Kyiv urges Russians not to adopt Ukraine’s ‘stolen’ children
March 28, 2023
The Wider Image: Ukraine seeks to trace thousands of ‘orphans’ scattered by war Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin outside Moscow
(Reuters) – Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk urged Russians on Tuesday not to adopt children who she said were “stolen” in Ukraine during the war and deported to Russia.
The war that Russia has been waging on its neighbour for 13 months now has seen millions of people displaced, including families and children. The real number of children who have been forcefully deported to Russia is impossible to establish.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant earlier in March against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, accusing them of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine.
Vereshchuk said on the Telegram messaging app that orphans have been “stolen in Ukraine” and allegedly given up for adoption in Russia.
“I strongly recommend that Russian citizens do not adopt Ukrainian orphans who were illegally taken out of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine,” Vereshchuk, in charge of social issues, said.
“Once again I remind all Russian so-called ‘adoptive parents’ and ‘guardians’: sooner or later you will have to answer.”
According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Integration of Occupied Territories, 19,514 Ukrainian children are currently considered illegally deported.
Russia has not concealed a programme under which it has brought thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, but presents it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.
Most of the movement of people and children occurred in the first few months of the war and before Ukraine started its major counter offensive to regain occupied territories in the east and south in late August.
Russia’s defence ministry said in mid-August that 3.5 million people had been brought to Russia by then, including more than half a million children.
The United States said in July that Russia “forcibly deported” 260,000 children, from their homes to Russia.
Russian TASS agency cited Vitaly Ganchev, Moscow-installed official of Russia-occupied parts of the Kharkiv region, as saying on Tuesday that a group of children from the region was sent to Russia last year with the consent of their parents or guardians.
“The children were placed in excellent conditions, they are provided with everything necessary. And we will continue to take care of them until their parents come for their return,” Ganchev added.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Ron Popeski in Winnipeg; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Stephen Coates)
Video shows guards walking away during fire that killed 38 migrants near US-Mexico border
Wyatte Grantham-Philips, Christine Fernando and Jeanine SantucciUSA TODAY March 29, 2023
Surveillance footage from inside the immigration detention center in northern Mexico near the U.S. border where 38 migrants died in a dormitory fire appears to show guards walking away from the blaze and making no apparent attempt to release detainees.
The fire broke out when migrants fearing deportation set mattresses ablaze late Monday at the National Immigration Institute, a facility in Ciudad Juarez south of El Paso, Texas, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said.
Authorities originally reported 40 dead, but later said some may have been counted twice in the confusion. Twenty-eight people were injured and were in “delicate-serious” condition, according to the National Immigration Institute.
The security footage, which was broadcast and later authenticated by a Mexican official to a local reporter, shows at least two people dressed as guards rush into the frame, then run off as a cloud of smoke quickly filled the area. They did not appear to attempt to open cell doors so migrants could escape the fire.
Authorities were investigating the fire, the institute said. The country’s prosecutor general has launched an investigation, Andrea Chávez, federal deputy of Ciudad Juarez, said in a statement. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission also was alerted.
What caused the fire?
López Obrador said the fire was started by migrants inside the facility after they learned they would be deported.
“They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune,” López Obrador said.
The immigration institute said it “energetically rejects the actions that led to this tragedy,” without further explaining what those actions may have been.
Video shows guards leaving as fire starts
The video footage shows the area in the facility filled with smoke within seconds, obscuring the view of the camera. In the video, two people dressed as guards are seen rushing into the frame, then walking quickly off as migrants remain behind bars. At least one migrant is seen kicking at a cell door while flames grow.
Mexico’s interior secretary, Adán Augusto López, told local journalist Joaquín López Doriga he was familiar with the video.
Katiuska Márquez, a 23-year-old woman from Venezuela and her two children, ages 2 and 4, were looking for her half-brother in the aftermath of the fire.
“We want to know if he is alive or if he’s dead,” she told The Associated Press. She wondered how all the guards who were inside made it out alive and only the migrants died. “How could they not get them out?”
Migrants from Central, South America caught in blaze
The institute said 68 men from Central and South America were staying at the immigration facility at the time of the fire. Authorities were working with other countries to identify the dead.
Victims were identified as being from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. Guatemalans made up the largest contingent, according to the Mexican attorney general’s office.
Guatemalan Foreign Affairs Minister Mario Búcaro said 28 of the dead were Guatemalan citizens.
“We are going to look to find those responsible for this,” Búcaro said.
A migrant cries leaning on an ambulance as a person she knows is attended by medics after a fire broke out at the Mexican Immigration Detention center in Juarez on Monday, March 27, 2023.
Photos show mass law enforcement response in Ciudad Juarez
Photos showed ambulances, firefighters, Mexican soldiers and vans from the morgue swarm the scene. Rows of bodies were laid out under silver sheets in a parking lot outside the facility. Survivors were carried on stretchers into ambulances. A woman wept while leaning her head against an ambulance.
Mexico border fire sheds light on systemic issues, advocates say
Global human rights organizations called for stronger protections for asylum seekers and expressed outrage over the fire, which they said sheds light on systemic issues related to the detention and treatment of migrants.
The immigration institute has struggled recently with overcrowding in its facilities. About 20 migrants, officials and human rights workers described a southern Mexico immigration detention center run by the institute as crowded and filthy, according to an investigation by The Associated Press in 2019.
The “extensive use of immigration detention leads to tragedies like this,” Felipe González Morales, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights of migrants, said in a Twitter statement. He said immigration detention “should be an exceptional measure” and not generalized.
Human rights organizations have warned for years about the risks people from Central and South America face when trying to apply for asylum in the United States, Rafael Velásquez, Mexico director for the International Rescue Committee, a global human rights organization, said in a statement. The dangers have increased, and humanitarian infrastructures in the country have been “increasingly strained” amid “historic numbers of new asylum claims” and stricter border policies.
“The news of the fire at the migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez is devastating,” Velásquez said. “This is proof of the extremely urgent need to ensure that there are systems in place to provide safety for people in need of international protection.”
Mounting tensions in Ciudad Juarez
Tensions between authorities and migrants had apparently been running high in recent weeks in Ciudad Juarez, a major crossing point across the border from El Paso for migrants entering the United States. Shelters in the city are full of migrants waiting for opportunities to cross or who have requested asylum in the U.S. and are waiting out the process.
On March 9, more than 30 advocacy organizations and migrant shelters wrote an open letter denouncing the criminalization of migrants and asylum seekers in Ciudad Juarez and accusing authorities of excessive force in detaining migrants.
Mexico’s migrant facilities have seen protests from time to time as the American government has pressured the country to ramp up efforts to reduce the number of migrants coming to United States.
Frustrations reached a fever pitch this month when hundreds of migrants, most of them Venezuelan, heard false rumors that the U.S. would allow them to enter and tried to cross an international bridge to El Paso. In October, migrants rioted at a Tijuana immigration center, and in November, dozens rioted at the country’s largest detention center in the southern city of Tapachula.
A girl lights candle during a vigil for the victims of a fire at an immigration detention center that killed dozens in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. According to Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, migrants fearing deportation set mattresses ablaze at the center, starting the fire. (AP Photo/Christian Chavez) ORG XMIT: XMC156
The Physical Toll Systemic Injustice Takes On the Body
Arline T. Geronimus – March 28, 2023
abstract portrait symbolizing depression and psychotherapy. Profile of a woman with a road and tears
Credit – Getty Images
The pathologists who performed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s autopsy noted he had the heart of a 60 year old, although he was 39 when he died. His damaged heart was duly noted in the official record as a curiosity, but there was no question as to the cause of death: homicide; indeed, assassination. A racist hate crime.
But if we were to try to understand the poor condition of his heart, we might be flummoxed. Our general repertoire for understanding the early onset of heart disease points us to demographic and behavioral risk factors like poverty, low education, family breakdown, unhealthy diet, and little exercise. King certainly looked physically fit, capable of leading miles-long civil rights marches. He was well-educated, not impoverished. He grew up in an “intact” household and had a strong father figure. His faith was unswerving, as was his sense of purpose. He had a loving wife and family.
We might ask, did he partake of a particularly unhealthy diet? Did he have a genetic predisposition, a family history of heart disease? We can neither rule out nor rule in such possibilities for King. Yet, the more likely explanation, according to data on the prevailing causes of heart conditions, is that chronic stress or exhaustion took a toll on his heart. But what does that really mean? Would his heart have been healthy if he had managed his stress with meditation? (We don’t know that he didn’t.) Or if he reduced his travel and public engagements to get more rest? Perhaps marginally. But those strategies alone would not have addressed the source of his most severe and chronic stressors—the fact that he lived continuously on alert to threats, maintaining his composure, nonetheless, and in survival mode. This chronic vigilance and adaptation takes a huge health toll on the human biological canvas—a condition known as “weathering.”
More from TIME
After almost 40 years of research in public health and a lifetime of wrestling with questions of racial and class injustice, I have concluded that a process I call “weathering” is critical to understanding why someone like King, whom we’d consider young and healthy by all conventional measures, would have the damaged heart of someone in late middle age. Weathering afflicts human bodies—all the way down to the cellular level—as they grow, develop, and age in a systemically and historically racist, classist, stigmatizing, or xenophobic society. Weathering damages the cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, immune, and metabolic body systems in ways that leave people vulnerable to dying far too young, whether from infectious diseases like COVID-19, or the early onset and pernicious progression of chronic diseases like hypertension. Because of the physiological impacts of unrelenting exposure to stressors in one’s physical and social environment, as well as the high physiological effort that coping with chronic stressors entails, weathering means that relatively young people in oppressed groups can be biologically old.
Take Erica Garner. She became a tireless advocate for racial justice after her father, Eric Garner, was murdered by a New York City in 2014 police officer who placed him in an illegal chokehold for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes. Her father’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. Afterward, though she was initially apprehensive, Garner became a major force in the movement for police accountability. She died at age 27 in 2017, only three and a half years after the death of her father, and four months after the birth of her second child. Her own difficulty breathing, due to asthma, precipitated a major heart attack that killed her. According to her doctors, the pregnancy had stressed Garner’s already enlarged heart, so her death was classified as a maternal death. But why did she have an enlarged heart at her young age?
In the weeks before her death, Garner described the stress, exhaustion, and frustration she suffered as a spokeswoman for the Black Lives Matter movement. “I’m struggling right now with the stress and everything,” she said. “This thing, it beats you down. The system beats you down to where you can’t win.” Or as her sister, Emerald Snipes Garner, described it a week after Garner’s death, “It was like a Jenga”; they were “taking out pieces, taking out pieces, ripping her apart.”
Weathering is a life-or-death game of Jenga. The Jenga tower appears strong and upright as the first pieces are removed, one by one. To all appearances, it continues to stand strong as pieces keep being taken away until the removal of one last fateful block exposes the many weaknesses of its interior, and the tower collapses. In spring 2020, COVID-19 turned out to be that last fateful block for tens of thousands of people of color. Every day, towers collapsed, as they continue to do, before our eyes.
“The only thing I can say is that she was a warrior,” Garner’s mother, Esaw Snipes, said after she died. “She fought the good fight. This is just the first fight in 27 years she lost.” After she had spent 27 years of battling headwinds, fighting the same system that had killed her father for selling a few cigarettes, those headwinds took their toll and killed her too. She was weathered to death.
I think the same could be said of Fannie Lou Hamer, the 1960s voting rights activist who famously observed at age 46 that she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” She died 13 years later at age 59, of breast cancer and complications of hypertension. I think she intuitively understood the price she paid for her years of activism. After failing the literacy test in her first attempt to register to vote, she told the registrar of voters, “You’ll see me every 30 days till I pass.” In later years, as she reflected on her persistence, her words suggest she knew she was being weathered: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kind of seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.”
“A little bit at a time,” piece by Jenga piece, the assaults on the body continue to accumulate as weathering. You don’t have to be a high profile political activist to experience weathering. Any marginalized person who persists daily to survive or overcome and to see to their family’s and community’s needs in the face of long odds and systemic barriers will weather, to greater or lesser extent. Through my decades of research, I have seen how cultural oppression and economic exploitation move from society to cells in the bodies of people of color, working-class people, political refugees, the deplored or stigmatized, and the impoverished who sustain ferocious hope as they work hard and play by the rules.
However, as the Reverend William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, asserted in June 2020, “Accepting death is not an option anymore.” He emphasized that the imperative extends far beyond the issue of police brutality. Echoing Fannie Lou Hamer, he said, “In everything racism and classism touch, they cause a form of death.”
Barber’s words read as metaphor, but they are the literal truth. The country is waking up to what Black Americans have known for centuries and what public health statistics have shown us for decades: systemic injustice—not just in the form of racist cops, but in the form of everyday life—takes a physical, too often deadly toll on Black, brown, and working-class or impoverished communities. Contrary to popular opinion and accepted wisdom, healthy aging is a measure not of how well we take care of ourselves—but rather of how well society treats and takes care of us. When society treats our community badly, it doesn’t just “cause a form of death,” it causes damage that can literally age and kill us.
Opinion: Sen. Sherrod Brown: American consumers losing power over their savings and paychecks is an emergency, too.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau holds Wall Street and big banks accountable. The U.S. Supreme Court must protect it, writes Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Sherrod Brown – March 27, 2023
U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) says the CFPB must remain strong and independent. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank sent shockwaves through the global economy and had the makings of another crisis. Depositors raced to withdraw money. Banks worried about the risk of contagion. I spent that weekend on the phone with small business owners in Ohio who didn’t know whether they’d be able to make payroll the next week. One woman was in tears, worried about whether she’d be able to pay her workers.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve responded quickly, took control of the bank, and contained the fallout. Consumers’ and small businesses’ money was safe. That Ohio small business was able to get paychecks out.
The regulators were able to protect Americans’ money from incompetent bank executives because when Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1913 and the FDIC in 1933, it ensured that their funding structures would remain independent from politicians in Congress and free from political whims.
But now, as the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case of Community Financial Services Association v. CFPB, these independent watchdogs’ ability to keep our financial system stable faces an existential threat.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the only agency solely dedicated to protecting the paychecks and savings of ordinary Americans, not Wall Street executives or venture capitalists. Corporate interests have armies of lobbyists fighting for every tax break, every exemption, every opportunity to be let off the hook for scamming customers and preying on families.
The CFPB’s funding structure is designed to be independent, just like the Fed and the FDIC.
Ordinary Americans don’t have those lobbyists. They don’t have that kind of power. The CFPB is supposed to be their voice — to fight for them. The CFPB’s funding structure is designed to be independent, just like the Fed and the FDIC. Otherwise, its ability to do the job would be subject to political whims and special interests — interests that we know are far too often at odds with what’s best for consumers.
Since its creation, the CFPB has returned $16 billion to more than 192 million consumers. It’s held Wall Street and big banks accountable for breaking the law and wronging their customers. It’s given working families more power to fight back when banks and shady lenders scam them out of their hard-earned money.
The CFPB can do this good work because it’s funded independently and protected from partisan attacks, just as the Fed and the FDIC are. So why, then, does Wall Street claim that only the CFPB’s funding structure is unconstitutional?
Make no mistake — the only reason that Wall Street, its Republican allies in Congress, and overreaching courts have singled out the CFPB is because the agency doesn’t do their bidding. The CFPB doesn’t help Wall Street executives when they fail. It doesn’t extend them credit in favorable terms or offer them deposit insurance like the other regulators do. The CFPB’s funding structure isn’t unconstitutional — it just doesn’t work in Wall Street’s favor.
If the Supreme Court rules against the CFPB, the $16 billion returned to consumers could be clawed back. What would happen then — will America’s banks really go back to the customers they’ve wronged with a collection tin?
Invalidating the CFPB and its work would also put the U.S. economy — and especially the housing market — at risk.
Invalidating the CFPB and its work would also put the U.S. economy — and especially the housing market — at risk. For more than a decade, the CFPB has set rules of the road for mortgages and credit cards and so much else, and given tools to help industry follow them. If these rules and the regulator that interprets them disappear, markets will come to a standstill.
By attacking the CFPB’s funding structure and putting consumers’ money at risk, Wall Street is putting the other financial regulators in danger, too.
The Fifth Circuit’s faulty ruling against the CFPB is astounding in its absurdity — the court ruled that the authorities that other financial agencies, like the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, have over the economy do not compare to the CFPB’s authorities. In other words, the court is claiming that the CFPB supposedly has more power in the economy than the Fed.
That’s ridiculous. Look at the extraordinary steps taken to contain the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — the idea that the CFPB could take action even close to as sweeping is laughable.
But we know why the Fifth Circuit put that absurd assertion in there — they recognize the damage this case could do to these other vital agencies, and to our whole economy.
Imagine what might happen if another series of banks failed and the FDIC did not have the funds to stop the crisis from spreading.
The FDIC’s own Inspector General has stated that the Fifth Circuit ruling could be applied to their agency. If that happens, the FDIC and other regulators could be subject to congressional budget deliberations, which we all know are far too partisan and have resulted in shutdowns. Imagine what might happen if another series of banks failed and the FDIC did not have the funds to stop the crisis from spreading, or the Deposit Insurance Fund to protect depositors’ money. Imagine if politicians caused a shutdown, and we were without a Federal Reserve.
U.S. financial regulators are independently funded so that they can respond quickly when crises happen. It’s telling, though, that plenty of people in Washington don’t seem to consider the CFPB’s issues in the same category. Washington and Wall Street expect the government to spring into action when businesses’ money is put at risk. But when workers are scammed out of their paychecks, that’s not an emergency — it’s business as usual.
When Wall Street’s abusive practices put consumers in crisis, the CFPB must have the funding and strength it needs to carry out its mission — to protect consumers’ hard-earned money.
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
Bye, banks: Recent turmoil is spurring many to move their money
Abha Bhattarai, The Washington Post – March 24, 2023
FILE – Customers and bystanders form a line outside a Silicon Valley Bank branch location, Monday, March 13, 2023, in Wellesley, Mass. The sudden crisis in the U.S. banking industry is sure to cause some tightening of lending and credit and a slowdown in the pace of borrowing and spending. If it does, the crisis could actually end up aiding the Federal Reserve in the elusive goal the Fed has been pursuing for a full year: A much lower inflation rate. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Dan Ushman isn’t sure where he’ll end up stashing his company’s money. But he’s been thinking a lot about it these days.
The start-up founder recently moved savings out of Silicon Valley Bank, whose spectacular collapse this month set off tremors across the financial industry, and parked it in accounts at Bank of America and Chase while he contemplates what’s next – brokerage accounts, perhaps, or money market funds, Treasury-backed trusts or certificate of deposit accounts.
The goal, he says, is simple: to reduce risk while maximizing interest.
“Having SVB collapse out from under us gave us a lot of pause,” said Ushman, 38, founder of a software firm in Chicago. “We’re thinking hard about how to spread our cash around. We want higher yields and safety. But the thing about business savings is that they’re savings until you need them, so we don’t want to lock anything up long-term.”
Across the country, millions of Americans are making similar calculations, trying to figure out how to best allocate their money following the implosion of two U.S. banks and the emergency takeover of European banking giant Credit Suisse last weekend, which set off fears of a global financial crisis.
The crisis so far doesn’t seem to have come, and the government has taken great pains to reassure depositors that bank accounts are safe. But that hasn’t stopped people from shifting their money around. Americans are moving hundreds of billions of dollars out of banks – especially smaller, regional banks – into larger institutions, as well as money market funds, government bonds, high-yield online savings accounts, even cryptocurrencies and gold.
In the two weeks since SVB’s dramatic collapse, investments in money market funds, a type of mutual fund focused on low-risk securities, have ballooned by nearly $240 billion, according to the Investment Company Institute. Yields on 2-year Treasury bonds have fallen 24 percent as a result of booming demand. Money market funds are not insured by the government the way bank accounts less than $250,000 are. But even riskier investments are thriving, too: Bitcoin prices have risen 40 percent, and gold is up about 10 percent.
Overall, an estimated $550 billion in deposits have moved from smaller and regional banks to large banks and money market funds in the past two weeks, according to an analysis by JPMorgan.
“Turmoil in the markets always puts money in motion,” said Danielle Lucht, a financial adviser in Cape Coral, Fla., who is fielding twice as many calls from clients as she was a few weeks ago. “The big concern right now is: Is my money safe? How can I make it safer? People who have cash in simple savings accounts are using this as an opportunity to move their money.”
About 12 percent of Americans say they have taken money out from the bank “because of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” and 18 percent say they are considering doing so, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released Tuesday. (It is also worth noting, though, that most people – 55 percent – said they are confident the banking system is safe.)
The recent shift builds on a trend that began a year ago, when the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates after years of keeping them near zero. Suddenly regular bank accounts – that pay very little, if any, interest – became much less attractive than other investments offering higher returns.
That steady movement out of bank accounts took on a life of its own this month after fears of bank failures led customers at SVB and Signature Bank of New York to take out billions of dollars in cash in a matter of a few hours. The result was a bank run that triggered the collapse of both institutions.
The Federal Reserve and other regulators were quick to step in with emergency measures aimed at stemming similar runs at other banks. But panic persists: This week, shares of PacWest Bancorp, a regional California institution, tumbled 17 percent after it said it had lost 20 percent of its deposits this year. Economists say that lack of confidence in a company’s stock can be self-fulfilling if it prompts customers to remove their money, leaving the bank in even worse shape.
At First Republic Bank, not even a $30 billion rescue package from the nation’s biggest banks has been enough to keep people from taking out their money. In all, customers have withdrawn about $70 billion in recent weeks, or roughly 40 percent of the bank’s deposits, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
“People are looking around and saying, ‘I really don’t want to be uninsured,'” said Itamar Drechsler, a finance professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’re buying government bonds and going to bigger banks at the expense of regionals.”
The federal government insures deposits of up to $250,000 in any given bank account, though there are looming questions about whether it might raise that cap or extend protection to all deposits as it did at SVB and Signature Bank of New York this month. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen struggled to manage the fallout from remarks Wednesday over the extent to which the federal government could insure deposits over the limit at other banks if they failed; markets fell after she spoke, and she later amended her written testimony to stress that the government has “tools we could use again” and would be “prepared to take additional action if warranted.”
Still, the recent panic has been enough to spook those with large sums piled into traditional bank accounts. Brenton Wickam, 53, a commercial real estate investor in Silicon Valley, hadn’t thought twice about keeping his personal savings in one bank account – until recently.
When SVB collapsed, Wickam started getting a barrage of text messages all saying the same thing: “First Republic’s next.” That was particularly troubling to Wickam, who had been banking there for years.
Last week, he showed up at a local branch to begin moving his savings into new accounts, in $250,000 chunks so they’d be insured by the government. The leftover money he took to Wells Fargo, though he plans to invest it in money markets or Treasurys.
“I felt like the dumbest guy in the room, keeping all of my cash in one bank account,” Wickam said. “I’ve been around awhile – 2000, 2008, I’ve seen what a financial crisis looks like – but I was just being lazy.”
The exodus of deposits, particularly from smaller banks, is particularly worrisome because it could have a chilling effect on how much those institutions are able to loan. Nearly 70 percent of commercial real estate loans, for example, come from small and midsize banks, Fed data shows.
“The consequence of this is manyfold,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. “The reality is, banks finance themselves through deposits.”
A drop in deposits, he said, would mean banks have less money on hand to make loans. If someone walked in looking for a $40,000 car loan, for example, and a bank didn’t have much in deposits, it would have to borrow that money from wholesale markets, where interest rates have risen rapidly in the past year. As a result, borrowers could face higher interest rates and stricter standards, Slok said.
“If banks across the country suddenly say, ‘We’re going to tighten lending standards for anyone who would like to buy a car or a house or get a corporate loan’ – if they stop lending money out, you could have a sudden stop in the economy,” he said. “That begins to raise the risk of a recession.”
Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell pushed back against that fear this week, saying the banking system is “sound and resilient.”
“We took powerful actions with Treasury and the FDIC, which demonstrate that all depositor savings are safe and that the banking system is safe,” Powell said in a news conference on Wednesday. “Deposit flows in the banking system have stabilized over the last week.”
Verbal assurances aside, the interventions of regulators have raised more questions than answers for many Americans. They’ve also prompted many people to stop and consider their investment habits, since interest rates are at their highest level in 16 years.
“The silver lining in this debacle is that it’s caused people to pause and ask, ‘Is my money OK at the bank?,'” said Rick Salmeron, a financial adviser in Dallas, who has seen a rush toward high-yield online savings accounts. “They’re realizing, ‘Wow, I have all of this cash making a paltry 0.01 percent interest in the bank when I could be getting 3.5 percent.'”
Steve Miller, 51, a stay-at-home dad in Orange County, Calif., recently moved his family’s savings from a large bank to a Vanguard federal money market account. It wasn’t so much panic over recent bank failures that prompted the move, he said, but rather the realization that he could be earning much higher interest on his money. Now he’s earning 4.65 percent interest.
“We have always kept our cash reserves parked in the bank, but this was a good trigger,” he said. “It made me realize we could be earning much more by being invested in Treasury bills.”
The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein contributed to this report.
Trump, Turning Up Heat, Raises Specter of Violence if He Is Charged
Maggie Haberman – March 24, 2023
Former President Donald Trump at an America First Education Policy event at in Davenport, Iowa on March 13, 2023. (Desiree Rios/The New York Times)
In an overnight social media post, former President Donald Trump predicted that “potential death and destruction” may result if, as expected, he is charged by the Manhattan district attorney in connection with hush-money payments to a porn star made during the 2016 campaign.
The comments from Trump, made between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on his social media site, Truth Social, were a stark escalation in his rhetorical attacks on the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, ahead of a likely indictment on charges that Trump said would be unfounded.
“What kind of person,” Trump wrote of Bragg, “can charge another person, in this case a former president of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting president in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a crime, when it is known by all that NO crime has been committed, & also that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our country?”
“Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!” the former president wrote.
A spokesperson for Bragg did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an email to his staff last week, Bragg wrote that the office “will continue to apply the law evenly and fairly, and speak publicly only when appropriate.”
“We do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York,” he added.
Trump is also being investigated by the Justice Department in connection with his efforts to stay in power leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In a post this past Saturday, Trump erroneously claimed that he was to be arrested three days later and urged people to protest and “take our nation back.”
Since then, he has called Bragg, the first Black district attorney in Manhattan, an “animal” and appeared to mock calls from some of his own allies for people to protest peacefully, or not at all.
“Our country is being destroyed as they tell us to be peaceful,” Trump said in a post Thursday.
Trump has also attacked Bragg for having received indirect financial support from billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
So far, Trump’s calls for protests have been largely ignored, with just handfuls of people coming out for a demonstration Monday organized by some of his New York Republican allies.
In a statement published Friday in Politico’s New York Playbook newsletter, a group of civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and former Gov. David Paterson, condemned Trump’s statements.
“This disgraceful attack is not a dog whistle but a bullhorn of incendiary racist and antisemitic bile, spewed out for the sole purpose of intimidating and sabotaging a lawful, legitimate, fact-based investigation,” they said. “These ugly, hateful attacks on our judicial system must be universally condemned.”
Bragg is weighing charges against Trump in connection with hush money his former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid late in the 2016 campaign cycle to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.
Judge in Fox News, Dominion Case Says Network’s Legal Woes Mostly the Fault of One ‘Problem’ Host
Josh Dickey – March 21, 2023
In what’s playing out like an extended preview to the $1.6 billion First Amendment prize fight between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News, both sides threw opening punches Tuesday in a Delaware court, where a judge is hearing summary arguments and other matters ahead of next month’s scheduled trial.
Dominion Voting systems opened this round, arguing before Judge Eric Davis that Fox News made a “household name” out of Sidney Powell, let hosts “run wild” and developed what the judge called a “Lou Dobbs problem.” Fox countered in the afternoon, arguing that a “reasonable” viewer could easily discern that the network was reporting on allegations and newsmakers’ theories.
Both sides have asked Davis to rule summarily in their favor, a routine stop for any civil trial that rarely works. But Fox and Dominion each put significant resources into their summary arguments and supporting documents, which have been widely picked over and scrutinized.
By the time the lawyers assembled Tuesday for their first live arguments before Davis, many details had already become familiar, as each side released troves of sworn deposition testimony, text messages, emails and other discovery-phase records this month – most of them rather embarrassing to Fox News. Davis was not expected to rule on the motions for summary judgment during the pre-trial hearing spanning Tuesday and Wednesday.
However, Davis could rule this week on whether certain redacted material in those evidentiary depositions should be revealed, which could bring another wave (or trickle) of bombshell revelations. Those arguments and other minor pretrial matters were expected to be resolved before the April 17 start date.
Dominion is asking for $1.6 billion in damages – significant, but not a potential death-blow for the crown jewel of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – for what it says are defamatory statements about its voting machines in multiple reports, guest segments and host commentary immediately following the 2020 election. Defamation cases hinge on “actual malice,” proof that the defendant intended harm – and Dominion has been pushing hard on that front in it pretrial efforts.
Fox has maintained it was merely doing the news, and was protected by its framing of even the wildest election conspiracy theories as allegations and speculation. Fox’s lawyers also argued Tuesday that there were, and still are, legitimate questions about security around Dominion machines.
Dominion’s receipts include 20 on-air instances of what it says are defamation – a notable number of them featuring Lou Dobbs. “Lou Dobbs Tonight” was an engine of the stolen-election narrative, and though Dobbs was fired abruptly after Joe Biden’s win was certified, depositions revealed that Fox brass had been looking to move him out up to a year before.
“This seems to be a Lou Dobbs problem,” Davis commented as Fox attorneys were going through the instances one by one.
The pre-trial hearing was expected to resume Wednesday.
Questions like: Why is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment relating to Stormy Daniels likely to be the first for the former president and not one related to Jan. 6? Is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in love with Trump or afraid of him? And, this big one: Will we see Trump do a perp walk?
Starting with the perp walk question, The New Abnormal political podcast co-host Andy Levy shares why he isn’t so hopeful with co-host Danielle Moodie on this all-Trump episode.
“I’ve seen supposedly serious people make this comment that we need to be worried about them charging Trump, because it may lead to riots in the streets. You already did that, first of all, [and] no, you don’t get a heckler’s veto if you break the law. If you break the law, you break the law,” says Andy. “That stuff cannot factor into charging someone, [but], it can factor into how you arrest them.”
“Trump was tweeting in all-caps about that they were debating whether to have him do a perp walk in handcuffs. That’s never gonna happen. We are never gonna see that, honestly, as much as I would enjoy it. We don’t really need that,” he adds, to Danielle’s dismay.
“I kind of do,” she jokes.
Then MSNBC legal analyst Katie Phang joins the show and gives Danielle insight into the “why this case?” question. According to Phang, a Trump indictment for something a while ago and not Jan. 6-related is still important.
“We need to appreciate the prosecution of the former President of the United States. Even if it’s for jaywalking. Why? Because you and I would be prosecuted for that crime.
“And so I am glad that even though this is an ‘old event,’ the payoff to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet, to influence the outcome of the 2016 election may have been years ago, you know, damn it. I am glad. If he’s kicking his dog, he should be arrested and prosecuted. I believe this is the beginning of the fall of dominoes.”
Plus, Phang shares the indictment that she thinks will really “break the dam.”
Then, Jeff Sharlet, author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, tells Andy what he learned while writing about the post-Trump world—like how right-wing grandmas have nasty things to say about Hillary Clinton—and why he doesn’t actually care about Trump like other Trump-era writers.
U.S. grapples with forces unleashed by Iraq invasion 20 years later
Arshad Mohammed and Jonathan Landay – March 16, 2023
U.S. grapples with forces unleashed by Iraq invasion 20 years later
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – From an empowered Iran and eroded U.S. influence to the cost of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria to combat Islamic State fighters, the United States still contends with the consequences of invading Iraq 20 years ago, current and former officials say.
Then-U.S. President George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to oust Saddam Hussein by force, the way limited U.S. troop numbers enabled ethnic strife and the eventual 2011 U.S. pullout have all greatly complicated U.S. policy in the Middle East, they said.
The end of Saddam’s minority Sunni rule and replacement with a Shi’ite majority government in Iraq freed Iran to deepen its influence across the Levant, especially in Syria, where Iranian forces and Shi’ite militias helped Bashar al-Assad crush a Sunni uprising and stay in power.
The 2011 withdrawal of the U.S. troops from Iraq left a vacuum that Islamic State (ISIS) militants filled, seizing roughly a third of Iraq and Syria and fanning fears among Gulf Arab states that they could not rely on the United States.
Having withdrawn, former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2014 sent troops back to Iraq, where about 2,500 remain, and in 2015 he deployed to Syria, where about 900 troops are on the ground. U.S. forces in both countries combat Islamic State militants, who are also active from North Africa to Afghanistan.
“Our inability, unwillingness, to put the hammer down in terms of security in the country allowed chaos to ensue, which gave rise to ISIS,” said former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, faulting the U.S. failure to secure Iraq.
Armitage, who served under Republican Bush when the United States invaded Iraq, said the U.S. invasion “might be as big a strategic error” as Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which helped bring about Germany’s World War Two defeat.
MASSIVE COSTS
The costs of U.S. involvement in Iraq and Syria are massive.
According to estimates published this week by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University, the U.S. price tag to date for the wars in Iraq and Syria comes to $1.79 trillion, including Pentagon and State Department spending, veterans’ care and the interest on debt financing the conflicts. Including projected veterans’ care through 2050, this rises to $2.89 trillion.
The project puts U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Syria over the past 20 years at 4,599 and estimates total deaths, including Iraqi and Syrian civilians, military, police, opposition fighters, media and others at 550,000 to 584,000. This includes only those killed as a direct result of war but not estimated indirect deaths from disease, displacement or starvation.
U.S. credibility also suffered from Bush’s decision to invade based on bogus, exaggerated and ultimately erroneous intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
John Bolton, a war advocate who served under Bush, said even though Washington made mistakes – by failing to deploy enough troops and administering Iraq instead of quickly handing over to Iraqis – he believed removing Saddam justified the costs.
“It was worth it because the decision was not simply: ‘Does Saddam pose a WMD threat in 2003?'” he said. “Another question was: ‘Would he pose a WMD threat five years later?’ To which I think the answer clearly was ‘yes.'”
“The worst mistake made after the overthrow of Saddam … was withdrawing in 2011,” he added, saying he believed Obama wanted to pull out and used the inability to get guarantees of immunity for U.S. forces from Iraq’s parliament “as an excuse.”
‘ALARM BELLS RINGING … IN THE GULF’
Ryan Crocker, who served as U.S. ambassador in Iraq, said the 2003 invasion did not immediately undermine U.S. influence in the Gulf but the 2011 withdrawal helped push Arab states to start hedging their bets.
In the latest example of waning U.S. influence, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed on Friday to re-establish relations after years of hostility in a deal brokered by China.
“We just decided we didn’t want to do this stuff anymore,” Crocker said, referring to the U.S. unwillingness to keep spending blood and treasure securing Iraq. “That began … with President Obama declaring … he was going to pull all forces out.”
“These were U.S. decisions not forced by a collapsing economy, not forced by demonstrators in the street,” he said. “Our leadership just decided we didn’t want to do it any more. And that started the alarm bells ringing … in the Gulf.”
Jim Steinberg, a deputy secretary of state under Obama, said the war raised deep questions about Washington’s willingness to act unilaterally and its steadfastness as a partner.
“The net result … has been bad for U.S. leverage, bad for U.S. influence, bad for our ability to partner with countries in the region,” he said.
A debate still rages among former officials over Obama’s decision to withdraw, tracking a timeline laid out by the Bush administration and reflecting a U.S. inability to secure immunities for U.S. troops backed by the Iraqi parliament.
Bolton’s belief that removing Saddam was worth the eventual cost is not held by many current and former officials.
Asked the first word that came to mind about the invasion and its aftermath, Armitage replied “FUBAR,” a military acronym which, politely, stands for “Fouled up beyond all recognition.”
“Disaster,” said Larry Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff.
“Unnecessary,” said Steinberg.
(This story has been refiled to fix the spelling of former U.S. President Barack Obama’s name in paragraph 5)
(Reporting By Arshad Mohammed and Jonathan Landay; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by William Maclean)
Texas announces takeover of Houston schools, stirring anger
Juan A Lozano and Paul J. Weber – March 15, 2023
People hold up signs at a news conference on Friday, March 3, 2023, in Houston while protesting the proposed takeover of the city’s school district by the Texas Education Agency. Local and federal officials say state leaders are preparing to take over the Houston Independent School District over allegations of misconduct by district board members and the yearslong failing performance of one campus. ( Juan A. Lozano/AP Photo) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
HOUSTON (AP) — Texas officials on Wednesday announced a state takeover of Houston’s nearly 200,000-student public school district, the eighth-largest in the country, acting on years of threats and angering Democrats who assailed the move as political.
The announcement, made by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s education commissioner, amounts to one of the largest school takeovers ever in the U.S.
It also deepens a high-stakes rift between Texas’ largest city, where Democrats wield control locally and state Republican leaders have sought increasing authority in the wake of election fumbles and pandemic restrictions.
Other big cities including Philadelphia, New Orleans and Detroit in recent decades have gone through state takeovers, which are generally viewed as last resorts for underperforming schools and are often met with community backlash. Critics argue that past outcomes show little improvement following state interventions.
The state began making moves toward a takeover of the Houston Independent School District in 2019, following allegations of misconduct by school trustees, including inappropriate influencing of vendor contracts, and chronically low academic scores at one of its roughly 50 high schools.
The district sued to block a takeover, but new education laws subsequently passed by the GOP-controlled state Legislature and a January ruling from the Texas Supreme Court cleared the way for the state to seize control.
Schools in Houston are not under mayoral control, unlike in cities such as New York or Chicago, but as expectations of a takeover mounted, the city’s Democratic leaders unified in opposition.
Most of Houston’s school board members have been replaced since 2019. District officials also say the state is ignoring academic strides made across city schools.
Race is also an issue because the overwhelming majority of students in Houston schools are Hispanic or Black. Domingo Morel, a professor of political science and public services at New York University, has studied school takeovers nationwide and said the political dynamics in Texas are similar to where states have intervened elsewhere.
The demographics in Houston, Morel said, are also similar.
“If we just focus on taking over school districts because they underperform, we would have a lot more takeovers,” Morel said. “But that’s not what happens.”
