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17 September 20
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Chris Smith, Vanity Fair
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Amy Dorris in her home town in Florida. (photo: Mitchel Worley/Guardian UK
Donald Trump Accused of Sexual Assault by Former Model Amy Dorris
Lucy Osborne, Guardian UK
Osborne writes: "A former model has come forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her at the US Open tennis tournament more than two decades ago, in an alleged incident that left her feeling 'sick' and 'violated.'"
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A U.S. Navy helicopter descends to land on the flight deck of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier while at sea on Jan. 18. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
Mandy Smithberger | National (In)Security and the Pentagon Budget: A Post-Coronavirus Economy Can No Longer Afford to Put the Pentagon First
Mandy Smithberger, TomDispatch
Smithberger writes: "The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis."
Suckers? Give me a break. It’s perfectly clear that Donald Trump considers just about every last one of us a sucker (including the members of his base) and that’s not news at all. It's only news when he calls the military dead of past wars “suckers” and “losers,” as reported by Jeffrey Goldberg in an Atlantic article that knocked his presidential campaign off the rails (however briefly), caused him to attack anyone seconding such claims, even demanding the firing of Jennifer Griffin, a reporter at his own personal news service, Fox News, for confirming much of Goldberg’s story. (Many others reporters there would, in fact, defend her.)
And yes, when it came to the U.S. military, he was already assaulting its generals -- admittedly, not exactly the most successful crew in this century -- even in his 2016 election campaign. “I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble” was the way he put it at the time. He used bogus bone spurs to avoid service himself in the Vietnam War years (and anyone who didn’t, of course, was a sucker or a loser), and he called for ending America’s endless wars (though he hasn’t). Under the circumstances and with positive attitudes toward him evidently dropping in the military itself, you might think that he was, in every sense, an anti-military figure of the first order and that would be one of your bigger mistakes.
His military record, in fact, is rather similar to his record when it comes to the Washington swamp and the wealthy (and the drastic inequality they’ve induced in these years): he ran against them all and won that base of his thanks to just such opposition. He came into office still badmouthing the unequal, unfair mess of a world (“American carnage”) they had created and then, with every move that mattered, made this country’s billionaires even richer and helped ensure that the Pentagon, as well as the rest of the national security state, would remain by a country mile the best-funded part of the government. And just in case you missed it, he even bragged about that in his recent White House speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, swearing that, almost $2.5 trillion later, his “rebuilding” of the Pentagon would never end.
As TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert Mandy Smithberger suggests today, in our pandemic moment, when it comes to the Pentagon, this is only going to get worse. So, remind me, just who are the losers and suckers in this all-American world of ours? Not billionaire Donald Trump or the U.S. military, that’s for sure -- unless, as Smithberger makes clear, in the years to come Americans do something to begin to defund the Pentagon.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
he inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis. More than 190,000 Americans are dead, approximately half of them people of color. Yelp data show that more than 132,000 businesses have already closed and census data suggest that, thanks to lost wages, nearly 17% of Americans with children can’t afford to feed them enough food.
In this same period, a number of defense contractors have been doing remarkably well. Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s top contractor, reported that, compared to 2019, its earnings are actually up -- yes, up! The company’s success led the financial magazine Barron’s to call it a “pandemic star.” And those profits are only likely to grow, given the Trump administration’s recent approval of a 10-year deal to sell $62 billion worth of its F-16s to Taiwan.
And Lockheed Martin is far from the only such outfit. As Defense One reported, “It’s becoming abundantly clear that companies with heavy defense business have been able to endure the coronavirus pandemic much better” than, for instance, commercial aerospace firms. And so it was that, while other companies have cut or suspended dividends during the pandemic, Lockheed Martin, which had already raised its gift to shareholders in late 2019, continued to pay the same amount this March and September.
The spread of Covid-19 has created one of the most significant crises of our time, but it’s also provided far greater clarity about just how misplaced the priorities of Washington have been all these years. Americans -- the Trump administration aside -- are now trying to deal with the health impacts of the pandemic and struggling to figure out how to safely reopen schools. It’s none too soon, however, to start thinking as well about how best to rebuild a devastated economy and create new jobs to replace those that have been lost. In that process, one thing is crucial: resisting the calls -- and count on it, they will come -- to “rebuild” the war economy that had betrayed us long before the coronavirus arrived on our shores, leaving this country in a distinctly weakened state.
A New Budget Debate?
For the past decade, the budget “debate” in this country has largely been shaped by the Budget Control Act, which tried to save $1 trillion over those 10 years by placing nominal caps on both defense and non-defense spending. Notably, however, it exempted “war spending” that falls in what the Pentagon calls its Overseas Contingency Operations account. While some argued that caps on both defense and non-defense spending created parity, the Pentagon’s ability to use and abuse that war slush fund (on top of an already gigantic base budget) meant that the Pentagon still disproportionately benefited by tens of billions of dollars annually.
In 2021, the Budget Control Act expires. That means a Biden or Trump administration will have an enormous opportunity to significantly reshape federal spending. At the very least, that Pentagon off-budget slush fund, which creates waste and undermines planning, could be ended. In addition, there’s more reason than ever for Congress to reassess its philosophy of this century that the desires of the Pentagon invariably come first, particularly given the need to address the significant economic damage the still-raging pandemic is creating.
In rebuilding the economy, however, count on one thing: defense contractors will put every last lobbying dollar into an attempt to convince the public, Congress, and whatever administration is in power that their sector is the country’s major engine for creating jobs. As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung has shown, however, a close examination of such job-creation claims rarely stands up to serious scrutiny. For example, the number of jobs created by recent arms sales to Saudi Arabia are now expected to be less than a tenth of those President Trump initially bragged about. As Hartung noted in February, that’s “well under .03% of the U.S. labor force of more than 164 million people.”
As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the economy. As experts at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University have both discovered, this country would get significantly more job-creation bang for the bucks it spends on weaponry by investing in rebuilding domestic infrastructure, combating climate change, or creating more alternative energy. And such investments would pay additional dividends by making our communities and small businesses stronger and more resilient.
Defense Contractors Campaigning for Bailouts
At the Project On Government Oversight where I work, I spend my days looking at the many ways the arms industry exerts disproportionate influence over what’s still called (however erroneously in this Covid-19 moment) “national security” and the foreign policy that goes with it, including this country’s forever wars. That work has included, for instance, exposing how a bevy of retired military officers advocated buying more than even the Pentagon requested of the most expensive weapons system in history, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, while failing to disclose that they also had significant personal financial interests in supporting that very program. My colleagues and I are also continually tracking the many officials who leave the Pentagon to go to work on the boards of or to lobby for arms makers or leave those companies and end up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the national security state. That’s known, of course, as the military-industrial complex’s “revolving door.” And as President Trump recently noted, it helps ensure that those endless wars never end, while stoking an ever-increasing Pentagon budget. While his actions on behalf of the arms industry don't back up his rhetoric, his diagnosis of the problem is largely on target.
And yet, as familiar as I am with the damage that the weapons industry has done to our country, I still find myself shocked at how a number of those companies have responded to the current crisis. Almost immediately, they began lobbying the Department of Defense to make their employees part of this country’s “essential critical infrastructure,” so that they could force them to return to work, pandemic or not. That decision drew a rare rebuke from the unions representing those workers, many of whom feared for their lives.
And mind you, only then did things become truly perverse. In the initial Covid-19 relief bill, Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to help respond to the pandemic. Such aid, as congressional representatives imagined it, would be used to purchase personal protective equipment for employees who still had to show up at work, especially since the Department of Defense’s own initial estimate was that the country would need to produce as many as 3.3 billion N95 masks in six months. The Pentagon, however, promptly gave those funds to defense contractors, including paying for such diverse “needs” as golf-course staffing, hypersonic missile development, and microelectronics, a Washington Post investigation found. House appropriators responded that money for defense contractors “was not the original intent of the funds.”
And now those defense contractors are asking for yet more bailouts. Earlier this summer, they successfully convinced the Senate to put $30 billion for the arms industry in its next coronavirus relief bill. As CQ Roll Call reported, the top beneficiaries of that spending spree would be the Pentagon’s two largest contractors: Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
The pandemic has certainly resulted in some delays and unexpected expenses for such companies, but the costs borne by the weapons industry pale compared to the devastation caused to so many businesses that have had to close permanently. Every sector of the economy is undoubtedly facing unexpected costs due to the pandemic, but apparently the Department of Defense, despite being by far the best-funded military on the planet, and its major contractors, among the richest and most successful corporations in America, have essentially claimed that they will be unable to respond to the crisis without further taxpayer help. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee and the lead Democrat for the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee recently pointed out that, even though contractors across the federal government are facing pandemic challenges, no other agency has asked for additional funds to cover the costs of the crisis. Instead, they have worked on drawing from their existing resources.
It’s laughable to suggest that the very department that already has by far the most resources on hand and is, of course, charged with leading the country’s response to unexpected threats can’t figure out how to adjust without further funding. But most defense contractors see no reason to adapt since they know that they can continue to count on Washington to bail them out.
Still, the defense industry has become impatient that Congress hasn’t already acquiesced to their demands. In July, executives at most of the major contractors sent a letter to the White House demanding more money. In it, they included a not-so-subtle threat of electoral consequences for the president and Senate Republicans in close races if such funds weren’t provided. Only one major contractor, Northrop Grumman, has stayed away from such highly public lobbying efforts because its CEO apparently had the common sense to recognize that her company was doing too well to demand more when so many others are desperate for money, particularly minority-owned businesses, many of which are likely to never come back.
On a Glide Path to Disaster?
There are signs, however, that someday such eternal winners in the congressional financial sweepstakes may finally be made accountable thanks to the pandemic. This summer, both the House and the Senate for the first time each considered an amendment to cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. Such efforts even received support from at least some moderates, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), although it went down to defeat in both houses of Congress. Although Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) refused to support the specifics of the amendment, she did at least express her agreement with the principle of needing to curtail the Pentagon’s spending spree during this crisis. “As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, I’m keenly aware of the global threats facing our country,” she said in a statement she released after the vote. “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need.”
The first real test of whether this country will learn any of the right lessons about national security from this ongoing pandemic moment will undoubtedly come in next year’s budget debate when the question will be: Is everything finally going to be on the table? As I previously wrote at TomDispatch, giving the Pentagon trillions of dollars in these years in no way prepared this country for the actual national security crisis of our lives. In fact, even considering the Pentagon’s ridiculously outsized budget, prioritizing funding for unaffordable and unproven weapons systems over healthcare hurt its ability to keep the military and its labor force safe. No less significantly, continuing to prioritize the Pentagon over the needs of every other agency and Americans more generally keeps us on a glidepath to disaster.
A genuinely new discussion of budget priorities would mean, as a start, changing the very definition of “security” to include responding to the many risks we actually face when it comes to our safety: not just pandemics, but the already increasing toll of climate change, a crumbling infrastructure, and a government that continues to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and well-connected over everyone else.
At the simplest level, the “defense” side of the budget ledger should be made to reflect what we’re really spending now on what passes for national security. That means counting homeland security and veterans’ benefits, along with many other expenses that often get left out of the budget equation. When such expenses are indeed included, as Brown University's Costs of War Project has discovered, the real price tag for America’s wars in the Greater Middle East alone came to more than $6.4 trillion by 2020. In other words, even to begin to have an honest debate about how America’s other needs are funded, there would have to be a far more accurate accounting of what actually has been spent in these years on “national security.”
Surprisingly enough, unlike Congress (or the Pentagon), the voting public already seems to grasp the need for change. The nonprofit think tank Data for Progress found that more than half of likely voters support cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10% to pay for domestic priorities like fighting the coronavirus. A University of Maryland poll found bipartisan majorities opposed to cutting funding generally with two notable exceptions: Pentagon spending and agricultural subsidies.
Unfortunately, those in the national security establishment are generally not listening to what the American people want. Instead, they’re the captives of a defense industry that eternally hypes new Cold War-style competition with China and Russia, both through donations to Washington think tanks and politicians and that infamous revolving door.
In fact, the Trump administration is a military-industrial nightmare when it comes to that endlessly spinning entrance and exit. Both of his confirmed secretaries of defense and one acting secretary of defense came directly from major defense contractors, including the current one, former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper -- and the Biden administration seems unlikely to be all that different. As the American Prospect reported recently, several members of his foreign policy team have already circumvented ethics rules that would restrict lobbying activities by becoming “strategic consultants” to the very defense firms aiming to win more Pentagon contracts. For example, Biden’s most likely secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, became a senior adviser to Boston Consulting Group and the first three years she was with that company, it increased its Pentagon contract earnings by a factor of 20.
So whoever wins in 2020, increased spending for the Pentagon, rather than real national security, lies in store. The people, it seems, have spoken. The question remains: will anyone in Washington listen to them?
Mandy Smithberger, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
U.S. Post Office worker. (photo: Getty)
The White House Blocked a Plan by the US Post Office to Send Face Masks to Every American
Tony Romm, Jacob Bogage and Lena H. Sun, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "It would be months before Louis DeJoy took the reins of the nation's mail system, and the U.S. Postal Service already was mired in crisis."
Nearly 10,000 pages of emails, memos and other private documents offered new details about the agency’s struggles and the pro-Trump figures to whom it turned for advice.
Mail carriers were revolting, fearful they had few protections against the newly emerging coronavirus. The Trump administration was bearing down on its finances, sending USPS officials scrambling over what they saw as a potential illegal takeover of agency operations. And then there was a looming standoff with Amazon, which privately signaled it could take some of its lucrative delivery business elsewhere.
The tensions surfaced at an April 9 meeting, when Amazon executives “stated their concerns” about the Postal Service’s economic plight amid the pandemic and questioned its “viability to them as a continued shipping partner,” according to a once-secret memo circulated within the agency, which described the situation as an “inflection point.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The wide-ranging headaches that so troubled the USPS in April ultimately foreshadowed a summer of upheaval, thrusting the once-venerated mail service into a political maelstrom months before a presidential election. Newly disclosed details of these struggles are laid bare in nearly 10,000 pages of emails, legal memos, presentations and other documents obtained by The Washington Post from American Oversight, a watchdog group that requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents, which mostly span March and April, depict an agency in distress, as its deteriorating finances collided with a public-health emergency and a looming election that would be heavily reliant on absentee ballots. During that period, the USPS occasionally relied on the legal counsel of well-connected Republicans, including Stefan C. Passantino, who once served as a top White House lawyer under President Trump. Passantino, whose role has not been previously reported, is also part of a new pro-Trump legal coalition preparing for the possibility of a contested election, a relationship that has raised new ethical flags among the administration’s critics.
The records also offer fresh detail about the Postal Service’s precarious position in the White House’s early pandemic response. At one point in April, USPS leaders drafted a news release announcing plans to distribute 650 million masks nationwide, enough to offer five face coverings to every American household. The document, which includes quotations from top USPS officials and other specifics, was never sent. But it suggests that the government’s initial interest in tapping the Postal Service as part of its campaign to combat the coronavirus may have been far more advanced than initially reported this spring.
The Postal Service declined to discuss its specific dealings with the White House, Treasury Department or Amazon about plans to distribute masks or its finances. David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, stressed in a statement that the mail agency is “firmly committed to being a source of constancy and reliability in every community.”
“Our more than 630,000 employees are working to make sure our customers can depend on us,” he added. “We’re on the front lines — delivering needed medicines, supplies, benefit checks, financial statements and the important correspondence every family counts on.”
But the emails and other records offer fresh insight about the Postal Service, its philosophical shifts and the little-known board of governors overseeing its operations and finances. Lawmakers already have trained their attention on board leader Robert M. Duncan, a top Republican financier, for his political ties. The board later picked DeJoy, whose support for Trump, history of GOP fundraising and controversial USPS cost-cutting moves have stoked widespread criticism.
“I see President Trump’s fingerprints all over,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight. “It’s clear from the president’s public comments, and the actions of his administration, he has a major agenda for the post office — and we see a lot of it in black and white here.”
‘I don’t want to die’
The frantic emails began reaching the Postal Service leadership in March, mere weeks after the coronavirus is believed to have arrived in the United States. Mail carriers and, in some cases, their spouses practically pleaded with then-Postmaster General Megan Brennan and her top aides for help in protecting themselves on the front lines.
At the time, New York City was emerging as the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic. Yet postal employees continued delivering letters and packages even as broad swaths of the state had started to shut down. A local union leader, whose name is redacted in email records shared with The Post, urged Brennan to follow suit and temporarily cease operations in the city.
“I literally was on the phone today with many of my members screaming at me to do something [and] I don’t want to die,” the unnamed union official wrote, noting they had 12 confirmed coronavirus cases among the ranks by March 25. “You cannot expect the unions to convince the employees that if they come to work they have nothing to worry about.”
Roughly a week later, USPS publicly pledged to stock up on personal protective equipment and allow employees to more easily take leave as soon as they felt sick. But angry notes continued to flood Brennan’s inbox, as postal workers and their families expressed fears for the public health crisis to come.
“WHY IN GOD’S NAME ARE THEY DELIVERING UNESSENTIAL MAIL to EVERY HOUSE in a HIGHLY INFECTED AREA!!!!” wrote an unidentified woman who described herself as the spouse of a mail carrier in Pennsylvania. “Do you want them to get the coronavirus! … You as post master seem to be the ONLY ONE who can do something about the situation … so DO SOMETHING, before the virus does it for you!”
Brennan did not respond to a request for comment. Partenheimer, the USPS spokesman, said in a statement that “supply chain issues” had affected the mail agency just as it had other businesses and institutions in the early stages of the pandemic. “However, those issues have long since been addressed and we are ensuring millions of masks, gloves and cleaning and sanitizing product are available and distributed to more than 30,000 locations every day through our Postal Service supply chain,” he added.
Inside the agency, though, leaders at the time appeared to be scrambling to keep operations running smoothly. The Trump administration had deemed postal workers essential, with the critical task of delivering medicine, supplies and other goods to a nation upended by the pandemic and largely staying at home. Unlike other elements of the economy, the U.S. Postal Service simply could not shut down.
Some top administration officials even hoped to tap the mail service’s vast network — and its unrivaled ability to reach every U.S. Zip code — to help Americans obtain personal protective equipment. The idea originated out of the Department of Health and Human Services, which suggested a pack of five reusable masks be sent to every residential address in the country, with the first shipments going to the hardest-hit areas.
At the time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been working on coronavirus guidance that recommended face coverings, a reversal of its previous position, in the face of mounting evidence that people could spread the coronavirus without experiencing symptoms. The Postal Service prepared for the possibility it might be deputized in the effort, drawing up a news release touting that it was “uniquely suited” to help. The service specifically identified Orleans and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana as the first areas to receive face coverings, with deliveries shortly thereafter to King County, Wash.; Wayne County, Mich.; and New York, according to the newly unearthed document, which is labeled a draft.
Before the news release was sent, however, the White House nixed the plan, according to senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. Instead, HHS created Project America Strong, a $675 million effort to distribute “reusable cotton face masks to critical infrastructure sectors, companies, healthcare facilities, and faith-based and community organizations across the country.” About 600 million of the 650 million masks ordered have been distributed, according to an HHS spokesperson, including 125 million set aside for schools.
“There was concern from some in the White House Domestic Policy Council and the office of the vice president that households receiving masks might create concern or panic,” one administration official said in response to the scrapped mask plan.
‘Fox in the hen house’
The Postal Service, meanwhile, faced a panic of its own. And it soon would try to turn to some of Trump’s closest political allies for help.
For years, the agency had been operating in the red. Its mandate to deliver to every U.S. Zip code had come at great cost, and it struggled to meet its workers’ sky-high retirement obligations — leaving it $160.9 billion in debt. The pandemic only exacerbated its financial standing, with agency officials in April predicting a $23 billion loss over the next 18 months and expressing fears the mail service could run out of money by October.
To bridge the gap, the Democratic-controlled House proposed setting aside $25 billion for the USPS as part of the March debate over coronavirus relief legislation. But the Republican-led Senate whittled that down to $13 billion, and Trump soon after threatened to veto any bill that included direct aid to the agency. Ultimately, Congress replaced the funding with a $10 billion loan in the package that became known as the Cares Act, a pot of money the Treasury Department was tasked with administering.
The approach appeared to spook the USPS, agency records show. The money seemed insufficient, the law itself presented serious legal challenges, and some mail service leaders questioned the Trump administration’s involvement, according to its emails and memos, prompting them to go on the offensive.
To boost its legal and political standing, the USPS turned to Passantino, a partner at the law firm Michael Best & Friedrich and a former deputy White House counsel for Trump. He departed the administration in fall 2018, but he never fully severed his ties to Trump’s orbit. Passantino has since helped the Trump Organization handle investigations led by House Democrats, for example, and he has consulted for a firm assisting his reelection campaign.
Duncan, the USPS board chairman, brought in Passantino and his law firm in part to help ease the agency’s financial stress, according to emails and people involved with high-level USPS deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a frank assessment of the agency. The board also retained Republican consultant Rick Hohlt and others to address lingering policy and budget issues in Washington, the records reveal.
An April 1 memo also shows the USPS considered tapping one of Passantino’s colleagues — Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff and Republican National Committee chairman — believing he could help break a Washington logjam over the need for additional stimulus aid. People familiar with the matter said Priebus never made those calls, and Priebus is barred by executive order from lobbying the White House until 2022.
Priebus and Hohlt declined to comment. Passantino and his law firm did not respond to requests for comment. The Postal Service did not answer detailed questions about their work, including the extent to which Passantino or Hohlt worked on matters related to the election, but it confirmed the hires came at a time when the board of governors was understaffed.
Ethics watchdogs raised concerns about new evidence showing additional overlap between the Postal Service, which will deliver ballots this fall, and the Republican Party.
“Why did the Postal Service need the services of Stefan Passantino when his primary claim to fame, the primary reason you hire him, is to carry out Donald Trump’s personal and political defense work?” asked Evers, the head of American Oversight, who called him the “fox in the hen house.”
The document trove also includes three separate email chains referencing calls with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other agency officials over nine days in early April. Two people familiar with the matter say Treasury drove a hard line, demanding operating control over the agency in exchange for the $10 billion congressionally approved loan. Such a demand was unprecedented, postal experts said, and appeared to lead the USPS to hire another law firm in the spring to study the legality of the issue. That firm, Mayer Brown, concluded that Treasury’s request was illegal.
“Any agreement by the Postal Service to surrender its authority to the Secretary of the Treasury or to the [Federal Financing Bank] therefore would be illegal,” lawyers concluded in an unreleased April 24 memo, referring to a federal borrowing entity.
The Treasury Department ultimately backed away from the idea of assuming control of USPS operations, amid swelling opposition from congressional Democrats and Postal Service leaders. During an April 9 meeting between Kip Kranbuhl, a Treasury assistant secretary; Gary Grippo, a career Treasury official; and Postal Service executives, Grippo said Treasury would not seek to take operating control as part of the terms, according to notes from the meeting. But the agency continued to press the idea for weeks, insisting that any loan to the USPS should result in it assuming operational control of the mail agency, three people familiar with the talks said.
Asked about the proposed arrangement, Monica Crowley, a Treasury spokeswoman, said in a statement that the USPS had been losing money — so the Trump administration sought to “protect” billions of dollars in loans ultimately authorized for the mail service.
“As in any arms-length negotiation, some of these proposals were rejected by USPS, while other reforms, such as enhanced monthly and quarterly financial reports, were agreed upon as part of the recent $10 billion loan that Treasury and USPS agreed to terms on last month,” she said. “Treasury’s proposed financing conditions have at all times been commercially reasonable and consistent with law. It is absurd to describe commonsense conditions on continued taxpayer funding as a ‘takeover.’ ”
But the revelations still troubled some White House critics on Capitol Hill. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) faulted the administration in a statement for being “hell-bent on sabotaging the USPS,” adding, “Congress must protect the USPS from attacks by Trump and his cronies — tens of millions of Americans across the country are counting on us to act.”
‘What does the USPS look like’
Amazon would prove to be a bigger headache, according to USPS email records, which reveal new details about the e-commerce giant’s financial ties to the U.S. mail system.
Trump for years has alleged without evidence that the Postal Service is undercharging companies, particularly Amazon, that rely on it to deliver to addresses the company itself can’t reach — or, in industry parlance, the “last mile.” In April, the president even called on the agency to “raise the price of a package by approximately four times,” marking the latest in a long line of attacks against the company.
But the documents unearthed by American Oversight suggest Amazon is a lucrative client for the mail service. Amazon drove about $3.9 billion in revenue, and $1.6 billion in profit, for the USPS in fiscal 2019, according to multiple emails and financial statements obtained via open records laws. The Postal Service delivered 1.54 billion packages on Amazon’s behalf last year, about 30 percent of the company’s total volume in 2019, and deliveries and revenue increased this year, the documents also indicate.
Amazon declined to answer questions about its relationship with the USPS. “For more than two decades, Amazon has partnered closely with the United States Postal Service to invent and deliver for our customers, which has resulted in significant revenue for the USPS and thousands of American jobs,” company spokeswoman Rena Lunak said in a statement. “USPS continues to be a great partner in serving Amazon customers.”
White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern said in a statement that the agency “has been losing billions of dollars for more than a decade and is projected to lose tens of billions more in the next decade.”
The tensions came to head in April as Amazon and the USPS attempted to negotiate a new contract to determine the cost at which the country’s mail service will deliver packages on Amazon’s behalf. The relationship is a crucial one for the USPS, which warned throughout the spring that it stood to “cede” control to its competitors if it raised rates on Amazon too high, according to emails and memos obtained by The Post.
In response to the president’s attacks, the agency appeared to circulate a memo internally that appeared to fact-check his statements. Trump, for example, had claimed during a meeting of his coronavirus task force in late March that the agency “lose[s] money every time they deliver a package” for Amazon. USPS, however, countered that “unfunded government mandates,” such as its retirement obligations, are driving its budget woes — not Amazon.
“Amazon made it very clear that the USPS is alone, globally, among their partners in having this pricing uncertainty,” indicated the document. It is not clear who drafted it or to whom it was sent.
The documents do not indicate the status of the Postal Service’s talks with Amazon, but they do presciently list some of the e-commerce giant’s lingering questions about the agency amid a roiling pandemic that had thrust the agency and its finances into doubt: “What does the USPS look like in the new few weeks, the next few months and the next several years?”
U.S. Border Patrol agents look at the border fence construction in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Lukeville, Arizona, Jan. 7, 2020. (photo: Carolyn Van Houten/Getty)
Indigenous Activists Arrested and Held Incommunicado Following Border Wall Protest
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "Two indigenous women who were arrested by federal agents while attempting to block border wall construction in southern Arizona last week say they were chained and held incommunicado by the government without access to a phone call or lawyer for nearly 24 hours."
Nellie Jo David and Amber Ortega visited the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument early Wednesday morning to pray at Quitobaquito Springs, a desert oasis that has become a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to bulldoze its way through protected lands and stand up new sections of border wall. In order to mix concrete for the wall, government contractors have tapped into a desert aquifer that feeds into the springs, draining the only source of fresh water for miles around and slowly killing a sacred and ancient site of deep spiritual significance for the Tohono O’odham and Hia Ced O’odham people; David and Ortega are both Tohono O’odham and Hia Ced O’odham.
In an exclusive interview following their release from government custody, the two women described a baffling and terrifying ordeal in which they were bounced from one federal agency to another before being dropped at a private prison with no idea when they would be let out. “They didn’t read us any rights,” Ortega told The Intercept. “We both asked to speak to a lawyer. We were not given the opportunity to speak to a lawyer or make a phone call, and then we found out that it was a petty charge and that we shouldn’t have been arrested and detained to begin with, that we should have been given a citation and released.”
Complaints filed in federal court in Tucson on Thursday show that David and Ortega were given misdemeanor charges of violating a lawful order of a government officer and violating a closure order; the area where their confrontation took place was closed to the public in October to allow for wall construction. The arrests were carried out by U.S. Park Service law enforcement personnel with support from the Border Patrol. The women were processed at a nearby port of entry before being driven to a private detention center more than 130 miles away.
David and Ortega were taken to the Florence Correctional Center, a medium-security federal facility owned and operated by the private prison corporation CoreCivic, following their arrest Wednesday morning and remained there until Thursday evening. They described being strip searched twice during their time at the facility. Both women were chained at the feet and waists “well into the night,” David told The Intercept. “We heard that they did that only because the Border Patrol or the Park Service or whoever handed us over didn’t give them any information, but they just agreed to house us,” David said. She added that detention center officials told the women that they had no authority to release them, nor did they have any information about their charges.
“We kept hearing that they were full and that they didn’t have any place for us, and so I guess for that reason we were left waiting,” she said. It seemed that part of the problem stemmed from confusion over the two women’s genders. “They thought that we were men,” David said, adding that detention center officials at one point prepared to move the pair to a men’s section. “They were going to put us in the men’s facility, and then I asked to use the bathroom and then they were just kind of like, ‘Oh shit, she’s not a man.’”
The two women spent much of the evening in a cold room with cage-like walls, waiting to be moved to their final location. Their shackles remained on while they waited, making it impossible to sleep. “There was a toilet, but it was really hard to use because we were handcuffed,” David said. “There was no soap available. There was no hand sanitizer available,” Ortega added — in a class-action lawsuit filed earlier this year, the ACLU accused officials responsible for the Florence facility of failing to provide basic safeguards for people in its care in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. It wasn’t until the following morning, when they were moved to the cells that they had been waiting for, that the women said their shackles were removed and they were given access to basic hygienic items and allowed to use a cellphone.
“It was heartbreaking,” Ortega said. “Knowing that this is the process that migrants go through, that a lot of people go through.”
Ryan Gustin, a public affairs manager at CoreCivic, confirmed that David and Ortega were held at the Florence facility from 3:48 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon until 6:30 p.m. Thursday, and that their detention was requested by U.S. Park Police, the federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction on public lands. Gustin said the claims that the women were chained and lacked access to soap or hand sanitizer were “patently false,” and that every detainee at the facility receives sanitary items and bedding.
As for the chains, Gustin said the women were placed in “approved restraints” according to policy, and that they arrived in restraints without any documentation that would allow detention center officials to determine the level of threat that they posed. Gustin confirmed that David and Ortega made no phone calls during their intake but added that “the holding cells have phones that they could have used had they made a request to do so.”
David and Ortega maintain that it was absolutely untrue that they had standing access to phones in their cells. They said they made multiple specific requests to speak a lawyer from the moment of their arrests Wednesday morning — those conversations were not facilitated until the following day. David added that she was “shocked” to hear CoreCivic push back on the fact that they were kept in chains. “They put the chains around our bodies and secured our hands and our feet,” she said, adding that there was simply no other way to describe it. “We were tired,” David said. “We had been out there early in the morning in the heat, and we were in those chains, high-security chains, well into the night, and they would not let us sleep.”
Why David and Ortega were transferred to a federal facility over low-level misdemeanors in the first place remains unclear. Calls and emails to Organ Pipe’s public affairs office were not returned.
Irreversible Damage
With the 2020 presidential election nearing, the Trump administration has seized on federal lands in southern Arizona as a means to run up the total number of new border wall miles completed before voters head to the polls. In keeping with that goal, the Department of Homeland Security has focused its efforts on the state’s wildlife refuges, wilderness areas, and national monuments, using the post-9/11 Real ID Act to waive scores of federal laws designed to protect sensitive environmental and cultural spaces like Organ Pipe’s Quitobaquito Springs.
The costs of the race toward expansion have been severe. In early February, The Intercept broke the news that DHS had begun using explosives to clear the way for border wall expansion on Organ Pipe. By the end of the month, the Border Patrol was inviting members of the press to observe its explosives in action.
Laiken Jordahl, a borderlands campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity and former Park Service employee at Organ Pipe, said the speed with which the government has pushed through the national monument after breaking ground last August has been staggering.
“I think a lot of people thought that this much damage couldn’t be done in a year, that the wall couldn’t go up and destroy Organ Pipe in just a year, and I so wish they were right, but the truth is that this place will never be the same,” Jordahl told The Intercept. “We can rip down the wall, we can employ mitigation measures and habitat restoration, but you can never, never piece back together these sacred sites that have been destroyed. You can never put back together the puzzle of cultural and natural history that make Organ Pipe so special.”
This year, water flow at Quitobaquito hit an all-time low, Jordahl explained, from an average of 30 to 45 gallons a minute down to just under six. “It’s slowed to a trickle,” he said. “The springs itself looks like a mud flat most of the time, the pond is just dried up — it’s just devastating.” At the same time, DHS contractors are pushing forward with the installation of a power grid to illuminate giant lights over the pristine desert habitat, a move that, along with the installation of towering steel walls, will drive away the migratory animals that have passed through the area for thousands of years.
With national security waivers in the DHS legal arsenal, the federal agencies entrusted to protect places like Organ Pipe and Quitobaquito Springs have been powerless to stop border wall expansion in southern Arizona, Jordahl said, as have the Indigenous stakeholders who would normally appeal to laws designed to preserve cherished and sacred cultural spaces. “They’ve really left Indigenous people with no choice but to put their bodies on the line to stop this project because they’ve silenced their voices in every other possible way.”
Praying, Crying, Singing
In southern Arizona, David and Ortega have been leading voices challenging the Organ Pipe project, drawing national attention to the existential danger it poses to Quitobaquito Springs. In November, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the pair rallied hundreds of people on Organ Pipe to oppose border wall expansion. Native resistance to the border wall has escalated and extended beyond Arizona in recent weeks, with members of the Kumeyaay Nation also blocking construction equipment and access roads in the Laguna Mountains of Southern California.
Both David and Ortega said that while they anticipated an increase in heavy construction near Quitobaquito last week, their decision to take direct action was not preplanned. “We just wanted to go out there and visit the springs and have some time,” David said. The two women parted ways soon after they arrived Wednesday morning, each going through their own process of communing with the land. “When we visit, we check the land, we look for anything out of place,” Ortega explained. “We were at the spring praying, crying, singing, and then we went on our separate ways.”
Ortega said she was approaching the base of a mountain when she heard the sound of construction trucks nearby. From different areas, the pair raced toward the commotion. “We just knew,” Ortega said. “We knew in our hearts that they were about to dig, so we stood in front of the construction truck.” She added: “We just knew we had to stop it in some way.”
For the better part of an hour, David and Ortega faced off against the construction vehicles and the contractors alone, as they waited for other border wall activists and media to arrive. “It was really last minute,” David said. “We didn’t have support at all, and we were really scared because we were just out there by ourselves.” Some of the contractors appeared confused, she said; others were visibly angry, including one contractor who she said swung the bucket of his front-end loader at them. “He just swung it around, like really macho, and he had this angry look on his face,” David recalled. “I just felt like he was fighting us with his machine.”
David managed to get inside the bucket of one of the machines, where she took a seat and refused to move. Across the road, Ortega attempted to block a second vehicle from digging into the earth. Eventually, Border Patrol agents and park rangers arrived at the scene. “There were so many,” David said. Around the same time, outside media started to show up. In a video from the scene, Ortega can be heard imploring the men to leave. “This is O’odham land,” she said. “This is a sacred area. You do not have permission to be here.”
The arresting agents approached David first, as she remained seated in the bucket of the front-end loader. “I put my head down because I didn’t want to see it,” she said. “I just stayed where I was in that bulldozer until I felt a bunch of hands grab my arms and then they lifted me up.” Ortega, who was on the other side of the road, said the words and actions of law enforcement felt contradictory. “They said that I had permission to leave, but they wouldn’t let me leave,” she said. The presence of so many men with guns near the springs left her shaken. “There was so many I couldn’t even count,” Ortega said. “It was really intimidating, and I was trying to explain that they were on sacred land, and it was not OK for them to be there in the way that they were with their weapons, and how violent it was, and how disrespectful it was to our people, to our land.”
Both women were handcuffed for the long drive from the border to the Florence detention center. As the hours ticked away inside the facility, they grew increasingly concerned. “We knew we had to have our initial appearance, but they were making it seem like we were there for the long haul,” David said. “We were getting really scared. We hadn’t gotten a phone call. We hadn’t been able to even tell our parents where we were, and they were giving us directions and clothing allocations.”
The following morning, the pair learned that they would be given an afternoon hearing and Ortega was eventually able to speak to a court-appointed attorney who informed her family of what had happened. It was well past midnight by the time they made it home.
Nearly a week later, the two women are still recovering from the ordeal, leaning on friends for support and taking measures to ensure that they were not exposed to Covid-19 as they plan their next steps in the defense of O’odham land.
Ortega described the struggle as intergenerational and said it will not end soon. “We come from a people that have had to fight to be recognized,” she said. “This isn’t over. This isn’t the end of the story. This has been an ongoing process and it’s another chapter.”
Abyssinian soldiers in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1936. (photo: Getty)
How Italy's Colonial War in Ethiopia Foreshadowed the Barbarism of World War II
Anne Colamosca, Jacobin
Colamosca writes: "In early 1934, with the United States and Europe mired in the Great Depression, Italy's Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, was widely hailed by any number of Western media barons and public intellectuals."
The Booker Prize shortlisting of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King is the latest sign of rising interest in Fascist Italy’s colonial war in Ethiopia. The genocidal violence perpetrated against Ethiopians in 1935–6 was soon turned back onto European soil — and united Italian anti-fascists with the Africans resisting colonial aggression.
Faced with the dramas of the economic crisis, they praised the “successes” of Mussolini’s corporatist state — supposedly overshadowing the economic model used by the Western democracies.
Eminent author Sir Philip Gibbs informed New York Times readers of Mussolini’s “acute, subtle and far-seeing mind.” Britain’s King George V spoke of Italy as being “under the wise guidance of a strong statesman.” And academics from all over loyally churned out papers supporting Mussolini’s “creativity” in boosting Italy’s domestic economy. But not all were deceived. A. L. Rowse, the somewhat snobbish scholar at All Souls College Oxford, shrewdly described him as a “short, stocky butcher, with a heavy, ill-shaven jowl.”
Mussolini had long been a favorite of British and US establishment figures like press mogul Lord Beaverbrook, Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, Henry R. Luce of Time, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, and Winston Churchill. This latter remarked in 1927 that he could not help being charmed “by Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing.” Even American progressives, including Lincoln Steffens and New Republic editor Herbert Croly, publicly applauded Mussolini.
Such admirers acknowledged Mussolini’s success in “saving” Italy not only from bankruptcy after the Great War, but from a Bolshevik takeover. Two “red years” of strikes in 1919–20 known as the “biennio rosso” had horrified Italian bankers, industrialists, and landowners; their response was to finance the recently formed fascist paramilitary troops to destroy the powerful labor movement. In the May 1921 elections, Mussolini made quiet political deals with the government parties and whipped up many peasants’ and lower-middle-class Italians’ fears of leftist power-grabbing and violence. On October 28, 1922, the King — by some accounts, fearful of a civil war — invited Mussolini to form a government.
This had drastic consequences — and by 1926, a one-party Fascist regime had taken form. By the end of the decade, Italy’s diverse political left, made up of socialists, communists, and anarchists, had been eviscerated. They had been murdered, exiled, or imprisoned, in a campaign of ceaseless brutality largely unremarked upon across much of the West. International press did not want to be associated with the anti-fascists; it was imagined Italians were too politically “immature” to live in a real democracy anyway.
The Italian left was in a state of trauma. It was the bloody death of popular socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924 — kidnapped in broad daylight and murdered — that had really terrified them. Mussolini initially professed sorrow at Matteotti’s death, claiming that he had had nothing to do with it. Revered University of Florence historian and socialist activist Gaetano Salvemini secured documents proving Mussolini’s key role in the heinous murder. But he himself soon fell victim to arrest and imprisonment.
A big-boned man, at this point boasting a long, heavy, dark beard, Salvemini came from Molfatta, Puglia, a village deep in the Mezzogiorno — not a typical background for a literary figure or academic, in this period. Fascists had been disrupting his lectures for weeks before the arrest, waving their truncheons and yelling “the Ape of Molfetta” at the historian while the students tried to protect him. Salvemini told a friend that he never knew if he would make it home alive from one day to the next; he had already experienced deep personal tragedy years before, in 1908, when his wife and five children were killed in an earthquake.
The trial against Salvemini had a surprising outcome: the judge granted Salvemini “provisional freedom,” and through a large network of anti-fascists, he escaped into exile in 1925. After nine years in London and Paris, he moved to the United States in 1934, teaching at Harvard. The first chair of history of Italian civilization was created just for him — an especially prestigious platform from which to continue his ceaseless battle against Mussolini. Decisive in this regard were the events of the Italo-Ethiopian war, a brutal onslaught of colonial violence that served as a prelude to the great confrontation of World War II.
Wag the Dog
Already in 1927, Salvemini had published The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, contradicting the view that Mussolini had “saved” Italy from Bolshevism. But public opinion abroad did not shift. This began to change in 1934, as Mussolini announced that he was planning to invade Ethiopia in order to “civilize” its population. This threw the League of Nations into a dither; for while Ethiopia was its only African member state, there was little international reaction or support for it. In October 1935, Mussolini invaded.
Already prior to the invasion, Salvemini had finished work on Under the Axe of Fascism, which was then published a few months into the war. It offered a meticulously documented critique of Fascism, aimed at what a deeply frustrated Salvemini saw as totally clueless Europeans and Americans — though the book soon became a best seller.
In it, he describes profound unemployment, ongoing wage cuts for working-class Italians, and relentless brutality by police and the OVRA secret service. Supported by reams of statistics and anecdotes about individual shattered lives, the book concluded that Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia in order to divert attention away from his failing domestic economy — a political hoax, famously dramatized in the late 1990s in Wag the Dog. And, for the first time since Mussolini’s 1922 coup, there began to be a shift in public opinion.
For decades, the Italian-Ethiopian War was largely ignored, at least in terms of Anglophone academia. But in the last two decades there has been a growing number of important studies, along with original, English-language literary works that further illustrate Salvemini’s long-held view of the essential brutality of Italian fascism. Belying the notion that Mussolini was relatively benign as compared to Hitler or Stalin, this growing cache of research and literary work has helped to produce a detailed, clear-eyed — if profoundly painful — view of an invasion that killed an estimated 760,000 Ethiopians and wounded countless others.
Just in the last two years, two high-profile Ethiopian women have produced acclaimed works describing the war, as seen by relatives who lived through it. (A number of other, mostly male Ethiopians have previously published works, generally about their own “coming-of-age” experiences.) Aida Edemariam’s memoir, The Wife’s Tale, and Maaza Mengiste’s novel The Shadow King — this latter shortlisted for the Booker Prize — highlight the importance of this colonial war for understanding fascist violence and contemporary racism.
Ethiopian Perspective
The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History is the story of Edemariam’s paternal grandmother, Yetemengu, whom she grew up with, learning her story little by little throughout her own childhood years. Later, Edemariam left Ethiopia to study at Oxford and eventually become a senior feature writer and editor at the Guardian. Her book is a lyrical, subtly written memoir that spans most of the twentieth century, although the Italian invasion and occupation plays a key role in her grandmother’s story. (In 2019, Edemariam won the coveted Ondaatje literary prize, given to a work of literature that best evokes the “spirit of a place.”) In her grandmother’s voice, she wrote of the moment of the Italian attack:
The town had emptied of people and then one day, finally an answer: six specks in the sky, specks moving faster and faster and straighter than any bird, growing bigger and bigger, until she could hear the roar . . . the streets ran with women, children, clergy, the infirm, as the thundering drew near they threw themselves into ditches, huddled against walls, behind trees . . . a dark rain fell from them, a hail of metal that exploded with a terrible noise as it hit the ground. How many huts caught fire, and the women and children inside them.
Mengiste’s novel, The Shadow King, revolves around a protagonist based on her great-grandmother Getey — here named Hirut. Mengiste, born in Ethiopia, moved to New York with her parents as a child but returned often to her native land. A Fulbright scholar, she spent years researching the war in both Addis Ababa and Rome.
Only late in her research did Mengiste learn about her great-grandmother’s life as a warrior. But as historian Bahru Zewde notes in A History of Modern Ethiopia,
Not only were there Ethiopian women warriors, but they played a major role in the very strong resistance movement after the Italians took over the government. By reason of their capacity to arouse less suspicion, they played a predominant role . . . inside the enemy’s organizational network, passing on crucial information about enemy strength, troop movements and planned operations.
In Mengiste’s novel, Hirut is captured, disrobed, and photographed for postcards Italian soldiers sent home — supposedly demonstrating “the whorish qualities” of the African women they encountered. Hirut was an impoverished teenage orphan, fighting for her country with a gun from 1896. Her father had used this same weapon almost four decades before in the successful fight against an earlier Italian invasion — a resistance that had humiliated Italy’s hard right and provided Mussolini with a certain base of support for the unprovoked invasion in 1935.
“The Italian state was almost bankrupt when the Italian Empire was officially proclaimed in 1936,” write Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor at NYU, and Mia Fuller, a professor at Berkeley, in their introduction to their 2005 co-edited volume Italian Colonialism. “For Italian believers in colonialism, empire promised an escape route from a subordinate international position and a means of advertising Italian power and modernity.” As they explain, this “modernity” adopted the most brutal forms:
The Italians used industrial killing methods (mustard gas) that are more commonly associated with Hitler’s and Stalin’s soldiers than with Mussolini’s rank and file . . . Indeed, the slaughter in Ethiopia was so out-of-keeping with the Italians’ self-perception as the more “humane” dictatorship that it has been edited out of popular and official memory. Until 1995, the Italian government and former combatants . . . denied the use of gas in East Africa.
Indeed, in an article in this same collection, scholar Alberto Sbacchi writes of how:
On December 23, 1935 the Italians dropped barrels that broke up upon hitting the ground . . . projecting a colorless liquid . . . and a military officer comments, “a few hundred of my men were hit, their feet, their hands, their faces, were covered with blisters . . . I did not know how to fight this rain that burned and killed” . . . By the end of January, 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes and pastures were systematically sprayed with gas.
This barbarism was perpetrated in the lowliest of causes. “The Ethiopian War was willed neither by the Army chiefs nor by big business,” wrote Salvemini in Under the Axe of Fascism:
The war was willed primarily by Mussolini and by the leaders of the Fascist Party . . . because something had to be done to restore the prestige of the regime . . . An increasing number of people in Italy were asking themselves what was the good of a dictatorship . . . During 1934 a deadly and unconquerable inertia had become apparent all over Italy among the bulk of the population.
War Comes Home
Already by the summer of 1935, the looming war had attracted journalists from around the world to the Ethiopian capital. Many grew bored in Addis Ababa, as Italian troops were held up in remote areas dealing with bad weather, local dissidents, and logistical problems. Evelyn Waugh — at that time a young reporter for London’s Daily Mail — was known as pro-Italian. He wrote that the Ethiopians were as “naïve as children with noses pressed at the nursery window-pane longing for the rain to clear.” The scenery, he added, “was ramshackle squalor.” Waugh believed wholeheartedly in the great benefit colonization would bring to “unruly dark-skinned nations.”
But George Lowther Steer, a highly regarded reporter for the London Times (whom one observer called “flamingly pro-Ethiopian”) clearly did not buy into Mussolini’s lies — and was extremely upset at the sheer injustice of the war. He wrote that the Ethiopian army “resembles so little any other army in the world,” and noted:
Dressed each according to his taste, wearing no military insignia; followed by a welter of pack animals, donkeys and mules, and by their womenfolk; by their children who carried their rifles; and by their servants and slaves, this army looked more like the emigration of a whole people.
This violence would soon come back to Europe. As Neelam Srivastava explains in her recent Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970, by the time Steer completed his Caesar in Abyssinia, a book damning Mussolini, he was already reporting on the Spanish Civil War. It was Steer’s article “on the bombing of Guernica by German airplanes that caused a global outcry and inspired Picasso to paint one of his most famous works of art, Guernica.” But Srivastava also fascinatingly makes clear the small window of opportunity anti-fascists had to draw attention to the horrors of the Ethiopian war. The international press corps was anxious to move on to Spain and the Germans — considered a far more important event.
All Roads Lead to Rome
It was during this period that the New Times and Ethiopia News, or NTEN, became a major factor in the campaign to bring attention to Ethiopia. It was written and published by former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, a good friend of Salvemini and longtime partner of Italian anarchist Silvio Corio, who had also worked to overthrow Mussolini.
Pankhurst’s readership was small but influential, in some ways similar to I. F. Stone’s Weekly, established fifteen years later. Despite the big budgets of major Western publications, it was Pankhurst’s NTEN that black activists like Marcus Garvey and many Harlemites read to get the inside story on causes which would help establish the Pan-African movement.
Pankhurst’s role is explained in an excellent and brief 2013 biography by historian Katherine Connelly, Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire. Despite the censorship and the fascists’ suspension of telegraph services, NTEN carried stunning reports of a three-day murderous rampage in Addis Ababa in retaliation for the attempted murder of fascist commander Rodolfo Graziani — well known in a previous action in Libya for his sadistic actions against Africans.
And some surprising things did happen. In January 1936, Time magazine named Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, its Man of the Year. This, after more than a decade of swooning over Mussolini. Hard-right Time foreign editor Laird Goldsborough began to be marginalized by the magazine’s publisher, Henry Luce. He finally left in 1938 after insisting — and being turned down — on an effort to make Mussolini a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, a step over the top even for right-wing Luce.
As James Dugan and Laurence Lafore point out in Days of Emperor and Clown, “The old liberal tradition of sympathy for fascism still lingered toward the end of 1935, but it had begun to change.” In November of that year, the New Republic proposed a more sophisticated explanation of the war, one that showed a much clearer and more hostile understanding of the nature of fascism. And by January 1936, it gave great prominence to an article by Salvemini and Max Ascoli, excoriating Mussolini.
“The strange destiny of Ethiopia had begun to realize itself,” add Dugan and Lafore. “It was paradoxically creating the Rome-Berlin Axis, making it terrifying and therefore strong. But it was also commencing the work that would eventually invoke the conscience of the west and bring an end to fascism . . .”
It would take until much later for that confrontation finally to come. For his part, the anti-fascist Salvemini’s determination was only deepened in 1937 when Mussolini had his close friend Carlo Rosselli and his brother, Nello, murdered in Normandy, France. True to form, it was Salvemini, among all of the Rosselli brothers’ many friends, who published a piece formally accusing Mussolini of having them murdered, as Stanislao Pugliese explains in his Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile.
“Salvemini’s view was ‘all roads lead to Rome.’” And, as Pugliese adds:
The fascist press tried to link the assassinations to conflicts within the antifascist community. The recent murder of the anarchists Camilo Berber and Francesco Barbieri at the hands of Stalin’s agents in Spain gave this story “credibility.” It soon became clear (though) that the assassins were members of the French Cagoule, a secret extreme right-wing sect. Despite attempts by the regime to accuse the Left, proof of fascist (if not Mussolini’s) authorship of the assassinations was provided by the regime itself.
Despite the mounting confirmation of his accusations against the Mussolini regime, Salvemini was hated by many figures on the Right across the West, including in the United States. There, many Italian émigrés were pro-Vatican and pro-Mussolini. But Harvard was, in many ways, a sanctuary for the Italian anti-fascist. One colleague recounted, “He has only friends here. No enemies.”
In 1945, the Fascist regime finally came to its end. After living in exile for almost twenty-five years, in 1948, Salvemini returned to Italy and was invited back to his old university job, although he was already in his mid-seventies. He resumed his teaching job, starting with the words, “As I was saying in my last lecture.” There, he taught for a few years, surrounded by students and anti-fascist friends happy to have him home again. But if Mussolini was at long last dead, this did not mean the end of Salvemini’s struggle. Now, the socialist could turn his attention to the omnipresent Americans — and the quickly emerging Cold War.
The EPA cut back enforcement during COVID. These researchers are assessing the damage. (photo: Getty)
The EPA Cut Back Enforcement During COVID. These Researchers Are Assessing the Damage.
Naveena Sadasivam, Grist
Sadasivam writes: "As the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic descended upon the U.S. in mid-March, the head of the nation's most powerful oil and gas industry group wrote to President Trump. The American Petroleum Institute CEO, Michael Sommers, asked for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to exempt his industry from so-called routine reporting and monitoring requirements, a set of rules that form the backbone of federal environmental law."
The EPA cut back enforcement during COVID. These researchers are assessing the damage.
Six days later, Sommers’ wish came true: The EPA announced a temporary enforcement policy stating that facilities — like coal plants, refineries, and wastewater processing plants — that weren’t able to monitor and report emissions of toxic pollutants during the pandemic would be excused. The agency “[did] not expect to” pursue fines when these facilities failed to fulfill their obligation to report the quantities of various cancer-causing chemicals they were releasing into the air and water.
In the following weeks, environmental groups and a coalition of nine states filed three separate lawsuits, arguing that the policy was too broad and essentially allowed polluters to decide whether or not they wanted to comply with environmental laws. Ultimately, despite the threat of COVID-19 showing few signs of slowing, the EPA phased out its policy at the end of August. But for 172 days, in the middle of a global pandemic, the nation’s top environmental cop looked to many like it was essentially off the beat.
“EPA’s COVID-19 enforcement policy was just ill-conceived from the beginning,” said Joel Mintz, a professor of law emeritus at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and former EPA enforcement attorney. “Whether intentionally or not, it sent a signal to regulated companies and to states that EPA was basically suspending enforcement during the pandemic. That was how it was perceived.”
Six months after the agency announced its temporary enforcement policy, a picture of its effects is slowly beginning to emerge. Self-reported data from industrial polluters collected by the EPA shows that these facilities conducted 40 percent fewer emission tests at smokestacks in March and April this year compared to the same period last year. Also, while only 325 facilities notified the EPA that they would be unable to submit water quality reports as required during those two months, more than 16,500 facilities simply did not submit them — that’s the fourth-highest amount of noncompliance in the last 20 years, according to an analysis of the agency’s own data.
In addition, reporters with the Associated Press calculated that state environmental agencies following the EPA’s lead granted more than 3,000 waivers exempting companies from having to comply with state-level environmental rules. The dearth of emission and water quality reports makes it difficult for both regulators and public watchdogs to determine exactly how much the facilities have polluted since March. For those who live near these facilities, it complicates efforts to hold polluters accountable.
Separately, a study by researchers at American University in Washington, D.C., found that counties with six or more facilities required to report toxic emissions to the EPA saw a 14 percent year-over-year increase in particulate matter pollution after the EPA announced its enforcement policy. The study, which has undergone one round of peer review but not yet been published, also links the additional pollution to an increase in deaths from the novel coronavirus in these counties. On average, these counties saw a 53 percent increase in cases and 10 percent increase in deaths after the rollback, compared to those with fewer polluting facilities. The study, which has received little attention, is the first to document what its authors say is a causal relationship between the EPA’s policy shift and an increase in both COVID-19 cases — air pollution weakens the immune system — and deaths.
Many of these findings complement Grist’s own reporting, which has found that the Texas state environmental agency pursued 40 percent fewer violations during the pandemic compared to the same period last year, and that Pennsylvania’s state regulator conducted 37 percent fewer inspections following its coronavirus shutdown in mid-March. Many states also continued to permit oil and gas drilling at a normal pace even as they scaled back inspections and other enforcement activity.
EPA’s policy “opened the door to the wholesale waivers that many states granted, even to recidivist polluters in a number of cases, which was particularly disturbing,” Mintz said. Still, even as researchers and journalists piece together the effects of the EPA’s enforcement policy across the country with the limited data available, the true extent of the damage may never be known, he said.
“There’s no way to really know exactly what happened,” he said. “The government is not aware if there’s no self-monitoring of the incidences and volume of waste that are going out through leaks, and the companies very likely don’t know if they’re not monitoring.”
Disentangling the data
For most of her career, Claudia Persico has been interested in the effects that pollution has on public health, from causing kids to perform worse on academic tests to damaging the health of unborn children. A professor of applied public policy at American University in Washington, D.C., she has become intimately familiar with two EPA data sets: the Toxic Release Inventory and the Air Quality System. The former provides an accounting of the toxic pollutants that industrial facilities release, and the latter contains information about air quality collected by thousands of air monitors across the country.
Persico thought of the two datasets in March, when the EPA announced that it would be lenient when assessing fines for noncompliance with reporting requirements. Would the data show that the policy resulted in more pollution — and more COVID-19 deaths? After all, COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, and decades of research shows that air pollution worsens asthma and other lung diseases. It also inhibits the body’s defense system, making people more susceptible to infectious diseases. A study published earlier this year by Harvard’s school of public health found that people who lived in counties with poor air quality were more likely to die from COVID-19. Even one microgram of additional particulate matter pollution per cubic meter of air could increase death rates by 8 percent, they found. A new study published last week in Environmental Research Letters, an academic journal, also found that counties with higher levels of certain hazardous air pollutants had a 9 percent higher death rate from COVID-19 than those with lower levels.
But Persico faced several challenges when she assessed the EPA’s data. For one, the toxics database only contains pollution information from factories that use certain chemicals considered especially dangerous by the EPA. Nitrogen oxide emissions, for instance, aren’t reported in the database even though they can cause asthma attacks and difficulty breathing. As for the air quality data, monitors are few and far between. Some counties do not have any monitors, and research has shown that monitors are often strategically placed by local regulators in areas with good air quality.
Then there’s the question of causality: How would the researchers know if facilities started polluting more because of the new lack of consequences or because of some other pandemic-related reason? It was a crucial question, because companies were making the argument that key employees working on environmental and safety compliance might catch the virus, leaving them short-staffed and therefore unable to prevent pollution.
The findings, however, indicated that the date of the rollback was a turning point in the 2020 data. When the researchers looked at air quality data in 2017, 2018, and 2019, comparing counties with six or more facilities that reported emissions to the EPA to those with one to five such facilities over the month of March, they didn’t find any major differences in the amount of pollution. But when they ran the same analysis for 2020, they found that counties with six or more facilities had 14 percent more particulate matter and 5 percent more ozone after the March 26 enforcement rollback.
When the researchers then looked at COVID-19 cases and deaths, they found that counties with six or more polluting facilities also had a 10 percent increase in their daily death rate after the rollback. According to the researchers, deaths began increasing “substantially” six days after the rollback announcement, suggesting that “pollution affected deaths, at least in the short term, by causing existing COVID-19 cases to worsen.”
“In the absence of this rollback, there would’ve been fewer cases and deaths,” said Persico.
Persico found even more evidence that the increase in pollution was tied to the rollback when she looked at the polluting facilities’ compliance history. Counties where pollution increased after the rollback had more facilities that the EPA had previously tagged as “high priority violators” than those whose pollution remained relatively constant.
“When you minimize penalties and signal that you’re unlikely to fine [polluting companies], it might induce more facilities to emit more pollution, irrespective of whether or not the pandemic is making it hard on them,” said Persico.
The first version of Persico’s study was rejected by a journal after peer reviewers raised questions about the causality she attributed to the rollback. It was possible, they said, that legitimate challenges to maintaining compliance — such as sick workers — could have caused the increased pollution, rather than companies taking advantage of the rollback. In order to address that concern, Persico eliminated counties that had reported COVID-19 cases prior to the rollback from her study. That way, the increase in pollution wouldn’t likely be explained by workers contracting the virus in significant numbers. Even after controlling the data in this way, the results showed similar levels of increased pollution after the rollback, suggesting her original conclusions about causality were sound. She has since resubmitted the working paper to another economics journal for publication.
Mintz, the emeritus professor at Nova Southeastern University, said there’s “no reason to doubt the results” given that the researchers are “respected” and “their methodology seems to be sound.” He said the findings were “significant” but that he wasn’t surprised by them.
Seth Shonkoff, executive director of the nonprofit Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, said the study had a “relatively strong design” and that the authors “did a good job of controlling for other factors which could have gotten in the way.” Shonkoff pointed out that the study’s use of air monitors, which are designed to pick up on pollutants at the regional level, could have missed localized effects and actually underestimated the effects of pollution on COVID-19 cases and deaths.
“They used the best available data that they could have had access to,” he said.
Persico’s work complements research by data analysts at the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, a network formed after the 2016 election out of fear that crucial environmental data collected by the federal government might be deleted or altered. An analysis conducted by geography and geospatial sciences professors and data engineers, which was published by the network last month, also found that compliance with federal reporting requirements under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act decreased after the rollback, with thousands of facilities failing to submit reports specifying the quantity of chemicals being released into the air and water.
Of the facilities that didn’t report smokestack emissions to the EPA after the rollback, 20 percent were noncompliant with the Clean Air Act for all of the last three years, and a third had been noncompliant for at least half that time. Kelsey Breseman, a data engineer with the network and a co-author of the report, said that the pattern of noncompliance suggests that serial polluters took advantage of the rollback.
“Even if they were to return to ‘normal reporting levels,’ I would have a pretty deep fear for all the communities that are impacted by this,” she said. “You can see serious health impacts years and years down the line, and I fear deeply that the people who are impacted will never be able to prove who caused that problem, and the burden will rest on their shoulders.”
Molly Block, a spokesperson for the EPA, said in a written statement that there is “no support” in Persico’s research to make the claim that the enforcement policy led to an increase in pollution.
As for the Environmental Data Governance Initiative’s report, Block said the work had not been peer-reviewed and claimed that the group has made mistakes when evaluating EPA data in the past. (The group did once acknowledge inadvertently undercounting EPA enforcement actions in an analysis of 2018 data.) She said the agency has initiated more than 100 criminal enforcement cases and 460 civil enforcement cases between mid-March and the end of July.
“EPA has not curtailed its enforcement during this public health emergency,” she told Grist. “Given that companies have had five months to adjust their operations to constraints arising from the pandemic, the agency expects that they have the experience necessary to comply with the regulations.”
“As always, if noncompliance occurs, EPA will be reasonable when deciding what enforcement response is appropriate,” she added.
Suit after suit
When the EPA first announced its relaxed enforcement policy, it said the measure was “temporary” but did not include an end date. After two lawsuits, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the state of New York, were filed against it, the agency announced in June that it would phase out the policy. A third lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation groups was filed in August.
The attorneys general of nine states claimed that the EPA’s pandemic policy forced states to expand their enforcement capacity to fill the void left by the federal agency’s rollback. In New York, for instance, the EPA is responsible for enforcing water quality standards for wastewater discharges into rivers and streams. If the EPA reduced reporting requirements for industrial polluters, the state environmental agency would be forced to step in to conduct their own inspections and pursue violations. Last week, the state voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit after the agency confirmed that it had phased out the policy.
Similarly, a group of environmental nonprofits led by the Natural Resources Defense Council requested that the agency publish an emergency rule requiring companies that took advantage of the enforcement policy to provide written notice that they were doing so. When the EPA did not respond to the request, the groups sued, claiming that the policy created a “a serious and immediate risk” and that the agency had delayed responding to their petition for an emergency rule. A federal judge ruled in July that the groups did not have standing, because they did not establish the harm caused by EPA’s failure to respond to their petition. An attorney for the group said that they did not plan to appeal the decision.
The third lawsuit, however, will proceed. Last month, the Center for Biological Diversity and two other conservation groups filed a suit arguing that the agency had failed to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service — as the Endangered Species Act requires — to determine the effect the policy may have on vulnerable species. Jared Margolis, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said that the EPA’s responsibility to consult with other agencies is still an issue even though the policy has been rescinded.
“It’s separate and aside from life of policy itself,” he said. “Just because the policy isn’t around doesn’t mean the health effects aren’t. People want to know what has occurred.”
Even though the EPA phased out its pandemic enforcement policy on August 31, the fight to ensure environmental laws are continuously enforced is not over yet. For one, the recent curtailment of enforcement during the pandemic comes at the tail end of decades of dwindling enforcement, according to environmental advocates and researchers. A 2018 report by the Environmental Data Governance Initiative found that civil cases against polluters that year fell to their lowest point since 1994. 2018 was also the second-lowest year on record for criminal cases, and the dollar amount of civil penalties collected dropped to its lowest level since 1987.
The Trump administration is now seeking new steps to provide regulatory relief to businesses. On August 31 — the day the EPA phased out its enforcement policy — the White House sent a memo to federal agencies directing them to take certain deregulatory steps in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, like dialing back enforcement when companies demonstrate a good-faith effort to comply with laws and increasing the standard of evidence when an agency wants to issue fines. While the exact result of this policy on the EPA is unclear, it could mean the agency’s willingness to hold polluters accountable continues to slide.
Margolis, the Center for Biological Diversity attorney, said that the EPA’s enforcement rollback “set a bad precedent.”
“We need to send a message that those who care about wildlife and public health shouldn’t tolerate this kind of behavior,” he said.
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