Lily Salter's Blog, page 267

RNC “cloakroom” was secretly funded by corporate cash

President-elect Donald Trump talks with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis. on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. () (Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

President Donald Trump pledged to drain the swamp when he took over the White House and vowed to end Washington’s addiction to corporate money and influence.

During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, Trump said he would not be “able to look the other way” when the nation’s political system “has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash.”

But records obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show that a myriad of corporations and trade groups secretly “bankrolled a plush hideaway for lawmakers at the same Republican National Convention in Cleveland.”

The “cloakroom” was a lavish, “exclusive office, lounge and gathering space for Republican lawmakers — including House Speaker Paul Ryan.”

The “cloakroom” was built on the practice court inside Quicken Loans Arena, according to CPI.

The corporations and lobbying giants that funded the cloakroom included Comcast, the Koch Companies, the National Retail Federation, Microsoft, Chevron, Health Care Service Corp., AT&T and the American Petroleum Institute, CPI noted.

“The immediate effect is it looks like it hid certain donors to the convention,” Lawrence Noble, senior director and general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for campaign finance reform, told CPI.

A limited liability company called “Friends of the House 2016 LLC” paid for the secret room which afforded its contributors with entry space.

“As a sponsor of the hospitality venue, we were invited to use it, as well,” Jori Fine, a spokeswoman for Health Care Service Corp., told CPI. Health Care Service Corp. gave $100,000 to Friends of the House LLC, bank records show.

The purpose of the payments and what contributors expected to receive in return is still currently unclear, but Jeffrey Livingston is listed as the company’s registered agent. A court filing by Livingston’s lawyer showed that the LLC was “established to manage and raise funds for hospitality activities and events during the 2016 Republican National Convention.”

Master Plan Design and Joe Mineo Creative were credited as the contractors for the room on a marketing booklet, CPI reported. They said that “Ryan’s representatives helped design the space and supervise construction,” however Ryan’s office disputed that claim.

Kevin Seifert, a spokesman for Paul Ryan’s congressional campaign committee, told CPI that Ryan nor his office were “involved in supervising construction or consulted about the design of the cloakroom.”

Facing pressure from activists, corporations were skeptical about openly sponsoring the convention, but discreetly funding Friends of the House 2016 LLC gave them the opportunity they were looking for, with no public backlash.

CPI elaborated:

But national political conventions are legendary opportunities for access to lawmakers, despite ethics reforms Congress passed in the wake of influence peddling scandals. Complex rules govern even the details of events, such as food menus, but often turn on technical points, forcing lawyers to double-check legal advice every four years.

For example, although individual congressional members can’t be honored by special interests, certain delegations of lawmakers can be — and frequently are. The rules for U.S. House members and U.S. senators aren’t identical. And companies have many routes to court those in power, like sponsoring delegations or events that raise money for charity.

Microsoft donated $1.8 million in software to the Cleveland Host Committee, without records of a cash donation.

“We decided last fall to provide a variety of Microsoft technology products and services instead of making a cash donation,” Fred Humphries, corporate vice president of U.S. government affairs for Microsoft, wrote in an April 2016 email.

Microsoft did, however, make a $100,000 cash donation to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, and they weren’t alone.

“The convention is one big loophole to the limits of corrupting money on politics,” Paul S. Ryan (who is unrelated to Speaker Ryan), vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for limits on money in politics, told CPI.

Comcast donated $200,000 to the LLC company, but isn’t listed as a donor by the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee.

As CPI noted:

“Koch Companies Public Sector, which wrote a $100,000 check to Friends of the House 2016 LLC, [is not listed as a donor]. In fact, a Koch Industries spokesman in June said the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, well-known Republican megadonors, weren’t planning to contribute to the convention at all.”

 

On the eve of Richard Spencer’s rally, see when 20,000 Nazis took over Madison Square Garden

Charlottesville wasn’t the beginning of white supremacist demonstrations in the United States. It certainly won’t be the end, either. Just look to Nazi sympathizer Richard Spencer’s upcoming rally in Florida.

But today we had a stark reminder that someone once stood on center stage at New York City’s Madison Square Garden and tried to sell the notion that Nazism was as American as apple pie, as 20,000 applauded.

Wednesday, Gothamist published a stirring interview with filmmaker Marshall Curry, who just last week released a chilling short called “A Night at the Garden” in collaboration with the documentary project, Field of Vision. In it, Curry talks about his compilation of rarely seen or unused footage from the 1939 “Pro American Rally,” held by the American Nazi group called the German American Bund at Madison Square Garden. Between the 20,000 who attended inside and the protestors against it outside, the rally sparked the biggest police mobilization for a single local event in the city’s history.

“It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget. We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled,” Curry told Gothamist. “But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message.”

In the video, Americans offer the Nazi salute to the American flag, rush a Jewish activist who crashed the stage, and yield to a charismatic leader belittling a press that he claims is “Jewish controlled.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow Americans and American patriots. I’m sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger,” says Bund leader Fritz Julius Kuhn. “You all have heard of me through the Jewish controlled press as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof and a long tail.”

“We, with American ideals demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it. If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter: First, a socially just, Gentile ruled United States. Second, Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination,” he continued.

You’d be forgiven if you thought the above sounded almost like a 2016 campaign address.

“The footage is so powerful, it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because it’s scary and embarrassing,” said Curry. “When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden, you can be sure that many times that were passively supportive.”

Most telling is when Curry reminds us that “These were ideas that, if not universally accepted, were at least considered legitimate points of view. But two years after this rally, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the U.S. And at that point this sort of philosophy became unacceptable,” he said

“When the Nazis began killing American soldiers, we started erasing the fact that any Americans had ever shared their philosophy.” So perhaps it wasn’t a humanitarian crisis and the deaths of a million innocent Jewish people that the United States was fighting for, but the death of American soldiers. And truly chilling, is the fact that these were everyday people, Americans we live alongside — just like those who held Tiki Torches in Charlottesville, just like those who may greet Spencer in Florida.

“We’d like to believe that there are sharp lines between good people and bad people,” said Curry. “But I think most humans have dark passions inside us, waiting to be stirred up by a demagogue who is funny and mean, who can convince us that decency is for the weak, that democracy is naïve, and that kindness and respect for others are just ridiculous political correctness.”

Unlike Charlottesville, which was touted by Trump as having “fine people” on both sides, leadership in New York was quick to separate themselves from ideals of the Nazis. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called the rally an “exhibition of international cooties,” calling out the attendees for the germs they were.

The German American Bund, or “the Bund,” was a collaboration of sorts between two pre-existing, native-born German-American organizations and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government. Founded in 1933 as Nazi Germany was ascendant on the international stage, the group was primarily made up of German immigrants and their children and espoused a message that was simultaneously nationalistic toward German and American interests.

Pro-Nazi without apology, the distinctly racist Bund flourished for a short period that decade, eventually surpassing 25,000 before a series of investigations and turn in public sentiment against Germany and Nazism led to its dissolution in 1941. The U.S. government would imprison its leader, the German-born Kuhn, for embezzlement and later revoke his American citizenship, ultimately deporting him back to his home country in 1945. He died six years later, poor and forgotten.

Back in 1933, The New York Times, the American Jewish Committee spoke against the Bund’s Garden rally, noting that while they saw it as “completely anti-American and anti-Democratic . . . we believe that the basic rights of free speech and free assembly must never be tampered with in the United States, we are opposed to any action to prevent the Bund from airing its views.”

Florida Governor Rick Scott echoed that sentiment as he announced he was preparing for Spencer’s upcoming rally by declaring a state of emergency. “We live in a country where everyone has the right to voice their opinion. However, we have zero tolerance for violence and public safety is always our number one priority,” Scott said.

The best course of action as these echoes continue is to document new atrocities and remember past ones. Forgetting this brought us where we are today.

Watch “A Night at the Garden” below.

The unending state of emergency

(Credit: Getty/Photo montage by Salon)

It’s old news that Donald Trump abuses reason, knowledge, decency and dark-skinned people. You can’t tear your eyes away. You can already write tomorrow’s story: Today the vicious, deranged freak-show star trashed Enemy A, picked a fight with Failed Insider B, invited unconstitutional action C, insulted population D, declared his intent to abrogate Agreement E or make war on Country F, and denied facts G through Z. Fill in the blanks.

If you are paying attention, each one of his assaults on decency, intelligence and knowledge will feel urgent, ridiculous or both. Each day he threatens grave damage to actual human beings and the rest of Planet Earth, and each day he demonstrates his incapacity to do anything but inflict more damage. But some readers and viewers have erected walls to protect themselves from appreciating the damage, while many others think that what he just said is just the sort of thing you’d expect him to say; or isn’t as bad as expected; or sounds like what he said last week, and so is, like it or not, normal.

Even some of our best journalists continue to scavenge the rubble of everyday politics looking for signs of normalcy and “presidentialness.”

You want to jack up your eyebrows permanently. You will feel tempted to offer, as a prologue or a follow-up to each item of news, You won’t believe this. And your task as a journalist is to convey what he just said so that the reader or viewer willbelieve that he did say what he just said, and will be able to take the measure of it, to know how it was wrong, or incoherent, and why; to know that it was founded on ignorance and falsehood, and in what ways. Making intelligible the everyday nonsense without losing the sense of the ways in which it is nonsense is the tallest of journalistic orders. And to reveal not only what he just said but what he just did, or just let happen, is a task for more journalists than can be found in the entire United States of America.

Whether you are a journalist or a citizen of some other kind, if you lose your capacity to be shocked, you have come untethered from the real shocking world in which meaning is steadily mangled. If you lose your ability to feel disgusted, you have lost your moral purchase. So in order to remain alive to the world, you must hold on to your vulnerability. You must, every day, pause the thought that you’ve heard this story before. You must feel, every day, the pain and contempt that is the gross domestic and international product of this travesty of government — let alone democratic government.

How can you tear your eyes away without renouncing every value you hold dear? But if you don’t tear your eyes away, how do you convey the true magnitude of the menaces unfolding 24 hours a day?

If you are a journalist, it is your duty to disturb — not by exaggerating, not by refusing “balance,” but by refusing to cut corners. You must consider a maniac a maniac. You must agree to be unnerved. Failure to be unnerved is a sign of impairment. Failure to disturb is a failure at your job, which is to excavate and sort through the facts in such a way as to help citizens act as they are bound to act — to restore, as best we can, the health of the republic.

Part of journalism’s challenge at this insane moment is to overcome one of its cardinal principles. It abhors “old news.” So it must struggle to get a grip on the most important news, which surely includes the ugliest, and is always, in a way, “old.” This is because the ugliest news is news that continues, that goes on happening, that fans out into more than one trajectory at a time — news that rolls on in cascading sequences that, by prevailing standards, decline in news value. It’s the initial event that seizes the headlines — the rest is aftermath, mop-up, “old news.” Next will come “breaking news.” This just in… The assumption, possibly accurate, is that once the event has been catalogued in collective memory, it loses its tensile strength, and we stop paying attention.

This distortion of our collective experience is so ordinary as to escape much notice. But the consequences of the original news, the “story,” go on shaping life regardless of who pays attention.

The killer opened fire for a few minutes but the wounded, if they survive, remain wounded, their families and friends suffer their injuries, the trauma goes on. The factories shut down, people take to drugs and drink, and the recently unemployed get worse — less secure, less meaningful — jobs. The poor lose health insurance and then get sick and cannot afford treatment. Homes get seized for nonpayment of impossible loans, neighborhoods crumble, community networks break down. Wildfires burn, and ruins smolder, and the lost are found — or not — but a community expires. The hurricane moves on and the rubble remains, the power is off at the hospital, the medicines run out. The bombs fall, the wedding party was blown up, and the survivors tell stories about what happened and talk about what to do next.

In other words, the important news is not a rivulet flowing through a bounded channel from Point A to Point B. It is more like the sea, endlessly in motion in every direction. The most serious news continues to play out, if less dramatically, less shockingly, than at the desperate moments when the shots first rang out, the fire raged, the factory gate slammed shut, the hurricane first made landfall, the would-be president first opened his mouth about Mexicans. In the nearly 12 months through which we have staggered, day by horrific day, journalists have done well to catch the man making no sense. Yet the challenge remains. How do you tell a story you may think you’ve already told even as the story continues to unfold in its unruly way?

So as not to let this piece lapse into a chronicle of failure, here are some excerpts from a fine example of journalism that rises to the occasion: Ed Morales’ report on Puerto Rico in The Nation:

As Donald Trump’s rule-by-disinformation strategy intensifies, three weeks after Hurricane Maria, a reeling Puerto Rico is becoming more of a sideshow for his callous stereotyping and ruthlessness. He is subjecting the island’s citizens to layers of anguish, at once revealing the resourcefulness of a sturdy rural culture and the banality of government by public relations. Puerto Ricans, meanwhile, are suffering that all-too-human affliction: the desperate need to connect.

One of the enduring images from Puerto Rico in the wake of Maria is people crowded together near outposts of cable or wireless companies, trying to get a signal so they can communicate. By now most people know that their friends and loved ones have survived; that they may in some cases have water but almost never electricity; that they may need precious medications, or may have stood on line at their local pharmacy for hours to get them; that they may have lost all or part of the roof to their home. Survivors have seen their neighborhoods strewn with the carcasses of dead trees, discarded mattresses and refrigerators; have spent hours trying to get cash out of the few working ATMs in their area or — now a less common complaint — waiting in a gas line.

Sustaining contact on an island littered with fallen power lines and cell-phone towers is difficult, and it contributes to a pervasive feeling of disconnection and chaos. This island is full of people suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Imagine finally reaching the remote mountaintop home of a close friend or relative, who sits there with a municipal government–issued packet of crackers, applesauce and bottled water, looking up at you watery-eyed and saying, “I was wondering whether you even wanted to talk to me anymore.”…

And meanwhile, lest the story of Puerto Rico appear too abstract:

Pence’s visit had the unpleasant effect of throwing metro-area traffic into complete chaos, prompting the closure of the Baldorioty Expressway, which is something like Manhattan’s FDR Drive. With all surrounding avenues closed, I was forced to drive back toward Old San Juan, which is still without electricity (as opposed to Condado, where billionaire hedge-funder John Paulson has bought the area’s most luxurious hotel). Driving south toward Rio Piedras in the hopes of avoiding traffic, I encountered flash floods that made Avenida Muñoz Rivera a one-lane lake. Pushing on to the old Route 3 on the way back east to the rain forest, a feeling of dread overtook me as I realized that night had fallen and thousands of cars were surging along highways with stoplights that didn’t work.

Amazingly, the anxious civility that has permeated the island kept us all safe, and I maneuvered the painstaking miles through a torrent of headlights, fading cell signals, flooded roadways and yawning potholes. The landscape had become an unrecognizable blur of fallen trees, twisted highway signs and mangled electrical wires. Landmarks had become distorted and useless, while entire communities that had been previously invisible now emerged, ghostlike. There was no light anywhere, just a full moon that seemed to swallow all of Route 66….

In his sociological classic, Deciding What’s News, published in 1979, Herbert J. Gans itemized what he called “enduring news values” — the unwritten, often unthought elements of a story that elevate it to prominence. Disasters loomed large in his accounting. Some disasters are social, some are natural, but all represent violent breaks from what came before. The rupture is, by definition, a sign of the extraordinary. Something has been torn asunder. The event can be pinpointed, assigned a who, a what, a where and a when, if not a why. So later we can speak of “after Vietnam” and “after Charlottesville,” with the place-name doubling as the time when a specific, bounded experience “took place.”

Gans noted, too, that after a time — usually no more than a few days — the emphasis in the reporting of a disaster shifts from the damage caused to the restoration of order. The restoration of order is not necessarily a happy ending but it’s a happier one, an exercise in not only social but mental management. It affords a sense of what we have come to call closure. The streets are drained, the rubble cleaned up, the National Guard withdrawn, the patients moved from the dysfunctional hospital, the surviving victims outfitted with their prostheses. We can move on.

But there are millions who can’t move on. Thus Ed Morales’ sum-up of the financial situation after Hurricane Maria: “…the relief designated for Puerto Rico comes in the form of roughly $5 billion in loans…a cruel joke for a territory already drowning in debt.”

One rupture of order follows another. Don’t expect order to be restored. All systems failed. That is the story. It must be told, and refreshed, and followed, and followed anew.

What “Fearless Girl” and Harvey Weinstein have in common

A statue titled "Fearless Girl" faces the Wall Street bull, Wednesday, March 8, 2017, in New York. A big investment firm, State Street Global Advisors, put the statue there to highlight International Women's Day. The work by artist Kristen Visbal. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan) (Credit: AP)

In March of this year, State Street Global Advisors unveiled the “Fearless Girl,” a statue of a little girl installed to face Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” statue. Her defiance was aimed at financial culture’s historical exclusion of women in the financial industry, especially in leadership positions.

In early October, its parent company, State Street Corporation, quietly settled allegations that it had been paying female employees less than their male counterparts, agreeing to award US$5 million in back pay.

Then, a week later, a series of explosive articles revealed that Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein may have engaged in a decades-long pattern of abusing and harassing women. Weinstein, the reports noted, had been a prominent donor to causes that address gender inequality, especially in the entertainment industry.

In both cases, a public-facing feminism ended up essentially serving as a front, a superficial sheen that distracted from systemic sexism. What does feminism mean if it functions as an alibi for structural discrimination? And how powerful are the forces that oppose it?

Popular feminism and popular misogyny

Together, these two stories tell an even bigger tale of a national dynamic that I call “popular feminism” and “popular misogyny.”

Popular feminism refers to a sort of mainstream, corporate-friendly feminism. It announces itself on self-help blogs that implore women to “be confident in the workplace” and on aspirational Tumblr pages that remind women that they are beautiful despite societal norms that tell them that they’re not. In this way, popular feminism is “safe” – it implicitly encourages more women to work within a system that is already designed to devalue (and underpay) the labor of women.

Like popular feminism, popular misogyny is expressed and practiced on multiple media platforms. Yet its primary goal is to dehumanize and devalue women.

Every time feminism gains broad traction – that is, every time it spills beyond niche feminist enclaves – the forces of the status quo lash back. Skirmishes ensue between those determined to change the normal state of things and those determined to maintain it, who frame the challenges to the status quo as a set of risks that must be contained.

This happened with suffrage and abolition. More recently, it happened to the women who sought to assert themselves within the male-dominated world of video games (the “Gamergate” controversy).

We also see this dynamic in the stories of the Fearless Girl and Harvey Weinstein.

A sanitized version of feminism

The “Fearless Girl” statue was installed in the middle of the night in lower Manhattan on March 7, 2017, on the eve of International Women’s Day.

It faced the well-known “Charging Bull” statue, which, since 1987, has been a global symbol of Wall Street. The bull was intended to be a sign of American “virility and courage” – an “antidote,” in the artist’s words, for the stock market crash of 1986. The bull’s allusions to manliness and a strong sex drive continue to be acknowledged in the popular tourist practice of taking a picture next to (or touching) the bull’s huge testicles.

Is the feminist message of ‘The Fearless Girl’ more whisper than rallying cry?

Chris Holthof

On the surface, the appearance of a statue that appears to directly challenge the bull is a striking symbol of empowerment.

But let’s not forget that “Fearless Girl” was intended as an advertisement. State Street’s new index fund sought to signal itself as a collection of “gender-diverse” companies, meaning that they have a higher percentage of women among their senior leadership than most global investment companies. (Its NASDAQ ticker symbol is “SHE.”)

To be clear: I believe it is important to praise those companies that hire women in leadership. It is equally important to have women directors behind the camera in the entertainment industries.

At the same time, the recognition of gender inequality in leadership positions is a familiar trope of popular feminism. The remedy is thought to be simple: Have more women “sit at the table.” This is Weinstein’s brand of “feminism” as well: to talk about the importance of hiring more female directors or giving more opportunities to female actors.

But where are the results? Why is it that, despite widespread acknowledgment of gender and racial exclusion in the technology industries, women and people of color remain in the vast minority? Why is it that, despite Harvey Weinstein’s vocal support for feminist causes, just 4 percent of directors of the 100 top-grossing films between 2007 and 2016 were female?

Harvey Weinstein’s public support of gender issues in Hollywood and of female politicians easily gained traction and praise. But in reality, it could have worked to distract people from his behavior and a culture of sexual assault and gender discrimination that undergirds Hollywood.

Popular misogyny takes aim

What does the “Fearless Girl” distract us from?

The plaque below the statue originally read, “Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference.” (The plaque has since been removed and replaced.)

The presumption here is that putting more women in leadership positions is a catch-all solution to gender inequality. But what if it’s simply a statement about women becoming better workers?

The artist, Kristen Visbal, admitted that the artwork isn’t meant to alienate, but to accommodate.

“I made sure to keep her features soft,” she explained. “She’s not defiant, she’s brave, proud and strong, not belligerent.” (This is one way that popular feminism transfigures other feminist movements, which, historically, have been mobilized by defiance and belligerence, while directly confronting patriarchy.)

Yet the accommodating tone didn’t matter to the forces of misogyny.

Even the suggestion that women should participate more visibly within capitalism – an economic system that depends, after all, on a gendered division of labor – incurred a misogynistic backlash.

The creator of the Charging Bull, Arturo Di Modica, has asked for the Fearless Girl to be removed, claiming that she was “attacking the bull” and that he objected to her “political messaging” (as if symbolizing capitalist America’s resilience was somehow not political).

Other reactions were more pronounced than Di Modica’s. Alongside hundreds of photos and selfies of girls and women with Fearless Girl, pictures also circulated in social media featuring men simulating sex with the statue. In May 2017 another artist, Alex Gardega, installed a statue of his own: “Pissing Pug,” a small dog urinating on “Fearless Girl.”

Even a “soft” corporate feminism poses a threat to masculinity – so much so that it becomes a target of degradation and sexual violence.

Apparently, the Fearless Girl injures masculinity simply by existing in the first place.

The perils of popular feminism

The pervasiveness of popular misogyny can appear in subtler ways, whether it’s political campaigns centered on taking away reproductive rights for women, or denying women and girls opportunities in the workplace.

Others join “Pissing Pug” in the not-so-subtle category, like Weinstein’s alleged tactics of forcing women to perform sexual acts in order to earn his approval.

The years-long silence of Weinstein’s many female accusers – or of the many men and women who were aware of what was happening – is all, in my view, about the power of popular misogyny. Women are rarely believed when they report sexual assault, while public shaming can ensure that future opportunities to do so can dry up.

In the aftermath, misogynistic backlash has already emerged. Those who came forward are being questioned about what they were wearing and why they let themselves be alone with him – how they “invited” the assault.

Harvey Weinstein is only the latest in a list of powerful men who have been exposed this year alone: Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and, of course, Donald Trump.

But while popular misogyny can silence in very visible ways, popular feminism can also work to silence dissent. Through building statues, appointing a woman to the board of a company and paying celebrity feminist spokespeople, this soft, corporate version of feminism signals that by being accommodating and safe, the problem will go away.

Popular feminism might dispense a vision of progress. But don’t let it distract from the structural gendered violence that persists, unabated, in so many aspects of American society.

Sarah Banet-Weiser, Vice Dean, Director of the School of Communication and Professor of Communication, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Trump wants to plunder Afghanistan for its vast mineral wealth

(Credit: AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

October 7th marked sixteen years since the start of the US War in Afghanistan – America’s longest war. In an effort to justify the continued and expanded presence of US troops in the country, President Trump is seeking a plan to have US companies extract minerals from resource-rich Afghanistan.

Afghanistan’s deposits of iron, copper, zinc, gold, silver, lithium and other rare-earth metals are estimated to be worth roughly $1 trillion, a price tag which has intrigued the business mogul-turned-President Trump.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani brought up the matter in one of his first conversations with Trump, suggesting it would be a great opportunity for US businesses.

“We are sitting on enormous wealth,” Ghani reportedly told Trump during a meeting in Riyadh in May. “Why aren’t the American companies in this instead of China?”

President Trump embraced the idea, convening meetings with senior aides and top mining and security executives to discuss profiting from Afghanistan’s mineral riches.

In July, he met with Michael Silver of American Elements, a company focused on using rare-earth minerals in high-tech devices. Stephen A. Fienberg, the owner of the military contracting firm DynCorp International, is also advising Trump on the issue. DynCorp, a controversial human rights violator, could provide security for the mines in Taliban-controlled regions.

Erik D. Prince, the founder of the notorious private security firm Blackwater International, has also been involved in discussions with Trump about Afghanistan.

Prince, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last May, argued for a complete privatization of the war in the country, calling for one sole “viceroy” to conduct all US efforts, and an “East Indian Company approach” involving “private military units” and “a nimbler special-ops and contracted force.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s discussions with Afghan President Ghani continue. The two met in New York on September 22 and discussed, according to a White House press release, “how American companies can help quickly develop Afghanistan’s rich rare earth mineral resources.”

“They agreed that such initiatives would help American companies develop materials critical to national security while growing Afghanistan’s economy and creating new jobs in both countries,” the press release continued, “therefore defraying some of the costs of United States assistance as Afghans become more self-reliant.”

While the heads of the state discuss profiting from the mining sector, the US war in Afghanistan is escalating.

Since the US started the war in Afghanistan in 2001, Washington has spent an estimated $714 billion in war and reconstruction efforts there, according to the most recent report from the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. This means the war in Afghanistan costs the US roughly $3.9 billion per month.

Eleven thousand troops are currently stationed in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon. In August, Trump ordered an additional deployment of four thousand troops. At this point, Republican Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expects US troops to remain in Afghanistan for another decade or beyond.

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And the bombs keep falling. Last month, airstrikes conducted by the US-led coalition in Afghanistan reached a seven-year high. In the first nine months of this year, the US dropped 2,353 bombs on Afghanistan – a dramatic increase from the 236 total airstrikes in 2015. In April, the US dropped an eleven-ton bomb, the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used by the US, in a bombing of ISIS militants in eastern Afghanistan.

Civilian casualties have increased with the escalated violence. From January 1 to September 30 of this year, the UN reported 2,640 deaths and 5,379 injuries among civilians.

US and Afghan airstrikes in 2017 have contributed to a 43% rise in civilian casualties from the air, according to the UN.

Civilian casualties among children and women have seen a rise from the previous year. The UN reports that two thirds of the casualties were due to bombings and attacks from the Taliban and other anti-government forces, such as ISIS. In addition, bombs left in empty homes and across the countryside have resulted in 1,483 injuries and many amputations.

“Afghan civilians are caught between corrupt, U.S.-backed warlords in government, U.S. troops on the ground and airstrikes from above, Taliban forces, and now an emerging Islamic State presence,” Sonali Kolhatkar, co-author of the book Bleeding Afghanistan and co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, recently wrote. “The war has hardly improved their lives and will likely mean many more years of violence.”

Meanwhile, the mineral wealth of Afghanistan has the attention of President Trump, who is looking for a reason to continue America’s longest war.

“Trump wants to be repaid,” a source close to the White House explained. “He’s trying to see where the business deal is.”

A new reissue of the Rolling Stones’ oft-demeaned “Their Satanic Majesties Request” flips the script

If you were alive in 1967 and old enough to be listening to music, I imagine the last thing you would have expected, after the summer of that year, was for the Rolling Stones to get in on the lovey-dovey act of prevailing good vibes. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” had happened, Monterey Pop had happened, but the Stones had had a quiet year, as if they were busy formulating a response.

That rejoinder to the zeitgeist came in the form of “Their Satanic Majesties Request,” which has just been lavishly reissued by Universal Music in a set that is intended to make you stop and take notice, not of what might have been, but what, perhaps, we’ve been getting wrong for a long time.

Namely, that the almost-always-panned “Satanic Majesties” not only wasn’t that bad, but was about as lovey-dovey as a hug that finished off with the other participant kneeing you in the balls. Let us call it a mixed message, then.

I used to have an editor who loved to say, “this doesn’t track.” He said it about everything in life. The Starbucks could have their holiday cups in in early November, and he’d say, “this doesn’t track.” Sometimes I’d imagine him listening to this Stones LP, then or now. The Stones ought not to track with our sociopolitical times, where everything, it seems, is either bad, or waiting to be labeled as bad. For the Stones could be, to put it simply, quite bad. They were bad within the context of art, which is something rather different than bad. Is “Lolita” bad? It’s not Brock Turner — it’s art. It exists within its own world, to provide insight on our outer one.

But to set the context: the Stones had had a monster year in 1966. We regularly think of that campaign in rock history as the time of the Beatles — who dropped their best album, “Revolver,” on the world — and Dylan, who truckled to no contender back then, releasing his own “Blonde on Blonde.” The Stones roared and soared in 1965 with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the single that broke them across the globe.

But I don’t know if the Stones were ever better than in 1966, with singles like “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” — the former being a cross of folk-jangle and cosmos-gallivanting energy, the latter a claustrophobic rush of sound to break down the door of the room it was briefly trapped in.

Then there was the “Aftermath” album, full of exotic sounds, with African instruments broadening the rhythm and blues experience, as the Stones dished out some pretty nasty things. “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” weren’t ever exactly mix tape material for the woman you wished to woo. You hear them now, and you wonder when the Stones backlash is coming. Surely there are SJWs who would like us never to hear this material again?

But that’s the things with songs: they often don’t mean what they say, in the sense that they are not directives, not advisory notes on how to live your life. They’re sonic snapshots of personas. Consider the blues, that genre from which the Stones pulled a lot of their early power: there is more boasting in the blues than in any rap song, and there is also more lamenting than in the lowest circles of Dante’s “Inferno,” because life can get like that, can’t it?

Still, you can’t deny that the musical persona version of the Stones churned and burned with a real animus at this stage. Artistically, it was good for them. It certainly didn’t hurt with their arrangements, which were becoming more sophisticated by galaxies than the Bo Diddley pastiches they had traded in, with the band itself being tight enough to rival some of the jazz units that drummer Charlie Watts loved so much.

Were they super aggro at time? Yep. But you were listening in on a world, not looking for a self-help manual on the best way to be a prick at times. In a way, the Stones trafficked in a version of ethical tourism; that is, they let your id up and dance on a wilder side, before you returned back to your world. They helped you exorcise your moral system, your darker moods, your black thoughts, via your stereo.

The knock against “Their Satanic Majesties Request” was that the Stones did not have their heart in anything even remotely hippie-related. Love was not their drug. The Stones and rock’s great year of love did not, you might say, track. This was a pack of Byrons, not lovelorn poets who were even sappier now that Day-Glo sprayed affection was all the rage. Consequently, the songs on “Satanic Majesties” were said to suffer. They noodled, went nowhere, and were imprecise compositionally, emotionally, you name it. Flat.

Listening again to the reissue, I don’t hear that. I hear a tableau, a record that unfurls less as a collection of songs and more like a musical Pangea. Everything is gummed together, the continents have yet to break up, and the Stones are doing that bit where they embrace you, with the dagger clutched over your shoulder. Mind you, they are not plunging it in, but the thought is there, and it is that thought that will flesh itself out into cuts like “Stray Cat Blues” and the utterly brilliant “Sympathy for the Devil” the following year.

The lenticular album cover gave you some idea of what was held inside. Certain things would resemble what was going on at the time in rock music, but the Stones would be taking a sidestep or three in another direction. It’s a music of refractions. “Sing this All Together (See What Happens)” is the communal, “All You Need Is Love” kind of number, a song as tour guide to a happier world, but in that sidestep style it becomes a beckoning to follow these particular pied pipers who you know you probably shouldn’t trust. Instead, you’re just checking out their lair, seeing how they live, incapable of resisting your own curiosity.

The Stones were always great bewitchers. Not a lot of musical acts could put you under a spell as they could, and “Satanic Majesties” is their sustained LP version of this. Even the titles reflect new geography: “In Another Land,” “Citadel.” Who says “citadel?” There’s an old-timey word for you. This is a darkened citadel, so we have need of a song like “The Lantern.” Remember that Zeppelin poster where there’s some wizard dude on this great steep point, and it’s dark and he has a lantern, presumably so he can find his way and you can follow him? That’s “Satanic Majesties” in a single image. But what we also have is a development in songwriting that is going to take the band forward to the artistic riches of “Beggars Banquet” and “Let It Bleed.” 

“She’s a Rainbow” is the Stones’ most beautiful song, and for artists known for nastiness, it’s interesting how often they could send the bucket down into this particular romantic well and pull up a winner. Their early cover of Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On” was flecked with a vulnerability that could even be considered unnerving — for a heart laid bare can do that — and “Ruby Tuesday” is every bit the lovely English pastoral as anything Vaughan Williams ever wrote. “She’s a Rainbow” is downright benevolent.

The Stones were starting to figure out how to meld openness with individuality, songs that were great at processing what was unfolding in a given world — be it the actual world, a romantic one, an emotional one, what have you — while not forfeiting a singular identity and bringing that new knowledge to bear on how to best move forward, even if that meant doing so while out of kilter with the systems of the time. I think that is why outsiders have always flocked to the band, just as you see with the Who. The Stones, though, had the more populist version of that, because their musical approach tended to be universal, whereas the Who had a pronounced English aspect.

We also mustn’t forget that “Satanic Majesties” features one of your half dozen best Stones songs in “2000 Light Years from Home.” Again, the title packs extra meaning, as the Stones are, indeed, rather removed from their home base, at least as far as their discography went up until late 1967.

Has a song ever sounded more empoweringly badass than the opening bars of “2000 Light Years from Home?” You can’t even tell what genre this might be. It’s blues but exotic, it’s proto-metal but Sun Ra-like in its weird rhythms. When the primary beat kicks in and Mick Jagger’s vocals take over, we share a new form of collective musical high.

You are not remotely sure where that is going to take you, on this soupy, strange record. Do you care? I never cared. You venture into the lair of these pied pipers who look suspiciously like highwaymen, and you’re both happy you went in and happy you got out. Then you, and they, go on, your one-off assignation complete.  

The uphill battle facing “The Mayor,” ABC’s aspirational comedy

Brandon Micheal Hall in "The Mayor" (Credit: ABC)

A year ago prime-time television contended with a problem whose magnitude programming executives did not foresee: the nerve-racking live performance art piece that was the presidential election. Distracted, exhausted viewers tuned out most of the new scripted offerings for fall 2016-2017 schedule, and this lead the networks to turn into the skid during pilot season by picking up series about military and political outsiders.

ABC’s “The Mayor,” airing Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m., is one of the beneficiaries of that move, a pleasant comedy about a rapper named Courtney Rose (Brandon Micheal Hall) runs for public office solely as a publicity stunt. Unfortunately for Courtney, his statements during the debate actually appeal to voters and he wins, becoming the Mayor of the small down of Fort Grey, California.

The first two episodes of “The Mayor” depict Courtney coming to grips with the responsibilities that come with holding office. His sweet, goofy best friends T.K. (Marcel Spears) and Jermaine (Bernard David Jones) act as his official advisors alongside his more capable aide Valentina (Lea Michele), a classmate of his from high-school who has some idea of what it takes to govern a city. Courtney’s mother Dina (Yvette Nicole Brown) acts as the unofficial moral compass of Fort Grey’s top elected official.

Nearly all of them are untested outsiders with zero political experience, an intentional conceit on the part of executive producer Jeremy Bronson, who spent seven and a half years as a producer for “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” Over the summer Bronson explained to critics that his goal was not to satirize America’s least experienced, least qualified political leader in its history but to demonstrate what’s possible if people, regardless of political affiliation, pulled together on behalf of the greater good.

This approach makes “The Mayor” successful, if perhaps overly gentle, as a character comedy as well as an aspiration tale. Courtney, T.K., Jermaine and Valentina make the usual mistakes millennial men and women who suddenly have massive responsibility dropped into their laps would be expected to make.

They have the optimism, energy and desire to do the right thing, but they also feel the obligation to make their mark on the world by polishing their own image. In the second episode, for example, Courtney overcomes a city council-imposed block to his political will  — which, to his credit, he flexes in order to preserve and expand arts funding to local schools — by live streaming a musical performance by the youth who would be affected to his constituents.  The gambit works, and it also makes his brand look good. A win-win all around.

“The Mayor” is a sweet, family friendly comedy that fits in well with a block populated by series catering to nearly every major audience psychographic. Taken as a whole, ABC’s Tuesday night line-up is a quilt of the American family experience: The highest rated show, “The Middle,” reflects the tribulations white middle class families face in terms of schooling, parenting and scraping by financially.

“Fresh Off the Boat” filters that through the framework of a first-generation immigrant family. Leading in to “The Mayor,” the fourth season of “Black-ish” opened the season with the creatively bold “Juneteenth” episode which addressed the dilution of history to downplay and negate the contributions and tribulations of blacks and other minorities.

All of these comedies, and “Black-ish” in particular, find accessible and intelligent ways to invite the audience into discussions about topics politicians and commentators would rather not talk about. In that respect these comedies provide a stealthy service to viewers by urging in engagement through entertainment. This is no small task at a time when so many of us are exhausted by mean-spirited national politics.

However, while “Black-ish” still performs well in its 18-49 target demographic, “The Mayor” is struggling to find and audience due, in part, to a very standard counter-programming decision made by its competition. The pair airs against America’s feel-good obsession of the moment, NBC’s “This Is Us.”

NBC originally intended to move “This Is Us” to Thursdays, which would have boded well for ABC’s critically acclaimed veteran comedy and its newcomer. But when NBC changed its mind, ABC did not.

Further hampering its prospects, “The Mayor” also had the miserable fortune of debuting days after the Las Vegas mass shooting. In an ideal world its upbeat tone should have been welcome. But who’s been in the mood for idealism lately? Any one?

It’s too early to evaluate the long-term prospects for ABC’s kindhearted new family show about civil service and the yearning to employ democracy in the service of the greater good. “The Mayor” appears to have the right running mate in its timeslot, and it is part of a comedy block that speaks honestly and in unifying terms about what it means to be American, how America’s families live. But when upheaval is the new normal, it’s hard to predict whether it can inspire potential constituents to show up in enough numbers to keep it around.

Trump’s Puerto Rico debacle: 81 years ago, we were better at disaster relief

The remnants of a destroyed home stand more than two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit the island on October 6, 2017. (Credit: Getty/Mario Tama)

It’s been an unprecedented season of natural disasters. From Houston to Puerto Rico, California to Florida, hurricanes and wildfires have decimated cities and rural areas, bringing death and destruction to the doorstep of thousands. These disasters have raised the stakes in questions about whose bodies matter and whose don’t, whose histories will be told and whose buried in the rubble, who counts as a citizen and who doesn’t.

In times like these, the past can teach us something about how to move forward.

Case in point: the Tupelo, Mississippi tornado of 1936. It roared in like a run-away train at 9 p.m. on Palm Sunday, April 5, registering an F5, the highest level on the Fujita Scale, and leveling 48 city blocks. Afterward, the dead and dying were strewn about the town, dangling in the sheared limbs of leafless trees, buried under the wreckage, pinned to the bottom of a small lake called Gum Pond. Debris littered the neighboring state of Tennessee. The official death toll was 233, with about 1,000 residents listed as injured, many seriously. Based on these figures, it remains today the fourth most deadly tornado in the history of the United States.

The tornado occurred in the midst of a disaster of even greater proportion, the Great Depression, which had seized the country in its iron grip throughout the 1930s. Ironically, a large part of Tupelo’s remarkable recovery is the result of that very fact. President Roosevelt’s massive government safety net of New Deal projects, employing millions of laborers, artists, scholars, engineers and teachers, was firmly in place in Tupelo. The city had had the distinction, in 1934, of becoming the nation’s first community powered by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal agency that had built dams throughout the region to prevent devastating floods and provide cheap electricity. Incredibly, two hours after the tornado struck, TVA construction crews had run temporary wires to light locations where the injured were being treated. By midnight, TVA lines were being used for long distance calls to summon help from the outside world. Around 250 TVA engineers and workers rushed to the city and had the electricity fully restored three days after the disaster.

More crucially, a group of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program for impoverished young men, was working nearby. Alongside local residents, “the CCC boys,” as they were called, saved countless lives, rescuing the injured from crumbled houses, putting out the fires that burned throughout the night and later digging hundreds of graves. Meanwhile, within hours, the National Guard leapt into action, stationing hundreds of reserve soldiers around town to prevent looting, and the American Red Cross began setting up food stations and providing people with shelter and clothing.

By April 10, five days out, the U.S. Resettlement Administration had begun clearing 32 acres for housing, and a day later, a special WPA grant of $1,000,000 — an eye-boggling amount in those times — was released for relief work. By April 18, thirteen days later, the President had signed a bill which would lend up to $50,000,000 to those who had lost homes and possessions. Meanwhile, bolstered by the federal government’s concretely demonstrable commitment to restore Tupelo, state and local officials, business and religious leaders, and transportation carriers like the Frisco railway and Greyhound bus lines were providing assistance. As J.M. Thomas of the Federal Land Bank of New Orleans telegraphed to Tupelo’s mayor: “I want to be of service. . . . Please command me.”*

The difference between the federal responses to the Tupelo and Puerto Rico disasters is stark. Nearly four weeks have passed since Puerto Rico was laid low by Hurricane Maria. Despite enormous advances in transportation, technology and communication over the past 80 years, scant electric power has been restored, and communication lines are still largely down. Federal troops are just now being sent to rural areas to make sure aid gets to the people who need it. This lack of immediate action is literally the difference between life and death, as news headlines continue to ominously report: “Puerto Rico’s Health Care Is in Dire Condition”; “Puerto Rico: US Officials Privately Acknowledge Serious Food Shortage”; “Puerto Rico’s Death Toll From Hurricane Maria Climbs to 48.”

This calamitous situation is not for lack of relief efforts organized by ordinary citizens and celebrities alike. From Lin-Manuel Miranda’s release of the song “Almost Like Praying” to meal preparations by chef José Andres to the millions of dollars raised by celebrities like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon and smaller amounts donated by everyday Americans, the response to the Puerto Rican tragedy has been overwhelmingly compassionate. But money alone, compassion alone, doesn’t turn on the lights. It takes a monumental, organized federal effort.

Why did it take so long for the Trump administration to suspend the Jones Act (eight days) and only allow it to stay suspended for ten? Why did it take more than a week for the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort to leave port and 11 days for it to reach Puerto Rico — and why are doctors still having problems getting their patients aboard? Why did the President chide Puerto Ricans for breaking the federal budget? Why did he attack the mayor of San Juan while she begged for help that wasn’t forthcoming? It was five days before the first Trump administration officials even visited the island.

A key to some of these questions may lie in President Trump’s own rejoinder to Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz’s desperate pleas: “They want everything done for them when it should be a community effort.” This statement raises larger questions: What kind of safety net do Americans — and Puerto Ricans are Americans — deserve? What counts as timely, effective federal assistance in times of utter disaster? Rolls of paper towels tossed to survivors? Self-congratulatory press conferences and photo ops?

And who counts as a citizen in Trump’s America?

Millennial candidates are changing Pennsylvania politics

Joe Michael (Credit: Ashley Murray)

Emily Marburger sits at a cafe table at the Muddy Cup, a coffee shop on Bellevue’s main street, Lincoln Avenue. When she lifts her iced drink, a henna tattoo on her hand is visible. Members of the local Somali Bantu refugee community applied it at a fundraising table they had at Bellevue’s weekly farmer’s market.

“It’s a huge strength to have diversity in your community,” said Marburger, 30, who won the Democratic mayoral primary in Bellevue in May. “As soon as we embrace that diversity and allow different voices come in, that’s when you’re going to get a stronger population and really flourish and come back.”

Marburger is just one of several Millennial candidates who won local primary races in Western Pennsylvania.

Marburger, an M.B.A graduate who works in finance, began to look in her own backyard after Republican candidate Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

His “hatred, xenophobia and sexism” are “dividing the country,” she said. And on the recent local primary ballot, she saw two mayoral candidates whom she didn’t think represented the Democratic majority in Bellevue — and one who openly supported Trump.

She bought her house in the borough — just four miles along the Ohio River past Pittsburgh — in 2010.

“We have a lot of deferred maintenance on our roads, we have a lot of empty storefronts, and in the seven years I’ve lived here, I can’t say that any of that seems to be changing too dramatically.”

The one-square mile borough has been steadily losing population since the 1960s, but its percentage of non-white residents has been growing — from 2 percent in the 1980s to nearly 15 percent in 2016.

Marburger’s plan if she wins in November: to attract small businesses and young families to the affordable real estate in a location just minutes from Downtown Pittsburgh.

Marburger said she’s feeling confident about November when she will face Tom Fodi, 34-year-old pastor, who previously ran in 2014 for state house and lost. Fodi lost the Democratic primary to Marburger but won as a write-in for the Republican ticket.

Just three miles from Bellevue, another young, first-time candidate is running for office in Emsworth, a smaller borough with 2,500 residents along the Ohio River.

The same August Saturday that Marburger sipped her iced coffee and lamented Trump’s response to Charlottesville, Joe Michael, 22, of Emsworth stood along Route 65 — the main artery connecting the northern boroughs to Pittsburgh — holding a Trump sign with a small crowd, asking for “honks” to drain the swamp.

Michael, who works at a car dealership north of Pittsburgh, won the Republican primary for mayor of Emsworth as well as a write-in campaign for a council seat.

He said that while several things Trump says make him “face palm,” he still believes in supporting the sitting U.S. president.

National politics aside, Michael said, he’s been honing his reputation among local Republicans since he was a teenager — volunteering for local state races and for Republican presidential candidate John Kasich last year.

He credits his admiration for 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his involvement in politics.

His plans for Emsworth if he’s elected are to institute a neighborhood watch — as one police department covers several northern boroughs — and securing private sponsors to fund things like park maintenance.

“I think I have a very good chance at a getting a council,” Michael said.

How to connect with people you hate

“It is so different to express your opinion to someone when you’re voice to voice than when you don’t have to be accountable to it,” Dylan Marron, writer and video creator told me on “Salon Talks.”

Marron is known for his social justice video content like “Every Single Word,” where he edited down popular films to just words spoken by people of color and “Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People,” all of which has garnered him some serious flack online.

In his newest venture, as host of the Night Vale Presents podcast “Conversations with People Who Hate Me,” Marron calls some of the people who’ve left him hateful comments. But it is not to confront them, he says, it’s to open a dialogue.

“When you start with a question rather than an accusation, that is like the magical key to understanding a lot,” Marron said. “Whereas if you start with ‘here is why you’re wrong about this social movement,’ the only thing they can say is a comeback.”

Marron finds this back and forth, of just “poking holes in each other’s arguments” as unproductive.

In the podcast, he finds the balance between defending himself, as a gay man and person of color, and standing in solidarity with movements like Black Lives Matter, without isolating the caller, whose beliefs often differ substantially from Marron’s.

“Listening to someone and considering what they’re saying and then having a dialogue with them does not mean that you are switching sides,” Marron said. “That itself I find really toxic. We are not this dichotomous species.”

For Marron, there’s room to complicate that.

When I asked him if he was surprised by the way his callers were able to take ownership of some of the hurtful things they had said and engage in a civil conversation with him, he said, he was surprised, but then again, not really.

Rather it was a reminder: “That’s what humans are, humans are good,” he said.

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

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