Chris Hedges's Blog, page 499

Baker Involved in Supreme Court Case Whips Up a New Controversy

DENVER — A Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds — a stance partially upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — has sued the state over its opposition to his refusal to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition, his attorneys said Wednesday.

Jack Phillips, owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in suburban Denver, claimed that Colorado officials are on a “crusade to crush” him and force him into mediation over the gender transition cake because of his religious beliefs, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Phillips is seeking to overturn a Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruling that he discriminated against a transgender person by refusing to make a cake celebrating that person’s transition from male to female.

His lawsuit came after the Supreme Court ruled in June that Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission displayed anti-religious bias when it sanctioned Phillips for refusing to make a wedding cake in 2012 for Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins, a same-sex couple.

The justices voted 7-2 that the commission violated Phillips’ rights under the First Amendment. But the court did not rule on the larger issue of whether businesses can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gays and lesbians.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit law firm, represented Phillips in the case and filed the new lawsuit.

Phillips operates a small, family-run bakery located in a strip mall in the southwest Denver suburb of Lakewood. He told the state civil rights commission that he can make no more than two to five custom cakes per week, depending on time constraints and consumer demand for the cakes that he sells in his store that are not for special orders.

Autumn Scardina, a Denver attorney whose practice includes family, personal injury, insurance and employment law, filed the Colorado complaint — saying that Phillips refused her request for a gender transition cake in 2017.

Cardina said she asked for a cake with a pink interior and a blue exterior and told Phillips it was intended to celebrate her gender transition. She did not state in her complaint whether she asked for the cake to have a message on it.

The commission found on June 28 that Scardina was discriminated against because of her transgender status. It ordered both parties to seek a mediated solution.

Phillips sued in response, citing his belief that “the status of being male or female … is given by God, is biologically determined, is not determined by perceptions or feelings, and cannot be chosen or changed,” according to his lawsuit.

Phillips alleges that Colorado violated his First Amendment right to practice his faith and the 14th Amendment right to equal protection, citing commission rulings upholding other bakers’ refusal to make cakes with messages that are offensive to them.

“For over six years now, Colorado has been on a crusade to crush Plaintiff Jack Phillips … because its officials despise what he believes and how he practices his faith,” the lawsuit said. “This lawsuit is necessary to stop Colorado’s continuing persecution of Phillips.”

Phillips’ lawyers also suggested that Scardina may have targeted Phillips several times after he refused her original request. The lawsuit said he received several anonymous requests to make cakes depicting Satan and Satanic symbols and that he believed she made the requests.

Reached by telephone Wednesday, Scardina declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Her brother, attorney Todd Scardina, is representing her in the case and did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

Phillips’ lawsuit refers to a website for Scardina’s practice, Scardina Law. The site states, in part: “We take great pride in taking on employers who discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and serving them their just desserts.”

The lawsuit said that Phillips has been harassed, received death threats, and that his small shop was vandalized while the wedding cake case wound its way through the judicial system.

Phillips’ suit names as defendants members of the Colorado Civil Rights Division, including division director Aubrey Elenis; Republican state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman; and Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper. It seeks a reversal of the commission ruling and at least $100,000 in punitive damages from Elenis.

Hickenlooper told reporters he learned about the lawsuit Wednesday and that the state had no vendetta against Phillips.

Rebecca Laurie, a spokeswoman for the civil rights commission, declined comment Wednesday, citing pending litigation. Also declining comment was Coffman spokeswoman Annie Skinner.

The Masterpiece Cakeshop wedding cake case stirred intense debate about the mission and composition of Colorado’s civil rights commission during the 2018 legislative session. Its seven members are appointed by the governor.

Lawmakers added a business representative to the commission and, among other things, moved to ensure that no political party has an advantage on the panel.

Emmy Glory Won’t Solve Lingering Problems With ‘The Vietnam War’

In a critique I wrote last fall of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War,” I took the filmmakers to task for failing to expose the essential and damning truth of Vietnam: that the U.S. instigated a war of aggression that resulted in the deaths of three million Vietnamese, including more than 2 million civilians.

Now, it’s Emmy season and, while “The Vietnam War” has been passed over in the nominations for exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking, Burns and Novick are nominated for directing and Geoffrey Ward for writing of episode 8, the strongest in the series.

There is much to commend in the nominated episode. Kent State is sensitively rendered, with previously unseen footage of the May day in 1970 when the Ohio National Guard’s guns were turned on American college students. Army Veteran James Gillam’s comment about the effects of killing another human being—“the other casualty was the civilized version of me”—could stand as a coda for the episode, and for the war itself. And the decisions of Tim O’Brien, Bill Ehrhart and John Musgrave to join anti-war demonstrations—to finally do a march that felt “sensible” and “purposeful” as O’Brien put it—offers hope that America can recover from the wounds of Vietnam.

But even the filmmakers’ strongest episode is undermined by their uneven command of the history, best exemplified in episode 8 by a single line of narration on the My Lai massacre.

“The killing of civilians has happened in every war. In Vietnam, it was not policy or routine, but it wasn’t an aberration either,” the voice-over intones.

The preponderance of the evidence shows that the targeting of civilians was both policy and routine.

Quang Ngai, the province where My Lai is located, offers a case in point. According to the 1967 reportage of Jonathan Schell, 70 percent of peasant villages there had been completely decimated in the months preceding My Lai, with a civilian death toll estimated at 50,000 per year in that province alone.

Schell’s reportage in “The Military Half” (1968) describes his observations in detail. He reported all of it to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara upon his return to the States.

Schell had flown in forward air control planes over Quang Ngai for a month that summer, watching from the air as pilots directed bombers to their targets and as ground troops used Zippo lighters to burn villages to the ground. The military campaign was designed for the purposeful generation of refugees, in the name of what the military planners euphemistically termed “pacification” (a benign choice of words for a designated war crime). Once emptied, the villages became free-fire zones, where U.S. forces were instructed to shoot “anything that moved.”

Part-way through Schell’s reporting stint, commanders received an order to stop generating refugees, for lack of room to accommodate them, even as destruction of the villages continued. That could only mean destruction of the villagers themselves.

Burns and Novick depict the My Lai atrocities after alluding briefly to the near-total destruction of Quang Ngai. And their coverage of My Lai is devastating. But they fail to drive home the understanding that My Lai fit into a wider and systematic operation of mass murder and destruction of the land and its people.As Americans, we need that level of analysis if we are to avoid other such debacles.

The filmmakers give the last word on My Lai to one of the advisors on their film, Tom Vallely (U.S. Marine Corps), who blames the massacre on the actions of rogue individuals, deflecting attention from the systemic nature of the violence against civilians.

While the filmmakers have unearthed new material in their quest to tell the whole story of Vietnam, it is illuminating to consider the sources they’ve ignored. U.S. targeting of civilians in Vietnam has been widely documented. Sources from the period, like the Winter Soldier Investigation, would have quickly dispensed with the notion that U.S. war crimes were anything but systemic, had the soldiers’ devastating first-hand accounts been covered in the film.

Other contemporary sources available to Burns and Novick included congressional hearings replete with incriminating detail. In the decades since the war’s end, a wealth of primary source research and reportage has been published that reinforces period accounts of the targeting of civilians.

Then, there’s the air war. In 1971, journalist Neil Sheehan called the air war  “a distinct weapon of terror” and perhaps the gravest war crime of all. From March 1965 through November 1968, Operation Rolling Thunder unleashed 800 tons of munitions a day on North Vietnam, a total of a million bombs, rockets, and missiles. Even more bombs were dropped in the South with estimates ranging from seven million to eight million tons, not to mention 70 million liters of defoliants, as well as napalmand anti-personnel weapons designed to strike multiple victims.

Sheehan cites the air war in his video interview on My Lai with Burns and Novick, offering the filmmakers a potential entry point to a broader discussion of U.S. culpability. My Lai was different, he says, “because they were killing Vietnamese point blank, with rifles and grenades. They were murdering them directly. They weren’t doing it with bombs and artillery.If they had been doing it with bombs and artillery, nobody would have said a word because it was going on all the time.” The filmmakers eschew the opportunity to dig deeply into the significance of the air war, choosing to start and end the discussion there.

By war’s end, half the population of South Vietnam was homeless, millions of civilians were killed and millions more maimed. That holocaust, along with the destruction of the North and of neighboring Laos and Cambodia, and the American public’s mass outcry against these crimes are deserving of generous treatment in an epic rendering of the war.

Episode 8’s shortcomings are reflected in the wider series, which misrepresents the war as a civil war, not a war of aggression. Considering the lengths they went to tell the Vietnam story in its entirety, it is notable that they got this wrong. Perhaps it reflects an unwillingness to challenge the taboo that blocks substantive discussion of U.S. war crimes culpability.

All this raises the question of the documentarian’s, and particularly our nation’s most renowned documentarians’, responsibility to the public.

Encyclopedia Britannica offers a definition of “historiography” that should also stand as the credo of the historical film documentarian: “the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particular details from the authentic materials in those sources and the synthesis of those details into a narrative that stands the test of critical examination.”

“The Vietnam War” ultimately fails to meet that critical examination test. As the new curators of our collective memory of Vietnam, Burns, Novick and Ward owe the public more critical analysis than they were willing to deliver.

This article was initially published on the History News Network. 

Trump Yanks Ex-CIA Chief’s Clearance, Hitting Vocal Critic

WASHINGTON — President Trump abruptly revoked the security clearance of ex-CIA Director John Brennan on Wednesday, an unprecedented act of retribution against a vocally critical former top U.S. official.

Trump also threatened to yank the clearances of a handful of individuals, including former top intelligence and law enforcement officials, as well as a current member of the Justice Department. All are critics of the president or are people whom Trump appears to believe are against him.

Trump in a statement denounced Brennan’s criticism and spoke anxiously of “the risks posed by his erratic conduct and behavior.” The president described his own action as fulfilling his “constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information.”

However, Democratic members of Congress said it smacked of an “enemies list” among fellow Americans and the behavior of leaders in “dictatorships, not democracies.” Brennan, in a phone interview with MSNBC, called the move an “abuse of power by Mr. Trump.”

“I do believe that Mr. Trump decided to take this action, as he’s done with others, to try to intimidate and suppress any criticism of him or his administration,” he said, adding that he would not be deterred from speaking out.

Trump’s action, critics and nonpartisan experts said, marked an unprecedented politicization of the federal government’s security clearance process. It also was a clear escalation in Trump’s battle with members of the U.S. intelligence community as the investigation into Russia election meddling and possible collusion and obstruction of justice continues.

And it came in the middle of the president’s latest controversy — accusations of racism by former adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman and his bitter reaction to them. Trump’s statement, distributed to reporters, was dated July 26, 2018, suggesting it could have been held and then released when needed to change a damaging subject. The White House later released a new version without the date.

Trump, his statement read by his press secretary, accused Brennan of having “leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration.”

“Mr. Brennan’s lying and recent conduct characterized by increasingly frenzied commentary is wholly inconsistent with access to the nations’ most closely held secrets,” Trump said.

Brennan has indeed been deeply critical of Trump’s conduct, calling his performance at a press conference last month with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland “nothing short of treasonous.”

Brennan continued that criticism on Wednesday. “I’ve seen this type of behavior and actions on the part of foreign tyrants and despots and autocrats for many, many years during my CIA and national security career. I never, ever thought that I would see it here in the United States,” he said.

Brennan said he had not heard from the CIA or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that his security clearance was being revoked, but learned it when the White House announced it. There is no requirement that a president has to notify top intelligence officials of his plan to revoke a security clearance. “The president has the ultimate authority to decide who holds a security clearance,” the ODNI said in a statement.

Former CIA directors and other top national security officials are typically allowed to keep their clearances, at least for some period, so they can be in a position to advise their successors and to hold certain jobs.

Trump’s statement said the Brennan issue raises larger questions about the practice of allowing former officials to maintain their security clearances, and said that others officials’ were under review.

They include former FBI Director James Comey; James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence; former CIA Director Michael Hayden; former national security adviser Susan Rice; and Andrew McCabe, who served as Trump’s deputy FBI director until he was fired in March.

Also on the list: fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from the Russia investigation over anti-Trump text messages; former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom Strzok exchanged messages; and senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whom Trump recently accused on Twitter of “helping disgraced Christopher Steele ‘find dirt on Trump.'”

Ohr was friends with Steele, the former British intelligence officer commissioned by an American political research firm to explore Trump’s alleged ties with the Russian government. He is the only current government employee on the list.

At least two of the former officials, Comey and McCabe, do not currently have security clearances, and none of the eight receive intelligence briefings. Trump’s concern apparently is that their former status gives special weight to their statements, both to Americans and foreign foes.

Former intelligence officials are also wondering how far Trump will go, according to a former senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity to share private conversations he’s had with people who have worked in the field.

They said Trump has moved from threatening to revoke security clearances of former intelligence officials who have not been involved in the Russia investigation to former officials who did work on the probe. And they wonder if he will next choose to target those who currently work on the investigation, which Trump has called a “witch hunt.”

The CIA referred questions to the White House.

Clapper, reacting on CNN, called Trump’s actions “unprecedented,” but said he didn’t plan to stop speaking out. Asked what linked those threatened by the White House, Clapper said he and the others have been outspoken about the Trump administration, have “directly run afoul of it” or have taken actions the president dislikes.

“So I guess that’s what we all have in common,” Clapper said.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, insisted the White House wasn’t targeting only Trump critics. But Trump did not order a review of the clearance held by former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who was fired from the White House for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Russian officials and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Democrats, and even some Republicans, lined up to denounce the president’s move, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., slamming it as a “stunning abuse of power.” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, warned that a “dangerous precedent” was being set by “politicizing the way we guard our national secrets just to punish the president’s critics.”

And California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, tweeted, “An enemies list is ugly, undemocratic and un-American.”

Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen tweeted, “Trump is now categorizing dissent and free speech as ‘erratic behavior.'” He added, “Leaders behave like this in dictatorships, not democracies.”

Several Republicans also weighed in, with Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., saying, “Unless there’s something tangible that I’m unaware of, it just, as I’ve said before, feels like a banana republic kind of thing.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had previously dismissed Trump’s threat as nothing more than presidential “trolling.”

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Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann, Zeke Miller, Lisa Mascro and Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

‘Manafort and His Lies’ at Heart of Case, Prosecution Argues

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Paul Manafort lied to keep himself flush with cash and later to maintain his luxurious lifestyle when his income dropped off, prosecutors told jurors Wednesday in closing arguments at the former Trump campaign chairman’s financial fraud trial.

The government’s case boils down to “Mr. Manafort and his lies,” prosecutor Greg Andres said.

“When you follow the trail of Mr. Manafort’s money, it is littered with lies,” Andres said as he made his final argument that the jury should find President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman guilty of 18 felony counts.

Attorneys for Manafort, who is accused of tax evasion and bank fraud, spoke next, arguing against his guilt by saying he left the particulars of his finances to other people, including his former deputy Rick Gates.

Manafort’s trial is the first to emerge from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but it does not relate to Russian election interference or possible coordination with the Trump campaign — the main topics of Mueller’s probe.

Neither Manafort nor Gates has been charged in connection with his Trump campaign work. But Mueller’s legal team says it discovered Manafort hiding millions of dollars in income as a result of the ongoing probe.

Defense attorney Richard Westling told jurors that the fact that Manafort employed a team of accountants, bookkeepers and tax preparers shows he wasn’t trying to hide anything. The lawyer appeared to be trying to blunt the effect of testimony from some of the people who handled Manafort’s finances, including his bookkeeper, who said he concealed offshore bank accounts and lied to them.

Westling said the evidence against Manafort has been cherry-picked by Mueller’s team and doesn’t show jurors the full picture.

“None of the banks involved reported Manafort’s activities as suspicious, he said.

Westling questioned whether prosecutors had shown criminal intent by the former Trump campaign chairman, and pointed to documents and emails that the defense lawyer said may well show numerical errors or sloppy bookkeeping but no overt fraud.

During the prosecution’s arguments, jurors took notes as Manafort primarily directed his gaze at a computer screen where documents were shown. The screen showed emails written by Manafort that contained some of the most damning evidence that he was aware of the fraud and not simply a victim of underlings who managed his financial affairs.

Andres highlighted one email in which he said Manafort sent an inflated statement of his income to bank officers reviewing a loan application. He highlighted another in which Manafort acknowledged his control of one of more than 30 holding companies in Cyprus that prosecutors say he used to funnel more than $60 million he earned advising politicians in Ukraine.

Prosecutors say Manafort falsely declared that money to be loans rather than income to keep from paying taxes on it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, a loan is not income, and income is not a loan. You do not need to be a tax expert to understand this,” Andres said.

The government says Manafort hid at least $16 million in income from the IRS between 2010 and 2014. Then, after his money in Ukraine dried up, they allege, he defrauded banks by lying about his income on loan applications and concealing other financial information, such as mortgages.

Manafort chose not to testify or call any witnesses in his defense. His lawyers have tried to blame their client’s financial mistakes Gates, calling him a liar and philanderer.

Gates, who struck a plea deal with prosecutors, told jurors he helped conceal millions of dollars in foreign income and submitted fake mortgage and tax documents. He was also forced to admit embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manafort and conducting an extramarital affair.

Andres said the government isn’t asking jurors to like Gates or take everything he said at “face value.” He said the testimony of other witnesses and the hundreds of documents are enough to convict Manafort on tax evasion and bank fraud charges.

“Does the fact that Mr. Gates had an affair 10 years ago make Mr. Manafort any less guilty?” Andres asked, noting that Manafort didn’t choose a “Boy Scout” to aid a criminal scheme.

Referring to charts compiled by an IRS accounting specialist, Andres told jurors that Manafort declared only some of his foreign income on his federal income tax returns and repeatedly failed to disclose millions of dollars that streamed into the U.S. to pay for luxury items, services and loans. In 2012, Manafort’s most successful year during his Ukrainian work, he reported $5.3 million. But he told the government nothing about another $9.2 million that went to pay for loans and other items, prosecutors said.

The prosecutor said Manafort should have been well aware each time he signed tax and financial documents indicating that he had no foreign accounts to declare. “Mr. Manafort was willful,” Andres said.

In a brief rebuttal after defense arguments, Andres said the defense “wants to make this case about Robert Gates,” but hasn’t explained “the dozens of documents” Manafort’s name is on.

Defense lawyer Kevin Downing said the government was so desperate to make a case against Manafort that it gave a sweetheart plea deal to Gates, and he would say whatever was necessary so it would not recommend he serve jail time.

“Mr. Gates, how he was able to get the deal he got, I have no idea,” Downing said.

After the closing arguments were finished, U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III began his instructions to jurors, which he had earlier estimated could take up to an hour.

On Tuesday, Ellis rejected a defense motion that the case should be dismissed because the government had not met its burden of proof. Manafort’s lawyers asked the judge to toss out all the charges, but they focused in particular on four bank-fraud charges.

Manafort’s lawyers argued there is no way that one of the banks, Federal Savings Bank, could have been defrauded because its chairman, Stephen Calk, knew full well that Manafort’s finances were in disarray but approved the loan to him anyway. Witnesses testified that Calk pushed the loans through because he wanted a post in the Trump administration.

Ellis, in making his ruling, said the defense made a “significant” argument, but that the decision was “an issue for the jury” to decide.

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Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Anne Flaherty contributed to this report.

The Evidence Is In, and Austerity Is Declared a Loser

In 2014, Portugal stood on the brink. Its economy had collapsed amid Europe’s debt crisis, and unemployment had doubled. As part of a bailout program with the International Monetary Fund, which had lent the country 78 billion euros ($90 billion) in 2011, its government imposed drastic cuts to wages, pensions and social security.

But then something remarkable happened. Rather than bow to the demands of its European debtors, the Portuguese government elected to reinvest in its public sector, restoring salaries and benefits to their pre-crisis levels. Four years later, the results speak for themselves.

“The government’s U-turn, and willingness to spend, had a powerful effect,” writes The New York Times’ Liz Alderman. “Creditors railed against the move, but the gloom that had gripped the nation through years of belt-tightening began to lift. Business confidence rebounded. Production and exports began to take off.”

Its recovery remains fragile, with unions lobbying for more public spending to reduce inequality. Still, Portugal’s reversal of fortune would appear to confirm what the 2008 financial crisis made abundantly clear: Austerity—the process of reducing government deficits through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—is not just a failure on a human level but a policy level as well. As Ryan Cooper argues this week in The Week, “in the great economic battle of the past decade, the winner is the tried and true—in a rout.”

“The anti-Keynesian forces have been proved conclusively mistaken on every single argument,” he writes. “Their refusal to pick up what amounted to a multiple-trillion-dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk is the greatest mistake of economic policy analysis since 1929 at least.”

In the wake of the Great Recession, which saw U.S. unemployment balloon to 10 percent, Republican politicians and prominent neoliberals alike attacked the notion that the Obama stimulus package would revive the nation’s economy. Their objections ranged from concerns about hyperinflation to a belief that unemployment was “structural” to concern about a “skills gap” in the jobs market. Cooper’s latest column lines them up and knocks them down, one by one.

“Economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna outlined a theory of ‘expansionary austerity,’ arguing that governments could increase taxes, cut spending, and grow strongly,” Cooper notes. “Meanwhile, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff demonstrated an apparent trigger point of a 90 percent debt-to-GDP level beyond which more borrowing would cause economic stagnation.”

These economists, to borrow a phrase from the neoconservative Irving Kristol, were soon mugged by reality. Whatever its failings, the stimulus package did grow the U.S. economy, while the European countries that abided draconian austerity measures saw their production and employment crater. (Greece is only now emerging from the wreckage of the debt crisis, and its progress is halting.)

“In late 2010, a bunch of conservative financial and economics luminaries, including Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Niall Ferguson, Kevin Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Bill Kristol, and John Taylor, signed an open letter to then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke warning that ‘[t]he planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation,’” Cooper continues. “Yet it’s been six to eight years since their arguments and there’s hardly been a glimmer of the kind of inflation they warned about. … In fact, not only has there been no hyperinflation, inflation has consistently come in under the Fed’s supposed target value of 2 percent.”

Concerns about a “skills gap”—the notion that Americans were untrained or ill-equipped to take available jobs—have proved similarly overblown. One need look no further than the stagnant wage growth over the last decade. (If there really was a scarcity of skilled labor, that trend line would theoretically point upward as companies compete for their services.)

“As we have seen, the evidence for the Keynesian position is overwhelming,” Cooper concludes. “Through a combination of bad faith, motivated reasoning, and sheer incompetence, austerians have directly created the problem their entire program was supposed to avoid. Good riddance.”

Read Ryan Cooper’s column at The Week.

Black Americans Aren’t Buying Omarosa’s Turn Against Trump

WASHINGTON — For years, Omarosa Manigault Newman stood at Donald Trump’s side, making her deeply unpopular with African-Americans who see her as a sellout for aligning herself with a president who has hurled one insult after another at black people.

Her falling out with Trump and her decision to call him a racist as she sells her new book — and in turn, his calling her a “dog” — have not been enough for many African-Americans to invite her back to the family picnic.

Too little, too late, many said.

“Her tell-all mea culpa won’t win her any brownie points with most blacks,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author of the book “Why Black Lives Do Matter.” ″Their loathing of Omarosa is virtually frozen in stone. She’s still roundly lambasted as a two-bit opportunist, a racial sellout and an ego-driven hustler.”

Few in the black community immediately rushed to defend Manigault Newman after she wrote a book titled “Unhinged” about her time in the White House. It paints a damning picture of Trump, claiming without evidence that tapes exist of him using the N-word as he filmed “The Apprentice” reality series, on which she co-starred.

She has since stepped up her attacks on Trump as she promotes her book, telling The Associated Press on Tuesday that the president is “a racist, a misogynist, a bigot.”

“I want to see this nation united as opposed to divided,” she said. “I don’t want to see a race war, as Donald Trump does.”

The deep hostility that African-Americans harbor for Manigault Newman stems largely from her defense of the president or her public silence as he repeatedly attacked the American citizenship of former President Barack Obama; insulted various minority groups and described some African nations as “shithole” countries. He has also insulted prominent blacks like U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters and NBA superstar LeBron James, said that “many sides” are to blame for the violence at last year’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and ripped African-American athletes for protesting racial injustice.

As the highest-profile African-American on the White House staff, she pushed back on accusations that Trump was racist. She once told PBS’ “Frontline,” ″Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down under President Trump.”

In the book, Manigault Newman suggests she joined Trump’s campaign — despite the misgivings she said she had about her longtime friend and mentor — after an arrangement to join Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign fell through and left her feeling spurned.

She writes that Trump and his campaign were “eager for my help” and she wanted to experience working on a campaign at a “high level.” And, “since Trump had little chance of winning, it would be ‘no harm, no foul’ for me to have worked with the campaign for however long it lasted,” she wrote.

She now says he “used” her, calling him a “con” who “has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities” but is “truly a racist.”

Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric against Manigault Newman on Tuesday. “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” Trump said. “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!” John Kelly is the White House chief of staff.

Many condemned the president and his repeated attempts to compare minorities with animals, but there was little defense of Manigault Newman — unlike when Trump attacked NBA superstar LeBron James in recent weeks.

“We should not mistake anything that has happened here as to be Omarosa in any way purporting be a benefit to the African-American community,” said Aisha Moodie-Mills, a Democratic strategist.

More than 8 in 10 blacks said they thought Trump was racist in a February poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. More than 9 in 10 of African-Americans disapproved of how Trump is handling his job as president.

Manigault Newman has been associated with Trump for more than a decade.

Minimal association with Trump, like taking a photograph with the president in the Oval Office, was enough for protesters to decry Historically Black Colleges and University presidents on their own campuses last year. Black ministers who met with Trump are being criticized by their colleagues and some by their congregations. Among the criticized is Darrell Scott, an African-American pastor from Ohio who declared “This is probably going be … the most pro-black president that we’ve had in our lifetime.”

Raynard Jackson, a black Republican who has worked on GOP presidential, gubernatorial and local campaigns, said Manigault Newman secretly recording Trump and other White House officials will make her a pariah in conservative circles as well.

“There is absolutely no way she can redeem herself. Who is going to trust her ever again?” Jackson said. “Recording someone under these circumstances is the political equivalent of spitting on a man.”

Conservative commentator Armstrong Williams said he’s known Manigault Newman since she was 19 and will always consider her a friend. But “Omarosa can’t be trusted,” he said. “There’s an issue when you can’t be trusted and can’t be loyal.”

As her feud with Trump intensified, Manigault Newman’s relationship with the black community became the topic of many conversations among African-Americans, especially on social media. Some offered hope for Manigault Newman, however conditional.

If Omarosa “is the one to get some traction on people seeing how truly raggedy this administration is enough to take action… we should reconsider letting her get a to-go plate from the cookout. Someone can take it to her,” tweeted Bari A. Williams, an Oakland lawyer and business operations executive.

Elizabeth Warren Unveils Bold New Legislation to Curb Corporate Greed

Taking aim at the heart of America’s toxic economic status quo—which has over the past several decades produced soaring corporate profits and CEO pay while keeping workers’ wages stagnant—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced legislation on Wednesday that would “give workers a stronger voice” in the decision-making of major businesses and put an end to corporations’ single-minded commitment to maximizing shareholder value at the expense of employees.

“Because the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. households own 84 percent of American-held shares, the obsession with maximizing shareholder returns effectively means America’s biggest companies have dedicated themselves to making the rich even richer,” Warren noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed outlining her new measure. “For the past 30 years we have put the American stamp of approval on giant corporations, even as they have ignored the interests of all but a tiny slice of Americans. We should insist on a new deal.”

Tracing what she terms the “shareholder value maximization” ideology to the work of influential right-wing economist Milton Friedman—who argued that corporations have a “social responsibility” to put profits ahead of all other objectives, including public health, worker safety, and environmental protection—Warren argues that corporate America’s unwavering prioritization of shareholder returns has produced a system in which “workers aren’t getting what they’ve earned.”

To address this fundamental inequity and establish a system in which prosperity is broadly shared rather than hoarded at the very top, Warren’s bill—officially titled the Accountable Capitalism Act—would:

Require American corporations that bring in over a billion dollars in annual revenue to obtain a federal charter, which would force companies to “consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders,” including workers, customers, and communities;
Give workers the power to elect at least 40 percent of corporate board members;
Ban corporations from making political expenditures “without the approval of 75 percent of its directors and shareholders”; and
Allow the federal government to revoke a corporation’s charter if it engages in illegal behavior.

“There’s a fundamental problem with our economy. For decades, American workers have helped create record corporate profits but have seen their wages hardly budge,” Warren said in a statement on Wednesday. “To fix this problem we need to end the harmful corporate obsession with maximizing shareholder returns at all costs, which has sucked trillions of dollars away from workers and necessary long-term investments.”

Warren’s legislation quickly won the support from a wide array of groups, including labor unions, progressive think-tanks, advocacy groups, and legal scholars (pdf).

@SenWarren‘s proposal to ensure that workers elect 40% of the board of directors in big companies—and to require authorization of 75% of board members before a corporation can undertake political activity—is brilliant, breathtaking, and a huge, huge deal. https://t.co/sVHcevTQsa

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) August 15, 2018

Applauding Warren’s new bill in a tweet on Wednesday, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka declared, “It’s time to rewrite the rules so our economy works for working people, not just those at the top.”

.@SenWarren is right! It’s time to rewrite the rules so our economy

works for working people, not just those at the top. https://t.co/HYYvuwmXFw

— Richard L. Trumka (@RichardTrumka) August 15, 2018

Lenore Palladino, senior economist and policy counsel at the Roosevelt Institute, said in a statement that Warren’s bill is a “clear step in the right direction” that would “ensure that the voice of working people in corporate decision-making reflects the crucial role they play in their employers’ success.”

“Corporations today no longer advance the public interest. That’s because they’ve chosen to use their massive profits to enrich themselves and their shareholders at the expense of workers and long-term, shared growth,” Palladino added. “Solutions like the proposed legislation would create a more prosperous economy and ensure greater financial security for workers and their families.”

What the U.S. Can Learn From a Tiny Republic in the Caucasus

If my UCLA students are representative of the country at large, virtually no one outside of the Armenian diaspora has ever heard of the Republic of Artsakh or the geopolitical conflict surrounding its existence. This is probably unsurprising; millions of Americans have little interest in matters that have no direct impact upon their lives or those of their families, and generally pay scant attention to events in the Caucasus. But perhaps they should.

During a recent visit to Artsakh (formerly known as Nagorno-Karabakh), I spoke to governmental officials, current legislators, diplomats and former acting President Georgi Petrosyan, all of whom offered unique insight into the fledgling democratic republic. Between presentations for government and university officials, I also had the opportunity to experience some of the vibrant culture the beleaguered young nation has to offer.

The history of the now independent, if still unrecognized, country traces to the early days of the Soviet Union. Artsakh has long been an integral part of Armenia, and its population is almost entirely Armenian. But Josef Stalin ceded its lands in 1921 to the administration of Soviet Azerbaijan.

Stalin had been commissioner of nationalities before laying claim to full dictatorial powers in the Soviet Union. His reasoning in carving up Armenia was to foster closer relations between Turkey and the Bolshevik regime following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Armenia and Azerbaijan would soon become constituent parts of the Soviet Union, but the latter remained tied to Turkey through religion and language. Delivering Nagorno-Karabakh—now Artsakh—to Azerbaijan was no more than a calculated political decision that discounted the will of the region’s people.

Throughout the Soviet era, Artsakh maintained semi-autonomous status within Azerbaijan. Still, its Armenian residents overwhelmingly desired reunification with their mother country. Armenians in Azerbaijan were regularly subjected to discrimination and violence, but conflict between the Armenian people and the Azerbaijani authorities remained largely dormant up until perestroika—the restructure and reform policies promoted by Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s.

Gorbachev’s embrace of glasnost—the airing of the nation’s social and economic problems—catalyzed Armenian attempts to bring the persecution of their people to the attention of the international community. The Karabakh movement’s massive demonstrations in the city of Yerevan in February 1988 were part of a larger push for independence throughout Eastern Europe as the Soviet empire began to crumble. Its ultimate goal? To unite the region with Armenia.

On Dec. 10, 1991, Artsakh held a referendum in which an overwhelming majority voted for Armenian independence. Less than a month later, its democratically elected leaders declared the region an independent republic.

Azerbaijan responded with all-out war, a conflict that lasted for the better part of six years, from 1988 to 1994. The Republic of Armenia backed the Armenians of Artsakh as Azerbaijan failed to curb the secessionist movement. A Russian-brokered cease-fire ended the hostilities, but only after a staggering amount of blood had been shed. Talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan are currently being mediated by OSCE Minsk Group (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), which seeks a peaceful, negotiated resolution to the issue. But neither side trusts the other. Since 1994, skirmishes have broken out on the border, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries. As uncertainty between Azerbaijan and Artsakh has increased, so has the probability of major armed conflict.

On April 2, 2016, full-scale conflict resumed. Known as the Four-Day War, Azerbaijan initiated the hostilities, possibly to divert from socioeconomic unrest stemming from declining oil prices in the international market. The fighting was heavy, and dozens of soldiers and civilians were injured and killed. Azerbaijan managed to shift the front lines of the conflict very slightly in its favor before a cease-fire was announced on April 5. Perhaps the greatest effect of the truce was that Russia reinforced its position as the dominant power in the region.

So why should any of this matter to a U.S. population with its own pressing problems? After all, the Trump administration appears bent on eradicating the final vestiges of New Deal protections and implementing a racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-labor agenda. Young people face staggering debt, health care is unraveling in real time and the federal government’s immigration policy is plumbing new depths of depravity. The list goes on and on.

Artsakh’s population of 150,000 is hardly bigger than Pomona, Calif., but its struggle is one Americans would be wise to observe. It is a democratic country, with its own strengths and flaws, living in a state of neither peace nor war; it has held free and open elections, certified as such by international observers. On this criteria alone, the country deserves Americans’ recognition and support.

Artsakh is also under threat by a hostile regime that is in many ways its antithesis. Beyond its ethnic and religious differences, Azerbaijan is a deeply authoritarian state ruled, in effect, by a family dictatorship with a long history of corruption. The president, Ilham Aliyev, is the son of the former President Heydar Aliyev, who served as a former Soviet KGB operative before Azerbaijan declared its independence (the Aliyev regime is reminiscent of the Kims in North Korea and the Assads in Syria). This is perhaps the central reason Artsakh can never “rejoin” a nation that Stalin artificially and cynically cleaved out nearly a century ago.

Azerbaijan’s chief sponsor on the world stage is Turkey, whose authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Donald Trump has admired for his “strength” and “decisiveness.” In truth, Erdogan has ruthlessly imprisoned his political opponents and extinguished civil liberties. Azerbaijan under Aliyev is remarkably similar, with its extensive crackdown on journalists, human rights advocates and others deemed threatening to the government, all of whom routinely face harassment, violence and imprisonment. The fate of Armenians in Artsakh under such a regime would be unthinkable. Americans should be keenly concerned with such a prospect, and take every step to ensure it never meets such a fate.

Moreover, Azerbaijan joins Turkey in formally denying the 1915 Armenian genocide. A dutiful client state, Azerbaijan is complicit in a monstrous historical crime that continues 103 years after it began. The civilized world knows that Armenia was the victim of the first holocaust of the 20th century, as approximately 1.5 million people were slaughtered, starved, raped and tortured by the Ottoman Turks.

In both Armenia and Artsakh (as well as the Armenian diaspora communities across the world), descendants of the victims still grapple with the trauma of these events and the pain of Turkey and Azerbaijan’s denial. I have seen the expression of this suffering in Armenia, and it would be cruel beyond imagination to return Artsakh to a nation that denies a people’s deepest historical anguish. That is something that the United States should care about most profoundly.

In May, I spoke informally to a handful of young diplomats at the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Artsakh. Afterward, some colleagues and I listened to an informal presentation by Artsakh Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Armine Alexanyan. Not only did she offer a cogent overview of the recent history of the Artsakh-Azerbaijan conflict, she made a compelling argument for the republic’s independence and its dynamic leadership.

At the end of her presentation, I asked whether the country should join Armenia and become a constituent part of that nation. Her answer helped illuminate why Americans might want to pay closer attention to the region. She replied that the decision is truly up to the people of the republic.

The United States should vigorously applaud such an expression of self-determination and autonomy. What happens to the 150,000 people of Artsakh is a matter for them to decide, and a choice of democracy over authoritarianism is one we might all stand to emulate.

Church Helped Ex-Priest Accused of Abuse Get Disney Job

HARRISBURG, Pa.—A sweeping grand jury report into child sexual abuse in Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania said church officials gave a former priest a positive reference to work at Disney World, even though they’d fielded at least one allegation about him sexually abusing a boy.

The ex-priest, Edward Ganster, left the priesthood in 1990, moved to the Orlando area and went on to work at Disney World before he died in 2014.

The report said Ganster worked at the theme park for 18 years. Ganster drove the train at the Magic Kingdom, according to an obituary in the Orlando Sentinel, which said Ganster worked there for 15 years.

Disney World did not respond to a request for information.

Ganster, who became a priest in 1971, was working at St. Joseph’s Church in Easton in the late 1970s when a woman complained to a monsignor that Ganster had gotten in bed with her 13-year-old son on an overnight trip and “hurt” him, the report said. The boy also told his mother that “something happened” in the confession booth, it said.

The monsignor told her Ganster would be given counseling and Ganster was promptly reassigned, the report said.

About a decade later, Ganster was on sick leave at a Catholic mental health hospital as he sought to leave the priesthood and get married.

Ganster wrote the Diocese to say he would apply for a job at Disney World and wanted to use the Diocese as a reference, the report said.

Allentown’s bishop, Thomas Welsh, wrote to Orlando’s bishop that Ganster’s problems were “partially sexual” and that he couldn’t reassign him. A monsignor separately assured Ganster that he would get a positive reference.

“I am quite sure that the Diocese will be able to give you a positive reference in regard to the work you did during your years of service here as a priest,” the monsignor wrote, according to the report.

A diocese spokesman, Matt Kerr, said he knows of no reference letter, or if one was written.

“That should not have happened,” Kerr said. “It would not happen today.”

More than a decade after Ganster left the priesthood, a man contacted the Allentown Diocese to report that Ganster had victimized him when he was 14 and an altar boy some two decades earlier, the report said.

Ganster fondled, groped and beat him repeatedly, once dragging him across a living room floor by his underwear and once beating him with a metal cross, the report said.

Years later, in 2015, the mother of another victim contacted the Allentown Diocese to report that Ganster abused her then 12-year-old son in 1977, the report said.

Turkey Retaliates With Tariffs on U.S. Goods

ANKARA, Turkey—Turkey said Wednesday it is increasing tariffs on some U.S. products like cars, alcohol, and coal — a move that is unlikely to have much economic impact but highlights the deteriorating relations with the U.S. in a feud that has already helped trigger a currency crisis.

The Turkish government said tariffs on American cars will be doubled to 120 percent while those on alcoholic drinks will be hiked by the same rate to 140 percent. Overall, the duties will amount to $533 million, a relatively small sum meant as retaliation for U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to double tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum.

The tariffs also come a day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey would boycott U.S. electronic goods, singling out iPhones. Though it was unclear how the boycott would be enforced or encouraged.

Beyond the bluster of the two world leaders, the spat between the NATO allies has exacerbated a financial storm in Turkey. International investors have been put off by the country’s high levels of foreign debt and Erdogan’s refusal to allow the central bank to raise interest rates to support the currency, as experts say it should.

The currency drop is particularly painful for Turkey because it has accumulated a high debt in foreign currencies.

The Turkish lira has dropped to a series of record lows in recent weeks, having fallen 37 percent so far this year. It recovered a bit, by 5 percent to around 6.05 lira per dollar Wednesday, after the government took steps to shore up the currency by reducing the daily limit in bank foreign currency swap transactions.

On Wednesday, Turkish officials said Qatar had pledged $15 billion of direct investments for Turkey, in a bid to help Turkey’s economy. The officials said Qatar’s Sheikh Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani pledged to “quickly implement” the investment package during a meeting with Erdogan in Ankara. The officials from Erdogan’s office provided the information on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin later confirmed the pledge on Twitter, saying: “Turkish-Qatari relations are based on solid foundations of true friendship and solidarity.”

Also helping the Turkish currency were moves by Turkey to gain favor with European countries.

It decided to release two Greek soldiers from prison on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Turkey then freed Amnesty International’s honorary chairman for Turkey, Taner Kilic, from prison pending the outcome of his trial on terror charges. And Erdogan held a phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and planned to speak this week also with France’s Emmanuel Macron.

Investors seemed to focus on this and underlying economic problems over the exchange of tariffs with the U.S., which analysts said was unlikely to cause serious pain.

Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Ankara office, noted that Turkey buys just 0.5 percent of all U.S. exports and most of that is civilian aircraft and weapons.

“This is just a symbolic gesture,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Ankara office. He said “So anything other than weapons purchases… would not hurt the United States.”

It was unclear, meanwhile, whether the boycott of American electronics would be enforced in any way.

Apple has 22 percent of the smartphone market in Turkey, where 11.4 million units were sold last year, according to Ramazan Yavuz, research manager at IDC consultancy company.

Although preference for Apple products is strong, their already high prices are curbing demand, Yavuz said adding that the boycott “is expected to reduce Apple’s performance in the country in the upcoming quarters.”

Attention will turn Thursday to an address by the finance minister to foreign investors for clues on any change in economic policy.

Investors are looking for substantive economic policy changes by Erdogan — namely the acceptance of higher interest rates — whereas the president has so far reacted mainly by blaming foreign powers, particularly the United States, which he says is waging an “economic war.”

Washington has imposed financial sanctions on two Turkish ministers and doubled steel and aluminum tariffs on Turkey, as Trump tries to secure the release of Andrew Brunson, a 50-year-old American pastor being tried in Turkey on espionage and terrorism-related charges.

On Wednesday, a court rejected an appeal for Brunson’s release from detention and for a travel ban against him to be lifted, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. A higher court however, was scheduled to review the appeal, the agency said.

Although he was released to home detention, Brunson faces a prison sentence of up to 35 years if he is convicted on both counts at the end of his ongoing trial.

The evangelical pastor, who is originally from Black Mountain, North Carolina, has lived in Turkey for 23 years and led the Izmir Resurrection Church.