Chris Hedges's Blog, page 576

Giuliani: White House Wants Briefing on Classified Info

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s legal team wants a briefing on the classified information shared with lawmakers about the origins of the FBI investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election and may take it to the Justice Department as part of an effort to scuttle the ongoing special counsel probe.

Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s attorneys, told The Associated Press on Friday that the White House hopes to get a readout of the information next week, particularly about the use of a longtime government informant who approached members of Trump’s campaign in a possible bid to glean intelligence on Russian efforts to sway the election. Trump has made unproven claims of FBI misconduct and political bias and has denounced the asset as “a spy.”

“If the spying was inappropriate, that means we may have an entirely illegitimate investigation,” Giuliani said of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. He then invoked the material compiled by former FBI Director James Comey before he was fired.

“Coupled with Comey’s illegally leaked memos, this means the whole thing was a mistake and should never have happened,” Giuliani said. “We’d urge the Justice Department to re-evaluate, to acknowledge they made a mistake. It’s a waste of $20 million of the taxpayers’ money. The whole thing is already a waste of money.”

Comey has said he had the authority as a private citizen to ask a friend to share details from one of his memos with the news media and that he did nothing wrong. The Justice Department official who would be the one to receive any complaints from Giuliani would presumably be Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller last year in the wake of Comey’s firing and was present for Thursday’s briefings.

The extraordinary two meetings held Thursday were sought by Trump’s GOP allies in Congress and arranged by the White House, as the president has tried to sow suspicions about the legitimacy of the FBI investigation that spawned Mueller’s probe.

Trump and his allies have focused on the use of the informant.

“What motivated putting him in? What sort of information were they seeking from him? What did they get?” Giuliani asked Friday. “They clearly did not get incriminating information or we’d have found out about it by now. And why did they hide it for so long? There’s a big concealment that went on here for over a year since the president said he had been surveilled.”

Democrats emerged from the meetings saying they saw no evidence to support Republican allegations that the FBI acted inappropriately. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was not in the meetings but, in a radio interview Friday, broke with the president to say that a “confidential informant is not a spy.”

Initially offered only to Republicans, the briefings were the latest piece of stagecraft meant to publicize and bolster the allegations. But they also highlighted the degree to which the president and his allies have used the levers of the federal government — in this case, intelligence agencies — to aide in Trump’s personal and political defense.

The presence of a White House lawyer, Emmet Flood, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly at the outset of the briefings raised immediate alarms from Democrats, who said they were concerned officials could use information from the meetings to the president’s legal advantage. They also said it was inappropriate for White House officials to attend any part of a meeting about a criminal investigation that directly concerns the president and his campaign. Some also questioned whether their presence violated Justice Department policy meant to limit contacts with the White House to specific circumstances.

The White House said Flood and Kelly gave brief remarks at the outset of the briefings but did not stay for the substance. Giuliani said it would be appropriate for Trump to be briefed about the findings.

“He’s not the subject or target of that investigation. He should know what is discussed,” said Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City. “Moreover, I assume President Obama knew about it. And if Obama knew about it, why can’t Trump?”

It was unclear how much information was given to lawmakers. According to a U.S. official familiar with the broader of the two meetings, the briefers did not reveal the name of the informant. They brought documents to Capitol Hill but did not share them, and made several remarks about the importance of protecting intelligence sources and methods. The person declined to be identified because the briefing was classified.

The president intensified his attacks on the probe this week, calling it “spygate” and tweeting Thursday that it was “Starting to look like one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history.” Trump told one ally this week that he wanted “to brand” the informant a “spy,” believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.

It remained unclear what, if any, spying was done. The White House provided no evidence to support Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama’s administration was trying to spy on his 2016 campaign for political reasons.

Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, an ardent Trump supporter, originally demanded the information on an FBI source in the Russia investigation. And Trump took up the cause as the White House tries to combat the threat posed by Mueller’s investigation.

Giuliani said the president’s legal team would wait to see a report out of the briefings before making a decision as to whether Trump would sit for an interview with Mueller’s investigators. He previously had said that a decision would not be made about an interview until after Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a meeting that the president canceled on Thursday but the White House is open to reviving.

“We’ll see about the future of the summit before we definitely make a decision about a timetable,” Giuliani said.

___

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed reporting.

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Blackstone, BlackRock or a Public Bank for California’s Money?

California needs over $700 billion in infrastructure during the next decade. Where will this money come from? The $1.5 trillion infrastructure initiative unveiled by President Trump in February includes only $200 billion in federal funding, and less than that after factoring in the billions in tax cuts in infrastructure-related projects. The rest is to come from cities, states, private investors and public-private partnerships (PPPs). And because city and state coffers are depleted, that chiefly means private investors and PPPs, which have a shady history at best.

A 2011 report by the Brookings Institution found that “in practice [PPPs] have been dogged by contract design problems, waste, and unrealistic expectations.” In its 2015 report “Why Public-Private Partnerships Don’t Work,” Public Services International stated that “experience over the last 15 years shows that PPPs are an expensive and inefficient way of financing infrastructure and divert government spending away from other public services. They conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies.” They also divert public money away from the neediest infrastructure projects, which may not deliver sizable returns, in favor of those big-ticket items that will deliver hefty profits to investors.

Meanwhile, California is far from broke. It has over well over $700 billion in funds of various sorts tucked around the state, including $500 billion in CalPERS and CalSTRS, the state’s massive public pension funds. These pools of money are restricted in how they can be spent and are either sitting in banks drawing a modest interest or invested with Wall Street asset managers and private equity funds that are not obligated to invest the money in California and are not safe. For fiscal year 2009, CalPERS and CalSTRS reported almost $100 billion in losses from investments gone awry.

In 2017, CalSTRS allocated $6.1 billion to private equity funds, real estate managers and co-investments, including $400 million to a real estate fund managed by Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity firm, and $200 million to BlackRock, the world’s largest “shadow bank.” CalPERS is now in talks with BlackRock over management of its $26 billion private equity fund, with discretion to invest that money as it sees fit.

“Private equity” is a rebranding of the term “leveraged buyout,” the purchase of companies with loans that then must be paid back by the company, typically at the expense of jobs and pensions. Private equity investments may include real estate, energy and investment in public infrastructure projects as part of a privatization initiative. Blackstone is notorious for buying up distressed properties after the housing market collapsed. It is now the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the United States. Its rental practices have drawn fire from tenant advocates in San Francisco and elsewhere who have called it a Wall Street absentee slumlord that charges excessive rents, contributing to the affordable housing crisis. Pension funds largely contributed the money for Blackstone’s purchases.

BlackRock, an offshoot of Blackstone, now has $6 trillion in assets under management, making it larger than the world’s largest bank (which is in China). Die Zeit journalist Heike Buchter, who has written a book in German on it, calls BlackRock the “most powerful institution in the financial system” and “the most powerful company in the world”—the “secret power.” Yet despite its size and global power, BlackRock, along with Blackstone and other shadow banking institutions, managed to escape regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who has cozy relationships with government officials, according to journalist David Dayen, pushed hard to successfully resist the designation of asset managers as systemically important financial institutions, which would have subjected them to additional regulation, such as larger capital requirements.

The proposed move to hand CalPERS’ private equity fund to BlackRock is highly controversial, because it would cost the state substantial sums in fees (management fees took 14 percent of private equity profits in 2016), and BlackRock gives no guarantees. In 2009, it defaulted on a New York real estate project that left CalPERS $500 million in the hole. There are also potential conflicts of interest, since BlackRock or its managers have controlling interests in companies that could be steered into deals with the state. In 2015, the company was fined $12 million by the SEC for that sort of conflict; and in 2015, it was fined $3.5 million for providing flawed data to German regulators. BlackRock also puts clients’ money into equities, investing it in companies like oil company Exxon and food-and-beverage company Nestlé, companies that have been criticized for not serving California’s interests and for exploiting state resources.

California public entities also have $2.8 billion in CalTRUST, a fund managed by BlackRock. The CalTRUST government fund is a money market fund of the sort that triggered the 2008 market collapse when the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck” on Sept. 15, 2008. The CalTRUST website states:

You could lose money by investing in the Fund. Although the Fund seeks to preserve the value of your investment at $1.00 per share, it cannot guarantee it will do so. An investment in the Fund is not insured or guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or any other government agency. The Fund’s sponsor has no legal obligation to provide financial support to the Fund, and you should not expect that the sponsor will provide financial support to the Fund at any time.

CalTRUST is billed as providing local agencies with “a safe, convenient means of maintaining liquidity,” but billionaire investor Carl Icahn says this liquidity is a myth. In a July 2015 debate with Larry Fink on Fox Business Network, Icahn called BlackRock “an extremely dangerous company” because of the prevalence of its exchange-traded fund (ETF) products, which Icahn deemed illiquid. “They sell liquidity,” he said. “There is no liquidity. … And that’s what’s going to blow this up.” His concern was the amount of money BlackRock had invested in high-yield ETFs, which he called overpriced. When the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, investors are likely to rush to sell these ETFs; but there will be no market for them, he said. The result could be a run like that triggering the 2008 market collapse.

The Infrastructure Bank Option

There is an alternative. California’s pools of idle funds cannot be spent on infrastructure, but they could be deposited or invested in a publicly owned bank, where they could form the deposit base for infrastructure loans. California is now the fifth-largest economy in the world, trailing only Germany, Japan, China and the United States. Germany, China and other Asian countries are addressing their infrastructure challenges through public infrastructure banks that leverage pools of funds into loans for needed construction.

Besides the China Infrastructure Bank, China has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), whose members include many Asian and Middle Eastern countries, including Australia, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia. Both banks are helping to fund China’s trillion-dollar “One Belt One Road” infrastructure initiative.

Germany has an infrastructure bank called KfW which is larger than the World Bank, with assets of $600 billion in 2016. Along with the public Sparkassen banks, KfW has funded Germany’s green energy revolution. Renewables generated 41 percent of the country’s electricity in 2017, up from 6 percent in 2000, earning the country the title “the world’s first major green energy economy.” Public banks provided over 72 percent of the financing for this transition.

As for California, it already has an infrastructure bank: the California Infrastructure and Development Bank (IBank), established in 1994. But the IBank is a “bank” in name only. It cannot take deposits or leverage capital into loans. It is also seriously underfunded, since the California Department of Finance returned over half of its allotted funds to the General Fund to repair the state’s budget after the dot.com market collapse. However, the IBank has 20 years’ experience in making prudent infrastructure loans at below municipal bond rates, and its clients are limited to municipal governments and other public entities, making them safe bets underwritten by their local tax bases. The IBank could be expanded to address California’s infrastructure needs, drawing deposits and capital from its many pools of idle funds across the state.

A Better Use for Pension Money

In an illuminating 2017 paper for UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute titled “Funding Public Pensions,” policy consultant Tom Sgouros showed that the push to put pension fund money into risky high-yield investments comes from a misguided application of the accounting rules. The error results from treating governments like private companies that can be liquidated out of existence. He argues that public pension funds can be safely operated on a pay-as-you-go basis, just as they were for 50 years before the 1980s. That accounting change would take the pressure off the pension boards and free up hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. Some portion of that money could then be deposited in publicly owned banks, which in turn could generate the low-cost credit needed to fund the infrastructure and services that taxpayers expect from their governments.

Note that these deposits would not be spent. Pension funds, rainy day funds and other pools of government money can provide the liquidity for loans while remaining on deposit in the bank, available for withdrawal on demand by the government depositor. Even mainstream economists now acknowledge that banks do not lend their deposits but actually create deposits when they make loans. The bank borrows as needed to cover withdrawals, but not all funds are withdrawn at once; and a government bank can borrow its own deposits much more cheaply than local governments can borrow on the bond market. Through their own public banks, government entities can thus effectively borrow at bankers’ rates plus operating costs, cutting out middlemen. And unlike borrowing through bonds, which merely recirculate existing funds, borrowing from banks creates new money, which will stimulate economic growth and come back to the state in the form of new taxes and pension premiums. A working paper published by the San Francisco Federal Reserve in 2012 found that $1 invested in infrastructure generates at least $2 in GSP (state GDP), and roughly four times more than average during economic downturns.

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Irish Expats Fly Home for Vote on Abortion

Editor’s note: Friday night (California time), the BCC was reporting that exit polls indicate that Ireland’s abortion ban will be repealed by a landslide vote. “Polls by The Irish Times and RTE suggest about 69% voted to repeal a part of the constitution that effectively bans terminations,” it wrote. The official vote count begins Saturday.

Abortion has been illegal in Ireland since 1983, when its constitution was amended to equate an unborn child’s right to life with that of a pregnant mother’s. A historic referendum taking place Friday gives the country a chance to abolish the ban. Many Irish expatriates are flying home to vote to appeal the amendment and legalize abortion. As of Friday morning, the vote was still close after a tense campaign.

The vote concerns Article 40.3.3 of the Irish Constitution, known as the eighth amendment. The article brought on a near-total ban on abortion in Ireland, even in cases of rape and incest.

WATCH: A powerful statement from John McGuirk before Ireland’s referendum on abortion.

“When you legalize abortion, you change the culture of a country utterly. You change the way we think about life. You change the way that we as a society relate with each other.” #SaveThe8th https://t.co/lANWyw2WAK

— Live Action (@LiveAction) May 22, 2018

While the U.S. allows any citizen living abroad to cast an absentee ballot in the general and primary elections, the Irish system is much more strict. Irish citizens are not allowed to cast votes from abroad except in special circumstances—if they are diplomats or members of the military, for instance. Citizens who have lived abroad for more than 18 months aren’t allowed to vote.

The London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign created the #HomeToVote campaign to mobilize Irish expats who are eligible to vote. The Irish Times estimates that 40,000 of the 750,000 Irish citizens abroad meet the criteria.

The Guardian reports:

Ruth Shaw and 20 of her family members and friends had flights lined up to a wedding in New York when the date was set for Ireland’s referendum on legalising abortion. None of them thought twice about what to do.

“We changed our flights,” said Shaw, who voted to lift a decades-old near-ban on abortion on Friday. “It’s really important, I’ve got two daughters.” At 6.55 am, she was waiting with Simi, nine, outside Our Lady’s Clonskeagh Parish secondary school, second in line to cast her vote before heading to the airport.

On a day of glorious sunshine and heightened emotion, polling stations across Ireland were reporting high turnout in a ballot that politicians and campaigners expect to settle the country’s position on abortion for at least a generation.

Indeed, Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, said that if the proposal to repeal the constitutional clause is defeated, it is likely to be at least 35 years before citizens get to vote on the matter again.

The Guardian provides additional social context for the vote:

Changes in social attitudes have been in lockstep with the declining influence of the Catholic church, once the dominant voice in Ireland and a crucial player in the drive to add an abortion ban to the constitution.

But revelations of sexual abuse and cover-up by priests in recent years have shaken Ireland’s faith in the church, and the internet and social media have challenged the authority of the pulpit.

Although 78% of the population still identified as Catholic in 2016, the proportion is significantly smaller among people under the age of 35. Between 1972 and 2011, weekly church attendance fell from 91% to 30%. In Dublin, it dropped to 14%.

Irish citizens are allowed to vote until 10 p.m. local time Friday. Some highlights from the #HomeToVote hashtag are below:

I’m coming #HomeToVote ! Will be traveling 5,169 miles from LA to Dublin and will be thinking of every Irish woman who has had to travel to access healthcare that should be available in their own country. Let’s do this, Ireland! #repealthe8th #VoteYes pic.twitter.com/fZDxUIGrs9

— Lauryn Canny (@LaurynCanny) May 23, 2018

Started my own solitary 6 hour #HomeToVoteYes journey – more tired, sad and scared than I ever thought I would be. Living away from Ireland does not shield me from this. In fact, it reminds me why I had to leave my home country in the first place #TogetherForYes #hometovote pic.twitter.com/BnSNMC27Zx

— Ciara (@CiaraBurb) May 25, 2018

Dublin! Ireland! Let’s go!

Bestowing a Legacy Better Than His Own

“Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces”
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“Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces” 

A book by Michael Chabon 

What impresses me most about Michael Chabon is not his Pulitzer Prize or the literary accolades that accompanied it. Nor is it that he once spent seven years on a novel and impulsively threw it out. Or the chutzpah he demonstrated by writing an entire chapter that was one sentence long in his recent novel, “Telegraph Avenue,” from the perspective of a parrot flying over his beleaguered characters. Or even the mystical and melancholy Jewish-flavored genius that laces all of his masterworks: “Moonglow,” “The Adventures of Cavalier & Clay,” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Or the provocative things he says about the aggressiveness of the Israeli military.   

All of this amazes me, but what really moves me about Chabon is his attempt to be the best possible father he can be, one who is present and consistently available in his children’s lives. Chabon’s own father left him when he was only 11, an abandonment that scarred him forever. Chabon found his father’s desertion unbearable and unforgivable; he still does. It became the permanent lens through which he still sees the world; a sort of before and after that still haunts his dreams. He is obsessed by the fragility that hovers over every family. He has written barely disguised autobiographical stories about his father, a physician. 

But Chabon did not want his emotionally distraught legacy to become his children’s, and in his new book of essays, “Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces,” we listen to him struggle to become something different for them, someone better. It is not always a smooth ride. Chabon is a disciplined writer who works for hours, late into the night after his four children go to sleep, and still tries to be up early in the morning to see them at breakfast. His wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a writer, suffers from bipolar disorder and severe mood swings which she has written candidly about. One senses that Chabon feels additional pressure to be available to his children due to his wife’s recurring states of anguish.  

Click here to read long excerpts from “Pops” at Google Books.

In one of the stories in “Pops,” “The Old Ball Game,” Chabon writes about his resistance to having his then 9-year-old son play Little League. Chabon hated the conformity of the entire enterprise—the uniforms, the competitiveness, the overzealous parents. But his son wanted to play. When his son winds up hating the game and wanting to quit, Chabon insists he finish out the season in respect to his fellow teammates. But he is conflicted about his own sternness. He remembers the euphoria of his own youth when a baseball game ignited by itself on the street unsupervised by adults of any kind:

“My son doesn’t have a sandlot to repair to on a Sunday afternoon. Nobody ever comes by with a glove and a Wiffle ball to see if he wants to hit some, at least not without complicated arrangements having been made beforehand by his parents. He has no idea that a baseball game is something that can just happen to a kid, spontaneous as a fever, that it can be disorganized, random, open-ended, played according to quirky and variant rules, with manhole covers and car fenders for bases and a mean old lady for a color commentator.”

In “Against Dictitude,” Chabon is incensed by his son’s coldhearted dismissal of a young lady who is pursuing him via text messages. He begins to reflect upon his own youthful agonies, particularly how repressed he felt among other young men with whom he felt the need to always keep up his guard. When he was with a girl amid his buddies, he was careful not to show her too much tenderness. Alone with her later, he could relax and be more expressive. Chabon credits the demands of his first wife for teaching him what it really took to respond empathetically to a woman. He writes movingly:

“…and I grew up and got married to a woman who was older than I was and had certain expectations of how she ought and ought not to be treated. It was not just a matter of calling, keeping promises, maintaining the proper form. Even being nice, whatever that means, was insufficient. What loving a grown-up woman required, it turns out, was a kind of fundamental metaphysical shift akin to the move from Jewish to Christian law, from outward obedience and conformity with the commandments, as it were, to the cultivation and maintenance of a righteous soul. I was expected to reach outside myself, beyond the dome and eyeholes of my own skull, imagine the life that was going on inside the head of another human—her fears, wishes, needs, likes and dislikes, longings—and then take these into consideration before I acted. In order to be a man—a real man—by her lights—I must try to imagine what it was like to be a woman. I did my best.”

Their marriage did not last, but Chabon took what he learned from her and let it become a part of him. 

He tells an incredibly moving anecdote about accompanying his adolescent daughter for a haircut and losing himself in a book while she is being tended to by the stylist. When she asks him what he thinks, he at first does not hear her, and she repeats her plea, already distressed by his distractedness. He assures her she looks beautiful but notices the wounded look in her eyes and knows that he has failed her. There would be no second chances for them on that particular day. It is hard for me to imagine too many other men having the emotional radar to understand the psychological cost of his delayed response, but Chabon does, and we marvel at his ability to sense what other men can’t see.

In the book’s star piece, Chabon takes his 13-year-old son to Fashion Week in Paris to indulge his son’s passion for clothing and design. Abraham Chabon always loved dressing up. He would spend hours each evening laying out his outfits on the bed, often making last minute adjustments by adding a certain hat or scarf to perfect the look. Chabon would watch him fiddling for hours, mystified and somewhat disturbed by his son’s interest in clothing—an interest he did not share. This obsession got Abraham teased in junior high school but it never stopped him from pursuing his passion. The clothes, Chabon comes to realize, were not simply garments for Abraham, but an essential part of his evolving sense of self. But Chabon still worried. He finds himself strangely relieved when he watches his son effortlessly mingle with designers, models and fellow fashionistas in Paris. He feels invigorated and almost envious at his son’s early immersion in an intense passion. He writes about his growing confidence in Abe’s ability to endure the ensuing years in high school:

“As before—even worse than before–Abe suffered taunts and teasing for his style of dress and his love of style. But he did not back down; he doubled down. He flew the freak flag of his Tigran Avetisyan shirt high. And though I couldn’t fathom the impulse driving my kid to expose himself to mockery and verbal abuse at school, I admired him for not surrendering, and in time came to understand the nature of my job as the father of this sartorial wild child: I didn’t need to fathom Abe or his stylistic impulses; I needed only to let him go where they took him and, for as long as he needed me, to follow along behind.”

Chabon’s personal essays are filled with the same enchantment, sadness and intuition as in his extraordinary novels. But there are sparkles of hope here nestling beneath his turbulent prose. Without making overt declarations of any kind, Chabon takes us on the journey of a man who has decided that his own emotional legacy need not be the one he bestows upon his beloved children.  

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Follow the DOD’s Money: The ‘Tackling Paid Patriotism’ Report

Now that the NFL is kneeling to Donald Trump and his supporters, the national anthem has stirred up more controversy. The league’s new policy will fine teams whose players elect to take a knee during the singing of the “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The NFL players’ union is against the new rule and is considering its next move.

NFL players used to not appear on the field during the national anthem. That changed in 2009, when the Department of Defense poured millions of dollars into the NFL in exchange for displays of patriotism during games.

In 2015, Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake investigated how the DOD finances displays of patriotism at sporting events with taxpayer dollars. They compiled a joint report called “Tackling Paid Patriotism.”

Read the full report below.

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Woman Who Posed as Black Accused of Welfare Fraud

SPOKANE, Wash.—A former NAACP leader in Washington state whose life unraveled after she was exposed as a white woman pretending to be black has been charged with welfare fraud.

Nkechi Diallo, known as Rachel Dolezal before she legally changed her name in 2016, was charged this week with theft by welfare fraud, perjury and false verification for public assistance, Spokane news station KHQ-TV reported Thursday.

She illegally received $8,747 in food assistance and $100 in child care assistance from August 2015 through November 2017, court documents said.

An investigation started in March 2017 when a Washington state investigator received information that Diallo had written a book. The investigator reviewed Diallo’s records and found that she had been reporting her income as usually less than $500 per month, court documents said.

A subpoena for her self-employment records, which included copies of her bank statements, showed Diallo had deposited nearly $84,000 into her bank account between August 2015 and September 2017, without reporting most of it to the Department of Social and Health Services.

The money came from authoring her memoir, “In Full Color,” speaking engagements, soap making, doll making, and the sale of her art, according to the case file.

Diallo did report a “change of circumstance” to the state agency, saying she did a one-time job in October 2017 worth $20,000, court documents said.

The former civil rights activist told investigators she “fully disclosed her information” and declined to answer further questions, the documents said.

She has said previously that she grew up near Troy, Montana, with religious parents and that she began to change her perspective as a teenager, after her parents adopted four black children. She decided to become publicly black years later, after a divorce.

The ruse worked for years until 2015, when her parents, with whom she has long feuded, told reporters that their daughter was white but was presenting herself as a black activist in the Spokane region.

The story became an international sensation, and she was fired as head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP and kicked off a police ombudsman commission. She also lost her job teaching African studies at Eastern Washington University.

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Amazon Battles Seattle—and Loses

Sen. Bernie Sanders excoriated Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in a damning video tweet this week that zeroed in on Bezos’ personal wealth and his company’s unfair economic advantages. It wasn’t the first time Sanders had targeted Amazon—three weeks earlier the nation’s most popular politician highlighted how Amazon paid zero federal taxes in 2017.

The company is sensitive to such accusations and tweeted back defensively, “We’ve created over 130K new full-time jobs in the last year alone. Good jobs w/highly competitive pay & full benefits.” What Amazon didn’t mention is that a significant percentage of its employees rely on food stamps, in a trend reminiscent of Walmart. It also failed to mention that it fought tooth and nail against a modest tax bill to fund housing for the poor in Seattle, where it is headquartered.

In fact, the Washington city’s tax fight with Amazon is a critical lesson for how cities around the country can take on corporate behemoths and win. Amazon’s presence in Seattle has resulted in an influx of highly paid tech workers, which has in turn fueled gentrification, raised rents and increased homelessness. With Kshama Sawant, the fiery Socialist member of Seattle’s City Council, leading the battle, the council on May 14 unanimously passed a so-called “head-tax” on large corporations in the face of stiff opposition from Amazon. The tax, which was originally proposed as $500 per employee for corporations making more than $20 million a year, was downgraded to $275 per employee when the vote finally took place. The modest revenues will help fund low-income housing and address homelessness.

The city is in crisis. A new report found that King County—where Seattle is located—needs more than $400 million to address its housing crisis, and revenues from the city’s new head tax would address some of those needs. County executives in 2015 had declared a “state of emergency” on the issue of homelessness, a designation usually reserved for devastation from natural disasters.

Sawant, who burst onto the national political scene with her bold socialist agenda, won her seat on Seattle’s City Council by calling for three major reforms, summed up by the slogans “$15 an Hour,” “Tax the Rich” and “Rent Control.” Four years ago, Sawant fulfilled the first of her campaign promises by leading the fight to win an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In an interview on “Rising Up With Sonali,” she shared with me how her second reform was achieved against massive opposition. “It was a bitterly fought-for victory,” she said of the “Amazon tax” as it became known, “because we went up against the Democratic Party establishment, the absolutely ferocious opposition of the Chamber of Commerce, of big businesses like Starbucks and especially of Amazon.”

The larger question, she added, is, “Who gets to occupy urban spaces in America?” Indeed, as the technology sector has seen record growth, the cities in which tech companies establish themselves—including Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Chicago and others—become playgrounds for the wealthy new transplants who work the high-tech jobs. “The billionaire class—[those] like Jeff Bezos—get to enrich themselves hand over fist,” Sawant said, “while every square inch of this city gets privatized and gets more and more expensive.”

Despite Seattle’s homelessness crisis, Amazon’s opposition to the head tax was ruthless. The corporation threatened to shut down construction sites and cut jobs. It echoed the familiar conservative refrain that tax increases and higher wages would slow growth and ruin the economy. “It’s a threatening message not just to Seattle but to every city in the world,” Sawant said of Amazon’s hardball tactics. “The message Jeff Bezos is sending is that, ‘if working people in any city have the temerity to go against me and the billionaire class, then we will threaten you with taking away jobs.’ That is an attempted strike of capital.”

Sawant shared with me that in the end the tax measure passed by the City Council will generate a mere $50 million a year of the $410 million needed to combat homelessness in King County (Seattle is the county’s largest city). Of that revenue, Amazon’s share is a pittance—about $8 million. Nothing about this tax would even remotely threaten the company’s financial profile. “This tax is like pocket change for the Amazon billionaires, and especially for Jeff Bezos,” Sawant said. Bezos could lose $8 million a year personally and not even notice it.

Bezos’ wealth is so obscene that in a recent interview he boasted about having so much money that the only thing he could think of spending it on was space travel. “[W]hat does money mean for you, being the first person in history who has a net worth of a three-digit amount of billions?” asked the interviewer. Bezos responded, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.”

If Bezos has money to burn (literally), why did Amazon, one of the largest companies in the world, oppose Seattle’s modest head tax? The battle between corporate America and working people is an ideological one, and Sawant captured the power dynamics between these two forces perfectly when she told me that “the interests of our movement and the interests of the billionaire class are not in line. There is a fundamental antagonism between the two.”

But the Democratic Party has for years been trying to convince Americans that liberalism now means that “what is good for corporate America is good for ordinary Americans.” That logic has clearly not translated into material gains for Americans who have seen their livelihoods decimated. A new report found that millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) may never accumulate as much wealth as their parents did. What are these young Americans to do with the fact that the stock market is booming while their bank accounts are bottoming out?

Even though Amazon and its ilk managed to water down the Seattle city tax to nearly half the original amount, the movement that Sawant is leading can count on the unanimous council vote as a major victory. After all, Amazon is on the hunt for a location for its new headquarters and has warehouse locations all over the country. Instead of mayors and city councils falling over themselves to lure Amazon to their city with tax breaks, perhaps cities ought to be wary of the problems of homelessness and rising rents that Amazon’s presence could bring.

What Seattle demonstrated to other cities is that it is possible to take on a commercial giant, and, using the democratic process, squeeze taxes out of it that benefit our cities and ordinary people. After all, Amazon takes advantage of our publicly funded infrastructure to operate its business. Despite Donald Trump’s grumblings about Amazon, the president and his party passed a tax reform bill last year that gifted Amazon a whopping $789 million in tax breaks—money that should have been part of our federal treasury. All it would take is for ordinary Americans to push their local city councils to replicate Seattle’s efforts in city after city where Amazon plans to expand.

And if the company warns it would move elsewhere or cut jobs? Sawant responded that while it is important to take such warnings seriously given Amazon’s power, “the only response is for working people in every city to say, ‘we’re not going to accept your threats because the inevitable logic of your threats is a race to the bottom.’ ” Indeed, Amazon has so far not made good on its promise to cut jobs in Seattle or stop construction on its buildings. But it did issue a petulant statement sprinkled with words like “apprehensive,” “hostile” and “anti-business.”

In the game of chicken between democracy and corporatism, Seattle demonstrated that people power can prevail. According to Sawant, “The fact that we had the nerve to go up against Amazon and win a tax in the face of their extortionary threats, that represents that you can build a movement and you can win.”

Actor Morgan Freeman Accused of Sexual Harassment

In an interaction caught on camera in 2015, CNN entertainment reporter Chloe Melas was interviewing actor Morgan Freeman during a press junket for his movie “Going in Style” when, in a crowded room that included his co-stars, he grabbed her hand, looked her up and down and commented regarding her pregnancy, “I wish I was there.” He also said she looked “ripe,” though this was not recorded.

These comments sparked a CNN investigation in which Freeman would become the latest Hollywood actor to be accused of sexual misconduct, including unwanted touching and sexual comments.

One former production assistant told CNN that Freeman subjected her “to unwanted touching and comments about her figure and clothing on a near-daily basis.” She said, “Freeman would rest his hand on her lower back or rub her lower back.” It was reported that he also frequently tried to lift her skirt.

Another former production staffer often dodged comments from Freeman about her body. “He did comment on our bodies,” she told CNN. “We knew that if he was coming by … not to wear any top that would show our breasts, not to wear anything that would show our bottoms, meaning not wearing clothes that [were] fitted.”

The behavior was consistent across movie sets, CNN writes, and within the offices of Revelations Entertainment, Freeman’s production company. In total, 16 people spoke to CNN, eight of them victims of harassment; the other eight had witnessed or heard about the harassment.

They didn’t report it until now because, as most said, “they feared for their jobs,” even though, as CNN notes, the incidents were not private and instead had “allegedly happened in public, in front of witnesses—even in front of cameras.”

Freeman released an apology, obtained by Variety, saying he was sorry and “anyone who knows me or has worked with me knows I am not someone who would intentionally offend or knowingly make anyone feel uneasy.”

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Black Women Running for Office in Record Numbers in Alabama

In December 2017, for the first time in 25 years, Alabama voters elected a Democrat to the Senate. Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore to fill the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As NBC News reported, Jones won largely thanks to the support of 96 percent of black voters and, notably, 98 percent of black women. Black women changed the course of Alabama politics, but they were just getting started. Now, black women are running for office across the state.

As Glamour reported this week, “An unprecedented groundswell of at least 70 black women have launched electoral campaigns across Alabama for local, state, and national offices in 2018.”

NBC puts that number lower, at three dozen, but also used the word “unprecedented” to describe the situation.

Many of the women are first-time candidates like Jameria Moore, an attorney who is running for a judgeship. “It’s so important that we step up, that we show the nation that we can lead,” Moore told NBC. Organizers and local officials said the candidacies are “evidence of a small but significant Democratic burst of political activism that could put a blue-hued dent in a deep-Trump state.”

Other observers say that this surge of energy isn’t an aberration. As Dr. Wendy Smooth, a political scientist at Ohio State University, told Glamour: “Once women learn [how to] get a candidate elected into office, a lightbulb comes on and they say, ‘This isn’t that hard after all. I too can do this.’ ”

Rhonda Briggins, a co-founder of RunVoteLead and an Alabama native, agreed, telling Glamour, “Women are primarily the workers behind the Alabama New South Coalition and Alabama Democratic Conference, organizations that, since the civil rights movement, have become the foundation of black political power in Alabama.”

Electing Jones to office made many of these women realize they could not only support candidates, they could be candidates. “After so many black women carried Doug Jones over the threshold, I think more women across the state began to see our political power,” Ashley Smith, 34, who is running for district judge, told the magazine.

All that campaigning has been good training. “We know we can do these jobs because we’ve been behind the scenes, whether it is assisting someone in doing the job, or doing it and not getting the recognition,” Marshell Jackson Hatcher, 51, a lawyer running for Jefferson County circuit court judge, said.

These women are well qualified, but the lingering question is whether they’ll be able to break down the doors of the old, white boys’ clubs and get access to the same kinds of resources white candidates do. Smooth cautions that voters and observers alike should “pay attention to how many of them are formally endorsed, [which is a sign of] their parties’ support and belief that these candidates are viable.” Unfortunately, “In surveys, women of color report that when they first ran for office, they received less party support than they’d hoped, or were even discouraged from running.”

Still, the candidates remain undaunted, taking inspiration from the late Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress as well as the first black presidential candidate. As Chisholm once said, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

 

 

When It Comes to Sex, What Makes a Political Scandal?

Scandal is measured by the damage resulting from an actual or apparent violation of propriety. With the exception of French presidents and, it seems, Donald Trump, a sex scandal usually sends a political career swirling down the drain.

Trump has admitted to indirectly paying off a porn star claiming to have had sex with him. Though he is the first American president to be linked with hush money meant to prevent a sexual encounter from becoming known to the voting public, there’s a fairly impressive list of American politicians who’ve done the same—one being Alexander Hamilton, who was blackmailed by an enterprising husband after the man discovered that his wife was having an affair with Hamilton.

The British are currently revisiting a political sex scandal of their own that took place in the 1970s and centered on affair 10 years earlier involving Jeremy Thorpe, former leader of the Liberal Party and a pillar of the establishment. The BBC is airing a brilliant TV dramatization about the shamed politician in a three-part series, “A Very English Scandal,” with Hugh Grant as Thorpe—which, it must be said, is an inspiring bit of casting. Grant can claim firsthand experience with a sex scandal: Some 20 years ago, he was arrested in Los Angeles for lewd behavior in a public space with a hooker.

It’s one thing to pay to block news of a sexual encounter from going public, another thing entirely to hire a hit man to eliminate the evidence. Thorpe was tried for conspiracy and incitement to murder after a bungled attempt to have his lover done away with. The lover’s dog was shot instead by what proved to be an incompetent hired gunman. (To be fair, guns are against the law in the United Kingdom, and, presumably, the gunman didn’t have a meaningful opportunity for target practice beforehand.)

What adds yet another dimension to the Thorpe scandal is that the encounter he was desperate to hide was gay sex—the point being that there was more of a stigma attached when a politician, married or not, was discovered in a gay affair, despite the impression that “the English culture is basically homosexual,” or so concluded feminist writer Germaine Greer. She was not the first to think that. Until the term “homosexual” emerged in the 1860s, the French, when describing a man’s sexual proclivity toward other men, would say simply, “He is partial to the English style.”

Stereotypes do not appear out of thin air, so let us start with something with which most might agree—including Britons—that, although they’ve produced some of history’s most compelling poetry, music, art and literature, the British are known for their reserve. Living among them for the last few years, I’ve witnessed just how far they are willing to go to avoid a public display of private sentiment; and I can say with confidence that taking this an oblique step further are British men, who are able to present an impeccable façade when, all the while, things are far more complicated than they appear. Historical perspective might be found in Britain by way of the 19th century, when exhibitionism was met with corporal punishment—the reason being that the perpetrator, by the blatantly ridiculous action of exposing himself, endangered the very definition of a self-controlled male—but a British aristocrat inclined on occasion to dress as a woman was not considered an affront to that same concept of maleness. Go figure.

It’s been 40 years since the Thorpe scandal. Comedian and trans-everything Eddie Izzard has been appointed to the Labour Party’s governing body, and there are now more openly LGBTI elected members of Parliament than in any other country. But real progress can be measured by the fact that British tabloids no longer discriminate among gay, bi and straight sex scandals—they cover them with an equal degree of salaciousness.

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