Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 76

The free-market welfare state: Preserving dynamism in a volatile world

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Reprinted with permission from the Niskanen Center.

Today I’m proud to release my latest paper for the Niskanen Center, “The Free-Market Welfare State: Preserving dynamism in a volatile world.” You can find it here.

The paper proposes a set of principles for a “free-market welfare state” research and reform agenda, based around a simple but provocative thesis: America’s historical combination of free-markets and limited income security is fundamentally unstable. Either we get better at complementing markets with comprehensive income and re-employment supports, or the forces of creative destruction will generate anti-market backlashes with lasting political consequences:

The fallout from China’s entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 is a clear case in point. Cheaper imports benefited millions of Americans through lower consumer prices. At the same time, Chinese import competition destroyed nearly two million jobs in manufacturing and associated services — a classic case of creative destruction. Yet rather than help those workers adjust, our social insurance system left them to languish. In the regions of the United States most exposed to import competition, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) was more than twice as responsive to the economic shock as unemployment insurance and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) combined, even though it is one of the most restrictive disability programs in the developed world. Indeed, while critics of the welfare state often argue the United States spends a trillion dollars a year on social programs, only about a quarter of this comes close to anything resembling cash or quasi-cash income support — about the same annual amount spent subsidizing employer-based health insurance.

I illustrate the gaps in our income security system with an “income adequacy” metric from the OECD’s social expenditure database — in essence, a country’s post-transfer minimum income:

Why does this gap matter? Through a dive into the political economy of the welfare state, I argue that democracies tend to respond to economic insecurity in one of two ways: Either the cooperative surplus of a productive, growing economy is used to buoy workers in transition, or politicians are tempted to intervene in the market itself through reactive regulations. Consider the mounting research showing that the China Shock fueled a subsequent growth in anti-trade sentiment that directly contributed to increased political polarization, helped nativists win election to Congress, and put wind at the back of populist presidential candidates. In short, absent robust systems of social insurance, even one-off economic shocks can have lasting political-economic consequences.

This can be further shown cross-nationally by plotting the OECD’s income adequacy metric against the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom (modified to remove its “government size” components). The strong positive relationship between income security and economic freedom is immediately apparent:

To illustrate the dilemma created by the mismatch between ideological affiliation and actual political-economic outcomes, I propose a multi-axis model of political ideology that makes an explicit distinction between light-touch social insurance and heavy-handed market interventions:

The traditional ideological spectrum runs diagonally from the bottom right, “libertarian” or anti-government quadrant (pro-market, anti-transfer), to the top left, “social democratic” or pro-government quadrant (anti-market, pro-transfer). Orthogonal to the traditional spectrum are what could be thought of as the “reactionary populism” and “free-market welfare state” quadrants. Like other varieties of liberalism, the success of free-market welfare states is liminal, existing on the boundary of conflicting worldviews.

Thus while history is not predetermined, the multi-axis model suggests that the current U.S. equilibrium is unstable. Measured economic freedom in the United States has been slowly declining in recent years, and with future trade and technology on the horizon, there’s a risk that the trend will accelerate towards the reactionary-populist quadrant. The paper therefore leads with a framework for thinking about a “free-market welfare state” research and reform agenda, premised around four design principles:

Promoting productive risk-taking and entrepreneurship;
Easing the adjustment costs of trade and technology shocks;
Benefit portability and neutrality to market structure;
Robustness to immigration.

Applying these principles in good faith will require defenders of free-markets to transcend the politics of austerity. Indeed, a more universal welfare state, far from being at odds with innovation and economic freedom, may end up being their ultimate guarantor.

Trump’s delay on tariff decision disappoints regional steelmakers

Getty/Photo Montage by Salon

This piece originally appeared on 100 Days in Appalachia.

Regional iron and steel industry leaders say they are disappointed by the Trump administration’s delay on a decision about which countries will face new import tariffs. President Trump has postponed until June a decision on which countries will be subject to new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The decision had been due May 1.

Nucor Corporation CEO and president John Ferriola was among the steel and iron industry representatives who discussed the delay in a press briefing on Tuesday. Nucor has facilities in Kentucky and Ohio. Ferriola said the delay is disappointing because it gives other countries more time to undercut domestic producers with unfairly priced goods, a practice known as dumping.

“By opening up another month what we’re doing is giving these countries another month,” he said. “These countries that have been dumping into our country get another month to get their steel into the country before the tariffs or quotas go into effect.”

Ferriola supports the president’s tariffs and said he is confident that there will be no more extensions.

Originally, Trump announced a 25 percent tariff for steel imports and 10 percent for aluminum. He then temporarily exempted the EU, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and South Korea.

South Korea has secured a permanent exemption to the tariffs, but the U.S. is limiting South Korea’s steel exports by imposing a quota.

The pending decision will determine if the other countries, which include some of the biggest U.S. trading partners on metals products, will remain exempt, face tariffs or face product quotas limiting the amount of exports to the U.S.

Ferriola said he wants action on those countries’ status.

“At the end of the day if our words are to have meaning we have to act on those,” he said. “We have to follow through on the promises we made to our industry and to our country and we’re counting on the president to do that.”

Commercial Metals Company Executive Vice President and COO Tracy Porter called the continued diminishing of the U.S. manufacturing sector “a travesty.”

“At the pace we’re going we are going to be relegated to some third world country status, probably in my children’s lifetime, if we do not stop it now,” he said. “Unfair is unfair.”

The Ohio Valley has long been a major center for iron, steel, and aluminum production. Despite sharp reductions in recent decades there are still more than 200 steel, aluminum and iron facilities in Kentucky alone.

However, economists warn that tariffs can create problems for domestic industries as well. Affected trading partners have threatened to retaliate against U.S. goods, and the tariffs would raise prices for U.S. businesses and consumers that use steel and aluminum.

According to a report by the Tax Foundation the estimated negative effect on Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia businesses could be more than $600,000 each year.

The latest news on Russian interference

Getty/Sean Gallup

Earlier this week, I wrote about what information related to Russian interference in the U.S. elections Americans need before this year’s midterm elections: the Senate intelligence committee report on the issue, the entire cache of Facebook ads that Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) purchased targeting American voters, and a report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office about Russian influence on the election and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion. Two of those three are now in motion.

On Tuesday, the Senate intelligence committee released the first of what will be multiple reports on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The six-page report covers Russian cyberattacks on U.S. voting systems, explains what Russian hackers did and what their motives were, and lays out recommendations for government agencies to prevent foreigners from interfering in future elections. According to Buzzfeed, “The next report will evaluate the Intelligence Community’s January 2017 assessment that found the Russians waged an influence campaign in the 2016 elections and ‘developed a clear preference for’ President Donald Trump.”

Today, Democrats on the House intelligence committee released the entire cache of Russian Facebook and Instagram ads. It’s quite the document dump — PDF files of all 3,519 ads including targeting information with each ad. The accompanying analysis makes clear that the same Russians whom Mueller’s office indicted for attempting to aid the Trump campaign are responsible for the ads. Here are a few more facts from the analysis worth noting:

 During the hearing, Committee Members noted the breadth of activity by the IRA on Facebook: 

3,393 advertisements purchased (3,519 advertisements were released today);
More than 11.4 million American users exposed to those advertisements;
470 IRA-created Facebook pages;
80,000 pieces of organic content created by those pages; and
Exposure of organic content to more than 126 million Americans.

A few things of note about the ads. The data dump doesn’t include 80,000 pieces of organic content (content without an ad buy behind it) that Russian trolls spread on Facebook. (House Democrats promise they’ll eventually release that content as well.) .

Russia sought to weaponize social media to drive a wedge between Americans, and in an attempt to sway the 2016 election. They created fake accounts, pages and communities to push divisive online content and videos, and to mobilize real Americans.

Here's how: pic.twitter.com/JqKSm5saAi

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 10, 2018

Russia sought to divide us by our race, our country of origin, our religion, and our politics. They attempted to hijack legitimate events meant to do good – teaching self-defense, providing legal aid – as well as those events meant to widen a rift.

Here's just some examples: pic.twitter.com/YMX2FTgPGU

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 10, 2018

They sought to harness Americans’ very real frustrations and anger over sensitive political matters to influence our thinking, voting and behavior. They created online communities that appeared organic and American, but were really run by a troll farm in St. Petersburg: pic.twitter.com/8NabLfv6go

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 10, 2018

In the report, House Democrats quote Mueller’s indictment of the 13 Russians that says Russia’s initial goal was to weaken American democracy but ultimately became electing Trump. There are a multitude of possible reasons for this — all of which the special counsel is charged with investigating — but it seems fair to say that if your goal is undermining American democracy, Trump is the guy you’d want running the country.

Russia attacked America with a combination of sophisticated cyber tactics. Russians hacked some of our voting machines and ran a multiyear propaganda operation across multiple platforms. They exploited our political and cultural weaknesses for their own gain. The more Americans understand about their tactics, the better prepared we’ll be to combat their attacks in 2018 and beyond.

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Congress aims to force Pentagon reform on open burning of munitions

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This article originally appeared on ProPublica.

This article originally appeared on ProPublica.

The next round of Department of Defense funding will come with an important requirement: Congress wants the Pentagon’s outmoded and highly toxic practice of burning old munitions and other explosives in the open air to finally come to a stop.

The language of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act made public this week, which proposes $717 billion in spending, also demands that the Pentagon report back to Congress with a specific plan for ending the centurylong burning of munitions.

ProPublica investigated the Pentagon’s open burn program as part of a series of reports on Department of Defense pollution last year. We highlighted a little-known program to incinerate millions of pounds of materials containing dangerous contaminants in the open air at more than 60 sites across the country, often without common-sense protections. The burns posed a substantial risk to service members and nearby civilians, including schoolchildren.

“The Pentagon will have to tell us what it plans to do to stop this practice,” wrote U.S. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, a Democrat from New Hampshire, in an emailed statement to ProPublica. Shea-Porter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, introduced the amendment to the spending bill that deals with open burns. Shea-Porter earlier led efforts to curb the Pentagon’s use of open burn pits at overseas bases — a practice believed by medical experts to have sickened thousands of U.S. soldiers — and she has often pressed for action against other defense-related pollution risks at home.

“If these answers aren’t satisfactory, I am hopeful that the Armed Services Committee will require the Defense Department to take appropriate action to curb this disturbing practice,” she wrote.

Shea-Porter told New Hampshire Public Radio that she and the Armed Services Committee took up the burn issue this year after reading ProPublica’s reporting.

Neither a spokesperson for the office of the Secretary of Defense nor for the Army’s munitions department immediately responded to requests for comment. But in previous statements to ProPublica, the Department of Defense has maintained that its open burn practices have already been vastly curtailed over the past decade, and where they still take place today, they are both safer and far less expensive than alternatives.

Congress has pressed the Pentagon to phase out open burning for more than a quarter-century. This past year, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine began studying the risks and impacts of the Pentagon’s burn practices.

The new bill would force the Defense Department to report back to Congress on the findings of this study and set out exactly what it will do to implement any recommendations made by the National Academies. The measure appears designed to spur the Pentagon to propose its own solutions, but could well lead to a law requiring regulatory action.

If the Defense Department cannot lay out a specific course of action, “it is essentially telling the Committee that it won’t do anything after the Committee explicitly said it was concerned about the practice,” a Congressional staff person with knowledge of the bill told ProPublica. “That typically doesn’t go over well. The intent here is to get DoD to take this seriously.” 

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Coalition of mayors goes to Washington to save federal programs

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

This piece originally appeared on 100 Days in Appalachia.

A group of mayors and city managers from across the country, including a sizable delegation from West Virginia and other Appalachian states, came to Washington, D.C. on April 24 to represent their rural communities and defend federal programs at risk for being rescinded from the Fiscal Year 2018 budget bill.

These officials, connected through the First & Main coalition, started their day by briefing House and Senate staffers on the importance of shielding and securing programs and funds that not only drive their local economies, but also solve some of their constituents’ most pressing issues. The prioritized programs were outlined in the coalition’s Blueprint, which the mayors delivered to their states’ representatives.

“We need and, quite frankly expect, the federal government to be there as a reliable partner working to help us build a thriving economy . . . We’re worried that Washington is not recognizing the importance of those federal programs and resources that are driving local revitalization,” mayor of Oxford, Miss., Robyn Tannehill said during the briefing. She added that talks of rescinding key portions of the bill and targeting domestic spending programs are happening now.

“Congressional appropriations subcommittees are putting together the spending plan now for the coming year. We need your support. We ask for your support in the budgeting, appropriations, tax and oversight process to make sure that these critical domestic programs . . . remain priorities,” she concluded.

Mayor Steve Williams of Huntington, W.Va. stressed the unique position of small towns and communities and their relationship with federal programs.

“One of the things we are able to do that larger cities aren’t able to do is that we are nimble. We’re small, we can respond quicker to the issues of today, we can identify sooner what works and for those things that aren’t working, we are able to correct more rapidly . . . Small to midsize communities are the innovation laboratories in our country.”

“We know what we need. We need partners who will show us how we can get there more quickly. . . . What we’re saying to you is simply ‘don’t forget the local needs.’ Don’t ignore the local programs that have been working,” Williams said in his parting words to Hill staffers.

The House and Senate were fairly well represented during the briefing, and both followed up with questions afterward. It would appear that on this issue, the coalition has reached a basic level of bipartisanship.

The West Virginia delegation consisted of eight mayors and city managers, representing a cross section of the state’s communities — from smaller ones like Charles Town (pop. just more than 5,000), represented by Mayor Scott Rogers to major ones like Huntington (pop. almost 50,000), run by Mayor Steve Williams. Also present were Mayor of Wheeling, Glenn Elliott, Mayor of Ranson, Duke Pierson and Mayor of Weirton, Harold “Bubba” Miller.

Not everyone got to brief from the podium, but those who did touched upon a host of issues. The mayors highlighted programs from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Economic Development Administration (EDA).

Both mayors Robyn Tannehill and Robert Reichert, from Macon-Bibb, Ga., made a special note of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), listing a number of investments and initiatives that benefited their towns and would not be possible without continued patronage.

“(The Local Arts Center’s) success would not be possible without the grant from the National Endowment for the Arts . . . It allowed us to provide an affordable venue for artists, making it possible for them to thrive in our downtown area,” Tannehill said of the NEA grant that helped fund a project that saved local Oxford artists from being priced out of their own downtown area, a phenomenon she characterized as “falling a victim to our own success,” an unwanted side effect of their growing and booming town.

Mayor Reichert called the budget cuts “penny-wise and pound-foolish.” He warned that the savings the federal government could find by cutting essential programs for the rural communities would fail to fix the budget deficit, but would surely thwart their progress.

He provided a very similar list of agencies and programs and agencies that benefit his community, ranging from the EPA, EDA, USDA and HUD, all the way to the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), Rural Development program, Appalachian Community Renewal, Manufacturing Extension Partnership, National Park Service and, again, the National Endowment for the Arts, which he characterized as the "boogeyman" of the current administration.

West Virginia mayors had a series of meetings arranged to follow the briefing.

There was a certain sense of camaraderie between the group throughout the day and at lunch. The general consensus seemed to be that the current Administration targets almost every program that is relevant to the very places that were responsible in electing President Trump.

“It’s not like they are doing anything they didn’t say they would do. But they’re misguided,” one mayor said at lunch. “They are highly misguided.”

The officials took off for the Executive Building to meet with representatives from the White House Office of Public Liaison, Intergovernmental Affairs and Domestic Policy Council. After that, it was time for meetings with their senators, Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican Shelley Moore Capito.

Although the meetings were off limits to me, after the mayors left Sen. Manchin’s office, he stepped out and spoke with me me briefly.

I asked the Senator if he would support the First & Main agenda and their bipartisan effort to secure federal programs that help their communities, and if he’s committed to defending those programs. He said yes, he would fight to push back against the efforts to rescind them. He also offered his explanation of what put the funding in danger in the first place.

“We had a fast track, irresponsible tax cut bill that went through and destroyed all the programs, and (the budget cuts are) going to continue. Their main concern was giving tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America and the wealthiest corporations ... I wanted to do the tax overhaul, and tax cuts were needed, but not at the expense of every little city and every little town and every little community getting devastated.”

I asked Sen. Manchin about the Rural Infrastructure Initiative that the White House presented in mid-February, and his reaction was almost immediate: “We’re not seeing any money put into it” He quickly followed by saying that the projected amount of dollars needed went down to $200 billion because of the $1.5 trillion of additional debt resulting from the tax bill passed in December.

Mayor Williams responded by email a few days later and expressed his satisfaction,  "In short, we got the 'West Virginia treatment' - respect, familiarity, and encouragement."

But the true test of the coalition’s effectiveness will be reflected by votes of support in Congress.

The thinking error at the root of science denial

pogonici, via Shutterstock

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.

No shades of gray

As a psychotherapist, I see a striking parallel between a type of thinking involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. As I explain in my book “Psychotherapeutic Diagrams,” dichotomous thinking, also called black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder.

In this type of cognition, a spectrum of possibilities is divided into two parts, with a blurring of distinctions within those categories. Shades of gray are missed; everything is considered either black or white. Dichotomous thinking is not always or inevitably wrong, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities because these usually involve spectrums of possibilities, not binaries.

Spectrums are sometimes split in very asymmetric ways, with one-half of the binary much larger than the other. For example, perfectionists categorize their work as either perfect or unsatisfactory; good and very good outcomes are lumped together with poor ones in the unsatisfactory category. In borderline personality disorder, relationship partners are perceived as either all good or all bad, so one hurtful behavior catapults the partner from the good to the bad category. It’s like a pass/fail grading system in which 100 percent correct earns a P and everything else gets an F.

In my observations, I see science deniers engage in dichotomous thinking about truth claims. In evaluating the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they divide the spectrum of possibilities into two unequal parts: perfect certainty and inconclusive controversy. Any bit of data that does not support a theory is misunderstood to mean that the formulation is fundamentally in doubt, regardless of the amount of supportive evidence.

Similarly, deniers perceive the spectrum of scientific agreement as divided into two unequal parts: perfect consensus and no consensus at all. Any departure from 100 percent agreement is categorized as a lack of agreement, which is misinterpreted as indicating fundamental controversy in the field.

There is no “proof” in science

In my view, science deniers misapply the concept of “proof.”

Proof exists in mathematics and logic but not in science. Research builds knowledge in progressive increments. As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but no final end point to the process. Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.

I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.

For example, climate change skeptics jump from the realization that we do not completely understand all climate-related variables to the inference that we have no reliable knowledge at all. Similarly, they give equal weight to the 97 percent of climate scientists who believe in human-caused global warming and the 3 percent who do not, even though many of the latter receive support from the fossil fuels industry.

This same type of thinking can be seen among creationists. They seem to misinterpret any limitation or flux in evolutionary theory to mean that the validity of this body of research is fundamentally in doubt. For example, the biologist James Shapiro (no relation) discovered a cellular mechanism of genomic change that Darwin did not know about. Shapiro views his research as adding to evolutionary theory, not upending it. Nonetheless, his discovery and others like it, refracted through the lens of dichotomous thinking, result in articles with titles like, “Scientists Confirm: Darwinism Is Broken” by Paul Nelson and David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute, which promotes the theory of “intelligent design.” Shapiro insists that his research provides no support for intelligent design, but proponents of this pseudoscience repeatedly cite his work as if it does.

For his part, Trump engages in dichotomous thinking about the possibility of a link between childhood vaccinations and autism. Despite exhaustive research and the consensus of all major medical organizations that no link exists, Trump has often cited a link between vaccines and autism and he advocates changing the standard vaccination protocol to protect against this nonexistent danger.

There is a vast gulf between perfect knowledge and total ignorance, and we live most of our lives in this gulf. Informed decision-making in the real world can never be perfectly informed, but responding to the inevitable uncertainties by ignoring the best available evidence is no substitute for the imperfect approach to knowledge called science.

Jeremy P. Shapiro, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University

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Why does Ebola keep showing up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

AP Photo/Tanya Bindra, File

This article was originally published by Scientific American.

When news broke this week that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is facing yet another Ebola outbreak, many public health experts were not surprised. The vast central African country has dealt with more outbreaks of this often-fatal hemorrhagic disease than any other nation. Yet exactly why the DRC is hit so often remains an unanswered question.

The DRC Ministry of Health announced the latest outbreak this week after laboratory testing confirmed two cases had occurred in the northwestern part of the country, near the its border with the similarly named Republic of the Congo. This is DRC’s ninth Ebola outbreak since scientists first identified the disease.

Most of the country’s outbreaks burn out quickly because they occur in relatively remote areas—but each has had a high fatality rate. The world’s first-known Ebola cases occurred in the DRC in 1976 (when the country was called Zaire), killing 280 of the 318 people known to have been infected. Last year eight cases were reported, and half of the infected people died.

The disease spreads among humans through direct contact with the bodily fluids of a person who is sick with or has died from Ebola. It can be transmitted via sexual contact. It can also spread to people who encounter the bodily fluids or viscera of infected primates or bats, such as when someone prepares these animals for food. Most outbreaks have originated in Africa or from lab accidents elsewhere, and have remained small—but people traveling from sites of a 2014 outbreak that roiled west Africa led to isolated cases in locations including the U.K., Italy, Spain and the U.S.

Ebola experts have various suspicions about why the DRC remains so vulnerable. Most theories involve the country’s large forested areas, and the possibility that infected fruit bats — widely believed to be the primary reservoir animal for the disease — are common in the affected areas. “If you live or work in a forest where bats roost, you may have the bad luck to be in touch with bat guano from an infected animal. Or perhaps you encountered saliva or guano on a piece of fruit which an infected fruit bat was involved with,” says Daniel Bausch, a veteran Ebola responder and director of the U.K. Public Health Rapid Support Team. In certain areas of the DRC — including where Ebola has been reported recently — the disease can now be considered endemic in reservoir animals, he says.

During the massive Ebola crisis that gripped west Africa from 2014 to 2016, researchers were told about a bat-filled roosting tree in Guinea they suspected may have been ground zero for that outbreak. Rounding up some of those bats could have given scientists a chance to test the animals and confirm them as a main reservoir for the disease. But the tree burned down and the bats were reduced to char, destroying the opportunity to search for much evidence — although researchers were able to use trace DNA fragments to pinpoint that they were Mops condylurus, an insect-eating species common across central and west Africa.

Whether experts will be able to find infected bats during the latest DRC outbreak remains unknown, partly because there may have been undetected cases of the disease dating back months; any culprit bat colony may have moved on by now. “If the outbreak started last month, then yes, it would be interesting to sample the bats. But if it started in December, then no, the best thing to do may be come to back next December” (when the same type of bats may return to the area), says Pierre Rollin, an Ebola expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who has responded to most known Ebola outbreaks.

Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was part of the team that originally discovered the virus in 1976, also believes people’s interactions with infected bats may be behind the repeated outbreaks there. “Due to its huge swathes of forest, the DRC is a reservoir for the virus, making the country particularly susceptible to outbreaks of Ebola,” he says. “Occasionally people living in these rural areas will come into contact with infected animals, and the transmission cycle begins.” Some experts also suspect deforestation could be a factor, bringing infected animals and people together in the area when they may cut down trees or butcher infected bats for food. DRC is about the size of Greenland—almost a million square miles—and much of it has long been forested, notes Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

The extent to which individual countries can detect, confirm and report the disease may also affect scientists’ understanding of why it occurs where it does. Whether or not the DRC is truly seeing the disease much more than some of its neighbors is debatable, Rollin says. “I think there could be surveillance bias—it’s difficult to say,” he says, noting the neighboring Republic of the Congo had multiple Ebola outbreaks in the early 2000s, although none have been reported since 2003. “The reservoir [animal] is in DRC, Gabon and the Republic of [the] Congo,” he says. So what’s different? The DRC has more robust Ebola surveillance and lab testing capacity in place, he says, and that may be a factor.

The U.K.’s rapid response team and the CDC are both standing by to help respond to the latest outbreak, and are consulting with the World Health Organization and the DRC’s Ministry of Health. But the British and U.S. organizations are not yet part of the formal response on the ground.  The formal response team — WHO, Doctors Without Borders and the DRC health ministry — have just arrived in the area, Rollin says, so there are still many unknowns.

In the latest DRC outbreak, “it is concerning that of the 21 reported cases so far, 17 are fatal. That makes me think this is the tip of the iceberg. But how large the iceberg is right now, it’s too early to say. It is appropriate to be taking this seriously and mounting a firm response,” Bausch says. “The village at the heart of the current outbreak is remote by land but it is on a major river with access to major population centers via the water route. And there is always concern about connections between populations.”

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The singularity is not near: The intellectual fraud of the “Singularitarians”

Getty/Henry Holt and Co.

Excerpted from “Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley” by Corey Pein. Published by Metropolitan Books. Copyright © 2018 by Corey Pein. All rights reserved.

Technology was identified as the true official religion of the modern state more than seventy years ago by the late Christian anarchist philosopher Jacques Ellul. A remarkable man, and a leader of the French underground resistance who sheltered refugees from the Holocaust, Ellul survived a global catastrophe that was enabled by scientists and engineers only to find that these same technicians, these false priests, would rule the century. And how he loathed them. “Particularly disquieting is the gap between the enormous power they wield and their critical ability, which must be estimated as null,” he wrote.

If, as Ellul has it, technology is the state religion, Singularitarianism must be seen as its most extreme and fanatical sect. It is the Opus Dei of the postwar church of gadget worship. Ray Kurzweil may be the best-known prophet of this order, but he was not the first. The true father of Singularitarianism is a sci-fi author and retired mathematics professor from Wisconsin named Vernor Vinge. His earliest written exposition of the idea appeared in the January 1983 issue of Omni, an oddball “science” magazine founded by Kathy Keeton, once among the “highest-paid strippers in Europe,” according to her New York Times obituary, but better known for promoting quack cancer cures and for cofounding Penthouse with her husband, Bob Guccione. In this esteemed journal, amid articles on “sea monkeys, apemen and living dinosaurs,” Vinge forecast a looming “technological singularity” in which computer intelligence would exceed the comprehension of its human creators. The remarkable exponential growth curve of technological advancement was not about to level off, Vinge proclaimed, but rather to accelerate beyond all imagining. “We will soon create intelligences greater than our own,” Vinge wrote. Unlike later writers, he did not see this as necessarily a positive development for humanity. “Physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility,” he wrote. “Think of the different ways we relate to animals.” In other words, our new robot overlords might reduce humans to slaves, livestock, or, if we’re lucky, pets.

Like many creative types, Vinge lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas. That task fell to Ray Kurzweil. A consummate brand builder, Kurzweil turned Vinge’s frown upside-down and recast the Singularity as a great big cosmic party, to great commercial success. Douglas Hofstadter, the scientist and author, derided Kurzweil’s theses as “a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid . . . with ideas that are crazy.” Nevertheless, it was a winning formula. By 2011, Time magazine named Kurzweil one of the one hundred “most influential people in the world” and endorsed the Singularity sect in a cover story. While seemingly “preposterous,” the magazine declared, the prospect of “super-intelligent immortal cyborgs” deserved “sober, careful evaluation.”

Even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn’t, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It’s not a fringe idea; it’s a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth.

This is absurd. Science begins with doubt. Everything else is sales. And Kurzweil is more salesman than scientist. In his writing and speeches, he has recycled the same tired catchphrases and anecdotes again and again. His entire argument hangs on two magic words: Moore’s Law, the theory that computer processing power grows exponentially each year. The theory, which was first conceived of by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore (and later named after him), doubles, incidentally, as a kind of advertisement for Intel microchips. Moore’s Law also inspired Kurzweil’s own Law of Accelerating Returns, which encapsulates his belief that the pace of all technological innovation is, over time, exponential. Within decades, Kurzweil figures, the unstoppable evolution of gadgetry will bring about the Singularity and all it entails: unlimited energy, superhuman AI, literal immortality, the resurrection of the dead, and the “destiny of the universe,” namely, the awakening of all matter and energy.

Kurzweil may not be much of a scientist, but he is an entertaining guru. His fake-it-till-you-make-it approach seems in good fun, except when he uses it to bluff through life-or-death problems. What’s worse, powerful people take him seriously, because he is forever telling them what they’d like to hear and zealously defending the excesses of consumer capitalism. Like techno-utopians such as Peter Thiel, Kurzweil has long argued that corporate interests should be calling the shots in the “new paradigms” of the future. Such views are unsurprising coming from a longtime corporate executive and salesman. Fossil fuels wrecking the planet? No worries, Kurzweil declares. We’ll crack the problem of cold fusion soon, and nanobots—always with the nanobots!—will restore the ruined environment. As America’s fortunes and prospects faded through the aughts, Kurzweil’s sanguine reveries sold more copies than ever, and the author insisted that things were better than ever and soon to be even more amazing.

For every conceivable problem, there is a plan, and it’s always the same plan: Someone in the future will invent something to solve it. Kurzweil has delivered the one true American faith the people were always waiting for, and it turns out to be an absurdly optimistic form of business-friendly millenarianism, which could pass for a satirical caricature of the tech worship Jacques Ellul identified.

The trick will be to survive a few more decades, until the inventions of atom-scaled medical nanobots and digital backups of human consciousness. “We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever,” Kurzweil writes. “But most baby boomers won’t make it.” This led to his other scammy obsession— life extension. To help his own rapidly aging generation survive until the arrival of the technological tipping point when they might upload their memories and personalities to a Google cloud server—around 2045, he figures—he promotes a program of diet, exercise, and unproven life-extending supplements. If all else fails to ward of the Reaper, one can always have one’s body or brain frozen for later resuscitation, a process known as cryonics, which Kurzweil endorses as a last resort.

Kurzweil’s morbid obsession with disease and death led him into the depths of tech-abetted unconventional medicine, where many a Singularitarian followed. He received a diabetes diagnosis at age thirty-five. Displeased with insulin treatment, he set out to find a better way. The result was an idiosyncratic and ever-changing menu of herbal medicine, plus hundreds of daily nutritional supplements and a custom fitness regimen. The details are laid out in two books that Kurzweil co-wrote with his doctor, Terry Grossman: "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever" and "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever." The latter includes sixty-nine pages of recipes, including one for carrot salad sweetened with stevia, yum yum. Skeptic magazine slammed "Fantastic Voyage" as “the triumph of hope over evidence and common sense” and suggested that some of its advice might actually be harmful.

Kurzweil and Grossman shamelessly cashed in on their presumed authority by selling loosely regulated supplements to credulous consumers under the label of “Ray and Terry’s Longevity Products—where science and nutrition meet.” The authors’ website shills dubious formulations including an $86 “Anti-Aging MultiPack” that promises a one-month supply of “smart nutrients.” As proof of efficacy, Kurzweil offers himself. Although he is seventy at this writing, he has long claimed that his true “biological age” was twenty years younger. The lens suggests otherwise. In 2014, Kurzweil began sporting a new hairdo—longer, straighter, and several shades darker than before. The sudden change worried some commenters on his website, kurzweilai.net. Was it a hairpiece? An unfortunate dye job? Or maybe Kurzweil had finally stumbled across a real miracle pill?

* * *

I am by no means the first to label Singularitarianism a new religion or a cult. Kurzweil himself has said the comparison was “understandable,” given the preoccupation with mortality. However, he rejects the argument that his sect is religious in nature, because he did not come to it as a spiritual seeker. Rather, Kurzweil writes, he became a Singularitarian as a result of “practical” eforts to make “optimal tactical decisions in launching technology enterprises.” Startups showed him the way!

Being a Singularitarian, Kurzweil claims, “is not a matter of faith but one of understanding.” This is a refrain Singularitarians share with Scientologists, for L. Ron Hubbard always marketed his doctrines as “technology.” This tic makes Singularitarians impossible to argue with. Because they believe that they have arrived at their beliefs scientifically, anyone who disputes their ludicrous conclusions must be irrational. If this sect did not have the ears of so many powerful men in business, politics, and military affairs, its leaders might seem clownish. But they are serious, dangerously so.

# # #

Corey Pein's new book, "Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey to the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley," is available now from Metropolitan Books. Read Salon's review here. 

Arms and influence: Trump’s love affair with the Saudi regime

AP/Evan Vucci

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.



It’s another Trump affair — this time without the allegations of sexual harassment (and worse), the charges and counter-charges, the lawsuits, and all the rest. So it hasn’t gotten the sort of headlines that Stormy Daniels has garnered, but when it comes to influence, American foreign policy, and issues of peace and war, it couldn’t matter more or be a bigger story (or have more money or lobbyists involved in it). Think of it as the great love affair of the age of Trump, the one between The Donald and the Saudi royals. And if there’s any place to start laying out the story, it’s naturally at a wedding, in this case in a tragic ceremony that happened to take place in Yemen, not Washington.

On Sunday, April 22nd, planes from a Saudi Arabian-led coalition dropped two bombs on a wedding in Yemen. The groom was injured, the bride killed, along with at least 32 other civilians, many of them children.

In response, the Saudis didn’t admit fault or express condolences to the victim’s families. Instead, they emphasized that their “coalition continues to take all the precautionary and preventative measures” to avoid civilian casualties in Yemen. This disconnect between Saudi rhetoric and the realities on the ground isn’t an anomaly — it’s been the norm. For four years, the Saudis and their allies have been conducting airstrikes with reckless abandon there, contributing to a staggering civilian death toll that now reportedly tops 10,000.

The Saudis and their close ally, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have repeatedly reassured American policymakers that they’re doing everything imaginable to prevent civilian casualties, only to launch yet more airstrikes against civilian targets, including schools, hospitals, funerals, and marketplaces.

For example, last May when Donald Trump landed in Saudi Arabia on his first overseas visit as president, Saudi lobbyists distributed a “fact sheet” about the prodigious efforts of the country’s military to reduce civilian casualties in Yemen. Five days after Trump landed in Riyadh, however, an air strike killed 24 civilians at a Yemeni market. In December, such strikes killed more than 100 Yemeni civilians in 10 days. The Saudi response: condemningthe United Nations for its criticisms of such attacks and then offering yet more empty promises.

Through all of this, President Trump has remained steadfast in his support, while the U.S. military continues to provide aerial refueling for Saudi air strikes as well as the bombs used to kill so many of those civilians. But why? In a word: Saudi Arabian and UAE money in prodigious amounts flowing into Trump’s world — to U.S. arms makers and to dozens of lobbyists, public-relations firms, and influential think tanks in Washington.

Trump’s love affair with the Saudi regime

Saudi Arabia’s influence over Donald Trump hit an initial peak in his first presidential visit abroad, which began in Riyadh in May 2017. The Saudi royals, who had clearly grasped the nature of The Donald, offered him the one thing he seems to love most: flattery, flattery, and more flattery. The kingdom rolled out the red carpet big time. The fanfare included posting banners with photos of President Trump and Saudi King Salman along the roadside from the airport to Riyadh, projecting a five-story-high image of Trump onto the side of the hotel where he would stay, and hosting a male-invitees-only concert by country singer Toby Keith.

According to the Washington Post, “The Saudis hosted the Trumps and the Kushners at the family’s royal palace, ferried them around in golf carts, and celebrated Trump with a multimillion-dollar gala in his honor, complete with a throne-like seat for the president.” In addition, they presented him with the Abdul-Aziz al-Saud medal, a trinket named for Saudi Arabia’s first king, considered the highest honor the kingdom can bestow on a foreign leader.

The Saudis then gave Trump something he undoubtedly valued even more than all the fawning — a chance to pose as the world’s greatest deal maker. For the trip, Trump brought along a striking collection of CEOs from major American companies, including Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, and Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group. Big numbers on the potential value of future U.S.-Saudi business deals were tossed around, including $110 billion in arms sales and hundreds of billions more in investments in energy, petrochemicals, and infrastructure, involving projects in both countries.

The new president was anything but shy in claiming credit for such potential mega-deals. At a press conference, he crowed about “tremendous investments in the United States . . . and jobs, jobs, jobs.” On his return to the U.S., he promptly bragged at a cabinet meeting that his deal-making would “bring many thousands of jobs to our country . . . In fact, will bring millions of jobs ultimately.” Not surprisingly, no analysis was offered to back up such claims, but it’s already clear that some of these deals may never come to fruition and many of those that do are more likely to create jobs in Saudi Arabia than in the United States.

Still, President Trump’s love affair with that country’s royals only intensified, leading to a triumphant U.S. visit last month by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the power behind the throne in that nation. He is also the architect of its brutal Yemeni war, where, in addition to those thousands of civilians killed thanks to indiscriminate air strikes, millions have been put at risk of famine due to a Saudi-led blockade of the country. But neither of these activities that, Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu has noted, “look like war crimes” nor Saudi Arabia’s abysmal internal human rights record drew a discouraging word from Trump or anyone in his cabinet. First things first. There were business deals to be touted — and so they were.

Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the White House took place on the very day that the Senate was considering a bill to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s Yemeni bombing campaign. While senators debated the constitutional authority of Congress to declare war and the human-rights impact of U.S. support for the Saudi war effort, Trump was boasting yet again about all those jobs that arms sales to Saudi Arabia would create, adding — in a sign of the total success of the Saudi charm offensive — that the relationship between the two countries “is now probably as good as it’s really ever been” and “will probably only get better.”

The centerpiece of Trump’s meeting was a show-and-tell performance focused on how Saudi arms sales would boost American jobs. As he sang the praises of those Saudi purchases, he brandished a map of the United States with the legend “KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] Deals Pending” above a red oval that said “40,000 U.S. jobs.” Prominent among them were jobs in the swing states that put Trump over the top in the 2016 elections: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Florida. Score another point for Saudi influence in the form of Trump’s firm belief that his relationship with that regime will bolster his future political prospects.

So the public courtship of Trump by the Saudi royals is already paying large dividends, but public flattery and massive arms deals are just the better-known part of the picture. The president has been heavily courted privately as well, both through personal connections and through an expansive lobbying operation, which it’s important to map out, even if there’s no administration show-and-tell on the subject.

The personal courtship

As a — as has been widely publicized — Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and officially anointed point man on Middle Eastern peace (an outcome he is uniquely ill-equipped to deliver), has struck up a beautiful friendship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Their relationship was solidified at a March 2017 lunch at the White House, followed by numerous phone calls and several Kushner visits to Saudi Arabia, including one shortly before the prince cracked down on his domestic rivals. Though that crackdown was publicly justified as an anti-corruption move, it conveniently targeted anyone who could conceivably have stood in the way of bin Salman’s consolidation of power. According to Michael Wolff in Fire and Fury, after bin Salman’s power play, Trump joyfully toldKushner, “We’ve put our man on top!” — an indication that Kushner had offered a Trump stamp of approval to the prince's political maneuver during his trip to Riyadh.

The friendship has clearly paid off handsomely for the Saudis. Kushner was reportedly the main advocate for having Trump make his first foreign visit to that country — over the objections of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who felt it would send the wrong signal to allies about Trump’s attitudes towards democracy and autocracy (as indeed it did). Kushner also strongly urged Trump to back a Saudi-UAE blockade and propaganda campaign against the Gulf state of Qatar, which Trump forcefully did with a tweet: “So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to horror of terrorism!”

Trump later changed his mind on this — after learning that Qatar hosts the largest U.S. military air base in the Middle East and after Qatar launched a PR and lobbying offensive of its own. That small, ultra-wealthy state hired nine lobbying and public relations firms, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s, in the two months after the Saudi-UAE blockade began, according to filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Most notably, the Qataris agreed to spend $12 billion on U.S. combat aircraft just weeks after Trump’s tweet.

Wherever Trump ultimately ends up on the campaign against Qatar (driven in part by a Saudi belief that its emir hasn’t sufficiently toed a tough enough line on Iran), Kushner’s role in the affair gives new spin to the old phrase "The personal is the political." According to a source who spoke to veteran reporter Dexter Filkins, Kushner’s antipathy toward Qatar may have been driven in part by anger over its unwillingness to bail his father out of a bad Manhattan real estate investment with a massive loan.

Another snapshot of the Saudi-UAE urge to get up close and personal with The Donald lies in the strange case of George Nader, a political operative and senior advisor to the UAE, and Elliott Broidy, who reportedly can get face time with President Trump as needed. Nader evidently successfully persuaded Broidy to privately press Trump to take positions ever more in line with Saudi and UAE interests on Qatar and in their urge to see Secretary of State Rex Tillerson head for the exit. Whether or not Broidy’s appeals were instrumental in Trump’s decisions, he can’t be faulted for lack of effort. His exploits underscore how far both countries are willing to go in their efforts to bend U.S. foreign policy to their needs and interests.

In his campaign to win over Broidy, Nader gave him a cool $2.7 million to fund an anti-Qatar conference sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a sum that was also followed by more than $600,000 in donations for Republican candidates.

The keynote speaker at that conference was House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, who then crafted a sanctions bill against Qatar and — miracle of — shortly thereafter received a campaign contribution from Broidy. Wherever those funds came from, it strains credulity to believe that this was all coincidental. To sweeten the deal, Nader also dangled the prospect of major contracts for Broidy’s private security firm, Circinus. One deal with the UAE, for $200 million, has already been sealed, while a Saudi one is in the works. At this point, who knows whether any of this was illegal, but in the world of Washington influence peddling, what’s legal is often as scandalous as what’s not.

The lobbying courtship

If such deep connections between Saudi Arabia and the Trump administration sometimes seem to surface out of nowhere, they all too often stem from an extraordinarily influential, if largely unpublicized, Saudi lobbying and public relations campaign.

Following the November election, the Saudis wasted no time in adding more firepower to their already robust influence operation in this country. In the less than three months before Trump was sworn in as president in January 2017, the Saudis inked contracts with three new firms: a Republican-oriented one, the McKeon Group (whose namesake, Howard “Buck” McKeon, is the recently retired chairman of the House Armed Services Committee); the CGCN Group, a firm well connected to conservative Republicans whose clientele also includes Boeing, which sells bombs to Saudi Arabia; and an outfit associated with the Democrats, the Podesta Group, which later dissolved after revelations about its work with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, and Russian banks under sanction.

Before Trump even made it to Riyadh that May, according to an analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act records, the Saudis signed contracts with six more public relations firms and then added two more immediately after severing diplomatic ties with Qatar in early June. All told, in just the first year of the Trump administration, the Saudis spent more than a million dollars monthly on more than two dozen registered lobbying and public relations outfits. The UAE was not far behind, boasting 18 registered lobbying and public relations firms in 2017, including more than $10 milliondollars that year alone that went to just one of them, the Camstoll Group.

All this lobbying firepower gave those two countries an unparalleled ability to steer U.S. foreign policy on the Middle East. Among other avenues of influence, their campaign included a steady stream of propaganda flowing to policymakers about the war in Yemen.

Large foreign lobbies of this sort also enjoy an even more direct path to influence through campaign contributions. While it’s illegal for foreign nationals to make such contributions in U.S. elections, there’s an easy workaround for that -- just hire lobbyists to do it for you. Such firms and figures have, in the past, admitted to serving as middlemen in this fashion and are known to have sometimes given handsomely. For example, a study by Maplight and the International Business Times found that registered lobbyists working at just four firms hired by the Saudis gave more than half a million dollars to federal candidates in the 2016 elections.

Another important avenue of influence for the Saudis and Emiratis: their financial contributions to Washington’s think tanks. The full extent of their reach in this area is hard to grasp because think tanks and other non-profits aren’t required to disclose their donors and many choose not to do so. However, an eye-opening New York Times exposé in 2014 revealed an expansive list of think tanks that received money from the Saudis or Emiratis, including the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Middle East Institute. In the age of Trump, it’s a reasonable bet that it has only gotten worse.

A War Alliance?

There is more at stake in Washington’s present web of ties to those two lands than just business. The uncritical embrace of such reckless, extreme, and undemocratic regimes by President Trump and many members of Congress has far-reaching implications for the future of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has asserted that Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “makes Hitler look good” and has suggested military action against Iran on a number of occasions. Add to this the prince's successful efforts to keep the Trump administration on board in supporting his war in Yemen, plus Riyadh’s political interference in Qatar and Lebanon, and there is a real danger that Trump’s uncritical embrace of the Saudi regime could spark a regional war. The indiscriminate killing of Yemenis by the Saudi coalition, with the help of U.S. weapons, has already contributed to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, while reportedly making the al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen “stronger than ever.”

There is much concern in official Washington about Trump’s seemingly cavalier attitude towards longstanding U.S. alliances, but in the case of Saudi Arabia, a major change of course would undoubtedly be advisable. The least we can do is help make sure that the people of Yemen don’t fear for their lives at their own weddings.

Ben Freeman is the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy (CIP).

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular , runs CIP’s Arms and Security Project and is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex .

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Copyright 2018 Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung

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Violence against women is a guns issue, but not the way the NRA wants you to believe

Bashutskyy via Shutterstock

This article originally appeared on Media Matters.

After multiple reports of physical abuse came out against former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the National Rifle Association’s media arm, NRATV, used the reports to falsely claim the solution to violence against women is more gun ownership. In reality, the presence of firearms in households where there is domestic violence drastically increases the likelihood that women who live there will be killed or injured.

A May 7 New Yorker article reported that four women say Schneiderman committed “nonconsensual physical violence” against them. According to the article, he “repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent,” as well as choked them. Just hours after the story broke, Schneiderman announced his resignation.

NRATV wasted no time using Schneiderman’s reported abuse of women as a pretext to slam gun regulation and push for female gun ownership as a means of defense against sexual assault and domestic violence. During the May 8 edition of her NRATV show "Relentless," NRA national spokesperson Dana Loesch claimed that Schneiderman’s views on gun regulation were motivated by his abusive behavior, saying, “Let’s not forget that Schneiderman just hates lawful gun ownership. Hearing these stories about him it’s no wonder why. The last thing human filth like this would want is for a woman to be in a position to defend herself.”

The next day on NRATV’s news show "Stinchfield," Loesch said that it was “fitting that Eric Schneiderman is also anti-gun because predators such as men like him, they don’t like for their victims to be armed” and claimed that abusers are usually “far-left individuals who want women to remain victims and are absolutely aghast when women speak about their right to defend themselves”:

Grant Stinchfield (Host): I am tired of using the word hypocrisy over and over again for just about everything the left does, but once again here we are. I don’t know how else to describe it.

Dana Loesch: Well, it seems fitting that Eric Schneiderman is also anti-gun because predators such as men like him, they don’t like for their victims to be armed.

[. . .]

People like Eric Schneiderman and Harvey Weinsteins of the — he apparently was the Harvey Weinstein of New York politics — these individuals, more often than not, they are far-left individuals who want women to remain victims and are absolutely aghast when women speak about their right to defend themselves or do anything else that would be in anyway considered self-empowerment. So I’m not surprised. I think hypocrites should feel the double force of the law, personally.

In actuality, there is a mountain of evidence that the presence of a firearm makes domestic violence situations more dangerous. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, “The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed.” One study found that among women living in the United States, “about 4.5 million have had an intimate partner threaten them with a gun and nearly 1 million have been shot or shot at by an intimate partner.” Another study that interviewed women at women’s shelters found that 71 percent of women who reported living in a household with a firearm had been attacked or threatened with a gun, but only 7 percent had successfully used a gun in self-defense. In fact, a September 2013 Violence Policy Center study titled "When Men Murder Women" found that women were more than three times more likely to be murdered when there was a gun in their household.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner.” On average, three or more women are murdered by their husbands and boyfriends every day. And one in four women have been the victim of severe physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime — that's roughly 40 million women. The issue also disproportionately impacts women of color.

While the NRA continues to dangerously advocate for greater firearm ownership as a solution to violence against women, it has also historically fought efforts to strengthen laws to keep domestic abusers from accessing guns. The group also spent more than $30 million in support of President Donald Trump’s campaign and stood by him when a tape emerged of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. The organization used its NRATV platform to shill for Trump while accusations of sexual misconduct mounted against him, including pushing the claim that such reports were getting too much attention in the press.

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