Doctors say this is the most important virus you’ve never heard of

 

The past winter was a heavy one for respiratory viruses, dominated by surges of RSV, influenza and Covid-19. But just as it was winding down, a little-known virus that causes many of the same symptoms – a lower lung infection, hacking cough, runny nose, sore throat and fever – was just picking up steam.

Cases of human metapneumovirus, or HMPV, spiked this spring, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s respiratory virus surveillance systems. It filled hospital intensive care units with young children and seniors who are the most vulnerable to these infections. At its peak in mid-March, nearly 11% of tested specimens were positive for HMPV, a number that’s about 36% higher than the average, pre-pandemic seasonal peak of 7% test positivity.

Most people who caught it probably didn’t even know they had it, however. Sick people aren’t usually tested for it outside of a hospital or ER. Unlike Covid-19 and the flu, there’s no vaccine for HMPV or antiviral drugs to treat it. Instead, doctors care for seriously ill people by tending to their symptoms.

An underestimated threat

Studies show that HMPV causes as much misery in the US each year as the flu and a closely related virus, RSV. One study of patient samples collected over 25 years found that it was the second most common cause of respiratory infections in kids behind RSV. A study in New York conducted over four winters found that it was as common in hospitalized seniors as RSV and the flu. Like those infections, HMPV can lead to intensive care and fatal cases of pneumonia in older adults.

Diane Davison caught human metapneumovirus during a family celebration in early April. Two weeks later, she was coughing so violently, she couldn’t talk on the phone.

“I couldn’t get out more than a couple of words,” said Davison, 59, an entertainment lawyer in Baltimore. “I would go into violent, violent coughing to the point where I was literally almost throwing up.”

Her cough was so constant and deep, she was convinced she had finally caught the coronavirus after managing to avoid it throughout the pandemic. But she took six rapid tests for Covid-19, and all came back negative.

Davison is immunocompromised, so she has been cautious throughout the pandemic. Concerned about pneumonia, she got a X-ray from a radiology clinic near her home and was told it was clear.

Her doctor wasn’t satisfied, however, and sent her to an emergency room for more testing. Blood tests determined that she had HMPV.

“I was like, ‘what?’ Because it sounds really dire,” Davison said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

Human metapneumovirus was discovered by Dutch virus hunters in 2001. They had 28 samples from children in the Netherlands with unexplained respiratory infections. Some of the children had been very ill and required mechanical ventilation, but they didn’t test positive for any known pathogens.

The researchers cultured the samples in various types of cells from monkeys, chickens and dogs, and then they looked at the cultures under an electron microscope. They saw something that seemed structurally related to the paramyxoviridae family, a group of viruses known to give people respiratory disease like measles, mumps and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.

A closer look at the virus’ genes showed a close relative: avian metapneumovirus, which infects birds. The new virus was dubbed human metapneumovirus. Scientists believe it probably jumped from birds to humans at some point and evolved from there.

When the researchers tested blood samples from 72 patients that had been stored since 1958, all showed evidence of exposure to the mystery virus, indicating that it had been circulating in humans, undetected, for at least the previous half-century.

Doctors and patients in the dark

Respiratory infections are the leading cause of death for children around the world and the No. 1 reason kids are hospitalized in the United States, but scientists don’t know what causes a good chunk of them, says Dr. John Williams, a pediatrician at the University of Pittsburgh who has spent his career researching vaccines and treatments for HMPV.

Williams says there were sweeping epidemiological studies conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, looking into the causes of respiratory infections.

“Basically, they could only identify a virus in people about half the time. And so the question was, ‘OK, what about that other half?’ ” he said. Human metapneumovirus doesn’t account for all the unknown viruses, but it’s a significant proportion – about as many cases as RSV or influenza.

But no one knows about it. Williams calls it “the most important virus you’ve never heard of.”

“Those are the three major viruses,” he said. “Those are the big three in kids and adults, the most likely to put people in the hospital and cause severe disease, most likely to sweep through nursing homes and make older people really sick and even kill them.”

Because testing for HMPV is rarely done outside hospitals, it’s hard to know the true burden of the disease.

Blood tests indicate that most children have had it by the age of 5.

A 2020 study in the Lancet Global Health estimated that among children younger than 5, there were more than 14 million HMPV infections in 2018, more than 600,000 hospitalizations and more than 16,000 deaths.

The infection generates weak or incomplete immune protection, however, and humans get reinfected throughout their lives.

Companies are working on vaccines against it. Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna just finished an early study of an mRNA vaccine against HMPV and parainfluenza, according to the website clinicaltrials.gov.

The CDC recommends that doctors consider testing for HMPV in the winter and spring, when it tends to peak.

Doctors don’t test for it mostly because of a lack of awareness of the virus, Williams said, but also because a test probably wouldn’t change the care they would give a patient. It would help them rule out other causes that do have dedicated treatments, like Covid or the flu.

Davison said HMPV gave her a serious bout of bronchitis. She was admitted to the hospital briefly for observation. She eventually got better, but she was sick for a month.

She’s had respiratory infections before, of course, but she’s particularly glad to be on the other side of human metapneumovirus, she said – “This was really kind of the worst I’d ever experienced.” -CNN

Progressives Condemn Biden-GOP Debt Ceiling Deal as "Cruel and Shortsighted"

 

Progressive economists and advocates warned that the tentative debt ceiling agreement reached Saturday by the White House and Republican leaders would needlessly gash nutrition aid, rental assistance, and education programs, all while making it easier for the wealthy to avoid taxes.

The deal, which now must win the support of both chambers of Congress, reportedly includes two years of caps on non-military federal spending, sparing a Pentagon budget replete with staggering waste and abuse.

The Associated Pressreported that the deal "would hold spending flat for 2024 and increase it by 1% for 2025," not keeping pace with inflation.

The agreement would also impose new work requirements on some recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) while scaling back recently approved IRS funding, a gift to rich tax cheats.

In exchange for the spending cuts and work requirements, Republican leaders have agreed to raise the debt ceiling for two years—a tradeoff that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is pitching as a victory to his caucus, which includes far-right members who have demanded more aggressive austerity.

President Joe Biden, for his part, called the deal "a compromise, which means not everyone gets what they want."

Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement Saturday night that "this is a punishing deal made worse only by the fact that there was no reason for President Biden to negotiate with Speaker McCarthy over whether or not the United States government should pay its bills," alluding to the president's executive authority.

"After inflation eats its share, flat funding will result in fewer households accessing rental assistance, fewer kids in Head Start, and fewer services for seniors," said Owens. "The deal represents the worst of conservative budget ideology; it cuts investments in workers and families, adds onerous and wasteful new hurdles for families in need of support, and protects the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations from paying their fair share in taxes."

The agreement comes days before the U.S. is, according to the Treasury Department, set to run out of money to pay its obligations, imperiling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments and potentially hurling the entire global economy into chaos.

House Republicans have leveraged those alarming possibilities to secure painful federal spending cuts and aid program changes that could leave more people hungry, sick, and unable to afford housing, critics said.

"For no real reason at all, hungry people are set to lose food while tax cheats get a free pass," wrote Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos.

While legislative text has not yet been released, the deal would reportedly impose work requirements on adult SNAP recipients without dependents up to the age of 54, increasing the current age limit of 49. Policy analysts and anti-hunger activists have long decried SNAP time limits and work requirements as cruel and ineffective.

"The SNAP changes are nominally extending work requirements to ages 50 to 54. In reality, especially as the new rule is implemented, this is just an indiscriminate cull of a bunch of 50- to 54-year-olds from SNAP who won't realize there are new forms they need to fill out," said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project.

Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote on Twitter that the agreement is "cruel and shortsighted," pointing to the work requirements and real-term cuts to rental assistance "during an already worsening homelessness crisis."

"House Rs held our nation's lowest-income people hostage in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling," Yentel continued. "The debt ceiling 'deal' could lead to tens of thousands of families losing rental assistance... Expanding ineffective work requirements and putting time limits on food assistance adds salt to the wound, further harming some of the lowest income and most marginalized people in our country."

The White House and Republican leaders also reportedly agreed to some permitting reforms that climate groups have slammed as a boon for the fossil fuel industry. According toThe New York Times, the agreement "includes measures meant to speed environmental reviews of certain energy projects," though the scope of the changes is not yet clear.

And while the deal doesn't appear to include a repeal of Biden's student debt cancellation plan—which is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court—it does contain a provision that would cement the end of the student loan repayment pause, drawing fury from debt relief campaigners.

The deal must now get through Congress, a difficult task given likely opposition from progressive lawmakers who oppose attacks on aid programs and Republicans who want steeper cuts.

As the Times reported, "Lawmakers in the House Freedom Caucus were privately pillorying the deal on Saturday night, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus had already begun to fume about it even before negotiators finalized the agreement." 

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

 

Meet Dr. Kariko

 

Katalin Karikó, PhD, is a biochemist and researcher, best known for her contributions to mRNA technology and the COVID-19 vaccines. Karikó and co-collaborator Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, invented the modified mRNA technology used in Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccines to prevent COVID-19 infection.

More than 15 years ago at Penn Medicine, Karikó and Weissman found a way to modify mRNA and later developed a delivery technique to package the mRNA in lipid nanoparticles. This made it possible for mRNA to reach the proper part of the body and trigger an immune response to fight disease.

These laboratory breakthroughs made mRNA safe, effective, and practical for use as a vaccine against COVID. The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine received FDA approval in August 2021, and the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine has been authorized by the FDA for emergency use.

Karikó is a senior vice president at BioNTech and an adjunct professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and began collaborating with Weissman in 1997.

Karikó received her bachelor's degree in biology in 1978 and her doctorate in biochemistry in 1982 from the University of Szeged in her native Hungary. She was working at the Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged before immigrating to the United States in 1985.

Research

Description of Research Expertise

Dr. Katalin Karikó’s research has for decades focused on RNA-mediated mechanisms, with the ultimate goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered (with Penn Medicine colleague Drew Weissman) that nucleoside modifications suppress the immunogenicity of RNA, which has widened the therapeutic potential of mRNA in treating diseases. This led to the development of the two most effective vaccines for COVID-19, the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and holds vast promise for future treatments of many other diseases. Dr. Karikó was recently honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Princess of Asturias Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Excellence in Biotechnology. She continues to work on new therapeutic applications of mRNA therapy.

Selected Publications

Krienke, C, Kolb, L, Diken, E, Streuber, M, Kirchhoff, S, Bukur, T, Akilli-Öztürk, Ö, Kranz, LM, Berger, H, Petschenka, J, Diken, M, Kreiter, S, Yogev, N, Waisman, A, Karikó, K, Türeci, Ö, and Sahin, U: A noninflammatory mRNA vaccine for treatment of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis Science 371 (6525): 145-153,2021.

Hotz, C, Wagenaar, TR, Gieseke, F, Bangari, DS, Callahan, M, Cao, H, Diekmann, J, Diken, M, Grunwitz, C, Hebert, A, Hsu, K, Bernardo, M, Karikó, K, Kreiter, S, Kuhn, AN, Levit, M, Malkova, N, Masciari, S, Pollard, J, Qu, H, Ryan, S, Selmi, A, Schlereth, J, Singh, K, Sun, F, Tillmann, B, Tolstykh, T, Weber, W, Wicke, L, Witzel, S, Yu, Q, Zhang, YA, Zheng, G, Lager, J, Nabel, GJ, Sahin, U, and Wiederschain, D: Local delivery of mRNA-encoding cytokines promotes antitumor immunity and tumor eradication across multiple preclinical tumor models Science Translational Medicine 13 (610): eabc7804,2021. Sahin, U, Muik, A, Derhovanessian, E, Vogler, I, Kranz, LM, Vormehr, M, Baum, A, Pascal, K, Quandt, J, Maurus, D, Brachtendorf, S, Lorks, V, Sikorski, J, Hilker, R, Becker, D, Eller, AK, Grutzner, J, Boesler, C, Rosenbaum, C, Kuhnle, MC, Luxemburger, U, Kemmer-Bruck, A, Langer, D, Bexon, M, Bolte, S, Karikó, K, Palanche, T, Fischer, B, Schultz, A, Shi, PY, Fontes-Garfias, C, Perez, JL, Swanson, KA, Loschko, J, Scully, IL, Cutler, M, Kalina, W, Kyratsous, CA, Cooper, D, Dormitzer, PR, Jansen, KU, and Tureci, O.: COVID-19 vaccine BNT162b1 elicits human antibody and TH1 T cell responses Nature 586 (7830): 594-599,2020. Karikó, K., Muramatsu, H., Welsh, FA., Ludwig, J., Kato, H., Akira, S., Weissman, D.: Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA yields superior nonimmunogenic vector with increased translational capacity and biological stability Molecular Therapy 16 : 1833-1840,2008. Karikó K, Buckstein M, Ni H, Weissman D.: Suppression of RNA recognition by Toll-like receptors: the impact of nucleoside modification and the evolutionary origin of RNA Immunity 23 (2): 165-75,2005.

Academic Contact Information

BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals
An der Goldgrube 12
Mainz, D-55131

 

Hundreds of Catholic priests and church officials in the State of Illinois have been named in a new report detailing sexual abuse by clergy

 

The state's top prosecutor said 451 clergy in Illinois had sexually abused 1,997 children since 1950. The church had acknowledged only 103 individual abusers before the start of the investigation in 2018. Nearly every survivor interviewed struggled with mental health issues after being abused, the report said.

Several U.S. states launched investigations into Catholic sexual abuse after a Pennsylvania grand jury report in 2018 found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children over a period of 70 years.

 

The nearly 700-page report released by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul on Tuesday includes dozens of harrowing stories of rape and sexual abuse, and details how allegations were ignored and abusers were shifted from church to church.

The archbishop of Chicago said he had not studied the new report in detail but took issue with how the statistics were presented, saying "it isn't fair or wise to focus only on the Catholic Church."

In a statement, Cardinal Blase J Cupich apologised to the survivors and pledged that the church would root out abusers and continue to investigate allegations.

"I am personally committed to applying the highest level of vigilance to these efforts and to further strengthening our safeguards against abuse," he said.

·       Sex abuse and the Catholic Church

·       US Diocese settles with abuse victims for $87.5m

Much of the report is dedicated to individual accounts of sexual abuse and lists of clergy accused of child sexual abuse.

One Chicago priest, Father Daniel McCormack, was called "one of the most infamous child abusers anywhere in Illinois." Complaints against McCormack go back to his training period as a priest in the late 1980s. Church officials later admitted that he should have been removed from a seminary and never allowed to become a priest.

Instead, McCormack was placed in several parishes and held teaching and coaching positions in several mostly African-American neighbourhoods on Chicago's west side throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

After numerous complaints and two arrests, he pleaded guilty to abusing five young boys and was sentenced to five years in prison in 2007. The report also includes testimony from survivors.

One survivor summed up the church's response to his reports of abuse by saying: "They had a chance to make things right, but they did everything wrong."

Victim advocacy group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap) said the report demonstrated that church policies are "weak, vague, and rarely followed."

The group called for further state and local investigations, the renaming of all church buildings and schools that were named after abusers, and for memorials in honour of survivors.

"This is a vindication of the people who have been hurt, the survivors who have been whoa have been ignored and lied to," said Snap Chicago leader Larry Antonsen. "Hopefully it will give other survivors the courage to stand up and tell their stories."

BBC News

Are the Republicans willing to allow a default as a price for beating Biden next year?

 

The US House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and president Joe Biden said they had a “productive” discussion on the debt ceiling late on Monday at the White House but that no deal had been reached, as the government seeks to avoid a potentially catastrophic economic event.

If the debt limit is not raised, the US government will default on its bills: a historic first likely to have catastrophic consequences. Federal workers would be furloughed, global stock markets would be likely to crash and the US economy would probably drop into recession. The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said this will happen on or around 1 June if no deal to raise the $31.4tn debt ceiling is reached.

McCarthy leads Republicans demanding harsh spending cuts in return for raising the ceiling. Democrats fear Republicans are willing to allow talks to fail whatever the cost, seeing a default as a price worth paying for beating Biden next year.

Biden has said he will consider spending cuts but has called Republican proposals “extreme” and “unacceptable”, saying he will not back subsidies for big energy companies and “wealthy tax cheats” or put healthcare and food assistance at risk.

-The Guardian

The One and Only Password Tip You Need

“…How strong, long, and complicated your password is almost never matters in the real world. The most common type of password attack is credential stuffing, which uses passwords stolen in data breaches. It works because it's so common for people to reuse the same password in two places, and it is completely unaffected by password strength.

    

“The next most common attack is password spraying, where criminals use short lists of very simple passwords on as many computers as possible. In both situations a laughably simple but unique password is good enough to defeat the attack.

“There are rare types of attack—offline password guessing—where a strong password might help, but the trade-off is that strong passwords are far harder for people to remember, which leads them to use the same password for everything, which makes them much more vulnerable to credential stuffing.

“Notebooks are a really good, simple solution to the password reuse problem, but for years people were ridiculed for using them. Password managers are also a good solution but they are much harder to use than notebooks and a majority of people don't use them, and don't trust them, despite years of positive press and advocacy…

 

“I would instead focus my energy on getting you to do one thing that really can transform your password security, which is using two-factor authentication (2FA):

“My password advice is this: Set up 2FA.

“To explain why: Your Pa$$word doesn’t matter.

“Based on our studies, your account is more than 99.9% less likely to be compromised if you use 2FA. 2FA defeats credential stuffing, password spraying, AND password reuse, AND a bunch of other attacks…

“2FA just means ‘do two different things to prove it’s you when you log in.’ One of those things is almost always typing a password. The other thing is often typing a six-digit code you get from your phone, but it might also be responding to a notification on your phone or plugging in a hardware key (a small plastic dongle that plugs into a USB port and does some fancy cryptographic proving-its-you behind the scenes).

“2FA is very widely supported, and any popular website or app you use is likely to offer it. In an ideal world, those sites and apps would take responsibility for your security and just make 2FA a mandatory part of their account setup process. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world, and the tech giants that know better than anyone else how much 2FA can protect you have left it for you to decide if you need it…

“If you have a choice, the best form of 2FA is a password and hardware key, but you’ll need to buy a hardware key. They are worth the small investment and not nearly as intimidating as they can seem.

“If you aren’t ready for the that, the next best form of 2FA uses an app that prompts you with a notification on your phone. Next best after that is 2FA that uses a code from an app on your phone, and the least good version of 2FA uses a code sent over SMS.

“However, don't let anyone tell you any form of 2FA is "bad." It's all relative. Adopt any one of them and you can safely ignore the rest of the password advice you were probably ignoring already.  To help you get started, here are links to the 2FA setup instructions for the five most visited websites”:

• Google 2-step verification
• YouTube 2-step verification (the company, owned by Google, uses the same process above)
• Facebook two-factor authentication
• Twitter two-factor authentication
• Instagram two-factor authentication

 

-Mark Stockley, Malwarebytes

 

The Worst Crime of the 21st Century by Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky

 

First, a story from the years of the American occupation of Iraq , one of thousands that could be recounted. This one appears in Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War: 

“The most basic barrier was language itself. Very few of the Americans in Iraq, whether soldiers or diplomats or newspaper reporters, could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn’t even have translators. That meant that for many Iraqis, the typical nineteen-year-old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying America’s goodwill; he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance. In Diyala, east of Baghdad, in the early days of the war, I came upon a group of American marines standing next to a shot-up bus and a line of six Iraqi corpses. Omar, a fifteen-year-old boy, sat on the roadside weeping, drenched in the blood of his father, who had been shot dead by American marines when he ran a roadblock.

“What could we have done? one of the marines muttered. It had been dark, there were suicide bombers about and that same night the marines had found a cache of weapons stowed on a truck. They were under orders to stop every car. The minibus, they said, kept coming anyway. They fired four warning shots, tracer rounds, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding.

“Omar’s family, ten in all, were driving together to get out of the fighting in Baghdad. They claimed they had stopped in time, just as the marines had asked them to. In the confusion, the truth was elusive, but it seemed possible that Omar’s family had not understood. ‘We yelled at them to stop,’ Corporal Eric Jewell told me. ‘Everybody knows the word ‘stop.’ It’s universal.’

“In all, six members of Omar’s family were dead, covered by blankets on the roadside. Among them were Omar’s father, mother, brother and sister. A two-year-old boy, Ali, had been shot in the face. ‘My whole family is dead,’ muttered Aleya, one of the survivors, careening between hysteria and grief. ‘How can I grieve for so many people?’” 

“Filkins tells us that among the marines at the scene, reactions to the killings were mixed. ‘Better them than us,’ muttered one. Another broke down in tears as he loaded one of the corpses onto a vehicle. Filkins quotes a colonel insisting that ‘most of the Iraqis are glad we are here, and they are cooperating with us.’ This was plainly false, though Filkins attributes the impression partly to Iraqis telling Americans what they thought the occupiers wanted to hear. Nevertheless, he writes:

“The Iraqis lied to the Americans, no question. But the worst lies were the ones the Americans told themselves. They believed them because it was convenient—and because not to believe them was too horrifying to think about.“

“The United States’ war on Iraq remains the deadliest act of aggressive warfare in our century, and a strong candidate for the worst crime committed in the last 30 years. It was, as George W. Bush said in an unintentional slip of the tongue, ‘wholly unjustified and brutal.’ At least 500,000 Iraqis died as a result of the U.S. war. At least 200,000 of those were violent deaths—people who were blown to pieces by coalition airstrikes, or shot at checkpoints, or killed by suicide bombers from the insurgency unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation. Others died as a result of the collapse of the medical system—doctors fled the country in droves, since their colleagues were being killed or abducted. Childhood mortality and infant mortality in the country rose, and so did malnutrition and starvation.

“Millions of people were displaced, and a ‘generation of orphans’ was created, hundreds of thousands of children having lost parents with many being left to wander the streets homeless. The country’s infrastructure collapsed, its libraries and museums were looted, and its university system was decimated, with professors being assassinated. For years, residents of Baghdad had to deal with suicide bombings as a daily feature of life, and of course, for every violent death, scores more people were left injured or traumatized for life.

“In 2007 the Red Cross said that there were ‘mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies on the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school.’ Acute malnutrition doubled within 20 months of the occupation of Iraq, to the level of Burundi, well above Haiti or Uganda, a figure that ‘translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from ‘wasting,’ a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.’ The amount of death, misery, suffering, and trauma is almost inconceivable. In many places, the war created an almost literal hell on earth. 

“Some of the war’s early proponents have gone quiet. Some have simply lied about the record. (‘We were able to bring the war to a reasonably successful conclusion in 2008,’ wrote neoconservative William Kristol in 2015.)  Others have made public displays of their regret, but cast the war as a noble and idealistic mistake.

It is hard, for instance, to find more extreme pro-war statements from 2002 and 2003 than those of Andrew Sullivan, who wrote that ‘we would fail in any conception of Christian duty if we failed to act after all this time, if we let evil succeed, if we lost confidence in our capacity to do what is morally right.’ Sullivan was unequivocal: ‘This war is a just one. We didn’t start it. Saddam did—over twelve years ago.’ (The United States, in this view, only ever takes defensive measures, thus Hussein is framed as having ‘started’ the war, despite never having attacked the U.S.)

“Nor was there any time to lose: ‘To say that we are in a rush to war is an obscene fabrication, a statement of willful amnesia, a simple denial of history.’ In response to those who pointed out the criminality of the invasion, Sullivan insisted that ‘we have to abandon the U.N. as an instrument in world affairs.’ In fact, he claimed, the lack of international approval only showed that the U.S. was one of the few morally serious countries in the world: 

“[B]y going in, we also stand a chance of seizing our own destiny and changing the equation in the Middle East toward values we actually believe in: the rule of law, the absence of wanton cruelty, the dignity of women, the right to self-determination for Arabs and Jews. We also have a chance to end an evil in its own right: the barbarous regime in Baghdad. We choose Iraq not just because it is uniquely dangerous but because the world has already decided that its weapons must be destroyed. We go in to defend ourselves and our freedoms but also the integrity of the countless U.N. resolutions that mandate Saddam’s disarmament. Our unilateralism, if that is what is eventually needed, will therefore not be a result of our impetuous flouting of global norms. It will be because only the U.S. and the U.K. and a few others are prepared to risk lives and limb to enforce global norms.”

“By 2007, however, with the war having entirely destroyed the country it was supposed to ‘liberate,’ Sullivan was professing to have been a duped innocent whose hatred of evil was so strong that it inhibited his rationality: 

“I was far too naive, and caught up in the desire to fight back against Islamist evil to recognize the casual evil I was enabling in the Bush administration. When I hear of the thousands of innocents who have been killed, tortured and maimed in the Rumsfeld-created vortex, my rage at what this president did is overwhelmed by my shame at having done whatever I did to enable and even cheerlead it, before the blinders were ripped from my eyes. This war has destroyed the political integrity of Iraq. But it has also done profound damage to the moral integrity of America.”

“Sullivan’s newfound concern for the killed, tortured, and maimed may be commendable (although massive human casualties were an entirely predictable consequence of the war which officials were warned about repeatedly). But Sullivan, like many others who realized the war was indefensible, retreated to the position that the war was another of the United States’ endless Well-Intentioned Blunders. He ultimately came to see that the ‘imprudent’ war ‘was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively.’

“As in the case of Vietnam, many ostensible critics of the Iraq war were actually critics of its execution, not its intent. David Ignatius of the Washington Post, writing about Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, lamented that Wolfowitz’s admirable principled idealism was unfortunately a mismatch for human imperfection: 

“I find it impossible to fault on moral grounds the case for toppling Saddam Hussein last March, and for staying the course now. America did a good deed in liberating Iraqis from a tyrannical regime. But Hussein never posed the sort of imminent danger to America that administration rhetoric implied, and Wolfowitz must share the blame for exaggerating that threat… One lesson of this painful year is that too much moralizing is dangerous in statecraft. The idealism of a Wolfowitz must be tempered by some very hard-headed judgments about how to protect U.S. interests…His commitment to principle is admirable, but sound policy can’t be premised on the dream of human perfectibility, in Iraq or anywhere else. America’s problems in Iraq stem in large part from wishful thinking…” 

“The Iraq War, Ignatius wrote, was “the most idealistic war fought in modern times,” fought solely to bring  democracy to Iraq and the region, and its very idealism doomed it to failure. Likewise, while Barack Obama did not dispute the good intentions of those who began it. (The Obamas maintain warm relations with George W. Bush, with Michelle Obama telling the Today show, “I love him to death. He’s a wonderful man,” and “he is my partner in crime.”)

“Very few mainstream criticisms of the war call it what it was: a criminal act of aggression by a state seeking to exert regional control through the use of violence. A great deal of this criticism has focused on the costs of the war to the United States, with barely any attention paid to the cost to Iraq and the surrounding countries. 

“Those who critique the execution are not actually opposing the crime of the war itself. When we apply to ourselves the standards that we apply to others, we see just how little principled opposition to the Iraq War there has actually been and how little acknowledgement that the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral from the outset. If there is ever going to be accountability for this crime, we would first do well to understand what was done and why.”

 

As Right-Wing Judiciary Thrashes Democracy, Dems Reintroduce Bill to Expand US Supreme Court

 

Citing a "crisis of legitimacy" they say is plaguing the U.S. Supreme Court, a group of congressional Democrats on Tuesday reintroduced legislation aimed at thwarting Republican attacks on democracy by expanding the nation's top court from nine to 13 justices.

Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) reintroduced the Judiciary Act outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., where they held a press conference.

"The nation's highest court today faces a crisis of legitimacy that began when Senate Republicans first abandoned norms and precedent to block the confirmation of then-President [Barack] Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, only to later ram through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett a mere 10 days before Election Day 2020, and while millions of Americans were already casting ballots," the lawmakers said in a statement.

"The stolen, far-right Supreme Court majority has since ruled to destroy 50 years of settled precedent by rolling back the fundamental right to abortion care in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and has become the subject of scandal, including new and resurfaced reports of Justice Clarence Thomas' failure to disclose gifts provided to him by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow and his spouse's more than $680,000 in unreported income from the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation," the statement noted.

Markey contended that "Republicans have hijacked the confirmation process and stolen the Supreme Court majority—all to appeal to far-right judicial activists who for years have wanted to wield the gavel to roll back fundamental rights."

"Each scandal uncovered, each norm broken, each precedent-shattering ruling delivered is a reminder that we must restore justice and balance to the rogue, radical Supreme Court," he argued. "It is time we expand the court."

Johnson said that "it's easy to take for granted that the number of justices on the Supreme Court must be nine. But it is not written in the Constitution and has changed seven times over the course of our nation's history. Thirteen justices would mean one justice per circuit court of appeals, consistent with how the number of justices was originally determined, so each justice can oversee one circuit."

Bush asserted that "the Supreme Court is a cesspool of corruption devastating our communities. Because of the decisions made by an unethical and illegitimate majority, my constituents are unable to access abortion care, have weaker labor protections, are more vulnerable to voter suppression, and are subjected to a racist legal system."

"As lawmakers, we have a mandate to ensure our rights are not stripped away by bought-and-paid-for judges trying to implement a fascist agenda," she added. "I'm proud to lead on the reintroduction of the Judiciary Act, which would expand the court and help us reclaim our democracy once and for all."

The bill's sponsors were joined at Tuesday's press conference by leaders of advocacy groups backing the bill, including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, League of Conservation Voters, Demand Justice, and Stand Up America.

"The Supreme Court is facing a legitimacy crisis. In recent years, right-wing justices on the court have disregarded long-standing precedent and undermined Americans' fundamental freedoms," Sean Eldridge, founder and president of the advocacy group Stand Up America, said in a statement. "Now, reported ethics violations by conservative justices have raised serious questions about the Supreme Court's ability to impartially administer justice. It's no wonder 6 in 10 Americans say they don't have confidence in the Supreme Court."

"The American people need bold action to protect our freedoms and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court," he continued. "Sen. Markey and Rep. Johnson have heeded the call by reintroducing the Judiciary Act. This urgently needed legislation would rebalance the court to protect our fundamental freedoms and uphold long-standing precedents."

Planned Parenthood Federation of America president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson warned that "our freedom to make decisions about our lives, bodies, and futures is at stake. Everything is on the line: abortion rights, voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights, our democratic institutions, and our bodily autonomy."

"Our courts should function as the backstop to protecting and advancing our rights, but have, instead, been misused by people pushing deeply unpopular agendas to implement their dangerous endgame," McGill Johnson said. "Planned Parenthood Federation of America is proud to endorse this legislation and we are committed to standing shoulder to shoulder with our partners to achieve bold changes to our courts, and fight for real justice for all people." 

-Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams

 

Mormon church has $100bn "clandestine hedge fund," says whistleblower

 

A former investment manager for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints says that the organization stockpiled more than $100bn in funding intended for charity work but never spent it on such projects.

“It was really a clandestine hedge fund,” David A Nielsen said during an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes. “Once the money went in, it didn’t go out.” Nielsen, who submitted a complaint to the Internal Revenue Service in 2019, previously managed the church’s investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, for nine years.

 

A report on the complaint to the top US tax authority was published by the Washington Post in 2019 after Nielsen’s brother provided a copy. Nielsen, a devout Mormon himself, was first recruited to work for Ensign Peak while working on Wall Street.

 

Nielsen said that during his time with Ensign Peak, he observed the church’s investment firm “[masquerading] as a charity”, dodging what would be billions of dollars in taxes by falsifying records, and generally misleading other believers of the Mormon faith.

Every year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints collected an estimated $7bn from its 17 million members through a practice known as tithing, in which members give about 10% of their income to the religious organization.

About $1bn of the collected money was placed into a reserve fund at Ensign Peak – which is registered as a non-profit – and invested, with profits growing tax-free.

Created in 1997, the reserve fund has ballooned to more than $100bn, which is nearly twice the size of Harvard’s endowment, Nielsen said. “I thought we were going to change the world,” Nielsen remarked. “We just grew the bank account.”

Records show that money from the church’s reserve fund was used to support for-profit initiatives, including a Salt Lake City mall built on church land and a church-owned insurance company.

Nielsen resigned in 2019 after a website named Mormon Leaks linked church members to shell companies that held billions of dollars in stocks and bonds, assets that were actually controlled by Ensign Peak.

 

After his resignation, Nielsen filed a 74-page whistleblower complaint to the IRS that accused Ensign Peak of violating its tax-exempt status by directing money to for-profit businesses.

Nielsen’s complaint was later forwarded to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which said the church took great lengths to hide the size of its investments through shell companies and fake office addresses, the Washington Post reported. The church paid $5m to resolve its SEC case in February.

 

The Mormon church official W Christopher Waddell, who oversees the organization’s financial, real estate, investment and charitable operations as the first counselor in the presiding bishopric, vehemently denied Nielsen’s accusations. “Flat-out wrong,” said Waddell, who added that Ensign Peak acted as “the church’s treasury” and provided resources for its operation.

Nielsen’s interview with 60 Minutes is one of the first times he has given public comment on the report. “We gave the IRS and the SEC all the professional courtesy,” Nielsen said. “This is just too important to fall through the cracks.”

But experts say that the likelihood of the IRS investigating Nielsen’s claims is low. “The political risk is so great that it comes with real danger,” former IRS official Phil Hackney said during the 60 Minutes segment. “At the same time, there’s a real risk to the rule of law if the IRS doesn’t come in and enforce those rules.” 

-The Guardian