Scary portrait..

A scary portrait of life inside Trump's White House

Opinion by Frida Ghitis

The indelible image that emerges from the latest tell-all book about the Trump White House is of a President plagued by insecurities and unmoored from morality. We piece it together from the eye-popping anecdotes revealed in advance excerpts, provided to the media, of "I'll Take Your Questions Now," the forthcoming memoir by Trump's former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham.

The sketches of life with Trump and his family that Grisham alleges are unquestionably titillating: her claims about the former president's private interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin; his concern about his masculine, shall we say, proportions; his puerile attitude toward women.

Then there are the allegations of pretension and power-grabbing by his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner -- advisers to Trump -- along with behind-the-scenes looks at key moments in White House life. All in all, an amusing retrospective of a bizarre presidency.

But Grisham's stories -- and those recounted in a slew of recent books by and about people with front-row seats to Trump's presidency -- are much more than that. They carry enormous weight today as we see Trump and his acolytes laying the groundwork to try to capture the presidency in 2024, apparently at any cost. Viewed in this context, they are dark portents.

When Grisham describes Trump's "terrifying" rage episodes, one wonders what could happen in another Trump administration, with an even more emboldened president -- one who was so frightening to those who served under him, that the country's top military man, General Mark Milley and the speaker of the House worried he might strike China. (In a forthcoming book by Susan Glasser, Milley is also depicted fearing Trump would provoke Iran to war.)

Grisham is not nearly as well-known as Trump's other press secretaries because, incredibly, she didn't hold a single press conference, arguably her principal function in the job. (The book's title, presumably, is deliberately ironic.)

And yet, she spent more time than the other three working with the administration -- she joined the campaign in 2015 and resigned after the January 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters -- so she accumulated a trove of astounding stories surely enraging the former president. ("Stephanie didn't have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning," he said in a statement Tuesday.)

She offers glimpses into one of the lingering mysteries of Trump's presidency, his curiously deferential approach to Putin. Despite Trump's relentless praise, she says, Putin was cold to Trump when they met in Osaka, Japan, for a 2019 G-20 meeting. So, she alleges, Trump kept trying to impress him.

According to Grisham's account, as the media prepared to enter the meeting room, Trump -- who declared it "a great honor to be with President Putin," even though US intelligence was convinced Russia had been systematically attacking US elections to undermine democracy -- leaned over and told Putin, "I'm going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it's for the cameras...you understand."

What's interesting is what happened later. Click here to refresh your memory. Reporters walked in and asked Trump if he was going to warn Putin to keep his hands off the upcoming election. Trump turned to Putin and said, "Don't meddle in the election, please." When Putin's translator told him what Trump said, the Russian president laughed out loud.

Grisham writes that Fiona Hill, Trump's Russia adviser, speculated to her that Putin had brought along a remarkably attractive woman as his translator to distract the president.

Perhaps Putin and Hill knew about Trump's immaturity when it comes to women. In Grisham's telling, the former president comes across as either a sex-hungry adolescent or a creepy, insecure old man.

When Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who says she had an affair with Trump (which he denies), wrote in her own tell-all book that the president's penis was "smaller than average" and shaped like a mushroom character in Mario Kart, Grisham says Trump called her from Air Force One to deny this.

Indeed, judging by the allegations in the excerpts, Trump's was inordinately interested in his manliness and with sexual matters. Grisham writes that the former president asked her boyfriend if she was good in bed. And, in more disturbing behavior alleged of a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women and was caught on tape boasting about grabbing women's genitals (all of which he denies), Grisham wrote that Trump had his eye on a young press aide, and that he invited her to his Air Force One cabin, allegedly explaining, she wrote, "so he could look at her [behind]."

Beyond the sophomoric, Grisham says Trump instilled a culture of lies and deceit. "Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as if it were in the air conditioning system."

She writes that he instructed her to "just deny" the accusations by E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of raping her. "That's what you do in every situation," Grisham says he told her. "'Right, Stephanie? You just deny it.'"

And indeed, Trump's press secretaries delivered falsehoods to the press repeatedly.

Also startling are some of Grisham's Jared and Ivanka stories. According to the Washington Post, "Grisham writes that Ivanka and Jared tried to push their way into meeting Queen Elizabeth II alongside the President and first lady, a wild breach of protocol on a state visit, but were thwarted when they couldn't fit into the helicopter." Recounted Grisham: "I finally figured out what was going on. Jared and Ivanka thought they were the royal family of the United States."

Ivanka Trump frequently tried to go into meetings where she didn't belong, the book alleges. (The entire world got to see that often enough.) And Jared steadily accumulated power as Trump disposed of chiefs of staff and other key staff as one would expired "bottles of milk." White House staffers, Grisham writes, dubbed the two "the Princess" and "the Slim Reaper."

Not surprisingly, Trump denies the book's claims. Also unsurprisingly, he does it in sexist, childish, defamatory terms, claiming Grisham had "big problems," and is acting from an emotional reaction to a breakup.

In a statement provided to CNN, Trump said, "Too bad that sleaze bag publishers continue to report this very boring garbage. We and the MAGA movement are totally used to it. And someday in the not too distant future we will have our voice back and be treated fairly by the press."

Despite the shock value of the stories Grisham tells, they match closely with revelations from other recent publications. (Has any presidency been followed by such an avalanche of unflattering books and disclosures from administration insiders?)

The mounting evidence is a reminder to American voters about what the country just survived and what still threatens it: a man beset with insecurities and unrestrained by principles, an admirer of dictators, still assaulting the nation's democracy, and aiming to regain power.

Manufacturing industry is in trouble....

It's official. China's manufacturing industry is in trouble

By Jill Disis

Factories in China are struggling at a time when the world's second largest economy has to contend with yet another concern: a growing power supply crunch.

A government survey of manufacturing activity released Thursday fell to 49.6 in September, down from 50.1 in August. Any reading below 50 indicates contraction — and in this case, it was the first time the official survey showed activity shrinking since the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Factories are getting dinged by the soaring cost of energy, according to China's National Bureau of Statistics, which added Thursday that high-energy businesses have not been prospering.

"The big picture is that industry was coming off the boil even prior to the latest power shortages," wrote Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics, in a Thursday research note.

A boom in construction and manufacturing drove much of China's economic recovery this year, and continues to play a vital role in growth.

But that work requires tons of power and thus massive amounts of coal. Power shortages began to bite in June but have worsened since then as coal prices have soared and China's provinces have tried to meet Beijing's targets to reduce carbon emissions.

The worsening power crunch has triggered blackouts for households and forced factories to cut production — a threat to the country's vast economy that could place even more strain on global supply chains.

Companies in the country's industrial heartlands have been told to limit their energy consumption in order to reduce demand for power, according to state media. The problem prompted China's State Grid Corporation to say this week that it would "go all out to fight the tough battle of power supply," making every effort to secure residential consumption.

Evans-Pritchard noted that the latest surveys took place before most of the impact from the latest power shortages was felt.

"Since then, power shortages have intensified," he added, pointing out that media reports suggest factories in more than 20 provinces have had to scale back production.

Thursday's data wasn't all bad. A private survey of manufacturing activity, the Caixin Purchasing Managers' Index, rose from 49.2 to 50, indicating stable levels of activity in September compared to a decline in August.

And an official index of non-manufacturing business activity rose to 53.2 from August's 47.5, a sign that the services sector is recovering. Flagging consumer demand has been a concern in China this year.

But the overall economic picture is troubling. Analysts at Nomura and Goldman Sachs trimmed their forecasts for Chinese growth in 2021 in recent days over the power shortage problems. The Goldman analysts noted this week that there's "considerable uncertainty" headed into the final quarter of the year, given that the Chinese economy already faces risks because of the debt crisis at embattled conglomerate Evergrande.

"There is still some scope for a further recovery in services activity as disruptions from the pandemic ease," Evans-Pritchard wrote. "But industry looks set for further weakness."

Telescopes....

How telescopes make the universe self-aware

Telescopes are time machines. Someday, they could take us to a time before starlight.

By Brian Resnick

A telescope is like a time machine. When astronomers peer out into the vast distances of space, they’re also looking back in time. That’s because faraway light takes a long time to reach us. When light from distant galaxies enters our telescopes, it’s like a fossil of a time long gone.

Just as scientists study fossils on Earth to understand bygone eras, scientists can chart the evolution of the cosmos by looking at starlight of various ages — but there’s a limit to how far back in time we can see.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which is orbiting the Earth right now, can see 13.3 billion years back in time. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be able to peer even farther back in time than the Hubble after it is launched in December.

“We are looking for the first light that turned on at the very beginning of cosmic time,” says Caitlin Casey, a UT Austin astronomer who has been approved to use the Webb to look for this light.

This is an epic quest. Humans have never before had the technology to see this first light. It will teach us a lot about how our universe formed, and why it looks the way it does today.

But even this first starlight does not represent the beginning of time. The Big Bang occurred hundreds of millions of years before starlight. For most of that time, the universe was shrouded in darkness. And when there’s no light, there’s nothing for existing telescopes to observe.

Yet astronomers tell me that one day, new and innovative telescopes may be able to see deeper into that darkness — to break through the barriers that even the mighty Webb Space Telescope won’t be able to see through. They dream of putting an observatory in a crater on the far side of the moon, or building one that can potentially detect ripples of warped space coming from the calamity of the Big Bang itself.

When they do, humans may finally be able to piece together a more complete timeline of the history of our universe. And is there any quest more human, or more meaningful, than the drive to understand where we come from?

The space we cannot see

Let’s start with something very obvious. When we look up at the night sky, we can see the stars because the universe is see-through. Light can travel hundreds of millions of years — billions, even — across the transparent void to reach us. Lucky for us, scientists can use this light to study the history of the cosmos, and our place in it.

But there was a time when our universe was not transparent but opaque. In the beginning, there was darkness.

“When the universe was first created, it was so hot after the Big Bang, atoms couldn’t exist,” explains Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics. “It was just a plasma of subatomic particles.”

There’s no light shining through to us from this extreme early universe because light simply cannot travel through a plasma of particles tinier than atoms. Any light that existed then “would just go a very short distance before it would be scattered off some subatomic particle,” Hertz says.

Eventually, several hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, this plasma cooled and a bit of light broke through. Scientists call this light the cosmic microwave background — essentially the afterglow of the Big Bang — and observatories can see it in very dark places like Antarctica, the Atacama Desert, and in Earth’s orbit.

But this light represents only a small snapshot of the early universe, before stars or galaxies. It’s just a nearly uniform dispersal of matter (and dark matter). Somehow, from that starting point, we get everything we see in the universe today.

But soon (cosmically speaking), the universe was dark again. Shortly after the universe cooled, the cosmic dark ages began.

Back in the dark ages, the universe “was full of hydrogen and helium atoms and nothing else,” Hertz says. “And there was nothing to emit light. So it was still dark.”

What’s more, that hydrogen formed “a dense, obscuring fog of primordial gas,” as the National Science Foundation explains. If there was light anywhere, it would be shrouded in the fog.

Only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang was “the darkness of the universe ... pervaded by light for the first time,” Casey says. Astronomers call this period “cosmic dawn,” when the fog lifted and the first starlight shone through the universe. Cosmic dawn, Casey says, permanently transformed the universe “from a dark place to a light place.” That’s the universe we still live in today.

Casey says scientists still don’t precisely know what lifted the fog. They suspect the earliest stars provided the energy needed. That’s what she and others will investigate with the James Webb Space Telescope. “We’re trying to see the first galaxies turn on, for the first time, and emit their light for the first time,” she says.

But the observatory will leave other mysteries untouched: What happened in the dark ages? What happened in the moments after the Big Bang?

This is how, in the future, we might find out.

How special telescopes could see the invisible

How do you see a region of space from which no light emanates? Scientists, surprisingly, have some solutions to this problem.

One is to build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon (that is, the side that never faces the Earth). This type of telescope could help scientists peer into the dark ages, though not necessarily all the way back to the Big Bang.

During the dark ages, astronomers believe, the hydrogen that pervaded the universe emitted very faint radio waves. And that gives astronomers some hope. “You could look back into the dark ages, because those atoms were giving off radio waves,” Hertz says.

It’s as though they were broadcasting a lonesome signal from near the beginning of time, which could make it through the fog.

“If you build the right kind of radio telescope, very large, very sensitive, then you would be able to detect the radio waves and we could study the universe before the first stars and first galaxies,” Hertz says.

But we can’t detect these faint radio waves from Earth. All the radio transmissions that are produced on Earth would drown them out.

This is where the moon comes in — as a kind of giant shield. The moon is “thousands of miles of rock, so the radio waves can’t get through that,” Hertz explains. The far side of the moon is quiet enough for us to listen in.

Right now there are a few concepts for these moon telescopes, from one that nestles the telescope in a crater to ones that involve lunar rovers. There are currently no concrete plans to build and launch one.

Still, even a giant radio telescope on the far side of the moon could only take us so far. It couldn’t take us all the way back to the Big Bang, when the universe was just a dense plasma of particles.

Astoundingly, scientists know of something that could get us much closer to the beginning, to make observations of the very early, hot universe as it existed soon after the Big Bang. But it would take a very different type of telescope — one that can see gravitational waves.

The Webb, the Hubble, and even a future radio telescope on the far side of the moon are all telescopes that capture some form of electromagnetism (which include visible light, infrared light, radio waves, microwaves, ultraviolet, and so on).

Gravitational waves, by contrast, are ripples in the very fabric of spacetime. They form as a consequence of the fact that mass can bend space.

And so when massive cataclysms happen in space (say, when two black holes collide), space ripples a bit like after a stone is thrown into a pond. It’s “like flapping space,” Hertz explains. “Space will propagate that movement as waves.”

Gravitational waves are really weird. They literally distort space as they move — shrinking it, stretching it — as if it were an image in a funhouse mirror. The thing is, when these waves reach the Earth, they are almost imperceptibly small, making changes on scales smaller than an individual atom.

Remarkably, scientists have the technology to record gravitational waves. In 2015, scientists first detected gravitational waves that resulted from the collision of two black holes. Scientists believe that there are gravitational waves emanating from this very early, hot universe that existed after the Big Bang, but we would need a huge and specialized observatory to detect them.

“We need to have a gravitational wave observatory where the two ends of it are a million kilometers apart,” Hertz says.

And where do you put such an observatory? In space!

Currently, NASA and the European Space Agency have plans for a space-based gravitational observatory called LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), to launch in 2034. It will be a constellation of three satellites that form a triangle, with each side measuring a whopping 2.5 million kilometers.

“It measures whether the distance between the satellites has changed,” Hertz explains. “And if it changes, it’s because a gravitational wave went by and shrank or expanded space.”

Some of those gravitational waves could be coming from that hot cauldron of the post-Big Bang universe.

Why build telescopes?

Scientists build telescopes to learn about the history of the cosmos and where we fit into it. When we build observatories to peer into the cosmic dark ages, into the fiery heart of the Big Bang, humans fill in the blank spaces in our timeline of the evolving universe. Telescopes help answer the question: Why does the universe look the way it does today?

This urge to understand may be even deeper and more philosophical than curiosity. As Casey, the UT Austin astronomer, puts it: “Humans trying to understand the universe is really the universe trying to understand itself.”

We humans aren’t separate from the universe. We are of it. The Big Bang, the cosmic dark ages, cosmic dawn ... all of this history led to us.

In this light, building telescopes is a means to make our corner of the universe self-aware.

There’s a virtuous cycle here. The Webb Space Telescope will generate incredible images that are only going to inspire more people to get interested in science, to be curious about the universe they inhabit. Those people may dream up the next barrier-breaking telescope, and the cycle will continue.

There will never be one ultimate telescope that can see everything humans want to see. “Each telescope, whether it’s on Earth or in space, is designed to do a particular kind of science,” Hertz says. Even the mighty LISA, capable of peering back to near the very beginning of time, would be blind to some things, like starlight. Other future telescopes might not set their gaze on the beginning of time, but rather on the many planets that revolve around other stars, as they search for another Earth.

“We’re just a bunch of humans floating on a rock through space,” Casey says. “It’s wild, when you think about it, that we’re able to even piece together what happened before the Earth or the sun even existed.”

Telescopes of the future will bring even more of that history into focus.

Fences

Good Fences Make Bad Neighbors for Wild Animals

So these scientists are using high-tech methods to do something about it.

MICHAEL PARKS

One smoke-tinged July morning on Horse Prairie—a plateau of big sagebrush and dusty washes overlooking Horse Prairie Creek in southwestern Montana—a man sat at the helm of a skid-steer loader. Attached to its front was a spool-like contraption called a Dakota wire winder and post puller. Four volunteers threw up their thumbs—Ready!—and the man flung a switch. The winder spun up, and a stretch of woven wire fence lying on the ground jerked into motion.

Soon, a hundred-plus years of tangled Western history had become a tidy bale.

Andrew Jakes joined the volunteers in a cheer. The group was the last in a two-week parade of helpers who had come out to Horse Prairie, and Jakes believed their hard work wrestling fences would be worth it.

Jakes is a biologist with the National Wildlife Federation and an expert on pronghorn antelope. In 2018, he and four colleagues published a paper calling for more research on how fences affect ecosystems. They also coined a term: “fence ecology.” Today, the growing subdiscipline is not just revealing how fences can harm Western wildlife; it’s also informing solutions.

Fence ecology research shows that the West is a wiry place, containing enough fencing to circle the equator 25 times. Sage grouse, peregrine falcons and other birds collide with fences, and ungulates must navigate an endless obstacle course. A 2021 paper found that pronghorn in Wyoming encountered fences an average of 249 times in a single year and changed their behavior around the barriers nearly 40% of the time. Fences often ensnare and kill large animals; woven wire with barbed wire on the top, like that on Horse Prairie, is particularly lethal. Fences also separate mothers from calves, exclude herds from prime habitat and exhaust and injure animals. “Probably a quarter to half of (pronghorn I’ve seen) have scarring at this point, from trying to get under,” Jakes said.

A number of nonprofits, land trusts, ranchers, tribal nations and government agencies have already removed or modified thousands of miles of harmful fences. But because fences are difficult to study, these projects haven’t had much science to guide them. There is no global fence map, as there is for roads; fences are hard to see on satellite imagery. And even as satellite-based mapping improves, researchers say it’s difficult to distinguish between an impassable woven-wire fence and, for example, a dilapidated or smooth-wire fence that’s more permeable to wildlife.

Recently, though, fence ecologists have begun to unravel some mysteries. Using models, they’ve estimated the locations of fences over large areas and painstakingly mapped them in a number of important habitats. And they’re studying the paths of GPS-collared animals: If a mule deer makes a 90-degree turn in a section of roadless rangeland, for example, it could be because of a problem fence.

On Horse Prairie, one of Jakes’ colleagues, Simon Buzzard, combined all three tools—modeling, mapping and GPS-collar data from a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks pronghorn study—to identify stretches of fencing that appeared to impede ungulate movement. “We had collars from 40 animals,” Buzzard said. “Many of them stopped right here,” at the 2.1-mile stretch that the volunteers took down in July.

The removal effort was the result of a cost-sharing agreement among the National Wildlife Federation and the landowners on either side of the fence: the Bureau of Land Management and two ranchers. The section that came out is the first of 10 miles of fence that Buzzard and Jakes hope to fix through a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant this year.

Still, the sheer scale of fencing in the West presents a daunting challenge, and many questions remain unanswered. For example, how do fences affect the long-term health of wildlife populations? And how do different species learn about and use wildlife-friendly fences? “Until we have a large amount modified and recorded,” said Wenjing Xu, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley who has led or co-authored several recent fence ecology papers, “we don’t know how well or fast (animals) will respond.”

Back on Horse Prairie, piles of fencing were stacked on a flatbed trailer by noon. The following week, a contractor would put up a four-strand barrier with a smooth top wire 40 inches off the ground—low enough for “jumpers” like elk, deer and moose to go over—and a smooth bottom wire 16 inches above the earth, high enough for pronghorn, as well as calves of other ungulates, to slide under. (Jakes’ research shows an 18-inch bottom wire is even better, but for now, he said, 16 inches is a major step forward.)

“Yesterday, we saw nine elk with one little calf,” Buzzard said to Jakes as they drove across the newly reopened range. “If that old fence had been up, would that calf have been able to cross under?’

Lets see where it goes...

Manchin offers alternative plans to Democrats' 'fiscal insanity'

The moderate Democrat laid out how he wants to work on President Joe Biden’s family plan, starting with tax reform.

By BURGESS EVERETT

Joe Manchin released a statement on Wednesday afternoon panning his colleagues’ spending plans as “fiscal insanity.” Then he started to lay out how he wants to work on President Joe Biden’s family plan.

As all of Washington hangs on his every word, Manchin said he did want to clinch a reconciliation bill even as some progressives fear he’s trying to kill the whole thing. But rather than approach the effort as the multi-trillion-dollar social spending and climate change bill envisioned by his colleagues, Manchin said Democrats needed to start with gutting the 2017 Trump tax cuts and go from there.

“I want to do a tax overhaul. One thing you understand that all Democrats agreed on, there’s not a lot of things we all agree on, is that the 2017 tax cuts are unfair and weighted toward the high end. Let’s fix that. That’s the reconciliation,” Manchin said. “I think we can get a good bill done. I really do, if we work in good faith.”

The House will vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Manchin helped negotiate on Thursday, but Manchin’s remarks aren’t helping his bill succeed. Progressives are eager to sink the legislation after he said Wednesday that it's "not possible" to get an agreement on the larger spending package before the infrastructure vote.

“This is why we’re not voting for the bipartisan bill until we get a reconciliation bill,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told reporters. “After that statement we probably have even more people willing to vote no.”

And for Manchin the timetable is months, not days or weeks. He said he would also focus on extending the child tax credit that expires at the end of the year, a strong signal that Dec. 31 may be the true deadline for passage of a reconciliation package even as congressional leaders desperately try to force action this fall.

“Do you know how convoluted the tax system is? Do you really understand? We don’t have a one-week, two-week deadline, I don’t believe, on this. Because everything’s covered,” he said. “There’s nobody going to go without. The child tax credit ends at the end of the year and everything else goes to 2023. That’s why I said, ‘let’s do a pause,’ and really take time to work with it.”

Manchin’s comments amounts to a mixed bag for his fellow Democrats, but they can't ignore his concerns because Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer needs total lockstep unity from his caucus to advance anything. Democrats will be cheered that Manchin wants to finish a bill at all, but they will not necessarily appreciate his view on their goals of expanding safety net programs nor his reluctance to embrace their expansive plans for climate action.

Progressives say Manchin is off-base in his worries about their spending plan, since much of it will be paid for. But in the West Virginia senator’s view, starting new programs that shut off a few years from now is akin to making them permanent; Congress will never be able to shut them off.

And he wants to means test as much of the new spending that Congress comes up with as possible, another goal that clashes with his more progressive colleagues.

“Once you start doing something, it becomes ingrained in it. We want to do it and do it right and finance it,” Manchin said. “I just don’t want our society to move to an entitlement society.”

Allegation of unwanted sexual advances

Lewandowski cast out of Trump operation after allegation of unwanted sexual advances

The former Trump campaign manager lost his role running Trump's super PAC after POLITICO reported allegations a GOP donor made against him.

By ALEX ISENSTADT

Corey Lewandowski, one of Donald Trump’s longest-serving, highest-profile advisers, has been exiled from the former president’s orbit following allegations, reported earlier Wednesday by POLITICO, that he made unwanted sexual advances toward a major Trump donor.

Lewandowski's roles advising Trump included overseeing the principal pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again Action. But Taylor Budowich, a Trump spokesperson, announced on Twitter that Lewandowski was being removed from that job.

“Corey Lewandowski will be going on to other endeavors and we very much want to thank him for his service. He will no longer be associated with Trump World,” Budowich wrote.

Earlier in the day, POLITICO detailed allegations that Lewandowski had pursued a female donor, Trashelle Odom, during a Sunday evening charity event in Las Vegas. Odom accused Lewandowski of touching her repeatedly, including on her leg and buttocks, talking about his genitalia and sexual performance, and following her throughout the hotel.

Odom also described being afraid and intimidated as Lewandowski allegedly talked about past violent behavior and boasted about his control over Trump's political activities.

The 48-year-old Lewandowski, who is married, has long been by Trump’s side — though it is not the first time he has been cast out by Trump. He served as Trump’s first campaign manager during the 2016 election but was fired ahead of the 2016 Republican convention.

He made a comeback during Trump's White House years, emerging as a key outside adviser and surrogate. After Trump lost reelection, he personally appointed Lewandowski to oversee the Make America Great Again Action super PAC.

Lewandowski's reentry into Trump's orbit following the 2016 firing came in spite of a history of unwanted touching. In late 2017, singer Joy Villa filed a police report alleging the former Trump campaign manager slapped her buttocks during a holiday party at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Lewandowski was also charged with battery in 2016 after yanking the arm of a reporter, Michelle Fields, at a Trump event. The charges were later dropped, but Lewandowski claimed the incident never happened before video emerged confirming that it did.

In addition to Trump, Lewandowski has advised other Republican politicians around the country this year, including South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was also in attendance at the Las Vegas event. As of late Wednesday night, Noem's operation had not yet said whether Lewandowski would remain on her team.

Trashelle Odom and her husband, Idaho construction executive John Odom, were among the donors to Make America Great Again Action this year. Prior to the weekend’s incident, the couple had given the Lewandowski-run super PAC $100,000. Those close to the Odoms said they planned to ask for their money to be refunded unless Lewandowski stepped aside from the organization.

Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and staunch Trump supporter, is to take Lewandowski’s place in steering the super PAC.

Wink to progressives

White House gives a wink to progressives as they threaten Biden’s infrastructure bill

In an effort to put pressure on Manchin and Sinema, any help is welcome.

By NATASHA KORECKI and CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO

Progressives in the House are revolting. Inside the White House, they’re welcoming it.

One by one, liberal lawmakers have announced that they will vote to defeat a bipartisan infrastructure bill if moderate Democrats and the White House do not offer a firm outline for an accompanying social and climate spending package as well. And just as tensions within the party were at a seeming boiling point this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) turned it up even further, urging House Democrats to vote against that bipartisan infrastructure bill when it is scheduled to hit the floor on Thursday.

Though some of those same progressives have loudly complained that President Joe Biden isn’t doing enough to reach out to them individually on his legislative agenda, the White House seems utterly unbothered by it.

Instead, they’re hoping that the prospect of a progressive revolt will only add to the pressure they’re attempting to exert on Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the two moderate Senators most noncommittal about supporting a party-line reconciliation bill. Two sources familiar with the White House’s messaging to progressives said that officials have made it clear to them that they are not displeased with all the talk about voting down the infrastructure package.

“I think it's good to have drama around this because it does isolate those people who are obstructing it for no good reason other than some sort of austerity politics mentality that, when you're in a time of crisis, just isn't a logical position,” said Heather Gautney, a former senior adviser to Sanders.

“We made a deal and I think they just need to keep hammering that because the tradition is to paint the progressive as hard headed and wanting to spend too much money and that’s just absurd at this point — especially with Biden where he is on all of it,” Gautney added.

Ultimately, the White House wants to see the infrastructure bill passed when it is brought up. But the idea that it would be comfortable with an effort by a portion of its own party to delay and put into question one of the president’s most important initiatives would have been unheard of in previous administrations. These, however, are not normal times. And this is hardly a normal legislative calendar.

Biden and his top aides are desperately trying to reach an agreement on the reconciliation package with the two moderate Democrats. But both Manchin and Sinema have not just resisted overtures, the two have been evasive about what framework and price tag they would accept for the $3.5 trillion climate and social spending plan.

Without any material commitments from their moderate counterparts, progressives in the House have vowed to tank the bipartisan infrastructure package, believing that if it were to pass they would be removing whatever leverage they still had to ensure the reconciliation bill’s passage. They argue that both plans are part of Biden’s economic agenda — a point that the White House has increasingly echoed in public statements as well.

The White House is convinced progressives’ end goal is still aligned with theirs and see the pressure they’re exerting as ultimately helpful rather than damaging.

“We want to know what will be in a bill, especially if it’s going to be anything less than $3.5 [trillion],” said Rep. Chuy García, (D-Ill.). “The holdup isn’t with progressives, because we’ve maintained our position throughout. It’s the moderates that have slowed this down and delayed it.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki seemed deferential to progressives in the briefing room Wednesday when asked about the progress of negotiations.

“[M]embers of the Progressive Caucus want to have an understanding of the path forward on the reconciliation package,” Psaki said. “They have stated that publicly. You know why? Because they think it's a historic progressive package that will make bold changes into addressing our climate crisis, into lowering costs for the American people, bringing more women back into the workplace.”

Progressives, meanwhile, have taken pains to stress in their public comments that the package they want advanced is Biden’s agenda, and they are merely ensuring it all passes Congress. And while some on the left have complained about the lack of communication between the White House and progressives, an aide to Sanders said the senator has been in regular touch with both senior members of the White House and top officials in the Biden administration.

“It’s constant communication with everybody,” the aide said.

Sanders did not give the White House a head’s up before his Tuesday tweet insisting that no “infrastructure bill should pass without a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.” But the president’s team was aware of his position, an aide said.

One point several progressives raised in interviews is that moderate intransigence on the social spending package will only hurt moderates in addition to the party at large. Indeed, should Biden’s entire agenda crumble over the two-bill stalemate, progressives are exceedingly less likely to suffer politically given that most represent safe seats, while many moderates hold swing districts.

“It will be moderates who suffer. We will lose moderates if we’re running on a record that is not attractive enough to voters,” Matt Bennett, of the centrist Third Way, said matter-of-factly. “And we’ve been very clear, along with the vast majority of Democratic moderates including the president, that reconciliation is absolutely vital. It's important that we confront all of these crises, including climate change, with something real. And I think we’d agree that the infrastructure bill is necessary but not nearly sufficient.”

As progressives continue to make the case for dual tracking the two bills, there is fear among some close Biden allies and moderate Democrats that they may be tarnishing the infrastructure component in politically damaging ways. It’s a proposal that the party still plans to run on during the mid-terms, and the fear is it will have less impact if Democratic lawmakers themselves are downplaying it.

“Those are powerful images — the commemorative hard hats and the golden shovels. Those visuals are solid gold. They are great for TV. It may be the only thing that saves our bacon in 2022,” said Colin Strother, a Democratic strategist in Texas who works with moderates and regularly tangles with progressive activists. “A full bowl of rice does wonders for your polling, as a lot of countries will tell you. Biden needs this win. He really, really needs this win.”

Strother said the lack of a breakthrough in Washington is also presenting a problem for Democrats, by driving up anxiety elsewhere in the country and raising doubts about whether Biden can effectively use his power to pull together lawmakers from across the party. It’s not just Manchin and Sinema that need to be put on notice, he said, it was House progressives as well.

“I am not convinced the White House is being particularly effective. How many fucking times can we go to the White House and have tea?” Strother added. “Right now, everyone has their arms folded across their chest and their bottom lip sticking out. We need to be in some of these progressive districts talking about the infrastructure bill and what it will do and how many jobs it will create. We need to get them on our program.”

Better ties

North Korea’s Kim seeks better ties with South, but slams U.S.

Kim Jong Un’s statement is an apparent effort to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

North Korea leader Kim Jong Un expressed his willingness to restore stalled communication lines with South Korea in early October to promote peace while shrugging off U.S. offers for dialogue as “cunning ways” to conceal its hostility against the North, state media reported Thursday.

Kim’s statement is an apparent effort to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington as he wants South Korea to help him win relief from crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions and other concessions. Pyongyang this month has offered conditional talks with Seoul alongside its first missile firings in six months and stepped-up criticism of the United States.

The U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency closed meeting Thursday at the request of the United States, United Kingdom and France on North Korea’s recent tests.

During a speech at his country’s rubber-stamp parliament on Wednesday, Kim said the restoration of cross-border hotlines — which have been largely dormant for more than a year — would realize the Korean people’s wishes for a peace between the two Koreas, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.

Kim still accused South Korea of being “bent on begging external support and cooperation while clamoring for international cooperation in servitude to the U.S.,” rather than committing to resolving the matters independently between the Koreas.

Kim repeated his powerful sister Kim Yo Jong’s calls for Seoul to abandon “double-dealing attitude” and “hostile viewpoint” over the North’s missile tests and other developments, saying the fate of inter-Korean ties is at a critical juncture. Some experts say North Korea is pressuring South Korea to tone down its criticism of its ballistic missile tests, which are banned by U.N. Security Council resolutions, in a bid to receive an international recognition as a nuclear power.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry responded that it’ll prepare for the restoration of the hotlines that it said is needed to discuss and resolve many pending issues. It said the “stable operation” of the channels is expected because their restoration was directly instructed by Kim Jong Un.

On the United States, Kim Jong Un dismissed repeated U.S. offers to resume talks without preconditions, calling them an attempt to hide America’s “hostile policy” and “military threats” that he said remain unchanged.

The Biden administration “is touting ‘diplomatic engagement’ and ‘dialogue without preconditions’ but it is no more than a petty trick for deceiving the international community and hiding its hostile acts and an extension of the hostile policy pursued by the successive U.S. administrations,” Kim said.

He added: “The U.S. remains utterly unchanged in posing military threats and pursuing hostile policy toward (North Korea) but employs more cunning ways and methods in doing so.”

North Korea has long called U.S.-led economic sanctions on it and regular military drills between Washington and Seoul as proof of U.S. “hostile policies” on them. Kim Jong Un has said he would bolster his nuclear arsenal and not resume nuclear diplomacy with Washington unless such U.S. hostility is withdrawn.

U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed hopes to sit down for talks with North Korea “anywhere and at any time,” but have maintained they will continue sanctions until the North takes concrete steps toward denuclearization. The diplomacy has been stalled for 2 ½ years due to disagreements over easing the U.S.-led sanctions in return for limited denuclearization steps.

Prior to the launch Tuesday of what North Korea said was a new hypersonic missile, it also this month launched a newly developed cruise missile and a ballistic missile from a train. Both of those weapons could carry nuclear bombs to attack targets in South Korea and Japan, both key U.S. allies where a total of 80,000 American troops are stationed.

Kim said in his parliament speech that “a spur has been given to ... developing a powerful new weapon system capable of thoroughly containing the military moves of the hostile forces.” He accused the United States and its “vassal forces” of creating a “’neo-Cold War” and ordered officials to work out “tactical measures” on U.S. relations.

Kim Jong Un maintains a moratorium on testing a longer-range missile capable of reaching the American homeland, an indication he wants to keep alive chances for future diplomacy with the U.S.

After nearly 10 years in power, Kim Jong Un has said North Korea is facing its worst-ever crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S.-led sanctions and natural disasters. In his latest speech, he claimed progress toward the troubled economy but urged stronger efforts to tighten epidemic prevention measures and fulfill other objectives set during a January ruling Workers’ Party congress.

Meanwhile, Kim’s sister was elected as a member of the State Affairs Commission led by her brother during this week’s Supreme People’s Assembly session, KCNA reported. The appointment of Kim Yo Jong, who already is a senior Workers’ Party official who handles Pyongyang’s relations with Seoul, is another sign Kim is solidifying his family’s rule in the face of the difficulties.

Pandemic taught farmers

How the pandemic taught farmers to love online sales

Covid-19 has prompted states from Florida to Maine to build new tools — many of them online — to market fresh food locally.

By XIMENA BUSTILLO

For Tony DiMare, who manages two large tomato farms in Florida for his 93-year-old family-run company, the timing of the Covid-19 pandemic couldn’t have been worse.

DiMare’s farms produce millions of tomatoes each season, most of it aimed at food service — the hamburgers, sandwiches and salads served in schools, restaurants and on cruise ships. In Florida’s year-round warmth, March and April are harvest time. So in spring 2020, as states around the country started imposing lockdowns and schools and restaurants closed for what would turn out to be months, DiMare was left with no one to buy his tomatoes just as they were hitting peak ripeness.

The situation was the same for many of the Florida farmers who grow fruits and vegetables. At a time when millions of pounds of crops were supposed to be leaving the state, many couldn’t even leave the fields and grocery store shelves were often bare. DiMare offered his excess tomatoes to food banks, and he did manage to offload about 2 million pounds that way. But most of the rest was abandoned.

“The losses were devastating,” DiMare recalled in an interview. “It takes money to harvest the crop, and nobody was in position to really take the glut that was left. Not only from our company, but the industry and others around the country. They had no outlet.”

DiMare wasn’t alone. The Florida Tomato Committee estimates there were 40 million pounds of unsold tomatoes between mid-March and mid-April 2020, about 42 percent of the crop that usually ships in that time period. Unsold tomatoes were either plowed under, dumped or donated. Total losses were estimated to be $48 million.

And it wasn’t just tomatoes. Producers of fruit and vegetables, including potatoes and onions, began reporting record waste of crops around the country. Dairy farms reported the same. The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not track much of that waste, but they did track dairy losses, which skyrocketed as more than 780 million pounds of milk was literally poured down drains.

The farmers who grow America’s fresh food face special challenges during times of emergency. Factories that manufacture household items or even shelf-stable food can mothball an assembly line and hold the excess in storage, but farmers can’t just delay a harvest or ask cows to take a pause in milk production. Produce and milk is by definition perishable, which means it needs to be harvested and brought to market when it’s ready.

That meant the pandemic was a different kind of emergency for many American farmers. Florida’s usual disasters are hurricanes and tropical storms, which means farmers typically have a few days warning that they can use to protect or harvest crops and get them distributed. There is also crop insurance specifically designed to compensate for losses from a storm or other natural disaster.

But Covid caused disruptions for months up and down the supply chain, from field hands who fell ill from the coronavirus, to packing plants that were shuttered, to restaurants and schools that closed their doors. All that meant many farmers, particularly those like DiMare who primarily served the wholesale market, had nowhere to send their fresh food when it was ready.

“Florida is used to disasters,” said Alan Brock, rural affairs director at the Florida Agriculture Department. “This was the one thing about Covid — our crops were still in the field. We weren't able to harvest them and ship them. This was a unique challenge we hadn’t conceived prior to this.”

That’s why producers and state officials across the country are now working on new ideas for weathering future crises without suffering such massive food losses again.

For many states, including Florida and Maine, the solution involves building and expanding secondary food distribution chains that can connect producers more directly to customers. This is particularly important for farmers whose food is aimed primarily at the food service industry; when those larger, national networks are disrupted, farmers like DiMare need to be able to find more customers closer to home.

What this means is that even in large agricultural states with a focus on serving the national market, officials are now working on ways to start thinking local.

Eating local has been trendy in recent years; in 2018, a Gallup poll found that nearly 75 percent of Americans said they were actively trying to include locally grown foods in their diets, with the biggest focus on vegetables, fruits and chicken.

But during Covid, for many, finding local food became a necessity. Stephanie McClung, external affairs director at the Florida Agriculture Department, said that at the start of the pandemic, the department was flooded with calls from producers like DiMare, so the department decided to focus on finding agencies and other food service customers in Florida that normally purchase food from out of state and get them to buy local instead.

The result was Florida Farm to You, a website where over 550 producers uploaded their profiles, complete with the produce and products that they offered, expiration dates and location. McClung said the Florida Department of Corrections, nursing homes and schools and daycares that stayed open were among the buyers who began purchasing bulk fresh Florida produce through the site.

“There was more realization around the state of how much we weren't using our fresh and Florida products, so I think individuals wanted to buy local more,” McClung said. “We wanted to make it more of an online farmers market.”

To make the system work, individuals who had refrigerated trucks or other ways to transport produce donated their equipment and time to get the produce to the purchasers. The website also helped producers find ways to pivot from their usual bulk packaging to individually sized retail packaging.

Although the emergency has since passed, McClung said the website is still providing a useful tool for both producers and consumers.

“We were able to be the go-between in a lot of cases. Which is why we saw a need for the site to continue,” McClung said.

One beneficiary was William Johnson, who helps run his family’s small fruit and egg farm in Miami. When the pandemic hit and avocado prices dropped, Johnson estimates he lost 30 percent of his avocados that went to waste and fertilizer use.

He said Florida Farm to You program helped the operation increase its sales and helped him find a new customer that continues to buy bulk produce.

“It was tough on us from a cost perspective. But from a sales perspective, we did sell more than we did before the pandemic,” Johnson said, adding that the visibility of his Florida Farm to You profile played a role in getting more attention from individual customers.

“It honestly surprised me how many people found us through that portal,” he said.

At the start of the pandemic, the state of Maine already had a leg up with its own local food distribution website, “Real Maine.” Similar to Florida Farm to You, it's built around an interactive map that connects local residents with local food in a state where nearly 90 percent of food produced is exported across the country.

During 2020, the site’s traffic increased by 71 percent over 2019 and so far in 2021, is up an additional 7.6 percent, according to Maine’s Agriculture Department. And just like in Florida, the state Corrections Department and others began using the site to make new bulk purchases of in-state produce.

But agriculture officials found that the website wasn’t enough to help some local producers, who had trouble pivoting to direct-to-consumer sales and needed help with things like setting up credit card payment systems or equipment to pack and ship to individual buyers. So the state began providing grants to help with those transition costs.

“What we saw (during the pandemic) was a natural turn to local farmers and producers. And customers went to great lengths to reach out to farmers and to find other ways to purchase food that they were looking for,” said Maine Agriculture Commissioner Amanda Beal.

Beal sees the move paying dividends for Maine in the future. “Maine is at the end of the line for trucking routes,” she said. “If there ever was market disruption [again], we want to be in a better position for resilience and food supply for our own benefit.”

One producer to take advantage of these programs was Amber Lambke, founder and CEO of Maine Grains located in the small town of Skowhegan, Me.

“Right around the end of March, we lost our biggest customer that was a chain restaurant in urban areas in the same week that flour ran out in grocery stores across the country,” Lambke said. “And our online sales went berserk.”

Prior to the pandemic, Maine Grains used to do a couple dozen orders a week online, usually for special products. In April 2020 they averaged 180 orders a day — causing them to be about 3,000 orders deep at one point. Overall, the business grew by 35 percent in 2020.

“It has meant a whole new exposure to customers that discovered our product through that period and were thrilled. And the feedback we were getting was heartwarming,” Lambke said. “We got pictures in the email of people hugging their packages of grains when they arrived, pictures of what everyone was home making, and realizing you could see just how much stress people were under and nervous about running out of food.”

Though sales have largely gone back to a focus on bulk supply, online sales remain at a much higher level than before the pandemic. Lambke said she is using a state grant to purchase equipment that increases their ability to package retail-sized bags and is broadening a product line for home cooks. They even hired an in-house baker to help develop products for their retail shop.

“Even on the wholesale side, people are thankful to regional producers and thankful we exist,” Lambke said. “We have seen a loyalty and an interest that has come out of Covid that the infrastructure of a local food system is fragile and it's really important because it ensures self reliance.”

The experience is shared by Christa Bahner of Bahner Farm, a small, organic vegetable farm that typically sells in farmers markets, natural food stores and small restaurants. During the pandemic, they opened a to-go window to serve drive-up customers as well as online sales.

“I think people in general were looking for places to go that were not a store,” Bahner said. “We had people come up to our front window and our farm stand sales tripled from 2019 to 2020. Which is bonkers.”

Bahner used some of the state’s support programs to help cover credit card fees, which was a new expense for a business that previously worked mostly in cash. Bahner said she feels more confident, now, that her business is well positioned to weather future emergencies.

“We know we can do it, hopefully it wouldn't be so scary. We have a nice three-legged stool of sales,” Bahner said. “We have the farmers market, the farm stand and the wholesale. And if one of those things got kicked out from under us, we still have two strong legs.”

Slow run...

96-year-old former Nazi secretary detained after fleeing authorities

Irmgard Furchner worked in the Stutthof concentration camp from 1943 to 1945.

BY LOUIS WESTENDARP

The half-day escape attempt of a 96-year-old former secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp, who was to face trial on Thursday but fled from authorities, ended at noon when the police brought her before a judge.

Irmgard Furchner is charged with being an accessory to 11,000 counts of murder, according to a statement released by Itzehoe Regional Court. She worked as a stenotypist and secretary between June 1943 and July 1945, thus allegedly aiding those responsible for the camp in the systematic killing of prisoners.

“Dear judge,” Irmgard F. wrote in a September 8 letter to the court, according to WELT, “Due to my age and physical limitations, I will not attend the court dates and ask my defense counsel to represent me. I would like to spare myself this embarrassment and not make a laughing stock of myself.” Nobody expected her to follow through with those announcements.

The former secretary, who usually resides in her home in Quickborn, in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, began her escape in the early hours of Thursday morning, Süddeutsche Zeitung reports. “She took a taxi,” said a court spokesperson. Her destination was the Norderstedt subway station, just outside Hamburg, but after that, her trail was lost.

Furchner did not get very far, and was detained by police at the outskirts of Norderstedt — roughly 10 kilometers from her home.

While she was on the run, over 50 journalists and spectators, as well as 12 representatives of the joint plaintiffs, defense attorneys, state prosecutors and others sat perplexed in the courtroom as it was announced that Furchner had failed to be picked up by police that morning.

An estimated 65,000 prisoners died in the Stutthof concentration camp during World War II. Furchner is considered a typical “desk criminal,” whose work enabled the Nazis’ destructive regime. In an earlier letter to the judge, she claimed she “Didn’t do anything as an 18/19-year-old to answer for as a 96-year-old.”

Dial back drug-pricing

Democrats dial back drug-pricing plans to win over moderates

It’s a sign the drug industry is bending a potential compromise in manufacturers’ favor after spending more than $171 million lobbying in the first half of this year.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and MEGAN WILSON

Top congressional Democrats are acknowledging for the first time that they’ll have to scale back their drug pricing plans to win centrist votes for their giant social spending package.

Leadership may drop efforts to have the government directly negotiate the prices for medicines in private insurance plans and make fewer drugs subject to negotiations in Medicare, among the changes under consideration.

It’s a sign the drug industry is bending a potential compromise in manufacturers’ favor after spending more than $171 million lobbying in the first half of this year, including fighting House leadership's set of proposed price controls. But a more industry-friendly outcome could slash hundreds of billions of dollars in projected savings from the Democrats’ social spending bill, H.R. 5376 (117), and antagonize progressives who promised they'd enact tough new measures to reel in pharmaceutical costs.

“It is alarming that a very modest bill could become even weaker,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who chairs the health subcommittee of House Ways and Means. “I’m aware of how tight our vote is, but I don’t believe any of the changes … do anything other than make it approach meaninglessness.”

The Democrats’ thinking on drug pricing and a swath of other policies was recently scrambled by efforts to pare the overall size of the social spending package from $3.5 trillion to win over holdouts like Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

One senior Democratic aide said negotiations between the House, Senate and White House on the pharmaceutical piece of the bill have been playing out "quietly." Another aide said a compromise is set to be “a little more limited” than the House plan pushed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and backed by progressives, H.R. 3 (117), not only because of centrists’ concerns, but because of Senate rules around what kind of legislation can be brought up under the expedited process known as reconciliation and passed on a party-line vote. The House plan could save as much as $700 billion over a decade, according to congressional estimates.

Lawmakers, aides and lobbyists close to the process said the leaders are now discussing making fewer drugs subject to government negotiation, and shifting the benchmark for such talks away from prices paid in other developed nations.

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Wednesday that he’s in talks with House members who are insisting the bill be “sensitive to innovation” in the drug industry, and he suggested that the negotiated prices may be limited to Medicare and not apply to the private market or employer-sponsored plans, as progressives originally sought.

“History shows that changes made in Medicare almost always migrate to the private sector,” said Wyden. “Because Medicare is the flagship federal program, and when the private sector learns about [the lower drug prices], they're going to insist on it.”

All three of the centrist House Democrats who defied Pelosi earlier this month and voted against the leadership-backed pricing plan in the Energy and Commerce Committee told POLITICO they’ve received assurances from committee leaders that changes are underway and have been part of negotiations in recent days.

The White House has also begun making overtures to centrist Democrats to gauge what compromise language on drug pricing could look like, said one Democratic lobbyist familiar with the talks.

Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) said leaders are discussing options such as using a different benchmark for drug negotiations than the price paid in countries where drugs typically sell for less — a key part of House leadership's plan that Schrader said “has no juice” among his fellow centrists.

“The White House, Senate Finance, our senator friends, we’re all looking for a different vehicle that makes sense, that threads the needle between not restricting innovation and getting these drugs to the lowest cost we can in the marketplace,” he said.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), one of the leading House members working on the drug pricing legislation, confirmed that the leadership plan has been reopened for debate, and “not just around the number of drugs” but “the whole process.”

It’s a coup for the pharmaceutical industry, which has spent tens of millions more on lobbying than any other industry so far this year, according to disclosures tallied by the watchdog group OpenSecrets. Though drug companies would prefer to kill the House plan entirely, weakening it may be their best-case scenario given Democrats’ full control of Washington and vows to go after the industry.

“The idea that you're going to have a Democratic-driven [social] infrastructure package that doesn't take a pound of flesh out of the pharma sector, to me, is laughable,” a Republican health care lobbyist told POLITICO. “But how big a pound of flesh that will be is a function of how powerful the pharma sector is.”

The big Washington drug industry lobby, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, declined to comment about the state of negotiations.

K Street sources, however, said the industry is still intent on killing an escalating excise tax Democrats want to levy on drug companies that refuse to negotiate with the government — a tax that would increase up to 95 percent depending on how long a company doesn't comply. The Congressional Budget Office said in 2019 that the proposal would reduce the federal budget deficit by nearly $500 billion over 10 years, making it a key driver of the bill’s savings. But critics argue it could result in fewer new drugs being brought to market.

“How do you know that companies aren’t going to say, ‘F--- the price controls,’ pay the tax and then pass the tax on to consumers?” said another Republican lobbyist working on the issue. “There are going to be whole political campaigns built on this 95 percent tax... [Democrats] are going to get blitzed with TV ads.”

Even Democrats who have long pushed Democratic leaders to stick to their guns on drug pricing are now acknowledging that a watered-down version may be their best option with such slim majorities in the House and Senate.

“On drug negotiation, and every other issue, any three members can bring it down, so they’ve got negotiating power,” Welch allowed. “And I think a number of concerns they’re raising are in good faith, even if I disagree with their argument. We have to be successful, so we have to try to work with them.

Too many changes, however, and progressives could balk and withdraw their support.

“For every action there are collateral reactions,” he warned.

Going badly........

Brexit is ‘going badly,’ say Brits in new poll

Pollster asks Brits how the EU exit is working out.

BY PAUL DALLISON

More than half of Brits think that Brexit is "going badly," according to new polling — and the number of people with that opinion is growing.

The pollster YouGov asked people how they thought the country's exit from the European Union was working out, and a whopping 53 percent said it was going badly, a rise of 15 percentage points from June, when they asked people the same question. The "badly" camp can be split into two: those who thought Brexit was going "fairly badly" (21 percent) and those who said it was going "very badly" (32 percent).

The number of people with a positive take on Brexit was down seven percentage points from June, to 18 percent — of those, 14 percent said it was going "fairly well" and just 4 percent "very well."

In addition, 21 percent said it was going "neither well nor badly" and 8 percent said they didn't know.

YouGov asked 6,546 British adults for their opinion on Wednesday, with the results published the same day.

It's called "covering your ass"... Military knew for a decade Taliban had major control or influence yet lied about it...

Top US generals punch holes in Joe Biden's defense of Afghanistan withdrawal

Opinion by Peter Bergen

Top American generals warned President Joe Biden that the Afghan military would collapse. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in essence on Tuesday that both former President Donald Trump and Biden had botched negotiations with the Taliban -- and the net result of the US actions was a "logistical success but a strategic failure."

If the old joke is true -- that in Washington, the definition of a gaffe is telling the truth in public -- then Milley and the other military leaders who testified Tuesday on Capitol Hill committed many gaffes.

At a televised hearing of the US Senate Armed Services Committee featuring Milley, CENTCOM commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, and the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin -- himself a retired four-star general and former CENTCOM commander -- all told a great deal of truth.

Generals Milley and McKenzie said that they advised the Biden administration that unless the US kept 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, the Afghan military would collapse. They also said that the ground commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin "Scott" Miller, provided the same advice.

This clearly contradicts what President Biden told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos last month -- that the US military didn't advise him to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

In answer to a question from a senator, Gen. Milley conceded that the abrupt and complete US withdrawal had "damaged" US credibility around the world.

Milley also said that both the Trump and Biden administrations made a mistake by putting specific dates on the US withdrawal rather them making it a conditions-based withdrawal.

Relatedly, McKenzie and Austin both agreed that the Doha agreement with the Taliban that was negotiated by the Trump administration and signed in February 2020, and which laid out the timeline for a total US withdrawal, significantly undercut the morale of the Afghan military.

Milley blamed the US intelligence community for missing the "scale and scope, plus the speed" of the collapse of Afghan government, testifying, "All the intel assessments, all of us got that wrong. There's no question about it. That was a swing and a miss on the intel assessment of 11 days in August, there's nobody that called that."

In fact, according to CNN's reporting before the fall of Kabul, the US intelligence community was predicting in early August that the Taliban could take Kabul within a month to three months, which at the time seemed like a reasonably accurate assessment of how dire the situation was becoming.

Milley described the US airlift of more than 120,000 Afghans, US citizens and other nationals from Kabul as a "logistical success," but he called the overall policy in Afghanistan a "strategic failure."

The fruits of that failure have been starkly clear from the actions of the Taliban during just the past month.

In a highly symbolic move on September 17, the Taliban's feared religious police commandeered the building that once housed the Ministry of Women's Affairs.

The next day, the Taliban ministry of education summoned only teenage boys back to school, but no female teens. They remain at home, unschooled.

The following day, the mayor of Kabul decreed that women can work for the city, but only in jobs that could not be done by men, such as cleaning toilets used by women.

Then Mullah Nooruddin Turabi, a founder of the Taliban, told the Associated Press that the regime would resume the practice of amputating the hands of thieves.

And earlier this month, the Taliban appointed Siraj Haqqani, who the UN has identified as part of the leadership council of al Qaeda, as the acting Minister of the Interior.

No wonder then that Gen. McKenzie testified he was not confident that al-Qaeda and ISIS wouldn't regroup in Afghanistan now that the US has withdrawn from the country.

The upshot of Tuesday's hearing was that even the most senior US generals couldn't defend the debacle that has unfolded in Afghanistan during the past several weeks, a disaster owned by President Biden, even if it was teed up by President Trump's ill-fated "peace" negotiations with the Taliban that culminated in the Doha agreement.

System collapse....

The workers who keep global supply chains moving are warning of a 'system collapse'

By Hanna Ziady

Seafarers, truck drivers and airline workers have endured quarantines, travel restrictions and complex Covid-19 vaccination and testing requirements to keep stretched supply chains moving during the pandemic.

But many are now reaching their breaking point, posing yet another threat to the badly tangled network of ports, container vessels and trucking companies that moves goods around the world.

In an open letter Wednesday to heads of state attending the United Nations General Assembly, the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and other industry groups warned of a "global transport system collapse" if governments do not restore freedom of movement to transport workers and give them priority to receive vaccines recognized by the World Health Organization.

"Global supply chains are beginning to buckle as two years' worth of strain on transport workers take their toll," the groups wrote. The letter has also been signed by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the International Road Transport Union (IRU) and the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF). Together they represent 65 million transport workers globally.

"All transport sectors are also seeing a shortage of workers, and expect more to leave as a result of the poor treatment millions have faced during the pandemic, putting the supply chain under greater threat," it added.

Guy Platten, secretary general of the ICS, said that worker shortages are likely to worsen towards the end of the year because seafarers may not want to commit to new contracts and risk not making it home for Christmas given port shutdowns and constant changes to travel restrictions.

Fragile supply chains

That will heap pressure on stretched supply chains and could, for example, worsen current challenges with food and fuel supply in the United Kingdom.

"The global supply chain is very fragile and depends as much on a seafarer [from the Philippines] as it does on a truck driver to deliver goods," added Stephen Cotton, ITF secretary general. "The time has come for heads of government to respond to these workers' needs."

When Karynn Marchal and her crew were told that they wouldn't be allowed to go on shore upon docking in Hokkaido, Japan it was a big hit to morale.

"None of us knew how long it would go on for," the 28-year old chief officer of a car-carrying ship told CNN Business.

That was more than 18 months ago. Marchal — and hundreds of thousands of seafarers like her — have not been permitted shore leave since.

After weeks on board a ship, a couple of hours on shore provides much needed respite. But seafarers can only leave a vessel in order to travel elsewhere, usually to return home. Marchal considers herself "one of the luckier ones," because she has at least been able to make it home to the United States.

"There are people who have been stuck at sea for over a year," she said.

Early in the pandemic, many seafarers agreed to extend their contracts by several months to keep supplies of food, fuel, medicine and other consumer goods flowing around the world. The grounding of planes and border closures had made it almost impossible to move workers from one part of the world to another and to swap crews.

At the peak of the crisis in 2020, 400,000 seafarers were unable to leave their ships for routine changeovers, some working for as long as 18 months beyond the end of their initial contracts, according to the ICS.

Multiple vaccinations, repeated testing

While these numbers have improved, crew changes remain a major challenge. Some travel restrictions were reimposed as a result of the coronavirus Delta variant and transport workers continue to face a myriad of vaccine and testing requirements just to do their jobs. Often these are imposed at a moment's notice, said Platten.

Inconsistent requirements mean that some seafarers have been vaccinated multiple times because some countries have approved only certain vaccines, according to Platten.

He knows of at least one seafarer who has received six vaccine doses, or three two-dose regimens. "It's an absolute nightmare. I can't understand why we don't have some sort of global standard," he told CNN Business.

Meanwhile, the unequal distribution of vaccines globally means that only about 25% to 30% of seafarers, many of who are from India and the Philippines, are fully vaccinated, according to Platten.

Coronavirus testing is also a challenge. In February, Germany unilaterally introduced mandatory PCR testing with no exemption for truck drivers, leading neighboring countries including Italy to impose similar restrictions to avoid having thousands of drivers stranded in their own territory.

These measures affected thousands of truck drivers, particularly on the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria, forcing them to queue for days in sub-zero temperatures with no food or medical facilities. The EU Digital Covid Certificate has since eased some of the pressure, but bottlenecks remain.

"Drivers have faced hundreds of border issues and blockades through the pandemic," said Umberto de Pretto, IRU secretary general. "Truck drivers, and the citizens and businesses that depend on the goods they move, pay a heavy price for misguided Covid restrictions that do not exempt transport workers," he added.

Marchal, the chief officer, and her crew had to do 10 Covid tests in seven days before they were allowed to enter the shipyard in Singapore for repairs last month. Maintenance was delayed by a week following a coronavirus outbreak at the port and the vessel is not expected to leave before mid October. In the meantime, the crew must remain on board the ship.

Compulsory quarantines when disembarking and on arrival in their home countries can mean that pilots and seafarers spend a month of their vacation time stuck in a hotel room before they're able to see their families.

Seafarers "run the shipping industry," yet they have not been given the priority of frontline workers, said Shaailesh Sukte, the captain of Seaspan Amazon, a container ship. "If you want the world to [keep] moving, you need to relax travel restrictions," he told CNN Business.

Another Day, Another load of shit....

Donald Trump's appalling response to a new tell-all book about his White House

Analysis by Chris Cillizza

Stephanie Grisham spent years at the side of the Trumps, serving as then-President Donald Trump's press secretary and as chief of staff for first lady Melania Trump.

She quit her job in protest after the January 6 US Capitol riot and has written a tell-all memoir of her time at the center of the Trump storm, due out next week.

Excerpts of the book leaked Tuesday, including Grisham writing of Trump's "terrifying" temper: "When I began to see how his temper wasn't just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing," she wrote.

Trump, never one to let any slight (real or perceived) go, issued a statement via a spokeswoman that, in part, read this way:

"Stephanie didn't have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning. She became very angry and bitter after her break up and as time went on she was seldom relied upon, or even thought about. She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things."

Yes, you read that right. The former President of the United States said that Grisham's book shouldn't be taken seriously because she was "very angry and bitter" after a breakup.

(The relationship Trump is referencing is the one between Grisham and onetime White House aide Max Miller, who is currently running for Congress in Ohio and facing some tough questions about past behavior.)

Trump's dismissiveness of Grisham's book -- and Grisham -- as nothing more than a bitter woman on the wrong end of a breakup is appalling even by his decidedly low standards.

If you expect there to be any blowback for Trump's attack on Grisham from Republican elected officials, you haven't been paying much attention to politics for the past five years or so.

This, like so many other excesses and inappropriate comments from Trump, will be ignored or, in some quarters, even defended.

Yea... If it cost money, fuck it... Out the window...

The problem with corporate “values”

When values are at odds with a company’s bottom line, all too often they won’t win out.

By Anna Held 

“Don’t be evil” —Google

“Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome” —Starbucks

“Include and empower” —Zillow

Corporate values sound really good. They’re positive, optimistic, and assert some sense of moral authority, which has become expected by consumers: A majority say they expect companies to take a stand on issues, whether they agree with the stand or not.

“Moral leadership in this country has been ceded to the corporations now. I don’t think anyone has much faith in politics taking care of people anymore. Corporations are sort of the default, and there’s a lot of pressure on them to do the right thing,” says Tyler Wry, a management professor at Wharton. One way corporations take up that mantle is through corporate values statements.

Corporate values statements are pervasive: About 80 percent of large companies have an official list of values on their websites. At their best, core values are spoken of as hallowed and immutable, the heart and soul of a company.

Despite the language of essentialism around them, though, corporate values don’t always track with company behavior (all the value statements above have come under fire for inconsistencies with action). Some of this is due to a lack of specificity and accountability in their rollout — you can’t expect people to change their behavior if they don’t know why or how — but the primary reason is that, despite lip-service to the contrary, the long-term vision that values require is not rewarded. US corporate governance norms are based on the shareholder value model, which enshrines maximizing shareholder profits as a company’s raison d’être.

This model in its most typical application operates at the expense of a labor and economic ecosystem. Looking at the workforce, we’ve reached a tipping point in this power imbalance triggering both individual and collective action. Employees are resigning at unprecedented rates, with many employees opting out of the system entirely. The gap in sentiment between big business and unions hit a record high favoring unions in 2020, with over half of employees saying they’d vote for a union at work. Labor laws currently favor businesses, but if the federal PRO Act passes, “it will be the most significant pro-labor legislation passed since the New Deal,” Zack Beauchamp wrote for Vox.

Despite rising incentives, when companies are unwilling to make governance and policy changes, it’s hard to see initiatives like extra time off or even pay raises as anything other than an attempt to placate employees in lieu of giving them more power. Without a shift to a more democratic model that emphasizes the health of all stakeholders, we’ll all continue to suffer the calamitous effects of profit maximization.

Corporate values are guiding principles and beliefs that serve as the foundation for behavior. These values are reflected in the decisions the company makes: who gets hired and who gets fired, what gets rewarded and what gets punished. Codifying values as a trend seems to have kicked off in 1994 with the publication of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, which stressed the articulation of and commitment to core values and “cult-like cultures.”

Broadly speaking, values say what a company cares about. They refer to ethical characteristics like integrity and respect, strategic lenses like customer focus, and ways of working like collaboration (all four values listed appear on about 30 percent of value statements). It’s also become common to see social impacts noted on corporate value statements, like diversity and environmental impact.

Internally, values can guide the day-to-day employee experience, like a culture of feedback or innovation. They speak to expectations, both how employees are expected to behave and how they can expect to be treated. Externally, they articulate what customers and other parties can expect in their experience.

Corporate values’ primary purported purpose is to serve as cornerstones for company culture, but they are also integral as marketing tools, pitched to consumers and prospective employees. Leaders really like to talk about them: More than three-quarters of CEOs interviewed in recent decades in Harvard Business Review spoke about their company values, even when they weren’t specifically asked about them. This value-centric messaging strategy can pay off, at least hypothetically. According to a recent study from the Bauer Leadership Center at Washington University in St. Louis and Vrity, a brand measurement company specializing in values, 82 percent of people say they are willing to pay more money to buy from companies whose values align with their own, with 43 percent of respondents willing to pay twice as much.

On the recruitment side, company values may help attract and retain talent. Employers living core values ranked above benefits in an analysis of corporate culture elements most important to employees. They also may make employees more engaged, and engaged employees are productive employees.

The problem is, research indicates that values often don’t have a significant impact on making the world better. In an MIT Sloan study, researchers found no correlation between a company’s expressed values and how well employees felt they lived up to them. Diversity statements can do more harm than good. Environmental impact commitments fall short. The corporate values trend doesn’t seem to have much to do with values at all; it’s saying the right thing and doing nothing.

The first, perhaps obvious reason is that the highly subjective nature of value statements renders them nearly meaningless. Values are couched in the language of platitudes: respect, integrity, and even having a positive impact on communities mean different things to different people. There are some relative exceptions, like Netflix. Its actual values are no longer novel — they’ve been parroted by many tech companies — but the form embodies best practices, with a highly detailed culture memo of more than 4,000 words that takes a strong perspective on what each of their values means in context.

Netflix’s stated values range from the typical — respect, communication, and inclusion — to nuanced, company-specific norms like freedom as the explicit priority over error prevention. The memo includes statements explaining why they set these norms and examples of actions that support values. In at least some ways, it sets the stakes: The memo talks about compensation in line with values, having a fire-fast culture for those who don’t live up to them, and incentivizing people who want to leave to do so by fully vesting company stock options rather than requiring employees to stay for a certain amount of time to cash out.

In a more typical vacuum of process and operating principles, though, application and enforcement are up to interpretation. Especially as company policies tend to stress independent decision-making, this subjectivity puts employees at risk. In early 2020, for example, a US Bank employee was fired for bringing a customer who was stranded at a nearby gas station $20 with manager approval. (Her manager was also fired for approving the trip; the bank cited “unnecessary risk” and said it does not allow call center workers to meet with customers.) US Bank’s culture statement at the time was, “Our employees are empowered to do the right thing” (the language has since been changed to “We do the right thing”).

Doing the right thing is highly personal, and asks the question, the right thing for whom? The employee and her manager acted in a way consistent with their interpretation of the company values, yet were terminated without severance for “putting herself and the bank at unnecessary risk,” answering the implicit question with “the company.”

The subjectivity of values also means they can be used disingenuously or to defend bad behavior. In another case, as reported by Zoe Schiffer at The Verge, the DTC luggage company Away sold a vision of inclusion and a responsibility to make a positive impact. Leadership messaging was stacked with company values but characterized by employees as manipulative. CEO Steph Korey reportedly weaponized Away’s value statements to bully employees. One factor was the company’s insistence that conversations take place on Slack rather than email — ostensibly for inclusion and transparency, but also to monitor employee conversations. In this way, the values of “accessibility” can be used as an excuse to micromanage and “empowerment” as a pretense for overwork.

Inconsistencies in internal value application can attract negative attention and impact brand sentiment, but the effects are often temporary and do not catalyze substantive changes. “To a certain extent, it’s driven by news cycles. The company thinks that they manage these things with PR as opposed to action. I mean, it’s a cheaper solution,” says Wry.

Some of the bad strategy around values can be credited to sloppy implementation or because companies are going too “brand-first,” thinking about how they want to be perceived versus how they want to behave. The root cause, though, is that for most companies, no matter what they say, values simply are not a top priority.

This is not a moral judgment against corporate America but a simple fact of how corporate governance works in the United States. Values are a long-term commitment. Research indicates that prioritizing community and employee satisfaction does have positive long-term financial gains, but to actually live up to their promises takes resources, and as a rule, short-term financial priorities win out over any value statement, no matter how detailed.

This rampant focus on short-term financial gains over long-term sustainability and growth is born out of the shareholder model, which has been the norm of business governance in the United States since the 1970s. Introduced as the Friedman doctrine, it explicitly denounces corporate social responsibility and limits the goals of a company to maximizing shareholder profits. The longstanding defense of the shareholder model is it is the most likely to ensure the survival of the business, which is good for everyone. In practice, though, limiting the end goal of companies to making money for shareholders has shifted gains from worker productivity to shareholders, stagnating wages and stifling economic growth. In 2019, the average CEO made 320 times as much money as the average worker.

As companies create and codify income inequality, they also create and codify unproductive and unsafe communities, says Julie Battilana, a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard’s Business and Kennedy Schools and the author of Power, for All. “Everyone is losing, including the people at the top. They get a large part of the pie, but that pie is getting smaller.”

Counterarguments to critiques of the shareholder value model boil down to, “It works if you’re doing it right, and they weren’t doing it right,” and “the law lets us do it, so it’s fine.” (It’s also hard to convince a person making $231 million annually that the status quo is bad for them.) But if most people aren’t doing it right — with destructive environmental, social, and economic ends — then maybe we should reconsider it as the primary mode of corporate governance in the United States.

Upending hierarchies is a big cultural shift — one that requires a lot of work, process, and bureaucracy, not to mention a departure from current operating norms — but it is long overdue to prioritize the health of our interdependent communities. Working within the current system, the solution is unglamorous: distributing voting power, with stakeholder needs systematically represented, and expanding the definition of success beyond purely the financial and setting incentives and accountability to that end. In short, procedural changes.

They are not without precedent. “If you look abroad at the number of European countries, including one that’s well known for it, Germany, there’s a co-determination system, so by law, employees actually are entitled to have seats on the board. They do not only voice concerns and suggestions. They participate in the key strategy decisions,” says Battilana. There is even a 1919 law still on the books in Massachusetts that regulates employee representation on boards, though it is rarely applied. Similarly, the standards and metrics have been set by external bodies like the Global Reporting Initiative that specialize in sustainability and impact. There is a roadmap to follow.

The move to a power-sharing model allows companies to make their values real instead of hollow intentions, opening the door for actual innovation, integrity, collaboration, and respect. Procedural changes are not as flashy as culture decks, but they are how companies can expand their focus past financial goals. And with a quick reframe, they can sound like the best kind of value statement: articulating a long-term vision and how to execute on it.

By shifting the focus from solely financial goals to a system that incentivizes broader positive impact, companies might be able to think long term and reap the benefits of healthy employees, a healthy economy, and, hopefully, a healthier planet.

It’s subjective, perhaps, but so is “doing the right thing.”