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Sep 9, 2022
Seems Like A Good Idea
From the time I was a little kid taking my first steps in the Colorado mountains, I can remember being admonished to "watch out for the mine shafts". And when my own son moved out there a few years ago, that was one of the first things I told him.
That shit's dangerous, and there're at least 23,000 of them - that they know of - and possibly twice that number.
How do you keep Colorado hikers from falling 300 feet down a mine shaft? Foam.
Since 1980, the Colorado division of mining and the Forest Service have gated and plugged more than 13,000 inactive mines, often using expanding foam
ARAPAHO PASS — The bent and broken tent frame draped with an old tarp is wedged about 10 feet down the mine shaft.
“That will work,” says Brady Kutscher, clipping his harness into a rope wrapped around old machinery at the entrance shaft to the Fourth of July Mine. He leans over the hole and shakes a bag about the size of a carry-on. Inside the bag, chemicals mix with resin, creating an exothermic reaction. Soon the bag is spewing foam into the shaft.
The foam keeps getting thicker as it falls on the tarp. After a few hours of Kutscher’s shake-and-dribble routine, the belching bags of falling foam form a plug that will harden into a permanent cap for the mine shaft.
“Pretty high-tech isn’t it?” contractor Shane Stratton says as he directs his fellow worker’s foamy cascade from the other side of the mine shaft.
The Forest Service and the Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety do not like that mine shaft. They guess it falls about 300 feet down to the mile-long horizontal tunnel below — or adit — of the long abandoned Fourth of July Mine in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
Trez Skillern, the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests’ abandoned mines program manager, says this shaft, with its wide entrance, long drop and proximity to a very popular hiking trail close to the Front Range ranks the Fourth of July Mine as “one of the scariest around.”
Hence the project last week that involved more than a dozen volunteers, officials, workers and nine horses taking three round-trips up the Forest Service’s Arapaho Pass Trail, hauling 150 bags of polyurethane foam 2 miles and 1,000 vertical feet into the wilderness.
After pouring the bags of the quick-hardening foam everyone calls “PUF” into the mine shaft — enough to fill about 50 cubic feet — and covering that foam with a layer of old mining debris, no hiker or animal can fall into the shaft.
“Think of it like a cork in a wine bottle, but we have to build the cork,” says Erica Crosby, senior project manager for the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.
The whole project is all about keeping people from falling into the old mine. (And then trying to sue the Forest Service or state for not properly closing the mines.) It’s part of a mine-shuttering public-safety mission that began in the 1980s and has seen the state and Forest Service close about 13,000 abandoned shafts and tunnels.
The state and Forest Service closed the Fourth of July Mine tunnel in 2018. That involved placing a metal gate on the main adit below the mine shaft and shoveling debris into the shaft. Last summer, a volunteer with the Indian Peaks Trails Alliance notified the agencies that the plug to the mine shaft had collapsed.
An added challenge for the closure project at the mine shaft involves its location in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
If the mine was not inside federal wilderness, the division of mining and the Forest Service would be using helicopters to deliver the foam and maybe even welding a steel gate over the opening to keep people and animals from falling in. But wilderness designation prevents machines, hence the horses.
“We would have been done already if this was with a chopper,” says Cindy McCullom, the Eldora-born owner of McCollum Excavating who started plugging mines for the state and Forest Service decades ago after a career working with helicopters in the Navy.
The “new challenge” for land managers and mine guardians, Skillern says, are the many social media sites and accounts that post about abandoned mines and structures in Colorado.
Those social media posts help the Forest Service and state officials more easily identify and find mines that should be closed. But they also draw more visitors to those sites.
A few years ago, Crosby’s team at the division saw online videos of spelunkers exploring an abandoned mine and were able to identify where the mine was located. They went to the mine to close it and found several more adventurers preparing to explore the mine tunnel. The explorers were very angry at the closure, Crosby said.
“We do some stalking online and they show us some places we need to go in and close,” she says, noting how the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety will soon roll out its own mine safety social media education campaign. “We don’t always like what we see, but we are using it to our advantage.”
BTW - Biden's Infrastructure package includes money for coal mine reclamation, which in turn frees up a good bit of money that can be used to get more of these hazards dealt with.
How do you keep Colorado hikers from falling 300 feet down a mine shaft? Foam.
Since 1980, the Colorado division of mining and the Forest Service have gated and plugged more than 13,000 inactive mines, often using expanding foam
ARAPAHO PASS — The bent and broken tent frame draped with an old tarp is wedged about 10 feet down the mine shaft.
“That will work,” says Brady Kutscher, clipping his harness into a rope wrapped around old machinery at the entrance shaft to the Fourth of July Mine. He leans over the hole and shakes a bag about the size of a carry-on. Inside the bag, chemicals mix with resin, creating an exothermic reaction. Soon the bag is spewing foam into the shaft.
The foam keeps getting thicker as it falls on the tarp. After a few hours of Kutscher’s shake-and-dribble routine, the belching bags of falling foam form a plug that will harden into a permanent cap for the mine shaft.
“Pretty high-tech isn’t it?” contractor Shane Stratton says as he directs his fellow worker’s foamy cascade from the other side of the mine shaft.
To keep people and animals from falling down the 300-foot-deep hole,
Brady Kutscher pours polyurethane foam into the main shaft Tuesday - Indian Peaks Wilderness.
(Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)
The Forest Service and the Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety do not like that mine shaft. They guess it falls about 300 feet down to the mile-long horizontal tunnel below — or adit — of the long abandoned Fourth of July Mine in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
Trez Skillern, the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests’ abandoned mines program manager, says this shaft, with its wide entrance, long drop and proximity to a very popular hiking trail close to the Front Range ranks the Fourth of July Mine as “one of the scariest around.”
Hence the project last week that involved more than a dozen volunteers, officials, workers and nine horses taking three round-trips up the Forest Service’s Arapaho Pass Trail, hauling 150 bags of polyurethane foam 2 miles and 1,000 vertical feet into the wilderness.
After pouring the bags of the quick-hardening foam everyone calls “PUF” into the mine shaft — enough to fill about 50 cubic feet — and covering that foam with a layer of old mining debris, no hiker or animal can fall into the shaft.
“Think of it like a cork in a wine bottle, but we have to build the cork,” says Erica Crosby, senior project manager for the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.
The whole project is all about keeping people from falling into the old mine. (And then trying to sue the Forest Service or state for not properly closing the mines.) It’s part of a mine-shuttering public-safety mission that began in the 1980s and has seen the state and Forest Service close about 13,000 abandoned shafts and tunnels.
The state and Forest Service closed the Fourth of July Mine tunnel in 2018. That involved placing a metal gate on the main adit below the mine shaft and shoveling debris into the shaft. Last summer, a volunteer with the Indian Peaks Trails Alliance notified the agencies that the plug to the mine shaft had collapsed.
An added challenge for the closure project at the mine shaft involves its location in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
If the mine was not inside federal wilderness, the division of mining and the Forest Service would be using helicopters to deliver the foam and maybe even welding a steel gate over the opening to keep people and animals from falling in. But wilderness designation prevents machines, hence the horses.
“We would have been done already if this was with a chopper,” says Cindy McCullom, the Eldora-born owner of McCollum Excavating who started plugging mines for the state and Forest Service decades ago after a career working with helicopters in the Navy.
Miners dug silver ore from the Fourth of July Mine in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s, they switched over to searching for copper. Over the 300-foot mine shaft once stood a timber head frame, where miners and equipment were lowered into the main tunnel. The state has documented about 23,000 abandoned mine shafts and tunnels in Colorado.
“But there’s probably double that,” says Crosby, noting that her division’s Inactive Mine Reclamation Program has safeguarded about 13,000 abandoned mines and structures in Colorado since the inception of the program in 1980, including more than 3,500 in Boulder County.
This wilderness shaft-sealing project price tag is about $42,000, with the Forest Service paying $30,000 of that and the state’s division of mining covering the rest. The new federal infrastructure bill includes funding for coal mine remediation, which could free up money for the state’s effort to close more abandoned hard-rock mines across Colorado, Crosby says.
It usually takes close to three years to identify a mine that should be closed and go through analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, to close it. Since the Forest Service went through NEPA to close the Fourth of July Mine in 2018, the shaft-capping project was approved in only one year. It helps that there were no signs of bats in the mine shaft and bats can still come and go through the mine’s main tunnel down below, which is blocked by the steel-barred gate.
Bats also prefer caves to mines. There are no caves on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests.
The polyurethane foam does not harbor any so-called “forever chemicals,” found in polyfluorinated compounds — or PFAS — that are contaminating water supplies across the world. So the mine-capping foam does not shed dangerous chemicals like, say, PFAS-laden fire-fighting foam. The mine cap is backfilled with four feet of rock and dirt and includes a six-inch pipe to drain standing water into the mine, so surface water “has minimal to no contact” with the foam, Crosby says.
The cap atop the Fourth of July mine shaft is about public safety more than anything else. The Forest Service and state are hyper vigilant to reduce the chance a hiker or pet can fall into an abandoned mine shaft or injure themselves in old mining structures.
Last year a 19-year-old college student was injured after falling 45 feet down an abandoned mine shaft while walking on private land near the Forest Service’s Switzerland Trail in Boulder County on a Saturday night.
In 2016, two teenagers were killed when the truck they were in crashed into an Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests mine shaft in Boulder County around 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The family of one of the teenagers killed sued the federal government, arguing the Forest Service was negligent in closing the mine shaft.
That lawsuit was dismissed and the dismissal upheld by a federal appeals panel in 2020.
The Forest Service and state mining division were able to secure an emergency closure of the mine near Switzerland Trail last year following the several-hour rescue of the student. When the agencies showed up to install a gate on the mine shaft, they turned back people who had seen the news reports about the rescue and showed up with ropes and spelunking gear, Skillern says.
“But there’s probably double that,” says Crosby, noting that her division’s Inactive Mine Reclamation Program has safeguarded about 13,000 abandoned mines and structures in Colorado since the inception of the program in 1980, including more than 3,500 in Boulder County.
This wilderness shaft-sealing project price tag is about $42,000, with the Forest Service paying $30,000 of that and the state’s division of mining covering the rest. The new federal infrastructure bill includes funding for coal mine remediation, which could free up money for the state’s effort to close more abandoned hard-rock mines across Colorado, Crosby says.
It usually takes close to three years to identify a mine that should be closed and go through analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, to close it. Since the Forest Service went through NEPA to close the Fourth of July Mine in 2018, the shaft-capping project was approved in only one year. It helps that there were no signs of bats in the mine shaft and bats can still come and go through the mine’s main tunnel down below, which is blocked by the steel-barred gate.
Bats also prefer caves to mines. There are no caves on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests.
The polyurethane foam does not harbor any so-called “forever chemicals,” found in polyfluorinated compounds — or PFAS — that are contaminating water supplies across the world. So the mine-capping foam does not shed dangerous chemicals like, say, PFAS-laden fire-fighting foam. The mine cap is backfilled with four feet of rock and dirt and includes a six-inch pipe to drain standing water into the mine, so surface water “has minimal to no contact” with the foam, Crosby says.
The cap atop the Fourth of July mine shaft is about public safety more than anything else. The Forest Service and state are hyper vigilant to reduce the chance a hiker or pet can fall into an abandoned mine shaft or injure themselves in old mining structures.
Last year a 19-year-old college student was injured after falling 45 feet down an abandoned mine shaft while walking on private land near the Forest Service’s Switzerland Trail in Boulder County on a Saturday night.
In 2016, two teenagers were killed when the truck they were in crashed into an Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests mine shaft in Boulder County around 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The family of one of the teenagers killed sued the federal government, arguing the Forest Service was negligent in closing the mine shaft.
That lawsuit was dismissed and the dismissal upheld by a federal appeals panel in 2020.
The Forest Service and state mining division were able to secure an emergency closure of the mine near Switzerland Trail last year following the several-hour rescue of the student. When the agencies showed up to install a gate on the mine shaft, they turned back people who had seen the news reports about the rescue and showed up with ropes and spelunking gear, Skillern says.
The “new challenge” for land managers and mine guardians, Skillern says, are the many social media sites and accounts that post about abandoned mines and structures in Colorado.
Those social media posts help the Forest Service and state officials more easily identify and find mines that should be closed. But they also draw more visitors to those sites.
A few years ago, Crosby’s team at the division saw online videos of spelunkers exploring an abandoned mine and were able to identify where the mine was located. They went to the mine to close it and found several more adventurers preparing to explore the mine tunnel. The explorers were very angry at the closure, Crosby said.
“We do some stalking online and they show us some places we need to go in and close,” she says, noting how the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety will soon roll out its own mine safety social media education campaign. “We don’t always like what we see, but we are using it to our advantage.”
These Plutocrats
Somehow, rich people get the idea in their heads that they can do whatever they want and no matter the consequences for everybody else, they'll always be insulated to a point where the world of shit they create won't have a negative impact on them.
And there can be no better illustration of that than their apparent assumption that when things get too shitty on this planet, their money can either provide a safe and cozy little cocoon, or whisk them away to the next paradise.
The super-rich ‘preppers’ are planning to save themselves from the apocalypse
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?
Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.
A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.
The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.
They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its ow
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.
Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.
Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.
By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.
Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management”.
But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “It’s quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to ‘treat those people really well, right now’, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.”
He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”
Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.
JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”
JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”
The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.
On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”
That’s why JC’s real passion wasn’t just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”
JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.
There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.
On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.
Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.
Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?
But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.
That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?
Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.
Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences
As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don’t usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what’s left of the internet, much less civilisation?
Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That’s how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as “ultra-wealthy stakeholders”, out in the middle of the desert.
A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.
The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.
They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its ow
I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don’t just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.
This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.
Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.
What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.
Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.
Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.
Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.
Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.
By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.
Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of “risk management”.
But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. “You certainly stirred up a bees’ nest,” he began his first email to me. “It’s quite accurate – the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams… I believe you are correct with your advice to ‘treat those people really well, right now’, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.”
He felt certain that the “event” – a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident –was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. “By coincidence,” he explained, “I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an ‘event’ and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours’ drive from the city – close enough to get there when it happens.”
Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now – while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.
JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and “works well as long as the thin blue line is working”. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. “The fewer people who know the locations, the better,” he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a family’s bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. “The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.”
JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. “Wear boots,” he said. “The ground is still wet.” Then he asked: “Do you shoot?”
The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. “The only way to protect your family is with a group,” he said. That was really the whole point of his project – to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadn’t prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.
On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the “layered security” protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, “no trespassing” signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras … all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. “Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.”
That’s why JC’s real passion wasn’t just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The “just-in-time” delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. “Most egg farmers can’t even raise chickens,” JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. “They buy chicks. I’ve got roosters.”
JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.
So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.
Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.
There’s something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires – or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires – actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.
On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.
Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesn’t seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.
Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?
But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldn’t have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.
That’s because it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?
Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something they’re trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindset’s true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.
This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Sep 8, 2022
Both Sides Don't
It is a little odd that he's not more adamant about it - like he's only recently heard about these rabid idiots, and he's not quite made up his mind yet.
Opinion
The hidden danger posed by a MAGA takeover of the House
With Republicans favored to win the House, you’re already hearing a mind-numbing refrain: Once in the majority, Republicans plan to pursue “retribution” against President Biden and Democrats. How? By launching all kinds of investigations as payback on Donald Trump’s behalf.
This idea is already getting reproduced uncritically by major news organizations. The result is to create the impression that Republicans are merely telegraphing plans for some conventional political tit-for-tat.
But that obfuscates what is more likely the real story: Republicans are pre-fabricating a fake rationale to abuse their investigative powers in a way that isn’t remotely comparable to anything Democrats are doing. Such GOP spin deserves much more serious skepticism.
This reality is pressed on us by a new report in the New York Times that documents just how extreme some of this cycle’s House GOP candidates are.
As the Times notes, any GOP majority will probably be narrower than appeared likely earlier this year. A slim majority — plus the fact that the Trump-loyal America First Caucus is likely to grow — means GOP leaders will struggle to control their ranks. The Times hints at government shutdowns, debt-ceiling defaults and impeachments of everyone from the president down to (who knows?) even the aide who oversees the White House Easter egg hunt.
But the threat of a MAGA House takeover is even worse than this. That’s because a MAGA-fied House will have another, underdiscussed tactic at its disposal: using its fiscal and investigative powers to try to defund or hobble any and all investigations and prosecutions involving Trump.
How might this work? Here’s one way: A GOP majority could reinstate an obscure House rule permitting Republicans to use spending bills to zero out salaries of specific federal officials, or nix blocks of federal employees, functionally killing specific programs.
For instance, it might attempt to kill the salary of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Or it could try to defund — or cancel — any ongoing law enforcement investigations of Trump.
We need to distinguish this tactic from defunding the FBI, which GOP members such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have demanded. In a more MAGA-fied House, that effort might find support, but most Republicans probably wouldn’t back a wholesale dismantling of federal law enforcement.
By contrast, a more targeted attempt to defund specific officials or investigations could be harder for voters to understand and thus more politically inviting for Republicans.
“It is likely that they would use this process to block investigations and prosecutions of Trump,” congressional scholar Norm Ornstein told me. Indeed, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) recently floated exactly this idea. It’s being talked about. It’s real.
Obviously, such an effort would be opposed by the White House and the Senate (if Democrats keep it). But a faction of House Republicans could threaten to shut down the government while demanding those targeted cuts protecting Trump, Ornstein says.
Even worse, they could use debt-ceiling fights to try to leverage those Trump-protecting cuts. “They could say, ‘We’ll let this whole country go into default unless you stop all these probes of Trump,’” Ornstein told me.
This becomes harder to avoid when you look at GOP candidates likely to win House seats. As the Times details, they include numerous people who are already vowing to use their powers to continue contesting Trump’s 2020 loss with sham investigations, among other tactics.
Here’s another threat: Such Republicans might try to influence the 2024 election. If a corrupt GOP governor were to take over a swing state — say, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and were to certify electors for Trump or an imitator in defiance of the popular vote, a House GOP majority in thrall to Trump could count those electors. Without reform of the Electoral Count Act, that would mean chaos.
A lot will turn on whether as speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would defy the Trumpist bloc and seek majorities with Democrats. Ornstein’s view: “McCarthy won’t do anything to block or counter the crazies.”
There will be a strong temptation to treat these threats as the tea party redux. While crazed opposition to President Barack Obama drove that era’s chaos, it was aimed at discernible policy goals such as repealing Obamacare or forcing spending cuts. This time will be different.
The threats of chaos won’t be about realizing fiscal priorities in any meaningful sense; they will more likely be cultishly devoted to preserving one man’s absolute impunity. A sizable bloc of House Republicans may well see it as a higher mission to put Trump beyond the reach of accountability and above the law.
With the House Jan. 6 select committee, Democrats are running a legitimate congressional investigation into Trump’s incitement of a mob assault on the U.S. seat of government. The Justice Department search warrant for Mar-a-Lago followed lawful processes and was approved by a judge.
If and when GOP plans in response come into sharper focus, let’s not uncritically describe this as “revenge” or “retribution.” Such words take it as given that GOP conduct will be in some meaningful sense retaliatory for — or even equivalent to — those actions, as if everything is political all the way down, and we can’t ever distinguish between good-faith government conduct and flagrant bad-faith abuses of power.
There’s no reason to capitulate in advance to that framing.
(pay wall)
Opinion
The hidden danger posed by a MAGA takeover of the House
With Republicans favored to win the House, you’re already hearing a mind-numbing refrain: Once in the majority, Republicans plan to pursue “retribution” against President Biden and Democrats. How? By launching all kinds of investigations as payback on Donald Trump’s behalf.
This idea is already getting reproduced uncritically by major news organizations. The result is to create the impression that Republicans are merely telegraphing plans for some conventional political tit-for-tat.
But that obfuscates what is more likely the real story: Republicans are pre-fabricating a fake rationale to abuse their investigative powers in a way that isn’t remotely comparable to anything Democrats are doing. Such GOP spin deserves much more serious skepticism.
This reality is pressed on us by a new report in the New York Times that documents just how extreme some of this cycle’s House GOP candidates are.
As the Times notes, any GOP majority will probably be narrower than appeared likely earlier this year. A slim majority — plus the fact that the Trump-loyal America First Caucus is likely to grow — means GOP leaders will struggle to control their ranks. The Times hints at government shutdowns, debt-ceiling defaults and impeachments of everyone from the president down to (who knows?) even the aide who oversees the White House Easter egg hunt.
But the threat of a MAGA House takeover is even worse than this. That’s because a MAGA-fied House will have another, underdiscussed tactic at its disposal: using its fiscal and investigative powers to try to defund or hobble any and all investigations and prosecutions involving Trump.
How might this work? Here’s one way: A GOP majority could reinstate an obscure House rule permitting Republicans to use spending bills to zero out salaries of specific federal officials, or nix blocks of federal employees, functionally killing specific programs.
For instance, it might attempt to kill the salary of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Or it could try to defund — or cancel — any ongoing law enforcement investigations of Trump.
We need to distinguish this tactic from defunding the FBI, which GOP members such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have demanded. In a more MAGA-fied House, that effort might find support, but most Republicans probably wouldn’t back a wholesale dismantling of federal law enforcement.
By contrast, a more targeted attempt to defund specific officials or investigations could be harder for voters to understand and thus more politically inviting for Republicans.
“It is likely that they would use this process to block investigations and prosecutions of Trump,” congressional scholar Norm Ornstein told me. Indeed, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) recently floated exactly this idea. It’s being talked about. It’s real.
Obviously, such an effort would be opposed by the White House and the Senate (if Democrats keep it). But a faction of House Republicans could threaten to shut down the government while demanding those targeted cuts protecting Trump, Ornstein says.
Even worse, they could use debt-ceiling fights to try to leverage those Trump-protecting cuts. “They could say, ‘We’ll let this whole country go into default unless you stop all these probes of Trump,’” Ornstein told me.
This becomes harder to avoid when you look at GOP candidates likely to win House seats. As the Times details, they include numerous people who are already vowing to use their powers to continue contesting Trump’s 2020 loss with sham investigations, among other tactics.
Here’s another threat: Such Republicans might try to influence the 2024 election. If a corrupt GOP governor were to take over a swing state — say, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — and were to certify electors for Trump or an imitator in defiance of the popular vote, a House GOP majority in thrall to Trump could count those electors. Without reform of the Electoral Count Act, that would mean chaos.
A lot will turn on whether as speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would defy the Trumpist bloc and seek majorities with Democrats. Ornstein’s view: “McCarthy won’t do anything to block or counter the crazies.”
There will be a strong temptation to treat these threats as the tea party redux. While crazed opposition to President Barack Obama drove that era’s chaos, it was aimed at discernible policy goals such as repealing Obamacare or forcing spending cuts. This time will be different.
The threats of chaos won’t be about realizing fiscal priorities in any meaningful sense; they will more likely be cultishly devoted to preserving one man’s absolute impunity. A sizable bloc of House Republicans may well see it as a higher mission to put Trump beyond the reach of accountability and above the law.
With the House Jan. 6 select committee, Democrats are running a legitimate congressional investigation into Trump’s incitement of a mob assault on the U.S. seat of government. The Justice Department search warrant for Mar-a-Lago followed lawful processes and was approved by a judge.
If and when GOP plans in response come into sharper focus, let’s not uncritically describe this as “revenge” or “retribution.” Such words take it as given that GOP conduct will be in some meaningful sense retaliatory for — or even equivalent to — those actions, as if everything is political all the way down, and we can’t ever distinguish between good-faith government conduct and flagrant bad-faith abuses of power.
There’s no reason to capitulate in advance to that framing.
It's Coming
Remember: Every time we hear about someone worrying over the loss of tax revenues, we have to look at who's doing the worrying.
Rising seas could swallow millions of U.S. acres within decades
New research finds an estimated 25,000 properties in Louisiana could slip below tidal boundary lines by 2050. Florida, Texas and North Carolina also face profound economic risks.
The water is coming.
There’s no longer much doubt about that, as scientists have increasingly documented how the warming of the planet has accelerated sea level rise along coasts around the world.
But a new analysis published Thursday by the research nonprofit Climate Central reveals a troubling dimension of the economic toll that could unfold in the United States, as hundreds of thousands of homes, offices and other privately owned properties slip below swelling tide lines over the next few decades.
Here are five takeaways from the research about the people and places that stand to lose most, the likely ripple effects and reasons the world must cut its emissions of greenhouse gases in order to eventually stem the rising waters:
1. Sea level rise will shift coastlines — and property lines
Researchers at Climate Central took scientific data on projected sea level rise, as well as information about state tidal boundaries, and combined that with records on more than 50 million individual properties across hundreds of U.S. counties to identify parcels most likely at risk.
Their conclusion: Nearly 650,000 individual, privately owned parcels, across as many as 4.4 million acres of land, are projected to fall below changing tidal boundaries by 2050. The land affected could swell to 9.1 million acres by 2100. According to Thursday’s analysis, properties with a collective assessed value of $108 billion could be affected by the end of the century, based on current emissions. But, the authors noted, because complete property values were not available for all counties, the actual total is likely to be far higher.
The changes also could come gradually at first, then quickly. In many communities, the authors wrote, structures are clustered in areas that historically are on safe ground. But once rising seas reach those densely developed elevations, “the number of affected buildings sharply increases.”
“As the sea is rising, tide lines are moving up elevation, upslope and inland,” said Don Bain, a senior adviser at Climate Central and an expert in sea level rise, who led the analysis. “People really haven’t internalized that yet — that ‘Hey, I’m going to have something taken away from me by the sea.’ ”
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The Florida Department of Environmental Protection reported that almost all of Sand Key, a 14-mile stretch of Pinellas County coast from Clearwater Pass to John’s Pass, is critically eroded. (Luis Santana/AP)
2. The Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast stand to lose most
It’s no surprise that Louisiana, where the seas are swelling and land is sinking, faces a daunting loss of property in the years to come.
The Climate Central analysis estimated that more than 25,000 properties, totaling nearly 2.5 million acres in the state, could fall wholly below tidal boundary lines by 2050 — a number that far exceeds any other place in the nation. That would amount to 8.7 percent of Louisiana’s total land area, the report found.
But other states also appear to face widespread threats. The top three at risk behind Louisiana are Florida, North Carolina and Texas, all of which have large swaths of low-lying, imperiled coastlines.
While property across the Southeast might face the most collective risk, other states also have reason for concern. New Jersey and New York, for instance, also stand to see thousands of properties fall below tidelines in coming decades. Same for Maryland, which the researchers project could see more than 2,500 buildings impacted.
The impacts of sea level rise already are evident, as some communities face the prospect of retreat and a growing number grapple with nuisance or “sunny day” flooding.
Eventually, such issues will “transition from something that’s rare to becoming something that’s normal,” said William Sweet, an oceanographer and sea level rise expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service.
3. It’s not just about flooded homes. It’s about eroding tax bases.
The loss of homes and other properties — especially those along the waterfront — isn’t just a tragedy for owners. It is a surefire way to erode the revenue municipal governments need to operate.
“Ultimately, this is a local problem and a local story,” Bain said. “We finance local government through our property taxes.”
If sea levels continue to rise unabated, that poses more than just a problem to beaches and condos that line the coasts. It eventually will translate into fewer taxable properties, and less money to fund schools and fire departments, fix roads, maintain sewers and provide other essential services.
“Diminished property values and a smaller tax base can lead to lower tax revenues and reduced public services — a potential downward spiral of disinvestment and population decline, reduced tax base and public services, and so on,” Thursday’s analysis found.
4. The potential ripple effects are vast
Eroding tax bases are a big problem. But hardly the only one. The study also found a litany of other complications that likely will result as sea levels inch higher and higher.
“The legal and political ramifications of these changes are complex, and will likely vary among locations,” the analysis found. “Those ramifications extend well beyond loss of tax revenue as property owners object to paying taxes on submerged land.”
Beyond those initial shocks, municipalities and individuals will also be forced to confront the significant costs for removing inundated structures and flooded septic tanks. Governments could be on the hook for properties that get abandoned, adding additional expenses not covered by their budgets.
But even before then, communities already are wrestling with the need to repair streets and roads damaged by flooding, as well as overwhelmed or outdated sewer and water systems. “How city and county management teams respond to these risks, or if they respond at all, is material to the city’s and county’s future ability to repay debt and protect its credit rating,” the authors wrote.
5. The future is not (entirely) set in stone
The world’s foremost scientists have found that given the carbon built up in the atmosphere after generations of burning fossil fuels, the rate of sea level rise is increasing and will continue over the next several decades.
Those findings are in line with a major report earlier this year from the NOAA, which found that sea levels could rise along U.S. coastlines by roughly a foot between now and 2050 — roughly as much change over the next three decades as over the past century.
“That trajectory appears somewhat set,” said Sweet, who was not involved in Thursday’s study.
What remains undetermined is how communities across the United States prepare for the changes they know are coming, and what this country and others do to slow the heating of the planet.
“If we get our act together, we can get to a lower curve, and that buys us time,” Bain said. “We don’t want [seas] rising so fast that it outpaces our capacity to adapt.”
Sweet said having access to reliable data hopefully gives public officials and individuals information they need “so they can make the smart choices to best defend and prepare against rising seas” — from shoring up infrastructure to making thoughtful decisions about development.
But ultimately, he said, the world must act in concert to make sure the problem doesn’t grow worse indefinitely.
“Emissions matter, especially as we get beyond the next 20 or 30 years,” Sweet said. “You reduce emissions, you reduce your likelihood of higher sea levels.”
If there's a city manager or a county executive talking about having to find ways to fund the local cops and the new elementary school, that's one thing.
But if it's somebody with a bug up his ass about "starving the beast", then watch the fuck out.
Rising seas could swallow millions of U.S. acres within decades
New research finds an estimated 25,000 properties in Louisiana could slip below tidal boundary lines by 2050. Florida, Texas and North Carolina also face profound economic risks.
The water is coming.
There’s no longer much doubt about that, as scientists have increasingly documented how the warming of the planet has accelerated sea level rise along coasts around the world.
But a new analysis published Thursday by the research nonprofit Climate Central reveals a troubling dimension of the economic toll that could unfold in the United States, as hundreds of thousands of homes, offices and other privately owned properties slip below swelling tide lines over the next few decades.
Here are five takeaways from the research about the people and places that stand to lose most, the likely ripple effects and reasons the world must cut its emissions of greenhouse gases in order to eventually stem the rising waters:
1. Sea level rise will shift coastlines — and property lines
Researchers at Climate Central took scientific data on projected sea level rise, as well as information about state tidal boundaries, and combined that with records on more than 50 million individual properties across hundreds of U.S. counties to identify parcels most likely at risk.
Their conclusion: Nearly 650,000 individual, privately owned parcels, across as many as 4.4 million acres of land, are projected to fall below changing tidal boundaries by 2050. The land affected could swell to 9.1 million acres by 2100. According to Thursday’s analysis, properties with a collective assessed value of $108 billion could be affected by the end of the century, based on current emissions. But, the authors noted, because complete property values were not available for all counties, the actual total is likely to be far higher.
The changes also could come gradually at first, then quickly. In many communities, the authors wrote, structures are clustered in areas that historically are on safe ground. But once rising seas reach those densely developed elevations, “the number of affected buildings sharply increases.”
“As the sea is rising, tide lines are moving up elevation, upslope and inland,” said Don Bain, a senior adviser at Climate Central and an expert in sea level rise, who led the analysis. “People really haven’t internalized that yet — that ‘Hey, I’m going to have something taken away from me by the sea.’ ”
2. The Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast stand to lose most
It’s no surprise that Louisiana, where the seas are swelling and land is sinking, faces a daunting loss of property in the years to come.
The Climate Central analysis estimated that more than 25,000 properties, totaling nearly 2.5 million acres in the state, could fall wholly below tidal boundary lines by 2050 — a number that far exceeds any other place in the nation. That would amount to 8.7 percent of Louisiana’s total land area, the report found.
But other states also appear to face widespread threats. The top three at risk behind Louisiana are Florida, North Carolina and Texas, all of which have large swaths of low-lying, imperiled coastlines.
While property across the Southeast might face the most collective risk, other states also have reason for concern. New Jersey and New York, for instance, also stand to see thousands of properties fall below tidelines in coming decades. Same for Maryland, which the researchers project could see more than 2,500 buildings impacted.
The impacts of sea level rise already are evident, as some communities face the prospect of retreat and a growing number grapple with nuisance or “sunny day” flooding.
Eventually, such issues will “transition from something that’s rare to becoming something that’s normal,” said William Sweet, an oceanographer and sea level rise expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service.
3. It’s not just about flooded homes. It’s about eroding tax bases.
The loss of homes and other properties — especially those along the waterfront — isn’t just a tragedy for owners. It is a surefire way to erode the revenue municipal governments need to operate.
“Ultimately, this is a local problem and a local story,” Bain said. “We finance local government through our property taxes.”
If sea levels continue to rise unabated, that poses more than just a problem to beaches and condos that line the coasts. It eventually will translate into fewer taxable properties, and less money to fund schools and fire departments, fix roads, maintain sewers and provide other essential services.
“Diminished property values and a smaller tax base can lead to lower tax revenues and reduced public services — a potential downward spiral of disinvestment and population decline, reduced tax base and public services, and so on,” Thursday’s analysis found.
4. The potential ripple effects are vast
Eroding tax bases are a big problem. But hardly the only one. The study also found a litany of other complications that likely will result as sea levels inch higher and higher.
“The legal and political ramifications of these changes are complex, and will likely vary among locations,” the analysis found. “Those ramifications extend well beyond loss of tax revenue as property owners object to paying taxes on submerged land.”
Beyond those initial shocks, municipalities and individuals will also be forced to confront the significant costs for removing inundated structures and flooded septic tanks. Governments could be on the hook for properties that get abandoned, adding additional expenses not covered by their budgets.
But even before then, communities already are wrestling with the need to repair streets and roads damaged by flooding, as well as overwhelmed or outdated sewer and water systems. “How city and county management teams respond to these risks, or if they respond at all, is material to the city’s and county’s future ability to repay debt and protect its credit rating,” the authors wrote.
5. The future is not (entirely) set in stone
The world’s foremost scientists have found that given the carbon built up in the atmosphere after generations of burning fossil fuels, the rate of sea level rise is increasing and will continue over the next several decades.
Those findings are in line with a major report earlier this year from the NOAA, which found that sea levels could rise along U.S. coastlines by roughly a foot between now and 2050 — roughly as much change over the next three decades as over the past century.
“That trajectory appears somewhat set,” said Sweet, who was not involved in Thursday’s study.
What remains undetermined is how communities across the United States prepare for the changes they know are coming, and what this country and others do to slow the heating of the planet.
“If we get our act together, we can get to a lower curve, and that buys us time,” Bain said. “We don’t want [seas] rising so fast that it outpaces our capacity to adapt.”
Sweet said having access to reliable data hopefully gives public officials and individuals information they need “so they can make the smart choices to best defend and prepare against rising seas” — from shoring up infrastructure to making thoughtful decisions about development.
But ultimately, he said, the world must act in concert to make sure the problem doesn’t grow worse indefinitely.
“Emissions matter, especially as we get beyond the next 20 or 30 years,” Sweet said. “You reduce emissions, you reduce your likelihood of higher sea levels.”
Ukraine
And when the inevitable blame wave starts - with Republicans trying to tell us that the whole problem lies with Biden's energy policies - let's be sure to smack those idiots right in the face with a reminder that Vladimir Putin decided to invade his neighbor, and that's what started this whole fucking mess.
Ukraine didn't invade themselves - they weren't asking for it - Biden didn't "lose Ukraine" by making wrong moves - or any of the other bullshit they're going to throw against the wall.
Putin made the decision. He invaded Ukraine believing he had all the leverage he needed to coerce the rest of us into letting him Make Russia Great Again.
Let's also remember that if we hadn't allowed ourselves to get hornswoggled into being dependent on Dirty Fuels, a pimp like Vladimir Putin wouldn't be trying to play that energy card in the first fuckin' place.
(pay wall)
Shock Waves Hit the Global Economy, Posing Grave Risk to Europe
The threat to Europe’s industrial might and living standards is particularly acute as policymakers race to decouple the continent from Russia’s power sources.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the continuing effects of the pandemic have hobbled countries around the globe, but the relentless series of crises has hit Europe the hardest, causing the steepest jump in energy prices, some of the highest inflation rates and the biggest risk of recession.
The fallout from the war is menacing the continent with what some fear could become its most challenging economic and financial crisis in decades.
While growth is slowing worldwide, “in Europe it’s altogether more serious because it’s driven by a more fundamental deterioration,” said Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics. Real incomes and living standards are falling, he added. “Europe and Britain are just worse off.”
Several countries, including Germany, the region’s largest economy, built up a decades-long dependence on Russian energy. The eightfold increase in natural gas prices since the war began presents a historic threat to Europe’s industrial might, living standards, and social peace and cohesion. Plans for factory closings, rolling blackouts and rationing are being drawn up in case of severe shortages this winter.
The risk of sinking incomes, growing inequality and rising social tensions could lead “not only to a fractured society but a fractured world,” said Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at Oxford University. “We haven’t faced anything like this since the 1970s, and it’s not ending soon.”
Other regions of the world are also being squeezed, although some of the causes — and prospects — differ.
Higher interest rates, which are being deployed aggressively to quell inflation, are trimming consumer spending and growth in the United States. Still, the American labor market remains strong, and the economy is moving forward.
China, a powerful engine of global growth and a major market for European exports like cars, machinery and food, is facing its own set of problems. Beijing’s policy of continuing to freeze all activity during Covid-19 outbreaks has repeatedly paralyzed large swaths of the economy and added to worldwide supply chain disruptions. In the last few weeks alone, dozens of cities and more than 300 million people have been under full or partial lockdowns. Extreme heat and drought have hamstrung hydropower generation, forcing additional factory closings and rolling blackouts.
A troubled real estate market has added to the economic instability in China. Hundreds of thousands of people are refusing to pay their mortgages because they have lost confidence that developers will ever deliver their unfinished housing units. Trade with the rest of the world took a hit in August, and overall economic growth, although likely to outrun rates in the United States and Europe, looks as if it will slip to its slowest pace in a decade this year. The prospect has prompted China’s central bank to cut interest rates in hopes of stimulating the economy.
“The global economy is undoubtedly slowing,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at the global consulting firm EY- Parthenon, but it’s “happening at different speeds.”
In other parts of the world, countries that are able to supply vital materials and goods — particularly energy producers in the Middle East and North Africa — are seeing windfall gains.
And India and Indonesia are growing at unexpectedly fast paces as domestic demand increases and multinational companies look to vary their supply chains. Vietnam, too, is benefiting as manufacturers switch operations to its shores.
Even so, China, the eurozone and the United States together account for roughly two-thirds of the planet’s economic activity, and if those powerhouses all slow down, it will be hard for any country to remain insulated from the fallout.
Poorer people, who spend much more of their total incomes on food and energy, are being hit hardest.
In Europe, anxiety about frigid living rooms, shuttered production lines and head-spinning energy bills this winter ratcheted up this week after Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy company, declared it would not resume the flow of natural gas through its Nord Stream 1 pipeline until Europe lifted Ukraine-related sanctions.
Daily average electricity prices in Western Europe have reached record levels, according to Rystad Energy, surging past 600 euros ($599) per megawatt-hour in Germany and €700 in France, with peak-hour rates as high as €1,500.
In the Czech Republic, roughly 70,000 angry protesters, many with links to far-right groups, gathered in Wenceslas Square in Prague this past weekend to demonstrate against soaring energy bills.
The German, French and Finnish governments have already stepped in to save domestic power companies from bankruptcy. Even so, Uniper, which is based in Germany and one of Europe’s largest natural gas buyers and suppliers, said last week that it was losing more than €100 million a day because of the rise in prices.
The European Commission, which has scheduled an emergency meeting of energy ministers for Friday, is calling for a cap on wholesale gas prices and an overhaul of how electricity is priced. And in recent days, Germany, Sweden, France and Britain all announced sweeping billion-dollar relief programs to ease the strain on households and businesses, along with rationing and conservation plans.
The cost of all these measures would be enormous, at a time when government debt levels are already staggering. The worry about perilously high debt prompted the International Monetary Fund this week to issue a proposal to reform the European Union’s framework for government public spending and deficits.
Still, a pitiless and unyielding reality remains: a lack of energy that countries can afford.
At current prices, there is simply not enough to produce the steel, lumber, microchips, glass, cotton, plastic, chemicals and electricity that go into making the food, home heat, garage doors, tampons, bicycles, baby formula, wine glasses and more that consumers want.
The root of the shortage predates the Ukraine war.
Commodity prices started rising in 2020 as countries began emerging from pandemic restrictions, noted Sven Smit, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. In the United States alone, consumers were, in effect, buying $1 trillion more goods than expected, based on spending patterns before coronavirus hit.
And the sudden switch in spending on products like new kitchen tiles and cars rather than services like restaurant dining and entertainment added to the problem because more energy and materials are needed to make them.
There is a “depleted supply chain,” more than a broken one, Mr. Smit said. “This is a physical crisis rather than a psychological crisis,” which is different from those that most people remember.
In the past, “you got scared of something, you stopped spending, and then you got more comfortable and spending came back,” Mr. Smit said. “That’s not what’s happening right now. To solve this puzzle, we have to restore supply.”
That puzzle is complicated by the need to produce energy that not only is quickly available and affordable, but also won’t aggravate the calamitous climate change already endangering the planet.
Achieving that goal will take years, rather than months.
In the short term, a limit on energy prices could offer struggling households and businesses relief, but economists are concerned that caps blunt the incentive to reduce energy consumption — the chief goal in a world of shortages.
Central banks in the West are expected to keep raising interest rates to make borrowing more expensive and force down inflation. On Thursday, the European Central Bank raised interest rates by three-quarters of a point, matching its biggest increase ever. The U.S. Federal Reserve is likely to do the same when it meets this month. The Bank of England has taken a similar position.
The worry is that the vigorous push to bring down prices will plunge economies into recessions. Higher interest rates alone won’t bring down the price of oil and gas — except by crashing economies so much that demand is severely reduced. Many analysts are already predicting a recession in Germany, Italy and the rest of the eurozone before the end of the year. For poor and emerging countries, higher interest rates mean more debt and less money to spend on the most vulnerable.
“I think we’re living through the biggest development disaster in history, with more people being pushed more quickly into dire poverty than has every happened before,” said Mr. Goldin, the Oxford professor. “It’s a particularly perilous time for the world economy.”
Today's Yikes
And remember how Trump has been whining about "Biden's politicized DOJ", which lines up very neatly with:
Daddy State Awareness, Rule 1
Every accusation is a confession
Also - don't ever forget what a slimy ball of partly congealed pig snot Bill Barr is.
(pay wall)
Trump Pushed Officials to Prosecute His Critics, Ex-U.S. Attorney Says
Geoffrey S. Berman, who headed the Manhattan office, says in a book the Justice Department pushed cases, against John Kerry and others, to help Mr. Trump.
A book by a former top federal prosecutor offers new details about how the Justice Department under President Donald J. Trump sought to use the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics — even pushing the office to open a criminal investigation of former secretary of state John Kerry.
The prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for two and a half years until June 2020, when Mr. Trump fired him after he refused a request to resign by Attorney General William P. Barr, who sought to replace him with an administration ally.
A copy of Mr. Berman’s book, “Holding the Line,” was obtained by The New York Times before its scheduled publication Tuesday.
The book paints a picture of Justice Department officials motivated by partisan concerns in pursuing investigations or blocking them; in weighing how forthright to be in court filings; and in shopping investigations to other prosecutors’ offices when the Southern District declined to act.
The book contains accounts of how department officials tried to have allusions to Mr. Trump scrubbed from charging papers for Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, and how the attorney general later tried to have his conviction reversed. It tells of pressure to pursue Mr. Kerry, who had angered Mr. Trump by attempting to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.
And in September 2018, Mr. Berman writes, two months before the November midterms, a senior department official called Mr. Berman’s deputy, cited the Southern District’s recent prosecutions of two prominent Trump loyalists, and bluntly asserted that the office, which had been investigating Gregory B. Craig, a powerful Democratic lawyer, should charge him — and should do so before Election Day.
“It’s time for you guys to even things out,” the official said, according to Mr. Berman.
The book comes as Mr. Trump and his supporters have accused the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland of using the Justice Department as a weapon after a judge authorized FBI agents to search his Florida house for missing classified records. Mr. Trump, who is a likely presidential candidate in 2024, has suggested without evidence that President Biden is playing a role in that investigation.
However, Mr. Berman’s book says that during Mr. Trump’s presidency, department officials made “overtly political” demands, choosing targets that would directly further Mr. Trump’s desires for revenge and advantage. Mr. Berman wrote that the pressure was clearly inspired by the president’s openly professed wants.
In the book, Mr. Berman, who as U.S. attorney did not give news interviews, offers new details about the high-profile prosecutions of defendants like Mr. Cohen; Chris Collins, a Republican congressman from New York; Michael Avenatti, the celebrity attorney and Trump antagonist; and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.
He says there were cases his office pursued without pressure from Washington, but in others, he makes clear his greatest challenges did not always have to do with the law.
“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Mr. Berman, 62, writes, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”
“I walked this tightrope for two and a half years,” writes Mr. Berman, who is now in private practice. “Eventually, the rope snapped.”
Mr. Berman, who in the book describes himself as a Rockefeller Republican, had been a federal prosecutor in the Manhattan office from 1990 to 1994, and went on to become a co-managing partner of the New Jersey office of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.
During the 2016 presidential primary season, Mr. Berman volunteered for Mr. Trump’s campaign and later for his transition committee. Originally believing he might be named U.S. attorney for New Jersey, he was instead tapped to lead the Southern District, the most prestigious prosecutor’s office outside Washington. It handles Wall Street crime, international terrorism, political corruption and complex frauds.
Mr. Berman met briefly with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in June 2017, where the president did most of the talking, he writes. Mr. Berman, a Princeton resident, said he would need to move into the city. Mr. Trump recommended he live in downtown Manhattan, near the Southern District’s offices, ahead of what could be a dicey confirmation hearing.
“Make it a rental,” Mr. Trump said.
In March 2018, some two months after Mr. Berman assumed the post, the Justice Department, then headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, referred to the Southern District the investigation of Mr. Craig.
The allegations focused on whether Mr. Craig, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, had concealed work he had done years earlier for the government of Ukraine in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and whether he had lied to the Justice Department when questioned about it.
After months of investigation, the Southern District and Justice Department met with Mr. Craig’s lawyers, who made a presentation on his behalf. After his lawyers left and prosecutors voiced their opinions, Mr. Berman said he believed Mr. Craig was innocent of the FARA charge and so a jury would be unlikely to convict him on a false statement count.
A short time later, around mid-September, Mr. Berman writes, his deputy, Robert S. Khuzami, walked into his office and said he had just gotten a call from Edward O’Callaghan, the principal associate deputy attorney general, a political appointee. Mr. O’Callaghan, the book says, asked that the office “even things out” by charging Mr. Craig before Election Day.
In that conversation, Mr. Berman writes, Mr. O’Callaghan kept reminding Mr. Khuzami that the Southern District had just prosecuted Representative Collins and Mr. Cohen.
Mr. O’Callaghan said in a brief interview Wednesday that he had not read the book, but after being told by The Times of the statements attributed to him, called them “categorically false.”
Mr. Berman says he ignored the edict.
In mid-December, after a thorough investigation, Mr. Berman informed the department that his office was declining to prosecute Mr. Craig. He writes that he soon learned that the department had “peddled” the case to the U.S. attorney in Washington, where Mr. Craig was eventually indicted and tried on a single count of making false statements.
On Sept. 4, 2019, Mr. Craig was acquitted by the jury in less than five hours.
One of his lawyers, William W. Taylor III, said after the trial that the department had “hounded” his client “without any evidence and without any purpose.”
Mr. Berman writes: “The verdict felt like justice. Greg Craig should never have been prosecuted.”
One case Mr. Berman says his office had to fight to keep alive was the 2018 prosecution of Mr. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer. That August, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations over payments he arranged before the 2016 election, to keep two women from disclosing affairs they said they had with Mr. Trump. Mr. Berman did not participate in the investigation, because he had volunteered for the campaign. But he was later briefed on interference in the case.
Before the plea, Mr. Berman writes, as his office was preparing a charging document detailing the crimes, a Justice Department official badgered his deputy, Mr. Khuzami, without success, to remove all references to a person identified as “Individual-1.” It was Mr. Trump.
In the months after Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea, Mr. Berman writes, the Southern District continued to pursue investigations related to possible campaign finance violations, apparently by others in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
But after Mr. Barr became attorney general in February 2019, Mr. Berman writes, he tried to kill the investigations and suggested that Mr. Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed, even though six months had passed since Mr. Cohen had entered his guilty plea.
In late February, he writes, Mr. Barr summoned the Southern District deputy, Mr. Khuzami, who was overseeing the inquiry, to challenge the legal basis for Mr. Cohen’s plea and “the reasoning behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals.”
His office was ordered to pause all investigative steps, Mr. Berman writes. “Not a single document in our possession could be reviewed,” he says. Mr. Barr assigned the department’s Office of Legal Counsel to study the issue.
Mr. Berman says his office submitted memos to the department in support of its position, and top prosecutors met with officials in Washington, including Mr. Barr, to press the case.
In late April, with the case effectively stalled, Audrey Strauss, who had succeeded Mr. Khuzami as Mr. Berman’s deputy, finally persuaded Mr. Barr there was no basis to dismiss any charges against Mr. Cohen and that the investigations should be completed, Mr. Berman writes. The inquiry eventually ended without additional charges.
Mr. Barr did not respond to a request for comment.
After the September 2019 acquittal of Gregory Craig, Mr. Berman writes, he hoped the verdict would ease pressure on the Southern District “to prosecute yet another enemy of the president” — Mr. Kerry.
“That was naïve on my part,” Mr. Berman says.
Mr. Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran and a former longtime Massachusetts senator, was secretary of state under President Obama, a role in which he led the lengthy negotiations that produced the Iran nuclear accord — that administration’s signature foreign policy achievement. Mr. Trump, during his presidential campaign, called the deal “insane” and a “disaster.”
On May 7, 2018, Mr. Trump tweeted about Mr. Kerry’s “possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy” — an apparent reference to reports of Mr. Kerry having conversations as a private citizen with Iranian and other officials.
Mr. Trump tweeted another attack on Mr. Kerry the next day — the same day Mr. Trump announced the United States was withdrawing from the accord.
On May 9, Mr. Berman writes, Justice Department officials told his office that it would be responsible for an investigation into Mr. Kerry’s Iran-related conduct. The F.B.I. would join the inquiry.
The focus was on the Logan Act, a rarely invoked 1799 statute barring private citizens from unauthorized negotiations with foreign governments, which has been criticized as unconstitutionally vague. Mr. Berman notes that no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the law.
But, as he puts it, “The conduct that had annoyed the president was now a priority of the Department of Justice.”
Although Mr. Berman says he does not know what prompted the Justice Department to seek a Kerry investigation, “No one needed to talk with Trump to know what he wanted. You could read his tweets.”
Mr. Berman writes that Mr. Kerry did not learn of the investigation and it never leaked into the news media.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, kept tweeting. “Iran is being given VERY BAD advice by @JohnKerry,” he tweeted on the morning of April 22, 2019. “Big violation of Logan Act?”
That afternoon, Mr. Berman says, one of the co-chiefs of the Southern District’s national security unit got a call from a Justice Department official, asking why the office was delaying seeking an order to review “header information,” such as the date, recipients and senders of Mr. Kerry’s electronic communications. A more senior official pressed the issue again the next day with Southern District officials.
Mr. Berman writes that the pattern was “clear — and outrageous.” He said that the investigation began after Mr. Trump started tweeting “his displeasure about Kerry,” and a new tweet 11 months later prompted further prodding.
“And they were asking us, basically, what’s taking so long? Why aren’t you going harder and faster at this enemy of the president? There was no other way for me to look at it,” Mr. Berman writes.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Berman says that after an investigation of roughly a year, his office told the Justice Department that it would not prosecute Mr. Kerry.
A short time later, on Sept. 19, 2019, Mr. Berman writes, a senior adviser to the attorney general called to say that Mr. Barr expected to take the Kerry case to another U.S. attorney’s office, this time in Maryland.
That office reached the same conclusion as the Southern District had, Mr. Berman writes, “and the Kerry investigation just quietly died — as it should have.”
Sep 7, 2022
Overheard
There was probably a comical moment in the storage room at Mar-A-Lago
when a Russian spy
encountered a Chinese spy
and they had to do
a Rock-Paper-Scissors thing
to see who got what.
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