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Trump’s Treasury Pick Excelled at Kicking Elderly People Out of Their Homes

by BeatrizViner Posted on January 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

In 2015, OneWest Bank moved to foreclose on John Yang, an 80-year-old Korean immigrant living in Orange Park, Florida, a small suburb of Jacksonville. The bank believed he wasn’t living in his home, violating the terms of its loan. It dispatched an agent to give him legal notification of the foreclosure.

Where did the bank find him? At the same single-story home the bank had said in court papers he did not occupy.

Still OneWest pressed on, forcing Yang, a former Christian missionary, to seek help from legal aid attorneys. This year, during a deposition, an employee of OneWest’s servicing division was asked the obvious question: Why would the bank pursue a foreclosure that seemed so clearly unjustified by the facts?

The employee’s response was blunt: “You’re trying to make logic out of an illogical situation.”

Yang was lucky. The bank eventually dropped its efforts against him. But others were not so fortunate. In recent years, OneWest has foreclosed on at least 50,000 people, often in circumstances that consumer advocates say run counter to federal rules and, as in Yang’s case, common sense.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary has prompted new scrutiny of OneWest’s foreclosure practices. Mnuchin was the lead investor and chairman of the company during the years it ramped up its foreclosure efforts. Representatives from the company and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Records show the attempt to push Mr. Yang out of his home was not an unusual one for OneWest’s Financial Freedom unit, which focused on controversial home loans known as reverse mortgages. Regulators and consumer advocates have long worried that these loans, popular during the height of the housing bubble, exploit elderly homeowners.

The loans allow people to benefit from the equity they have built up over many years without selling their houses. The money is paid in a variety of ways, from lump sums to a stream of monthly checks. Borrowers are allowed to stay in their homes for as long as they live.

The loans are guaranteed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, meaning the agency pays lenders like Freedom Financial the difference between the ultimate sale price of the home and the size of the reverse mortgage.

But the fees are often high and the interest charges mount up quickly because the homeowner isn’t paying down any of the principal on the loan. Homeowners remain on the hook for property taxes and insurance and can lose their homes if they miss those payments.

A 2012 report to Congress by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said that “vigorous enforcement is necessary to ensure that older homeowners are not defrauded of a lifetime of home equity.”

ProPublica found numerous examples where Financial Freedom had foreclosed for legally questionable reasons. The company served several other homeowners at their homes to let them know they were being sued for not occupying their homes. In Florida, a shortfall of only $0.27 led to a foreclosure attempt. In Atlanta, the company sought to foreclose on a widow after her husband’s death, but backed down when a legal aid attorney sued, citing federal law that allowed the surviving spouse to remain in the home.

“It appears their business approach is scorched earth, in a way that doesn’t serve communities, homeowners or the taxpayer,” said Alys Cohen, a staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center in Washington D.C.

Since the financial crisis, OneWest, through Financial Freedom, has conducted a disproportionate number of the nation’s reverse mortgage foreclosures. It was responsible for 16,200 foreclosures on government-backed reverse mortgages, or 39 percent of all foreclosures nationwide, from 2009 through late 2014, even though it only serviced about 17 percent of the loans, according to government data analyzed by the California Reinvestment Coalition, an advocacy group for low-income consumers. While some foreclosures were justified, legal aid attorneys say Financial Freedom has refused to work with borrowers in foreclosure to establish payment plans, in contrast with other servicers of reverse mortgages.

Experts say the companies are not entirely to blame for the wave of foreclosures. HUD oversees standards on most reverse mortgages. In the years after the housing crash, HUD’s rules evolved, creating a miasma of confusion for mortgage servicers. Companies say the new federal rules required them to foreclose when borrowers fell far behind on property and insurance costs, rather than work out payment plans.

OneWest’s rough treatment of homeowners extended to its behavior toward borrowers with standard mortgages in the aftermath of the housing crash. In 2009, the Obama administration launched a program to encourage mortgage servicers to work out affordable mortgage modifications with borrowers. OneWest, weighed down by several hundred thousand souring mortgages, signed up.

It didn’t go well. About three-quarters of homeowners who sought a modification from OneWest through the program were denied, according to the latest figures from the Treasury Department. OneWest was among the worst performing large servicers in the program by that measure. In 2011, activists protested OneWest’s indifference at Mnuchin’s Bel Air mansion in Los Angeles.

“We’re in a difficult economic environment and very sympathetic to the problems many homeowners face, but under the government’s program there’s not a solution in every case,” Mnuchin told the Wall Street Journal in that year.

Despite the controversy, Mnuchin and the other investors in OneWest made a killing on their purchase. In 2009, Mnuchin’s investment group bought the failed mortgage bank IndyMac, which had been taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation after the financial crisis, changing the name to OneWest. They paid about $1.5 billion, with the FDIC sharing the ongoing mortgage losses. George Soros, a Clinton backer at whose hedge fund Mnuchin had worked, and John Paulson, a hedge fund manager who also supported Trump, invested alongside Mnuchin in IndyMac.

In 2015, CIT, a lender to small and medium-sized businesses, bought OneWest for $3.4 billion, more than doubling the Mnuchin group’s initial investment. Mnuchin personally made about $380 million on the sale, according to Bloomberg estimates. He retains around a 1 percent stake in CIT, worth around $100 million, which he may have to divest if confirmed.

CIT has found the reverse mortgage business to be a headache. Recently, CIT took a $230 million pretax charge after it discovered that OneWest had mistakenly charged the government for payments that the company should have shouldered itself. An investigation of Financial Freedom’s practices by HUD’s inspector general is ongoing.

Yang’s lawyers at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid fought his foreclosure for a year. Though Yang had run a dry cleaning business in Florida and roamed the world as a missionary, working in North Korea, China, and Afghanistan, the bank’s torrent of paperwork had overwhelmed him. Yang didn’t speak English well. OneWest claimed it had sent him forms to verify he was living at his home, but that he never sent them back.

Under HUD rules, OneWest was required to verify that each borrower continued to use the property as a principal residence. It is a condition of all the HUD-backed loans in order to help ensure the government subsidy goes to those who need it.

But Yang can be forgiven for thinking that OneWest could not have doubted that he was still in his home. During the same period that OneWest was moving to foreclose on Yang for not living in his home, another arm of the bank regularly spoke and corresponded with him at his home about a delinquent insurance payment, according to court documents.

A Financial Freedom employee testified in the case that the department that handled delinquent insurance payments and the department that handled occupancy did not communicate with each other in those circumstances.

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Trump’s Treasury Pick Excelled at Kicking Elderly People Out of Their Homes

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Black Immigrants Brace for Dual Hardships Under Trump

by AidenLoche Posted on December 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two days before the presidential election, Donald Trump traveled to the deeply segregated city of Minneapolis to make a final pitch to voters. He didn’t spend any time discussing Minnesota’s racial wealth gap—according to one study, the state’s financial disparity between races is the highest in the country—or the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile during a traffic stop in the state four months earlier.

Instead, he talked about Minnesota’s Somali population, larger than in any other state. “Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen first-hand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval,” Trump said in the November 6 speech. “Some of them are joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world,” he added.

A thousand miles away in New York City, the speech left Amaha Kassa worried. In 2012, Kassa founded African Communities Together, an immigrant rights group that connects African immigrants to services and advocates for immigration policies beneficial to people coming from Africa. “When our community sees a group of African immigrants being targeted in that way, then that gives cause for concern about what we are going to see from the administration,” he said of Trump’s Minnesota speech. “The fear is that under President Trump it is going to get worse.”

In the weeks after Trump’s stunning electoral upset, discussions of what the incoming administration could mean for immigrants have largely focused on the concerns of undocumented Latinos—an unsurprising development given the size of that population and its vocal activism in recent years. But other immigrant communities have also begun to question exactly how the Trump administration will affect their lives. And the country’s growing black immigrant population, which advocates say has borne the brunt of some of the country’s harshest immigration policies, fears that it could suffer particularly severely under Trump.

Advocates point to Trump’s call for a restoration of “law and order,” his focus on “criminal aliens,” and his proposal to make nationwide use of “stop and frisk,” the highly controversial New York practice that targeted minorities disproportionately and was eventually found ineffective and unconstitutional. (Trump has since walked back his stop-and-frisk proposal after criticism.) Immigrant groups worry that these policies could prey on black immigrants, given widespread evidence of prejudice that causes people to equate blackness with criminality and black immigrants’ existing struggles in the immigration enforcement system. Trump has also used harsh rhetoric about refugees, causing concern among groups that have fled disaster and conflict zones in Haiti and parts of Africa.

Recent policy proposals to assist immigrants have focused largely on Latino groups, leaving some black immigrants to feel that their concerns aren’t being addressed by lawmakers. “People don’t look at particular communities and how they benefit within the overall immigration system,” says Francesca Menes, the policy and advocacy coordinator for the Florida Immigrant Coalition and a member of the Black Immigration Network. “When you’re black and you’re coming from a black country it is much harder for you to come into the US.”

The United States’ black immigrant population has grown considerably in recent decades. According to a report released earlier this year by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the New York University School of Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, black immigrants now account for nearly 10 percent of the nation’s black population, up from roughly 3 percent in 1980. The majority come from Africa and the Caribbean, with immigration from African countries seeing a particularly sharp increase in recent years in response to a number of humanitarian crises. While black immigrants are more likely to be in the country lawfully than some other immigrant groups, the undocumented black population is growing at a faster rate than the overall foreign-born black population. The roughly 600,000 undocumented black immigrants currently living in the United States may have cause to be especially concerned about Trump’s plans for deporting large numbers of undocumented immigrants.

“Being undocumented and black, we have the traditional issues that come with being undocumented,” says Jonathan Jayes-Green, a founder and coordinator of the UndocuBlack Network, a group that advocates for the black undocumented community. “But because we are also black we deal with the ways in which blackness is criminalized in this country.”

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration report found that black immigrants, like the black population overall, were more likely to have criminal convictions, and that as a result they were more likely than other immigrant groups to be detained by immigration officials and to be deported due to a criminal record. Although less than 8 percent of the noncitizen population in the United States is black, more than 20 percent of immigrants in deportation proceedings on criminal grounds are black. The report notes that in 2013, “more than three quarters of Black immigrants who were deported were removed on criminal grounds in contrast to less than half of immigrants overall.”

“The voices of black immigrants were not being heard in migrant rights, even as some of the most violent aspects of migration were impacting black immigrants the most,” says Ben Ndugga-Kabuye, a research and policy associate with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Ndugga-Kabuye attributes much of the expansion of immigration enforcement and detention to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, a bill passed as part of the Clinton administration’s tough-on-crime agenda. “The criminal justice system became the welcome mat into the immigration system, and the issues of racial profiling in the criminal justice system are replicated in the immigration system,” he says.

Many of the issues black immigrants face in the immigration enforcement system are not new. Advocates note that the focus on immigrants with criminal records intensified during the Obama administration and could become even more of an issue once Trump takes office. While the president-elect’s exact policy plans remain unclear, he has frequently discussed his desire to deport undocumented immigrants en masse and has more recently settled on the goal of deporting as many as 3 million “criminal aliens” during his first hours in office. He has also suggested that he would give more leeway to police. During the campaign, he frequently characterized black protesters reacting to instances of police violence as anti-police.

“I think our communities were already in a state of emergency under a Democratic president,” says Jayes-Green. “We are already not in the best of places, so as we think about the next administration, our community has gone into a sort of crisis control.”

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Black Immigrants Brace for Dual Hardships Under Trump

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A Brief History of the Idea That Everyone Should Get Free Cash for Life

by DedraFreee Posted on December 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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From the window of his university office in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, philosophy professor Philippe Van Parijs—considered by many to be Europe’s most prominent advocate for the idea that the state should provide a regular income to every citizen—can see the mailbox where he sent off invitations to the first “basic income” conference more than 30 years ago. “I’m quite amazed by the seed we threw on the ground now,” he says.

After decades of obscurity, the idea is suddenly in fashion. Politicians around the world are interested and a handful of governments, such as Finland and the Canadian province of Ontario, are planning or considering basic-income pilot projects.

But the idea of basic income has been around for more than 200 years, rising on waves of political and economic turmoil only to disappear in calmer times. Here are some of the highlights of its long, turbulent history:

Thomas Paine Wikicommons

1795-97: As the Industrial Revolution widened the gap between rich and poor, land reform was seen by some as an answer to social inequity. Thomas Paine, who two decades earlier had written Common Sense, drafted Agrarian Justice in the winter of 1795 and 1796. The earth by right belongs to all people, Paine argued, but the private ownership of land has stripped us of this “natural inheritance”; at 21 years old, citizens should be compensated for their loss with a sum of 15 pounds. A year later, fellow British-born radical Thomas Spence responded with a pamphlet titled The Rights of Infants. Writing in the character of a woman (“because the men are not to be depended on”), Spence said society should be organized into parishes that would lease out all houses and lands and then, after the community’s expenses had been paid, distribute their remaining funds equally among members.

1848: Revolutions erupted across Europe, Karl Marx penned The Communist Manifesto, and Joseph Charlier, a Belgian variously identified as a “writer, an “accountant,” or a “merchant,” wrote The Solution of the Social Problem, now considered the first fully fledged proposal for basic income. His book received little attention and disappeared until two European academics stumbled upon it 150 years later and wrote an article that established Charlier’s place in history.

Late 1910s and 1920s: Social movements demanded a radical redistribution of resources after the devastation of World War I. In England, two young Quakers published a pamphlet calling for a weekly “state bonus” for all citizens of the United Kingdom. The idea gained a following and was considered by the Labor Party in 1920 but ultimately rejected.

Sen. Huey Long Wikimedia Commons

1930s: The Great Depression swept across the industrialized world, wiping out jobs and sending poverty soaring. In 1934, populist (and famously corrupt) Louisiana Sen. Huey Long addressed the country on the radio and called for the confiscation of wealth from the richest and guaranteed annual incomes for all families, a program he called “Share Our Wealth.” The movement was cut short by Long’s assassination in 1935. That same year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the landmark Social Security Act, creating the anti-poverty program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children—or “welfare.”

1940s: Conservative economists Milton Friedman and George Stigler, both future Nobel laureates, developed the idea of a “negative income tax” (NIT), essentially a guaranteed income administered through the tax system. Low-income filers would receive checks from the government rather than pay taxes; as their earnings increased, so would their tax burden, but also the total amount the filer took home. Friedman’s plan may come as a surprise to his small-government acolytes, but the economist firmly believed an NIT would address poverty without adding to the state bureaucracy he reviled.

1962-63: Basic income went mainstream as attention turned to poverty, unemployment, and the massive northern migration of African Americans. In 1963, critic Dwight Macdonald argued for the necessity of a guaranteed income for all families in an influential review of Michael Harrington’s The Other America in The New Yorker. Friedman made the case for an NIT in his book Capitalism and Freedom, while on the left, economist Robert Theobald outlined his “Basic Economic Security plan”—a proposal strikingly similar to modern basic-income schemes. Economists in the Kennedy administration embarked on a federal anti-poverty campaign, which, after Kennedy’s assassination, became Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

1964-68: Racially charged riots, with demands for economic justice, erupted in cities across the country. In a 1967 speech, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a guaranteed minimum income for all people. Protests organized by welfare rights groups raised the pressure on government to address poverty and guaranteed income gained popularity within the administration. In a 1966 report, Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisers said a negative income tax “would be the most direct approach to reducing poverty” and “deserve(s) further exploration.” By 1968, a surprising cast of characters, including heads of major companies, had lent support to the idea. John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson joined more than 1,200 economists in signing a statement advocating a “national system of income guarantees and supplements.”

1969-71: Richard Nixon repudiated guaranteed income on the campaign trail, but after his election, he was persuaded that it might be the best solution to the so-called “welfare mess.” In a televised address in August, Nixon presented his Family Assistance Plan (FAP). While Nixon insisted that it was “not a guaranteed income” because it included work requirements, the plan owed its central tenets to the guaranteed-income debate and would have made a radical break with past poverty policy. Families headed by both working and unemployed adults were eligible, erasing a historic line between the “deserving” poor (the old, disabled, and mothers with young children) and “undeserving” (people who are physically able to work).

Daniel Patrick Moynihan Marion S. Trikosko / Library of Congress

In 1970, Nixon’s bill easily passed the House but stalled in the Senate Finance Committee, which was chaired by Huey Long’s son, Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a proponent of the plan within the administration, wrote in a memo to Nixon that for Southern committee members “it would very likely mean the end of those political dynasties built on poverty and racial division.” Nixon’s plan died in committee. A revised version met the same fate the following year.

Late 1960s to the early 1980s: Beginning in 1968, the US government ran four groundbreaking negative income tax trials involving nearly 9,000 families. In Canada, between 1974 and 1979, the government turned the tiny, isolated town of Dauphin into a living laboratory where qualified residents received a guaranteed annual income equivalent to about $15,000 for a family of four. (The Canadian data was never analyzed; a determined academic discovered the documents in the early 2000s, packed away in 1,800 dusty boxes in a Winnipeg warehouse.) The US experiments, which were primarily intended to study an NIT’s impact on labor, found only small reductions in work effort. But researchers reported that the trials in Seattle and Denver appeared to increase the rate of marriage dissolution by 40 percent to 60 percent. Although the results were later disputed, the damage was done. Moynihan, now a senator and once an avid supporter in Congress, renounced guaranteed income. But Nixon’s welfare reform efforts did have a lasting impact: Supplementary Security Income (income support for the aged, blind, and disabled) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (an NIT applied solely to the working poor) were enacted in 1972 and 1974.

Jay Hammond Wikicommons

1982: In 1976, as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline neared completion, Jay Hammond, a professional hunter turned governor, proposed a system of dividends to be paid to all Alaskans from a state oil fund established in 1976. The program dispensed its first dividends in 1982, in effect becoming the first basic-income system in the United States. Last year, the state sent checks of $2,072 to nearly 650,000 residents. In June, current Gov. Bill Walker capped payments at $1,000 per person this year to help cover Alaska’s budget deficit.

Early 1980s to 1990s: In 1982, Philippe Van Parijs, then a young Belgian academic losing sleep to fears of unfettered capitalism, landed on the idea of a basic income. He found like-minded thinkers across Europe, and in 1986 they scraped together enough money for the first basic-income conference. At that meeting, the Basic Income Europe Network (“BIEN,” or “good” in French) was born. In 2004, at the insistence of a growing international contingent, the organization was renamed the Basic Income Earth Network.

1997: Mexico launched a large-scale conditional cash transfer program (CCT), or a system of direct cash payments to poor households, followed in 2001 by Brazil and Colombia. While CCTs are not identical to basic income—the grants come with requirements, such as sending children to school, and are only given to the poor—they also operate on the assumption that people can be trusted to spend cash grants wisely. CCT programs spread rapidly across Latin America in the early 2000s and on to parts of Asia and Africa. Tens of millions of impoverished people worldwide now receive financial assistance through CCTs funded by governments, international aid organizations, and nonprofits.

Zephania Kameeta Wikicommons

2006-11: At a BIEN conference in Cape Town, South Africa, Zephania Kameeta, then head of the Namibian Evangelical Lutheran Church, shouted in frustration: “Words! Words! Words!” Kameeta was fed up with the endless scholarly discussions and lack of progress, so after the conference he set about organizing a real-life basic-income trial. By early 2008, a basic-income coalition assembled by the bishop had launched a pilot project in an impoverished settlement. Two years later, a group of researchers began a series of basic-income experiments in rural India involving more than 6,000 individuals.

2015-Present: The Canadian province of Ontario pledged to roll out a basic income trial in 2017, with the Dutch city of Utrecht to follow in 2017. The Finnish government mulled a pilot project with up to 10,000 participants. In the United States, where Silicon Valley bigwigs were among basic income’s most vocal supporters, the startup incubator Y Combinator in June announced plans to start a pilot project this year in Oakland, California, that will distribute up to $2,000 a month to a few dozen people. Another private enterprise, the US-based nonprofit GiveDirectly, is planning an extended trial in Kenya that will span 10 to 15 years and involve at least 6,000 participants.

2016: On June 5, Switzerland became the first country to vote on, and roundly defeat, a national basic income. Opponents argued that the policy would have discouraged work and undermined the Swiss economy. But for basic-income advocates, the referendum was remarkable. Just a few decades ago, Van Parijs remembers, it was “difficult to find 30 people who had heard of the idea.”

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A Brief History of the Idea That Everyone Should Get Free Cash for Life

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This American Fought ISIS. Now He’s Trying to Get Washington to Untangle Its Syria Policy

by DanteDunckley79 Posted on December 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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“This reminds me of when I was fighting ISIS,” Robert Amos told me, improbably, one sunny September day as we rode in a white Jeep through the streets of downtown Washington, DC. The vehicle was packed with four elderly Kurdish passengers in sweaters and suit jackets, members of the American Kurdish Information Network, a non-profit organization. They complained in their native Kurmanji dialect about the broken A/C, and Amos occasionally chimed in with phrases that he learned during six months he spent as a soldier with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the predominately Kurdish militia that controls a 200-mile stretch of territory in northern Syria known as Rojava.

Amos, who is 30, Jewish, and grew up in West Virginia, has hair the hue of desert sand, and he wore big black granny sunglasses. “We’d always be driving through the desert in cars like this,” he said. “One time, during a battle, ISIS guys came streaming out of a tunnel at the bottom of a hill and I thought we were going to die. My friend kissed me on the cheek and said ‘goodbye.’ I survived, but he didn’t.”

Today Amos is fighting a new war. Since returning home in late 2015, he’s formed the American Veterans of the Kurdish Armed Forces, a group that aims to increase visibility and support for the YPG as well as the approximately 200 Americans who have joined them. The Pentagon has provided Special Forces troops to advise the YPG and air strikes to assist them on the battlefield. But Amos believes this isn’t enough, and his group has lobbied the Obama administration to provide more military assistance. It now plans to do the same with the incoming Trump administration, whose policy toward the Syrian Kurds remains—like most things Trump-related—wildly unpredictable. “Obama, Trump, none of them know what’s going on over there,” Amos said.

Amos’s inspiration for the group was an incident on August 24, 2016, when Vice President Joe Biden flew to Istanbul, where he and Turkish President Recep Erdogen reprimanded Kurdish fighters for being too effective against ISIS. “Move back across the Euphrates River,” Biden said at a joint press conference, referring to the YPG’s recent capture of Manbij, a strategic city north of Aleppo, from ISIS. (Three Americans died in combat during the two-month battle.) Soon after the meeting, 20 Turkish tanks, accompanied by 1,500 Syrian Islamists and aerial support from the US Air Force, rolled into Rojava. When they clashed with the YPG, the dizzying contradiction of the mission became clear: One US-sponsored force (Turkey and the Syrian rebels) was killing another US-sponsored force (the YPG).

A video, later posted on YouTube, showed a group of Syrian jihadists who’d participated in the Turkish invasion chasing 25 US Army soldiers out of the village of Al-Rai, where the Americans had gone to offer assistance to the pro-Turkey troops. On the tape, the Syrian rebels call the troops who’ve come to help them “dogs and pigs.” “Christians and Americans,” another man shouts, as the Americans flee, “have no place among us!”

Some Middle East experts have expressed outrage at the August invasion and the Obama administration’s support for it. Turkey’s attack on the YPG, said US Army Special Envoy Brett McGurk, was “unacceptable and a source of deep concern.” The incursion would be the beginning of “Erdogen’s Waterloo,” wrote David L. Phillips, a former advisor to President Obama and director of Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, in the Huffington Post. By backing Turkey’s invasion, he believes, the United States wasn’t just facilitating attacks on its own soldiers and allies, but inadvertently enabling jihadists to carry out those attacks. “Slipping into Syria’s quagmire is not in America’s interest,” Phillips wrote. “Nor is being played by Turkey.”

In response, on September 1st, Amos put on the olive fatigues he’d worn in Syria and drove six hours from Indiana, where he was living, to Parma, Ohio, to confront Biden. “Why did you tell the YPG to go back?” Amos shouted, as the vice president gave a speech to Hillary Clinton supporters at a union hall. An MSNBC segment called Amos “Biden’s heckler.” In the clip, his voice cracks as he cries out, “My friends died! My American friends!”

“If you’re serious,” Biden says, interrupting his speech, “come back after and talk to me about this. You have my permission.”

“Biden slipped out the back door,” Amos told me as our driver, Jay Kheirabadi, an Iranian Kurd who lives in Maryland, weaved erratically between lanes of traffic, as if dodging landmines. He honked and shouted out the window. “I think I have a perspective the vice president could learn from,” Amos said. “I just want to talk.”

The Jeep parked in front of Biden’s house at Number One Observatory Circle, near Massachusetts Avenue. Separated from the white Queen Anne-style mansion by stands of poplar trees, a steel fence, and a police checkpoint, the five men set up two large signs facing the road. One read, using a somewhat inscrutable reference to Turkey’s support for jihadist groups in Syria, “Joe Biden supports Diet ISIS.” The other read, “Kurds are fighting ISIS tooth and nail. America will you help them?”

Two other YPG veterans had promised to come but never arrived, and the lackluster turnout put Amos in a melancholy mood. Still, the protest’s modesty underscored its message: U.S. support of both Turkish and Kurdish groups who are killing each other in Syria is a danger to American interests, but no one is paying much attention. This point was made dramatically on November 24, when Turkish air strikes killed the first American YPG volunteer in Syria, an anarchist from California named Michael Israel. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that Americans fighting alongside the YPG would be treated as “terrorists…regardless of whether they are members of allied countries”.

A passing car honked. A man gave the middle finger out the top of his convertible. An Italian woman whizzed by on a mountain bike and shouted “Bongiorno!“

When I asked Azad Kobani, a former Syrian parliament member who now lives in Virginia, if American volunteers like Amos were crazy for risking their lives fighting in his home country, he said, “Fighting for democracy is never crazy. Not realizing Turkey doesn’t represent the US’s best interests is what’s crazy.”

Two Secret Service members crossed the street, playing Frogger against traffic. They rubbed their chins and stared down Amos, who is six-foot-two, a little plump, and who, in his sunglasses and YPG fatigues, appeared a bit deranged. “I fought ISIS,” Amos told the agents. “Biden promised he’d speak with me. He lied.”

“He does that,” one agent said, sarcastically.

“We went over there and fought and died,” Amos said after the agents had left, “and it’s like nobody cares.” Moments later a woman in a black SUV drove by, rolled down her window, and yelled an expletive at Amos. “Well,” he said, sighing, “I guess I need to keep fighting.”

Support for this article was provided by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

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This American Fought ISIS. Now He’s Trying to Get Washington to Untangle Its Syria Policy

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Facebook Makes It Easy for Advertisers to Be Racist

by SolomonToosey Posted on October 28, 2016

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers.

That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.

The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment.

Here is a screenshot of a housing ad that we purchased from Facebook’s self-service advertising portal:

ProPublica

The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. (Here’s the ad itself.)

When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it illegal “to make, print, or publish, or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.” Violators can face tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 also prohibits the “printing or publication of notices or advertisements indicating prohibited preference, limitation, specification or discrimination” in employment recruitment.

Facebook’s business model is based on allowing advertisers to target specific groups 2014 or, apparently to exclude specific groups 2014 using huge reams of personal data the company has collected about its users. Facebook’s microtargeting is particularly helpful for advertisers looking to reach niche audiences, such as swing-state voters concerned about climate change. ProPublica recently offered a tool allowing users to see how Facebook is categorizing them. We found nearly 50,000 unique categories in which Facebook places its users.

Facebook says its policies prohibit advertisers from using the targeting options for discrimination, harassment, disparagement or predatory advertising practices.

“We take a strong stand against advertisers misusing our platform: Our policies prohibit using our targeting options to discriminate, and they require compliance with the law,” said Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook. “We take prompt enforcement action when we determine that ads violate our policies.”

Satterfield said it’s important for advertisers to have the ability to both include and exclude groups as they test how their marketing performs. For instance, he said, an advertiser “might run one campaign in English that excludes the Hispanic affinity group to see how well the campaign performs against running that ad campaign in Spanish. This is a common practice in the industry.”

He said Facebook began offering the “Ethnic Affinity” categories within the past two years as part of a “multicultural advertising” effort.

Satterfield added that the “Ethnic Affinity” is not the same as race 2014 which Facebook does not ask its members about. Facebook assigns members an “Ethnic Affinity” based on pages and posts they have liked or engaged with on Facebook.

When we asked why “Ethnic Affinity” was included in the “Demographics” category of its ad-targeting tool if it’s not a representation of demographics, Facebook responded that it plans to move “Ethnic Affinity” to another section.

Facebook declined to answer questions about why our housing ad excluding minority groups was approved 15 minutes after we placed the order.

By comparison, consider the advertising controls that the New York Times has put in place to prevent discriminatory housing ads. After the newspaper was successfully sued under the Fair Housing Act in 1989, it agreed to review ads for potentially discriminatory content before accepting them for publication.

Steph Jespersen, the Times’ director of advertising acceptability, said that the company’s staff runs automated programs to make sure that ads that contain discriminatory phrases such as “whites only” and “no kids” are rejected.

The Times’ automated program also highlights ads that contain potentially discriminatory code words such as “near churches” or “close to a country club.” Humans then review those ads before they can be approved.

Jespersen said the Times also rejects housing ads that contain photographs of too many white people. The people in the ads must represent the diversity of the population of New York, and if they don’t, he says he will call up the advertiser and ask them to submit an ad with a more diverse lineup of models.

But, Jespersen said, these days most advertisers know not to submit discriminatory ads: “I haven’t seen an ad with 2018whites only’ for a long time.”

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Karl Rove’s Group Injects Scare Tactics Into New Hampshire Senate Race

by EmmettF826676 Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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New Hampshire voters came home last night to find an alarming warning in their mailboxes. Voting for Democrat Maggie Hassan in her Senate race against incumbent Sen. Kelly Ayotte, they were told, would essentially mean voting for terrorists to target their children. The large glossy mailer warns on the front that radical Islamic terrorists are searching for their next city to target:

The crosshairs motif continues on the inside, which bashes Hassan for supporting the Iran nuclear deal and emphasizes—over a silhouette of a woman and a young girl walking hand in hand—that terrorists are “searching for soft targets…”:

The back of the mailer shows yet another crosshairs over an American flag outside a home, paired with a warning that terrorists are an imminent threat and support for Hassan could put “our families at risk”:

Where did the money come from to create the provocative mailer? We’ll probably never know. According to the fine print at the bottom, the mailer was sent by One Nation, a politically active 501(c)(4) nonprofit, also known as a dark money group. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, One Nation was taken over earlier this year by operatives from American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s outside money operation.

Federal Election Commission records show that One Nation paid about $44,000 for the mailer, but as a nonprofit organization, One Nation will never have to disclose who donated the money to fund the mailer. It’s not clear whether One Nation has sent similar mailings in other states, though FEC records show the group is spending money on mailers in Nevada, Indiana, and North Carolina.

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Karl Rove’s Group Injects Scare Tactics Into New Hampshire Senate Race

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23 Ways You Could be Killed While Being Black

by KristinaEllzey Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the week after shootings that left two black men dead, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé and other notable celebrities have teamed up to create this powerful video on the everyday interactions that can get black people killed in America.

The video, produced for Mic.com in collaboration with activist group We Are Here Movement, shows portraits of people who have been shot and killed by police, including Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, and what they were doing when they were shot. Often, as Mother Jones has documented, these acts are mundane: failing to signal a lane change; wearing a hoodie; selling CDs outside of a supermarket.

“It’s moving to see that celebrities have taken charge of telling this story. What we’re seeing now are black entertainers — singers, actors, athletes and artists who are deeply in tune with what’s happening in the United States — speaking out, taking action,” Mic writer Jamilah King wrote in response to the video, which was based on one of her pieces. “Too often, the ordinary seems impossible for black folks in America. Violence follows everywhere — driving down the street, or selling CDs, or playing in a park, or sleeping on our grandmothers’ sofa. We become suspects in our own deaths, tried and executed by those sworn and paid to protect us.”

“We must tell the world that our lives matter no matter how controversial that point has become.”

Watch the video below:

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23 Ways You Could be Killed While Being Black

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

by ToniaR25ivfco Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Amid a resurgence of nationwide protests sparked by smartphone videos of police shootings of black men, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law on Monday a bill that will severely restrict public access to footage from police body camera and dash cams.

House Bill 972 requires a court order before any such footage may be released to journalists or members of the public, which also means that police departments cannot voluntarily release footage without a judge’s approval. Under the new law, police chiefs get the final say on whether or not people caught on camera—or their lawyers—will be allowed to view the relevant footage. If the chief says no, the subject will have to successfully sue the department to gain access.

The law’s passage is sure to rankle some Black Lives Matter activists, who have repeatedly called for even greater access to police video footage in the wake of disputed police shootings of black subjects. Gov. McCrory said he signed the bill to “ensure transparency,” and that while recordings of police interactions with the community could be helpful, they can also “mislead and misinform.” In drafting the bill, McCrory added, lawmakers grappled with how technology “can help us, and how can we work with it so it doesn’t also work against our police officers.”

Susanna Birdsong, director of the North Carolina ACLU, believes the new law will hurt—not help—transparency in policing. “There really should be some minimum guarantee of access to the recordings by someone other than the police,” she told me.

People involved in incidents recorded by the police, as well as their attorneys, should be able to view the footage without exception, Birdsong says. And law enforcement agencies should have protocols in place for the timely release of footage when it’s in the public interest—for example, in cases in which officers use physical force to subdue a person. The process, she adds, should not require any court’s approval.

The law, Birdsong adds, could have consequences for reporting on law enforcement. Before, a news organization could go directly to a local police department to request access to footage or put pressure on city officials to make it happen, but now “that avenue is foreclosed.”

The bill’s primary sponsors were Reps. John Faircloth, Allen McNeil, and Pat Hurley. (Faircloth is a former police chief while McNeil was once a sheriff’s deputy.) The legislation was crafted at the urging of the Legislative Committee on Justice and Public Safety, a bipartisan panel convened earlier this year to consider criminal justice issues. The committee heard from civil rights groups, community organizers, and law enforcement before announcing its findings in June. Among the recommendations: The state should pass an act providing that police camera footage is not part of the public record.

The bill’s authors, according to Birdsong, were lobbied by law enforcement groups, including the North Carolina Sheriffs Association and the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police. And while the advisory committee heard from the ACLU and others who opposed such a recommendation, the authors consulted with few nonpolice stakeholders on their bill’s language. “The language in the bill very much reflects that,” Birdsong says. (None of the bill’s key sponsors responded to requests for comment.)

New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Louisiana also recently passed laws restricting public access to police body-cam footage. But many jurisdictions provide reasonable access to such recordings, Birdsong told me. Consider Chicago’s new effort in transparent policing, created in the wake of heavy criticism of city officials for their handling of police videos. In May, the city’s police review board launched a database of audio and video recordings, police reports, and other documents related to more than 100 open investigations into misconduct by officers. The database, which is accessible to the public, includes more than 300 videos from body cameras, police dash cams, and cellphones.

At least one North Carolina police chief thinks his state’s new law is a bad idea. “I would rather let our video tell the story—good, bad or indifferent—than someone who has a cellphone who has the opportunity to edit it,” Fayettevile police chief Harold Medlock told the Charlotte Observer. “Sometimes we do ourselves a great disservice by not disclosing as much information as we can.”

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

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When You See the Film of These Brave Veterans in Therapy, It Will Change How You Think About PTSD

by Nilda0140pi Posted on May 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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As millions of Americans around the country fire up the grills on Memorial Day and welcome the arrival of summer, it might be easy to forget what the holiday is supposed to commemorate. That’s why on Monday, the POV (Point of View) series on PBS will air Of Men and War, a documentary years in the making that chronicles the stories of American combat veterans as they undergo therapy to cope with their traumatic memories of war.

French filmmaker and producer Laurent Bécue-Renard spent 10 years working on the project, conceptualizing it, scouting locations, finding veterans who would be willing to participate, and then filming their therapy sessions. He focused much of the film on the Pathway Home, a therapy and service center for veterans in Northern California that offers an immersive residential treatment setting for veterans. Bécue-Renard and his cinematographer spent 14 months filming therapy sessions and then checked in on the veterans over the course of four years, filming their family lives after treatment.

“Rage and anger carried me through everything,” one veteran says as the cameras roll. Another describes killing somebody. “I leveled my weapon, led my target, and I pulled the trigger,” he says, adding that while subsequently moving the body, “a big chunk of his brain fell on my foot.” As he starts to tear up, he describes the blank stare on the corpse’s face. “He just kept looking at me.”

The film originally debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 and went on to win the award for best feature-length documentary at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam later that year. Monday’s airing is the US television debut. Bécue-Renard’s first war documentary, War Wearied, was released in 2003 and chronicled the lives of three war widows in Bosnia. Of Men and War is the second film in this trilogy; the third will focus on the children of veterans and how their parents’ military service shapes their lives.

Bécue-Renard spoke with Mother Jones about the process of making the film, how it affected him, and what he thinks people should take away from it.

Mother Jones: This film deals with some pretty heavy stuff. How did the material affect you?

Laurent Bécue-Renard: I had a specific quest while doing this project. Both my grandfathers fought in World War I, but they never spoke about it to their wives, nor to their kids, or to their grandkids. So I always felt that there was something that wasn’t being told in the family and that I definitely wanted to access. I also have my own experience of war as a civilian, since I spent the last year of the war in Bosnia as the editor of an online magazine. That experience determined my career as a filmmaker, and I first made a film called War Wearied, where the question of being a war widow was addressed. After that film, I really felt the need to have access to what it is to be a young man sent to war, survive it, come back home, and start a family, or live with a family, and raise kids.

I was ready to hear what I was going to hear while I would be shooting. Besides that, for three years before starting to shoot, I did extended scouting, mostly in California, with combat veterans and their families and therapists. All that I heard, including what I heard afterward while shooting, sounded very familiar. It’s not only about death, it’s about surviving. The film itself is a journey toward life, which makes it a rather positive outcome. Although it’s tough. There are a lot of difficulties for each of these young men to survive. On the daily basis when you’re sitting in the therapy room, it’s mostly about death.

So I won’t be hiding that. At times it was tough to hear, because when you’re in the editing room for four years, you keep hearing it, day after day after day after day, and we had so much material, 500 hours to edit, so it takes a toll on you, of course. But again, I had a quest, and also, as the therapist is doing in the therapy room, I was seeking to show their quest to regain life. And that also helped not only me, but also my editors and my cinematographer.

MJ: Less than 10 percent of the US population has served in the military. What do you want Americans to take away from this film?

LBR: There’s a huge amount of young men and women deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan that are paying a high price, and this is the real cost of the war. It can’t be only when we talk “this war” or “that war,” or “going to war there or there,” and we are in favor or we are against. It can’t be only a discussion over the idea or the concept or the politics of the war. It has always to bear in mind the high price that will be paid by these young men and women and their families. That’s one thing.

The second thing is, you’re right, people have no idea, consciously they have no idea. But all our families in the Western world have gone through two world wars in the course of the 20th century and subsequent wars in the post-colonial world. You’re talking about the US—all families were touched one way or another by World War II. So what these guys are saying, and what I was saying earlier about my grandfathers, it’s something that did touch their family at one stage or another, and it did shape the psyche of the family in one way or another.

I’m always amazed in America, when I write the subject and say it’s not really about now—of course it’s about now because I shot now—but it’s also about your father or your grandfather or your great grandfather. And you know, they would have said most probably the same thing as these men in the therapy room had they been in a position to talk about their experience, to talk about what they felt and how war affected them.

MJ: You point out the generational aspect of this, and it’s certainly apparent in the film. Why are generations so important in this story of war?

LBR: In the film you see a few kids who are growing up next to their father, who has been traumatized by the experience of war. And these kids that we see on screen, to some extent it is us, or it is our parents, who grew up next to a father or a grandfather that was strongly affected by the experience of war.

So it’s not that far away. You just need to think a little bit. If we, the democracies, go to war, of course it’s always a failure because we didn’t manage to solve our problem through diplomacy or politics or economics or culture or whatever. But there’s a high price that will be paid by a few young men and women, and we should always have that in mind.

It is already in our family. We might not know it consciously, but it’s there. It’s been experienced in the past and it has shaped our families.

I’m deeply convinced that most modern neuroses find their roots in the experience of war in the previous generation in the 20th century, and sometimes we don’t know why we have that kind of neurosis in our behavior, and in one way or another there’s a link to some extent with the experience of the war.

MJ: There has been a lot of PTSD coverage in the US in various mediums. What makes this film different?

LBR: The camera is, from scratch, embedded in the therapy process. And it’s part of the therapy process. Meaning that you, the viewer, you’re part of it. And you’re in this room from the very beginning of this journey that each of these guys is going through in therapy, and they want you to be there; otherwise they would not accept the camera. It is, for them, very important to be acknowledged, and that their trauma and their experience be validated by not only the community they belong to, but the community of mankind that they feel separated from because of their experience with war. I know a lot of programs have addressed the question of…what is PTSD, what are the consequences of PTSD? But here you’re part of the process.

MJ: It seems as if the role of narrative in all this is really important.

LBR: Part of the trauma and part of the consequences of the trauma is that they feel so lonely. Not only within the family, but within the community. The premise of the film is also that this story they’re working on and their work as a patient in therapy is something that is going to be shared. The process itself, not only the story, but the process of how difficult it is to find a way to tell a meaningful story about what happened to you in the context of the war. That’s what you’re witnessing on screen.

It’s not a depressing process. This is the difference between just interviewing people with trauma. Here they are in a survival process. They want to survive, they want to live. So what you’re witnessing is their fight for survival, even though it’s tough, and things you’re going to be hearing are tough things. Even though these guys went through very, very difficult things, they’re fighting to survive psychologically. And that’s what you’re witnessing, and you’re part of their survival journey.

MJ: What do you think about the Memorial Day timing of your film’s first screening in the United States?

LBR: I’m very happy and honored that POV and PBS chose Memorial Day to broadcast the film. It’s not only about the Afghanistan or the Iraq war. It’s about all the men and women who went to war and experienced it and were traumatized by it and survived it and lived with the experience of the war. I think if people can bear that in mind, always, it will help them, even in their daily life. That’s where we come from. At one stage or another we have to face it, and it’s better than avoiding it.

I’m also very happy for the characters in the film, because for them it was not only a courageous journey to go through therapy. Very few men and women go to such a residential therapy program during which, for three to four months on average, you go to sessions and you’re really working hard on your psychological wounds. It’s a very courageous journey—but it’s all the more courageous to do it and publicly accept the camera in the room and to stick to it. They never asked us to leave the room or stop filming. They really wanted it and they did it very courageously.

And when they eventually saw the finished film, they realized and they told us how important it was for them. They realized that the film was giving a voice not only for them, but for all the guys and women who would never go to therapy or would never be heard by not only their families, but the community. So I’m so proud that it’s broadcast on Memorial Day.

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When You See the Film of These Brave Veterans in Therapy, It Will Change How You Think About PTSD

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These Are the People Who Really Run the NRA

by Daniela3623 Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Rifle Association claims to speak for more than 5 million gun owners. But most of the shots at the organization are called by a hush-hush board of 76 directors. The majority are nominated by a top-down process and elected by a small fraction of the organization’s life members.

Since 2013, when we last looked at the NRA’s board, only five new members have joined. Two of them, Timothy Knight and Sean Maloney, played roles in the successful 2013 effort to recall two Colorado lawmakers who had voted for stronger gun laws. (A complete list of current board members is at the bottom of the page.)

by the numbers

Overall, the NRA board members are 93 percent white and 86 percent men. Most are hunters and/or shoot competitively or for sport. About a third are current or former lawmakers or government officials. About one-tenth are entertainers or athletes; nine percent own, work for, or promote gun companies. Here’s a breakdown of the current board, based on bios posted by the NRA (since deleted) and other sources:

According to the NRA’s own tax documents, all of its board members reside at the office of its general counsel. Here’s where they actually hail from:

notable members

Some noteworthy members of the current board of directors include celebrities, politicians, and a few whose family history with firearms the NRA prefers not to publicize.

Tom Selleck in Magnum P.I. Globe Photos/Zumapress

Tom Selleck
The Magnum, P.I. star, gun buff, prolific water user, and vocal gun-rights supporter was the top vote-getter in 2008’s board election. (Fellow ’80s TV heartthrob Erik Estrada sought a seat on the NRA board in 2011 but eventually withdrew his candidacy when the chips were down.)

Grover Norquist
The president of Americans for Tax Reform is a NRA Life Member and member of the Fifty Caliber Shooters Association. After Newtown, he echoed the NRA’s line: “We have got to calm down and not take tragedies like this, crimes like this, and use them for political purposes.”

J. William “Bill” Carter
Carter is a retired Border Patrol agent whose record was cited in a 1994 New York Times investigation into “the agency’s historic failure to hold managers accountable for egregious wrongdoing.” He is the son of former NRA executive vice president Harlon Carter, who helped set the organization on its current hardline course, and who, as a teenager, shot and killed a 15-year-old boy in Laredo, Texas.

Larry Craig
The former Idaho senator sponsored a 2005 law protecting gun makers from liability in connection with their products being used by criminals. He is the longest serving member of the NRA board.

Ted Nugent Amy Harris/Zumapress

Ted Nugent
At the NRA’s 2012 annual conference, the Nuge announced, “If Barack Obama becomes the next president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” prompting the Secret Service to meet with the R-word dropping, “tiger dick” eating Motor City Madman.

Gage Skidmore

Mercedes Viana Schlapp
Schlapp, a new board member, is a former Bush administration spokeswoman. She runs a Virginia public-affairs firm with her husband, Matthew, who is a former Koch Industries vice president and is the current chairman of the American Conservative Union.

H. Joaquin Jackson
Jackson is a retired 27-year veteran of the Texas Rangers. His son Don Joaquin is currently serving a 48-year prison sentence for his involvement in a double homicide. In his memoir, One Ranger, Jackson quotes his son’s partner in crime, who said that he had committed the murder because he was “drunk and the gun was available.”

Oliver North Globe Photos/Zumapress

Oliver North
“I love speaking out for the NRA in large part because it drives the left a little bit nuts,” says the Iran-Contra conspirator-turned-conservative pundit, who was once better known for invoking the Fifth Amendment rather than the Second.

Karl Malone
In 2010, the retired NBA player upset some gun fans when he penned a column for Sports Illustrated in which he opined, “The big picture is that guns won’t protect you. If someone really wanted to get you, they would…For you to say you need a gun for your protection? My goodness gracious, how are you living that you need that?”

Patricia Clark
A record-holding shooter, Clark has been on the NRA board since 1999 and is the head of the NRA’s nominating committee, which helps pick the majority of board members. She lived in Newtown, Connecticut at the time of the 2012 school massacre there.

Ronnie G. Barrett
Founder of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing and inventor of the .50 sniper rifle, which can penetrate armor from more than 4,500 feet and is legal for civilian purchase in 49 states.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush hands a pen to Marion Hammer at a 1999 gun bill signing. AP Photo/Eric Tournay

Marion Hammer
Hammer, a former NRA president, helped craft and implement Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which provided a model for similar self-defense laws in 24 other states.

David Keene
He is the former president of the NRA and the former chairman of the American Conservative Union. In 2003, his son was sentenced to 10 years in prison for shooting at another driver during a road rage incident.

Carl T. Rowan Jr.
Rowan was formerly a cop, FBI agent, and vice president of the private security firm Securitas. He is the son of columnist Carl Rowan Sr., who once caught a teenager swimming in his backyard pool and wounded him with an unlicensed handgun.

R. Lee “The Gunny” Ermey Gene Blevins/Zuma Wire

R. Lee “The Gunny” Ermey
Former Marine gunnery sergeant turned actor is best known for his turn as a drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket (who is gunned down by a suicidal recruit). He’s also a spokesman for Glock.

Robert K. Brown
The former Special Forces soldier and big-game hunter is the founder and publisher of Soldier of Fortune, which was sued in the late ’80s for running want ads for mercenaries and guns for hire.

Roy Innis
The head of the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights organization that’s morphed as a climate-denying astroturf outfit. While representing the United States at a United Nations arms conference in 2001, Innis explained, “The Rwanda genocide would not have happened if the Tutsis had had even one or two pistols to fight back with.”

the current board

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These Are the People Who Really Run the NRA

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