehnhoff, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. They might not understand that they have a right to a hearing before a judge or that government benefits like Social Security and disability are exempt from collection. “The settlement agreement just gets rubber-stamped by the court and people get railroaded through this process,” she said.

Stauffer maintained that she is trying to help. “We try and set up arrangements outside of court to make it easier on them. That way, they don’t have to go in front of the judge,” she said. “Any judge intimidates people, so it’s easier just to try and set up arrangements outside.”

At a quarter to 10, Stauffer gathered her folders and walked inside the courtroom. She had 52 cases to be heard, which represented all but two of the cases on the court’s docket that day. Stauffer had been able to strike a deal with a handful of debtors. None of them followed her inside the courtroom. I sat with a handful of people in the gallery.

Judge Bryan Memmott was presiding. Temporarily stationed in South Ogden, he spends most of his time handling minor criminal and civil matters in the justice court in Plain City, about 15 miles away. A former partner at a small law firm near Phoenix, specializing in real estate and bankruptcy law, Memmott began his legal career in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the Air Force. He seemed at ease with Stauffer and talked to her as though they were colleagues. (Memmott declined to be interviewed for this article.)

“Why don’t you tell me what cases you’ve got and we’ll go through them that way?” he said.

Stauffer laughed. “OK,” she said. “So I’ll go in alphabetical order.”

The judge moved quickly, approving judgments as soon as Stauffer shared a defendant’s name and the amount they owed. When the judge lingered once on a case for more than 30 seconds, he begged her pardon: “Sorry. My computer’s being a little slow. I was going between screens. I apologize.”

“No, you’re OK,” Stauffer said.

In many cases, a judgment had been previously entered and borrowers had missed the follow-up hearing. “Can we get a bench warrant?” Stauffer asked in one such case. Memmott obliged, setting the bail amount at $200.

During the half-hour hearing, Memmott issued 21 such warrants. He never refused a request by Stauffer.

When they came to Limas’ case, Stauffer told the judge that Limas had paid $200 in bail but had told her he was planning to file for bankruptcy. “We were going to set up arrangements,” she explained. “He walked out.”

Memmott didn’t wait for Stauffer to request that the Limas’ bail be transferred to Loans for Less. “He hasn’t filed bankruptcy yet,” the judge said, “so we’ll forfeit the bail [to the company] and issue a new warrant. If he files bankruptcy, we’ll stay the proceedings.”

“So, what’s your new warrant,” he said, glancing at Stauffer. “$300?”

“OK,” she said.

After the hearing was over, Stauffer stepped into the hallway to talk to a constable stationed by the metal detectors outside the courtroom. He works for Wasatch Constables, a company hired by South Ogden to serve as bailiffs in its courthouses.

The company is also deputized by payday lenders, who pay them a fee to serve warrants on debtors. S. Steven Maese, who was then Wasatch’s chief operating officer, defended his company’s work for payday lenders. “The biggest misconception, I would say, is that people think that they are being punished for owing money — they are not,” he said. “A warrant is a wake-up call to say that you need to comply with court proceedings.”

Stauffer lowered her stack of folders to the gray folding tables near the metal detectors. The officer leaned over and snapped a picture of an address in one of her folders, ready for his next job.

A few weeks after the hearing, a constable showed up at the home of Limas and Greer to arrest him. Greer said she was able to provide evidence of the couple’s bankruptcy filing and the constable went away, but not before informing her that court records indicated Limas had missed his court date.

At first blush, Utah would seem an unlikely home to a concentration of companies that specialize in peddling high-interest loans to low-income, often minority customers. Utah has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, and its population is more middle class and white than the rest of the U.S. Yet a quarter of the state’s population lives in a household that earns less than $39,690 a year.

The presence of 417 payday and title loan stores in Utah — more than the number of McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, Burger King and Subway stores combined — is symptomatic of an age in which financial precariousness is widespread. Across the country, wages have stagnated for decades, failing to keep up with the cost of living. That helps explain why 12 million Americans take out payday loans every year, according to Pew Charitable Trusts. As an often-quoted study by the Federal Reserve Board has noted, a quarter of adults in the U.S. would not be able to handle an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing or selling something to pay for it.

There’s also a policy reason behind the ubiquity of payday lenders in Utah. After the U.S. Supreme Court relaxed restrictions on interest rates in 1978, Utah became one of the first states to scrap its interest rate limits in the hopes of luring credit card and other finance companies. A favorable regulatory climate in Utah made lenders feel welcome. The first payday loan store opened in Salt Lake City in 1985, and other companies soon flocked.

Today, Utah is home to some of the most expensive payday loans in the country. The average annual interest rate hovers at 652%, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research and policy organization. (The center was started with support from the Sandler Foundation, which is also a major funder of ProPublica.) Payday lenders charged annual percentage rates as high as 2,607% in 2019, according to the Utah Department of Financial Services. Utah is one of six states where there are no interest rate caps governing payday loans.

When it comes time to pay, just a few weeks after getting a loan, most borrowers find they can’t afford to do so, according to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As a result, the vast majority of payday loans — 80% — are rolled over or renewed within two weeks. Most loans go to borrowers who have taken out at least seven loans in a row. Many people pay more in fees than the amount borrowed and get stuck in a cycle of debt.

Payday lenders counter that they offer a crucial service to people with poor credit. Loans for Less says it helps people who are short on rent, behind on utility bills or at risk of overdrafting on their bank accounts. Many of the company’s customers can’t qualify for bank loans, credit cards or a paycheck advance. “It’s not our intention to take people to jail over debt,” the company wrote in a statement. “Warrants are issued for their failure to appear in court. We are more than willing to work with our customers.”

The federal government has never regulated payday lenders. Under the Obama administration, the CFPB began the laborious process of drafting federal regulations. The agency finished writing what were meant to be the final rules in 2017, after the Trump administration had taken office. The most notable provision would require payday, vehicle title and some installment lenders to ascertain, in advance, a borrower’s ability to repay the loan without sacrificing basic living expenses like rent and food. The industry aggressively lobbied against the provision, which would have curtailed its profits, and so far it has not gone into effect. The Trump administration has delayed the payday lending rules and is considering a proposal to gut them.

In the absence of federal regulation, rules vary wildly among states. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have banned payday loans entirely. A handful have strictly limited the industry. For example, South Dakota, once a leader in lifting interest rate limits, voted in 2016 to cap rates for short-term loans at 36% APR. Payday lenders have since left the state.

In Utah, by contrast, efforts to regulate the industry have faced fierce opposition. In 2009 and 2012, two bills, one to cap payday loans at an APR of 100% and a second to prevent lenders from issuing more than one loan per consumer, both failed. The second bill prompted the industry to flood the sponsor’s constituents with robocalls and direct mail, contributing to his defeat at the polls. (He won again in 2016). In 2014, Utah lawmakers passed their bill to allow bail to be paid to creditors in civil cases.

Over the past few years, there’s been a steady resurgence in the number of small claims suits filed by high-interest lenders. The numbers are now approaching the previous peak, which occurred during the Great Recession. Peterson’s study found that, in addition to the high volume of suits, lenders had a lower-dollar threshold for suing than others do: Lenders took people to court for a median of $994, about one-third of the median amount claimed by other plaintiffs.

“They just fight more aggressively,” Peterson said.

It’s unclear how many people across the country are arrested every year for missing hearings over payday loans. Tens of thousands of arrest warrants are issued every year in debt-related lawsuits, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which examined cases in 26 states in a 2018 report. Arrest warrants were issued against debtors who owed as little as $28.

Some policymakers have proposed a federal interest rate cap that would effectively ban payday loans. In May, presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced the Loan Shark Prevention Act, which would cap interest rates at 15%. Last month, a group of lawmakers introduced the Veterans and Consumers Fair Credit Act, which would extend the 36% interest rate maximum for active-duty service members to everyone. “You have to ask yourself, if it’s immoral to give this type of loan to somebody who is in the military now, how is it OK to give the loan to anybody else?” said Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., the only Republican sponsor of the bill. Both bills will face substantial difficulty getting through the Senate, according to experts.

Advocates are also calling on state legislatures to take action. The ACLU would like to see a complete ban on arrest warrants in debt collection cases. In the absence of this, consumer advocates have recommended a number of reforms: creditors should give consumers 30 days notice before filing a lawsuit; they should do more to verify that a consumer lives at an address on file; debtors should be immediately released after a warrant is served or taken to a hearing on the same day that they are arrested.

In December 2016, Jessica Albritton took out a $700 auto title loan from Loans for Less. Albritton had four kids under the age of 8 and barely scraped by on her $10-an-hour wage. It had been a hard year. Christmas was coming up.

Albritton used the title of her 1984 Fleetwood trailer as collateral. She signed a contract with a 192% APR. If Albritton fulfilled the agreement, she would be paying $1,383.76 over six months to extinguish a $700 loan.

On Christmas morning that year, her children woke up to gifts from Santa Claus: new clothes and shoes, Legos and other toys. They recounted the day in a journal tucked inside a compartment underneath the family’s nativity set. “We’ve written in it every year,” Albritton said, recalling the tradition that started before she had kids. “It’s literally almost full.”

Albritton made some payments but struggled to keep up. She cut back her work hours to go to school part time to study cosmetology and barbering. The school fees ate at her budget. Bills like rent and car payments took priority. Albritton said she informed the company when she couldn’t meet a payment because of an electricity bill. “When times got hard,” she said, “they were not understanding.”

In April 2017, Loans for Less filed a small claims suit against Albritton in South Ogden. In Utah, the plaintiff is usually responsible for making arrangements to serve papers to defendants in a civil case. Instead of delivering the court notice to Albritton, records show, Loans for Less hired a constable who left the documents with her father.

Albritton missed the hearing at the end of July 2017. Loans for Less won the case by default. At that point, her outstanding balance was $1,239.96. The company also asked her to shoulder the cost of filing the case and hiring a constable to serve the papers.

Two months later, Albritton missed another hearing. She’d run out of vacation days and couldn’t take time off, she said. The judge issued a bench warrant, setting the bail at $200.

James Houghtalen, the constable hired by Loans for Less, served the warrant on a Sunday morning. “She informed me that I woke her upon my arrival,” he wrote in his notes, which were included in a court filing. Houghtalen gave her the option of paying $200 in bail or going to jail. Albritton didn’t have the money, so her mother paid, borrowing the $200 from Check City, another payday lender.

Two weeks later, Albritton filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. “They were constantly after me,” she said. Filing bankruptcy shields debtors from collections, at least temporarily, but the process can be cumbersome and expensive. Albritton wasn’t able to complete her case; it was terminated on Jan. 29, 2018.

The next day, Albritton got up early and pulled into the parking lot at work. It was cold outside. As she stepped out of her car, someone called her name. Houghtalen, the constable, had been waiting for her. “You didn’t show up to court,” he said. Confused, she responded, “But I have a bankruptcy case.”

Without further explanation, Albritton asserted in an interview with ProPublica, Houghtalen “slammed” her against his car and handcuffed her. Albritton said the constable didn’t give her a chance to pay and took her phone away so she couldn’t make any calls. Albritton was taken to Weber County Jail, where she was held in a cell with other women. She was released four hours later after paying another $300 in bail. That money, along with $200 in bail from the previous arrest, was forfeited to Loans for Less.

Houghtalen delivered the borrower to jail in every such case ProPublica could find involving Loans for Less. He has a history of misconduct, according to public records. In 2013, the Utah Peace Officer Standards and Training Council concluded that he had failed to turn in $450 in cash from two defendants. Houghtalen told investigators he didn’t know what happened to the money. The council suspended his peace officer certificate for three years as a result.

Houghtalen is also the subject of an ongoing disciplinary investigation, according to the Utah Department of Public Safety’s response to a public records request. The department declined to comment on the specific charges. Houghtalen did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Loans for Less said it was unaware of the ongoing investigation.

After Albritton’s arrest last year, Loans for Less tried to garnish her wages. That effort was stymied, Albritton said, because 25% of her paycheck was already being withdrawn over an unpaid electric bill.

Albritton’s life began spiraling as her debts mounted. In March 2018, she split up with her partner. Albritton and her four children moved into a domestic-violence shelter and then a government-subsidized apartment. Her ex surrendered the trailer to Loans for Less against her wishes, she said. The company sold it at auction for $500 but continued to pursue her for the remaining balance. Albritton agreed to contribute $25 a week but then struggled to pay up. Loans for Less re-initiated legal proceedings. (“We’ve been willing to work with her a ton,” said Kimberly Jones, the legal manager at Loans for Less. “I don’t want anyone to go to jail.” Jones added, “from time to time she would make these arrangements and [then] she would just go MIA for three to four months and obviously not keep the arrangements.”)

In late September, a constable came by and notified her of a new $400 warrant. On a Monday night a few weeks after that, Albritton stood in her kitchen, defrosting bags of frozen meat and green beans. The kids jumped up and down on the gray couch in the living room. The previous weekend, they picked pumpkins at a farm. She was going to take them trick or treating in her parents’ neighborhood.

Albritton had a court date in two weeks. “This is too much for me right now,” she said. “I’m moving. I just had a death in the family. I have four kids. I have a friggin $10-an-hour job. It’s more than what I can handle.”

Albritton felt under constant scrutiny by Loans for Less. Her cellphone was filled with messages from constables. She scrolled through her phone, reading aloud text messages she said were sent by different constables. “This is what got me,” Albritton said, repeating one message: “Hi Jessica, if you want to see me again, just say so. Don’t keep putting it off so I have to come back.”

Loans for Less occupies a bungalow south of Salt Lake City. A bold yellow banner outside declares the company offers the “lowest rates” with “no credit check.”

Inside the store on the counter, a green pen holder has a different message on it: “If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a payment.”

I visited with a photographer in October and asked to speak to the company’s owner, Ralph Sivertson. The receptionist said he wasn’t in the office but promised to pass on a message. Our photographer obtained her permission to photograph the pen holder.

We were walking back to our car moments later when Sivertson bolted out into the parking lot. He was furious about the pen holder photo. “It’s a joke!” he said.

Sivertson, 54, has a stocky build and salt-and-pepper stubble. He was reluctant to be interviewed, he said, because he thinks payday lenders get a bad rap. Sivertson said he’s in business to help people. But he was also blunt about how integral lawsuits are to his operation. “At this point, small claims court is in the model,” he said. “If we didn’t have that avenue, I’ll be honest … we could be out of business.”

When we asked about arresting customers, Sivertson said he had heard about it happening a few times. “I don’t see a need for that. I don’t like it. And I’m going to make sure that doesn’t happen.” He then insisted that constables should have some discretion to arrest debtors who are threatening or belligerent. He promised to take a second look at the practice. “That’s unnecessary,” he said. “Not over a $500 loan.”

Two weeks later, another constable working for Loans for Less texted Albritton about an upcoming court date.

“My lawyer told me not to go,” Albritton texted back. “She is taking care of it.”

“Okay,” the constable wrote. “I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to come out and arrest you for not appearing so I am glad that’s not going to happen.”

America’s Potemkin War in Afghanistan

This piece originally appeared on antiwar.com.

Series note: It has taken me years to tell these stories. The emotional and moral wounds of the Afghan War have just felt too recent, too raw. After all, I could hardly write a thing down about my Iraq War experience for nearly ten years, when, by accident, I churned out a  book  on the subject. Now, as the American war in Afghanistan – hopefully – winds to something approaching a close, it’s finally time to impart some tales of the madness. In this recurring, semi-regular series, the reader won’t find many worn out sagas of heroism, brotherhood, and love of country. Not that this author doesn’t have such stories, of course. But one can find those sorts of tales in countless books and numerous trite, platitudinal Hollywood yarns.

With that in mind, I propose to tell a number of very different sorts of stories – profiles, so to speak, in absurdity. That’s what war is, at root, an exercise in absurdity, and America’s hopeless post-9/11 wars are stranger than most. My own 18-year long quest to find some meaning in all the combat, to protect my troops from danger, push back against the madness, and dissent from within the army proved Kafkaesque in the extreme. Consider what follows just a survey of that hopeless journey…

It was, at heart, a nice gesture. Much of that was lost in all the (some of it fair) controversy about Trump’s surprise Thanksgiving visit with the troops in Afghanistan. Whether a war is right or wrong – and this one is emphatically the latter – it is the president’s job to both review and stiffen the morale of the nation’s deployed soldiers. Especially in year nineteen of a ludicrous, endless, war. Nevertheless, to use the parlance of our post-millennial times, you could say I was “triggered” by Trump’s Turkey Day Afghan visit.

Watching the whole trip on television conjured nightmare visions of the countless times that then Captain Sjursen hosted general after general at the forward edge of American “freedom,” deep in the Arghandab Valley of rural Kandahar in 2011-12. Such VIP stopovers were – as per kiss-ass army conventions – inevitably absolute dog-and-pony shows. And God help me if they weren’t the bane of my existence. I still have nightmares, quite literally, in which a young soldier from my tactical operations center (TOC) wakes me with the news that my squadron commander is on the phone, and (yikes), gives me twelve hours notice that some senior colonel or – worse still – a general officer would be visiting my humble sandbagged version of the Alamo.

Few without insider knowledge of military deployment culture know just how much useless labor goes into preparation for such a visit, or, quite how dangerous the events themselves can often be. First off, every one of your exhausted soldiers must go on alert to perform such worthy war zone tasks as sweeping dust off floors essentially made of dust, hiding the inevitably accumulated trash, changing into “clean” uniforms, and (hopelessly) trying to convince our allied Afghan soldiers to bathe and wear their helmets.

Worse still, senior colonels and most all generals want to join a young captain and his ground-pounding troopers on an “authentic” “combat” patrol during the trip. That way, so they say at least, the senior officers can see the battlefield “situation” and buck up the low-ranking soldiers that slog that perilous terrain on the daily. Secretly, of course, such patrols mainly serve to boost the egos and assuage the office-ridden consciences of the generals themselves. And, not-so-secretly, real combat soldiers don’t give a shit about seeing the generals and find the whole charade to be little more than a needless pain in the ass.

Some of the bother tends towards the cosmetic and annoying. Like the onetime I went on my obligatory two-week leave and then returned to get my butt chewed because apparently while I was gone the brigade commander visited my little base and (say it ain’t so!) found one of my soldiers had shed his blouse – in triple-digit heat – and wore only his issued tan t-shirt. Then there was another instance, when the command sergeant major who advised the general commanding the whole Afghan War, dropped in. As a senior enlisted soldier he was, ostensibly, an up-from-the-ranks kind of fella who should’ve “connected” with the troops. Instead, in the middle of a ceremony where he got the honor of pinning medals for valor on a few of my battle-hardened, bone-tired, soldiers, he too decided to berate one of the awardees for having a bullet-hole through the sole of his boot. When I tried to intervene and explain that the soldier had miraculously escaped injury in the firefight which produced the hole, and that friends of his were shot that same day, the sergeant major silently fumed. Then, in the vein of a truly “manly” army-style man of integrity, he tattled to my colonel who proceeded to rip my ass the next day.

More often though, the trouble was rather more treacherous. One time, that same brigade commander – a full-bird colonel earmarked for general – decided to tour the new (empty) marketplace we’d been ordered to construct in an all-but-abandoned stretch of still contested scrubland. Which meant, of course, that I had to coax, bribe, and threaten enough area Afghan elders to dig up enough locals and faux merchandise to fill the vacant stalls in time for the boss’ visit. To tell you the truth, the tribal leaders – at least half of whom played both sides in the conflict – did a bang up job. In spite of my strenuous protests to the squadron commander that the area was too dangerous for a bulky patrol that would inevitably include the brigade colonel’s entourage, when the nature walk kicked off, the joint really resembled a flourishing marketplace.

Thus, I felt the terrified – if vindicated – prophet of sorts, when the Taliban soon unleashed a brief but intense barrage of machine gun fire at our unwieldy patrol. It was a closer call than most, but perhaps because no one was hurt, I took significant pleasure in watching my prima donna colonel dive for his life into a dry canal. Who knows, maybe he wrote himself a commendation for valor after the “authentic” experience of muddying the knees of his fatigues just a bit. It all worked out, I suppose. None of us died, and the diva colonel got all he’d ever wanted and made general.

After a few such nightmares, it didn’t take long before I learned to “play-the-game,” in order to appease my immediate boss (who veritably worshipped each visiting general), and still keep my troopers as safe as humanly possible. So, being the geeky historian I was and am, I got to thinking about Potemkin Villages. The term refers to any literal or figurative construction built to deceive an observer that any situation is more favorable than it really is. See, back in the 18th century, as the (likely exaggerated) story goes, Catherine the Great of Russia’s former lover, Grigory Potemkin constructed fake portable villages to impress the empress along the route of her journey to Crimea in 1787. In fact, the fancy, flourishing, structures would be disassembled as soon as she passed, only to be quickly reassembled farther along her route. Even if partly apocryphal, the use of Potemkin villages later in history was quite real and usually employed by totalitarian states. The Nazis built them; so did the Soviets, and North Korean Communists. In fact, just such a village was featured prominently in the controversial, absurd Seth Rogen comedy film about life in North Korea, titled “The Interview.”

What a brilliant, albeit ludicrous, idea, I’d then thought. Why can’t I do that? After all, the big wigs only visited every few weeks, and only for an hour or two at time at that. It simply wouldn’t be too hard to fool career-obsessed combat voyeurs who were almost never (in my experience) half as smart as they styled themselves. Therefore, when, quite suddenly, my own early and (for the province) unique experimentation with raising Afghan Local Police (ALP) – essentially warlord led militias – to combat the Taliban village by meaningless village, suddenly caught the attention of the military powers that be, I set my plans in motion. It mattered not to these feckless general officers, I realized, that our own “success” with living in muddy villages and arming illiterate young Afghans of questionable loyalty, was having very mixed results, and had alarmingly questionable long-term implications. They wanted to see a “win,” one that they could sell to their bosses, the media, and the American people as proof positive of “success” in a then ten (and now eighteen) year old war.

For about two months at the end of our troop’s tour of duty – by which point three men were dead, thirty or so wounded, many having lost limbs – one, two, and even three-star generals started stopping by my base to observe the miraculous “miracle” of my ALP program in the nearby villages. See, my pilot-program, despite its (should’ve been) obvious inability to turn around a failing war, had produced that which most generals prize most of all: a temporary, statistical, drop in violence. Suddenly, my weathered little cavalry troop was in high demand. Everyone who was anyone, it seemed, wanted to visit our besieged sandbag paradise.

So for two months I pulled off my greatest trick of all: pleasing, whilst deceiving, the star-cladded visitors, and saving a few of my soldiers’ lives to boot. It was a complicated, if theoretically simple, ruse. I’d, with the help of (somewhat) friendly tribal elders, and my subordinate lieutenant accomplices, preemptively, and temporarily, secure a small perimeter around the village in question, fill it with happy Afghans that didn’t really live in the abandoned hellholes, and map out a safe, bomb-cleared route for the expected general’s combat tourism patrol. The vacuous flag officers absolutely loved it. They’d shake hands with happy Afghans, fortuitously run into, and banter with, my more charismatic young soldiers, and witness a thriving village lifestyle straight out of a quaint Central Asian Norman Rockwell scene.

I know, I know. Undoubtedly I was a willing contributor to the illusion of Afghan War progress sold to Congress, the media, and thereby to the public. Don’t you think I knew that?!? My complicity is undeniable; but my conscience can bear as much. I’d spent nine months trying to tell my colonel, his colonel, even generals – anyone who would listen – the truth: we aren’t winning; we can’t win; the whole strategy is preposterous. They silenced me repeatedly. Told me I couldn’t possibly understand the big picture that they (apparently) divined from the safety of their massive secure bases.

With only a few months left to drag as many of my beloved boys back to Kansas – with as many of their limbs as possible – I guess you could say I quit. Maybe a better officer wouldn’t have. Thing is, after fifteen months toiled away in Iraq, and by then nine months suffered in Afghanistan, I knew something civilian observers didn’t: most generals didn’t want the truth anyway. They bought my Potemkin patrols hook-line-and-sinker because they wanted to believe, needed to believe, that the aimless wars, which defined their careers and augured their coveted promotions, could be won. And, surprise: they still haven’t been; and won’t be.

Let’s call the moral of my admittedly tragicomic farce of a story, then, this: in our current world of absurd forever wars, a bit of higher-level deception might just be in order – even if the historical inspiration (oops) derives from absolute monarchies and authoritarian dictatorships. Which leads to yet another of my ubiquitous “modest proposals:” if presidents are going to pretend to think the wars they start and continue are winnable, and if Congress is going to pretend to sanction and oversee them, then the generals – at least those with any conscience left to speak of – ought to pretend to fight them.

Keep the boys on their bases, generals. Send phony reports, produce the requisite PowerPoint slides that no one reads anyway, and put on a theater-level Potemkin show when this, or the next, president decides to make his semiannual visit to whichever of the dozen or so war zones America remains hopelessly immersed in. The kids in the proverbial trenches will thank you. So will their poor mothers. And no one else will even notice…

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet

Why Have No Republicans Turned on Trump?

There is a very simple reason why some Republicans voted for the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, but none have so far broken ranks against Trump.

That reason is a corrupted U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1976 (Buckley v. Valeo) and 1978 (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti), the Supreme Court ruled that when corporations and billionaires purchase their very own politicians, it is constitutionally protected “free speech” rather than “bribery,” which is how we defined it from the beginning of our republic until 1976. In 2010, the Supreme Court doubled down on its betrayal of American democracy with its Citizens United decision.

After those twin decisions in the 1970s, money from corporations and the morbidly rich began to flow into the coffers of the Republican Party, hoisting Ronald Reagan into the White House. (Democrats were then still largely funded by unions, and thus not so easily up for sale.)

The spigots of cash never turned off; the 2016 election was a $6.5 billion affair.

As a result, today’s Republican politicians are wholly owned agents of corporations and the billionaire class, stoking extreme anger over a few social issues (immigration, guns, God, gays, race) and using it to bring in the Fox rubes that the billionaire Murdochs kindly hand them.

Prior to this betrayal of America by the Supreme Court, politicians generally felt a need to respond to the wants and needs of their constituents. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s people-powered election in 1932 to Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, politicians’ proposed legislation and votes tended to reflect what the people in their districts or states wanted.

Nixon’s impeachment hearings happened in 1974, before the Supreme Court legalized bribery—and so the Senate voted 77-0 to forward the investigation, and the House voted 412-3 to accept the Judiciary Committee’s report showing “clear and convincing evidence” of Nixon’s corruption. Republicans were more concerned about their voters than about their donors back then.

From the 1980s to today, though, as a study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page shows, the political desires of the economic bottom 90 percent of Americans are completely irrelevant to the introduction or passage of legislation. But the desires of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently passed into law and policy.

Republicans don’t want the money to stop, so they have to keep supporting Trump as he pushes the corporate- and billionaire-friendly policies of deregulation and tax cuts supported by their donors.

When the billionaires abandon Trump, so will the GOP.

It’s really just that simple.

As long as the Supreme Court continues to assert that there is absolutely nothing wrong with billionaires and corporations owning politicians, the GOP will continue to be an extension of the lobbying industry and the morbidly rich. In exchange for deregulation and tax cuts, that bunch would work to keep a gerbil in the White House, if that’s what it took.

And as long as their owners and funders continue to pay Republicans to keep Trump in office, they’ll continue to say, “How high?” every time Trump yells, “Jump!”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

Humanity Is Riding Delusion to Extinction

Horses sporting gas masks. That, of all things, has been on my mind lately. Bear with me, now. Gaze at the ever-so-cockamamie photo. A horse, wearing a gas mask. Nothing so illustrates the rank absurdity and irrationality of the human condition. It was during World War I—which killed an unheard-of nine million soldiers in just four years—that the armies of Europe still employed horses in an age of machine guns, airplanes (eventually), tanks and poison gas attacks. Rather than call a halt to the inane slaughter in the trenches, the world’s great powers fought that wildly nationalistic war to its macabre conclusion. One result was horses in gas masks. That was only a hundred years ago.

As the U.S. government, as well as far too many Americans, remain fixated on the decidedly minor threat of Islamist “terrorism,” two actual global existential perils persist and are hardly addressed. I’m speaking, of course, of nuclear war and man-made, climate-based catastrophe. Hardly any serious establishment political figure in this country has taken meaningful action on such grave matters, mind you—busy as they are either reflexively attacking or defending Trump’s comparably trivial policies in Ukraine or Syria. Who noticed as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ticked the Doomsday Clock a stroke closer to midnight? Who has commented on the absurd reality that one of the two major American political parties denies the very existence of climate change, while the (hardly progressive) Pentagon repeatedly warns of its reality and profound consequences?

Which brings me back to the irrational slaughter of the First World War: its philosophical meaning, consequences, and what it, and a few subsequent events, portends for the fate of humanity. Were the generals of the era simply dumb for sending waves of infantrymen into the teeth of machine-gun fire, or did they face the old “wheel problem?” It took human beings at least tens of thousands of years to even conceive of the wheel. Seen in this context, the three or so years it took the generals to develop a combined-arms (tanks + radios + artillery + small unit infantry maneuver) “solution” to break the stalemate doesn’t seem quite so awful. Not that many, if not most, senior commanders couldn’t be at times, and especially early on, obtuse, arrogant and callous.

They and their civilian political masters ought to have recognized, when around a million soldiers died in the first five months of war, that as of Dec. 31, 1914, nationalism was obsolete. Fighting for one’s “country,” the romance of national power, was essentially—with the advent of efficient machine guns and poison gas—a suicide pact among each country’s young men. Yet on the war raged, and soon enough, an even bloodier Second World War broke out. This happened despite the widespread global antiwar sentiment in the wake of the first war. Few major governments were responsive, and despite the profound hopes among WWII veterans that theirs would be the last, war has continued almost endlessly into our new century.

The Second World War began with its own horse-gas-mask, technology-ahead-of-tactics sort of absurdity, when, in September 1939, Polish cavalrymen (to some degree apocryphally) faced off with German tanks. But the real, philosophical, lesson of that war’s culmination was this: If World War I should’ve made nationalism obsolete, events in August 1945 ought to have proven that countries were themselves outmoded. Because, when the United States (still the only country, ever, to do so) slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with two atomic bombs, the whole game changed.

At that point, for the first time in organized human history and due to the fantastically destructive power of nuclear weapons, a single nation could end the world within minutes. It is that sort of planet that the human race has inhabited for 75 years. And we aren’t scared enough. Until the invention and proliferation of atomic and hydrogen bombs, no single state or empire possessed world-ending power. Even Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler were eventually checked by coalitions of convenience and necessity. The Macedonian spearmen were halted by determined Afghan tribesmen; Mongol horsemen were held off by Egyptian and European armies; and as for the Nazis, the paradoxical duo of the Soviets and the Americans had their number.

The near certainty of planet-destroying nuclear winter in the event of major war has forever changed the entire geopolitical calculus. Or, at least, it should have. These days, a “rogue” state like North Korea, or eventually the Czech Republic or Bhutan, could end the world. Such a ludicrously tenuous situation clearly demonstrates that the only rational model of geopolitics capable of avoiding catastrophe, whether due to nuclear annihilation or collective climate suicide, is some sort of world government.

The United Nations or the European Union (but not military-focused NATO) represent the only rational model for compromise, conversation and war avoidance. Only today, in a paragon of inherent human irrationality, it is precisely such models against which Western (Trump, Brexit, Orban), and other (Bolsonaro, Putin, Xi Jinping) governments react. Collective delusion—reflected in the populist, rightward, authoritarian global political wave—might just spell the end of organized human life on this planet. It seems that plenty of folks worldwide are riding nationalist nostalgia right to the edge of extinction. These sorts of strongman leaders historically have poor records on communal action—exactly what’s now needed to save the world.

Perhaps the key metaphysical problem is this: Human beings simply don’t live long enough. Limited life spans inherently seem to encourage selfish, expedient, short-term, and thus delusional and destructive, thinking. In that sense, climate change, though it’s becoming increasingly imminent, may just be too big (and long-term, and existential) of a problem for the truncated life spans of most humans. Especially, it appears, among the wealthy elites clearly living it up in what may the last days of their species’ existence. Egyptian pharaohs, who once had themselves entombed with their worldly treasures, have a current equivalent in the CEOs set to drown in rising seas while their wealth is stashed in (far more virtual) mutual funds and subprime mortgage bundles.

As oceans flood the coasts, famine breaks out wholesale and resource-driven inter-state combat breaks out, my guess is that most desperate people will ignore John Lennon’s advice and turn toward religion—or the irrationality of the humanity-unique casino/gambling culture—to endure the absurdity of their existence. Perhaps eventually, though time is ever-so-short, people will force governments to unite, organize and (just barely) avoid disaster. I’m rooting for humanity, no doubt, but my own limited life experience has made me unlikely to bet on our species.

All the knowledge needed to save the world from climate catastrophe (and even nuclear war) is on our iPhones. Unfortunately, most Americans are too busy watching porn and trolling their exes on Facebook to unite, organize and save themselves. It’s an irrational, and classically human, defense mechanism of sorts. Such is life, in all its bizarre glory, all its absurdity.

————

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to Truthdig. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The LA Times, The Nation, TomDispatch, The Huffington Post, and The Hill. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” He co-hosts the progressive veterans’ podcast “Fortress on a Hill.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Copyright 2019 Danny Sjursen

Nancy Pelosi Buries Historic Labor Bill to Appease Centrists

For the first time in decades, the House of Representatives has a rare chance to rewrite American labor laws, in ways that would actually help workers. Among other benefits, a new bill would abolish right-to-work laws that cripple union organizing, create penalties for employers that punish workers for organizing, and set out rules to eliminate delays in negotiating union contracts.

The bill, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO), was introduced by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., and has 215 co-sponsors. It passed the House Committee on Education and Labor in late September. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., told the Intercept that “it is taking longer than it should” to pass PRO, “given the number of co-sponsors that we have. Many other bills have come to the floor with fewer co-sponsors than this one.”

So why hasn’t Nancy Pelosi brought it to the floor for a vote? And why is she instead focusing on a trade bill that’s a high priority for Donald Trump?

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which removed tariffs and other restrictions on trade among the three countries, but also caused significant job losses and led companies to move their operations overseas.

Pelosi, Cohen suggests, may be focusing on USMCA instead of PRO because she’s following the demands of centrist Democrats eager to prove that they can work with the president. Those moderates believe that passing USMCA would help protect House Democrats who flipped Republican seats in 2018. It’s an argument also advanced by Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that Jesús Seade, Mexico’s undersecretary for North America, said the agreement had a good chance of being finalized this week. That’s also what Pelosi wants, although Democrats, the Post reports, want “changes that would ensure enforcement of the agreement in a way that would help American workers and prevent further outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas.”

It’s unclear whether any of those changes would satisfy unions, whose support Democrats still depend on. Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, has pushed the Democrats to hold out for more labor protections. According to the Post, “his endorsement would be likely to sway dozens of House Democrats to support the new deal.”

According to an earlier Intercept article by Ryan Grim, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., chair of the Ways and Means Committee, agrees with Bustos, but goes a step further, advocating what Grim calls “a divide and conquer strategy,” adding pension reform to the USMCA deal, a decision that could split union support, and, as Grim puts it, “allow House leaders to say that labor is divided on the question, so the party might as well vote yes [on USMCA].”

Cohen’s own reporting suggests that union support for the NAFTA replacement is far from guaranteed. She writes: “Unions have made clear … that from their perspective, USMCA lacks real labor enforcement mechanisms, which could undermine the whole deal, further drag down wages, and eliminate more jobs.”

Dan Mauer, director of government affairs for the Communications Workers of America, which supports PRO, told the Intercept that “We get it’s hard, there’s a lot of stuff on people’s plates, and at the same time, this bill already has a lot of demonstrated support.” CWA members, Maurer said, would be “very unhappy” if the House failed to make progress on the bill.

Aside from the ample number of co-sponsors, the bill has growing public support for unions. Organizations like nonprofits and digital media companies are beginning to form unions. According to a Gallup poll released just before Labor Day, 64% of Americans support organized labor, a near fifty year high.

Pelosi’s office did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.

The ‘Silicon Six’ Is Dodging Taxes to the Tune of Billions

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix have collectively dodged over $100 billion in global taxes so far this decade, according to an analysis released Monday by a U.K.-based tax transparency campaign group.

Later this week, the Fair Tax Mark plans to publish its full report on the tax conduct of the companies, entitled The Silicon Six and Their $100 Billion Global Tax Gap. The report’s key findings were detailed on the group’s website Monday.

“Our analysis of the long-run effective tax rate of the Silicon Valley Six over the decade to date has found that there is a significant difference between the cash taxes paid and both the headline rate of tax and, more significantly, the reported current tax provisions,” said the Fair Tax Mark chief executive Paul Monaghan. “We conclude that the corporation tax paid has been much lower than is commonly understood.”

The Fair Tax Mark studied each company’s annual filings in the United States—where the tech giants are incorporated—as well as some quarterly filings and accounts of subsidiaries over the period of 2010–2019. The group found that the collective global tax gap between the expected headline rates and the cash taxes paid was $155.3 billion. The gap between the current tax provisions and cash taxes was $100.2 billion.

Analysis we have released today finds a significant difference between the cash taxes paid by the Silicon Six and both the expected headline rate of tax ($155.3bn) and, more significantly, the reported current tax provisions ($100.2bn). https://t.co/2bEp1vuwmH pic.twitter.com/DrhKjStxl4

— Fair Tax Mark (@FairTaxMark) December 2, 2019

“The report suggests that the bulk of the shortfall almost certainly arose outside the United States, given that the foreign current tax charge was just 8.4% of identified foreign profits,” the group explained. “Profits continue to be shifted to tax havens, especially Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.”

The Fair Tax Mark determined that Amazon, whose CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest individual in the world, “stands out as the business with the poorest tax conduct” among the Silicon Six. The headline corporate tax rate in the U.S. was 35% for most of the years studied, but the group found that Amazon paid only $3.4 billion in income taxes—just 12.7% of profit—during the analyzed period.

“The company is growing its market domination across the globe on the back of revenues that are largely untaxed, and can unfairly undercut local businesses that take a more responsible approach,” the group said, warning that “the situation is unlikely to reverse soon.”

The Guardian reported that Amazon pushed back against the findings, saying that the report’s “suggestions are wrong” and the company had “a 24% effective tax rate on profits from 2010–2018.”

Facebook ranked as the second-worst offender, having paid just 10.2% of its profit. Google, whose cash tax paid as a percentage of profit was 15.8%, came in third. Netflix, in the fourth spot, “proved to be the most difficult to rank,” and had the same cash tax percentage as Google.

Facebook told The Guardian that “we take our tax obligations seriously and pay what we owe in every market we operate. In 2018 we paid $3.8bn in corporation tax globally and our effective tax rate over the last five years is more than 20%.”

Apple ranked fifth. The Fair Tax Mark pointed out that although Apple “presents itself as ‘the world’s largest taxpayer’ and it certainly makes the largest tax contribution of the Silicon Six,” the company’s cash tax paid as a percentage of profit was still just 17.1%.

“Microsoft, by a slim margin, has the least aggressive approach to tax avoidance of the six,” the tax group concluded. Microsoft was co-founded by the world’s second-richest individual, Bill Gates, and “makes the second largest tax contribution of the Silicon Six,” according to the analysis. The company’s cash tax paid as a percentage of profit was 16.8%.

The Fair Tax Mark’s Monaghan said Monday that “the international tide is turning on the acceptability of corporate tax avoidance. The idea of countering the profit-shifting of Big Tech multinationals via the introduction of digital sales taxes has taken root in many countries.”

Monaghan noted that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) “is now leading multilateral efforts to address the tax challenges from digitalization of the economy, and is looking to ensure that profitable multinationals pay tax wherever they have significant consumer-facing activities and generate their profits.”

Alex Cobham, chief executive of the London-based advocacy group Tax Justice Network, said that the group’s new report “demonstrates why we need a fundamental reprogramming of the world’s approach to tax, based on a unitary taxation.”

Under a unitary taxation system, the global profits of multinational corporations would be allocated across the countries where the companies actually conduct business, which advocates argue would effectively make tax havens useless.

“When multinational corporations abuse their tax responsibilities to society, they weaken the supports that our economies need to work well and create wealth,” said Cobham. “A unitary approach to tax means we can finally make sure multinational corporations contribute tax based on where they employ workers and do business, not where they rent mailboxes and hide ledgers.”

“By ensuring multinational corporations pay their fair share locally for the wealth created locally by people’s work—based on an agreed formula and supplemented by a minimum effective tax rate—governments can strengthen their economies to run smoothly and make a good life possible for everyone,” he added.

Long-Lived Storm Clobbers Eastern U.S.

ALBANY, N.Y. — A seemingly endless winter storm that hindered travel across most of the country over the long holiday weekend is delivering a last wallop as it swoops through the Northeast, dumping heavy snow, shuttering hundreds of schools and bedeviling commuters in the region Monday.

The storm dropped more than a foot of snow on parts of the region late Sunday and Monday and could bring 10 to 20 inches total by Tuesday morning from Pennsylvania to Maine, forecasters said. Heavy snow was also expected in the Appalachian Mountains down to Tennessee and North Carolina.

“It’s moving very slowly, so the snow is just going to continue through the day,” National Weather Service meteorologist Jennifer Vogt said Monday.

By Monday afternoon, the storm had dropped 27 inches of snow in Delanson, New York, 25 miles northwest of Albany — the highest snow total in the Northeast so far.

The same storm has pummeled the U.S. for days as it moved cross country, dumping heavy snow from California to the Midwest and inundating other areas with rain.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency Monday for seven counties in eastern New York and assigned 300 National Guard members to assist with snow removal. State police had responded to more than 740 storm-related crashes statewide since the snow started falling.

“We’re tough, we’ve seen it all, we can handle it all,” Cuomo said at a storm briefing before urging people to stay off the roads. He told nonessential state employees to stay home.

But some workers had no choice but to trudge through knee-high snow and brush off their cars before heading out on the slushy roads.

“I just hate driving in snow,” Kaia Jansson said as she raked snow off her car in Albany. “It’s always a mess and it’s cold and not fun.”

In Nashua, New Hampshire, Alana Kirkpatrick didn’t enjoy her 5 a.m. “workout,” which consisted of removing heaps of snow from her car.

“Why do I still live in New England?” she said.

Hundreds of schools were closed in advance of the region’s first significant storm of the season, a nor’easter so named because the winds typically come from the northeast.

“It’s going to be a long, difficult storm,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said.

At least four counties closed schools Monday in West Virginia, where 2 inches to a foot of snow was forecast. Closer to the heavily populated, coastal Interstate 95 corridor, a wintry mix was more likely. The National Park Service said parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and U.S. 441 through Great Smoky Mountains National Park were closed because of heavy snow predictions.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday at a news conference that the worst was still ahead. He closed state government for nonessential workers at noon.

Only 3 inches of snow was forecast for New York City, where schools were expected to remain open, and 5 inches for Philadelphia.

The National Weather Service on Monday predicted that the Boston area could get 7 inches of snow with lower amounts to the south and into Rhode Island and Connecticut. Communities north of Boston could see a foot in the storm expected to reach its peak Tuesday morning, snarling the morning commute.

Rowe in western Massachusetts received 16 inches of snow from the storm that started Sunday night.

More than 660 flights into or out of the U.S. were canceled Monday, with more than 4,000 delays, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware. Airports in the New York and Boston areas accounted for many of them. There were 950 cancelations and 8,800 delays on Sunday.

The storm also caused major traffic disruptions. Tractor-trailers were banned or lower speed limits put in place on stretches of highway in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. New York also posted lower speed limits on some highways.

Many buses from New York City to Pennsylvania and upstate destinations such as Ithaca and Binghamton were canceled.

A commuter ferry on its way to Boston, where it was rainy and windy Monday morning, hit a wave and listed heavily, sending some passengers to the floor. No injuries were reported.

The trouble began in the East on Sunday as the storm moved out of the Midwest after days of pummeling parts of the U.S.

Duluth, Minnesota, is still cleaning up more than 21 inches of snow that dropped over the weekend. Major highways reopened in Wyoming and Colorado after blizzard conditions and drifting snow blocked them.

___

Michael Hill contributed to this story from Albany, New York.

China’s Climate Paradox: A Leader in Coal and Clean Energy

WASHINGTON — As world leaders gather in Spain to discuss how to slow the warming of the planet, a spotlight falls on China — the top emitter of greenhouse gases.

China burns about half the coal used globally each year. Between 2000 and 2018, its annual carbon emissions nearly tripled, and it now accounts for about 30% of the world’s total. Yet it’s also the leading market for solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles, and it manufactures about two-thirds of solar cells installed worldwide.

“We are witnessing many contradictions in China’s energy development,” said Kevin Tu, a Beijing-based fellow with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It’s the largest coal market and the largest clean energy market in the world.”

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That apparent paradox is possible because of the sheer scale of China’s energy demands.

But as China’s economy slows to the lowest level in a quarter century — around 6% growth, according to government statistics — policymakers are doubling down on support for coal and other heavy industries, the traditional backbones of China’s energy system and economy. At the same time, the country is reducing subsidies for renewable energy.

At the annual United Nations climate summit, this year in Madrid, government representatives will put the finishing touches on implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, which set a goal to limit future warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Nations may decide for themselves how to achieve it.

China had previously committed to shifting its energy mix to 20% renewables, including nuclear and hydroelectric energy. Climate experts generally agree that the initial targets pledged in Paris will not be enough to reach the goal, and next year nations are required to articulate more ambitious targets.

Hopes that China would offer to do much more are fading.

Recent media reports and satellite images suggest that China is building or planning to complete new coal power plants with total capacity of 148 gigawatts — nearly equal to the entire coal-power capacity of the European Union within the next few years, according to an analysis by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.

Separately, investment in China’s renewable energy dropped almost 40 percent in the first half of 2019 compared with the same period last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research organization. The government slashed subsidies for solar energy.

Last week in Beijing, China’s vice minister of ecology and environment told reporters that non-fossil-fuel sources already account for 14.3% of the country’s energy mix. He did not indicate that China would embrace more stringent targets soon.

“We are still faced with challenges of developing our economy, improving people’s livelihood,” Zhao Yingmin said.

China is alternately cast as the world’s worst climate villain or its potential clean-energy savior, but both superlatives are somewhat misplaced.

As a fast-growing economy, it was always inevitable that China’s energy demands would climb steeply. The only question was whether the country could power a sufficiently large portion of its economy with renewables to curb emissions growth.

Many observers took hope from a brief dip in China’s carbon emissions between 2014 and 2016, as well as Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s statement in 2017 that China had “taken a driving seat in international cooperation to respond to climate change.”

Today the country’s renewed focus on coal comes as a disappointment.

“Now there’s a sense that rather than being a leader, China is the one that is out of step,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Helsinki. He notes that several developed countries — including Germany, South Korea and the United States — are rapidly reducing their reliance on coal power.

Fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline and natural gas release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trapping heat and changing the climate. Coal is the biggest culprit.

Last year, coal consumption in the United States hit th elowest level in nearly 40 years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

One place to consider the rise, pause and rise again of China’s coal sector is Shanxi province — a vast mountainous region in central China.

Shanxi is the heart of China’s traditional coal country, dotted with large mines, but also the site of some of the country’s largest solar and wind-power projects, according to state media.

During most of the past 30 years of rapid economic growth, the coal business boomed in Shanxi and nearby provinces. As China’s cities and industries expanded, coal supplied much of that power, and China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s top carbon emitter in 2006.

But after climbing sharply for two decades, China’s emissions stalled around 2013 and then declined slightly in 2015 and 2016, according to Global Carbon Budget, which tracks emissions worldwide. This dip came as Chinese leaders declared a “war on pollution” and suspended the construction of dozens of planned coal power plants, including some in Shanxi.

At the same time, the government required many existing coal operators to install new equipment in smokestacks to remove sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide and other hazardous substances. About 80% of coal plants now have scrubbers, said Alvin Lin, Beijing-based China climate and energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit.

As a result, the air quality in many Chinese cities, including Beijing, improved significantly between 2013 and 2017. Residents long accustomed to wearing face masks and running home air-filter machines enjoyed a reprieve of more “blue sky days,” as low-pollution days are known in China.

Annual levels of PM 2.5 — a tiny but dangerous pollutant — dropped by roughly a third across China between 2013 and 2017, from 61.8 to 42 micrograms per cubic meter, according to scientists at Beijing’s Tsinghua University and other institutions. They made the report in November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal.

“That’s a big improvement, although in terms of safe air quality, we’re still not there yet,” Lin said. China’s pollution levels are still well above standards set by the World Health Organization.

While these retrofitted coal plants emit fewer pollutants that harm human health, the scrubbers do not reduce greenhouse gases. “The new plants are good for air quality, but you still have all that carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere,” Lin said.

In the past three years, China’s carbon emissions have begun to rise again, according to Global Carbon Budget.

That trend was evident in the first half of 2019, when China’s carbon emissions from fossil fuels and concrete production rose 4%, compared with the same period last year, according to Myllyvirta’s preliminary analysis of Chinese government data.

The coming winter in Beijing may see a return of prolonged smog, as authorities loosen environmental controls on heavy industry — in part to compensate for other slowing sectors in the economy. Cement and steel production remain both energy intensive and heavily polluting.

Permits for new coal plants proliferated after regulatory authority was briefly devolved from Beijing to provincial governments, which see construction projects and coal operations as boosts to local economies and tax bases, said Ted Nace, executive director of Global Energy Monitor.

“It’s as though a boa constructor swallowed a giraffe, and now we’re watching that bulge move through the system,” said Nace. In China, it takes about three years to build a coal plant.

In November, Premier Li Keqiang gave a speech to policymakers emphasizing the importance of domestic coal to energy security.

But because China’s coal-power expansion is growing faster than energy demand, overcapacity “is a serious concern now,” said Columbia University’s Tu.

And once new infrastructure is built, it’s hard to ignore.

“It will be politically difficult to tear down a brand-new coal plant that’s employing people and supporting a mining operation. It will make it more difficult for China to transition away from coal,” Nace said.

The world has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius. All scenarios envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for holding planetary warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius involve steep worldwide reductions in coal-power generation.

In that effort, other countries rely on China to manufacture most of the solar panels installed worldwide, according to an analysis in the journal Science co-authored by Jonas Nahm, an energy expert at Johns Hopkins University.

“If we have any chance to meet climate targets, we have to do a lot by 2030 — and we won’t be able to do it without China’s clean-energy supply chain,” Nahm said.

China’s manufacturing helped bring down the cost of solar panels by 80% between 2008 and 2013. Prices for wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries also dropped significantly, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“China has a really mixed record. On the one hand, it’s seen rapidly rising emissions over the past two decades,” Nahm said. “On the other hand, it’s shown it’s able to innovate around manufacturing — and make new energy technologies available at scale, faster and cheaper.”

Robert Reich: McConnell May Be Worse Than Trump

He’s maybe the most dangerous politician of my lifetime. He’s helped transform the Republican Party into a cult, worshiping at the altar of authoritarianism. He’s damaged our country in ways that may take a generation to undo. The politician I’m talking about, of course, is Mitch McConnell.

Two goals for November 3, 2020: The first and most obvious is to get the worst president in history out of the White House. That’s necessary but not sufficient. We also have to flip the Senate and remove the worst Senate Majority Leader in history.

Like Trump, Mitch McConnell is no garden-variety bad public official. McConnell puts party above America, and Trump above party. Even if Trump is gone, if the Senate remains in Republican hands and McConnell is reelected, America loses because McConnell will still have a chokehold on our democracy.

This is the man who refused for almost a year to allow the Senate to consider President Obama’s moderate Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland.

And then, when Trump became president, this is the man who got rid of the age-old Senate rule requiring 60 Senators to agree on a Supreme Court nomination so he could ram through not one but two Supreme Court justices, including one with a likely history of sexual assault.

This is the man who rushed through the Senate, without a single hearing, a $2 trillion tax cut for big corporations and wealthy Americans – a tax cut that raised the government debt by almost the same amount, generated no new investment, failed to raise wages, but gave the stock market a temporary sugar high because most corporations used the tax savings to buy back their own shares of stock.

McConnell refuses to support what’s needed for comprehensive election security – although both the U.S. intelligence community and Special Prosecutor Mueller say Moscow is continuing to hack into our voting machines and to weaponize disinformation through social media.

McConnell has earned the nickname “Moscow Mitch” because he’s doing exactly what Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump want him to do – leave America vulnerable to another Putin-supported victory for Trump.

McConnell is also blocking bipartisan background-check legislation for gun sales, even after the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, El Paso and Odessa, Texas.

So even if Trump is out of the White House, if McConnell remains Senate Majority Leader he will not allow a Democratic president to govern.

He won’t allow debate or votes on Medicare for All, universal pre-K, a wealth tax, student loan forgiveness, or the Green New Deal. He won’t allow confirmation votes on judges nominated by a Democratic president.

The good news is McConnell is the least popular senator in the country with his own constituents. He’s repeatedly sacrificed Kentucky to Trump’s agenda – for example, agreeing to Trump’s so-called emergency funding for a border wall, which would take $63 million away from projects like a new middle school on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee.

McConnell is even cut funding for black lung disease suffered by Kentucky coal miners. I know from my years as labor secretary that coal mining is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and the number of cases of incurable black lung disease has been on the rise. But when a group of miners took a 10-hour bus ride to Washington this past summer to ask McConnell to restore the funding, McConnell met with them for one minute and then refused to help them. No wonder Democrats are lining up in Kentucky to run against Moscow Mitch in 2020.

The not-so-good news is that McConnell is up for re-election the same day as Donald Trump, and Trump did well in Kentucky in 2016. Which means we have to help organize Kentucky, just as we have to organize other states that may not be swing states in the presidential election but could take back the Senate.

Consider Georgia: Republican Senator Johnny Isakson is retiring, meaning both of Georgia’s Senate seats are now up for grabs. And this one extra seat—in a state that is trending blue—could be the tipping point that allows Democrats to win enough seats to end GOP control of the Senate.

Trump has to go, but so does McConnell.

Here’s what you can do: Wherever you are in the country, you can donate to McConnell’s challengers. If you live in or near Kentucky, you can get out and knock doors or make calls. Or if you have friends or family in the state, encourage them to get involved.

As to the question of who is worse, Trump or McConnell — the answer is that it’s too close to call. The two of them have degraded and corrupted American democracy. We need them both out.

For Banks, Data on Your Spending Habits Could be a Gold Mine

NEW YORK — There’s a powerful new player watching what you buy so it can tailor product offerings for you: the bank behind your credit or debit card.

For years, Google and Facebook have been showing ads based on your online behavior. Retailers from Amazon to Walgreens also regularly suction up your transaction history to steer future spending and hold your loyalty.

Now banks, too, want to turn data they already have on your spending habits into extra revenue by identifying likely customers for retailers. Banks are increasingly aware that they could be sitting on a gold mine of information that can be used to predict — or sway — where you spend. Historically, such data has been used mostly for fraud protection.

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Suppose you were to treat yourself to lunch on Cyber Monday, the busiest online shopping day of the year. If you order ahead at Chipotle — paying, of course, with your credit card — you might soon find your bank dangling 10% off lunch at Little Caesars. The bank would earn fees from the pizza joint, both for showing the offer and processing the payment.

Wells Fargo began customizing retail offers for individual customers on Nov. 21, joining Chase, Bank of America, PNC, SunTrust and a slew of smaller banks.

Unlike Google or Facebook, which try to infer what you’re interested in buying based on your searches, web visits or likes, “banks have the secret weapon in that they actually know what we spend money on,” said Silvio Tavares of the trade group CardLinx Association, whose members help broker purchase-related offers. “It’s a better predictor of what we’re going to spend on.”

While banks say they’re moving cautiously and being mindful of privacy concerns, it’s not clear that consumers are fully aware of what their banks are up to.

Banks know many of our deepest, darkest secrets — that series of bills paid at a cancer clinic, for instance, or that big strip-club tab that you thought stayed in Vegas. A bank might suspect someone’s adulterous affair long before the betrayed partner would.

“Ten years ago, your bank was like your psychiatrist or your minister — your bank kept secrets,” said Ed Mierzwinski, a consumer advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Now, he says, “they think they are the same as a department store or an online merchant.”

The startup Cardlytics, one of the field’s pioneers, runs the offer programs for Wells Fargo, Chase and other banks. Though these partnerships, Cardlytics says it gets insights on about $2.8 trillion worth of annual consumer spending worldwide.

A Cardlytics rival named Augeo runs a similar program with other banks, which it declined to name. American Express has an in-house program for its cardholders. Visa targets offers on Uber’s app for credits toward rides and food delivery.

Even though banks only know where you’ve shopped — and not specifically what you bought — they’re often able to make educated guesses. After all, it’s not likely you’re at a liquor store for the potato chips.

The bank can then infer other things you may like. It would have a pretty good idea that you’re about to travel if you’ve charged a flight or hotel stays. HSBC is looking into using that data to set up automatic alerts, so that it wouldn’t decline your card use as fraudulent when you start charging for meals in Kathmandu or Karachi.

The next step is to make location-specific offers, perhaps for a car rental, as soon as you land. Marcos Meneguzzi, HSBC’s U.S. head of cards and unsecured lending, said cardholders will welcome such offers, at least when they’re relevant. But he warns that banks could easily overstep and lose their customers’ trust.

Many of these efforts remain in their infancy, and it’s not yet clear how well they’ll catch on. The Cardlytics programs, for instance, don’t push offers through notifications. You have to look for them in your banking app or website.

Abeer Bhatia, an executive with Chase’s credit-card business, said commissions barely cover operational costs. To Chase, the program is more important for incentivizing rewards-conscious consumers to use its cards. If a Chase card gets you an extra 10% at Rite Aid, why pull out your Citi card?

As far as these companies are concerned, Americans have repeatedly demonstrated that they value freebies and discounts more than intangible privacy concerns.

“Consumers understand the banks are giving them ways to save money based on how they shop,” said Scott Grimes, CEO and co-founder of Cardlytics.

But banks often don’t explain clearly what they’re doing with your data, even though they sometimes share your transactions with outside data companies such as Cardlytics to process offers. And many banks don’t seek explicit consent, instead including these programs by reference in general agreements for the card or online banking.

“It’s totally long, and people don’t read that,” said Saisattha Noomnual, a graduate student in Chicago who gets targeted offers through her Chase and Bank of America cards.

Under federal law, banks merely have to let you withdraw from marketing, or opt out. That’s difficult to do if you’re not aware it’s happening.

Noomnual said she can only guess she gets more offers for Starbucks because she visits Starbucks a lot. She reasons that based on how well banks analyze her spending for fraud alerts. While she said she doesn’t mind that, she wishes banks were more forthcoming.

Bank of America declined comment. Chase said it tries to keep disclosures simple and understandable without overwhelming consumers.

Banks insist they don’t share personal information with other companies because they replace names with anonymous ID numbers. Privacy researchers, however, have shown that such data can be “de-anonymized” under the right conditions.

Privacy advocates worry that past transactions could come back to haunt you. Frequent visits to fast-food joints might flag you as a health risk, which could be a problem if your health insurer could pay to learn about that. Auto insurers might grow wary of cardholders who run up large bar tabs.

And ultimately, these targeted offers could inadvertently encourage people to overspend or double down on unhealthy habits such as fast food.

“Consumers aren’t aware of the subtle nudges apps are giving them to buy, buy, buy,” Mierzwinski said. “They are basically digging deep into your psyche and figuring out how to manipulate you.”