The Food to Families program, touted by Ivanka Trump, gave tens of millions of dollars to unqualified firms and was also used to promote then-President Trump.
A $6 billion federal program created to provide fresh produce to families affected by the pandemic was mismanaged and used by the Trump administration for political gain, a new congressional report has found.
As a ProPublica investigation revealed last spring and as the new report further details, the Farmers to Families Food Box program gave contracts to companies that had no relevant experience and often lacked necessary licenses. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released its report last week, found that former President Donald Trump’s administration did not adequately screen contractor applications or identify red flags in bid proposals.
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One company that received a $39 million contract was CRE8AD8 LLC (pronounced “Create a Date”), a wedding and event planning firm. The owner compared the contract to his usual work of “putting tchotchkes in a bag.”
In response to the report, the firm’s CEO said in a statement, “We delivered far more boxes/pounds than many other contractors and as a for-profit company, we’re allowed to make a profit.”
The congressional report also highlighted the application of an avocado grower who was initially awarded a $40 million contract before it was canceled after a review. Under the section of the application that required applicants to list references, the farmer wrote, “I don’t have any.”
The Food to Families program was created by the Department of Agriculture in the early days of the pandemic to give away produce that might have otherwise gone to waste as a result of disruptions in distribution chains. The boxes included produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats — and many also included a signed letter from then-President Trump.
The program was unveiled in May 2020 by Ivanka Trump. “I’m not shy about asking people to step up to the plate,” the president’s older daughter said in an interview to promote the initiative.
According to congressional investigators, Ivanka Trump was involved in getting the letter from her father added to the boxes. The USDA told contractors that including the letter was mandatory. Food bank operators told the investigators the letter concerned them because it didn’t appear to be politically neutral.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention in August 2020, President Trump and his daughter headlined a nearby event to announce an additional $1 billion for the food box program. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also spoke at the event and encouraged attendees to reelect the president.
A federal ethics office later found that Perdue’s speech violated a federal law that prohibits officials from using their office for campaign purposes. The USDA at the time disputed the notion that Perdue was electioneering, saying that Perdue’s comments merely “predicted future behavior based on the president’s focus on helping ‘forgotten people.’”
The yearlong congressional investigation also identified problems with the deliveries themselves, including food safety issues, failed deliveries and uneven food distribution. Some contractors also forced recipient organizations to accept more food than they could distribute or store.
Committee chair Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a statement that the mismanagement of the program is another example of the previous administration’s failures.
“The Program was marred by a structure that prioritized industry over families, by contracting practices that prioritized cutting corners over competence, and by decisions that prioritized politics over the public good,” he said.
Above: Photo / Lynxotic Collage / Images from Twitter @parents_4future
“Johnson’s failure to act has left us with petrol queues, energy companies going bust, offshore workers unemployed for months on end, and a deepening climate crisis.”
The Metropolitan Police arrested at least seven Greenpeace activists in London on Monday for disrupting traffic outside Downing Street by locking themselves to barrels and a 12-foot oil-splattered statue of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“Johnson must stop Cambo, and instead prioritize a just transition to renewable energy to protect consumers, workers, and the climate from future shocks.”
Though Johnson is not currently at his London residence—he is vacationing with family in Spain—the action comes less than three weeks before the United Kingdom is set to host a global climate summit known as COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Some demonstrators toted posters and banners that read “Stop Cambo,” referring to a new oil field near Shetland that Greenpeace expects the government to approve “any day now,” spokesperson James Hanson toldAgence France-Presse.
A sign protesters propped up by the statue of Johnson declared the oil field his “monumental climate failure.” The Conservative prime minister, Greenpeace U.K. highlighted Monday, “has said he backs 16 new North Sea oil and gas projects going ahead.”
Greenpeace U.K. also pointed to recent comments from a fellow Tory. Secretary of State for Business Kwasi Kwarteng said last month that “the U.K. is still too reliant on fossil fuels. Our exposure to volatile global gas prices underscores the importance of our plan to build a strong, home-grown renewable energy sector to strengthen our energy security into the future.”
The advocacy group explained Monday that “when it comes to Cambo, 80% of oil extracted is likely to be exported, and production won’t start for a few years—so the project would do very little to shore up the U.K.’s energy supply and won’t fix the current gas price crisis.”
In a statement, Greenpeace U.K. oil campaigner Philip Evans also noted the current prices.
“People across the U.K. are feeling the stresses of a gas price crisis as well as a climate crisis,” he said, “and the government acknowledges that our reliance on fossil fuels has left the U.K. vulnerable and exposed. People are right to feel angry and upset.”
Evans asserted that “Johnson’s failure to act has left us with petrol queues, energy companies going bust, offshore workers unemployed for months on end, and a deepening climate crisis.”
“Johnson must stop Cambo, and instead prioritize a just transition to renewable energy to protect consumers, workers, and the climate from future shocks,” the campaigner declared. “If he doesn’t, he will be remembered as a monumental climate failure.”
Early start to support the @GreenpeaceUK protest against the Cambo oil field this morning.
On the same morning Peter Capaldi writes in the @guardian 'Johnson's backing for the Cambo oilfield is unscientific and potentially disastrous'.#StopCambopic.twitter.com/TXVRTEiGXT
The protest in London came just days after Greenpeace lost a court case challenging the U.K. government’s decision to grant a permit to BP for another North Sea drilling operation.
After the loss, Greenpeace U.K. executive director John Sauven pointed out that “now the prime minister is poised to sign off even more oil if he approves a new oil field at Cambo—against official guidance from climate experts.”
“In just a few weeks’ time Boris Johnson will be opening global climate talks where his actions, not his words, will be what counts,” said Sauven. “And right now his actions are covered in oil. We will not give up the fight for the climate. Our intention is to appeal this ruling before the Supreme Court.”
The U.K. government announced in April a new climate target of cutting planet-heating emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990 levels, which would bring the nation more than three-quarters of the way to its goal of net-zero by 2050.
Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace U.K., said at the time that “in order to actually deliver on this commitment, new measures to slash emissions from homes and transport should already be well underway.”
“So unless the government’s policies and spending commitments urgently fall in line with its ambitions,” she added, “there will still be awkward questions for Boris Johnson at the global climate talks in the autumn.”
The Climate Change Committee—an independent body that advises the U.K. on emissions targets and provides progress reports to Parliament—noted in June that a large share of reductions has come from decarbonizing the power sector and warned if progress does not extend beyond that sector going forward, the new targets “will be missed by a huge margin.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” said one expert.
Underscoring the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions and invest in public goods to better prepare communities across the United States for escalating extreme weather, a new report released Monday finds that one-quarter of the nation’s “critical” infrastructure is already susceptible to flooding that renders it inaccessible, with risks projected to increase in the coming decades.
Described as the first-ever nationwide evaluation of community-level vulnerability to flooding, the report—Infrastructure on the Brink, compiled by the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group that specializes in environmental risk assessment—highlights localities where housing, commercial real estate, transportation networks, schools, hospitals, power plants, and other pieces of infrastructure face operational flood risk in 2021.
The analysis also explores how spatial patterns of flood risk are expected to change over the next 30 years, as the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency exacerbates sea-level rise and extreme rainfall events, which pose direct and indirect threats to the safety and well-being of people throughout the U.S.
“It is clear, now more than ever,” the report states, “that the ways and places in which we live are likely to continue to be impacted by our changing environment. One of the most important implications in this development is the vulnerability of our national infrastructure.”
Using a unique national database that contains parcel-level flood risk information—combining hazards, exposure, and vulnerability—as well as over 20,000 flood adaptation measures, the report maps Americans’ current and future flood risks based on their proximity to coasts and flood plains plus the estimated impacts of flood-damaged infrastructure at the broader scales of neighborhoods, zip codes, cities, and counties.
As the authors note, “Individuals whose homes were spared the impact of a particular flood event are increasingly likely to find their local roads, businesses, critical infrastructure, utilities, or emergency services affected.”
The report assesses risk to (1) residential properties; (2) roads; (3) commercial properties; (4) critical infrastructure (airports, fire stations, hospitals, police stations, ports, power stations, superfund/hazardous waste sites, water outfalls, and wastewater treatment facilities); and (5) social infrastructure (government buildings, historic buildings, houses of worship, museums, and schools).
Defining risk as “the unique level of flooding for each infrastructure type relative to operational thresholds,” the report finds:
Risk to residential properties is expected to increase by 10% over the next 30 years with 12.4 million properties at risk today (14%) and 13.6 million at risk of flooding in 2051 (16%);
Two million miles of road (25%) are at risk today and that is expected to increase to 2.2 million miles of road (26%) over the next 30 years (a 3% increase over the next 30 years);
Commercial properties are expected to see a 7% increase in risk of flooding from 2021 to 2051, with 918,540 at risk today (20%) and 984,591 at risk of flooding in 30 years (21%);
Currently, 35,776 critical infrastructure facilities are at risk today (25%), increasing to 37,786 facilities by 2051 (26%), a 6% increase in risk; and
Compounding that risk, 71,717 pieces of social infrastructure facilities are at risk today (17%), increasing to 77,843 by 2051 (19%), an increase of 9% over that time period.
The report comes in the wake of several highly destructive flooding events that affected various parts of the U.S. this summer, including one in Tennessee in August as well as the inundation of New York City’s subway system in July and again in September during Hurricane Ida—deadly and costly disasters that exposed how ill-prepared the country is to reduce extreme weather-related infrastructure damage and the ensuing consequences.
The new analysis also points to earlier catastrophes, such as Hurricane Sandy, which hit the New York City metropolitan area in 2012 and “flooded hospitals, crippled electrical substations, overwhelmed wastewater treatment centers, and shut down power and water to tens of millions of people.”
“Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of the First Street Foundation, said in a statement.
“This report highlights the cities and counties whose vital infrastructure are most at risk today and will help inform where investment dollars should flow in order to best mitigate against that risk,” Edy added.
According to the report:
There are significant differences at the county and city level in the amount of risk that exists today and into the future. Most importantly, there are a group of counties and cities that have persistent patterns of vulnerability across multiple dimensions of physical risk from flooding. These areas tend to be in regions with well-established flood risk, such as coastal flood plains along the Gulf and Southeastern coasts of the U.S., but also in less well-known flood zones, such as in the Appalachian Mountain regions of West Virginia and Kentucky.
To that point, 17 of the top 20 counties in the U.S. which are most at risk (85%) are in the states of Louisiana, Florida, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Additionally, the top cities at risk of flooding persistently show up in the states of Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. The analysis further uncovered a high degree of vulnerability in some of the major population centers in the U.S., including New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Even as extreme storms and material insecurity become more common and severe—rendering continued inaction far more expensive than prevention—congressional Republicans and a handful of conservative Democratic lawmakers swimming in corporate cash continue to fight against the Build Back Better Act, a President Joe Biden-endorsed proposal to invest trillions in strengthening climate action and expanding the nation’s relatively underdeveloped welfare state.
Opposition to greening the nation’s physical infrastructure and improving its social infrastructure increases disaster vulnerabilities and worsens impacts, particularly in marginalized communities, experts say, although the inverse—simultaneously addressing the intensifying crises of climate and inequality—is also possible.
“The decarbonization question, the infrastructure question, and the inequalities question are the same question,” Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tweeted last week. “Only an epic struggle from the left, combining mass organization, mobilization, and technical expertise—across borders—can provide a good answer in the 2020s.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Both the Republicans and the Democrats vote as if the nation’s middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker.
by Ralph Nader
“Polarization” is the word most associated with the positions of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The mass media and the commentators never tire of this focus, in part because such clashes create the flashes conducive to daily coverage.
Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.
The quiet harmony between the two parties created by the omnipresent power of Big Business and other powerful single-issue lobbyists is often the status quo. That’s why there are so few changes in this country’s politics.
In many cases, the similarities of both major parties are tied to the fundamental concentration of power by the few over the many. In short, the two parties regularly agree on anti-democratic abuses of power. Granted, there are always a few exceptions among the rank & file. Here are some areas of Republican and Democrat concurrence:
1. The Duopoly shares the same stage on a militaristic, imperial foreign policy and massive unaudited military budgets. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Pentagon budget was voted out of a House committee by the Democrats and the GOP with $24 billion MORE than what President Biden asked for from Congress. Neither party does much of anything to curtail the huge waste, fraud, and abuse of corporate military contractors, or the Pentagon’s violation of federal law since 1992 requiring annual auditable data on DOD spending be provided to Congress, the president, and the public.
2. Both Parties allow unconstitutional wars violating federal laws and international treaties that we signed onto long ago, including restrictions on the use of force under the United Nations Charter.
3. Both Parties ignore the burgeoning corporate welfare subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts turning oceans of inefficient, mismanaged, and coddled profit-glutted companies into tenured corporate welfare Kings.
4. Both Parties decline to crack down on the nationwide corporate crime spree. They don’t even like to use the phrase “corporate crime” or “corporate crime wave.” They prefer to delicately allude to “white-collar crime.”
Trillions of dollars are at stake every year, yet neither party holds corporate crime hearings nor proposes an update of the obsolete, weak federal corporate criminal laws.
In some instances, there is no criminal penalty at all for willful and knowing violations of safety regulatory laws (e.g., the auto safety and aviation safety laws). Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is trying to find just one Republican Senator to co-sponsor the “Hide No Harm Act” that would make it a crime for a corporate officer to knowingly conceal information about a corporate action or product that poses the danger of death or serious physical injury to consumers or workers.
5. Both Parties allow Wall Street’s inexhaustibly greedy CEOs to prey on innocents, including small investors. They also do nothing to curb hundreds of billions of dollars in computerized billing fraud, especially in the health care industry. (See, License to Steal by Malcolm K. Sparrow and a GAO Report about thirty years ago).
6. The third leading cause of death in the U.S. is fatalities from preventable problems in hospitals and clinics. According to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine study in 2015, a conservative estimate is that 250,000 people yearly are dying from preventable conditions. Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has an effort remotely up to the scale required to reduce this staggering level of mortality and morbidity. Nor is the American Medical Association (AMA) engaging with this avoidable epidemic.
7. Both Parties sped bailout of over $50 billion to the airline industry during Covid-19, after the companies had spent about $45 billion on unproductive stock buybacks over the last few years to raise the metrics used to boost executive pay.
8. Both Parties starve corporate law enforcement budgets in the Justice Department, the regulatory agencies, and such departments as Labor, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, and Health and Human Services. The Duopoly’s view is that there be no additional federal cops on the corporate crime beat.
9. Both Parties prostrate themselves before the bank-funded Federal Reserve. There are no congressional audits, no congressional oversight of the Fed’s secret, murky operations, and massive printing of money to juice up Wall Street, while keeping interest rates near zero for trillions of dollars held by over one hundred million small to midsize savers in America.
10. Both Parties are wedded to constant and huge bailouts of the risky declining, uncompetitive (with solar and wind energy) nuclear power industry. This is corporate socialism at its worst. Without your taxpayer and ratepayer dollars, nuclear plants would be closing down faster than is now the case. Bipartisan proposals for more nukes come with large subsidies and guarantees by Uncle Sam.
11. Both Parties hate Third Parties and engage in the political bigotry of obstructing their ballot access (See: Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News), with hurdles, harassing lawsuits, and exclusions from public debates. The goal of both parties is to stop a competitive democracy.
12. Both Parties overwhelmingly rubber-stamp whatever the Israeli government wants in the latest U.S. military weaponry, the suppression of Palestinians and illegal occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands, and the periodic slaughter of Gazans with U.S. weapons. The Duopoly also supports the use of the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to insulate Israel from UN sanctions.
13. Continuing Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich’s debilitating internal deforms of congressional infrastructures, the Democrats have gone along with the GOP’s shrinking of committee and staff budgets, abolition of the crucial Office of Technology Assessment’s (OTA) budget, and concentration of excessive power in the hands of the Speaker and Senate leader. This little noticed immolation reduces further the legislature’s ability to oversee the huge sprawling Executive Branch. The erosion of congressional power is furthered by the three-day work week Congress has reserved for itself.
14. Even on what might seem to be healthy partisan differences, the Democrats and the GOP agree not to replace or ease out Trump’s Director of the Internal Revenue Service, a former corporate loophole tax lawyer, or the head of the U.S. Postal Service, a former profiteer off the Post Office who will shortly curtail service even more than he did in 2020 (See: First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, by Christopher W Shaw).
Right now, both Parties are readying to give over $50 billion of your tax money to the very profitable under-taxed computer chip industry companies like Intel and Nvidia, so they can make more profit-building plants in the U.S. These companies are loaded with cash. They should invest their own money and stop the stock buyback craze. Isn’t that what capitalism is all about?
Both Parties vote as if the American middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker. Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.
Sleep on America, you have nothing to lose but your dreams.
Originally published on Common Dreams by RALPH NADER and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels, it’s time to listen.”
With an open letter expressing “the utmost alarm about the state of our climate system,” over 330 scientists on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency and swiftly put an end to a fossil fuel-based energy system.
“When scientists across the U.S. are imploring the president to get the country off fossil fuels,” said Dr. Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “it’s time to listen.”
The letter—an effort organized by biologist Dr. Sandra Steingraber and climate scientist Dr. Peter Kalmus along with advocacy groups Center for Biological Diversity and Food & Water Watch—frames the current moment as a “time of peril” that must be met with “emergency action.”
Other initial signatories include Dr. Robert Bullard, known as the father of environmental justice, and climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
A three-step action plan is presented in the letter, beginning with a full ban on any new fossil fuel leasing and extraction on public lands and waters; no future permits for related infrastructure; and ending fossil fuel exports and subsidies.
Biden must also declare a climate emergency, the letter says, through which a chunk of the nation’s vast military spending would instead be directed to fund renewable energy projects and the crude oil export ban would be reinstated.
As a third key step, the president needs to reject fossil fuel industry schemes, such as carbon capture and storage, that the scientists frame as “delay tactics” that ultimately “impede the rapid transition to renewable energy.”
The first two in the trio of demands mirror those set out by the People Vs. Fossil Fuels mobilization, which is set to kick off next week.
“U.S. scientists are done speaking calmly in the face of inaction,” Steingraber said in a statement in which she expressed solidarity with the upcoming mobilization.
She also urged the president to follow through on a key campaign vow that his support for pipelines like the Dakota Access and Line 3 has betrayed.
“President Biden,” said Steingraber, “listening to science means acting on science. It means stopping new fossil fuel projects, opposing industry delay tactics, and declaring a national climate emergency.”
The scientists warned that “our chances for avoiding irreversible and uncontrollable climate chaos diminish daily.”
“We implore you, on behalf of and for the love of all life on Earth,” they added, “to respond to the greatest threat ever to face our species and lead the transition away from fossil fuels that humanity desperately needs.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” one group asked after whistleblower Frances Haugen said the corporation is unwilling to confront hate speech and disinformation.
Following whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Sunday night allegation that Facebook’s refusal to combat dangerous lies and hateful content on its platforms is driven by profit, social media experts denounced the corporation for embracing a business model that encourages violence and endangers democracy—and urged the federal government to take action.
Haugen, who copied a “trove of private Facebook research” before she resigned from the social media company in May, toldCBS‘s Scott Pelley during a “60 Minutes” interview that the tech giant took some steps to limit misinformation ahead of the 2020 election because it understood that then-President Donald Trump’s incessant lies about voter fraud posed a serious threat. Many of the safety measures that Facebook implemented, however, were temporary, she added.
“As soon as the election was over,” Haugen said, “they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”
Facebook officials claim that some of the anti-misinformation systems remained in place, but in the interregnum between Election Day and President Joe Biden’s inauguration, far-right extremists used the social networking site to organize the deadly January 6 coup attempt—something acknowledged by an internal task force’s report on Facebook’s failure to neutralize “Stop the Steal” activity on its platforms.
There is, according to Haugen, a simple explanation for why executives at the company refuse to do more to mitigate harmful social media behavior: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she said.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen told Pelley. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
Haugen—who first revealed her identity on Sunday after having secretly shared internal documents with federal regulators, reported on in the Wall Street Journal‘s series, “The Facebook Files”—also said the corporation is lying to the public about how effective it is at curbing hate speech and disinformation, arguing that “Facebook has demonstrated it cannot operate independently.”
In the wake of Haugen’s bombshell interview, social media experts condemned Facebook for prioritizing “profits above all else.”
“Facebook runs on a hate-and-lie-for-profit business model that amplifies all sorts of toxicity on its platforms,” Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press, said Monday in a statement. “Thanks to this brave whistleblower, we now have further proof that Facebook’s executives—all the way up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg—routinely chose profits over public safety.”
González, co-founder of Ya Basta Facebook and the Change the Terms coalition, added that Facebook executives “designed the company’s algorithms to put engagement, growth, and profits above all else, even allowing lies about the 2020 election results to spread to millions in advance of the white-nationalist assault on the U.S. Capitol.”
Longtime critics of Facebook argued that the “new revelations” about the company demand immediate federal intervention.
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a coalition of civil rights leaders and academics, asked in a statement released after Haugen’s interview aired. “The system is blinking red, and without real, meaningful, independent, and robust oversight and investigation of Facebook, more lives will be lost.”
“The goal,” added the group, “is no longer to save Facebook—Facebook is beyond hope. The goal now is to save democracy.”
Free Press summarized the Journal‘s key findings on Facebook, which we now know stem from internal documents provided by Haugen:
Facebook exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules; Instagram is harmful to millions of young users; Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change promotes objectionable or harmful content; Facebook’s tools were used to sow doubt about Covid-19 vaccines; and globally, Facebook is used to incite violence against ethnic minorities and facilitat[e] action against political dissent.
Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, praised Haugen for exposing Facebook’s “amplification and use of hate to keep users on the platform engaged.”
Facebook has “weaponized… data in harmful ways against users,” Mitchell continued, and failed to consider the negative effects of “hate-filled rhetoric” even after the Myanmar military used Facebook to launch a genocide in 2018.
González argued that Haugen “turned evidence of this gross negligence over to the government at great personal risk, and now we need the government to respond with decisive action to hold the company responsible for protecting public safety.”
“The government must demand full transparency on how Facebook collects, processes, and shares our data, and enact civil rights and privacy policies to protect the public from Facebook’s toxic business model,” said González.
“Facebook must also act swiftly to remedy the harms it is continuing to inflict on the public at large,” she added. “It must end special protections for powerful politicians, ban white supremacists and dangerous conspiracy theorists, and institute wholesale changes to strengthen content moderation in English and other languages—and we need this all now.”
According to Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist at The Guardian and co-founder of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, “Facebook is a rogue state, lying to regulators, investors, and its own oversight board.”
“What we are seeing today is a market failure with profound, devastating global consequences,” she said. “Executives and board members must be held to account. There is evidence to suggest that their behavior was not just immoral but also criminal.”
Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argued that “even as we feel outrage toward Mr. Zuckerberg and his corporation, the cause of this crisis is not a single company, not even one as powerful as Facebook.”
“The cause is the economic institution of surveillance capitalism,” said Zuboff. “The economic logic of these systems, the data operations that feed them, and the markets that support them are not limited to Facebook.”
“The imperatives of surveillance economics determine the engineering of these operations—their products, objectives, and financial incentives—along with those of the other tech empires, their extensive ecosystems, and thousands of companies in diverse sectors far from Silicon Valley,” she continued. “The damage already done is intolerable. The damage that most certainly lies ahead is unthinkable.”
Zuboff added that the only “durable solution to this crisis” is to “undertake the work of interrupting and outlawing the dangerous operations of surveillance capitalism and its predictable social harms that assault human autonomy, splinter society, and undermine democracy.”
Haugen is scheduled to testify on Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on “Protecting Kids Online.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Frances Haugen said the company’s leaders know how to make their platforms safer, “but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.
Two days after a bombshell “60 Minutes” interview in which she accused Facebook of knowingly failing to stop the spread of dangerous lies andhateful content, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified Tuesday before U.S. senators, imploring Congress to hold the company and its CEO accountable for the many harms they cause.
Haugen—a former Facebook product manager—told the senators she went to work at the social media giant because she believed in its “potential to bring out the best in us.”
“But I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy,” she said during her opening testimony. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”
“The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages,” she continued. “I came forward because I believe that every human being deserves the dignity of truth.”
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen: "I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved its conflicts in favor of its own profits."
“I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety,” Haugen added. “Facebook consistently resolved its conflicts in favor of its own profits.”
“In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people,” she said.
Addressing Monday’s worldwide Facebook outage, Haugen said that “for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”
“It also means that millions of small businesses weren’t able to reach potential customers, and countless photos of new babies weren’t joyously celebrated by family and friends around the world,” she added. “I believe in the potential of Facebook. We can have social media we enjoy that connects us without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger, and sowing ethnic violence around the world. We can do better.”
Doing better will require Congress to act, because Facebook “won’t solve this crisis without your help,” Haugen told the senators, echoing experts and activists who continue to call for breaking up tech giants, banning the surveillance capitalist business model, and protecting rights and democracy online.
She added that “there is nobody currently holding Zuckerberg accountable but himself,” referring to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—chair of the Senate Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security Subcommittee—called on Zuckerberg to testify before the panel.
“Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror today and yet rather than taking responsibility, and showing leadership, Mr. Zuckerberg is going sailing,” he said.
Frances Haugen strongly shakes her head in agreement as Richard Blumenthal says "Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror" and "Zuckerberg, you need to come before this committee." pic.twitter.com/QC0B6zK9tW
“Big Tech now faces a Big Tobacco, jaw-dropping moment of truth. It is documented proof that Facebook knows its products can be addictive and toxic to children,” Blumenthal continued.
“The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation,” he added. “Feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, rejection, and self-hatred will impact this generation for years to come. Our children are the ones who are victims.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINSand republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Former WH Chief Strategist was Knee-Deep in behind-the-scenes action on Jan 6….
Bannon has been very vocal in radical right politics, via his podcast platform the War Room. Alongside the release of the new book exposing what happened behind closed doors with, then-president Trump, “Peril”, Bannon took the opportunity to speak about, and appeared to confirm, details about his meeting with Trump in the now infamous time frame.
Bannon’s activities leading up to the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol has been well-documented, on Jan 5th, he told his listeners that “all hell was going to break loose” and even posted on his Facebook account; “TAKE ACTION, THEY ARE TRYING TO STEAL THE ELECTION”.
Yet the extent to which Bannon was speaking with Trump ahead of the insurrection was not yet well known, until the release of the Woodward and Costa’s new book.
Bannon, the former WH adviser admitted he spoke with Trump ahead of Jan. 6th with the intention to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”
As previously reported by The Rolling Stones, during his latest podcast, Bannon responded about his meeting as follows:
“Yeah, because his legitimacy. Forty-two percent of the American people — 4-2 — think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately. It killed itself. … Just let this go with what this illegitimate regime is doing. It killed itself. We told you from the very beginning. Just expose it. Just expose it. Never back down. Never give up. This thing will implode.”
A bill headed to the governor’s desk aims to curb injuries in warehouse distribution centers run by a broad spectrum of employers and outlaw punishment for bathroom breaks
Yesenia Barrera was just finishing up her 10-hour shift at an Amazon fulfillment center in Rialto, Calif., she recalled, when a manager approached her. She said he was concerned that throughout the day she’d racked up about 60 minutes of “time off task,” Amazon parlance for when someone is not directly working on the assignment at hand or taking too long to complete it. He told her he was writing her up and asked what happened, she said.
“I used the restroom today,” Barrera said she told him.
“How many times did you use it?” she remembered he asked.
“Three times,” she said she responded, thinking about how it took five minutes to walk each way across the warehouse floor to get to the bathroom.
When Barrera returned to Amazon for her next scheduled shift two days later, her badge wouldn’t let her into the building. She later learned she’d been terminated. Barrera has since become an organizer with the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of warehouse workers.
The California Senate passed legislation last week that, if signed by the governor, would prohibit a spectrum of employers, including Amazon, from firing warehouse workers like Barrera for policies such as “time off task.” The bill, AB 701, would be the first law in the country to address productivity quotas and strict algometric metrics used to manage warehouse employees. (Governor Newsom’s office did not reply to a request for comment.)
Under AB 701, employers wouldn’t be able to punish workers for failing to meet quotas when health and safety issues come into play, such as a worker’s need to take bathroom and water breaks. And it would prohibit retaliation against workers who complain. The law would also require companies that run warehouses to report to the government—and their own employees—the quotas and speed metrics they mandate for workers.
“Right now, it’s very secretive,” said Christian Castro, communications director for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, which sponsored the bill. “E-commerce has been growing exponentially, it’s gotten even more popular during the pandemic…. Workers are telling us about an increase in quotas, not even knowing their quotas.”
Amazon spokesperson Rachael Lighty declined to comment on AB 701 and Barrera’s allegations but said in an email, “The health and safety of our employees is our number one priority—and has been since day one,” adding, “We’re committed to giving our employees the resources they need to be successful, creating time for regular breaks and a comfortable pace.”
In opposition to AB 701 is a coalition of about two dozen business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, California Farm Bureau, and California Retailers Association. They say the law could raise costs for companies that run warehouses and effectively drive employers from the state.
AB 701 is “burdensome and needlessly overbroad,” Steve McCarthy, vice president of public policy for the California Retailers Association, wrote in an Aug. 30 letter to all state senators. He said the bill could lead to increased litigation “by establishing potentially open-ended employee access to bathroom facilities which will make employers’ ability to enforce production standards even more complex.”
AB 701 would cover all warehouse distribution centers, such as those run by Walmart, Target, and UPS, but the bill’s supporters say Amazon is the main target. The company, they say, is leading the charge to automate workforces, increase the speed of work, and use surveillance technologies to monitor worker productivity.
Advocates who support the bill say they hope it will cause a ripple effect to other states. They say California’s labor laws have often served as a model for policymakers and worker organizations nationwide.
“Chart Topping” Injury Rates
Amazon is the largest private employer in California, with more than 150,000 employees in the state, and the second largest employer in the U.S. Over the years, several Californian cities have welcomed the influx of warehouses, which they say have brought in thousands of well-paying jobs to regions historically plagued by unemployment.
But it’s been well documented that warehouse work can be dangerous. Several studies point to injury rates that exceed those of other industries.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cites data that shows warehouse workers are injured nearly twice as often as other workers in the private sector. And when employers, like Amazon, add in productivity quotas, those injuries tend to increase, other studies show. A December 2019 report by the Athena coalition looked at data and internal documents that Amazon provided to OSHA and found the injury rate at the company’s warehouses was nearly three times the combined rate of all other private employers that submitted data to OSHA.
“Primed for Pain,” a report by a coalition of four labor unions called the Strategic Organizing Center, found that not only are injury rates higher at Amazon warehouses, but the injuries also tend to be more severe—with a “serious injury rate” nearly 80 percent higher than that of all other employers in the warehousing industry.
“The rate of injuries at Amazon is astronomical…. It’s chart topping by all measures,” said Irene Tung, senior researcher at the workers’ rights group National Employment Law Project, who co-wrote a report about injury and churn rate at Amazon’s California warehouses. “I don’t think people understand just how different Amazon is as an employer and how they’re ushering in this new paradigm.”
When asked about injury rates at Amazon’s warehouses, spokesperson Lighty said the company has more than 6,200 “safety professionals” throughout its facilities. “We also invest billions of dollars in new operations safety measures, technologies and other innovative solutions that protect our employees, work closely with health and safety experts and scientists, conduct thousands of safety inspections each day in our buildings, and have made hundreds of changes as a result of employee feedback on how we can improve their well-being at work,” she said.
Lighty added that the data on musculoskeletal injuries, such as sprains, strained muscles, and torn ligaments, at Amazon’s warehouses “is skewed.” She said that’s because the company’s workforce has many people in the 18 to 24 age range, which she said is more likely than other age groups to claim work-related musculoskeletal injuries.
In April, Amazon’s executive chairman and former CEO Jeff Bezos called the company “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”
Along with injuries, Amazon has also been accused of not allowing workers enough time for bathroom breaks. In a 2020 letter to Bezos, a group of 15 U.S. senators wrote, “Pressure to meet their quotas is so great that workers report urinating in plastic bottles on the warehouse floor.” Amazon responded, saying workers are “allowed and encouraged to take breaks as needed.”
Last December, Amazon settled a class-action lawsuit in California brought by 27 warehouse workers who said the company violated the state’s labor codes by denying them adequate bathroom and rest breaks. Amazon’s “production clock does not stop when employees need to use the restroom facilities,” the lawsuit said, which meant workers “have been forced to forego bathroom breaks completely, simply out of fear of termination.”
Lighty declined to comment on the lawsuit or settlement.
While California law mandates that employers must allow breaks, warehouses with production quotas can make it difficult for workers to use the bathroom while still being able to meet their tasks. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, AB 701’s author, said the bill aims to strengthen state law by creating standards around these quota systems.
“To make next-day delivery possible, corporations like Amazon have forced warehouse employees to work faster, service more customers with more orders in record amounts of time, and risk their own bodies in the process,” Gonzalez said in a statement. “No worker should be forced to sacrifice their basic human needs, or accept such undignified conditions for a paycheck.”
When Barrera was working at Amazon’s Rialto warehouse, one of her jobs was scanning boxes on a conveyor belt.
“The conveyor doesn’t stop,” she said. “Time is against you.”
She remembers at one point, she fell behind and boxes started piling up. She set down her scan gun to move some boxes aside, and it got buried in the pile. She said when she tried to pry it free, she pulled too hard, and it bounced back and smacked her in the eye. She said she went to the onsite clinic, where she was given ibuprofen and told to hold a wet paper towel on her eye. Barrera said she asked to sit down, and after about five minutes, both her manager and the clinic medic said she should be good to go back to work.
“You’re being tracked the moment you clock in,” Barrera said. “Unrealistic quotas are why workers are getting injured.”
Amazon’s Lighty did not respond when asked about the incident.
Protecting Workers vs. Increasing Bureaucracy
AB 701 has two major components: creating more transparency around work quotas and banning policies that negatively affect worker health and safety, including “time off task” policies.
For the transparency piece, employers that run warehouse distribution centers would be compelled to tell government agencies the quotas and speed metrics they require of employees and also disclose that information to workers.
“This policy provides the tools that are needed to keep workers safe in a growing industry plagued with widespread injuries and labor violations,” said Ron Herrera, president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and secretary treasurer of Teamsters Local 396, both of which are sponsors of AB 701.
“This kind of speed-up on workers is breaking their bodies and churning them out,” Shadix said. “It undermines the argument that these are good stable jobs.”
While AB 701 would require transparency from companies around quotas, it would not create specific rules on worker surveillance and metrics.
Several Republican lawmakers in California have opposed AB 701, saying it would lead to more lawsuits, higher prices for consumer goods, and that the bill is part of an organized labor strategy to unionize warehouses.
“This bill is sponsored by union leaders as part of a campaign to tip the scales to coerce employees to unionize,” Sen. Brian Jones said in an email, adding that he doesn’t have confidence in Democratic legislators to run the state efficiently. “So now we’re supposed to trust them to micro-manage private warehouses throughout the state? No thanks.”
Jones is one of 11 senators who voted no on AB 701 (26 voted yes, and three had no vote recorded).
At least four senators, including Jones, received campaign donations of $2,500 from Amazon, according to public records from the California secretary of state. Amazon also made payments of $2,500 and $4,900 to various state assembly members, including to nearly half of those who voted no on the bill in May. The company additionally made several donations to senators and assembly members who voted yes (though not to any authors or co-authors of the bill).
When asked about the donations, Jones’s chief of staff, Craig Wilson, said, “Campaign contributions are irrelevant when it comes to how Senator Jones votes on legislation.”
Amazon has hired at least four lobbying firms in California during this year’s legislative session, according to the public records. For comparison, in 2019 and 2020, it hired just two firms per year. And the company spent more than $425,000 on lobbying in the state from January to June. More recent lobbying expenditures aren’t yet publicly available. Amazon’s Lighty didn’t respond to questions about the company’s lobbying activity.
While Amazon hasn’t publicly commented on AB 701, the coalition of business organizations and its members, including the California Retailers Association and California Chamber of Commerce, have spoken out against the bill.
Initially, the California Chamber of Commerce listed AB 701 on its “job killer” list—a label that often leads to dead bills—but then removed it in July after certain provisions around litigation and regulations were amended. The chamber still opposes the bill, however. When asked for comment, spokesperson Denise Davis referred The Markup to the letter McCarthy sent to state senators on behalf of the business coalition.
This bill “establishes anti-retaliation provisions that will make it more costly and difficult to take job actions against underperforming employees,” McCarthy wrote in the letter. He added that AB 701 could “have a chilling effect on production at distribution centers that will ripple through the rest of the supply chain.”
Amazon is on the California Retailers Association’s board of directors. McCarthy didn’t respond to a request for comment.
If AB 701 is signed by California governor Gavin Newsom, it would be slated to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2022. Newsom faces a recall election on Tuesday, but regardless of the outcome, he will determine the bill’s fate. Should Newsom lose Tuesday’s recall election, he would have 38 days to sign or veto all pending legislation before leaving office, according to California law.
After Steve Bannon urged his followers to take over local-level GOP positions, the plan went viral across far-right media.
One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”
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.
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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.”
This article was originally published by ProPublica via Creative Commons and written by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon
Above: A Climate Change Concept Image: Adobe Stock
More than two dozen advocacy groups launched “extreme weather ads” in five state newspapers on Monday to pressure right-wing Senate Democrats to stop giving taxpayer money to the oil, gas, and coal companies most responsible for the climate emergency.
“It’s time for Congress to stop taking over $15 billion from hardworking Americans and giving it to billionaire fossil fuel CEOs.”
—Anusha Narayanan, Greenpeace
Full page ads—featuring artwork from Hannah Rothstein’s 50 States of Change Collection, which depicts some of the detrimental effects U.S. residents can expect if lawmakers refuse to swiftly enact robust climate mitigation measures—have been placed in The Arizona Republic, The Dover Post, The Billings Gazette, The Union Leader, and The Charleston Gazette-Mail, to mark the beginning of a week of action against fossil fuel subsidies.
Those five publications were chosen because they are the home-state newspapers of Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), Chris Coons (Del.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), and Joe Manchin (W.Va.).
The coalition is targeting the six senators because of their close ties with Big Oil, which were exposed in late June when Greenpeace U.K. and the British Channel 4 Newsteamed up to release secretly recorded videos, wherein ExxonMobil lobbyists admitted that the company deliberately sowed doubt about climate science to protect fossil fuel profits and worked with several GOP lawmakers as well as conservative Democrats to undermine climate legislation.
According to the investigation, Coons, Manchin, Sinema, and Tester, along with Republican Sens. John Barrasso (Wyo.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), John Cornyn (Texas), Steve Daines (Mont.), and Marco Rubio (Fla.), have taken tens of thousands of dollars from Exxon.
Photo Credit / Hannah Rothstein
The 25 groups behind the ad campaign—including Greenpeace USA, Our Revolution, Public Citizen, the Indigenous Environmental Network, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Food & Water Watch, and the Sunrise Movement—noted that the federal government gives more than $15 billion in public funding to fossil fuel corporations every year.
The ad campaign comes just weeks after the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest report, which, in the words of Greenpeace USA climate campaign manager Anusha Narayanan, “showed the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels will kill us all.”
“Everyone saw the video where a Big Oil lobbyist named these six Democratic senators as key to their plan to delay climate action,” Narayanan said Monday in a statement. “Members of Congress like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have the fossil fuel industry on speed dial, while they keep the rest of us on hold. That’s a disaster for the future of the planet and its people.”
“It’s time for Congress to stop taking over $15 billion from hardworking Americans and giving it to billionaire fossil fuel CEOs,” she continued. “Despite what these companies say, subsidies don’t actually lead to jobs and most subsidies go to profits.”
Narayanan added that an amended infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion budget resolution, which Democratic Party leaders hope to pass through the reconciliation process, present a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for Sens. Kelly, Sinema, Coons, Tester, Hassan, and Manchin “to invest in a just transition to renewable energy, racial and economic justice, and working-class communities.”
That lawmakers continue to collaborate with oil, gas, and coal companies despite dire warnings from scientists and glaring real-time evidence that fossil fuel emissions are exacerbating extreme weather events prompted Rothstein to ask: “What is wrong with our politicians?”
“Why do they continue to support Big Oil and coal when it’s clear these industries are causing natural disasters that harm everyday Americans?” Rothstein asked Monday in a statement. “California’s increasingly rampant wildfires, Texas’ unprecedented February 2021 snowstorm, and the current water shortages in Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico are only a few examples of the unshakably clear evidence that we need urgent climate action ASAP.”
“We can lessen, reverse, and prevent many of the issues depicted in 50 States of Change, but we need to act now, starting with an immediate and expedited shift away from burning fossil fuels,” she added. “This can’t be done solely on a consumer level. We need our elected officials on our side.”
In addition to being featured in the ad campaign, Rothstein’s artwork is also being used in an interactive story map, which will “underscore a state-by-state breakdown of current and future state-level impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.” It is set to be published on Greenpeace USA’s website on Wednesday.
“The stench of corruption wafting up from Louis DeJoy’s office is so thick seagulls are flying in from the Jersey Shore and circling overhead.”
A leading government ethics watchdog on Wednesday cheered a federal judge’s ruling ordering the United States Postal Service to hand over documents concerning potential conflicts of interest involving embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates on Tuesday granted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) a full summary judgment (pdf) and orderedthe United States Postal Service (USPS) to give the advocacy group seven documents it requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
USPS claimed the documents were FOIA-exempt. According toLaw & Crime, “Four of the documents concerned a request for a certificate of divestiture from DeJoy and the remaining three concern his recusal from matters where he may have a conflict of interest.”
Over the past seven years, the USPS has reportedly paid approximately $286 million to XPO Logistics, DeJoy’s ex-employer, and has “ramped up its business” with the company since DeJoy’s appointment as postmaster general. After his appointment, DeJoy continued to hold financial interests in XPO totaling between $30 and $75 million. DeJoy also held a significant amount of stock in Amazon, a major USPS competitor.
Earlier this month, Common Dreamsreported on growing calls to fire DeJoy following the revelation by The Washington Post that USPS will pay XPO Logistics $120 million over the next five years. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) responded to the Post report by calling DeJoy a “walking conflict of interest.”
Last Friday, a Postreport that DeJoy had purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of publicly traded bonds from Brookfield Asset Management—where USPS Board of Governors Chair Ron Bloom is a managing partner—fueled further calls for DeJoy’s termination, with Connolly calling Bloom and the postmaster general “bandits” whose “conflicts of interest do nothing but harm the Postal Service and the American people.”
CREW communications director Jordan Libowitz called Bates’ order “a big win not just for CREW, but for transparency advocates everywhere.”
“DeJoy’s decision-making as postmaster general has raised some serious ethical questions—now we should finally get some answers,” Libowitz added.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Monday sent President Joe Biden a letter urging him to sack everyone former President Donald Trump appointed to the USPS board. Pascrell welcomed the Tuesday court order and reiterated his call for Biden to fire Trump appointees and “show DeJoy the door now before it’s too late.”
DeJoy and six of the nine USPS governors, including Bloom, were appointed by Trump; the rest are Biden appointees.
In addition to the alleged conflicts of interest in connection with XPO Logistics and Brookfield Asset Management, CREW, in advocating DeJoy’s ouster, notes that:
DeJoy and his wife, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada, got their jobs after contributing $2 million to Trump’s campaign coffers;
DeJoy is the first person in decades to lead the USPS without any previous experience in the agency;
DeJoy is under federal investigation for allegedly operating a scheme where he asked employees of his former company to make campaign contributions, then arranged for bonus payments to reimburse the employees; and
DeJoy apparently violated federal criminal laws by commanding the USPS to make policy changes at the agency that would depress or delay voting by mail in the 2020 election.
“Bottom line: Louis DeJoy has overseen an attack on the Postal Service and on American democracy itself,” CREW tweeted Wednesday. “The USPS Board of Governors must fire him before it’s too late.”
“The president made a promise to ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters,” said Greenpeace, “and the American people expect him to keep it.”
Climate groups are expressing deep concern following an Interior Department announcement Monday that the Biden administration will resume oil and gas drilling leases on public lands and waters—a practice President Joe Biden vowed to ban during his 2020 run for the White House—in response to a federal court ruling.
“The climate emergency reality we are facing demands immediate action, not acquiescence.”
—Nicole Ghio, Friends of the Earth
While the Biden administration confirmed in its announcement that an appeal has been filed with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in a legal battle with the state of Louisiana—which sued the federal government over the pause in the oil and gas leasing program ordered by Biden earlier this year—the Interior Department said leasing would resume while the process plays out.
“Federal onshore and offshore oil and gas leasing will continue as required by the district court while the government’s appeal is pending,” the DOI stated.
According to Bloomberg, the moves by the administration “mark the beginning of an open-ended analysis of the federal oil, gas and coal leasing programs that could span years—and lead to higher fees as well as new limits on development in sensitive areas.”
While environmental advocacy groups commended the administration for appealing the lower court ruling—handed down by a Trump-appointed U.S. district court judge in June—they also said the threat of resuming the leasing program on federal lands and for offshore drilling cannot be overstated.
“Our planet can’t afford any more new fossil fuel extraction,” said Taylor McKinnon, a senior campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement on Tuesday. “We’re out of time. The world’s existing oil and gas fields will already push warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius if they’re fully developed.”
Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, said in respsonse that with “the climate crisis smacking us in the face at every turn, it’s hard to imagine a worse idea than resuming oil and gas drilling on federal lands. As has been documented in long and excruciating detail, oil and gas drillers have trashed public lands and failed to clean up their mess—while siphoning public resources for a relative pittance.”
As the appeals process plays out, the Biden administration said it will perform a new analysis of the regulatory framework that governs leasing and extraction operations on federal lands as well as hold oil and gas companies to account under existing authorities and guidelines.
“We’re out of time. The world’s existing oil and gas fields will already push warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius if they’re fully developed.”
—Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity
“It’s encouraging that the Biden administration is appealing this wrongful decision,” said Nicole Ghio, senior fossil fuels program manager at Friends of the Earth. “However, the president made a promise to ban all new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters, and the American people expect him to keep it. The climate emergency reality we are facing demands immediate action, not acquiescence.”
Mary Greene, public lands attorney for the National Wildlife Federation, urged the Interior Department to act aggressively but also said that Congress must get off the sidelines on the issue.
“While the Biden administration responds to the court, we urge the Department of Interior to issue its reform initiatives so that the outdated leasing system is modernized for the benefit of our public lands, wildlife, and all Americans,” Greene said. “But administrative actions alone cannot solve this problem. Congress must also swiftly take action to update our hundred-year-old leasing law so that our nation can transition to the clean energy economy that we all need and deserve.”
Given the recent IPCC report which argues that global emissions must be urgently reduced, climate action advocates said the administration cannot be allowed to walk away from its commitment to end oil and gas development on federal lands.
“Last week’s IPCC report outlined the grisly risks that fossil fuels pose to people and the planet,” said Tim Donaghy, senior research specialist with Greenpeace USA. “The International Energy Agency (IEA) has clearly said there can be no new fossil fuel projects if we are to stand any chance at limiting the climate chaos.”
A complete and final end of drilling on U.S. public lands and in offshore waters, said Donaghy, “is an essential part of any effective climate plan.” Along with others in the climate just movement, he said there remain many avenues for Biden “to consider in reforming leasing and we urge him to do everything he can to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”
The FEC’s inspector general has called for the agency to review its policies and internal controls after ProPublica revealed a key employee’s undisclosed ties to Trump.
The inspector general for the Federal Election Commission is calling on the agency to review its ethics policies and internal controls after a ProPublica investigation last year revealed that a senior manager openly supported Donald Trump and maintained a close relationship with a Republican attorney who went on to serve as the 2016 Trump campaign’s top lawyer.
The report by ProPublica raised questions about the impartiality of the FEC official, Debbie Chacona, a civil servant who oversees the unit responsible for keeping unlawful contributions out of U.S. political campaigns. The division’s staffers are supposed to adhere to a strict ethics code and forgo any public partisan activities because such actions could imply preferential treatment for a candidate or party and jeopardize the commission’s credibility.
In its findings, the inspector general said Chacona, head of the FEC’s Reports Analysis Division, or RAD, did not improperly intervene in a review of the Trump inaugural committee’s fundraising and acted “consistent with relevant law and policy” by allowing career analysts to handle the filings.
But the inspector general said “it is important to address the ethical principle that federal employees should avoid even the appearance of impropriety.” It added that the FEC’s “unique mission raises heightened concerns when allegations of personal or political bias are raised against FEC senior personnel that could undermine the public’s confidence in the agency” and recommended the commission “evaluate the current agency policies on ethical behavior and update them, as may be appropriate.”
Chacona displayed her support for Trump in Facebook posts, including one in which she posed with her family around a “Make America Great Again” sign at Trump’s January 2017 inaugural. Separately, emails obtained by ProPublica showed that she also consulted regularly on matters personal and professional with the Republican lawyer, Donald McGahn, when he was an FEC commissioner from 2008 to September 2013.
After Trump’s election, the fundraising practices of his inaugural committee prompted complaints that the FEC failed to properly examine contributions. As head of RAD, Chacona signed off on amended filings by the committee intended to address some of those complaints even though the revised reports continued to list problematic donations, including ones from donors whose addresses didn’t exist in public records.
The 300-employee FEC is an independent regulatory agency that was created by Congress to enforce campaign finance law. It is headed by six presidentially appointed commissioners, four of whom must vote together for the agency to take any official action, a requirement that was meant to bolster nonpartisan compromise but has resulted in chronic gridlock.
The inspector general also took issue with the way the FEC regulates presidential inaugural committees, which are nonprofit entities separate from campaign committees. Trump’s inaugural committee raised a record-breaking $107 million from more than 1,000 contributors. Its initial disclosure report was 510 pages.
The inspector general found that unlike with campaign committees, FEC policy confers “broad, subjective discretion to the RAD senior manager to determine what potential violations of law warrant further inquiry” when it comes to inaugural committees. It called such a standard “ill-defined and subjective,” cautioning that it could create “a reasonable likelihood of inconsistent results and arbitrary or capricious application (in fact or appearance).”
The inspector general also said that unlike political committees, which file their reports to the FEC electronically, inaugural committee disclosure reports are filed on paper to the commission and then manually reviewed by agency staffers — a system the inspector general said was “antiquated and lacks adequate internal controls.”
Asked what the agency has done to address the appearance of a conflict of interest at RAD and whether the agency planned on adopting any of the inspector general recommendations, an FEC spokesperson declined to comment.
McGahn, who was appointed White House counsel after serving as the Trump campaign’s top lawyer, now heads the government regulations group at the law firm Jones Day. He did not respond to messages seeking comment; in a response for the earlier ProPublica story, he said he doesn’t comment on “nonsense.” Chacona did not respond to a message seeking comment. A spokesperson for Trump’s inaugural committee didn’t return a message seeking comment.
The inspector general said that it interviewed FEC lawyers and RAD staffers, and that it obtained and reviewed agency records to conduct its inquiry. Commissioners were notified of the investigators’ findings at the end of July.
With its unprecedented haul and its questionable outlays, Trump’s inaugural committee drew swift attention from journalists and regulators. The Washington, D.C., attorney general has sued the committee, accusing it of enriching the Trump family business by spending lavishly at Trump-owned properties, claims the committee has denied in court papers. Separately, federal prosecutors subpoenaed the committee’s donor records as part of an inquiry into illegal contributions made by foreign nationals.
Both inaugural and political committees are prohibited from accepting contributions from foreign nationals. But Trump’s inaugural committee included in its disclosure reports donations from contributors outside the U.S., and RAD relied on the word of the committee that the donors were indeed U.S. citizens, the inspector general report found. Investigators took issue with that practice. They noted that RAD’s policy of accepting a committee’s “self-certification” wasn’t memorialized in any policy, and they recommended that the division set a threshold when such a contribution would trigger further inquiry to independently verify the source of the money.
Fred Wertheimer, whose advocacy group Democracy 21 helped file a 2017 FEC complaint against Trump’s inaugural committee, which the agency’s general counsel later dismissed, said the head of RAD should have recused herself from overseeing the committee’s filings.
“In my view Ms. Chacona had a clear appearance of conflict and never should’ve gone anywhere near the inaugural committee’s report,” said Wertheimer, who was derided by Chacona and McGahn in the email exchanges obtained by ProPublica.
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“This story was originally published by ProPublica.”
The shoreline communities of Ocean County, New Jersey, are a summertime getaway for throngs of urbanites, lined with vacation homes and ice cream parlors. Not exactly pastoral — which is odd, considering dozens of Paycheck Protection Program loans to supposed farms that flowed into the beach towns last year.
As the first round of the federal government’s relief program for small businesses wound down last summer, “Ritter Wheat Club” and “Deely Nuts,” ostensibly a wheat farm and a tree nut farm, each got $20,833, the maximum amount available for sole proprietorships. “Tomato Cramber,” up the coast in Brielle, got $12,739, while “Seaweed Bleiman” in Manahawkin got $19,957.
None of these entities exist in New Jersey’s business records, and the owners of the homes at which they are purportedly located expressed surprise when contacted by ProPublica. One entity categorized as a cattle ranch, “Beefy King,” was registered in PPP records to the home address of Joe Mancini, the mayor of Long Beach Township.
“There’s no farming here: We’re a sandbar, for Christ’s sake,” said Mancini, reached by telephone. Mancini said that he had no cows at his home, just three dogs.
All of these loans to nonexistent businesses came through Kabbage, an online lending platform that processed nearly 300,000 PPP loans before the first round of funds ran out in August 2020, second only to Bank of America. In total, ProPublica found 378 small loans totaling $7 million to fake business entities, all of which were structured as single-person operations and received close to the largest loan for which such micro-businesses were eligible. The overwhelming majority of them are categorized as farms, even in the unlikeliest of locales, from potato fields in Palm Beach to orange groves in Minnesota.
The Kabbage pattern is only one slice of a sprawling fraud problem that has suffused the Paycheck Protection Program from its creation in March 2020 as an attempt to keep small businesses on life support while they were forced to shut down. With speed as its strongest imperative, the effort run by the federal Small Business Administration initially lacked even the most basic safeguards to prevent opportunists from submitting fabricated documentation, government watchdogs have said.
While that may have allowed millions of businesses to keep their doors open, it has also required a massive cleanup operation on the backend. The SBA’s inspector general estimated in January that the agency approved loans for 55,000 potentially ineligible businesses, and that 43,000 obtained more money than their reported payrolls would justify. The Department of Justice, relying on special agents from across the government to investigate, has brought charges against hundreds of individuals accused of gaming pandemic response programs.
Drawn by generous fees for each loan processed, Kabbage was among a band of online lenders that joined enthusiastically in originating loans through their automated platforms. That helped millions of borrowers who’d been turned down by traditional banks, but it also created more opportunities for cheating. ProPublica examined SBA loans processed by several of the most prolific online lenders and found that Kabbage appears to have originated the most loans to businesses that don’t appear to exist and the only concentration of loans to phantom farms.
In some cases, these problems would’ve been easy to spot with just a little more upfront diligence — which the program’s structure did not encourage.
“Pushing this through financial institutions created some pretty bad incentives,” said Naftali Harris, the CEO of Sentilink, which helps lenders detect potential identity theft. “This is definitely a case where companies that decided they wanted to be more careful in terms of giving out loans were penalized for doing so.”
Presented with ProPublica’s findings, SBA inspector general spokeswoman Farrah Saint-Surin said that her office had hundreds of investigations underway, but that she did “not have any information to share or available for public reporting at this time.” Reuters reported that federal investigators were probing whether Kabbage and other fintech lenders miscalculated PPP loan amounts, and the DOJ declined to confirm or deny the existence of any investigation to ProPublica.
Kabbage, which was acquired by American Express last fall, did not have an explanation for ProPublica’s specific findings, but it said it adhered to required fraud protocols. “At any point in the loan process, if fraudulent activity was suspected or confirmed, it was reported to FinCEN, the SBA’s Office of the Inspector General and other federal investigators, with Kabbage providing its full cooperation,” spokesman Paul Bernardini said in an emailed statement.
As soon as the pandemic swept across America, Kabbage was in trouble.
The online lending platform had launched in 2009 as part of a generation of financial technology companies known as “non-banks,” “alternative lenders” or simply “fintechs” that act as an intermediary between investors and small businesses that might not have relationships with traditional banks. Based in Atlanta, it had become a buzzy standout in the city’s tech scene, offering employees Silicon Valley perks like free catered lunches and beer on tap. It advertised its mission as helping small businesses “acquire funds they need for their big breaks,” as a recruiting video parody of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” put it in 2016.
The basic innovation behind the burgeoning fintech industry is automating underwriting and incorporating more data sources into risk evaluation, using statistical models to determine whether an applicant will repay a loan. That lower barrier to credit comes with a price: Kabbage would lend to borrowers with thin or checkered credit histories, in exchange for steep fees. The original partner for most of its loans, Celtic Bank, is based in Utah, which has no cap on interest rate, allowing Kabbage to charge more in states with stricter regulations.
With backing from the powerhouse venture capital firm SoftBank, Kabbage had been planning an IPO. Its model foundered, however, when Kabbage’s largest customer base — small businesses like coffee shops, hair salons and yoga studios — was forced to shut down last March. Kabbage stopped writing loans, even for businesses that weren’t harmed by the pandemic. Days later, it furloughed more than half of its nearly 600-person staff and faced an uncertain future.
The Paycheck Protection Program, which was signed into law as part of the CARES Act on March 27, 2020, with an initial $349 billion in funding, was a lifeline not just to small businesses, but fintechs as well. Lenders would get a fee of 5% on loans worth less than $350,000, which would account for the vast majority of transactions. The loans were government guaranteed, and processors bore almost no liability, as long as they made sure that applications were complete.
At first, encouraged by the Treasury Department, traditional banks prioritized their own customers — an efficient way to process applications with little fraud risk, since the borrowers’ information was already on file. But that left millions of the smallest businesses, including independent contractors, out to dry. They turned instead to a collection of online lenders that have sprung up offering short-term loans to businesses: Kabbage, Lendio, Bluevine, FundBox, Square Capital and others would process applications automatically, with little human review required.
For the platforms, this was also easy money. In the first funding round that ran out last August, Kabbage completed 297,587 loans totaling $7 billion. It received 5% of each loan it made directly and an undisclosed cut of the proceeds for those it processed for banks; its total revenue was likely in the hundreds of millions of dollars. A lawsuit filed by a South Carolina accounting firm alleges that Kabbage was among several lenders that refused to pay fees to agents who helped put together applications, even though the CARES Act had said they could charge up to 1% of the smaller loans (a provision that was later reversed). For Kabbage, that revenue kept the company alive while it sought a buyer.
“For all of these guys, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. If you could do the minimum amount of due diligence required, you could fill up the pipeline with these applications,” said a former Kabbage executive, one of four former employees interviewed by ProPublica. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation at their current jobs or from industry giant American Express.
To handle the volume, Kabbage brought back laid-off workers starting at $15 an hour. When that failed to attract enough people, they increased the hourly rate to $35, and then $40, and awarded gift cards for reaching certain benchmarks, according to a former employee with visibility into the loan processing. “At a certain point, they were like, ‘Yes, get more applications out and you’ll get this reward if you do,’” the former employee said. (Bernardini said the company did not offer incentive compensation.)
In a report on its PPP participation through last August, Kabbage boasted that 75% of all approved applications were processed without human review. For every 790 employees at major U.S. banks, the report said, Kabbage had one. That’s in part because traditional banks, which also take deposits, are much more heavily regulated than fintech institutions that just process loans. To participate in the PPP, fintechs had to quickly set up systems that could comply with anti-money laundering laws. The human review that did happen, according to two people involved in it, was perfunctory.
“They weren’t saying, ‘Is this legitimate?’ They were just saying, ‘Are all the fields filled out?’” said another former employee. As acquisition talks proceeded, the employee noted, Kabbage managers who held the most company stock had a built-in incentive to process as many loans as possible. “If there’s anything suspicious, you can pass it along to account review, but account review was full of people who stood to make a lot of money from the acquisition.”
One situation in which Kabbage approved a suspicious loan became public in a Florida lawsuit filed by a woman, Latoya Clark, who received more than $1 million in PPP loans to three businesses. When the funds were deposited into accounts at JPMorgan Chase, the bank discovered that Clark’s businesses hadn’t been incorporated before the PPP program’s cutoff and froze the accounts. Clark sued Chase, and Chase then filed a counterclaim against the borrower and Kabbage, which had originated the loan despite its questionable documentation. In its response, Kabbage said it had not yet completed its investigation of the incident.
Although the Justice Department rarely names lenders that processed fraudulent PPP applications, Kabbage has been named at least twice. One case involved two loans worth $1.8 million to businesses that submitted forged information, and the other involved a business that had inflated its payroll numbers and submitted a similar application to U.S. Bank, which flagged authorities. Kabbage had simply approved the $940,000 loan. American Express’ Bernardini declined to comment further on pending litigation.
Shortly after the application period for PPP’s first round closed on Aug. 8, American Express announced the Kabbage purchase. But the transaction included none of Kabbage’s loan portfolios, either from the PPP or its pre-pandemic conventional loans. The PPP loans had either been sold to SBA-approved banks or bought by the Federal Reserve. Bernardini wouldn’t say which banks now own the loans, however, and said that no potentially fraudulent loans had been pledged to the Fed.
In April, an Ocean County, New Jersey, resident contacted ProPublica after seeing his name attached to a Kabbage loan for a nonexistent “melon farm.” To see whether it was an isolated incident, ProPublica took basic information the government released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by ProPublica and others and compared it with state business entity registries. Although registries don’t pick up all sole proprietorships and independent contractors, the absence of a name is an indication that the business might not exist.
As it turned out, Kabbage had made more than 60 loans in New Jersey to unlisted businesses. Fake farms also showed up repeatedly in the SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program, according to reports from localnewsoutlets.
A common tie became apparent when the resident of the home to which one nonexistent business was registered said that he was a client of the certified public accountants at Ciccone, Koseff & Company. In March 2020, the firm notified its clients of what it called an “ultimately unsuccessful ransomware attack” that occurred the previous month. According to information filed with Maine’s attorney general, the attackers acquired Social Security numbers and financial information.
Several other clients of the accounting firm, including Mancini, the Long Beach mayor, also had loans registered to their addresses. Reached by phone, firm founder Ray Ciccone declined to comment.
But that CPA’s data breach didn’t account for all of the suspicious loans ProPublica found across the country. Searches for PPP applicants that didn’t show up in state registration records yielded hundreds in 28 more states, with dense clusters in Florida, Nebraska and Virginia. Other lenders had nonexistent businesses as well, but fake farms only showed up in Kabbage loans. Most followed a distinctive naming convention, with part of the name of a resident or former resident of the home to which the business is registered, plus a random agricultural term.
Some of the fake loans listed addresses of people who’d also legitimately applied for their businesses. Hartington, Nebraska, anesthesiologist Bruce Reifenrath received a PPP loan for his practice in nearby Yankton, South Dakota. That’s why the idea of one being approved for a “potato farm” was so strange. “We did a PPP loan last spring and it’s pretty extensive, the documentation,” Reifenrath said.
Reifenrath was part of a cluster of dubious Kabbage loans in Hartington that also included the home of J. Scott Schrempp, the president of the Bank of Hartington, who confirmed that he did not own a strawberry farm. Schrempp said he had noticed the fake loan, and reported it to the SBA.
The SBA data only reflects approved applications received from lenders, some of which are then caught and not funded. The SBA also periodically updates its dataset to remove loans canceled by lenders. But none of the suspicious loans pulled by ProPublica show undisbursed funds, and they all have remained in the dataset for more than eight months.
One possible mechanism for the invented businesses is a technique known as synthetic identity theft, in which a criminal obtains pieces of personally identifiable information — such as a home address, a Social Security number and a birthdate — and combines it with fake information to build a credit profile. The associated bank account then routes to the fraudster, not the owner of the original information.
None of the residents of the phony farms ProPublica contacted were getting notices that they needed to repay the loans they didn’t apply for, because they didn’t get any money. But that doesn’t mean they’re not at risk, according to James Lee, chief operating officer at the Identity Theft Resource Center.
“Just having an address linked to your name on a fraudulent loan can impact your credit,” Lee said. It can also pose problems for pre-employment background checks, insurance applications or new identification documents like passports and driver’s licenses.
Meanwhile, if not corrected, the fabricated identities will stay in circulation and become better at fooling other financial institutions. “Those records get built into the credit and authentication systems used by government and commercial entities,” Lee said. “Each next time they are used and authenticated, the more ‘real’ they become. That’s what makes synthetic identity fraud so insidious.”
This, however, is largely not Kabbage’s problem anymore.
After its huge blitz of PPP loans last summer, Kabbage had hundreds of thousands of borrowers whose loans would need to be serviced until they were closed out. The loans could either be forgiven, if the borrower demonstrated that they spent most of the money on payroll, or paid back with interest. But American Express didn’t acquire the part of Kabbage’s business that owned those loans. Instead, a separate entity called K Servicing would handle loan forgiveness and take applications for a second PPP draw that Congress funded in December. The servicer is led by former Kabbage employees and its website looks very similar to Kabbage’s, but American Express says it has no affiliation.
If Kabbage was understaffed for the volume of PPP loans it took on before the acquisition, the situation has apparently worsened since then. Reddit, Yelp, Consumer Affairs, Trustpilot, Facebook and Better Business Bureau threads are replete with complaints from customers whose applications were denied or who received no communication from the company. When the SBA changed the rules in February to make the program more generous to independent contractors, K Servicing couldn’t incorporate the new forms into its processing system. So it told all new applicants to apply through another company, SmartBiz, which had operated as a mostly online processor of SBA loans even before the pandemic.
K Servicing is run by Kabbage’s former head of program management, Laquisha Milner, who also runs her own consulting firm. “Due to extenuating circumstances beyond our control, currently, our processing function is delayed,” Milner emailed in response to detailed questions from ProPublica. “We are relentlessly exploring all available options to ensure our existing customers are able to maximize their loan forgiveness.”
Jennifer Dienst is a freelance travel and events writer who received her first-draw loan from Kabbage and wants to apply for forgiveness before her window for doing so closes in the fall, but she has been stymied by K Servicing’s failure to make the forms available. “Please be patient with us as we prepare for the new forms,” a message on the loan portal reads.
Meanwhile, Dienst’s account has started accruing interest, which Milner said will not be charged if the loan is forgiven. But it’s making Dienst nervous.
“It’s always the same response from K Servicing — we’re updating our forgiveness forms and they’ll be made available soon,” Dienst said. “They’ve been saying that for months.”
