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2025-12-08 00:43:39

In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, Bruna Ferreira, the mother of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, who has been in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since November 12, details her arrest, her long relationship with the Leavitts, and how the White House, in her own words, is spreading “disgusting” lies about her. 

“I asked Karoline to be godmother over my only sister,” she said Thursday in a video interview from a remote detention center in Louisiana. “I made a mistake there, in trusting….Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”

Since being picked up by ICE, the White House has painted Ferreira as a criminal and an absentee mom who hadn’t spoken to Leavitt in years. According to the Post, “Court records, family photos and Ferreira’s account tell a different story.”

Ferreira, born in Brazil, is facing possible removal after living in the United States for most of her life. She’s also a part of the cohort who received protection through the 2012 program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and is now being targeted for deportation. Her case has gained national attention because of her connection to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who remains a staunch supporter—and mouthpiece—for President Donald Trump and his administration’s ongoing mass-deportation campaign across the country. 

Ferreira’s arrest has raised the question of if there was personal involvement from the Leavitt family in ICE’s actions, a claim that Michael Leavitt, Karoline’s brother, has denied. “I had no involvement in her being picked up by ice,” he wrote Wednesday to the Post. “I have no control over that and had no involvement in that whatsoever.”

In their exclusive reporting, the Post’s Maria Sacchetti and Todd Wallack piece together more than 11 years, from Ferreira and Leavitt’s relationship to their separation to contentious co-parenting, all the way to Karoline coming to the White House. 

According to Ferreira, Michael and his father, Bob Leavitt, have in recent weeks told her sister that Ferreira should “self deport”—a common refrain from the White House to scores of immigrants across the country. Yet, if she did that, under federal law, Ferreira would be barred from coming back to the United States for a decade. 

Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, has advised against it: “It’s a trap.”

Read the full report here.

2025-12-07 23:48:11

Ben & Jerry’s boss thinks the company’s founders and board members ought to hand over pass the company to the next generation, amid a long-simmering fight for control of the ice cream brand.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are both in their seventies and have grown increasingly upset with their brand’s parent company, Unilever, claiming that executives there have repeatedly tried to stifle the brand’s activism. The frustration culminated in Greenfield deciding to quit Unilever in protest in September. 

And it has been fired up again: Peter ter Kulve, chief executive of Unilever’s ice-cream offshoot Magnum Ice Cream Company, recently told the Financial Times that it’s time for the pair to move on.

The ice cream brand’s co-founders’ “commitment to the brand, to the causes, has been immense,” ter Kulve told FT, “but at a certain moment you need to hand it over…we need to move on.” The comments, per the FT, also pertained to trustees of Ben & Jerry’s charitable arm, Jeff Furman and Liz Bankowski. 

“Unlike Magnum,” Cohen said in response, “I don’t think there is an age limit on campaigning for social justice and peace. This is another attempt to silence the social mission that we are all too familiar with, as Unilever attempts to wash their hands of Ben & Jerry’s through this IPO.” 

“But,” he continued, “Ben & Jerry’s social mission has always been inseparable from the brand itself, and it is legally protected.”

The back and forth comes as Magnum is demerging from its parent company, Unilever. Shares of the new ice cream offshoot start trading in Amsterdam on Monday. The Ben & Jerry’s brand, which the pair launched nearly five decades ago, sold to Unilever for $326 million in 2000. Unilever announced the spin-off last year “as part of a plan to slim down the sprawling multinational through lay-offs and divestments,” according to FT. 

According to Reuters, a recent audit of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation by Magnum “found that it had deficiencies in financial controls and governance” and “deficiencies in other compliance policies such as conflicts of interest.” Ter Kulve told FT that he “can’t continue to fund” the foundation “unless we basically have complied with the conclusions of the audit, and we’re working on that.”

Counsel for the Ben & Jerry’s board dismissed what they called Unilever’s “phantom allegations,” alleging the claims are part of a campaign against Anuradha Mittal, who chairs the independent board, because she is trying to “protect the independence of Ben & Jerry’s under the merger agreement.” 

With the demerger, Magnum is set to inherit a contentious legal battle between the Ben & Jerry’s board and Unilever. The board has accused Unilever of blocking its call for a ceasefire in Gaza, preventing it from supporting Palestinian refugees, and otherwise attempting to thwart the charitable arm of the company. In May, Cohen was arrested after disrupting a Senate hearing to protest the US government’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. 

In the note announcing his decision to quit, Greenfield said that the independence they fought for some 25 years ago was effectively “gone.” “Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important,” he wrote. 

“And yet,” he continued, “Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power.”

2025-12-07 19:00:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The push to ban gas-powered leaf blowers has gained an unlikely figurehead: Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress. “Leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the Earth,” she said in an interview in March. Her complaints have gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. “It’s a metaphor for what’s wrong with us as a species,” Blanchett said. “We blow shit from one side of our lawn to the other side, and then the wind is just going to blow it back!” 

Her complaints about leaf blowers—equal parts entertaining and earnest—stretch back nearly 20 years, and now the mood has caught up with her. Today, more than 200 local governments in the U.S. have restricted gas-powered lawn equipment or provided incentives to switch to quieter, less-polluting electric tools. The first bans date back to the 1970s, but the trend picked up after the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when newly homebound workers discovered just how inescapable the whine of their neighbor’s leaf blower can be.

“With every year that passes, more and more communities across the country are taking action to address the shocking amount of pollution and noise from gas lawn equipment,” said Kirsten Schatz, clean air advocate at the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, called CoPIRG.

Gas-powered leaf blowers aren’t just annoying; they’re bad for public health. Closing the windows can’t shut out their low-frequency roar, which can be louder than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 55 decibels up to 800 feet away. The unwanted sound can lead to high levels of stress, along with disturbing people’s sleep and potentially damaging hearing over time. 

Leaf blowers’ two-stroke engines also churn out a noxious blend of exhaust: fine particulate matter, smog-forming gases, and cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde. By one estimate, running a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much smog-forming pollution as driving a car from Los Angeles to Denver.

And while lawn and garden equipment is only a small slice of global carbon emissions, leaf blowers and other gas-powered tools “pack a big punch for the amount that they create based on the size of their engines,” said Dan Mabe, the founder of the American Green Zone Alliance, a group that works with cities and landscapers to shift to electric equipment. In 2020, fossil-fueled lawn and garden equipment in the United States released more than 30 million tons of CO2, more than the emissions of the city of Los Angeles. 

Cities and states across the country have taken different approaches to dealing with the problem. California’s law banning the sale of new gas-powered blowers took effect last January, while cities like Portland and Baltimore are phasing out their use. Some places, like Wilmette, Illinois, have enacted seasonal limits, either permanently or until a full ban takes effect. Others, like Colorado, attempt to sweeten the deal of buying electric lawn care equipment, offering a 30 percent discount.

But implementing the bans is proving more challenging than many expected. Many communities are frustrated that the new rules are not being properly enforced, said Jamie Banks, the founder and president of Quiet Communities, a nonprofit working to reduce noise pollution.

Westport, Connecticut, fought for years to get a seasonal restriction on gas-powered blowers, only to find that local officials were not enforcing it, Banks said. Noise complaints are not exactly at the top of police officers’ priority lists, and sometimes ordinances are written in a way that’s hard to carry out—police aren’t usually expected to go around town taking noise readings, for example. Some communities are taking a deliberate approach to the problem: Banks pointed to a group of towns in the greater Chicago area, including Wilmette, that are trying to create consistent policies across the region and working with the local police.

Then there’s the matter that swapping gas blowers for ones powered by electricity isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. While the costs are comparable for homeowners—you can get electric blowers at a big-box store like Home Depot for around $200 or less, cheaper than most gas ones—electric blowers are more expensive for commercial landscapers. They require multiple batteries for workers to get through the day. While a typical professional gas-powered blower runs for $550, a comparable electric one costs $700 and requires thousands of dollars worth of batteries. Landscapers also have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of charging equipment and find ways to charge safely on the go. 

Plus, it can be difficult to meet the standards customers expect with electric leaf blowers, which are less powerful than gas ones. “If you have customers that are demanding that you get everything off the ground, and you better do it quickly, and you’d better not charge me too much money, it’s really tough,” Banks said.

Bans have already generated a political backlash in some Republican-led states. Texas and Georgia have passed laws prohibiting local governments from regulating gas-powered leaf blowers. The Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry group, launched a Latino-focused messaging campaign in California that pushes back against laws to electrify vehicles and leaf blowers. But leaf blowers aren’t just a culture-war lightning rod; in some places, they’re leading to personal conflict. In Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, several landscape workers allege they’ve been harassed by people reporting violations of the local ban.

The American Green Zone Alliance noted in a recent statement that “heavy-handed bans on gas-powered leaf blowers can unintentionally create stress and hardship for workers who often labor for low wages, with limited benefits or control over their working conditions.” 

Although there remain a lot of details to work out, the organization is still pushing lawn care to go electric. “We are trying to convince our industry, ‘Look, we need to accelerate this,’” Mabe said.

The alliance is advocating for incentives that are sufficient to make the new equipment affordable for landscaping businesses operating on razor-thin margins. (In the end, lower fuel and maintenance costs for electric blowers can save companies money if the equipment is properly cared for, Mabe said.) Seasonal bans on gas-powered leaf blowers may be more feasible in some places than year-round ones, because they leave short windows for using the fossil-fueled devices in the spring and fall to take care of heavy cleanup jobs.

Another solution: Customers could loosen their expectations and accept a scattering of leaves, instead of demanding a perfectly manicured lawn. “Now, if that aesthetic was more relaxed, that could help change things,” Banks said. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to carry so many batteries.” Leaving some leaves on the ground is, at least ecologically speaking, a good thing—decaying leaves fertilize the soil and form a protective layer that provides shelter for snails, bees, and butterflies.

And of course, in many cases, a leaf blower isn’t needed at all: You can do as Blanchett advises and take matters into your own hands with a good-old fashioned rake.

2025-12-07 04:55:41

A Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida has ordered the public release of grand jury transcripts from the first federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, which took place during the mid-2000s. 

That investigation ended without any charges. In 2007, however, federal prosecutors in Florida did indict Epstein, who managed to obtain a plea deal, copping to relatively minor charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He was given an 18-month sentence in the Palm Beach County Jail—with daytime work release—and served about 13 months.

Back in July, a different judge, at the request of the Trump administration, had declined to demand release of records from the earlier investigation. On Friday, however, US District Judge Rodney Smith, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2018, stated that the Epstein Files Transparency Act that President Donald Trump signed into law on November 19, “overrides” rules that prohibit the public disclosure of “unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials”—including grand jury transcripts.

This same law compels the Department of Justice, federal prosecutors, and the FBI to release, by mid-December, materials they collected during their investigations into Epstein going back at least as far as the mid-2000s Florida case. The DOJ has not yet announced a timeline for making the information publicly available. 

Earlier this year, three federal judges denied DOJ requests to unseal the federal grand jury transcripts. US District Judge Richard Berman framed the effort as a “diversion” strategy to distract from the agency’s slow-rolling of its own Epstein files: “The information contained in the Epstein grand jury transcripts pales in comparison to the Epstein investigation information and materials in the hands of the Department of Justice,” he wrote.

DOJ officials are now attempting to unseal materials from three different Epstein investigations. The Trump administration has asked two New York judges for grand jury transcripts from Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking case and Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2021 trial. 

The state courts are now weighing privacy concerns from survivors and witnesses. The Epstein Files Transparency Act lists exemptions that may allow the DOJ to redact records that could result in personal identification. 

The New York judges are expected to issue their decisions next week. 

2025-12-07 02:48:36

The Indiana House voted on Friday to redraw the state’s congressional map with the aim to produce a 9-0 Republican delegation.

Lawmakers approved the redistricting proposal 57-41, despite 12 Republicans joining the entire Democratic House caucus in opposition. The bill now goes to the state Senate, where the outcome is unclear. Republican leadership has insisted for months that they do not have the votes to pass it. But President Donald Trump, who has asked Republican-led states to redistrict, has been putting the heat on holdout legislators.  

According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, at least 14 of 40 Republican senators have publicly voiced disagreement with the new map. Indiana has 10 Democratic senators, which leaves the tally roughly equal—for now. 

On Friday night, Trump weighed in with a vaguely mob boss-style social media post calling on his followers to pressure the stragglers: “I am hearing that these nine Senators, some of whom are up for Re-Election in 2026, and some in 2028, need encouragement to make the right decision: Blake Doriot, Brett Clark, Brian Buchanan, Dan Dernulc, Ed Charbonneau, Greg Goode, Jim Buck, Rick Niemeyer, and Ryan Mishler. Let your voice be heard loud and clear in support of these Senators doing the right thing.”

This comes after at least 11 Indiana Republicans were the targets of swatting or other threats following a November Trump Truth Social campaign against the state’s reluctant GOP. 

Indiana is just one of several states wrapped up in Trump’s redistricting crusade. On Thursday, the Supreme Court permitted Texas to use its new map in the 2026 midterm elections, which could hand Republicans five new seats. Missouri and North Carolina have also passed new maps that could enable the party to gain a seat in each state.

Florida may be next up, as lawmakers held a hearing on Thursday to consider redistricting. Florida has a constitutional amendment that prohibits gerrymandering, but Gov. Ron DeSantis said earlier in the week that the new map should be drawn in the spring so that the inevitable court debate could factor in a possible Supreme Court ruling in a Louisiana redistricting case that would further weaken the Voting Rights Act. 

Democrats are countering with their own map in California, and are beginning efforts in Virginia with the potential to flip two seats from red to blue. 

Mid-decade drawings are relatively rare. According to the Pew Research Center, previous to this election cycle, only two states have passed new maps since 1970 for partisan gains on their own—Texas in 2003 and Georgia in 2005. Most other redistricting took place because courts threw out maps for legal violations. 

This recent swell of gerrymandering is just one way the Trump administration is attempting to influence—and rig—the 2026 election. It has, for example, weaponized the Justice Department to pursue dubious claims of voter fraud to suppress specific voting groups. Notes my Mother Jones colleague Ari Berman, who has written extensively on the topic: “The sheer volume of threats to democracy can feel so overwhelming that some people may choose not to vote for fear that their ballot will not matter. And that may be part of Trump’s plan.”

2025-12-06 20:30:00

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For a moment, Jacob Hannah saw an unprecedented opportunity to make Appalachia great again.

In 2022, the Biden administration earmarked billions of dollars to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities. The objective was to lay down building blocks for the region to transition from extractive industries like coal and timber to a hub for solar and other advanced energy technologies, with a view to long-term economic, climate and social resilience.

But on his first day in office, Donald Trump scrapped Biden’s clean energy and environmental programs, which he lambasted as woke, anti-American, liberal hoaxes.

“We knew we were living in a historic moment, not just because of the amount of funding, but because the whole region mobilized to meet the moment,” said Hannah, 33. “It was a once-in-a-generation cash injection designed to prioritize extraction-based communities as part of the energy transition, which for the first time in almost a century made Appalachia very competitive. So to have it all taken away is deeply damaging and demoralizing.”

Hannah, a fifth-generation Appalachian with a bushy beard and signature wide-brimmed hat, has been crisscrossing the country on a mission to raise philanthropic capital to limit the economic damage caused by the Trump administration taking a chainsaw to Biden-era grants.

Hannah runs Coalfield Development, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Huntington, focused on rebuilding Southwest Virginia’s economy and social fabric through workforce training, job creation, and revitalizing abandoned buildings and mines in some of the most forgotten corners of coal country.

Coalfield Development has trained more than 4,000 people—including many formerly incarcerated and/or in addiction recovery—over the past 15 years in everything from solar installation to drywalling and first aid. Yet, historically, federal grants for community regeneration efforts in Appalachia have been mostly top-down, project-based and short-lived.

The 2022 cash injection came through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden’s landmark climate and infrastructure legislation, and was designed to help revitalize and strengthen former coal communities over the long haul.

It was the largest investment in Appalachia since the 1960s’ “war on poverty” under Lyndon Johnson.

In response, Coalfield Development spearheaded a coalition of universities, unions, nonprofits, businesses, and local governments to create collective infrastructure and capacity, enabling coal-affected rural communities across the US access to more than $900 million of the historic IRA investment.

Rural communities in Appalachia were on the verge of breaking ground on projects when the grants were paused or terminated by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by the billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. The wholesale cull included the $3 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Program created in the IRA to tackle the climate crisis and environmental harms at a local level.

A few grants have since been reinstated, but are subject to long delays—in part because so many staff at federal agencies were forced out by DOGE. Many remain the subject of litigation. Every single grant Coalfield Development was helping coordinate has been affected in some way.

The cuts have deepened existing mistrust in government, known colloquially as Appalachian fatalism, yet many of those interviewed by the Guardian blame Washington politics generally rather than Trump.

“This party has taken away that funding from Appalachia illegally: That’s the stone-cold fact. But by the time those facts reach communities on the ground, it’s just so muddy. I think some are asking questions about why training is being shut down and why they didn’t get their SNAP [food assistance] benefits, but where they’ll find the answers is the big issue,” said Hannah.

Huntington, the second largest city in West Virginia with 45,000 residents, was perhaps a perfect place to build a coalition for the massive IRA investment across coal country. Located on the Ohio river, it was once a major transportation hub for the region’s coalfields, but suffered major economic and social decline as the surrounding mines shut down—and then became an epicenter of the opioid epidemic.

It sits at the heart of the Bible belt, which once voted loyally with Democrats but like many blue-collar regions is now part of the loyal MAGA base who believed Trump when he pledged to resuscitate coal country and put America first.

Trump has won big in West Virginia in the past three general elections, securing every county in 2024 with an average of 70 percent of the vote—the highest percentage any party has won in the state’s history. His vote share was even larger in rural counties including Clay and Wayne, which Huntington straddles.

The Guardian’s visit coincided with the Democrats drubbing the Republicans in several state elections—including the governor’s race in Virginia.

It was also five weeks into the government shutdown, just days after the Trump administration announced that millions of Americans would not receive food stamps and Tesla shareholders approved a trillion-dollar pay package for Musk.

The damage caused by Trump’s dismantling of Biden-era programs was visible all around Coalfield Development’s redbrick office, which is located in a former manufacturing hub between the rail tracks and the river.

Next door, a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of a sprawling industrial site known as the Black Diamond warehouse has stalled—at first due to grant suspensions and more recently due to the federal shutdown slowing down payments. Coalfield Development is still waiting for close to $3 million in overdue reimbursements.

The warehouse, which once manufactured military planes, jeeps, and coal trains, is being repurposed as a hub for sustainable industries and training. But all six EPA grants for Reuse Corridor, a new social enterprise to salvage and repurpose mattresses, electronics, and other materials frequently dumped in the Ohio River, were cut, effectively killing the business and with it countless job opportunities.

Meanwhile, Solar Holler, a solar developer and installation company with 105 employees across Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Virginia, signed up for a new office in the warehouse as the business had been growing 20 percent to 30 percent annually.

But tax incentives for residential solar, which accounted for 70 percent of the company’s business, will be axed at the end of this year thanks to Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget. Commercial tax breaks will end in late 2027.

Solar Holler uses panels made in Georgia, yet Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions have caused supply chain delays and pushed up raw material prices across the board, as well as almost doubling the cost of solar energy on the market. The company’s forecast for 2026 is down from 30 percent to “roughly flat.”

“The massive increase in costs ends up being passed down to customers,” said Dan Conant, founder and CEO of Solar Holler. “The IRA rollbacks are obviously disappointing but that said, no matter how hard you make it on the ground for people, solar is the cheapest form of power on the planet so it’s going to happen one way or the other.”

Appalachian Voices is a nonprofit working with local communities—and in Washington, DC—on securing a just energy transition. In 2023, AV, which is part of the broader coalition with Coalfield Development, was awarded a half-million-dollar EPA grant to help five former coal communities in Virginia increasingly being hit by severe floods thanks to the climate crisis and the environmental legacy of mining.

The grant was among those summarily terminated by DOGE. It remains the subject of class-action litigation brought by 350 groups, tribes, and local governments that claim the wholesale termination of the $3 billion environmental justice and climate program is unconstitutional.

In Lee county, where 85 percent of voters opted for Trump and almost half rely on food stamps, AV had earmarked $40,000 for an asbestos survey in Pennington Gap. This was among a stack of grants secured by the community to demolish a derelict supermarket—a concrete, asbestos-ridden eyesore that frequently floods and cuts off neighborhoods from the main town—to create a green space that would mitigate future flooding.

For small communities such as Pennington Gap, securing funding for revitalization projects is like a game of Jenga, and removing just one or two pieces can make the whole stack collapse, according to Emma Kelly, AV’s New Economy program manager. “People in Appalachia are used to being let down by the government, but this time we had the money. It was still taken away, and people feel betrayed.”

A Department of Energy grant that the community hoped to use to install rooftop solar on public buildings that would save $400 or so in monthly energy bills—a reliable income source that could be reinvested in sustainability projects such as communal fruit trees and electric bikes—was also cut.

“Regardless of who’s in power, there’s a lot of finger-pointing, while life gets worse for the common people and the oligarch class keep winning,” said Orville Overton, 34, a local business owner and member of the residents’ council. “I don’t think people know who or what to trust, because both [political] parties have failed us in big ways.”

About 60 miles east, Dante, a sparsely populated former integrated mining community that was once the second largest in Russell county, suffers frequent power outages—including a four-day blackout during a major flood in July, and nine days after Hurricane Helene in August 2024.

Dante’s share of the terminated EPA grant was tagged for a feasibility study on the old railway depot, once the hub of mining operations and the whole town. This is the first step needed to convert the depot into a resilience hub with solar panels and battery storage, a place for residents to charge their phones and keep medication refrigerated during the next blackout.

The post office has been closed since July, due to flood damage. The only place still open for business in Dante is the volunteer-run mining museum.

Dante is also currently without a fire station, after nearly $400,000 appropriated by Congress to replace the one demolished due to subsidence was rescinded by the Trump administration.

“These are not frivolous things; these are basic services. And when you work hard for two or three years to secure federal funds, you expect it to be delivered,” said Lou Ann Wallace, Dante’s representative on the Republican-controlled Russell County Board of Supervisors.

“I don’t think the president knew. I’m one of his biggest supporters, but we’re dealing with the ills of industry here, and we’ve got to be able to clean this up so our people in these hollers can have a quality of life.”

Trump won 83 percent of the vote in Russell county in 2024 while Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor, secured 81 percent last month.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said: “President Trump cares about our miners more than any other president in modern history—which is why he has implemented his energy dominance agenda to protect their jobs and revive the mining industry…we can maintain the safety of miners while simultaneously rolling back Joe Biden’s Green New Scam regulations that were killing their jobs.”

Across Appalachia, people who believe in Trump will be hit hard by his wholesale cuts to Medicaid, Veterans Affairs, food aid, and education, among other public services. Simultaneously, the region is scrambling to save projects that would improve resilience and bring jobs.

It’s a race against the clock, according to Hannah, to find enough money to keep afloat and help people keep faith.

“The funding was committed by Congress, so we know the law’s on our side, and that we will eventually win back some of these grants,” Hannah said. “One objective was probably to remove confidence in the system, so we need to outlast what is a game of cashflow and the battle of morale.”