06 September 21
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In fact, Joe Biden is building back – often better – despite a deadlocked Congress and a predecessor intent on sabotage. But “United States” is a misnomer. Adversaries muscle in where its leadership falters; allies hedge bets on the future as it tears itself further apart.
A world facing climatic endgame and authoritarian takeover needs an America with a functioning democracy, run by enlightened leaders who rise above narrow interests to work together. Instead, Republican zealots wage an Afghan-style war at home.
H.R. McMaster, who as national security adviser failed to housebreak Donald Trump, foresees “an endless jihad that enemies of all civilized people are waging against us all.” If Americans don’t unite against that, he told an interviewer, “we are all at enormous risk.”
He says Trump’s clueless hubris produced hands-down surrender. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020,” he said. “The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.” He expects tighter links to Al Qaeda and others, even ISIS-K, to export a twisted view of Islam helped by intelligence and sophisticated weaponry Americans left behind.
Generals can be dubious analysts, prone to seeing lights at the end of tunnels. But McMaster is a military scholar who saw in Vietnam how a swift turn of events sends panicked people scrambling toward the exits. After covering war since the 1960s, I think he’s right.
Yet when Americans badly need to close ranks, faithless politicians howl for impeachment. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, with so much blood on their own hands, excoriate Biden. Others who want his job – with neither integrity nor sense of the real world – pile on.
A traditional Fourth Estate should be our safeguard. But it no longer works that way. Many in the “news media” tower of babble that Trump did so much to create choose to fault Biden for the inevitable finale of a needless war he has tried to end since 2009.
Biden’s failings will be clear when the war fog lifts. He infuriated NATO allies by not consulting before a sudden chaotic airlift. He says he had to act fast when President Ashraf Ghani fled in secret after pledging to negotiate a stable peace. The Taliban juggernaut caught most everyone by surprise.
Unsurprisingly, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal immediately editorialized that Biden was responsible for a debacle it called “one of the most shameful in history” and berated him for laying his guilt on Trump. And that was echoed widely in “news” reporting.
Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Washington Post: “The Afghan debacle lasted two decades. The media spent two hours deciding whom to blame.… What we largely got over the past few days was the all-too-familiar genre of ‘winners and losers’ coverage. It’s coverage that tends to elevate and amplify punditry over news, and to assign long-lasting political ramifications to a still-developing situation.”
On MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace offered wry hyperbole rooted in truth after Biden addressed the nation: “Ninety-five percent of American people will agree with everything he just said, and 95 percent of the press covering this White House will disagree.”
Reporters hurled hostile questions about trapped Americans and endangered Afghans left behind. Few seemed aware that getting out of a war is far harder than getting in. Chaotic evacuations are the norm. Operational decisions had to be made quickly on the spot.
Overall, The New York Times did stellar work. But a new effort to deliver so much to so many with fewer editors to ride herd took a toll. One story with the lead byline of a young hire declared failure after the first day. It said Americans and vulnerable Afghans were being left behind, citing a critic, who said “the administration was squarely to blame.” The headline opined that Biden should have acted months earlier.
In fact, Biden agreed with Ashraf Ghani that an early evacuation would trigger a chaotic collapse. When Ghani deserted, Afghan troops shed their uniforms overnight. Families that had made plans to leave in some orderly fashion thronged Kabul airport with what they could carry, their savings blocked in shuttered banks.
Biden rushed in 5,000 prepositioned troops. Twelve days later, 130,000 Americans and Afghans had been flown out under near-impossible conditions, and negotiations continue with the Taliban to evacuate others who could not make it to Kabul airport. Yet the narrative continued. To speed the flow, evacuees were screened on arrival. Why, some reporters demanded to know, did they have to wait hours for clearance at Dulles Airport?
In briefings, few asked about Afghanistan beyond the airport, where nearly 20 million people – half the population – face famine as food relief runs out and medical supplies dwindle. With national reserves and aid frozen, the Taliban has a pittance in ready cash. Rather than govern, it tracks down collaborators to imprison or kill.
Those first skewed reports were enough for the Republicans. At one rally early on, a smirking Trump called the airport tumult America’s “greatest foreign policy humiliation,” not mentioning that he was responsible for it. Later, he blamed Biden for the ISIS-K suicide bombing that no president could have prevented.
Trump said he would have brought Afghan loyalists out earlier, which his former aides say is horseshit. He had made no plans for that. Biden extended the withdrawal to September while Ghani and others talked to the Taliban. But the corrupt, fractious 300,000-man army that U.S. forces failed to train retreated in a rout. Ghani fled the country on August 15.
With notable exceptions, coverage was disgraceful. TV networks might have shown the story unfold live, explained by seasoned reporters steeped in background. Instead, big names safe at home, far from ground truth, interviewed retired generals, academics and activists.
In America, the story centered on official briefings. Jen Psaki at the White House, a polished pro, and John Kirby at the Pentagon, a retired rear admiral, did their jobs well – a 180-degree change from Trump’s string of stooges. But no government spokesman dwells on failings. And these days, with cameras rolling, briefings are public performance art rather than the old sausage-making process aimed at nailing down detail.
Fox News averaged 3 million viewers a day, equal to MSNBC and CNN combined. When “news” is whatever anyone wants it to be, a Hannity or a Carlson can spout demented monstrosities. Laura Ingraham blasted Biden for not creating an effective Afghan army during the years Trump was president.
For journalists who were kids in 1975, Vietnam might as well have been the Peloponnesian War. With a new approach to newsgathering, that matters. Reporters stayed close to the action and held U.S. forces to account. After Vietnam, the Pentagon resolved to take action.
Generals corralled the press into pools, then “embeds.” Few media executives objected, happy enough with just the appearance of access – bang-bang footage and supervised interviews. Now military control is the new normal. Journalists repeat jargon, such as “retrograde” and “dignified transfer,” as though they are part of the team.
In combat, reporters are as crucial as medics. War can’t be covered from a distance any more it can be won from the air. We saw at the outset that NATO troops were outmatched. One general assured that well-equipped U.S. troops would prevail in winter. Afghan fighters survive North-Pole conditions with a handful of tea, rice, a little mutton and woolly caps.
The Afghanistan collapse needed seasoned correspondents with trusted sources and a reality-based worldview. Fox sent Trey Yingst from Jerusalem for a brief stay. He boasted to The Wrap that he spent hours studying the background. NBC’s Richard Engel, among few others, roamed Kabul unhindered by Taliban checkpoints.
CNN could have owned the story. When Clarissa Ward left, it sent Sam Kiley, a masterful conflict reporter since the 1980s, who knew Afghanistan well. He spent six months with British troops under fire in Helmand Province. His book, “Desperate Glory,” is a classic. But CNN kept him at the airport and allowed him little time on camera. Then U.S. forces obliged reporters within their perimeter to evacuate.
CNN was excellent at times, but credibility demands consistency across the board, with journalists hired for gritty experience, not physical appearance. BBC was a universe ahead, without inaccurate chest-thumping boasts and “breaking news” hoopla.
BBC’s Yalda Hakim, who fled Afghanistan with her family during the Soviet war, worked old contacts: top politicians, Taliban leaders and friends across a large country. Secunder Kermani delved into Panjshir Valley resistance and corruption that eroded trust in the government. Military analyst Frank Gardner earned his chops the hard way, once shot six times by Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia.
At the end, Lyse Doucet was there to see the Taliban move in, asking hard questions with a gentle touch as victors celebrated with rockets and gunfire into the air. I first met her in 1969 when she was a BBC stringer in Africa; my admiration has grown steadily ever since.
The facts are clear. Biden tried to stop Barack Obama from wading deeper into a quagmire. Trump wanted to leave Afghanistan but focused instead on North Korea for his Nobel Prize. In 2019, he saw ending the forever war as his path to glory. Heedless of the consequences, he wanted a showy extravaganza during his reelection campaign.
His plan, against aides’ advice, was to bring Taliban and government leaders to Camp David for dealmaker magic. That fell apart when a Taliban attack killed an American soldier. He kept trying. In February, he agreed to surrender in exchange for, essentially, nothing.
Kori Schake, a top adviser to George W. Bush, laid out the deal in a New York Times op-ed:
“Mr. Trump agreed to withdraw all coalition forces in 14 months, end all military and contractor support to Afghan security forces and cease ‘intervening in its domestic affairs.’ He forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters and relax economic sanctions. He agreed that the Taliban could continue to commit violence against the government we were there to support, against innocent people and against those who’d assisted our efforts to keep Americans safe.”
The Taliban only had to say it would not target U.S. or coalition forces and not permit other terrorist organizations to use Afghan territory to threaten U.S. security. With no stipulated framework, the Taliban would negotiate a handover from the Afghan government.
There were no inspection or enforcement provisions. Trump made a familiar empty threat: “If bad things happen, we’ll go back with a force like no one’s ever seen.” The Republican National Committee hailed that as a “historic peace agreement.”
In sum, Schake concluded, “Really, the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban deserves opprobrium even greater than what it heaped on the Iran nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration.”
With a shred of integrity, Trump would have awaited the election. If he lost, a new president could negotiate withdrawal terms, sparing America the cost of reneging on its word as it did when Trump exited the Paris climate agreement and the Iran accords.
The timing was Machiavellian. Trump wanted all troops out quickly so that he got full credit. If he lost in November, a successor would have to answer for a likely debacle. He could have quietly brought out American citizens but didn’t. Stephen Miller refused visas to endangered Afghans. Olivia Troye, who sat at Mike Pence’s elbow, says almost none were granted.
And now, many Republican ideologues still oppose granting refuge to Afghans who risked their lives because they believed in America. Ingraham, Fox’s junkyard dog, focused the argument: Why should Americans welcome potential terrorists in their midst?
When Biden took power, he extended the deadline but stuck to the decision to withdraw, as a majority of voters wanted.
Republican hypocrisy defies belief. As I write, Kevin McCarthy is telling some CNN anchor that Americans must put aside politics for the greater good.
Whatever happens next, how will we know? Afghanistan was already a black hole for most Americans. By one tally over a recent 12-month period, when journalists had wide access to a country of dazzling complexity, evening news coverage on the three U.S. broadcast networks added up to five minutes.
Cable news droned on with questions, not answers, until Hurricane Ida drowned out the story. Maybe the Taliban, after two decades of infidel occupation and “collateral damage,” will find its better inner self. Maybe a need for Western aid will outweigh zealotry. Maybe a shapeless movement of disparate factions will manage to run a government.
That is all hard to imagine. The $800 million U.S. embassy is shuttered, but China is there, eager to lavish funds with no annoying human-rights strings attached. So is Russia, back at the centuries-old Great Game in Central Asia. Now Iran is also at the table.
Pakistan remains a wild card, as it has since its Inter-Services Intelligence created the Taliban in the 1990s as part of its historic standoff with India. Other what-ifs run on at length, including the impact of humanitarian calamity as food and medical supplies dwindle fast.
Until 2017, America’s democratic example inspired Afghan human rights activists, journalists and so many others to resist harsh Taliban rule. These days, that much-touted City on a Hill is looking pretty dim. And in 2024, its lights could flicker out.
Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Donald Trump, on May 27, 2019. Bannon has been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. (photo: Joel Saget/Getty/AFP)
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.
In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties’ nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers.
“We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state’s formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal” rally during Wisconsin’s November recount, said Bannon’s podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm.
ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon’s campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork,” said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it.”
Bannon, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.
While party officials largely credited Bannon’s podcast with driving the surge of new precinct officers, it’s impossible to know the motivations of each new recruit. Precinct officers are not centrally tracked anywhere, and it was not possible to examine all 3,000 counties nationwide. ProPublica focused on politically competitive places that were discussed as targets in far-right media.
The tea party backlash to former President Barack Obama’s election foreshadowed Republican gains in the 2010 midterm. Presidential losses often energize party activists, and it would not be the first time that a candidate’s faction tried to consolidate control over the party apparatus with the aim of winning the next election.
What’s different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can’t let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him,” said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again.”
It has only been a few months — too soon to say whether the wave of newcomers will ultimately succeed in reshaping the GOP or how they will affect Republican prospects in upcoming elections. But what’s already clear is that these up-and-coming party officers have notched early wins.
In Michigan, one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned. In Las Vegas, a handful of Proud Boys, part of the extremist group whose members have been charged in attacking the Capitol, supported a bid to topple moderates controlling the county party — a dispute that’s now in court.
In Phoenix, new precinct officers petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of 2020 ballots. Similar audits are now being pursued by new precinct officers in Michigan and the Carolinas. Outside Atlanta, new local party leaders helped elect a state lawmaker who championed Georgia’s sweeping new voting restrictions.
And precinct organizers are hoping to advance candidates such as Matthew DePerno, a Michigan attorney general hopeful who Republican state senators said in a report had spread “misleading and irresponsible” misinformation about the election, and Mark Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers militia who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is now running to be Arizona’s top elections official. DePerno did not respond to requests for comment, and Finchem asked for questions to be sent by email and then did not respond. Finchem has said he did not enter the Capitol or have anything to do with the violence. He has also said the Oath Keepers are not anti-government.
When Bannon interviewed Finchem on an April podcast, he wrapped up a segment about Arizona Republicans’ efforts to reexamine the 2020 results by asking Finchem how listeners could help. Finchem answered by promoting the precinct strategy. “The only way you’re going to see to it this doesn’t happen again is if you get involved,” Finchem said. “Become a precinct committeeman.”
Some of the new precinct officers were in the crowd that marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to interviews and social media posts; one Texas precinct chair was arrested for assaulting police in Washington. He pleaded not guilty. Many of the new activists have said publicly that they support QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that believes Trump was working to root out a global child sex trafficking ring. Organizers of the movement have encouraged supporters to bring weapons to demonstrations. In Las Vegas and Savannah, Georgia, newcomers were so disruptive that they shut down leadership elections.
“They’re not going to be welcomed with open arms,” Bannon said, addressing the altercations on an April podcast. “But hey, was it nasty at Lexington?” he said, citing the opening battle of the American Revolution. “Was it nasty at Concord? Was it nasty at Bunker Hill?”
Bannon plucked the precinct strategy out of obscurity. For more than a decade, a little-known Arizona tea party activist named Daniel J. Schultz has been preaching the plan. Schultz failed to gain traction, despite winning a $5,000 prize from conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie in 2013 and making a 2015 pitch on Bannon’s far-right website, Breitbart. Schultz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon’s podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered, beginning to explain his plan. Bannon cut him off, offering to return to the idea another time.
That time came in February. Schultz returned to Bannon’s podcast, immediately preceding Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who spouts baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
“We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz said. “I can’t guarantee you that we’ll save the republic, but I can guarantee you this: We’ll lose it if we conservatives don’t take over the Republican Party.”
Bannon endorsed Schultz’s plan, telling “all the unwashed masses in the MAGA movement, the deplorables” to take up this cause. Bannon said he had more than 400,000 listeners, a count that could not be independently verified.
Bannon brought Schultz back on the show at least eight more times, alongside guests such as embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a leading defender of people jailed on Capitol riot charges.
The exposure launched Schultz into a full-blown far-right media tour. In February, Schultz spoke on a podcast with Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, a leading popularizer of QAnon. In an episode titled “THIS Is How We Win,” Diaz said of Schultz, “I was waiting, I was wishing and hoping for the universe to deliver someone like him.”
Schultz himself calls QAnon “a joke.” Nevertheless, he promoted his precinct strategy on at least three more QAnon programs in recent months, according to Media Matters, a Democratic-aligned group tracking right-wing content. “I want to see many of you going and doing this,” host Zak Paine said on one of the shows in May.
Schultz’s strategy also got a boost from another prominent QAnon promoter: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law and “rerun” the election. On a May online talk show, Flynn told listeners to fill “thousands of positions that are vacant at the local level.”
Precinct recruitment is now “the forefront of our mission” for Turning Point Action, according to the right-wing organization’s website. The group’s parent organization bussed Trump supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, including at least one person who was later charged with assaulting police. He pleaded not guilty. In July, Turning Point brought Trump to speak in Phoenix, where he called the 2020 election “the greatest crime in history.” Outside, red-capped volunteers signed people up to become precinct chairs.
Organizers from around the country started huddling with Schultz for weekly Zoom meetings. The meetings’ host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It’s the only idea,” Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do.”
By the next week, though, Schultz suggested the new precinct officials might not stay peaceful. Schultz belonged to a mailing list for a group of military, law enforcement and intelligence veterans called the “1st Amendment Praetorian” that organizes security for Flynn and other pro-Trump figures. Back in the 1990s, Schultz wrote an article defending armed anti-government militias like those involved in that decade’s deadly clashes with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.
“Make sure everybody’s got a baseball bat,” Schultz said on the July strategy conference call, which was posted on YouTube. “I’m serious about this. Make sure you’ve got people who are armed.”
The sudden demand for low-profile precinct positions baffled some party leaders. In Fort Worth, county chair Rick Barnes said numerous callers asked about becoming a “precinct committeeman,” quoting the term used on Bannon’s podcast. That suggested that out-of-state encouragement played a role in prompting the calls, since Texas’s term for the position is “precinct chair.” Tarrant County has added 61 precinct chairs this year, about a 24% increase since February. “Those podcasts actually paid off,” Barnes said.
For weeks, about five people a day called to become precinct chairs in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, southwest of Green Bay. Albert, the county party chair, said he would explain that Wisconsin has no precinct chairs, but newcomers could join the county party — and then become poll workers. “We’re trying to make sure that our voice is now being reinserted into the process,” Albert said.
Similarly, the GOP in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, is fielding a surge of volunteers for precinct committee members, but also for election judges or inspectors, which are party-affiliated elected positions in that state. “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real,” county chair Lou Capozzi said in an interview. The county GOP sent two busloads of people to Washington for Jan. 6 and Capozzi said they stayed peaceful. “People want to make sure elections remain honest.”
Elsewhere, activists inspired by the precinct strategy have targeted local election boards. In DeKalb County, east of Atlanta, the GOP censured a long-serving Republican board member who rejected claims of widespread fraud in 2020. To replace him, new party chair Marci McCarthy tapped a far-right activist known for false, offensive statements. The party nominees to the election board have to be approved by a judge, and the judge in this case rejected McCarthy’s pick, citing an “extraordinary” public outcry. McCarthy defended her choice but ultimately settled for someone less controversial.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 1,000 people attended the county GOP convention in March, up from the typical 300 to 400. The chair they elected, Alan Swain, swiftly formed an “election integrity committee” that’s lobbying lawmakers to restrict voting and audit the 2020 results. “We’re all about voter and election integrity,” Swain said in an interview.
In the rural western part of the state, too, a wave of people who heard Bannon’s podcast or were furious about perceived election fraud swept into county parties, according to the new district chair, Michele Woodhouse. The district’s member of Congress, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, addressed a crowd at one county headquarters on Aug. 29, at an event that included a raffle for a shotgun.
“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed,” Cawthorn said, in remarks livestreamed on Facebook, shortly after holding the prize shotgun, which he autographed. “That’s right,” the audience cheered. Cawthorn went on, “As much as I’m willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there’s nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American, and the way we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”
After Cawthorn referred to people arrested on Jan. 6 charges as “political hostages,” someone asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?” The crowd laughed and clapped as Cawthorn answered, “We are actively working on that one.”
Schultz has offered his own state of Arizona as a proof of concept for how precinct officers can reshape the party. The result, Schultz has said, is actions like the state Senate Republicans’ “forensic audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 ballots. The “audit,” conducted by a private firm with no experience in elections and whose CEO has spread conspiracy theories, has included efforts to identify fraudulent ballots from Asia by searching for traces of bamboo. Schultz has urged activists demanding similar audits in other states to start by becoming precinct officers.
“Because we’ve got the audit, there’s very heightened and intense public interest in the last campaign, and of course making sure election laws are tightened,” said Sandra Dowling, a district chair in northwest Maricopa and northern Yuma County whose precinct roster grew by 63% in less than six months. Though Dowling says some other district chairs screen their applicants, she doesn’t. “I don’t care,” she said.
One chair who does screen applicants is Kathy Petsas, a lifelong Republican whose district spans Phoenix and Paradise Valley. She also saw applications explode earlier this year. Many told her that Schultz had recruited them, and some said they believed in QAnon. “Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party,” Petsas said. “That attitude can’t prevail.”
As waves of new precinct officers flooded into the county party, Petsas was dismayed to see some petitioning to recall their own Republican county supervisors for refusing to cooperate with the Senate GOP’s audit.
“It is not helpful to our democracy when you have people who stand up and do the right thing and are honest communicators about what’s going on, and they get lambasted by our own party,” Petsas said. “That’s a problem.”
This spring, a team of disaffected Republican operatives put Schultz’s precinct strategy into action in South Carolina, a state that plays an outsize role in choosing presidents because of its early primaries. The operatives’ goal was to secure enough delegates to the party’s state convention to elect a new chair: far-right celebrity lawyer Lin Wood.
Wood was involved with some of the lawsuits to overturn the presidential election that courts repeatedly ruled meritless, or even sanctionable. After the election, Wood said on Bannon’s podcast, “I think the audience has to do what the people that were our Founding Fathers did in 1776.” On Twitter, Wood called for executing Vice President Mike Pence by firing squad. Wood later said it was “rhetorical hyperbole,” but that and other incendiary language got him banned from mainstream social media. He switched to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by deplatformed right-wing influencers, amassing roughly 830,000 followers while repeatedly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Asked for comment about his political efforts, Wood responded, “Most of your ‘facts’ are either false or misrepresent the truth.” He declined to cite specifics.
Typically, precinct meetings were “a yawner,” according to Mike Connett, a longtime party member in Horry County, best known for its popular beach towns. But in April, Connett and other establishment Republicans were caught off guard when 369 people, many of them newcomers, showed up for the county convention in North Myrtle Beach. Connett lost a race for a leadership role to Diaz, the prominent QAnon supporter, and Wood’s faction captured the county’s other executive positions plus 35 of 48 delegate slots, enabling them to cast most of the county’s votes for Wood at the state convention. “It seemed like a pretty clean takeover,” Connett told ProPublica.
In Greenville, the state’s most populous county, Wood campaign organizers Jeff Davis and Pressley Stutts mobilized a surge of supporters at the county convention — about 1,400 delegates, up from roughly 550 in 2019 — and swept almost all of the 79 delegate positions. That gave Wood’s faction the vast majority of the votes in two of South Carolina’s biggest delegations.
Across the state, the precinct strategy was contributing to an unprecedented surge in local party participation, according to data provided by a state GOP spokeswoman. In 2019, 4,296 people participated. This year, 8,524 did.
“It’s a prairie fire down there in Greenville, South Carolina, brought on by the MAGA posse,” Bannon said on his podcast.
Establishment party leaders realized they had to take Wood’s challenge seriously. The incumbent chair, Drew McKissick, had Trump’s endorsement three times over — including twice after Wood entered the race. But Wood fought back by repeatedly implying that McKissick and other prominent state Republicans were corrupt and involved in various conspiracies that seemed related to QAnon. The race became heated enough that after one event, Wood and McKissick exchanged angry words face-to-face.
Wood’s rallies were raucous affairs packed with hundreds of people, energized by right-wing celebrities like Flynn and Lindell. In interviews, many attendees described the events as their first foray into politics, sometimes referencing Schultz and always citing Trump’s stolen election myth. Some said they’d resort to violence if they felt an election was stolen again.
Wood’s campaign wobbled in counties that the precinct strategy had not yet reached. At the state convention in May, Wood won about 30% of the delegates, commanding Horry, Greenville and some surrounding counties, but faltering elsewhere. A triumphant McKissick called Wood’s supporters “a fringe, rogue group” and vowed to turn them into a “leper colony” by building parallel Republican organizations in their territory.
But Wood and his partisans did not act defeated. The chairmanship election, they argued, was as rigged as the 2020 presidential race. Wood threw a lavish party at his roughly 2,000-acre low-country estate, secured by armed guards and surveillance cameras. From a stage fit for a rock concert on the lawn of one of his three mansions, Wood promised the fight would continue.
Diaz and her allies in Horry County voted to censure McKissick. The county’s longtime Republicans tried, but failed, to oust Diaz and her cohort after one of the people involved in drafting Wood tackled a protester at a Flynn speech in Greenville. (This incident, the details of which are disputed, prompted Schultz to encourage precinct strategy activists to arm themselves.) Wood continued promoting the precinct strategy to his Telegram followers, and scores replied that they were signing up.
In late July, Stutts and Davis forced out Greenville County GOP’s few remaining establishment leaders, claiming that they had cheated in the first election. Then Stutts, Davis and an ally won a new election to fill those vacant seats. “They sound like Democrats, right?” Bannon asked Stutts in a podcast interview. Stutts replied, “They taught the Democrats how to cheat, Steve.”
Stutts’ group quickly pushed for an investigation of the 2020 presidential election, planning a rally featuring Davis and Wood at the end of August, and began campaigning against vaccine and school mask mandates. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery,” Stutts had previously posted on Facebook, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Stutts continued posting messages skeptical of vaccine and mask mandates even after he entered the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19. He died on Aug. 19.
The hubbub got so loud inside the Cobb County, Georgia, Republican headquarters that it took several shouts and whistles to get everyone’s attention. It was a full house for Salleigh Grubbs’ first meeting as the county’s party chair. Grubbs ran on a vow to “clean house” in the election system, highlighting her December testimony to state lawmakers in which she raised unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Supporters praised Grubbs’ courage for following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence. She attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally as a VIP. She won the chairmanship decisively at an April county convention packed with an estimated 50% first-time participants.
In May, Grubbs opened her first meeting by asking everyone munching on bacon and eggs to listen to her recite the Gettysburg Address. “Think of the battle for freedom that Americans have before them today,” Grubbs said. “Those people fought and died so that you could be the precinct chair.” After the reading, first-time precinct officers stood for applause and cheers.
Their work would start right away: putting up signs, making calls and knocking on doors for a special election for the state House. The district had long leaned Republican, but after the GOP’s devastating losses up and down the ballot in 2020, they didn’t know what to expect.
“There’s so many people out there that are scared, they feel like their vote doesn’t count,” Cooper Guyon, a 17-year-old right-wing podcaster from the Atlanta area who speaks to county parties around the state, told the Cobb Republicans in July. The activists, he said, need to “get out in these communities and tell them that we are fighting to make your vote count by passing the Senate bill, the election-reform bills that are saving our elections in Georgia.”
Of the field’s two Republicans, Devan Seabaugh took the strongest stance in favor of Georgia’s new law restricting ways to vote and giving the Republican-controlled Legislature more power over running elections. “The only people who may be inconvenienced by Senate Bill 202 are those intent on committing fraud,” he wrote in response to a local newspaper’s candidate questionnaire.
Seabaugh led the June special election and won a July runoff. Grubbs cheered the win as a turning point. “We are awake. We are preparing,” she wrote on Facebook. “The conservative citizens of Cobb County are ready to defend our ballots and our county.”
Newcomers did not meet such quick success everywhere. In Savannah, a faction crashed the Chatham County convention with their own microphone, inspired by Bannon’s podcast to try to depose the incumbent party leaders who they accused of betraying Trump. Party officers blocked the newcomers’ candidacies, saying they weren’t officially nominated. Shouting erupted, and the meeting adjourned without a vote. Then the party canceled its districtwide convention.
The state party ultimately sided with the incumbent leaders. District chair Carl Smith said the uprising is bound to fail because the insurgents are mistaken in believing that he and other local leaders didn’t fight hard enough for Trump.
“You can’t build a movement on a lie,” Smith said.
In Michigan, activists who identify with a larger movement working against Republicans willing to accept Trump’s loss have captured the party leadership in about a dozen counties. They’re directly challenging state party leaders, who are trying to harness the grassroots energy without indulging demands to keep fighting over the last election.
Some of the takeovers happened before the rise of the precinct strategy. But the activists are now organizing under the banner “Precinct First” and holding regular events, complete with notaries, to sign people up to run for precinct delegate positions.
“We are reclaiming our party,” Debra Ell, one of the organizers, told ProPublica. “We’re building an ‘America First’ army.”
Under normal rules, the wave of new precinct delegates could force the party to nominate far-right candidates for key state offices. That’s because in Michigan, party nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor are chosen directly by party delegates rather than in public primaries. But the state party recently voted to hold a special convention earlier next year, which should effectively lock in candidates before the new, more radical delegates are seated.
Activist-led county parties including rural Hillsdale and Detroit-area Macomb are also censuring Republican state legislators for issuing a June report on the 2020 election that found no evidence of systemic fraud and no need for a reexamination of the results like the one in Arizona. (The censures have no enforceable impact beyond being a public rebuke of the politicians.) At the same time, county party leaders in Hillsdale and elsewhere are working on a ballot initiative to force an Arizona-style election review.
Establishment Republicans have their own idea for a ballot initiative — one that could tighten rules for voter ID and provisional ballots while sidestepping the Democratic governor’s veto. If the initiative collects hundreds of thousands of valid signatures, it would be put to a vote by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Under a provision of the state constitution, the state Legislature can adopt the measure and it can’t be vetoed.
State party leaders recently reached out to the activists rallying around the rejection of the presidential election results, including Hillsdale Republican Party Secretary Jon Smith, for help. Smith, Ell and others agreed to join the effort, the two activists said.
“This empowers them,” Jason Roe, the state party executive director whose ouster the activists demanded because he said Trump was responsible for his own loss, told ProPublica. Roe resigned in July, citing unrelated reasons. “It’s important to get them focused on change that can actually impact” future elections, he said, “instead of keeping their feet mired in the conspiracy theories of 2020.”
Jesse Law, who ran the Trump campaign’s Election Day operations in Nevada, sued the Democratic electors, seeking to declare Trump the winner or annul the results. The judge threw out the case, saying Law’s evidence did not meet “any standard of proof,” and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. When the Electoral College met in December, Law stood outside the state capitol to publicly cast mock votes for Trump.
This year, Law set his sights on taking over the Republican Party in the state’s largest county, Clark, which encompasses Las Vegas. He campaigned on the precinct strategy, promising 1,000 new recruits. His path to winning the county chairmanship — just like Stutts’ team in South Carolina, and Grubbs in Cobb County, Georgia — relied on turning out droves of newcomers to flood the county party and vote for him.
In Law’s case, many of those newcomers came through the Proud Boys, the all-male gang affiliated with more than two dozen people charged in the Capitol riot. The Las Vegas chapter boasted about signing up 500 new party members (not all of them belonging to the Proud Boys) to ensure their takeover of the county party. After briefly advancing their own slate of candidates to lead the Clark GOP, the Proud Boys threw their support to Law. They also helped lead a state party censure of Nevada’s Republican secretary of state, who rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of fraudulent ballots.
Law, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has declined to distance himself from the Las Vegas Proud Boys, citing Trump’s “stand back and stand by” remark at the September 2020 presidential debate. “When the president was asked if he would disavow, he said no,” Law told an independent Nevada journalist in July. “If the president is OK with that, I’m going to take the presidential stance.”
The outgoing county chair, David Sajdak, canceled the first planned vote for his successor. He said he was worried the Proud Boys would resort to violence if their newly recruited members, who Sajdak considered illegitimate, weren’t allowed to vote.
Sajdak tried again to hold a leadership vote in July, with a meeting in a Las Vegas high school theater, secured by police. But the crowd inside descended into shouting, while more people tried to storm past the cops guarding the back entrance, leading to scuffles. “Let us in! Let us in!” some chanted. Riling them up was at least one Proud Boy, according to multiple videos of the meeting.
At the microphone, Sajdak was running out of patience. “I’m done covering for you awful people,” he bellowed. Unable to restore order, Sajdak ended the meeting without a vote and resigned a few hours later. He’d had enough.
“They want to create mayhem,” Sajdak said.
Soon after, Law’s faction held their own meeting at a hotel-casino and overwhelmingly voted for Law as county chairman. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, a longtime ally of Law who helped lead Trump’s futile effort to overturn the Nevada results, recognized Law as the new county chair and promoted a fundraiser to celebrate. The existing county leaders sued, seeking a court order to block Law’s “fraudulent, rogue election.” The judge preliminarily sided with the moderates, but told them to hold off on their own election until a court hearing in September.
To Sajdak, agonizing over 2020 is pointless because “there’s no mechanism for overturning an election.” Asked if Law’s allies are determined to create one, Sajdak said: “It’s a scary thought, isn’t it.”
Striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization hold a rally on Aug. 6, 1981, on Long Island, N.Y. Nearly 13,000 air-traffic controllers walked off the job and most were fired by President Ronald Reagan after refusing to return to work. (photo: Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)
But hear Labor Day and what comes to mind? Grilled hot dogs, the end of summer? Maybe back-to-school sales?
"Labor Day should be a moment when we all reflect the critical contributions of working people to the political, economic and cultural development of this country," said Claudrena Harold, a history professor at the University of Virginia.
Three moments in labor history, in particular, are central to U.S. history, the modern labor movement, and today's workplace, according to history and labor scholars.
"As we face challenges of growing levels of wage and income inequality, hazardous working conditions in the midst of COVID, there are lessons we can learn from the past," Harold told NPR.
1911: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
The early 1900s were a period of massive industrialization, where factory work became a common job often done by young immigrant workers, especially women.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York became the site of one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history. The tragedy that occurred there on March 25, 1911, marked a major turning point in labor history and helped establish modern-day workplace safety standards.
The factory took up the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan where employees toiled away for 12 hours a day for low pay.
Years before the fire, garment workers across the city went on strike to improve workplace conditions and wages. While many factories reached a union agreement with workers to improve conditions, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory did not.
On March 25, as the workday was ending, a fire broke out on the 8th floor. With buckets of spare fabric and shirts hanging from the ceiling, the flames quickly spread to the upper floors, trapping workers desperate to get out.
But doors to the stairwells were locked, a common practice at the time so bosses could prevent unauthorized breaks and alleged theft. The foreman with the keys to unlock the doors managed to escape, leaving hundreds of others behind.
The workers either succumbed to the smoke and flames or leapt from the building's high windows down to the streets below. That day, 146 garment workers, 123 women and girls and 23 men died. Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrants.
The horror of the fire led to legislation meant to improve factory safety standards in New York. It also helped establish a watchdog agency with powers to investigate labor conditions. Frances Perkins, who later served as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's labor secretary, would lead this agency.
"We are in many ways the beneficiary of this struggle," Harold said of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. "In this moment of the COVID pandemic, when so many of the conversations right now center on wages and working conditions and safety, the Triangle Waist fire and the political struggles that came after it, is an extremely relevant moment to remember now."
1935: The U.S. passes the "Magna Carta" of labor law
"In the 1930s, what we see is finally a settlement of what many labor historians call the labor question: How can our country balance the need for corporations with labor democracy?" said Lane Windham, a professor at Georgetown University.
It's during this decade the country suffers from the Great Depression. Workers start to look to unions and workplace protections to improve their station, Windham said. The decade proved monumental for worker rights.
In 1935, Sen. Robert F. Wagner of New York began drafting what would become the National Labor Relations Act.
It's known as "the Magna Carta of labor," Harold said.
It grants the right for workers to organize. The NLRA also establishes the National Labor Relations Board with enforcement powers to protect the right to organize and certified employee unions. The law bans unfair labor practice such as blacklisting, strike-breaking and discriminatory firings.
About a year after Roosevelt signed the law, working-class organization in generally took off, especially among Black, white, Native American, and female workers in the South, Harold said. By the end of World War II, more than 12 million workers belonged to unions.
Decades later, the law was amended to include more workers in professional sports and nonprofit hospitals and nursing homes. Crucially though, farmworkers and domestic workers — in jobs often done by Black and Latino workers — are still left out of the NLRA and are not allowed to organize for the purpose of collective bargaining.
Today, unions are still trying to expand national labor law with the Protecting the Right to Organize Act — the labor movement's single biggest legislative priority in this Congress.
1981: Reagan fires striking air traffic controllers
Well into the 1970s, employers seemed to largely respect the NLRA, said Ileen DeVault, a labor history professor at Cornell University.
"At the time, it was pretty unheard of to fire strikers and bring on strikebreakers instead," she said.
That is until the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO) strike of 1981.
Forty years ago, on Aug. 3, nearly 13,000 air-traffic controllers walked off the job after negotiations with the federal government over pay and work hours proved fruitless.
President Ronald Reagan, a former labor union president himself, called the strike illegal and threatened to fire any worker who didn't return to work within 48 hours.
Reagan carried out his threat two days later, when he fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who hadn't returned to work. He also declared a lifetime ban on rehiring the strikers by the Federal Aviation Administration.
DeVault says this was one of the most devastating blows to organized labor.
"Once the president of the United States made this move toward his workers, private-sector employers began following in his footsteps," she said. Workers began to fear striking or unionizing out of concern for their jobs.
Decades later, 10.8% of U.S. workers belong to unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's about half what it was in 1983, the first year for which comparable data is available.
President Joe Biden participates in a virtual meeting on Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act at South Court Auditorium at Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Aug. 11, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Biden’s American Jobs Plan would raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent to help fund projects to rebuild highways and roads, expand high-speed broadband, build and renovate schools, and expand and upgrade power lines. Meanwhile, his American Families Plan would allocate $1.8 trillion over 10 years for education, child care, and national paid leave. To help fund those programs, he proposed a 39.6 percent capital gains tax for millionaires — almost double the current rate of 23.8 percent — and an increase in the marginal income tax rate for the top 1 percent, from 37 percent to 39.6 percent.
Companies that use such practices to avoid taxes and lobbied earlier this year on issues related to tax rates in Biden’s American Jobs Plan include Walmart, Oracle, Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Shell, and Walgreens, according to an analysis by Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on public corruption. Executives at companies that have historically avoided paying taxes, like Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and DuPont, have spoken out publicly against Biden’s proposed tax increases.
Shell and Walgreens lobbied earlier this year on corporate tax issues in the American Jobs Plan. Walmart hired a lobbying firm tasked with “monitoring of tax proposals related to infrastructure” in the plan and proposed legislative efforts related to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Accenture hired another firm to “monitor the American Jobs Plan as it relates to corporate taxes.” Oracle and Bristol Myers Squibb, a multinational pharmaceutical company, used the same firm hired by Accenture to monitor and lobby on similar issues in the proposal. Oracle also used that firm to monitor the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s first Covid-19 relief package, for provisions related to corporate taxes. Oracle spokesperson Jessica Moore said the company “has not lobbied on Corporate Tax issues since the new Administration.”
Nonprofit and media reports in recent years have found that those companies are among dozens of multinational corporations that have avoided tens of billions of dollars in taxes in recent years, and have used a variety of tax evasion mechanisms both in the U.S. and overseas, leading some to face fines and even criminal charges.
A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years’ worth of taxes the company did not pay. The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits. In 2013, India alleged that Shell had evaded taxes by underpricing a transfer of shares in 2009 by $2.8 billion.
A 2016 report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Bristol Myers Squibb held $25 billion across 23 tax haven subsidiaries. In 2012 the company set up a tax haven subsidiary in Ireland, which the IRS later described as an “abusive” tax shelter that could allow the company to avoid paying $1.4 billion in taxes.
Between 2008 and 2014, Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. In an arrangement internally known as “Project Flex,” the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary, Quartz reported, which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75. A 2013 report from CTJ found that the company held $19.2 billion in profits in offshore tax havens and did not disclose the U.S. tax rate it would pay if that money were repatriated.
A 2015 report from Americans for Tax Fairness found that Walmart put $76 billion of assets in 78 subsidiaries across 15 tax havens where the company did not have stores. The report found that in 25 of 27 countries where Walmart has stores, the company operates through shell companies held in tax havens. In Luxembourg, where Walmart does not have stores, the company has 22 shell companies to which it transferred ownership of more than $45 billion in assets since 2011. The report claimed that in 2014, Walmart took $2.4 billion in low-interest loans from its tax haven subsidiaries, allowing U.S. affiliates to access foreign earnings without paying U.S. taxes, which the report said “may transgress the intent of U.S. law.” A 2014 analysis by the same group found that Walmart avoids paying $1 billion a year in taxes by exploiting U.S. tax loopholes, and that the company used various methods to dodge paying taxes on $21.4 billion in offshore profits in 2013 — more than double the profits it dodged taxes on in 2008. A 2011 report from Good Jobs First found that Walmart used tax avoidance schemes, including deducting rent payments to itself, to avoid $400 million in local and state taxes each year.
Walgreens is among several major retailers that have been accused of using a legal tactic to reduce their property taxes by pursuing reductions in the assessed value of their properties. After public outcry, the company backed off a decision in 2014 to move its U.S. headquarters overseas, a change that would have allowed the company to avoid some $4 billion in taxes. The 2016 report from U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP found that Walgreens had 71 subsidiaries in tax havens, including 23 in Luxembourg alone.
A 2016 Oxfam report found that Oracle held more than $38 billion in offshore accounts between 2008 and 2014 on which the company avoided paying $8.3 billion in U.S. taxes. The 2016 U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP report found that the company held $42.6 billion in five subsidiaries in offshore tax havens on which the company paid a 3.8 percent tax rate. The 2013 report from CTJ showed that in that fiscal year, Oracle held $20.9 billion in offshore tax havens on which if paid a 30 percent tax rate while the U.S. tax rate was 35 percent.
In 2019, Oracle Corporation Australia was charged more than $300 million for avoided, withheld, and backed taxes. Oracle Korea was fined $275 million in 2017 for alleged tax evasion that allowed the firm to dodge taxes for seven years by using tax havens abroad. A 2012 study commissioned by a member of the British Parliament found that Oracle had paid nothing in corporate taxes in the U.K. that year on a projected 446 million pounds in profits. Oracle declined to comment on these findings.
In 2019, Accenture paid $200 million in a settlement following reporting from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on leaked documents — the 2014 “Lux Leaks” scandal — revealing that major multinational companies avoided global taxes by entering into secret tax agreements with the government of Luxembourg. In 2010, acting through PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Accenture processed a transfer of intellectual property rights from Switzerland to Ireland through Luxembourg. Documents obtained as part of Lux Leaks showed that the value of the assets rose almost 600 percent in 48 hours from $1.2 billion to $7 billion, zero of which was taxed in Luxembourg. The company successfully lobbied the U.S. government in the early 2000s to move its place of incorporation to Bermuda to avoid taxes. When the government planned to change tax policies that would jeopardize Bermuda’s tax haven status, the company — which says it has no headquarters — moved its place of incorporation to Ireland. Accenture did not provide comment by the time of publication.
A 2012 report by the Sunday Times found that Accenture was able to lower its tax rate in the U.K. to less than 3.5 percent, while the nation’s standard rate was 24 percent.
Congress has been struggling to pass the much-awaited bipartisan bill, and negotiations are ongoing (the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops last month put talks somewhat on hold). It’s unclear whether the measure will have enough support to pass. Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress but have had little luck moving forward on a number of Biden’s administrative goals even as calls to abolish the filibuster gain support.
Meanwhile, executives at other major companies that have reportedly dodged billions of dollars in taxes around the world have also spoken out against Biden’s plan to increase their taxes.
In April, Joseph Wolk, Johnson & Johnson’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, criticized the proposed corporate tax increase because it would make the U.S. “the highest-rated developed country in the world with respect to tax rates,” and said that the issue is something “we need a little more fact-based dialogue on and making sure that we remain competitive.” Following news of Biden’s proposal, strategists at JPMorgan Chase said the administration’s policies were “no longer so unambiguously positive.” Asked about Biden’s plan in May, JPMorgan Chase Chair and CEO Jamie Dimon said, “We already waste tremendous sums of money,” and the “notion that you can have uncompetitive corporate taxes and you can be a competitive nation is a little crazy.” FedEx Chair and CEO Fred Smith came out against Biden’s proposal in April and wrote in an email to staff that it would “reduce capital investment and significantly degrade U.S. competitiveness.” The same month, DuPont EVP and CFO Lori Koch said the proposed changes would put companies based in the U.S. “at a disadvantage” because they “would be subject to higher tax rates on their foreign earnings than their foreign competitors.”
Between 2013 and 2015, Johnson & Johnson reportedly dodged more than $1.7 billion in global taxes, including more than $1 billion in the U.S. alone, according to a 2018 Oxfam report. A 2016 report from the same group found that the company had avoided paying more than $16 billion in taxes between 2008 and 2014 by housing some $53 billion in offshore accounts. Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
JPMorgan Chase avoided $12 billion in U.S. taxes between 2008 and 2014 by holding more than $31 billion in offshore accounts, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. Another Oxfam report that year found that 96.8 percent of the bank’s foreign subsidiaries were housed in tax havens and that it only reported 0.9 percent of those on its 2014 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The report also noted that the bank estimated its deferred tax bill from offshore accounts at $7 billion. A 2013 report from CTJ found that in that fiscal year, the bank disclosed that it held more than $25 billion in offshore tax havens on which it paid a 23 percent tax, 12 points below the 35 percent corporate tax rate that year.
In 2015, French prosecutors filed criminal charges against a unit of the bank for “alleged complicity in tax fraud,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The case was later thrown out because of “clerical errors.” According to the 2014 Lux Leaks report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, JPMorgan Chase and FedEx were among companies that secured lucrative secret tax deals with the Luxembourg government that allowed them and other major companies to largely avoid global taxes. Members of the European Parliament subsequently investigated the country’s tax code and money-laundering schemes, and later took action to force Luxembourg to change its tax laws and follow new rules approved following the scandal. In 2012, the bank was in talks with the U.K. government to pay a 500 million pound settlement after it was found that the company used a tax-avoidance scheme there. The bank declined to comment.
FedEx used tax avoidance strategies that allowed the company to pay a negative 4.6 percent tax rate in 2018, according to a 2019 ITEP report. The same report showed that DuPont used government subsidies and tax avoidance strategies to pay a negative 54.8 percent tax rate in 2018 and avoided paying $119 million in taxes that year.
DuPont paid no net state income tax from 2008 to 2010, a net negative of $12 million, according to a 2011 report from ITEP and CTJ. A 2013 report from the same group found that the company held more than $13 billion in offshore tax havens. Before Dow Chemical and DuPont split in 2019, the merged companies agreed to pay a $1.75 million fine to the SEC after failing to disclose $3 million in perks given to Dow’s former chief executive.
The net effect of these tax dodges is catastrophic. According to a 2016 report by Kimberly Clausing, the Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law who was appointed in February as deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the Treasury’s office of tax policy, the U.S. loses more than $111 billion each year due to tax dodging by multinational corporations.
“Lobbyists have already created so many loopholes in our tax code that help the rich and powerful and big corporations,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said in a statement to The Intercept. “The American people understand what’s going on here and this is our opportunity to put a stop to it. [Maine Sen.] Angus King and I are pushing for a corporate profits tax that is essentially a minimum tax for the richest companies — no loopholes — that will allow us to increase tax revenue and help pay for these infrastructure investments we badly need.”
Quadruple murder suspect Bryan Riley is led from the Polk County Sheriff's Office in Lakeland, Fla., on Sunday, Sept. 5, 2021, by Deputy Steve Neil, left, Captain Bart Davis and Detective Brett Bulman. (photo: Kimberly C. Moore/The Ledger/AP)
Bryan Riley, 33, was wounded and surrendered in Lakeland, which lies between Orlando and Tampa in central Florida, the authorities said.
An 11-year-old girl who was shot seven times survived.
Polk county sheriff Grady Judd said Riley, a former US Marine who served as a sharpshooter in the US wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, seemed to have targeted his victims at random and appeared to be suffering from mental health issues.
Judd said Riley’s girlfriend told authorities Riley had been slowly unraveling for weeks and repeatedly told her that he could communicate directly with God.
Investigators said preliminary evidence shows that 40-year-old victim Justice Gleason just happened to be an unlucky stranger out mowing his lawn on Saturday night when Riley drove by his home in Lakeland and began making deranged claims about the man’s family.
Authorities responded to the scene but never found Riley.
About nine hours later, around 4.30am on Sunday, Riley returned to the home, laying out glow-sticks to create a path leading to the house, in what the sheriff’s office deduced was a ploy to draw officers “into an ambush”, Judd said.
Another law enforcement officer who just happened to be on duty some distance away heard popping noises and immediately alerted the authorities, who prepared for dealing with a potential shooter and brought a heft police presence swiftly to the scene.
Following the sounds of gunfire, authorities arrived at the home and found Riley’s white truck ablaze and an apparently unarmed Riley outside, dressed in camouflage.
Riley immediately ran inside, where authorities heard another round of gunfire, “a woman scream and a baby whimper,” Judd said.
Officers tried to enter the front of the house, but it was barricaded. When they circled to the back, they encountered Riley, who appeared then to have put on full body armor including head and knee coverings and a bulletproof vest.
Authorities exchanged heavy gunfire, with dozens “if not hundreds of rounds” fired, before Riley retreated back into the home, according to the sheriff.
Everything fell silent, Judd said, until a helicopter unit alerted authorities on the ground that Riley was coming out.
He had been shot once and was ready to surrender.
Meanwhile, officers heard cries for help inside the home, but were unsure whether there were additional shooters and feared the home was booby-trapped, the authorities said.
One sergeant took a chance and rushed in and found the 11-year-old girl who had been shot at least seven times, grabbed her and brought her out to safety, where she told sheriff’s deputies there were three dead people inside the house, Judd said.
The girl was rushed into surgery and was expected to survive.
Deputies sent robots into the home to check for explosives and other traps. When it was clear, they found the bodies of Gleason and other unnamed victims, the 33-year-old mother and the baby.
They also found the baby’s 62-year-old grandmother, who was in a separate home nearby. Authorities released only Gleason’s name, and did not say if or how he was related to the other victims. The family dog had also been shot and killed.
Authorities said Riley’s girlfriend of four years, whom he lived with, has been talking with the authorities and has said she is shocked by what occurred, as Riley was never violent – but that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had become increasingly erratic.
She said he’d spent the previous week on what he called a mission from God, stockpiling supplies that he said were for Hurricane Ida victims, including $1,000 worth of cigars.
Riley, who had no criminal history, also told authorities he was on methamphetamines. His vehicle had also been stocked with supplies for a gunfight, authorities said, including bleeding control kits.
While being treated at the hospital, Riley jumped up and tried to grab an officer’s gun.
“They had to fight with him again in the emergency room,” Judd said, adding that Riley was ultimately tied down and medicated. He is expected to recover and will be transferred to jail to face charges.
Belarusian opposition activist Maria Kolesnikova attends a court hearing in Minsk, Belarus, on Sept. 6. (photo: Ramil Nasibulin/Reuters)
Her opposition colleague, lawyer Maxim Znak, 40, who stood trial alongside her, was sentenced to 10 years. The two were also convicted of inciting action aimed at harming national security and the creation of an extremist group.
Kolesnikova is one of the key opposition figures jailed in Belarus after protests ignited in August last year over presidential elections rejected by opposition activists as rigged. President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, launched a violent crackdown on the protests, jailing hundreds of the regime’s opponents.
According to rights group Viasna, 652 people are political prisoners in Belarus.
Kolesnikova, 39, captured the imagination of the Belarus opposition movement after she was abducted in the street in Minsk by masked security agents last September and driven to the Ukraine border.
Told she could leave or stand trial, she refused to depart, ripped up her passport to avoid deportation, and was arrested and tried. She later said in a statement released through a lawyer that the security agents told her she could be deported “alive or in pieces.”
Although the trial was closed, the verdict was open. Long crowds of supporters formed outside the courtroom Monday, according to video posted online by journalists and activists. Her father, Alexander Kolesnikov, was able to get into the courtroom but dozens of people could not.
Her trademark is the heart sign she makes with her hands. Video posted online showed her making the heart sign behind bars in court Monday and smiling.
When her trial began last month alongside Znak’s, she was pictured dancing in court and making the heart sign, a show of optimistic defiance against Lukashenko’s regime.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken deplored the “politically motivated conviction and shameful sentencing” of the two and called for an end to political repression in Belarus.
“Regrettably, these sentencings are further evidence of the regime’s total disregard for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people of Belarus,” he said in a statement.
The European Union and Britain condemned the jailing of Kolesnikova and Znak and called for their release.
“The E.U. deplores the continuous blatant disrespect by the Minsk regime of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people of Belarus,” spokesman Peter Stano said in a statement. He said the charges were unfounded. “The EU also reiterates its demands for the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners in Belarus,” he said.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the sentences showed Belarusian authorities continuing their assault on democracy and freedom.
“Locking up political opponents will only deepen the pariah status of the Lukashenko regime,” he said.
Kolesnikova was one of three women, including Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and Veronika Tsepkalo, who united different opposition forces behind Tikhanovskaya in last year’s presidential election. The official result gave Lukashenko 80.1 percent of the vote and announced that Tikhanovskaya had won 10.12 percent of the vote, but the opposition claimed she gained more than 60 percent.
The official result was rejected by the opposition and Western governments, and Kolesnikova emerged as a key figure leading protests. Demonstrations erupted around the country over the result, with workers at a large state-owned tractor factory booing Lukashenko and shouting at him to leave power.
He had himself sworn in to office in a hasty secret ceremony surrounded by security officials and members of the elite, which still supports him and has in many cases benefited from his rule.
After Monday’s verdict, Tikhanovskaya called for the release of Kolesnikova and Znak, calling them heroes who “aren’t guilty of anything. It’s terror against Belarusians who dare to stand up to the regime. We won’t stop until everybody is free in Belarus.”
“The regime wants us to see them crushed and exhausted,” she said on Twitter. “Their terms shouldn’t frighten us.” Once the Lukashenko regime was removed from power, they and other political prisoners would be freed, she added.
Tikhanovskaya only stood in the presidential race because her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a prominent Lukashenko rival, was jailed before the election. Tsepkalo’s husband, Valery Tsepkalo, was barred from running in the election and fled the country before the vote.
Kolesnikova headed the campaign team of another opposition leader, Viktor Babariko, who was arrested before the election and was recently sentenced to 14 years in jail on fraud charges that he says were political.
Tikhanovskaya was forcibly deported soon after the election, while Veronika Tsepkalo fled the country.
Tikhanovskaya’s adviser, Franak Viakorka, said on Twitter on Monday after the verdict that he was proud of Kolesnikova and Znak. He said they were innocent, the trial was a “farce” and the Lukashenko regime was also a farce.
Lukashenko, sanctioned by the West over the violent crackdown on protests and forced landing of a Ryanair jet in May to arrest a journalist, clung to power with the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who promised to send in troops if necessary.
As protests continued, Kolesnikova helped set up a national Coordination Council, an opposition initiative to try to engineer a peaceful transition of power. But Lukashenko rebuffed the group, saying Belarus was at threat of an invasion from Western enemies and only he was capable of saving the country.
Flooding. (photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
But there is another factor that made Ida particularly devastating: Sea levels in parts of the Gulf Coast have risen nearly two feet since 1950, due to both climate change and land subsidence. And scientists note the higher the water level, the more is pushed onto land and the further inland it reaches during a hurricane.
“Ida is an unnatural disaster, at least in part,” Jason West, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health tweeted on Sunday. “Climate change makes it stronger, sea level rise makes it more damaging.”
Storm surges can often be the most destructive part of a hurricane — pushing water miles inland. Hurricane Ida’s storm surge was so powerful that it temporarily reversed the flow of the Mississippi River into the Gulf. It also drastically raised the river’s level; normally between 8 to 10 feet, the Mississippi rose to 16 feet during the storm. One levee toppled from the storm surge, sending over 7 feet of water into lower Jefferson Parish, trapping people in their attics.
The Gulf Coast has some of the fastest sea-level rise in the country, increasing 0.3 inches per year. Part of this rapid rise is due to climate change: As oceans warm, water is expanding. Freshwater entering the oceans as glaciers and ice caps melt are also contributing to the increase. The other part of the Gulf’s rapid sea-level rise is due to land subsidence, which happens both naturally and from human activities. Along the Gulf Coast, engineering decisions to drain swampland for development, extract groundwater and oil from the ground, cut canals through the bayous for shipping, and historic flood control measures have resulted in severe land subsidence issues, with places like New Orleans and Houston sinking at a rate of 2 inches per year.
“It’ll only get worse for as long as we continue burning fossil fuels and let global warming continue,” Jonathan Overpeck, a climate science expert at the University of Michigan, said in a press release. (Disclosure: The University of Michigan is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.)
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, sea level has risen 8 inches globally since 1900. The report states: “Human influence was very likely the main driver of these increases since at least 1971.”
If the world meets the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, climate experts project that global sea level would still rise by between 1.3 to 2.2 feet by 2100, thanks to past emissions already baked into the climate system.
“Even if we were to stabilize global climate change now, the ice sheets will take a while to catch up,” Overpeck told Grist. “They will continue to lose mass, meaning raise sea level for a couple centuries. It’s kind of unstoppable.”
And for coastal communities, sea level rise could continue to make hurricane damage more severe. In a study published in Nature Communications earlier this year, researchers found that sea-level rise was the cause of over $8 billion of the damages during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
“This case study underscores that human-caused sea level rise has contributed to damages associated with other past coastal floods,” the study authors wrote, “and will increasingly aggravate damages in the future as sea levels continue to rise, driven by anthropogenic warming.”
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