Chris Hedges's Blog, page 445

6 Reported Killed, 140 Wounded by Israelis at Gaza Fence

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Palestinian health officials say Israeli forces have shot dead six Palestinians, four of them in a single incident, in one of the deadliest days in months of mass protests along the security fence separating Gaza and Israel.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said Friday that four were killed in one location, where the Israeli military said it opened fire on a crowed of Palestinians who breached the fence and approached an army post. No Israeli troops were harmed, the army added.

Two other Palestinians were killed in other protest locations, the ministry said, adding that at least 140 Palestinians were wounded by live bullets.

Since March, Hamas has orchestrated near-weekly protests along the fence.

The Israeli military said 14,000 Palestinians thronged the border fence areas Friday.

Nikki Haley, We Hardly Knew Ye

Nikki Haley surprised the American and international foreign policy establishment by announcing on Tuesday her intention to resign as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, effective at the end of this year. While President Donald Trump indicated he had known of her desire in this regard for some time, the announcement took virtually everyone else in the Trump administration—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton—by surprise. Unlike previous senior-level administration departures, which were charged with acrimony and angst, Trump went out of his way to praise Haley, holding a news conference at which he complimented her for her work.

The reasons for her decision are stated as “personal,” and speculation abounds about potential causal factors. But at the end of the day, Haley’s resignation was a political act carried out by a political person for her own personal political gain.

To back up this assertion, here’s a bit of background about her political evolution. The daughter of Sikh immigrants, Nimrata “Nikki” Haley was schooled as an accountant and cut her teeth as a businesswoman by assuming various positions in her mother’s upscale women’s clothing establishment. Born and raised in South Carolina, Haley became a rising star for women in the Republican Party, a woman of color who embraced the conservative Christian-based ethos of the Deep South. She was a non-threatening figure in the eyes of those who would become her target demographic once she left her family business for a career in politics. In 2004, she won a seat in the South Carolina state Legislature, where she campaigned on a GOP-friendly platform of reducing taxes.

Haley was, by all accounts, a deft and capable political operator, pursuing conservative policies across the board. In 2009, encouraged by then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Haley announced she would run for governor of South Carolina. She won the election after receiving the support of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, vice presidential running mate of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain and (at the time) the darling of the American conservative establishment.

Once established in her role, Haley eschewed national politics—at first. She turned down an opportunity to be  Romney’s running mate in the 2012 U.S. presidential election; instead, she ran for re-election in 2014, winning handily. As governor, she backed conservative causes as she sought to further South Carolina’s fortunes. She oversaw the emergency response to Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and she faced controversy when she ordered the Confederate flag removed from the state Capitol in the aftermath of the racially motivated 2015 mass shooting at a Charleston church. Her status as a minority female, combined with her record of capable conservative governance, made her an ideal candidate for national-level politics, and she was widely touted as vice presidential material in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She was an early supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and later, after Rubio withdrew, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

In a moment of significant national exposure, Haley was chosen by the GOP to deliver the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address, during which she singled out then-presidential candidate Trump for criticism. “Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference,” she stated. “That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume.” Later, during an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Haley observed that “Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk.” Later still, after she incurred the Twitter-borne wrath of Trump by calling for him to release his tax returns, she kept her response short and Southern: “Bless your heart.”

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Yet once her former adversary emerged as the Republican candidate, Haley was quick to jump on the Trump train. After Trump won the 2016 election, she interviewed for a Cabinet-level position and was tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

It was a job for which she was singularly unqualified.

An ambitious politician in her own right, it was no secret that Haley viewed herself as someone who could one day take the top job at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and thus she knew  a high-profile assignment at the United Nations would not only increase her visibility nationally but would also help her gain critical national security and foreign policy experience, both of which her resume clearly lacked. Under normal circumstances, heading up the U.S. Mission to the United Nations (USUN) would be an ideal place to carry out on-the-job training in the field of international relations. Foreign policy is made in Washington, D.C., and implemented in New York, where the United Nations is headquartered. The job of the USUN, a facilitator and implementer of policy as opposed to conceiving and framing policy, is to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives to the rest of the world—the perfect setting for a novice to cut her teeth while being guided by a seasoned staff of experts.

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. is not traditionally a Cabinet-level position per se. However, starting with the Ford administration in the 1970s, the position had been granted Cabinet-level status. This practice ended under President George H.W. Bush, only to be reinstated under Bill Clinton. Like his father, George W. Bush rescinded Cabinet status; then Obama reinstated it. In a break from past Republican practice, Trump agreed to keep it a Cabinet-level post, acceding to one of Haley’s preconditions for accepting the job.

Typically, the detrimental consequences of appointing someone without any foreign policy experience to a Cabinet-level diplomatic post could be offset by ensuring they are adequately back-stopped by the rest of the national security/foreign policy team, especially a strong, experienced secretary of state. Trump’s initial appointment of Rex Tillerson to lead the State Department, along with Mike Flynn as national security adviser, represented the antithesis of such a move. These factors, combined with the wholesale flight of veteran diplomats from the State Department following Trump’s election, meant Haley would be assuming her post lacking the kinds of bureaucratic and procedural checks and balances one would normally expect to see in place prior to her starting date.

The USUN is one of the most sensitive and complex diplomatic posts in the American foreign service, requiring a firm but deft hand combined with tact and patience. By design, it is not intended to be used as a blunt instrument of American foreign policy—again, not under normal circumstances. But there has been nothing normal about the presidency of Donald Trump. In late 2016, after the outgoing Obama administration refused to employ a veto to block U.N. action targeting Israel, then President-elect Trump condemned the action (or lack thereof), bemoaning on Twitter that the U.N. had “such great potential” but it had become “just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!” He later ominously noted “things will be different after January 20th,” referring of course to the date of his inauguration.

Tillerson was never able to establish firm footing as secretary of state, overseeing, as he was, a department comprised of staffers whose morale was collectively in free fall and undercut at every step by a president who viewed himself as America’s most senior, all-knowing diplomat. Haley, on the other hand, thrived in her role as the administration’s mouthpiece at the United Nations. On matters of foreign policy, there was no semblance of originality vis-à-vis the White House emanating from USUN, or even an effort to take into consideration the viewpoints of the rest of the world. In the my-way-or-the-highway global view of Trump, the U.N. became little more than a podium from which America issued its demands and organized its retribution for anything less than absolute subservience. Haley played her role to a T, issuing dictates, threats and demands without displaying any notable grasp of the underlying issues or her office’s past negotiating history. In the fact-free world of the Trump administration, in which inciting global angst is considered a good thing, Haley’s purportedly muscular diplomacy played well—until it didn’t.

Haley was a loyal soldier to Trump, aggressively advocating for what passed for policy. In this she was no different than those who had preceded her. Indeed, there was little to separate her condemnation of Syrian President Bashar Assad, or Russia’s support of the Assad regime, from that of her predecessor, Samantha Power, when it came to tone and content. But the difference between the two was discernible. Power—an Ivy League-educated foreign policy wonk whose book on the Rwandan genocide garnered her a Pulitzer Prize and the attention of her future boss, Barack Obama—was at least conversant in multiple aspects of a given issue and able to engage  a wide variety of topics freely and without notes.

Ambassador Haley, on the other hand, carefully operated from a script prepared by others, reading her notes and rarely venturing into the world of free thinking. She had no experience to draw upon, lacking both academic and practical preparation. She was the dutiful puppet, unashamedly raising her hand to be the sole vote cast against a resolution condemning Trump’s precipitous decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and then woodenly holding up the images of stricken Syrian civilians as part of an orchestrated campaign to justify military action against the Syrian government. She lambasted the Russians and Chinese, insulted virtually every other nation and international institution, and threatened to “take names” when nations dared oppose the policies she fronted.

Haley was at the forefront of America’s retreat from multilateral engagement, leading the charge as the United States withdrew from U.N. treaties and agreements (the Paris Accords and the Iran Nuclear Agreement foremost among them), slashed America’s financial contributions to the U.N. and its affiliates, and otherwise denigrated anything that didn’t directly benefit the U.S. In her defense, she was not the author of these policies, only the face the Trump administration used to sell them to the rest of the world. But as every able politician understands (and Haley is, if anything, an able politician), perception is its own reality, and as the individual who gave voice and presence to these actions, she now owns them forever.

Under any rational standard, Haley would (and should) be mocked and reviled for her performance as America’s ambassador to the United Nations. Her tenure was an exercise in pathos, the living embodiment of American power and influence in decline. Her speeches, if viewed in isolation, were one step removed from a “Saturday Night Live” send-up. At the end of the day, Haley was little more than a polished cipher put forward to sell bad policy, something Trump himself alluded to when he credited Haley with making the job of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. “a more glamorous position than it was two years ago.”

It’s not as though Haley was constitutionally incapable of independent thought—far from it. Her experience as South Carolina’s governor proved she can be a savvy and self-reliant politician, able to weigh costs and benefits when making difficult decisions. Perhaps the most difficult decision Haley had to make, then, was to allow herself to be used in such an egregious fashion so that she could build a resume capable of sustaining and supporting her own aims. She showed flashes of independence, not on matters of policy but rather personal morality, challenging the president on his Muslim ban and insisting that women who claim to have been sexually assaulted have a right to be heard.

But these isolated moments of autonomy could not hide the reality that at the end of the day, Ambassador Haley was little more than a puppet. Her days were numbered with the resignation of Tillerson and the departure of H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. In the confusion that reigned in the White House during the transition from Tillerson to Pompeo, Haley got caught out as she advanced a policy position regarding Russian sanctions that was outdated, prompting a comment from within the White House she was “confused.” “I don’t get confused,” she snapped back. This was in April 2018, about the same time she reportedly first indicated to the president she was looking to leave.

Unlike Tillerson and McMaster, Pompeo and Bolton ran a tighter ship. Bolton in particular was opposed to the idea of the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. enjoying Cabinet-level status, having noted during his time at USUN that “it overstates the role and importance the U.N. should have in U.S. foreign policy,” adding that “you shouldn’t have two secretaries in the same department.”  There could be only one voice fronting for U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the president, and it would no longer be Haley’s.

Trump did his part to make Haley’s exit appear dignified and positive. She, too, played her prescribed role, making it known she was not positioning herself to become Trump’s political rival in 2020 while also offering she planned to make her opinions on policy matters known from time to time. Perhaps she will assemble a team of foreign policy experts to help her better shape these opinions, allowing her to continue the artifice that she somehow possesses depth when it comes to issues of diplomacy and foreign relations. In the shallow world of current American politics, Haley is a master at shaping perception.

One thing is for certain—barring some unforeseen turn in her career trajectory, this isn’t the last the American people will be seeing of Haley. She is far too ambitious, far too intelligent and far too “glamorous” to simply fade away. Trump hinted at a possible future role in his administration—perhaps secretary of state during a hypothetical second Trump term. And there is always 2024. Haley would be 55 years old, ideally situated in the prime of her life to make a run for the most powerful job in the world—that is, if America still retains the status of unmatched global superpower.

Present circumstances suggest this may not prove to be the case. For all his rhetoric about “making America great again,” Trump is presiding over the greatest loss of power and prestige in American history, not insignificantly because of policies Haley helped promote and implement. And while her departure from the role of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. appears perfectly timed to insulate her, at least in the minds of the American electorate, from the consequences of any future political catastrophe that might befall Trump, the rest of the world is not so easily confused, possessing superior memory and a grasp of a reality to which Haley’s ambition seems to have blinded her.

 

Stocks Rebound, Clawing Back Some of Week’s Steep Losses

NEW YORK — Stocks rebounded Friday, clawing back some of the week’s steep losses, but the turbulent trading of the last few days left no doubt that the relative calm the markets enjoyed all summer had been shattered.

Major U.S. indexes ended the week down about 4 percent, their worst weekly loss in six months. An index measuring the performance of small-company stocks had its worst week since early 2016.

Big technology and consumer-focused companies led the recovery Friday. Longtime favorites of many investors, they had plunged in the last few days.

A major factor cited by market watchers for the pullback was a sharp increase in interest rates, which can slow the economy and make bonds more attractive to investors relative to stocks.

Apple climbed 3.6 percent to $222.11 and Microsoft gained 3.5 percent to $109.57. Amazon jumped 4 percent to $1,788.41. Those are the three most valuable companies in the U.S., and they suffered startling declines the last few days: on Wednesday each took its biggest loss in more than two years. That made for a dramatic end to three months of calm on the U.S. market.

The S&P 500 index rose 38.76 points, or 1.4 percent, to 2,767.13 to end a six-day losing streak. The benchmark index tumbled 4.1 percent this week, and it’s down 5.6 percent since from its latest record high, set Sept. 20. Thanks in part to the big gain for technology companies, the Nasdaq composite jumped 167.83 points, or 2.3 percent, to 7,496.89.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose as much as 414 points early on, then gave it all up and turned slightly lower. It rebounded and finished with a gain of 287.16 points, or 1.1 percent, at 25,339.99.

The market’s recent skid started last week, when strong economic data and positive comments from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell helped set off a wave of selling in the bond market as investors they bet that the U.S. economy would keep growing at a healthy pace. That pushed bond prices lower and sent yields up to seven-year highs.

That drove interest rates sharply higher, which worried stock investors who felt that a big increase could stifle economic growth. The big swings in the market Friday suggest those fears haven’t gone away. The VIX, a measurement of how much volatility investors expect, hasn’t been this high in six months.

“What seems to have driven this is a fear interest rates were going to rise more quickly because the Fed was being too aggressive or the economy was going to overheat,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist for JPMorgan Funds. Kelly said he doesn’t think either of those fears is justified, as the Fed isn’t raising interest rates that rapidly and economic growth hasn’t sped up recently.

Small companies didn’t fare as well. The Russell 2000 index rose just 1.30 points, or 0.1 percent, to 1,546.68 to wrap up its largest loss in one week since January 2016. High-dividend stocks like utilities and real estate investment trusts also rose less than the rest of the market. They held up relatively well over the past few days. Investors view them as relatively safe, steady assets that look better when growth is uncertain and the rest of the market is in turmoil.

U.S. automakers Ford and General Motors continued to slump. GM shed 1.6 percent to $31.79, its lowest in almost two years. Ford, trading at its lowest in almost nine years, dipped 1.9 percent to $8.64. Both have plunged this year as they deal with slowing sales and the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are sending their manufacturing costs higher.

The stocks have fallen further in recent days following reports Ford might cut jobs. In late September, Ford CEO Jim Hackett said the steel and aluminum duties would cost the company $1 billion through 2019.

Investors are also growing more concerned that U.S.-China trade tensions are impairing global economic growth. The International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for global economic growth this week because of trade tensions and increased interest rates.

Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist for CFRA, said he thought stocks fell too far, but there could be more turmoil ahead for the markets. While stocks had done well in spite of the rising trade tensions between China and the U.S., investors seem more worried now.

“Everybody has been pretty much dismissing the effect of the trade war on U.S. equities, and now they’re beginning to think ‘wait a minute, maybe there could be a problem,’” he said. “I don’t think the reasons for the decline have been resolved.”

Bond prices edged lower. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 3.15 percent 3.13 percent. At the beginning of the year it stood at 2.46 percent.

U.S. crude oil added 0.5 percent to $71.34 a barrel in in New York. Brent crude, the international standard, picked up 0.2 percent to $80.43 a barrel in London.

Wholesale gasoline rose 0.5 percent to $1.94 a gallon. Heating oil fell 0.5 percent to $2.32 a gallon. Natural gas lost 1.9 percent to $3.16 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Asian stocks also rebounded. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index gained 0.5 percent after sinking early in the day and following a nearly 4 percent loss on Thursday. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng surged 2.1 percent and the Kospi in South Korea rose 1.5 percent.

European stocks finished mostly lower. The French CAC 40 dipped 0.2 percent and so did the FTSE 100 in Britain. The DAX in Germany slipped 0.1 percent.

After a big jump Thursday, gold lost 0.5 percent to $1,222 an ounce. Silver rose 0.2 percent to $14.64 an ounce. Copper slipped 0.1 percent to $2.80 a pound.

The dollar slipped to 112.01 yen from 111.94 yen. The euro fell to $1.1563 from $1.1594.

Naomi Klein: We’ve Entered a Frightening New Era of Capitalism

When Nikki Haley resigned this week as the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations, seemingly the political press’ first question was whether Donald Trump would name his daughter Ivanka as her replacement. Trump did little to discourage this speculation. “[It’s] nothing to do with nepotism,” he told reporters at the White House, barely concealing a smile. “But I want to tell you that the people that know, know that Ivanka would be dynamite.”

For “The Shock Doctrine” and “No Is Not Enough” author Naomi Klein, that the president’s offspring would even be considered for such a post is evidence enough that we’ve entered a frightening new era of capitalism—one in which the 1 percent so dominate our institutions that they consider political power to be their natural birthright. In her latest essay for The Intercept, she dubs it the “Age of the Pampered Princeling”:

The Koch brothers were raised in luxury and inherited Koch Industries from their father (who built his fortune constructing refineries under Stalin and Hitler). [Richard Mellon] Scaife was an heir to the Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum, and Mellon Banks fortunes and grew up in an estate so lavish it was populated with pet penguins. [The late John M.] Olin took over his father’s weapons and chemicals company.

And so it goes, right down to Betsy DeVos, who was raised by billionaire Edgar Prince and married into the Amway fortune—and who has devoted her life to dismantling public education, now from inside the Trump administration. And let’s not forget Rupert Murdoch, who inherited a chain of newspapers from his father and is in the process of handing over his media empire to his sons. Or relative newcomer Rebekah Mercer, who has chipped off a chunk of her father Robert’s hedge fund fortune to bankroll Breitbart News, among other pet projects. In short, these people are Downton Abbey lords and masters, playacting as Ayn Rand heroes.

Klein urges her readers to consider the mental gymnastics required for our nation’s scions to convince themselves not just that they’re self-made, but that their attacks on the social safety net are inherently righteous. Whether implicit or explicit, she concludes, it comes down to a belief in their own fundamental superiority: “better values, better breeding, a better religion, or as Trump so often claims, ‘good genes.’ ”

“And of course the even darker side is the often unspoken conviction that the people who do not share in this kind of good fortune must possess the opposite traits—they must be defective in both body and mind,” Klein continues. “This is where the Republican Party’s increasingly savage racial and gender politics merge seamlessly with its radical wealth-stratifying economic project. Convinced that people belong where they are on the economic and social ladder, the party can keep redistributing wealth upward to the … families that fund their movement, while kicking the ladder out of the way for those reaching for the lower rungs.”

Alarmingly, money and influence are only growing more entrenched. As part of the Trump administration’s latest tax plan, the mega-rich will be able to pass up to $22.4 million to their children without paying a cent in taxes, effectively locking in another generation of dynastic wealth. The consequences will be grave for the health of our society and the planet at large, especially as climate change threatens civilizational collapse.

“This is an intensely hierarchical worldview that is completely comfortable with a minority making decisions for a majority in a rigged electoral system, just as it feels no need to reconcile two totally different visions of justice—’innocent until proven guilty’ when it comes to Brett Kavanaugh’s job application and, as Trump told a gathering of police chiefs on Monday, ‘stop and frisk’ for anyone seen as a possible criminal in Chicago (obvious code for a black person walking down the street),” Klein concludes. “This is not seen as a contradiction: There are simply two classes of people—us and them, winners and losers, people deserving of rights and everyone else.”

Read Klein’s piece in its entirety at The Intercept.

Why Women’s Rage Is Necessary for America

“Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

“Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

“Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger”

A book by Rebecca Traister

“Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger”

A book by Soraya Chemaly

My wife looked at me with arched eyebrows as I read aloud several passages from the two books late one night. “You didn’t know that?” she asked quietly.

No, I didn’t.

Even now, a year since the Harvey Weinstein revelations and nearly two years since the “Access Hollywood” video, after hearing so many #MeToo stories and reading books on the structures of misogyny, there was still so much I didn’t know about the depths of anger that these accounts draw from—so much, I suppose, I had the luxury of not knowing.

I didn’t know that, by the time they are preschoolers, children learn that boys can express their anger but that girls must suppress theirs. I didn’t know how much physical pain women endure in their lives, simply because they are women, and how frequently that pain is discounted, deemed “emotional.” I didn’t fully grasp how throughout our political history, principled rage has been lionized when emanating from men, but pathologized when coming from women, acceptable when it upholds women’s roles as nurturers, not when it serves their personal ambitions or collective aspirations.

And I didn’t quite realize that the #MeToo movement is not solely about revealing the pervasiveness of rape, assault and harassment, though it is accomplishing that. It’s also, as Rebecca Traister writes in her new book, a broader insurrection against gender inequality driven by “the righteous fury of the unrepresented” and, as Soraya Chemaly writes, an attack on “the injustice of having one’s social experience denied and hidden from communal understanding.”

To read long excerpts at Google Books from “Good and Mad,” click here and from “Rage Becomes Her” click here .

Traister’s “Good and Mad” and Chemaly’s “Rage Becomes Her” are two urgent, enlightening books that I hope will be read together, works that are well timed for this moment even as they transcend it, the kind of accounts often reviewed and discussed by women but that should certainly be read by men. Traister, whose columns on gender and power earned her a National Magazine Award this year, focuses on the political history of female anger. She spans the suffrage movement to the 2016 election to, of course, the #MeToo wrath now upending the casting couch, the anchor chair, the editor’s desk and nearly even the highest bench in the land. Chemaly, an activist with the Women’s Media Center, emphasizes the psychology and culture of female anger, mixing personal experience with reporting and academic research to show how that anger is deemed a transgression of gender norms, and how the pressure to dial it back—and not be labeled shrill or scolding or imperious or just plain crazy—only pisses women off further.

But more than anything, these two writers have come to praise female anger, as an emotion and a tool. Anger is a catalytic force for activism and organizing, they argue, a demand for accountability, a statement of rights and assertion of worth. It is also a vital form of communication, Traister explains, a way for women to find one another and realize that their frustrations are shared. “The expression of primal, agonizing anger that followed Trump’s election meant that for the first time, some women—even those who’d been living in proximity to one another for years—could hear one another.” Or as Chemaly puts it, “Anger isn’t what gets in our way—it is our way.”

With “Rage Becomes Her,” Chemaly offers a relentless catalog of the sources of female anger and the efforts to repress it. “As girls, we are not taught to acknowledge or manage our anger so much as fear, ignore, hide, and transform it,” she writes, and that lesson promotes accommodation and deference. Structural burdens such as the “caring mandate”—women’s enduring responsibilities for household chores, child care and elder care, regardless of whether they also work for pay—are “stressing us out and making us angry, sick and tired.” The daily risks women navigate are just a cost of living while female. “Sexual harassment and violence are so normalized among girls and women,” Chemaly writes, “that they don’t often consciously register them as abusive behaviors.”

Until, of course, they do. Traister recalls a public run-in she had in 2000 with Harvey Weinstein when, as a young reporter, she sought to interview him at a party and the producer jabbed his finger into her shoulder, called her a “c—” and, after her male colleague asked him to apologize, wrangled him into a headlock. Weinstein suffered no consequences, and press accounts of the episode minimized his offenses. Soon thereafter, Traister began hearing rumors about his behavior with women. “Among the reasons that I never really entertained the idea of reporting the story myself was that I had been shown so clearly that I could not have won against that kind of power,” she writes. Only years later, with the New York Times and New Yorker coverage of Weinstein’s pattern of predation and violence, “a Harvey-sized hole was blown in the American news cycle, and there was suddenly space and air for women to talk—to yell and scream and rage.”

That rage, both authors argue, is not only healthy but rational and productive. “We envision our emotions battling our reason because, after all, that’s what we are usually taught,” Chemaly writes. “The entire setup makes it easier for what you say to be portrayed as unreasonable.” One of Traister’s heroes is the late Florynce Kennedy, the lawyer, civil rights advocate and second-wave feminist who laced her activism with anger (“The next son of a bitch that touches a woman is gonna get kicked in the balls,” she warned male journalists at the 1972 Democratic National Convention), as well as biting humor (“Are you my alternative?” she would retort when men asked if she was a lesbian). Traister sees echoes of that attitude in today’s uprising, in her view a welcome evolution from the glossy, nonconfrontational, celebrity-driven, cool-girl feminism of the early 21st century, one in which Traister acknowledges her own stylistic complicity. “I’d absorbed the message that open anger was needlessly overdramatic and unattractive—that it would be too much, really—and I had worked to accommodate these assumptions, tempering my fury in my writing,” she writes. “So I was funny! And playful, cheeky, ironic, knowing!”

“Good and Mad” is neither cheeky nor playful. It is angry; the book embodies its own argument. Traister remains outraged by the “brutal masculinity” that prevailed in the 2016 election. She decries the “shrugging condescension” with which many dismissed the women’s marches following President Trump’s inauguration. She dwells on the “performative dickishness” that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell displayed when attempting to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s criticisms of Jeff Sessions’ civil rights record. (Nevertheless, you may recall, she persisted.) And though her book was completed too early to discuss Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Traister is incensed at the late senator Ted Kennedy for staying quiet during the 1991 confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas—when an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee heard Anita Hill’s testimony—in part because of Kennedy’s own history with women.

In her insightful 2017 book, “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny,” Cornell philosopher Kate Manne explores the notion of “himpathy,” the impulse to extend excessive sympathy to male wrongdoers over their female victims. Traister is especially harsh toward any women of the #MeToo era who dare stand up for powerful men accused of misconduct. “Women who are willing to defend white patriarchy and its abuses—usually women with proximity to powerful men and the chance to gain from it, and who are therefore themselves often white—have historically found reward from those powerful men, in the form of sexual or romantic attention, marital alliances, as well as jobs and stature, in exchange for their defense,” she writes, wielding a rather broad brush.

Elsewhere in her book, however, Traister is more understanding of women with differing views, arguing that any movement that campaigns for half the population is necessarily “an unwieldy enterprise, one that tries to represent fundamentally conflicting interests, divergent perspectives, and people from varied backgrounds who have lots of good reasons to distrust, resent, and disagree with one another.” It’s a more realistic and compelling vision, and doesn’t rely on large-scale questioning of motives.

Indeed, Traister eloquently highlights the challenge of blaming not just forces and systems, but individuals. “We must confront the fact that the bad guys are, in many cases, also our good guys: the men in our beds, our hearts, our families,” Traister writes. “They are our brothers and fathers and uncles and friends and lovers and husbands and roommates and sons.” She is tired of male acquaintances and colleagues coming to her for “feminist absolution” and describes others, including her husband, who had just never realized things were this bad. One night during the peak of the #MeToo onslaught, he asked her, “How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?”

I’ve not posed that question to my wife, at least not yet. After my enthusiasm for these books betrayed ignorance about various aspects of female life, she assured me that she didn’t think I was an idiot, resignation and sympathy mingling on her face.

If there was anger there, too, she knew how to hide it.

America’s Sexual Politics Are Rapidly Regressing Before Our Very Eyes

I heard a report on the radio as I was driving recently, and it set me to thinking:

The mayor of Osaka, Japan, is ending the “sister city” relationship with San Francisco this week, following a dispute over a statue that honors women and girls who were sexually enslaved by Japan’s Imperial Army during World War II.

The statue commemorates “comfort women,” a euphemism for thousands who were forced, coerced and deceived into serving men at brothels near the front lines.

In 1993, Japan conceded that the Imperial Army in World War II had enslaved women, and expressed “sincere apologies and remorse.”

But in recent years, that apology has grown more complex.

I assume that the Japanese want to put the issue behind them. But the report went on to say that activists, family members and descendants of the enslaved and abused women insist it is not enough to simply express regret and make a token payment.

I think that this group is right. It’s important that we understand that human dignity is in question. How painful must it have been to those enslaved and abused women to be subject to the most base or petty whim of a master designated as such by forces in control of their very lives? It had to be more than simply painful; it had to be devastating to the human spirit.

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Brett Kavanaugh and the Triumph of the Conservative Counterrevolution



by Bill Blum

And what have we learned? Today, while some forms of slavery have fallen into disrepute, the phenomenon of women being forced into the sex trade continues in many corners the world, albeit without the imprimatur of a national government, at least as far as we know. Here again, human dignity is traduced, this time for profit.

The fact that such a trade continues in any form, I would argue, means the question of fundamental human dignity—and whether women have it and deserve that it be honored—remains unanswered. Both the organizers behind sexual slavery and its consumers desecrate the personhood of the women they are using and abusing, reducing them to simply chattel.

But it’s not always that obvious. It is difficult, I think, for some to see that despite the increase in awareness and sensitivity in modern times, the implication of continued male dominance and female subjugation in the realm of sexual relations remains. Nothing points more clearly to the untended wounds suffered by women in that arena today than the explosive, near-daily revelations of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements.

The recent anguished drama over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the accusations brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford provide a timely example of what appears to be a failure of those in power to face the above-mentioned fundamental question squarely. A woman’s credible accusation is met by a man’s angry denial. A full and honest examination of all the relevant facts could possibly provide evidence that would fairly resolve the issue. But that would mean placing the two in a position of equality in a search for justice. Faced with what could conceivably turn out to be a deeply embarrassing political loss, the men in charge chose to forge ahead with their political agenda, leaving the question of the dignity of the woman—and, by extension, that of the women who saw her as their champion—unresolved. Or did it?

How unrelated are powerful forces mandating that women be made the sexual slaves of their army in order to achieve a military goal and powerful forces in a purportedly more humane culture willing to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to a sexual assault victim’s demand for justice in order to achieve a political goal?

Given the harm done and the questions unanswered, it appears to me that Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, Brett Kavanaugh and their colleagues have more in common with the Imperial Japanese Army of yesterday, as well as many other male-dominated institutions from past and present, than they may realize.

The treatment of Japan’s “comfort women” amounted to an egregious assault on the dignity of women. As does this more recent incident in the U.S., it leaves questions yet to be resolved.

‘Mulholland Drive’ Is David Lynch’s ‘Ulysses’

“Filmmaking,” says David Lynch in the biography/memoir “Room to Dream,” “is just common sense.” But Lynch’s sense isn’t common. “Rabbits,” a short film featuring three actors from “Mulholland Drive” (Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Scott Coffey) wearing rabbit suits, is “the most inscrutable work Lynch has ever produced.”

Perhaps all of Lynch’s work is inscrutable, however. His “Ulysses,” the work where it all came together, is “Mulholland Drive” (2001).

Much has been written about the origins of “Mulholland Drive.” It began in 1999 as a TV show pilot for ABC, which wisely rejected it as the wrong vehicle for selling toothpaste and detergent.

Fortunately for Lynch, who has always been revered in France, a French studio came to his rescue, allowing him to expand the pilot. Within a year, he had flipped a failed TV show into a feature film that a 2016 BBC Culture poll of 177 critics named “the greatest of the 21st century.” The British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound Poll ranked “Mulholland Drive”—the only 21st-century film included on the list—as the 28th greatest movie of all time.

The scenic road passing through the Santa Monica Mountains around Los Angeles is the ghostly presence behind everything that happens in the movie that bears its name. The highway has always held a fascination for Lynch, who calls it “a magical street, and many people feel that when they drive on it at night.”

Daytime, too. Artist David Hockney’s famous 1980 painting, “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio,” seems like a Day-Glo version of the road as seen at the beginning of Lynch’s film.

Lynch lived there for several years, as did Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. It appears in movies, including Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (a street Mulholland Drive crosses) and even Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” Musician Randy Newman proclaimed his love for the road in “I Love L.A.”

It was named for William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant who rode into Southern California on a mule near the end of the 19th century, got a job digging wells and, within a couple of decades, parlayed his smarts into the position of superintendent of the Los Angeles Water Department. He can, with truth, be called the man who brought water to a desert city, making Los Angeles, and thus Hollywood, possible. He had an office above Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The machinations employed by Mulholland and associates to bring water to the city would make for a classic movie, and did, if you overlook the fictionalization of facts in “Chinatown.”

(You can read Mulholland’s story in “The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles,” by Gary Krist.)

***

Film critic Pauline Kael thought, “Lynch might turn out to be … a Frank Capra of dream logic.”

But the Capra-esque feel in “Blue Velvet” is absent in the ending of “Mulholland Drive.” Instead, it has the feel of a waking nightmare.

Set in an unspecified time somewhere in Lynch’s psyche, pop cultures from different decades meld: The clothes and cars are 1990s (except for Gloria Swanson’s limo from “Sunset Boulevard,” parked at a studio entrance), but the three pop songs used in the film were released around 1960, and behind the opening credits is a spectral jitterbug contest straight out of a 1950s grade-B teen movie.

Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), pretty, blond and as wide-eyed as a young Doris Day, arrives from Deep River, Ontario, fresh from winning the jitterbug contest. (Make what you will of the fact that Deep River was the name of the apartments where Isabella Rossellini’s character lived in “Blue Velvet.”)

That night, a limo glides down Mulholland Drive, with a beautiful brunette in the back seat (Laura Elena Harring). The limo stops at a deserted spot. The young woman asks, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” She’s about to be murdered when two cars full of joyriding teenagers slam into the limo. Only the young woman survives. She stumbles through the night, carrying a purse inexplicably stuffed with bundles of cash—is it the money the killers were paid?—and crosses Sunset Boulevard and hides in an unlocked apartment.

The apartment belongs to Betty’s Aunt Ruth, who is working on a movie in Canada. Betty sees the woman in the shower and assumes she is a friend of Ruth. Betty asks her name; the woman, who has lost her memory, sees a poster for the Rita Hayworth noir film “Gilda” and appropriates the actress’s name. Betty tells “Rita” her story, gushing, “Now I’m in this dream place”—one of the many lines you may have to watch the film a second time to appreciate. Betty dreams big—“You can be a great actress and a big movie star—and that’s what I hope to be!”

Rita breaks down, telling Betty, “I don’t know who I am” or where the money in her purse came from. They find a blue key in the purse and give it a blank, Lynchian stare. They hide the purse in a hatbox in the closet.

The next 30-odd minutes of the film spent tracking down Rita’s identity could easily be a Nancy Drew mystery. At Winkie’s diner (on Sunset Boulevard), Rita sees “Diane” on a waitress’s name tag and it sparks her memory. She recalls a name: Diane Selwyn. There’s a D. Selwyn in the phone book; they leave her a message. Betty says, in another line you may not understand until you see the film again, “It seems strange to be calling yourself.”

Appealing as the actresses are, you sense that something isn’t right. The characters and plot seem contrived from the outset—who arrives at LAX and walks straight into a waiting cab? At the apartment, the girls rehearse Betty’s audition for a potboiler movie. The dialogue is so hackneyed, they burst out laughing. In the next scene, Betty walks into the audition—who lands an audition their second day in Hollywood? Fresh-faced Betty from Ontario shocks with her level of sexual intensity while saying the same lines we heard her laughing at an hour earlier.

Suddenly, the film pivots, and we begin to question what we’ve been seeing.

Betty and Rita find Selwyn’s apartment and break in to find the body of a woman. Rita panics, convinced that the same killers are after her. Betty disguises her in a blond wig. The two look like sisters. (There are several blond women who look like projections of Diane: Betty, of course; a blond actress at Betty’s audition; two blond waitresses at Winkie’s, Betty and Diane; and, perhaps most sinister, an unnamed blond hooker seen with a pimp who Diane later hires as a hit man. The waitresses and hooker may be Diane’s suppressed memories of how she supported herself.)

Then comes another jolt: a sudden, torrid love scene that nothing up to this point has prepared us for. They sleep, but Rita wakes Betty, repeating the word “silencio.” Rita puts on her blond wig and the girls flag down a cab at 2 a.m. (and who gets a cab in L.A. at two in the morning?). A Lynchian Easter egg: On a utility pole outside their apartment, a small poster reads, “Hollywood is Hell.” They’re headed to Club Silencio, located in a desolate part of L.A., and, in Salon, Greil Marcus wrote, “… an all-night lip-synch palace, the dank, rotting theater is pure Hollywood: street level skag Hollywood. A few junkies, alcoholics, and other insomniacs dot the seats. A man appears and announces the concept—everything is taped.” This is the famous “No hay banda”—there is no band.

Again, Marcus: “He [the MC] and another man move so convincingly to the sounds behind them it’s as if they’ve called them into being. The sense of displacement hits Elms like a disease: suddenly she is shaking in her seat like a spiritualist’s table, shaking as if her bones are about to come out of her mouth.” Then the great Rebekah Del Rio, a roadhouse singer in “Twin Peaks,” appears and lip syncs to her own recording of “Llorando,” a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.”

In a scene reminiscent of Dennis Hopper crying to the title song in “Blue Velvet,” the women sob. In her purse, Betty finds a blue box, its purpose unexplained. Back in the apartment, Rita takes down the hatbox and pulls the blue key from the purse; she calls for Betty: “Donde está?” No Betty. Rita opens the box.

Suddenly, we’re in a different story. Watts has morphed into Diane Selwyn, a failed actress who has scraped by on bit parts while her roommate (and lover?) Camilla Rhodes—Harring, who plays Rita in the first part of the film—becomes a star, engaged to trendy director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). Watts looks used, her blond bob now disheveled.

The turn the film has taken is probably best explained by Watts herself, who told an interviewer, “I thought Diane was the real character and that Betty was the person she wanted to be and had dreamed up. Rita is the damsel in distress and she’s in absolute need of Betty, and Betty controls her as if she were a doll. Rita is Betty’s fantasy of who she wants Camilla to be.” In that fantasy, Betty sees a Hollywood controlled by gangsters—Mr. Roque (Michael J. Anderson, the dwarf in “Twin Peaks”) and the Castigliane Brothers (Dan Hedaya and Angelo Badalamenti, the film’s composer).

A mysterious cowboy soft-arms Adam Kesher into casting an actress named Camilla Rhodes with the code words, “This is the girl.” (Patti Smith appropriated the phrase in a tribute song for Amy Winehouse.)

The final 31 minutes were added by Lynch to the pilot. They include intensely erotic sex between Watts and Harring and a weeping Diane masturbating, the most disconcerting scene in any Lynch film. A shaken Watts told Lynch she couldn’t do it; he assured her she could.

A glimpse into Diane’s hell might be a painting in Ruth’s apartment, “Portrait of Beatrice Cenci,” by Italian painter Guido Reni; it’s centered between Betty and Rita in one scene.

Cenci was executed for plotting the murder of her father, who she claimed sexually abused her. She became a cause celebre for abused women and inspired many artists and writers, such as Percy Shelley, who wrote that her life touched on “the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.”

The painting seems to suggest that Diane was abused as a girl and perhaps also during her years in Hollywood—this “dream place.”

“Dream logic” is associated with Lynch, but what’s meant by the logic part? Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist turned self-help guru with a Jungian oil slick, dismisses “Mulholland Drive” as “Freudian,” as if a complex work of art could be dismissed by this association. (I would like to hear Carl Jung’s take on “Mulholland Drive.” Angelo Badalamenti’s theme music sounds as if it was composed after a session with Jung. It doesn’t tell us how to feel but how the characters feel.)

Here is the “Mulholland Drive” theme music by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.

***

Whether watching “Mulholland Drive” for the first time or the sixth, as I just did, I have three observations. First, the Lynchian universe subscribes to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of unconscious, “the part of the mind that is inaccessible to the conscious mind but that affects behavior and emotions” (sample phrase: “fantasies raging in the unconscious”) and subconscious, “the part of the mind of which one is not fully aware but which influences one’s actions and feelings” (“subconscious desires”).

Second, people in our dreams are always composites of people from our waking world.

Third, the film’s meaning, as such, derives from Watts’s interpretations. Lynch famously never explains his scripts to his actors. In “Room to Dream,” a crew member explains, “ … basically we’re like his brushes.” “Mulholland Drive,” though, is driven as much by the actor’s interpretation as the director’s. With some accuracy, “Mulholland Drive” can be called a collaboration between Lynch and Watts.

Watts’s performance is wrought from the script and from her own hellish years of fruitless auditions. (In 2005, she made a comedy about it called “Ellie Parker.”) Prior to being cast by Lynch, Watts says, “My self-esteem was at an all-time low.” When she read the script, “I couldn’t believe how much Betty’s story matched my own. … You don’t get two roles like that in one career.”

“I don’t know if Johanna [Ray, Lynch’s casting director] told David about how long I’d been struggling, but he definitely tapped into that part of me.”

Watts’s story gives us a clue: Diane hasn’t just arrived in Hollywood as Betty does in the opening, but has been knocking around the movie business for years. Though she looks much younger, Watts was 29 when Lynch cast her. He’s known for casting actors on hunches, from looking at their head shots; he had Watts fly to L.A. from New York after seeing hers. (In a scene in the film, we see a head shot of a woman who looks very much like Watts.)

It’s impossible to imagine any other actress in the role. Of all the descriptions of Watts’ amazing performance—performances—I like Greil Marcus’ best: Watts gives “an astonishingly controlled, extremist performance … At the start she walks out of LAX with stars in her eyes. The shot is both iconic and clichéd, silly and scary, because the radiance in Watts’s face, communicating the depth of her character’s commitment, or insanity, pushes the shot almost into abstraction. That’s true for every scene Watts is in.”

“Mulholland Drive” is about much more than the overused theme of dream versus reality. It explores how movies shape our consciousness. Diane’s unconscious and subconscious are imprinted with movies; near the beginning of “Mulholland Drive,” two police detectives (one played by Robert Forster, the sheriff in the return to “Twin Peaks”) examine the wreckage at the scene of the accident and conclude that someone is missing. That someone is Rita. We’re conditioned to expect a police procedural, but the detectives are never seen again. The gangsters that run Hollywood are caricatures. The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman called “Mulholland Drive” “a poisonous Valentine to Hollywood,” but Lynch isn’t ridiculing Hollywood. He’s after bigger game: the way movies shape our dreams and distort our perceptions.

Diane’s mind is a Cuisinart full of movie genres: teen musicals, pornos, melodramas, gangster films, even Westerns (the cowboy threatens Adam Kesher) are all jumbled together. “It’ll be just like in the movies,” Betty tells Rita when they begin the search for her identity. “We’ll pretend to be someone else.”

“Mulholland Drive” is sprinkled with homages to some of Lynch’s favorite films: “Sunset Boulevard,” Bergman’s “Persona” and Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (the scene where Betty puts a blond wig on Rita recalls James Stewart and Kim Novak). The names Betty and Rita nod to the two most popular actresses of the ’40s, Grable and Hayworth.

The film that seems to have influenced Lynch the most is “The Wizard of Oz.” Several scenes in his films refer to “Oz,” most memorably Sheryl Lee’s the Good Witch in “Wild at Heart.” The original script for “Mullholland Drive” set several scenes in a Denny’s; in the film, Lynch changes it to Winkie’s, the land to the West in “Oz.” The MC at Club Silencio is Lynch’s wizard, pulling back the curtain to reveal “No hay banda.”

“Oz” influenced Lynch in one special way: It’s a story in which characters are introduced in real life, then reimagined in a dream. This is what Lynch does in “Mulholland Drive,” though it’s not obvious at the first viewing because of a fractured narrative. Lynch would probably agree with Jean-Luc Godard: “I believe in a beginning, middle and end, though not necessarily in that order.”

To make narrative sense of “Mulholland Drive,” start it about 20 minutes from the end, where Diane gets a phone call from Camilla, telling her a car is waiting to bring her to a party at Adam Kesher’s house on Mulholland Drive. It’s virtually the same scene as in the beginning of the film. We see the same limo on the dark road, only this time the passenger is Diane. The limo stops. Diane says, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” They are stopping at the back entrance to Kesher’s house. “A secret path,” Camilla smiles, as she leads Diane up the slope. All the main characters from the first two hours appear now in what seems to be real life. We hear snatches of dialogue that Diane’s unconscious replays in the dream.

It’s the so-called reality part of the film, though, that contains the greatest mysteries. Lynch once said, “Waking dreams are the ones most important to me, the ones that come while I’m quietly sitting in a chair. When you sleep, you don’t control your dreams. I’d like to dive into a dream world that I made.”

It isn’t clear that Betty’s love scenes with Rita reflect a real relationship between Diane and Camilla. In the dream, there’s a famous Lynchian stare between Rita and Betty’s dark-haired neighbor; in the waking part, the same neighbor exchanges harsh words with Diane in what appears as a lovers’ breakup. Was Diane’s neighbor her real lover and Rita the unattainable fantasy of Camilla?

Lynch’s perfect trick on the viewer comes after the party at Kesher’s. At Winkie’s, a shockingly worn-looking Diane hires a man to kill Camilla. (“This is the girl,” she says, as she gives him Camilla’s head shot.) Is a jealous Diane contracting the murder of her former lover, or is this a waking revenge fantasy? Where would a destitute actress get cash to hire a killer? Look closely: Is the money in the same purse that Rita carried when she stumbled into Aunt Ruth’s apartment? Has Diane taken the money from her dream into real life? If not, where did it come from? And what was all that cash doing in Rita’s purse in the first place?

Is the money a reality reimagined in a dream—or is it taken from a dream into reality? Is this recurring Mobius strip Raymond Chandler reimagined by Jorge Luis Borges?

In the 1960s, Susan Sontag argued that the transcendental power of art was being undermined by an overemphasis on intellectual interpretation. I’d apply this to “Mulholland Drive.” It’s wrapped in a gorgeous impenetrability, a neon-lit noir of a puzzle in which all the pieces start to rearrange themselves as soon as they seem to be in place. The blue box, the blue key, the demon behind the diner, Club Silencio—no matter how many times you see them, the mystery expands.

You need to see “Mulholland Drive” at least three times to truly not understand it.

***

Additional links

David Lynch is not just about movies, but has a wide range of interests and can be seen in:

● Coffee commercials with “Twin Peaks” cast members)

● Music videos (here’s the official video for his album “Crazy Clown Time”)

● and even his own comic strip, “The Angriest Dog in the World”

● He’s also found time for acting in films other his own. Here he is in “Lucky,” the last movie of his friend, the late Harry Dean Stanton.

● In the TV shows “Twin Peaks,” he plays FBI agent Gordon Cole, and on Louis C.K.’s show appears as Jack Dall, a cynical Hollywood hanger-on. For his role on the Louie C.K. show, he was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Guest Performer in 2013.

● He’s also been a voice actor on “The Cleveland Show.”

Others pay tribute to Lynch:

●The Festival of Disruption in L.A. and New York:

●Lynch does the Ice Bucket Challenge:

Finally, find the script for the “Mulholland Drive” TV pilot here.

Ethics Watchdog Raises Pointed Question About Trump’s Ties to Saudis

As new evidence emerges that Washington Post correspondent Jamal Khashoggi was tortured and killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week, lawmakers and ethics watchdogs said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s reluctance to hold the Saudis responsible for Khashoggi’s possible murder is exactly what they’ve warned about when calling attention to Trump’s refusal to divest from his businesses—in which, according to the president himself, Saudis have invested tens of millions of dollars over the years.

Saudi officials, along with other international political figures, have stayed in Trump’s hotels since he took office in 2017, with lobbyists from Saudi Arabia spending $270,000 in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. last year alone.

“Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them,” Trump said in 2015. “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

The Saudis also have a long history of business dealings with Trump, including a Saudi prince’s purchase of a yacht and a hotel from him in the 1990s when the real estate developer was in need of money. But Democrats in Congress and the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have especially expressed concern with his financial entanglements with the kingdom after he took office, saying they blatantly violate the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.

On Twitter, CREW suggested that Saudi Arabia’s status as a loyal customer to the Trump Organization—from which the president refused to divest after taking office—has likely been on Trump’s mind this week as he’s told the press that he won’t consider sanctioning or condemning the Saudis over Khashoggi’s disappearance.

#tbt to Trump’s hotel in DC receiving $270,000 in payments linked to Saudi Arabia in late 2016 through early 2017. Is Trump going to think about all that money when he makes foreign policy decisions? https://t.co/RatdpFxNGR

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) October 11, 2018

We shouldn’t have to ask if the president’s foreign policy is being dictated by his business interests.

We have to ask if the president’s foreign policy is being dictated by his business interests. https://t.co/UaPNOk6wFD

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) October 12, 2018

Trump’s ongoing business relationship with the Saudis—including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MbS, whose visit to the president’s hotel in New York helped raise its revenues by 13 percent earlier this year—violates the Constitutional clause that forbids the president from receiving gifts or payments from foreign officials.

The Saudi government is funneling $ directly into Trump’s pockets while he refuses to hold them accountable for atrocities.

This is exactly what emoluments clause of Constitution was intended to prevent, & is why presidents should divest from biz interests before taking office. https://t.co/wBHWVMmVZt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 12, 2018

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) drew attention to Trump’s emoluments violations and put it bluntly on Twitter:

The subtext and context for this MBS situation is the emoluments clause of the constitution.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) October 12, 2018

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed along with 200 other Democratic lawmakers, demanding information on foreign patrons of Trump’s businesses, also suggested that the president is too entangled with the Saudis to condemn them for the journalists disappearance—or any other violations.

Is the Saudi gov’t purposely filling Trump’s pockets? If so, what do they expect in return? We don’t know, because Trump refuses to comply with the Constitution—requiring disclosure & Congressional approval for foreign gov’t benefits. I’m fighting in court to hold him accountable https://t.co/SOamlzkDq4

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) October 10, 2018

Kanye West Makes Bizarre Appearance at Oval Office

WASHINGTON — Live from the Oval Office, it’s Kanye West with a jaw-dropping performance.

The rapper didn’t rap. But, seated across from President Donald Trump at the Resolute Desk, the musician delivered a rambling, multipart monologue Thursday that touched on social issues, hydrogen planes, mental health, endorsement deals, politics and oh so much more.

Seizing the spotlight from the typically center-stage president, West dropped the F-word, floated policy proposals and even went in for a hug.

“They tried to scare me to not wear this hat,” West said of his red “Make America Great Again” cap. But, he said, “This hat, it gives me power in a way.”

“You made a Superman cape for me,” he told Trump.

It was a surreal scene even by the standards of a nonconventional White House. The unlikely allies spoke to reporters before a closed-door lunch that had been billed as a forum to discuss policy issues including manufacturing, gangs, prison reform and violence in Chicago, where West grew up. Spectators at the show included Trump son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner, former NFL star Jim Brown, the attorney for a gang leader serving time in federal prison, and a gaggle of reporters.

During one pause, Trump seemed to acknowledge the oddness of the moment, saying, “That was quite something.”

West’s mental health has been a question of speculation since he was hospitalized in 2016. In a bizarre performance last month on “Saturday Night Live” he delivered an unscripted pro-Trump message after the credits rolled.

Addressing the topic Thursday, West said he had at one point been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but was later told by a neuropsychologist he’d been misdiagnosed.

“So he said that I actually wasn’t bipolar; I had sleep deprivation, which could cause dementia 10 to 20 years from now, where I wouldn’t even remember my son’s name,” he said.

The conversation began with an exchange on North Korea among Trump, Brown and West. Trump said the region was headed for war before he took over, and West commended him for stopping it. Brown said he liked North Korea; Trump agreed.

From there, West discussed prison reform and violence in inner-city Chicago. He brought up Larry Hoover, the leader of the Gangster Disciples who is serving a life sentence for murder, claiming: “The reason why they imprisoned him is because he started doing positive for the community. He started showing that he actually had power, he wasn’t just one of a monolithic voice, that he could wrap people around.”

West said he “loved Hillary” Clinton, Trump’s 2016 Democratic rival, because he loves everyone, but said he connected with Trump’s “male energy.” He also criticized the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, calling it a “trap door.”

Holding out his phone, West showed Trump a picture of a hydrogen-powered plane that he thought should replace Air Force One.

“This right here is the iPlane 1,” he said. “This is what our president should be flying.”

Added West: “If he don’t look good, we don’t look good. This is our president. He has to be the freshest, the flyest” and have “the flyest planes.”

West also had a sartorial suggestion for Trump, proposing a hat that says just “Make America Great”—dropping the “again.”

At the end of West’s lengthy, sometimes-hard-to-follow dialogue, even Trump seemed at a loss.

“I tell you what: That was pretty impressive,” the president said.

“It was from the soul,” West replied. “I just channeled it.”

West later told reporters of his verbal stylings: “You are tasting a fine wine that has multiple notes to it. You better play 4D chess with me. … It’s complex.”

Taking questions from reporters, the rapper also voiced concern about stop-and-frisk policing. Trump this week called on Chicago to embrace the tactic, which allowed police to detain, question and search civilians without probable cause, though it was deemed unconstitutional in New York City because of its overwhelming impact on minority residents.

Trump said they’d discuss the matter and he’d keep an open mind.

Asked about his comments in 2005 that President George W. Bush didn’t “care about black people” after Hurricane Katrina, West said that “We need to care about all people” and that he “was programmed to think in a victimized mentality.”

Trump and West previously appeared together in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York shortly after Trump’s 2016 election.

Asked what the two had talked about during their December meeting, West responded briefly that time: “Life. We discussed life.”

While Trump has been shunned by much of the Hollywood establishment, he has a fan in West, who tweeted earlier this year that the two share “dragon energy.”

“You don’t have to agree with trump but the mob can’t make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother,” West wrote.

West is married to reality television star Kim Kardashian West, who successfully pushed Trump to grant a pardon to a drug offender earlier this year.

West himself has suggested he might be open to wading into politics, including a run for president in 2020.

Asked if West could be a future presidential candidate, Trump said, “Could very well be.” West shot back, “Only after 2024.”

After all that, the president brought the show to a close by suggesting, “Let’s go have some lunch, OK?”

​

Did Trump Get It Right on NAFTA 2.0?

During the second presidential debate of 1992, business magnate and independent candidate Ross Perot warned we’d hear a “giant sucking sound” of American jobs leaving the country if the U.S. enacted the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. Perot was largely dismissed at the time, perhaps because he himself was so eminently dismissible, but you can draw a straight line from NAFTA to the election of Donald Trump 24 years later.

Championed by Ronald Reagan and ultimately enacted by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the pact has hollowed out the manufacturing industry, leaving millions of Americans destitute and resentful. Enter Trump, who campaigned across the Upper Midwest on the message that NAFTA was “the worst trade deal in the history of the country” and that our partners were taking advantage of us. As director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade and a 25-year veteran of congressional trade battles, Lori Wallach reveals in the latest episode of “Scheer Intelligence” that he got it half-right, hyperbole notwithstanding.

“Trump [has this] nationalistic notion that ‘they stuck it to us.’ No!” she says. “Actually workers throughout North America got steamrolled by corporate America, united with some big Canadian and Mexican counterparts. … It was not rocket science to predict that NAFTA would lead to a million-job loss. It was designed to do that.”

Which brings us to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement reached earlier this month and currently headed to Congress for approval. Much to her astonishment, Wallach believes it may actually represent an improvement on NAFTA, despite extending “more extreme, new rights and privileges to big pharmaceutical companies.” Among its improvements, Robert Scheer points out, are a $16-per-hour wage requirement in a range of industries and the abandonment of corporate-controlled courts that damage the environment and run roughshod over labor. Even Trump’s trade wars, which spooked the stock market this week, could conceivably have long-term benefits for American workers.

“Whether the final package is going to be able to stop NAFTA’S ongoing damage … stop outsourcing jobs to Mexico … [and] stop attacks on environmental, health, water, and energy laws—that’s going to be the test,” she says.

Listen to her full interview with Scheer below: