MacKenzie Scott

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article (see below) this morning focusing on the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Ms. Scott has given away $6 billion this year, much of it to small charities and nonprofits. In the process, Ms. Scott has turned traditional philanthropy on its head. Whereas multibillion foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have large headquarters, Ms. Scott’s operation has no known address — or even website. She refers to a “team of advisers” rather than a large dedicated staff.

By disbursing her money quickly, Ms. Scott has pushed the focus away from the giver and onto the nonprofits she is trying to help. They are the types of organizations — historically Black colleges and universities, community colleges and groups that hand out food and pay off medical debts — that often fly beneath the radar of major foundations.

It is also noted that she has made her gifts with full trust and no strings attached. Such strings are a mainstay of modern philanthropy: onerous grant proposals and nerve-racking site visits, followed by reports on the variety of performance benchmarks that charities are required to meet to keep the money flowing.

Charitable groups applauded the unconditional nature of Ms. Scott’s gifts.

Ms. Scott’s approach has to be admired.  She may be an angel sent from above!

Tony

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New York Times

Giving Billions Fast, MacKenzie Scott Upends Philanthropy

By Nicholas Kulish

Dec. 20, 2020

On a Monday evening in November, Dorri McWhorter, the chief executive of the Y.W.C.A. Metropolitan Chicago, got a phone call from a representative of the billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. The news was almost too good to be true: Her group would be receiving a $9 million gift.

Between the pandemic and the recession, it had been a difficult year for the Chicago Y.W.C.A., which runs a rape crisis hotline and provides counseling to women on jobs, mortgages and other issues. Money was tight. Ms. McWhorter shed tears of joy on the call.

Similar scenes were playing out at charities nationwide. Ms. Scott’s team recently sent out hundreds of out-of-the-blue emails to charities, notifying them of an incoming gift. Some of the messages were viewed as possible scams or landed in spam filters. Many of the gifts were the largest the charities had ever received. Ms. McWhorter was not the only recipient who cried.

All told, Ms. Scott — whose fortune comes from shares of Amazon that she got after her divorce last year from Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder — had given more than $4 billion to 384 groups, including 59 other Y.W.C.A. chapters.

“Women-led, Black women-led organizations tend to be at the very bottom of the pile for philanthropists,” Ms. McWhorter said. Ms. Scott “has a recognition that the organizations are doing the good work and let us be the stewards of those dollars.”

In the course of a few months, Ms. Scott has turned traditional philanthropy on its head. Whereas multibillion foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have fancy headquarters, Ms. Scott’s operation has no known address — or even website. She refers to a “team of advisers” rather than a large dedicated staff.

By disbursing her money quickly and without much hoopla, Ms. Scott has pushed the focus away from the giver and onto the nonprofits she is trying to help. They are the types of organizations — historically Black colleges and universities, community colleges and groups that hand out food and pay off medical debts — that often fly beneath the radar of major foundations.

“If you look at the motivations for the way women engage in philanthropy versus the ways that men engage in philanthropy, there’s much more ego involved in the man, it’s much more transactional, it’s much more status driven,” said Debra Mesch, a professor at the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. “Women don’t like to splash their names on buildings, in general.”

As she did in July when she announced donations of $1.7 billion to 116 organizations, Ms. Scott unveiled her latest round of philanthropy through a post on Medium.

She noted that she had made “unsolicited and unexpected gifts given with full trust and no strings attached.” Such strings are a mainstay of modern philanthropy: onerous grant proposals and nerve-racking site visits, followed by reports on the variety of performance benchmarks that charities are required to meet to keep the money flowing.

“Not only are nonprofits chronically underfunded, they are also chronically diverted from their work by fund-raising and by burdensome reporting requirements that donors often place on them,” Ms. Scott wrote.

Charitable groups applauded the unconditional nature of Ms. Scott’s gifts.

“That mentality of trust is what we need in philanthropy,” said Katie Carter, chief executive of the Pride Foundation in Seattle, an L.G.B.T.Q.+ charity that received a $3 million donation.

Ms. Scott has moved away from “the heavy hand of the philanthropy in steering the direction of social change,” said Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. Many big-time donors, he said, “model themselves off of venture capitalism and take an extremely aggressive approach in terms of monitoring” the performance of grant recipients.

Experts on philanthropy said Ms. Scott’s nearly $6 billion in gifts might be among the most ever handed out directly to charities in a single year by a living donor (as opposed to a billionaire making a huge one-time gift to a foundation to be disbursed over decades). And rather than a few targeted donations, she gave broadly to hundreds of groups.

“She’s moved extraordinary sums out the door, quickly, in an anti-paternalistic way,” said Rob Reich, co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford.

Foundations are required by law to pay out at least 5 percent of their endowments a year. Many only barely meet that requirement, instead hoarding their cash and giving away less than the profits they earn through investments. That allows their endowments to keep growing and the foundations to survive in perpetuity, and some foundations argue that it allows them to take the time to make grants that will yield the best results.

But during a deep recession and an era of epic inequality, the traditional approach has fueled criticisms that foundations are more interested in preserving themselves than in helping those in desperate need.

Ms. Scott’s disbursement of $6 billion in about five months only accentuated the stodgy pace of her peers. It also distinguished her from her former husband, the richest man in the world. Mr. Bezos has made some big charitable commitments but has not made philanthropy a top priority.

Ms. Scott, who declined to comment, rocketed to public attention with the announcement nearly two years ago that she and Mr. Bezos were divorcing. As part of their split, she received 4 percent of the outstanding shares of Amazon. They were valued at the time at $38 billion. Today, they are worth about $62 billion, although it’s unclear how many of the shares Ms. Scott still holds.

Ms. Scott and Mr. Bezos met when they both worked at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw. She was behind the wheel when she and Mr. Bezos drove to Seattle to start an online bookstore named after a Brazilian river.

Ms. Scott is working on her giving with the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit organization in Boston that advises charities and philanthropies, including those set up by Mr. Gates and Michael Bloomberg, as well as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.

A spokeswoman for Bridgespan said that the group was “not in a position to share details about our client’s processes,” adding, “What we can say is that we feel very privileged to get to do this work.”

Ms. Scott described in her Medium post how her team used hundreds of emails and phone interviews and thousands of pages of data analysis to sift through 6,490 potential gift recipients. After “deeper research” into 822 of them, she and her advisers selected 384 groups to receive nearly $4.2 billion in funds.

“Usually you don’t have very large philanthropists wandering the landscape looking to drop millions of dollars very quietly into organizations that they care about,” said Adam Zimmerman, president and chief executive of Craft3, which gives loans to small businesses in Oregon and Washington and which received a $10 million gift from Ms. Scott. “The first email literally got stuck in my junk mail.”

Ms. Scott announced the names of groups that got gifts, but she didn’t disclose how much each received. And although Ms. Scott offered a list of nearly 400 organizations, she could well have given gifts to other groups.

If Ms. Scott was making her donations through a foundation, she would be required to publicly disclose the amounts and recipients of all gifts. But she is not using a foundation. Instead, at least some of her donations — including the gift to the Chicago Y.W.C.A. — were made through a Fidelity donor-advised fund. That fund will eventually disclose the groups that received money, but is not required to say who is behind each gift. Ms. Scott is under no obligation to publicly disclose anything about her giving.

“She has not been transparent either about the vehicles being used for philanthropy or about the process,” said Mr. Reich of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. “Power deserves scrutiny.”

But the criticism of Ms. Scott has tended to be more constructive than pointed.

“We’re in this very polarized time where there is tremendous, you could say obscene, wealth held among these very elite individuals,” said Elizabeth Dale, a professor specializing in philanthropy at Seattle University. “If their choice is to hold onto that wealth or give it away, I’m going to come down on the side of giving it away every time.”

Rev. Jim Wallis

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist,Nicholas Kristoph, recently interviewed the Rev. Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian pastor, author and justice activist. Among other questions, Kristoph asked Wallis  about the hypocrisy among some evangelicals.  Here is an excerpt from the interview.  Kristoph’s questions are in bold italics.

What is it with the modern evangelical movement? Historically, evangelicals were people like William Wilberforce, fighting to abolish slavery. More recently, they included Jimmy Carter. But these days the big cause of many evangelicals has been a philandering politician who rips children from parents at the border.

The word “evangel” comes from Jesus’ opening pledge to bring “good news” to the poor and let the oppressed go free. Trump evangelicals have turned Jesus’ message upside down. That’s called heresy. And, in the United States, this has created a toxic melding between white evangelicals and the Republican Party. We’ve seen the conversion of too many white evangelicals to the narcissistic and nationalistic cult of Trump, where the operative word in the phrase “white evangelical” is not “evangelical” but “white.”

I struggle with this. I’ve seen conservative evangelicals do heroic work, including Chuck Colson’s work in prisons, and George W. Bush’s leadership in fighting AIDS in Africa that saved 20 million lives. But some of the grossest immorality of my life came when evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson smirked at AIDS and resisted tackling the disease because it was killing gay people. How do we understand a faith that can produce so much good and so much evil?

The religious right leaders you name hijacked the word “evangelical.” Result: White evangelicalism has destroyed the “evangel.” When “evangelical” strays from the radical love of Jesus into hateful partisan faith, we see the worst.

Do you think about abandoning the term “evangelical” because it has too much baggage?

I understand why so many have moved to “post-evangelical” or “adjacent evangelical” as the old term has become so tainted by right-wing politics and hypocrisy. Many of us call ourselves “followers of Jesus” who want to return to the original definition of a gospel that is good news to the poor. And we believe that any gospel that isn’t good news for the poor is simply not the gospel of Jesus Christ. Period.

We’ve been denouncing religious intolerance, but I’m afraid many of us liberals have a problem with irreligious intolerance. A Black sociologist, George Yancey, once told me: “Outside of academia I faced more problems as a Black. But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it’s not even close.” Do liberals have a blind spot about faith?

I have been fighting “religious fundamentalists” my whole life. But are there also “secular fundamentalists”? I would say yes, and they can be as irrational, ideological and intolerant as the religious ones.

You founded a magazine and movement, Sojourners, that argues that Christians should push much harder for racial justice. I’m curious: Do you consider Jesus to have been a person of color?

Of course he was a person of color given where and when he was born. Blue-eyed white Jesuses exist only in American churches. And issues like voting rights, suppression and intimidation, or racialized policing, are not just political, but are a direct assault on “imago dei,” the created image of God in each of us that the Christ child reminds us of again.

But if faith drives your work on behalf of the poor, why does the same Scripture seem to lead others to cut funds for the homeless?

Because they aren’t reading those Scriptures with over 2000 verses in the Bible about the poor and oppressed! Those white evangelicals have cut all those texts out and their Bible is full of holes.

For many evangelicals, the paramount political issue is abortion, which Jesus never directly mentions. What’s your take?

Abortion is used by the political right as a distraction from all the other issues that would entail a consistent ethic wherever human life and dignity are affected. Everyone in the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” polarizations should want to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions — and there are clear policies to do that, especially in support of low-income women.”

Can we hear an AMEN for Wallis!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s delusions continued yesterday when he contradicted his secretary of state and almost all other top officials, when he suggested without evidence that China — not Russia — may be behind the cyber espionage operation against the United States and tried to minimize its impact.

In his first comments on the breach, Trump scoffed at the focus on the Kremlin and downplayed the intrusions, which the nation’s cybersecurity agency has warned posed a “grave” risk to government and private networks. As reported by the Associated Press.

“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control,” Trump tweeted Saturday. He also claimed the media are “petrified” of “discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”

There is no evidence to suggest that is the case. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said late Friday that Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the operation against the United States.

“This was a very significant effort and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo said in the interview with radio talk show host Mark Levin.

Officials at the White House had been prepared to put out a statement Friday afternoon that accused Russia of being “the main actor” in the hack, but were told at the last minute to stand down, according to one U.S. official familiar with the conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

It is not clear whether Pompeo got that message before his interview, but officials are now scrambling to figure out how to square the disparate accounts. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the statement or the basis of Trump’s claims. The State Department also did not respond to questions about Pompeo’s remarks.

Throughout his presidency, Trump has refused to blame Russia for well-documented hostilities, including its interference in the 2016 election to help him get elected. He blamed his predecessor, Barack Obama, for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has endorsed allowing Russia to return to the G-7 group of nations and has never taken the country to task for allegedly putting bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Pompeo in the interview said the government was still “unpacking” the cyberespionage operation and some of it would likely remain classified.

“But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well,” he said.

Though Pompeo was the first Trump administration official to publicly blame Russia for the intrusion, cybersecurity experts and other U.S. officials have been clear over the past week that the operation appears to be the work of Russia. There has been no credible suggestion that any other country — including China — is responsible.

Democrats in Congress who have received classified briefings have also affirmed publicly that Russia, which in 2014 hacked the State Department and interfered through hacking in the 2016 presidential election, was behind it.

It’s not clear exactly what the hackers were seeking, but experts say it could include nuclear secrets, blueprints for advanced weaponry, COVID-19 vaccine-related research and information for dossiers on government and industry leaders.

Russia has said it had “nothing to do” with the hacking.

While Trump downplayed the impact of the hacks, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has said it compromised federal agencies as well as “critical infrastructure.” Homeland Security, the agency’s parent department, defines such infrastructure as any “vital” assets to the U.S. or its economy, a broad category that could include power plants and financial institutions.

One U.S. official, speaking Thursday on condition of anonymity to discuss a matter that is under investigation, described the hack as severe and extremely damaging.

“This is looking like it’s the worst hacking case in the history of America,” the official said. “They got into everything.”

Trump had been silent on the hacks before Saturday.

Deputy White House press secretary Brian Morgenstern on Friday declined to discuss the matter, but told reporters that national security adviser Robert O’Brien had sometimes been leading multiple daily meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence agencies, looking for ways to mitigate the hack.

“Rest assured we have the best and brightest working hard on it each and every single day,” he said.

The Democratic leaders of four House committees given classified briefings by the administration on the hack have complained that they “were left with more questions than answers.”

“Administration officials were unwilling to share the full scope of the breach and identities of the victims,” they said.

Pompeo, in the interview with Levin, said Russia was on the list of “folks that want to undermine our way of life, our republic, our basic democratic principles. … You see the news of the day with respect to their efforts in the cyberspace. We’ve seen this for an awfully long time, using asymmetric capabilities to try and put themselves in a place where they can impose costs on the United States.”

What makes this hacking campaign so extraordinary is its scale: 18,000 organizations were infected from March to June by malicious code that piggybacked on popular network-management software from an Austin, Texas, company called SolarWinds.

It’s going to take months to kick elite hackers out of the U.S. government networks they have been quietly rifling through since as far back as March.”

Maybe Trump should have his nutty personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, investigate the Chinese or is it the Russian or is it the Venezuelan hacking operation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, David Bloomfield alerted me to this new policy in the New York City school system. As reported by the New York Post.

In a hotly anticipated decision, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) said yesterday that it will scrap academics-based admissions for middle schools next year while maintaining them for high schools.

The DOE also announced that it will administer the Specialized High School Admissions Test in-person beginning in late January.

The fate of Gifted & Talented programs has not yet been revealed.

Citing the impact of the coronavirus, the DOE said that no academic metrics will be used to admit city kids to competitive middle schools for the duration of one year and that spots will be offered based on lotteries.

A total of 196 city middle schools use screens in determining offers to applicants — or 40 percent of their overall number.

The DOE has argued that reliance on academics next year would be unfair due to the impact of coronavirus — especially on low-income kids lacking devices and reliable Wi-Fi.

“This will make it simpler and fairer for our families to be admitted to schools that have already gone through some much during this pandemic,” said DOE Chancellor Richard Carranza.

The coronavirus pandemic has eliminated or fundamentally altered several traditional admissions measures — from standardized test scores to grades to attendance.

Jean Hahn, an advocate with Queens Parents United, criticized the changes as “cosmetic” fixes that diminish academic merit while failing to address deeper educational problems within the DOE.

“There is a lot of disappointment right now,” she said. “There is a sense that there is no regard for even pretending to maintain academic excellence and that they are more concerned about optics. This is just a cosmetic improvement of what they say are trying to improve.”

David Bloomfield, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center education professor, lauded the changes and said they served as a dual recognition of coronavirus upheaval and pre-existing issues with academic screens.

“It’s welcome,” he said. “At the end of the day, it was inevitable recognition of the difficulties of score-based admissions.”

The DOE said yesterday that middle schools that prioritize spots for applicants who live in their districts can continue to do so.

The agency preserved academic screens at high schools, ruling that they can consider grades earned during the first term of last year along with standardized test scores from the 2018-2019 term.

But screened high schools will be now required to present their sometimes opaque admissions criteria publicly.

And while they were previously allowed to rank students for admissions purposes in-house, that process will now take place at central DOE headquarters.

The department also said Friday that geographic priorities in high school admissions will be phased out over the next two years. That system holds spots for kids who live in the same district as the school they are applying to.

Mayor Bill de Blasio argued that the step opens up screened schools to a larger pool of applicants.

District priorities will be eliminated next year and borough preferences the following year.

Admissions to the city’s eight elite specialized high schools will remain largely unchanged.

Entry will hinge solely on a single entry exam to be administered at each applicant’s middle school beginning January 27.

While that process survived the DOE revamp, de Blasio called it “broken” Friday.

“I want to make it crystal clear,” he said. “I don’t think it’s inclusive or fair. I think we need to do better.”

The DOE will begin accepting middle school applications the week of January 11 with a deadline set for the week of February 8. At LaGuardia HS, a performing arts specialized high school, auditions will be held virtually next year, the agency said.

Families can apply to high schools beginning the week of Jan. 18 with a deadline of the week of Feb. 22.

Finally, the DOE said Friday that five additional school districts will be able to apply to take part in diversity initiatives.

The screening system has emerged as a political flashpoint in recent years and has burned especially bright under Carranza.

Opponents cast it as an instrument of racial segregation that favors kids of means.

Backers counter that advanced students and their families deserve opportunities for accelerated learning.

Bloomfield acknowledged that the changes announced Friday could induce an exodus among parents who may no longer accept the educational choices offered by the DOE.

“I think there’s some likelihood of immediate and unjustified flight,” he said. “At the same time I think it will take some years to habituate families to this new reality.”

This is a big issue in New York.  I agree with David that this will likely lead to flight from the City on the part of some parents.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Brianna Keilar yesterday nailed the hypocrisy of Republicans who clutched pearls when a Biden official used an expletive to describe them but staunchly defend President Donald Trump and his egregious behavior.

The host of CNN’s “Newsroom” recalled how incoming White House deputy chief of staff, Jen O’Malley Dillon, in an interview with Glamour magazine this week said people mocked President-elect Joe Biden in the primaries for thinking he could work with Republicans, despite divisions in the country.

“I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of fuckers. [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell is terrible. But this sense that you couldn’t wish for that, you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that,” O’Malley Dillon continued. She later admitted to using “some words that I probably could have chosen better.”

Keilar called out two Republicans in particular for expressing “faux outrage” over O’Malley Dillon’s comments, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, and highlighted their past attacks on the defeated president.

“Yes, these folks are outraged that an aide of Joe Biden swore and called Republicans a PG-13 name, which is an odd stance when you consider the language and behavior that they have excused or ignored from President Trump for years,” said Keilar, who later aired a very long list of derogatory terms used by Trump.

Ms. Keilar is getting a reputation for her daily editorials (aka zingers) aimed at politicians – mostly Republicans!

Tony

Mitt Romney and Donald Trump

Dear Commons Community,

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said yesterday it was “stunning” for the White House to not issue a response regarding multiple alleged U.S. government cyber attacks stemming from Russia.

The senator from Utah tweeted an abbreviated version of the statement he told SiriusXM’s Chief Washington Correspondent Olivier Knox in a prerecorded interview, noting the recent reports of Russian hacks into government agencies showed “alarming U.S. vulnerability” and “apparent cyber warfare weakness.”

“I think the White House needs to say something aggressive about what happened. This is almost as if you had a Russian bomber flying undetected over the country, including over the nation’s capital, and not to respond in a setting like that is really stunning,” Romney told Knox.

On Sunday, reports emerged showing that the U.S. Treasury Department and a Commerce Department agency had been breached by a Russian military intelligence unit known as “Cozy Bear,” which is responsible for past hacks into government agencies.

The Republican senator’s comments come one day after Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) voiced similar thoughts about the recent alleged Russian hacks, calling it “virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States and we should take that seriously.”

President Trump has not addressed the latest hacks reported by Reuters on Sunday, and White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday the administration is “taking a hard look into this,” CNBC reported.

The Hill reached out to the White House but did not immediately receive a response.

President-elect Joe Biden has been outspoken regarding the latest suspected Russian hacking, saying his incoming national security team has been briefed by officials privy to the matter.

“My administration will make cybersecurity a top priority at every level of government — and we will make dealing with this breach a top priority from the moment we take office,” said Biden, later adding, “Our adversaries should know that, as president, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told congressional staffers this week the perpetrator behind the alleged cyberattack is “highly sophisticated.”

CISA officials further said that “it will take weeks, if not months, to determine the total number of agencies affected by the attack and the extent to which sensitive data and information may have been compromised.”

Is it ever more obvious that Trump is Putin’s puppet!

Tony

Kathe and David Sackler

Dear Commons Community,

Two members of the Sackler family who served on the board of Purdue Pharma in 2018 testified before the U.S. House of Representatives under threat of subpoena yesterday, where they answered questions about their role in the opioid epidemic.  As reported by the New York Times and other news media.

Lawmakers on the Committee on Oversight and Reform peppered David and Dr. Kathe Sackler with questions in the  testy hearing. 

While the Sacklers acknowledged the role Purdue’s painkiller OxyContin played in the epidemic, which has taken roughly 450,000 lives in the United States since 1999, they stopped short of apologizing or admitting any wrongdoing.

Asked if she’d apologize for her role in precipitating the crisis, Kathe Sackler said that after plenty of soul-searching, she’s not sure she’d have taken a different course.

“I have tried to figure out if there’s anything I could have done differently knowing what I knew then, not what I know now,” she said. “There is nothing I can find that I would have done differently.”

The comment provoked a fiery retort from Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) who later replied, “Ms. Sackler, you wanted to ask what you could have done differently? Look at your own damn balance sheet!”

Purdue generated more than $30 billion after bringing OxyContin to market in 1996. The privately held company transferred $12 to $13 billion of that to the family, according to a deposition revealed in court filings in October. 

The company pleaded guilty to three federal criminal charges last month and agreed to pay an $8.3 billion settlement. But the company filed for bankruptcy in September 2019, making it unlikely the money will be fully collected. The Sackler family also agreed to pay $225 million in civil damages ― less than roughly 2% of their net worth.

State attorneys general criticized the Department of Justice settlement as “a mere mirage of justice” that allowed “billionaires to keep their billions” while evading any real responsibility.

“Watching you testify makes my blood boil,” Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democrat, told the Sacklers Thursday. “I’m not sure that I’m aware of any family in America that’s more evil than yours.”

In her closing remarks, Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) urged the Sacklers “to mitigate at least some of the damage you caused.”

“Please stop hiding and offshoring your assets,” she urged. “Stop nickle-and-diming the negotiators. Make a massive financial contribution that leaves no doubt about your commitment, and finally acknowledge your wrongdoing.”

“The families and communities whose lives have been ruined deserve at least that much,” she closed. ”[The Sacklers] have taken money out of the company so it would be forever beyond the legal reach of the people they were harming. They are the Bernie Madoffs of medicine.”

The Sacklers should be tried as criminals for their role in causing the deaths of 450,000 innocent Americans.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It was recently announced that a broad Russian cyber espionage attack on the U.S. government and private companies, had been underway since spring and detected only a few weeks ago.  This breach of security is being described as among the greatest intelligence collapses of modern times.  Below is an article from today’s New York Times describing this failure on the part of our federal government to protect American interests.

By the way, where was President Trump and his cabinet during all of this?

Tony

New York Times

Billions Spent on U.S. Defenses Failed to Detect Giant Russian Hack

By David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Julian E. Barnes

Dec. 16, 2020

WASHINGTON — Over the past few years, the United States government has spent tens of billions of dollars on cyberoffensive abilities, building a giant war room at Fort Meade, Md., for United States Cyber Command, while installing defensive sensors all around the country — a system named Einstein to give it an air of genius — to deter the nation’s enemies from picking its networks clean, again.

It now is clear that the broad Russian espionage attack on the United States government and private companies, underway since spring and detected by the private sector only a few weeks ago, ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.

Einstein missed it — because the Russian hackers brilliantly designed their attack to avoid setting it off. The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security were looking elsewhere, understandably focused on protecting the 2020 election.

The new American strategy of “defend forward” — essentially, putting American “beacons” into the networks of its adversaries that would warn of oncoming attacks and provide a platform for counterstrikes — provided little to no deterrence for the Russians, who have upped their game significantly since the 1990s, when they launched an attack on the Defense Department called Moonlight Maze.

Something else has not changed, either: an allergy inside the United States government to coming clean on what happened.

The national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, cut short a trip to the Middle East and Europe on Tuesday and returned to Washington to run crisis meetings to assess the situation, but he and his colleagues have done whatever they could to play down the damage.

Asked on Tuesday whether the Defense Department had seen evidence of compromise, the acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, said, “No, not yet, but obviously looking closely at it.” Other government officials say that is trying to turn ignorance about what happened into happy spin — it is clear the Defense Department is one of many government agencies that made extensive use of the software that Russia bored into.

Over the past few days, the F.B.I., the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence formed an urgent response group, the Cyber Unified Coordination Group, to coordinate the government’s responses to what the agencies called a “significant and ongoing cybersecurity campaign.”

At the very moment in September that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was urging a truce in the “large-scale confrontation in the digital sphere,” where the most damaging new day-to-day conflict is taking place, one of his premier intelligence agencies had pulled off a sophisticated attack that involved getting into the long, complex software supply chain on which the entire nation now depends.

“Stunning,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Tuesday night. “Today’s classified briefing on Russia’s cyberattack left me deeply alarmed, in fact downright scared. Americans deserve to know what’s going on.”

He called for the government to declassify what it knows, and what it does not know.

So far, and it is early yet, the hacking appears to be limited to classic espionage, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Briefings on the intrusion, including to members of Congress, have discussed the extent of the Russian penetration but have not outlined what information was stolen — or whether the access the hackers gained might allow them to conduct destructive attacks or change data inside government systems, a fear that looms above mere spying.

Investigators have not discovered breaches into any classified systems, only unclassified systems connected to the internet. Still, the intrusion seems to be one of the biggest ever, with the amount of information put at risk dwarfing other network intrusions.

On Wednesday morning, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, called the Russian cyberattack “virtually a declaration of war.” He was wrong — all nations spy on each other, and the United States uses cyberinfiltration to steal secrets as well — but disparate Russian intelligence units have, in previous attacks, used similar access to shut systems down, destroy data and, in the case of Ukraine, shut off power.

The Russians have denied any involvement. The Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly I. Antonov, said there were “unfounded attempts by the U.S. media to blame Russia” for the recent cyberattacks, in a discussion hosted by Georgetown University on Wednesday.

President Trump has said nothing, perhaps aware that his term in office is coming to an end just as it began, with questions about what he knew about Russian cyberoperations, and when. The National Security Agency has been largely silent, hiding behind the classification of the intelligence. Even the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the group within the Department of Homeland Security charged with defending critical networks, has been conspicuously quiet.

Mr. Blumenthal’s message on Twitter was the first official acknowledgment that Russia was behind the intrusion.

Curiously, the Russian attack barely featured as a footnote at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, which featured testimony from Christopher Krebs, the cybersecurity chief who was fired last month after refusing to back Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. The hacking took place during Mr. Krebs’s tenure as director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, but senators did not ask him about it at the hearing, instead focusing on the hacking that wasn’t: baseless allegations of fraud in the November election.

Some Trump administration officials have acknowledged that several federal agencies — the State, Homeland Security, Treasury and Commerce Departments, as well as parts of the Pentagon — were compromised in the Russian hacking. But investigators are still struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected.

The hacking is qualitatively different from the high profile hack-and-leak intrusions that the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence division, has carried out in recent years. Those G.R.U. intrusions, like the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee, were intended to be short term — to break in, steal information and make it public for a geopolitical impact.

The S.V.R., a stealthier secret-stealer believed to be behind the new hacking, broke into the D.N.C. systems too, and those of the State Department in 2015, but the intent was not to release the information they found or damage systems they entered. Instead it was hoping for long-term access, able to slowly monitor unclassified, but sensitive, government deliberations on a range of topics.

Inside banks and Fortune 500 companies, executives are also trying to understand the impact of the breach. Many use the network management tool that the hackers quietly bored into in order to carry out their intrusions, which is called Orion and made by the Austin, Texas-based company SolarWinds. Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed, also uses it, as do major military contractors.

“How is this not a massive intelligence failure, particularly since we were supposedly all over Russian threat actors ahead of the election,” Robert K. Knake, a senior Obama administration cybersecurity official, asked on Twitter on Wednesday. “Did the N.S.A. fall in a giant honey pot while the S.V.R.” — Russia’s most sophisticated spying agency — “quietly pillaged” the government and private industry?

Of course, the N.S.A. is hardly all-seeing, even after placing its probes and beacons into networks around the world. But if there is a major investigation — and it is hard to imagine how one could be avoided — the responsibility of the agency, run by Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, one of the nation’s most experienced cyberwarriors, will be front and center.

The S.V.R. hackers took immense pains to hide their tracks, said the person briefed on the intrusion. They used American internet addresses, allowing them to conduct attacks from computers in the very city — or appearing so — in which their victims were based. They created special bits of code intended to avoid detection by American warning systems and timed their intrusions not to raise suspicions — working hours, for example — and used other careful tradecraft to avoid discovery.

The intrusion, said the person briefed on the matter, shows that the weak point for the American government computer networks remains administrative systems, particularly ones that have a number of private companies working under contract. The Russian spies found that by gaining access to these peripheral systems, they could make their way into more central parts of the government networks.

SolarWinds was a ripe target, former employees and advisers say, not only for the breadth and depth of its software, but for its own dubious security precautions.

The company did not have a chief information security officer, and internal emails shared with The New York Times showed that employees’ passwords were leaking out on GitHub last year. Reuters earlier reported that a researcher informed the company last year that he had uncovered the password to SolarWinds’ update mechanism — the vehicle through which 18,000 of its customers were compromised. The password was “solarwinds123.”

Even if the Russians did not breach classified systems, experience shows that there is lots of highly sensitive data in places that do not have layers of classification. That was the lesson of the Chinese hacking of the Office of Personnel Management five years ago, during the Obama administration, when it turned out that the security-clearance files on 22.5 million Americans, and 5.6 million sets of fingerprints, were being stored on lightly protected computer systems in, of all places, the Department of the Interior.

They are now all in Beijing, after the files were spirited out without setting off alarms.

“An intrusion like this gives the Russians a rich target set,” said Adam Darrah, a former government intelligence analyst, now director of intelligence at Vigilante, a security firm. “The S.V.R. goes after these targets as a jumping off point to more desirable targets like the C.I.A. and N.S.A.”

MacKenzie Scott

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday I blogged about the revelation that MacKenzie Scott, former wife of Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, had donated over $4 billion to various organizations during the past four months.  A large share of these funds were given to small colleges that serve large numbers of minority students.  In many cases the gifts were unsolicited and were unrestricted. Several of the college presidents said Ms. Scott had  allowed them to determine how to use the gifts as they saw fit.

As an example:  “I was stunned,” Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black college in Prairie View, Texas, said of learning that Ms. Scott was giving $50 million, the biggest gift the university had ever received. She thought she had misheard and the caller had to repeat the number: “five-zero.”  Ms. Scott’s gift was delivered to Prairie View on Oct. 20, and Dr. Simmons said she had been permitted to start disbursing money immediately to students affected by the pandemic.

Dr. Simmons said she was initially asked to keep word of the gift confidential, yet argued that making it public knowledge would send an important message.

“I used to be the president of one of those big colleges — Brown University — and there of course, it was quite routine to be in conversations with people about gifts of this size,” Dr. Simmons said. “But it rarely happens in institutions like Prairie View, and it rarely happens especially for the kinds of students that we serve.”

Tony Munroe, president of Borough of Manhattan Community College, a predominantly Black and Hispanic institution in Lower Manhattan, which received $30 million from Ms. Scott, recalled that there was no application to submit for the grant. He was simply contacted out of the blue by a representative of Ms. Scott’s, who engaged him in probing conversations about the college’s mission.

So it was telling to experts on philanthropy to see Ms. Scott associate herself with institutions that were much more humble and, indeed, needy. To these institutions, a $20 million donation was the equivalent of several times that to a Harvard or Yale, and could have a disproportionate impact.

“One of the things that’s so incredible about this massive grouping of gifts is that she does not have a personal connection to most, if any, of these universities,” said Kestrel Linder, chief executive of GiveCampus, a fund-raising platform that works with colleges and universities.

Ms. Scott made gifts to more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, as well as community and technical colleges and schools serving Native Americans, women, urban and rural students.

Again, all we can say is thank you and God bless you, Ms. Scott!

Tony