U.S. Intelligence News

The Plague Years

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In August, the most important Islamic religious council in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, issued a public health opinion. The Indonesian Ulama Council, known as the MUI, decreed that observant Muslims in the country should consider the measles vaccine haram, or forbidden, because it contains gelatin derived from pork.


The fatwa represented a niche opinion​—millions of observant Muslims accept vaccines every year—but it had the power of politics behind it: The head of the MUI, a religious hardliner, had recently agreed to appear on the ballot with Indonesia’s president when he runs for reelection in April. The ruling had disastrous consequences. Millions of parents in Indonesia refused to allow their children to be vaccinated, and the region of Aceh, which operates under religious law, blocked vaccination teams from entering. Outside of Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, the refusals pushed vaccine acceptance to just 68 percent of eligible children, when effective protection requires 95 percent. In Aceh, only 8 percent of children received the shot.


The opposition to the measles vaccine in Indonesia surfaced the same month that the Italian Senate voted to end all mandatory vaccinations for schoolchildren​—for measles, tetanus, polio, and seven other diseases. By October, the occurrence of measles—one of the most contagious diseases on the planet and a widespread cause of blindness, deafness, and brain damage—began rising there. Simultaneously the disease soared across Europe, with 82,596 cases in 2018, compared to 5,273 two years earlier. Measles also crept back in Venezuela, just two years after the Americas had been declared free of the disease. At the end of November, an array of international health authorities—the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UNICEF, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—jointly warned that measles was surging across the planet. “We risk losing decades of progress,” a WHO official said.


The worldwide effort to eliminate measles is not failing because the organism has changed significantly—the virus that infects a child today is largely the same one that sickened children 100 years ago—nor because the vaccine is faulty. Measles cases are multiplying across the globe for the same reason that the international campaign to eradicate polio has stalled, and that Ebola outbreaks continue, and that opportunistic new diseases like Zika take us by surprise: a rise in nationalist politics, which is causing countries to turn inward, harden their borders, and distrust outsiders. One hundred years after the influenza pandemic of 1918—the worst outbreak in recorded history, which killed as many as 100 million people by some estimates—the assumption that every nation owes an investment in health to every other nation no longer holds.


As nativist appeals undermine public health systems and cooperation among countries degrades, the potential for catastrophe increases. We are always at risk of a new disease breaking out, or a previously controlled one surging back. What’s different now is that the rejection of scientific expertise and the refusal to support government agencies leave us without defenses that could keep a fast-moving infection at bay. Pathogens pay no respect to politics or to borders. Nationalist rhetoric seeks to persuade us that restricting visas and constructing walls will protect us. They will not.


“Nationalism, xenophobia, the new right-wing populism in Europe and the United States, are raising our risk,” said Ronald Klain, who was the White House Ebola response coordinator for President Barack Obama and now teaches at Harvard Law School. “There’s a focus not so much on stopping infectious diseases as much as there is on preventing the movement of people to prevent the transmission of diseases. And that’s not possible, because no matter what you do about immigrants, we live in a connected world.”


Distrust of expertise, suspicion of immigrants, shunning of international cooperation—these all describe nationalist movements in Africa and Europe. But the place where official attitudes toward global public health have changed most sharply is the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump. It’s difficult to convey just how great the change has been over the past two years. The Obama administration wrote the first national strategy to tackle antibiotic resistance in 2014, launched with an executive order and a summit at the White House; created the Global Health Security Agenda, which drew 64 nations into a partnership to advance public health; and oversaw the largest foreign deployment of the CDC in the agency’s history, to the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa—which was accompanied by an emergency appropriation of more than $5 billion. The Trump administration has abandoned such commitments.


Trump’s first budget proposal included sharp cuts to the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for addressing the health problems caused by climate change. The final budget passed by Congress reinstated much of the funding for these agencies, but Trump’s next budget proposal a year later included further cuts to health and science. Beyond the budget cuts, Trump also drastically reduced the scale of the CDC’s overseas outbreak-prevention work from 49 countries to ten and attempted to eliminate $252 million in funding left over from the Obama administration’s appropriation for Ebola. Moreover, Trump dismantled the National Security Council’s global health security team, leaving the United States with no clear channel to respond to global health threats.


The Trump administration’s dismantling of public health protections should come as no surprise. In the summer of 2014, shortly after the start of the Ebola outbreak, Trump—not yet a candidate—demanded that the United States close its borders against the disease. “Keep them out of here,” he tweeted about American missionaries who fell ill in West Africa. “Stop the Ebola patients from entering the U.S.” and “The U.S. cannot allow Ebola infected people back.” In July 2015, a month after he declared his candidacy, he made an explicit association between immigrants and disease in a statement about his views on Mexico. “Tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border,” he said.


By that fall, Trump’s views on the value of public health spending had come to dominate political discourse. Zika, the mosquito-borne virus that causes grave birth defects, began to spread within Puerto Rico in December 2015, and the next month a baby was born in Hawaii with Zika-related microcephaly, the first signs of a multiyear outbreak that’s produced more than 43,000 confirmed diagnoses in the United States and its territories. In February 2016, President Obama sent an emergency request to Congress for $1.8 billion in funding to help fight the disease. The Republican-led Congress cut the request by $700 million, however, and then took 233 days to approve it. “That delay was driven, in no small part, by a baseless view that Zika was a disease being brought to our country by immigrants,” Klain said. “As a result, you had local transmission of Zika in Florida in 2016. You had for the first time in our country’s history the Centers for Disease Control issuing a travel advisory against part of the continental United States.”


Two weeks before last year’s midterm elections, as a migrant caravan made its way through Central America toward the U.S. border, the idea of immigrants posing a health risk to the American populace emerged again. “It’s a health issue, too, because we don’t know what people have coming in here,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on October 23. Two days later, a guest on her program raised the issue as well, saying, “We have mass amounts of people coming into our country with disease.” Fox & Friends next picked up the theme of disease-bearing immigrant hordes, followed by a Lou Dobbs guest on the Fox Business Network who linked “the continued invasion of this country” with “diseases spreading across the country that are causing polio-like paralysis of our children.” The most explicit outburst of this rolling moral panic probably came from David Ward, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who claimed on the Fox News show Your World with Neil Cavuto, “We have these individuals coming from all over the world that have some of the most extreme medical care in the world, and they are coming in with diseases such as smallpox and leprosy and TB that are going to infect our people in the United States.”


These assertions are either flatly false (smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980) or grossly inflated (roughly 34,000 cases of leprosy, now called Hansen’s disease, occurred in the Americas in 2015, 94 percent of which were clustered in Brazil—not the source of the caravan). Ironically, the caravan members might well have posed less of a risk to the American public than other U.S. residents do, because the countries from which they were fleeing have higher routine vaccination rates than those recorded in many parts of the United States. But even after the midterms, Fox News hosts and guests continued to promote the idea that immigrants to the United States were bringing with them the seeds of the next great pandemic. At the end of November, Fox & Friends First co-host Jillian Mele announced the network had “exclusively” found “serious health risks being carried by some of those migrants”—risks that, according to correspondent Griff Jenkins, included lice, chicken pox, and the common cold. And in December, in the infamous White House press briefing in which he promised to “take the mantle” of shutting down the government, Trump reemphasized the now-familiar point: “People with tremendous medical difficulty and medical problems are pouring in, and in many cases it’s contagious. They’re pouring into our country. We have to have border security.”


Nationalist politics has led to a massive measles outbreak in Europe.

2016: 5,273 cases

2018: 82,596 cases

Source: World Health Organization

The claim that immigrants are intrinsically dangerous long antedates Trump’s rise to power. Indeed, it was the justification for U.S. immigration restrictions for more than a century. “Whether we’re talking about the Irish during the great cholera epidemics of the antebellum period, or polio and the Italians, or tuberculosis from the Jews, or bubonic plague and the Chinese, it’s a recurring concern that Americans have,” said Alan Kraut, a professor of history at American University and the author of Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace. “The popular theme is they are ‘dirty,’ and a challenge to the public self.”


But nationalists who blame immigrants for bringing illnesses across U.S. borders are looking in the wrong place. A two-year project headed by University College London and The Lancet, published in December, found no evidence that the arrival of migrants endangers a nation’s health. (In fact, because migrants often go to work in medicine and as personal care attendants, they typically enhance a country’s health.) The more likely Patient Zeros are the people who are neither suspected nor checked: the citizens, legal residents, businesspeople, and tourists—227 million just in 2017—who fly unimpeded between the United States and other countries. The legal movement of people, and the shipment of food and freight, have already transported dangerous pathogens into—and out of—the United States: highly drug-resistant gut bacteria in a child returning from the Caribbean to Connecticut; treatment-resistant TB in an attorney who caught the disease in the United States, traveled to his destination wedding in Greece, and then returned home to Atlanta; foodborne illness on spices grown in Asia and mixed into charcuterie in Rhode Island.


In fact, migrants remanded into federal custody at the U.S. border seem likely to be facing graver health threats than the ones they would have encountered in their home countries. “I don’t hear much about efforts in the tent cities we’re building on the border to ensure that everyone’s got access to clean water and clean food and adequate ventilation to prevent transmission of respiratory disease,” said Peter Jay Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. In December, two Guatemalan children died in Border Patrol custody.


This is the perverse legacy of nationalism in power: By stigmatizing immigrants and segregating them, xenophobia can turn the lie of the “dirty foreigner” into truth.


The Trump administration’s neglect of America’s public health infrastructure is risky twice over: It courts outbreaks at home, and it weakens commitments that the United States—in fact, most governments—have made to public health around the world. The immediate aftermath of World War II saw a great upsurge of international collaboration on public health. The World Health Organization was founded in 1948, and an intensive multinational effort to eradicate smallpox—one of the deadliest killers in history—began in 1967. Leaders of the new global health regime developed complex surveillance systems and vast vaccination campaigns that they shared across borders. Their efforts soon met with success: Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, the first time in history that a deadly disease was effectively eliminated, and rinderpest, a cattle disease, followed it to extinction in 2011. The nationalist upheavals occurring across the globe now signal a potentially disastrous retreat from that confident cooperation.


“The greatest public health success happens in the context of social modernism, this legacy of the Enlightenment that history moves toward inevitable progress,” said Katherine Hirschfeld, an anthropology professor at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Gangster States: Organized Crime, Kleptocracy, and Political Collapse. “The political support for that has waned, and will probably continue to wane as we move into a darker era.”
 

Before the present crisis, we had ample warning that nationalist disputes could ruin public health achievements. Consider one instructive augur: Back in 1988, a punishing conflict broke out between two Soviet republics—Armenia and Azerbaijan, whose Nagorno-​Karabakh region voted to unify with Armenia. The war ruined the economies of both, impaired their public health systems, displaced more than one million people​—and led to the return of malaria, which a strict Soviet mosquito control program had suppressed for 50 years. By 1996, two years after the conflict ended, the number of malaria cases in Azerbaijan had surged to 13,135. The number of cases in Armenia peaked at 1,156 in 1998. It took more than a decade of eradication efforts—an aggressive program of spraying for mosquitoes and hunting down swamps and pools of stagnant water where the insects breed—to get the disease back under control. Malaria was not banished again from Armenia until 2011. Azerbaijan was declared malaria-free in 2013.


The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict set an ominous precedent. The same year the former Soviet republics launched hostilities, global health officials announced a campaign to permanently contain the spread of polio. Scientists confidently predicted that they would end transmission of the disease by 2000. It was a worthy goal; polio had mostly been chased from the Americas—the last case was in 1991—but was still paralyzing 350,000 children a year around the world. However, the campaign to destroy polio also proved a collateral casualty of nationalist unrest. In 2003, Muslim religious leaders in Nigeria, which then harbored 45 percent of all polio cases in the world, declared that the vaccine was religiously unacceptable, halting vaccination efforts in three states where the disease was clustered.


The move was nominally doctrinal—based on the same concern over vaccine ingredients that arose in Indonesia last year—but actually political. National elections had just transferred the center of power from a longstanding military regime with roots in the Muslim-majority north to a democratic one originating in the Christian-dominated south. Jockeying in the aftermath stirred up rumors and conspiracy theories—including some alleging that the polio campaign, led by Western nations, had deliberately contaminated the vaccine in a plot to wreck the fertility of Muslim girls. Only intensive diplomacy from other African and Islamic countries brought the disaffected states back into line behind the anti-polio campaign. But the new accord came too late; polio surged back. By 2006, Nigeria harbored four out of every five polio cases left in the world, and the disease had spilled across its borders to infect almost 1,500 children in 20 countries that had previously vanquished polio. Thanks to the worldwide movement of observant Muslims during the annual hajj, the Nigerian strain was carried to Saudi Arabia. From there, it spread as far as Indonesia.


Trump and his supporters on Fox News have spread the false idea that immigrants are carrying infectious diseases across the U.S. border. In fact, immigrants typically pose less of a health risk to the American public than other U.S. residents do.

Average Vaccination Coverage Rates

Nicaragua: 97 percent

Costa Rica: 95 percent

Mexico: 94 percent

United States: 89 percent

Source: World Health Organization

And polio is still not done. After pushing back the target date for eradication several times, the international campaign adjusted the time line yet again in January, extending it through 2023 and warning that even that goal may prove elusive. Wild polio virus remains entrenched in just two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but vaccine-derived virus—a condition arising from a mutation in the vaccine strain and spread by low rates of vaccination that leave children vulnerable​—persists in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Niger, Papua New Guinea, and Somalia. In January, several groups that are part of the 31-year-old campaign to eradicate polio urged the international community to push harder toward achieving their goal. “This is an effort that cannot be sustained indefinitely,” they warned.


In almost every case where polio persists, the same geopolitical backstory has enabled its survival, with ethno-nationalist and religious forces setting out to destabilize a dominant government. That’s been the case for the Taliban and Pashtun tribal members in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as for Boko Haram and tribal minorities in Nigeria. “The most important lesson we’ve learned is that if you intend to eradicate a disease—or at least achieve a high level of control of one—you should be thinking about how you engage ethnic and religious communities country by country, right from the start,” said Stephen Cochi, a senior adviser to the director of the CDC’s Global Immunization Division, which leads the agency’s polio eradication efforts. “Or history will repeat itself, and you’ll hit political or religious, ethnic, or ethnocentric obstacles that are inevitable.”

Undermining public health doesn’t require the involvement of a religious authority. Political disruption will do. That’s visible not just in the United States, but also in the increase in depression and chronic illnesses in eastern Ukraine, where about 1.5 million people have been displaced by ongoing tensions with Russia; the rise of antibiotic-​resistant bacteria in war hospitals in Yemen; the collapse of the health care system and spikes in infant mortality in Venezuela; and the staffing crisis in the British health care system triggered by the Brexit vote to withdraw the United Kingdom from Europe.


Perhaps the starkest example of how nationalist politics systematically undermines public health comes from Italy. Giuseppe Conte’s recently elected right-wing government acted with swift dispatch to target the country’s mandatory child-vaccination program. The reactionary Five Star Movement included opposition to vaccines in its campaign platform; after it won almost one-third of the vote last March, it formed a government with the far-right Northern League. One of the new coalition’s earliest official acts was to suspend the requirement that parents present proof of vaccinations against ten childhood diseases before their children can be enrolled in school.


In part, this policy arose from the spreading popularity of vaccine denialism, predicated on the now thoroughly debunked assertion that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is linked to autism. Even more, though, Italy’s anti-vaccine politics seems to stem from a broader rejection of expert opinion, based on lingering public outrage over the fallout from the 2008 economic collapse. In December, the new coalition’s health minister dismissed all 30 members of its expert advisers group, known as the Higher Health Council. The country’s chief research scientist, head of its National Institute of Health, quit in protest, telling a national newspaper, “Representatives of the government have endorsed … frankly anti-scientific positions.” (In March, faced with what health officials termed a “measles emergency,” the Italian government reversed course and banned unvaccinated children from attending school.)

As in the U.K., where measles is also rising, the new Italian government is skeptical of cross-border collaboration​—before the election, the Northern League proposed withdrawing from the European Union—and profoundly anti-immigrant. Those are all of a piece. “Nationalist movements are based on the rejection of expertise; they build divisions based on prejudice, and mainstream anti-science movements,” said Alexandra Phelan, a faculty research instructor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. “They are intertwined, and they all undermine global public health. No matter how strong a government’s rhetoric about sovereignty, pathogens do not respect, nor care for, country borders.”


No matter where it has surfaced, the nativist assault on public health is gaining traction—and as it does, protections against deadly diseases weaken. The world is interconnected—by legal travel, by the flow of refugees and migrants, by goods and commerce, by the movement of animals and water and air. Any of those channels can carry diseases. None of them has ever successfully been blocked. The only defense is to shore up public health, not destroy it. We are all holding the safety net for one another, and when we let it drop, none of us is safe.


America’s turn toward nationalism does not make the country stronger or safer; rather, it makes the nation more vulnerable to global health threats. Already, Trump’s xenophobic policies have begun to drive even those who have entered the country legally away from public health programs. In November, the nonpartisan organization Children’s HealthWatch reported that for the first time in ten years fewer families of legal immigrants were using food stamps, otherwise known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—a government benefit they are legally entitled to. That finding bore out a 2017 report from San Francisco that new applications to California’s food stamp program were declining, while families already legally enrolled in the program were dropping out.


Trump: “People with tremendous medical difficulty and medical problems are pouring in, and in many cases it’s contagious…. We have to have border security.”

Most common health issues among members of the migrant caravan: lice, chicken pox, respiratory infections.

Number of major disease outbreaks on the U.S.-Mexico border since Trump’s election: zero.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Associated Press

The California research and the national study both blamed the drop in legal food stamp use on immigrants’ fears that the government would target them for using a public program. The Trump administration lent credence to such fears in a policy announcement last September: If people seeking U.S. residency used public assistance programs, then Citizenship and Immigration Services would score that against them when their applications for green cards came under review. Afterward, organizations working with undocumented immigrants said the rule change was having a broader chilling effect—as it was likely designed to do. The nonprofit Fiscal Policy Institute estimated that 24 million legal residents, including nine million children, would be affected.


The rule change reaches beyond anti-hunger programs to threaten the immigration applications of people using Medicaid, which guarantees health care to low-income residents, and Medicare Part D, which helps make prescription drugs more affordable. The move drew forceful protests from a wide array of medical organizations, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Physicians. They said the rule change would keep adults and children from seeking care they need, either to keep from getting sick or after they had fallen ill, making them more expensive to care for.


That could mean, for instance, that a woman with a breast lump or a man in the early stages of heart disease might postpone getting checked out at a point when such conditions could be treated with less expense and risk. But it might also mean that both legal and illegal immigrants would avoid getting treatments such as flu shots or childhood vaccinations that would help prevent the spread of infectious diseases. In other words, Trump’s new policy would not only deprive visa applicants and legal residents of protection. By driving victims underground, it could turn them into an unwitting vector that could spread disease back to people who think they have made themselves safe by forcing immigrants away.


“The more that we drive up the rhetoric so that people who are now in this country feel threatened by national policy, the more we stand the chance of having a separate society that doesn’t come into the health care system,” said Thomas Inglesby, the director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “So even as we strive to have strong public health systems and to get people vaccinated and to have early reporting on infectious diseases, that wouldn’t touch this separate group.”


And thus an ominous dynamic lurches into gear: The more any part of the public distrusts the country’s health care system and is discouraged from participating in it, the more vulnerable the health of the entire public becomes. The 2017–2018 flu season killed 80,000 Americans, according to the CDC, making it the deadliest flu outbreak in decades. “Imagine if there were an event in the future where smallpox was released, or if there were a severe influenza,” Inglesby said. “We don’t want a group of ostracized folks on the margins who can’t get access to vaccines, or to whatever the countermeasures are for whatever the threat of the future might be.”


Last year, Inglesby’s group at Johns Hopkins ran a daylong simulation of the world’s likely response to the outbreak of a fictional previously unknown pathogen, one for which there would be no diagnostic test and no vaccine. In a finding that grimly foreshadows the risk of repudiating the protection of public health, Inglesby’s team recorded a worldwide death toll of 150 million, including 15 million deaths in the United States.  

The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: The Final Countdown

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

What We’re Following Today

It’s Friday, March 29.

‣ Linda McMahon, a former pro-wrestling executive and the current head of the Small Business Administration, will reportedly resign from her position to chair President Donald Trump’s super PAC, America First Action.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

Will the Public Ever See the Mueller Report?: Attorney General William Barr said he plans to share with Congress Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report by mid-April, if not sooner. In his letter to Senator Lindsey Graham and Representative Jerry Nadler, heads of Congress’s two judiciary committees, Barr also said that he will not share the contents of the report with the White House before releasing it, and noted that his summary of the findings from last week was “not an exhaustive recounting” of Mueller’s report, which is nearly 400 pages long.

But that doesn’t mean the public will see the review in full, reports Natasha Bertrand. “Between the withholding of grand-jury and privileged material and the redaction of classified information, the public could be left with a shell of the original report.”

Listen to this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, in which the staff writers Edward-Issac Dovere and McKay Coppins discuss what all this means for 2020.

Remember the Pee Tape?: Many of the president’s critics were disappointed last week when Barr declared that Mueller’s investigation all but cleared the president of wrongdoing. But the “seeds of the disappointment” were planted two years ago, when BuzzFeed News first published an unverified—and unverifiable—dossier compiled by the British-intelligence operative Christopher Steele, argues David Graham. The salacious document “set the stage for the political response to investigations to come—inflating expectations in the public, moving the goalposts for Trump in a way that has fostered bad behavior, and tainting the press’s standing.”

Call Me a Socialist!: Joe Sanberg, a multimillionaire investor, might be running for president.  Sanberg supports Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, increased regulation, and expanding the social safety net. He has no name recognition, but in an election where Trump has painted the Democrats as radical socialists, Sanberg thinks he has an edge: “Good luck to them if they want to call me a socialist, because businesspeople aren’t socialists,” he told Edward-Isaac Dovere.  

— Elaine Godfrey and Madeleine Carlisle

Snapshot

Three-year-old Ailianie Hernandez waits with her mother, Julianna Ageljo, to apply for the nutritional-assistance program at the Department of Family Affairs in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. The island’s government says it lacks sufficient federal funding to help people recover from Hurricane Maria amid a 12-year recession. (Carlos Giusti / AP)

Ideas From The Atlantic

Barbara Bush’s Long-Hidden ‘Thoughts on Abortion’ (Susan Page)
“In 1980, when George H. W. Bush was making his first bid for the presidency, Barbara Bush covered four sheets of lined paper with her bold handwriting, then tucked the pages into a folder with her diary and some personal letters. She was trying to sort out what she believed about one of the most divisive issues of the day.” → Read on.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Is Confusing Taxpayers (Mark Mazur)
“Although the most recent IRS data show that average income-tax refunds are closely tracking the average refund from last year, taxpayers have been complaining in interviews with journalists and on social media that their refund is smaller than expected or that they unexpectedly owe additional tax. Given that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was all about tax cuts, how can this be?” → Read on.

Quit Harping on U.S. Aid to Israel (James Kirchick)
“U.S. assistance to Israel demands far less—in both blood and treasure—than many other American defense relationships around the world.” → Read on.

What Else We’re Reading

‣ An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden (Lucy Flores, New York)
‣ Our President of the Perpetual Grievance (Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker) (? Paywall)
‣ Former Trump Family Driver Has Been in ICE Custody for 8 Months (Miriam Jordan, The New York Times) (? Paywall)
‣ Is Pete Buttigieg a Political Genius? (Alex Shephard, The New Republic)
‣ The Blue State Trump Thinks He Can Flip in 2020 (Alex Isenstadt, Politico)

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The Little Steps In Between

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Here’s a quote from a book titled They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, a study of ten Germans who lived under Nazism. The author was Milton Mayer, who wrote it in 1955; it was republished by University of Chicago Press two years ago. Read this and think of our own time and place:

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

Via Steve Perisho’s blog. 

Again: think about how this kind of thing is happening to us, and why. Because it is.

Here’s one way it’s happening to us:

 Some Christian schools have encountered hospitals and schools that refuse to accept their nursing and education students for jobs and internships, Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, told The Christian Post.

The students are being turned away due to the colleges’ understanding of marriage as between one man and one woman. The problem is not widespread, Hoogstra explained, but it is an issue that the CCCU has been dealing with and is concerned about for the future.

“There have been small pockets in the United States where Christian colleges that have held a traditional understanding of marriage have had some of their professional programs impacted,” she said. “For instance, there have been some public schools that will not allow teachers into their schools. Not because they have witnessed the student teachers in any way being bigoted or discriminatory, but because they have a penalty against a school that has a traditional understanding of marriage.

“In terms of nursing placements, this has repeatedly been a conversation between the public hospitals and nursing placements for student nurses. It’s not widespread yet, but there are pockets of it, which concerns us.”

That’s one way things are changing. There are others, as you well know.

Bombing Gaza as a Campaign Slogan

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

On March 25, 2019 while the major media fixated on Trump and his potential indictments in regards to Russia, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing his own political opponents, an upcoming election and five potential indictments back home, stood with President Trump in Washington, DC. Trump signed an executive order that recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Once Syrian, and not internationally recognized, the Golan Heights is a section of land taken by the Israelis in the 1967 war despite being a violation of international law as spelled out in Security Council Resolution 497.

Author of Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: a Primer and Institute for Policy Studies Middle East Analyst Phyllis Bennis expected Trump to sign the executive order. “Overall, we have seen a pattern of Trump giving the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu everything it wants — to make its reelection more possible. Bennis adding, “This includes moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, the decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the decision to deny that Palestinian refugees exist. All of these are things Netanyahu wanted from the Trump Administration and they are things he’s gotten,” remarked Bennis.

On the same day that Trump and the United States recognized the Golan Heights, Israel responded to a long range rocket aimed at civilians and allegedly fired by Hamas, in showing a clear use of collective punishment and disproportionate retaliatory force.[1] This was unlikely however, a major offensive since Netanyahu was in DC at the time and he most likely returned to Israel mainly for political purposes. Israel fired over a dozen separate intense airstrikes, totaling more than 60 missiles in the first 12 hours onto the Gaza Strip, deescalating by day’s end with the Egyptian led ceasefire.

Whether it was Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or an independent rogue cell, all three of which act outside the interests of the organized vast majority of Gaza, the violent response coming from Israel mirrored the responses to the peaceful nonviolent Gazan demonstrators who mobilize on a weekly basis and have over the course of the last year. The entire disproportionately hideous exchange, much like the Golan Heights production, was seen as an extreme and brazen optic in order for Netanyahu to win reelection.

Professor Noura Erakat wrote, “as in the past, the latest air strikes on a besieged population are brutal tools used by Israeli political officials, just weeks out from an Israeli election, to boost the standing of candidates who benefit from brandishing a ruthless disregard for Palestinian life. Erakat elaborated and called the Israeli response “gleeful,” coming within the context “of the Great March of Return, in which Palestinians have been protesting at the Gaza boundary every Friday, demanding the right to return to their homes and their freedom. Israel has responded with bullets and death, killing 195 Palestinians and injuring more than 28,939.”

Benny Gantz, a former general and commander, who bragged of leading slaughters in Gaza and attempts to become Israel’s next prime minister, remarked that Netanyahu is “too soft” on Gaza and that he has “lost grip on Israeli security.” Middle East Historian Lawrence Davidson also indicated that “the general feeling among the Israeli ‘left’ is that Benjamin Netanyahu has to ‘crush’ Hamas,’ or as Bennis put it, Netanyahu sees “bombing Gaza as a campaign slogan.”

International Relations scholar and researcher Richard Falk indicated that several factors also bear watching. Falk stated that, “Israeli leaders often cause a spike in violence just prior to national elections, and sometimes seem to stage false flag operations in order to validate.” Falk added that, “their recourse to military action, in any event is disproportionate, excessive, and indiscriminate.”

Furthermore, Falk expressed a concern that the recent violence may be part of an advanced payment for the “anticipated land day demonstration at the Gaza fence and the first anniversary of the Great March of Return.” There is also little question that “Trump’s green lighting of Israeli expansionism, came with the latest outrage — an endorsement of Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights.” Both Trump and Netanyahu continue to rule “in defiance of the international consensus,” Falk observes.

In a March 21, 2019 New York Times article, entitled Palestinian Lives Don’t Matter*: *Unless Israel is to blame, Bret Stephens cites the factual repression of Hamas, but incorrectly asserts that Hamas’ bullets are “buried by most Western news accounts” in an attempt to ensure that readers single out Israeli aggression. Stephens also goes on to state that since Bashar al-Assad “kills more” Syrians, Israel isn’t really an aggressor at all and should be let off the hook with the coverage of that region. The reality is that the Syrian’s government atrocities get extensive coverage, some even considered to the “far left,” exercises in propaganda. The article is filled with language that is essentially racist in character, and entirely misleading in its claim — that the world media is biased against Israel.

Despite Bret Stephen’s griping, Professor Stephen Zunes points out that Hamas has “in fact gotten a fair amount of coverage and it’s been reported by Amnesty International, etc.” And in terms of everyday Gazans, Zunes adds that he’s “not aware of the latest round of protests resulting in any fatalities, unlike the peaceful Gazan protests at the Israeli border.”

Noam Chomsky has previously pointed out “plenty of reasons to criticize Hamas, just as there were reasons to condemn crimes of the partisans,” and added that, “99% of the crimes however, are traceable to Israel.” In another way but in the same context, Richard Falk recalled a mean spirited and cynical assertion of Golda Meirwho is thought to have said, “There will be peace when the Palestinians love their children more alive than our children dead.” Falk stated that, “of course, there is nasty violence within the Palestinian communities, in part due to splits that Israel has encouraged over the years, including helping to found Hamas after the 1967 war.”

Falk remarked that, “the dominant and overriding reality is the apartheid structure of control created by Israel to impose and maintain a Jewish state with self-determination rights only for the Jewish people. The large casualties associated with the “Great March of Return” exclusively comes from Israel’s use of excessive and deadly force against largely unarmed demonstrations. In other words, yes, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and rogue actors can perpetrate a large number of extremely rotten things, but central to the Palestinian’s misery are the actions and policies by both the United States and Israeli governments.

The recent discourse in Middle East politics has been enormous and as AIPAC loses relevancy with progressive voters and younger Jews, CUFI unfortunately gains traction with fundamentalist Christians. As the work of Carolyn Karcher indicates, “Judaism is being reclaimed from Zionism,” as Jewishness no longer automatically ties to Israel. A stunning amount of candidates (seven) for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2020 have said they would not attend the AIPAC conference taking place March 24 – 27. This comes on the heels of protest, organization and support for progressive politicians. The political spectrum increasingly widens in the United States in regards to Jews and their perspectives of the United States, Israel and Palestine. This now features a prominent and vibrant left, a fading but stable center, and more importantly an increasingly diminishing right, for liberal and centrist Jews.

The sad reality on the ground for the Palestinians is that nothing really has changed. But as for American politics and the shift in language, it can only be viewed as a positive sign that casual and unapologetic support for Israel comes with a political price tag. This marks a historical first.

Nicaragua: Washington’s Other Hemispheric Nemesis

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Trump administration continues to tighten the screws on Venezuela’s left-wing regime, imposing new economic sanctions and recognizing Juan Guido’s claim to be the country’s new interim president over current ruler Nicolás Maduro. Trump has openly lobbied the Venezuelan military to break with Maduro, and has stated ominously that “all options”—including apparently a U.S. military intervention—remain on the table. There is little doubt that the administration is pursuing regime change in Caracas.

While most of the attention is focused on the volatile situation in Venezuela, however, another crisis is brewing nearby in Nicaragua. As in Venezuela, rising domestic discontent with a socialist government has led to large-scale demonstrations demanding change. And as in Venezuela, the beleaguered regime has responded with harsh, authoritarian measures.

Nicaragua’s incumbent president is Washington’s old nemesis from the 1980s, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. The Reagan administration expended considerable effort, including training and arming a cadre of anti-communist rebels, the so-called Contras, in an unsuccessful effort to oust the Sandinistas. Ultimately, Ortega agreed to hold free elections in 1990, and when opposition factions won, to the surprise of most U.S. officials, he relinquished power peacefully. Ortega returned to office following elections in 2007.

During his second stint in office, the government adopted increasingly authoritarian measures, and by 2018, opposition demonstrations were large and vocal. Protests surged in April 2018, and by early August, even the Ortega government reluctantly acknowledged that 195 people had died in the mounting violence. The Organization of American States (OAS) put the figure at 317, and a leading NGO, the Nicaraguan Pro-Human Rights Association, documented 448 killings. It also contended that government security forces and allied, armed civilian groups were responsible for most of those deaths.

The government did not take kindly to such criticism. Shortly after issuing its most recent report, the Nicaraguan Pro-Human Rights Association announced that it was closing its offices because of “threats and harassment” against staff members. Ortega defended the violent actions that police and pro-regime paramilitary units had taken. He exhibited no receptivity whatsoever to opposition calls for a referendum on holding early national elections in place of the balloting scheduled for late 2020. Given that the last elections in 2016 were afflicted with widespread fraud, critics of the regime see little benefit in being patient.

Washington moved to adopt punitive sanctions in response to the regime’s crackdown on last summer’s demonstrations. In November, the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions and targeted the assets of several high-level officials. Washington’s justifications echoed those used to justify even harsher measures taken against the Venezuelan government. The text of the Treasury Department order stated that the action was a counter to the Nicaraguan government’s corruption, its “violent response” to protests, and its “systematic dismantling and undermining of democratic institutions and the rule of law.”

Vice President Rosario Murillo and her political operators “have systematically sought to dismantle democratic institutions and loot the wealth of Nicaragua to consolidate their grip on power,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “Treasury is intent on ensuring that Ortega regime insiders are not able to access the U.S. financial system to profit at the expense of the Nicaraguan people.” Murillo was an especially prominent target, since she is not only the country’s vice president, but Ortega’s wife, and is generally considered to be an even more hardline socialist than her spouse.

Not only is the U.S. stance towards Nicaragua hardening, but Trump administration statements increasingly link together policy regarding Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Officials seem to regard those governments as a triumvirate of hemispheric troublemakers. Given Trump’s rollback of much of the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Cuba, and his open flirtation with the military option against Venezuela, Nicaraguan leaders have to be more than a little uneasy.

After a relatively calm period in early 2019, tensions appear to be flaring again. Government security forces arrested more than a hundred people following demonstrations in mid-March, and hundreds more remain in jail from last year’s protests. The Ortega regime also has intensified an already worrisome campaign to smother the country’s independent press. All of this is eerily reminiscent of Venezuela’s gradual transition from a somewhat illiberal democracy to a barely disguised dictatorship facing an increasingly angry and determined political opposition.

Thus far, the U.S. response has been milder and less intrusive than its campaign against Maduro. Washington has not yet declared Nicaragua to be a national security threat to the United States, as President Barack Obama did with respect to Venezuela in 2015. But it isn’t certain how long that more cautious approach will last. Indeed, it is likely that the relatively restrained posture is only because the Trump administration doesn’t relish taking on two hemispheric regime change campaigns simultaneously.

No one should find the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua worthy of praise. The former destroyed a once flourishing economy by imposing disastrous socialist economic policies and then responded to peaceful political opposition with brutally repressive measures. It is an ugly, corrupt dictatorship that deserves to end up on the ash heap of history. Ortega’s regime is not much better, and one hopes the Nicaraguan people can bring to power a better, more democratic successor.

Nevertheless, it is not the proper role of the United States to interfere in the internal affairs of either country. Even the imposition of economic sanctions would be inappropriate, much less launching a military intervention. At the same time, opponents of U.S. meddling should stop whitewashing the odious record of the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan leftist regimes. There is no need to excuse, much less lionize, socialist autocrats while opposing Washington’s fondness for forcible regime change. Those are separate issues and should remain so.

The Venezuelan and Nicaraguan governments have brought their populations widespread misery. Such arrogant socialist regimes deserve whatever fate they suffer at the hands of their abused people. But constructive political change or even outright revolution is the responsibility of the Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, not the United States.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 750 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support for Bogus Foreign Democratic Movements (2019).

Here's when you'll be able to read the (redacted) Mueller report

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Mueller report will be made public by mid-April, though it will be redacted, U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr said in a letter Friday to Sen. Lindsey Graham, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Barr has been under fierce pressure from Democrats to release the full report, compiled by special counsel Robert Mueller, since it was submitted to the attorney general last Friday. Over the weekend, Barr released his “principal conclusions” of the Mueller report, writing that the special counsel determined that President Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with the Russians to undermine the U.S. presidential election in 2016. Barr also wrote that Mueller did not make an official decision on whether Trump obstructed justice during the investigation; the attorney general determined the evidence was insufficient to bring charges. That move has caused the most consternation among Democrats.

Barr said the report is nearly 400 pages long, and he’s working with Mueller to decide what will be redacted, which includes four categories:

• Material subject to the rule of criminal procedure
• Material that could compromise intelligence sources or methods
• Material that could affect ongoing matters
• Material that would infringe on the privacy of third parties

Barr, who has faced criticism from Congressional leaders in recent days over the gap between his four-page summary and Mueller’s nearly 400-page report, said he never intended his letter to be viewed as a complete summary.

“My March 24 letter was not, and did not purport to be, an exhaustive recounting of the Special Counsel’s investigation or report,” Barr wrote.

“The Special Counsel’s report is nearly 400 pages long (exclusive of tables and appendices) and sets forth the Special Counsel’s findings, his analysis, and the reasons for his conclusions. Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own. I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion,” he added.

Barr’s also addressed concerns about the White House’s involvement in releasing the report, writing that Trump would have limited input over what is released as part of the public report.

“Although the President would have the right to assert privilege over certain parts of the report, he has stated publicly that he intends to defer to me and, accordingly, there are no plans to submit the report to the White House for a privilege view,” the letter said.

Trump and his allies have celebrated Barr’s finding of Mueller’s report as a total “exoneration” of the president. But Mueller’s report, according to Barr’s original letter, specifically says: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Barr said that he believed it was “appropriate” for him to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee shortly after the report is made public, and offered the dates of May 1st or 2nd.

Cover: In this March 24, 2019, photo, Special counsel Robert Mueller departs St. John’s Episcopal Church, across from the White House in Washington. Democrats say they want “all of the underlying evidence” in Mueller’s investigation. But what is all of that evidence? (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

The Coldest Spot on Earth, Melting

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Global warming is a fact of life that haunts society with consequences that hit hard, exponentially, but where nobody lives. It is happening hyper fast, and it’s downright scary as major ecosystems of the planet turn upside down in nasty fashion.

But none of the ecosystems has the punch of East Antarctica. Its clout is humongous with a couple hundred feet of fresh water contained in ice. When it rumbles, scientists pay attention.

In that regard, as a potential savior in the face of irrefutable global warming dangers, America is fortunate to have a powerful fighting spirit in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). She has strong instincts about the dangers of global warming. She is beating the drums for a Green New Deal, which cannot come soon enough and, in fact, may not come soon enough to save most life on the planet. Meanwhile, Republicans belittle her as foolhardy, not in the spirit of America’s capitalistic enterprise. A socialist?

But, brushing aside off-putting Republican obstructionism, the planet is endorsing AOC, as it sends clear signals of impending disaster straight out of East Antarctica. After all, no signal can be as strong as the melting of the coldest spot on the planet, which is comparable to knocking someone in the head with a ball-peen hammer as a wake up call.

(As an aside: Nicola Jones has an excellent article about East Antarctica entitled: Polar Warning: Even Antarctica’s Coldest Region Is Starting to Melt, YaleEnvironment360, March 28, 2019, which, in part, inspired this article.)

East Antarctica is the final frontier of global warming, but alas, overwhelmed by too much heat from ocean waters heating up way too soon. The evidence is compelling. AOC has got it right! Global warming is in full throttle, haunting 10,000 years of the Holocene Era’s Goldilocks “not too hot, not too cold” pitch perfect planet coming to an end much sooner than scientists ever realized. It’s happening that fast, and AOC knows it.

The scientific community has always maintained that East Antarctica was not a major concern. With ice up to three miles thick and temperatures on average running around -65° F, seemingly it was immune to the ravages of global warming. But, shocking new discoveries are turning heads in the scientific community.

For example, Eric Rignot (professor, University of California/Irvine and principal scientist for the Radar Science & Engineering Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory) gave a recent lecture “Sea Level Rise and What To Do About It” at The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, D.C. on March 27th. Dr. Rignot has been responsible for groundbreaking research on the melting of glacial ice due to global warming.

Rignot opened his lecture by saying that polar ice caps are changing fast as a result of global warming, which is intriguing from a scientific viewpoint, But, for society at large, the bearer of bad news, stating: “I don’t think you need to run for the hills, but I would walk.” Which is a bold statement with grave undertones.

Rignot’s lecture was laced with risks of rapid acceleration of glacial flow into the seas. It’s the flow of glaciers that carries the biggest risks, for example, if glacier flow overall happens to accelerate six times, it would produce 12-13 feet of sea level rise per century. Fortunately, that’s mostly in the abstract as of today, but some exceptions are now showing major cause for alarm.

East Antarctica is sending discomforting signals, and year-over-year scientists’ opinions have been sideswiped by acceleration of climate change. It happens where nobody lives, until it hits home. Then, everybody will see what scientists see at the fringes of continents and on vast uninhabited plains of tundra. Global warming’s impact is happening faster than scientists’ models can compute. Hidden danger exists all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole. It’s happening remarkably fast.

Nothing on the planet is so deeply troubling as East Antarctica melting… period! In fact, one of the fastest moving glaciers, the Totten Glacier alone contains ice equivalent to 12 feet sea level rise.

Here’s the grisly truth about the consequences of global warming: The following statistics come from an article in The National Academy of Sciences: Eric Rignot, et al, Four Decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet Mass Balance from 1979-2017, January 22, 2019:

“The total mass loss from Antarctica increased from 40 ± 9 Gt/y in the 11-y time period 1979–1990 to 50 ± 14 Gt/y in 1989–2000, 166 ± 18 Gt/y in 1999–2009, and 252 ± 26 Gt/y in 2009–2017, that is, by a factor 6.”

That’s acceleration-plus, to wit, ten year cycles, except for 2009-17 (8 yrs.), demonstrated increasingly rapid acceleration year-over-year, as follows: 40 Gt (1979-1990), 50 Gt (1989-2000), 166 Gt (1999-2009), 252 Gt (2009-2017) sure looks like rapid acceleration. Doesn’t it?

According to Rignot, acceleration of Antarctic glaciers of 5-to-8 times already happened with the Larsen B ice shelf collapse years ago. Significantly, ice shelves hold back glacial flow like a hockey goalie, when he leaves the game the net is open, similarly when the ice shelf collapses, glacial flow rolls ahead faster and faster without the ice shelf to stop it. In Larsen B’s case, sure enough glacial flow sped up 5-to-8 times. That’s big acceleration for a glacier. What if all of Antarctica’s glaciers follow suit?

According to Rignot, “Theoretically, if that happens continent-wide, it would raise sea levels by 13 feet per century.”

The main issue is: As the oceans have absorbed 85%-90% of planetary warming, those warmer waters are now registering heavy-duty impact in Antarctica.

Keeping in mind, it’s the first few feet of sea level rise that takes down one city after another and then another, starting with Miami Beach where global warming has already forced the city to raise streets by 2 feet.

For a photo of raised streets in Miami Beach, Google: “Miami Beach is Raising Streets by 2 Feet to Combat Rising Seas” or “Miami is Racing Against Time to Keep Up with Sea-Level Rise.”

Alas, the worst-case scenario is already in motion along shorelines around the world, including, the Trump Resort in Ireland permit application to “build a seawall because of climate change” (see here).

ProPublica to Further Expand Local Reporting Network With Additional Newsrooms

On April 1, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by ProPublica

As part of an ongoing focus on local accountability journalism, ProPublica announced Wednesday that it is again expanding the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. Made possible by a new grant from the Abrams Foundation, the expansion will provide support for an additional six local newsrooms across the country — allowing the Local Reporting Network to work with 20 participating newsrooms this year.

Applications for the new iteration of the Local Reporting Network are due April 26. National news organizations are not eligible to apply; all other newsrooms are. The reporters will begin their work on July 1.

The ProPublica Local Reporting Network, introduced to help create vital investigative journalism in communities where such stories would otherwise not be done, began its work in 2018. Through the initiative, ProPublica pays the salary, plus an allowance for benefits, for full-time reporters at partner news organizations dedicated to big investigative projects. Fourteen local news organizations are currently participating, with seven projects focused on state government and the rest covering a broad range of subjects. Local reporters work from and report to their home newsrooms, while receiving extensive support and guidance for their work from ProPublica, including collaboration with a senior editor and access to the nonprofit newsroom’s expertise with data, research, engagement, video and design.

ProPublica also announced that senior editor Charles Ornstein has been promoted to deputy managing editor to direct the work of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network, effective immediately. Ornstein was one of the first reporters ProPublica hired in 2008 and oversaw the first group of Local Reporting Network newsrooms in 2018.

This latest expansion of the initiative comes as hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. are losing their newspapers — more than 1,400 over the past 15 years, according to a recent Associated Press analysis compiled by the University of North Carolina. As many existing local news organizations grapple with budget constraints, accountability journalism has been shrinking and underfunded. ProPublica’s local journalism strategy includes not only the Local Reporting Network but also ProPublica Illinois, a fully staffed office of reporters and editors covering important issues in that state.

“Although local journalism has been decimated by cuts, the ProPublica Local Reporting Network has demonstrated that there is still plenty of energy left in local news organizations across the country,” ProPublica President Richard Tofel said. “Many reporters know what to do; they just lack the time and resources to do it. We’re so pleased that a generous grant from the Abrams Foundation will enable us to support more important investigative work at the ground level.”

Projects from the inaugural ProPublica Local Reporting Network exposed lapses in worker safety at nuclear facilities; failures in public housing; conflicts of interest that have allowed Louisiana legislators to benefit themselves, their relatives and their clients; and the devastating toll of post-traumatic stress disorder on first responders. An investigation from the South Bend Tribune in Indiana, which uncovered shocking misconduct by Elkhart County police, prompted the police chief to resign and the Elkhart mayor to announce an independent review of the city’s Police Department, in addition to a federal grand jury indictment of two Elkhart police officers on civil rights charges. The series was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. A project by the Charleston Gazette-Mail, exploring the price paid by West Virginia residents as the natural gas industry gains power, was a finalist for the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for environmental reporting.

More information on the ProPublica Local Reporting Network and application process can be found here.