Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 281

See the moment Bernie Sanders and Larry David found out that they’re related

Bernie Sanders; Larry David (Credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall/Chris Pizzello)

For at least the past year, many people have drawn comparisons to Sen. Bernie Sanders I-Vt., and the iconic comedian, Larry David — so much so that the latter was drafted into playing the former in a few “Saturday Night Live” skits.

As it turns out, the two Brooklyn natives are actually distant cousins, and each erupted with a mixture of joy and shock when they found out. On Tuesday’s episode of the PBS show “Finding Your Roots” host Henry Louis Gates revealed the two share some of the same DNA.

Before opening the folder to reveal who he was related to David said, “I hope it’s a good athlete.” But no, it was Sanders. “What the hell!” he said after seeing a picture of Sanders. “Oh that’s so funny, that is really funny. That is amazing.”

“Alright, cousin Bernie,” David cracked, nodding in approval of the news.

Sanders nearly jumped out of his seat when he opened the folder and saw David’s picture. Raising his hand to his head in disbelief, “you’re kidding!” Sanders said. “Oh my god, that is unbelievable!”

He continued, “It’s true? . . . People say to me, you know they talk about Larry David, and I say ‘he does a better Bernie Sanders than I do.'”

“Oh my god,” he said again, laughing hysterically.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the episode was that David, who frequently champions progressive values, found out one of his ancestors had once owned slaves. David found out that his great-grandmother Henrietta was born in Mobile, Alabama. Her father, David’s great-great-grandfather, Henry Bernstein, fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He was one of roughly 3,000 Jewish men to fight for the South, the Daily Beast reported.

Reports of the episode leaked back in July, and at the time, David said he was “very happy” when he found out the news. “I thought there must be some connection,” he said. “I love Bernie.”

Should white directors tell black stories?

Nancy Buirski knows her way around a documentary. As the founder and long-time head of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina, she was responsible for launching a fleet of documentaries and filmmakers.

But then she jumped ship, and in the past few years has been producing and directing her own films, including 2011’s “The Loving Story,” about an interracial couple that instigated a landmark Supreme Court decision, 2013’s “Afternoon of a Faun,” about a tragic ballet dancer, and 2015’s deep dive with a master director, “By Sidney Lumet.”

This weekend at the New York Film Festival, she premiered her most recent documentary “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” a disturbing look at the brutal rape of a young black woman by six white boys in Alabama in 1944. Taylor’s case became a cause celebre for the incipient Civil Rights era—Rosa Parks was an unknown investigator for the NAACP when she tried to bring Taylor justice—but Buirski’s film reveals that the even the movement failed her.

Buirski spoke with me on “Salon Talks” about why she choose to tell the story of Taylor’s struggle on film. “White people are responsible for what happened to black people and we are complicit if don’t try to do something to heal that,” she said. “For me, movie-making is how I can make a contribution.”

Buirski identified how looking at our racially divisive past is relevant to today, from Abbeville, Alabama to Charlottesville, Virginia to the White House. “’The Loving Story’ and the ‘Rape of Recy Taylor’ are linked by white supremacy,” Buriski added. “That’s a subject that white people have a responsibility to discuss.”

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on  Salon  and on  Facebook .

Trump had very different reactions to Hurricane Maria and the Vegas shooting

Donald Trump and Melania Trump arrive in Puerto Rico. (Credit: Getty/Hector Retamal)

A somber President Donald Trump emerged Wednesday in Las Vegas after visiting victims of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history — a stark contrast to the tone he took on Tuesday in Puerto Rico, where he downplayed Hurricane Maria’s devastation, and told residents they were lucky they didn’t suffer a death toll that was as high as during Hurricane Katrina.

In Puerto Rico, after receiving widespread criticism of his administration’s lackluster response to the disaster, Trump touted the federal response and said it “has been something like I’ve never seen before,” according to the Washington Post.

“What has happened in terms of recovery, what has happened in terms of saving lives — 16 lives, that’s a lot, but we compare that to the thousands of people that died in other hurricanes that were not nearly as severe,” Trump said, though he cited a death toll that hadn’t been updated in close to a week. The death toll has doubled since he left.

While in Puerto Rico, Trump put on a spectacle, taking pictures with local residents and throwing supplies into the crowd as if he were a mascot at a stadium tasked with riling the audience.

Trump’s visit to the island was confined to an affluent suburb in San Juan — “known for its amenity-driven gated communities,” and which was “largely spared” by Hurricane Maria, the Post reported. But not far from where the president stayed put, the scene was grimmer.

Then, in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Trump said that it had been a “sad day” for him.

“It’s a very sad thing. We are going to pay our respects and to see the police who have done really a fantastic job in a very short time,” Trump said, according to CBS. “It’s a very, very sad day for me, personally.”

Trump headed to University Medical Center’s trauma center, where he met with doctors and consoled victims.

“You have been a real inspiration,” Trump told law enforcement and first responders. “I was a fan before this, a big fan before this and I guess I’m even more of a fan now, you showed the world and the world is watching, you showed what professionalism is all about.”

It was a stark contrast: empathy and concern in Vegas, and a pep rally for Puerto Rican that degenerated into spectacle when Trump attacked the mayor of San Juan after she had criticized the cumbersome federal response.

This Silicon Prairie entrepreneur wants to shatter a grass ceiling

Steven Werner

Some innovators come up with ideas through intense research and experience, but for Steve Werner, inspiration came from a different source.

Two years ago, Werner was driving home from an entrepreneurship class when he remembered he’d forgotten to mow the yard, despite multiple reminders from his wife, Sonya.

“It was such a nice day — the sun was shining, people were jogging outside and walking their dogs,” Werner said. “The last thing that I wanted to do was mow. And then the light bulb went off.”

Instead of cutting his grass, Werner went inside and told his wife he had an idea. That night they developed the initial business plan and concept for Lawn Buddy: a mobile application for an on-demand lawn service.  

Since the development of the initial idea, Lawn Buddy has become a software as a service technology company. They do not directly provide the services but instead act as an intermediary.

Lawn Buddy provides lawn and snow removal services by connecting lawn care professionals to home owners via a mobile application and website. They are currently operating in Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois. Several other states have providers currently going through the vetting process.

The company also launched Cleaning Buddy on September 16 in the Wichita area — a mobile app that lets residents order house cleaning services on demand.

“We’re thrilled to meet the cleaning needs of modern families through our easy to use mobile app,” Werner announced at the time. “At the same time, we’re giving our provider partners a steady stream of well-paid opportunities so they can grow their own businesses. With Cleaning Buddy, everyone wins.”

Kansas is also winning. Lawn Buddy’s success has been used as an example of the viability of starting a successful technology company in the Midwest.

“I think it’s great that Lawn Buddy is located in Kansas. The fact that it’s happening here in the center of the United States speaks volumes,” said Sherdeill Breathett, Sedgwick County Economic Development Specialist. “To know that innovative businesses don’t have to come from the coasts or Seattle or Texas, it can happen here in Wichita. We have to start emphasizing that we can be a center for growth. We have a lot of talent here.”

A large part of the support for Lawn Buddy is an extension of support of Werner himself. He moved to Kansas after spending several years in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Aaron Bastian, the President of Fidelity Bank decided to invest in Lawn Buddy, in part because it was started by a veteran.

“It’s one of those cases where we saw a little bit of ourselves in Steven – he’s a good human,” Bastian said. “For me, personally, I admire his military service, it was the right thing to do and a good investment for someone that wanted to grow a business in Kansas.”

However, Bastian isn’t the only individual to praise Werner as an innovator.

“Steven has the work ethic of the Midwest but the innovative mindset of Silicon Valley,” said Jacob Wayman, director of e2e Accelerator in Wichita.

Vulture capitalists circle above Puerto Rico

(Credit: AP Photo/Carlos Giusti)

Puerto Rico is devastated. Two hurricanes plunged the island into darkness and despair. Crops perish in the fields. The landscape of ruined buildings and towns resemble Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped on it. Over 3 million people are desperate for food, water, electricity and shelter.

After a slow start, the Trump administration is now speeding up the flow of supplies to the island. A top US general has been given command of the relief efforts. And, like so many others, Yarimar Bonilla watches with a broken heart as her native Puerto Rico struggles. This noted social anthropologist — a scholar on Caribbean societies — says the hurricanes have made an already bad fiscal and economic crisis worse, and she sees darker times ahead unless major changes are made in the structure of power and in Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States.

Last night on NBC, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz made a spontaneous statement expressing her frustration with insufficient relief efforts that went viral. Before you read my interview with Yarimar Bonilla please take two minutes to watch this video. You will understand even more clearly Ms. Bonilla’s explainer of what is happening in Puerto Rico.

— Bill Moyers

San Juan mayor pleads for federal help after hurricane: “We are dying here”

Read more: https://t.co/MaHffyRIKKpic.twitter.com/LPqpXaFP21

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 30, 2017

Bill Moyers: What’s the first thing you would want us to know about Puerto Rico?

Yarimar Bonilla: That it is a US territory — as are the Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam. That it has a greater population than 21 other states — more residents than Utah, Iowa or Nevada — and is geographically larger than Delaware or Rhode Island.

However, rather than wanting folks to know something in particular, I would want them to ask why is Puerto Rico part of the United States, to investigate the question and come up with their own answers. I think it would be more interesting for people to start out wherever they are — be it with no knowledge at all — or people who grew up in Puerto Rico and have long lived this political relationship without fully understanding it, to ask themselves why the island is part of the United States and what explains the particular ambiguity of its situation today.

Moyers: What’s your personal connection to Puerto Rico, and how did you come to devote so much of your life to studying Caribbean societies?

Bonilla: I was born in Puerto Rico, although my mom says that I can choose if I want to be an Island Puerto Rican or a Diasporican because now I’ve spent pretty much equal time in the United States and in Puerto Rico proper.

Moyers: I dare say that until the hurricanes the popular image of Puerto Rico in this country was the epitome of prosperity. You know, all the ads on television and in magazines touting pleasure and escape — the resorts, the bright sun, the white beaches, the blue water, the rum and tonic, the sexy bikinis, the smiling locals.

Bonilla: Well, it’s funny, I had a colleague, a fellow anthropologist, with whom I joked about wanting one day for us to write an ethnography of the Puerto Rico that exists in tourist ads. Because it’s a place that we’ve never really visited or known.

Moyers: But doesn’t this distorted view make it more difficult for regular Americans to connect to the devastation today?

Bonilla: Perhaps. But I think even more than the tourist ads, what makes it difficult for Americans to connect is the deep ignorance that exists about the political relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Most folks in the US don’t even know how to orient themselves towards Puerto Rico. How should they feel about it? Should they support statehood, should they support independence? They’re unable to reconcile the political history of Puerto Rico with the history that they are taught in schools about the United States.

Moyers: You’ve said that Puerto Rico was in trouble long before the hurricane.

Bonilla: Puerto Rico’s been in an economic recession for over a decade. The great American recession that was so debated in the United States during the early Obama administration after the collapse of the banks in the US — all of that started in Puerto Rico much earlier, and whereas the US is said to have recovered to some extent for certain populations, Puerto Rico’s recession has only deepened. That is in part due to the lack of a strong economic base and to tax incentives that were put in place to bring foreign — “foreign” meaning US companies — to Puerto Rico. After the crash a lot of companies left and a base of employment in Puerto Rico was gone.

So even before this last hurricane, already Puerto Rico had huge unemployment, huge poverty rates — poverty rates that double any poverty rate in the US, even that of the poorest states of the US — and a very neglected infrastructure that was not ready for the storms.

Moyers: Donald Trump tweeted, “Texas and Florida are doing great after their hurricanes, but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure and massive debt, is in deep trouble.” And that seems to echo what you’ve just said and what you wrote in The Washington Post — that a state of emergency existed well before the hurricane hit.

Bonilla: I’m curious about that statement from Donald Trump. I wonder who in Florida and Texas is doing great and who is not. So that would be my first question. But you know, that’s for other folks to answer.

Moyers: Why was the inequality in Puerto Rico so great?

Bonilla: Because there’s been an erosion of the middle class. And so you have a lot of people at the bottom who can’t find work, who can’t start their own businesses. Many of them depend on government assistance, but there’s also a huge number who are working poor, who live paycheck to paycheck, who are supplementing their incomes with the gig economy. Retailers like Walmart offer no job security. Most of the people working for them can’t predict their shifts — their shifts change from week to week. They have to keep their schedules completely open. They are paid for part-time labor, but have to be available full-time.

And so all of this means that leading up to the storm, people already did not have enough money to prepare, to buy the supplies that they needed. Ideally, you would prepare for a storm of this nature by having a well-stocked pantry, plenty of water, lots of batteries, and if you can afford it, a generator. Also, your car would be full of gas and you would have a good amount of cash, because as can be expected and as we’re seeing now, ATMs are down. People who are just making ends meet, they don’t have the kind of money that is necessary to prepare for these storms.

There’s a lot of talk about the island’s environmental precarity and vulnerability. It’s true that the Caribbean is on the front lines of effects from climate change. But there are other forms of vulnerability, like socioeconomic vulnerability. And also a political vulnerability because Puerto Ricans don’t really have anyone in Congress advocating for them. They’re nobody’s constituents. They have no representation and no one who can leverage votes and trade deals with other states in order to get things expedited on the ground there.

Moyers: You’ve described these Caribbean societies, including Puerto Rico, as protected markets for national corporations.

Bonilla: Yes. If you look at the Jones Act, the only goods that can arrive in Puerto Rico have to be on US-made ships, and owned by US citizens, with a US crew flying a US flag. So this means that if the Dominican Republic wants to sell food to Puerto Rico, which it does, it has to send that food first to Jacksonville, Florida, unload it, put it on another ship that is allowed to bring it to Puerto Rico. So this makes it very difficult for Puerto Rico to engage in trade with other countries. We’re not an independent nation, so we can’t make our own trade arrangements. And that means that we have to buy mostly from the US.

Moyers: I understand the Jones Act goes way back to World War I, when German submarines were sinking so many American ships that Congress decreed the US maintain a shipbuilding industry second to none, with, as you say, ships carrying provisions to be owned, manned and built by America. This not only strangles Puerto Rico’s economy, but one writer called it a shakedown, a mob protection racket, with Puerto Rico as a captive market. Puerto Ricans have to buy mainly American products and pass the higher cost on to the consumers, who are then paying higher prices. Donald Trump has temporarily suspended the Jones Act, as you know.

Bonilla: That will help momentarily in terms of letting a few ships arrive and letting Puerto Ricans find more inexpensive methods of procuring the items that they need right now. A lot of us are very offended that it was only lifted for 10 days, as if you could resolve the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, which is of a devastating scale — as if you could resolve that in 10 days. It’s absolutely offensive for it to be so limited. A small crumb.

What I hope is that there are now a lot of people who have become educated about the Jones Act. Most people in the United States didn’t know anything about it before this. Maybe now there can be enough pressure to fully repeal it.

Moyers: You have described Puerto Rico and the other Caribbean societies as important economic cover for their colonial centers. What do you mean?

Bonilla: I mean that a lot of things happen in these places that aren’t supposed to happen — that’s what I mean by cover. The United States can claim to offer certain kinds of guarantees to its citizens, but those guarantees are suspended when it comes to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. So veterans benefits are less, guarantees of health care are less, guarantees of public education — all these things are reduced. And in addition, wealthy people who are supposed to pay their share, they’re able to completely evade their taxes and not contribute to the national interest by setting up companies in Puerto Rico.

Moyers: So things were really made worse by tax incentives to wealthy investors. I believe Puerto Rico’s Act #22 allows wealthy investors to evade both federal and local income tax by spending a minimum of 183 nights a year on the island.

Bonilla: Yes, it’s true. It’s hard to comprehend, but it’s true. You have a lot of wealthy Americans who say, “Oh, this is great for us, it’s the thing that can get you out from under the US Internal Revenue Service without having to renounce your citizenship.” So they retain their American voting rights, they retain all their benefits of US citizenship, but they do not contribute anything to the US, nor do they contribute anything to Puerto Rico because they’re also not paying local taxes.

Moyers: How did Puerto Rico get its unique privilege to offer triple tax-exempt bonds?

Bonilla: It’s basically written into its constitution. When Congress established Puerto Rico’s civil government in 1917 it decreed that any bonds issued by its government would be free from taxation. In addition, it is written into the 1952 constitution that the repayment of any kind of public debt must take priority over financing public services. In 1952, when Puerto Rican politicians tried to convince Puerto Ricans that they were no longer a colony, and they convinced the United Nations to take Puerto Rico off the list of non-self-governing societies, this constitution was put into place and one of its founding principles was that Puerto Rico was going to be a site for US economic investment. And so you can purchase these triple tax-exempt bonds and not pay any federal tax, any tax in Puerto Rico, or any tax in the municipality in which you live. This made these bonds incredibly seductive for US. I urge everyone to read the great story in The New York Times “The Bonds That Broke Puerto Rico.”

Moyers: Earlier this year Puerto Rico officially became the largest bankruptcy case in the history of the American public bond market. In another tweetTrump points out how indebted Puerto Rico is to Wall Street and the banks and reminds Puerto Ricans that it “sadly must be dealt with.” He’s acknowledging this is the first thing Puerto Rico taxpayers have to do.

Bonilla: It was so offensive. Puerto Ricans have been kicked by Irma, then kicked by Maria, and now kicked by Trump. We’re really suffering. In the middle of our humanitarian crisis, he tells us, “It’s a shame but you have to pay back that debt.” It’s clear that was a message to Wall Street not to worry, they’ll get paid back. Puerto Ricans need to worry, however.

Moyers: Something I’ve learned from you: Walmart and Walgreens have more stores per square mile in Puerto Rico than anywhere else in the world. How did that come about?

Bonilla: Walmart has negotiated a series of benefits from the Puerto Rican government such as free or subsidized land to build on, subsidies for their payroll, and for the training of new employees. So they basically get to set up shop almost for free. In addition, we are a captive market. There’s not a lot of competition for them. So they’re the biggest employer, and the biggest retailer. Also, Walmart USA sells to Walmart Puerto Rico, at surprisingly inflated prices so that then it appears as if Walmart Puerto Rico doesn’t have much profit, which means they pay very little taxes to the Puerto Rican government.

The Puerto Rican government wanted to raise the taxes but Walmart threatened to sue and leave and then a federal judge decided that the tax would be discriminatory because Walmart was the only operator of the scale to which these taxes would apply.

Moyers: So when the government tries to raise taxes on goods brought to the island from foreign sources because those taxes would help local improvement, the companies threaten to leave?

Bonilla: Yes, exactly. They don’t want to pay the government any of the profits that they’re making off the Puerto Rican people.

Moyers: So does this helps explain why the infrastructure in Puerto Rico has been so long neglected — the first priority is to serve this foreign debt and tax breaks for the wealthy?

Bonilla: Absolutely, and it’s only going to get worse because of the PROMESA Act [NB: Passed by Congress to deal with the financial crisis and bankruptcy]. Some critics have dared to describe it as a kind of bailout or aid package, but that’s not so. There is absolutely no transfer of money from the federal government to Puerto Rico as part of the PROMESA Act. If anything, there’s an imposition of an economic burden on the Puerto Rican government which now has to pay the overhead of the PROMESA board — which is estimated to cost $200 million in its first year alone — and an astronomical, unjustifiable salary of over half a million dollars a year to its manager Natalie Jaresko. This completely overpaid expensive board arrives in Puerto Rico and the first thing that they say is that everyone has to tighten their belts. There are “furloughs” of government workers, the government has to reduce its payroll by about 30 percent. Now they are going to privatize a lot of the services. The first target was the University of Puerto Rico, which they completely gutted leading to a massive strike at the university.

Moyers: And as you wrote in The Washington Post, the PROMESA Act imposed a fiscal control board focused on the short-term austerity policies in order to restore the country’s market rating, which means lower wages and tax increases for the working poor and tax breaks and other incentives for the rich investors. Why did Congress do that?

Bonilla: They didn’t want to seem like they were “bailing out” quote/unquote a community of people who are not imagined to be Americans. So a lot of senators and congressmen wanted to assure their folks in their home states that the money of hardworking Americans were not going to bail out Puerto Ricans, who are not seen as “Americans.” That’s the reason. [laughs]

Moyers: You laugh, but it hurts.

Bonilla: Absolutely, absolutely. One must laugh to keep from crying in the face of such cynicism. And especially right now in the moment of this crisis where a lot of people are saying that Puerto Rico does not deserve the same kind of aid that US states deserve — Florida and Texas, you know — because it’s a territory. There’s also been a lot of debate about whether when you get FEMA packages, the government will do matching funds. So several folks have asked for the government to lift that requirement. The bondholders of the electric company, said, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll let you borrow more so that you can pay the matching funds.” Clearly the only solution being imagined for Puerto Rico’s economic future is permanent and sustained indebtment.

Moyers: Well, our federal government’s own financial control board is saying that the island’s debt is not payable, and the governor of the island of Puerto Rico is talking about selling all utilities to private owners — electricity, water and sewers, the public transit. Will these drastic measures help the problem?

Bonilla: Absolutely not. Some have described these privatization schemes as if you are selling off your house to pay your credit card bill. So okay, you do a fire sale on your home, you pay your Visa, you pay your MasterCard, but then you have nowhere to live. Then what do you do? I think some people have been so frustrated with the kind of public services they’ve been receiving from this ever-shrinking government that they say, “Yes, okay, let’s privatize it.” But privatizing is not going to make things any better and it’s certainly not going to help Puerto Rico in the long term.

We talked previously about inequality and about the high levels of income disparity in Puerto Rico. This means that there are very wealthy people who to a great extent don’t need public services. They have gas generators and water tanks. Some of them even have helipads. The people who need the government services are the poor. They’re the ones who are going to suffer the most. So instead of implementing progressive measures that tax the wealthy in Puerto Rico, the opposite is being done.

Moyers: Trump is tweeting that help is coming. The Fiscal Oversight Board says reconstruction projects will be accelerated, emergency funds will be flowing to the people, the checks are in the mail. Will all this emergency help produce solutions to the structural problems we’ve been talking about? Will Puerto Rico emerge with chances for an economy that works for everyone?

Bonilla: I would love to say yes. I was very closely connected to the events in Haiti, the Haitian earthquake there. And I remember how so many people talked about how we were going to rebuild Haiti better, we were going to finally fix the long structural problems that that country had faced. This wasn’t to be. I recommend people watch this movie by Raoul Peck, Fatal Assistance, about how all the aid that was sent to Haiti, in the end it did not help.

One big problem is that donors want to aid small scale organizations. And there’s good reason for that. But the problem is, that when you need to rebuild something like an electricity grid or a public water system, you can’t do it in a patchy way. In Haiti, a lot of money was sent to organizations like the Red Cross that was kept for overhead and not used for what was promised. But then a lot of people, to avoid that kind of thing, would send money directly to a community that would build just one school. So you have this kind of patchy education system. You have communities that have wells that don’t connect to each other. You have roads that are built to go from one town to the church that helped build them but that doesn’t lead to a national roadway system. What you need is a systematic process of rebuilding by a government that has decided what kind of society they want to rebuild and in what way.

If you also look at a place like New Orleans and what has happened after Katrina, we know already that in other disaster situations, the preexisting inequalities just get exacerbated. And so the folks who were already suffering the most in these places are the ones who will benefit the least from the reconstruction.

I really fear that there’s going to be a mass exodus from Puerto Rico — basically what Aimé Césaire once described as genocide by substitution. Puerto Ricans are going to leave and FEMA workers brought in from the US are going to arrive. More wealthy investors are going to come and Puerto Rico is no longer going to belong to Puerto Ricans. It will look more and more like Hawaii. When we talk about rebuilding we have to think about why rebuild an energy sector that is not based on renewable sources when you can rebuild with solar power, for example. But we also have to think about rebuilding for whom, who is going to remain on the island and what role are they going to play in Puerto Rico’s reconstruction?

Moyers: Have you read Naomi Klein’s writing about “disaster capitalism”?

Bonilla: Absolutely, and we see it playing out. We see it playing out right now. When I was in Puerto Rico this summer — before the hurricanes — I talked to a wealth adviser at an investment center where rich Puerto Ricans go to create college funds for their kids and buy insurance and secure their retirements. She was very smart. Folks like her working in the banking industry and in investment and knew that bankruptcy and fiscal austerity was coming down the pike. The story was underreported so that there wouldn’t be a bank run. But folks like her told their clients to pull their money out of Puerto Rican bonds and put it into other sources. Most of her clients, their investments are in US stocks. So she said, “They’re doing great! Since Donald Trump was elected, stocks are high.” And then she said, “All we need now is a hurricane.” (Pause) This was last summer. I was naturally shocked to hear this because all I could imagine was the destruction that hurricanes bring. But of course what she was thinking about was how in a disaster the funds that flow in help precisely the kind of companies that her clients are investing in — say, Home Depot, the construction industry in the United States, wealthy contractors. She represents the kind of people who are going to benefit and profit and do very well in this post-hurricane economy at the expense of the folks who are now trapped in their homes without food, without water, without gasoline. So the suffering that people are experiencing right now could prove to be of economic benefit to a chosen few.

Moyers: The vulture capitalists, as they are sometimes called.

Bonilla: Absolutely. There’s no other way to talk about it, especially in a context where you literally have people dying in the hospital because there’s no energy to sustain their life-support systems.

Moyers: Most of us have a little bit of the vulture in us, so the question arises, who’s at fault when this happens? Did local politicians and local people just get too greedy or is this simply the way the Wall Street economy works — barracuda capitalism, so called? Or is what’s happening in Puerto Rico the inheritance of colonialism?

Bonilla: That’s an important question and something that really needs to be thought about carefully because there are so many contributors. We like to write simple articles that show simple causality, but you have wealthy folks like this investment manager, who is Puerto Rican, contributing to the situation. You have politicians — we see this in every disaster — you have politicians who are more focused on photo ops and political capital than they are really in doing what needs to be done in these moments.

I think one thing that has been really problematic in Puerto Rico is the way that the political parties are organized. They’re organized around the relationship to the United States. So some folks describe this as a kind of left/right political spectrum with independence on the left, statehood on the right and advocates of commonwealth status fashioning themselves as a kind of centrist party. There’s some truth in this description but it’s complicated because within the statehood party you have folks who are progressive, who supported Bernie Sanders, for example. You have folks who see statehood as a form of decolonization, who see it as the possibility of greater solidarity with continental US minority groups. Similarly, even though there is a very progressive pro-independence sector, when you look at what nationalist elites have brought to other Caribbean nations, and the kind of racial and economic disparities that characterize independent nations across the Americas, one can see that independence is not a guarantee of progressive politics.

My hope is that because this is such a deep political crisis, it will generate more than a banal optimism that simply says “Oh, let’s build better,” and stops there. I hope that it will lead to a profound grass-roots social movement — a movement of people sick of the government and sick of the limits of the political relationship that Puerto Rico has with the United States, which produced a delayed response by Washington to the devastation after the last hurricane.

Perhaps right now, when people feel so exposed, so left out in the rain, literally, by the US government, we might get a push for a political change.

Moyers: The journalist Kate Aronoff reminds us Puerto Rico suffered from two massive storms many years ago, one in 1928 that is still considered the second deadliest natural disaster in US history, and another in 1932 that killed over 250 people and destroyed more than 40,000 buildings. Between those two disasters the stock market collapsed and Puerto Ricans were knocked off their feet, like so many others. But they got up and with the help of the New Deal, they came back. What do you see as the path to recovery now?

Bonilla: I’m so excited you brought up those two storms. Indeed, the enactment of the New Deal and the assistance the United States was able to provide Puerto Rico at that time paved the way for the establishment of the commonwealth status. At that time many Puerto Ricans felt the new relationship with the United States would be good for them. Not only because it happened as the New Deal grappled with the Great Depression but it happened at a moment when Puerto Rico had the strongest momentum in terms of the nationalist movement. In addition, the storm totally wiped out local crops and devastated farmers. As a result they were encouraged to sell their lands to the US government and to US corporations, which is part of why we ended up where we are now, importing most of our food on these very expensive ships — we no longer have food sovereignty.

With this current storm I have been wondering if this will be a moment in which, as the farmers did back then, we will just sell everything off and privatize the rest of what we have. However, here’s where the US government’s response and Trump’s response could lead in a completely different direction if people realize that that United States does not in fact see us as part of the nation, does not see us as full Americans worthy of aid, does not think that our lives matter, literally. When Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast, Trump quickly suspended the Jones Act so that oil could be supplied to the pipelines; he did it immediately. After Irma hit Puerto Rico, however, it took eight days for the president to even consider suspending it, and he only did so for ten days, for an island completely dependent on importing its food. I think this has made it really clear for Puerto Ricans where they stand in terms of US priorities.

 

The key to Mueller’s investigation of Trump

(Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and his team have big advantage in the Washington debate about the story of the Trump campaign and the Russian government: a wellspring of new evidence gathered by the FBI and the NSA, with warrants approved by the federal courts.

Mueller & Co, can leak selected tidbits to shape the story of their investigation, and they do.

Mainstream media news organizations cultivate this relationship. Aggressive reporting, artfully assisted by leaks from Mueller’s lieutenants, are driving the story of the apparent collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in the 2016 election.

1) The Perpetrators

Indictments are coming, says Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. A former federal prosecutor, Blumen that told Politico this week he was “99 percent”sure that Mueller would file charges against  former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Blumenthal’s assessment was based on details of the FBI raid on Manfort’s northern Virginia home in late July. To obtain the search warrant, the FBI agents had to present evidence to judge that that Manafort had lied and destroyed evidence and might do so again. They got the warrant.

Last week two of Flynn’s siblings announced that they had formed a legal-defense fund for their brother whose lawyers’ fees are already “well into the seven figures,” his brother Joe told Fox News on Monday.

Flynn’s probelms are mounting. In March, he registered with the government as a foreign agent,  a tacit concession that he had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Even Trump apologist Alan Dershowitz has predicted that Flynn will “probably be indicted”

2) The Crimes:

Mueller has let it be known that he is pursuing charges of obstruction of justice, money laundering, making false statements, and possibly even treason.

On September 20 the Times reported Mueller is seeking documentation about a meeting Trump had in May with Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after he fired FBI director james Comey.  Trump met with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, along with other Russian officials. In the meeting Mr. Trump had said that firing Mr. Comey relieved “great pressure.”

Manafort was one Trump’s original conduits to the Russians. His  name turned up in financial ledgers of Ukrainian president and oligarch Victor Yanukovych for whom he served as a political consultant in 2010. The ledgers (whose authenticity Manafort has disputed) identified 22 payments adding up to $12 million.

As NBC News reported in May, federal officials say that the money Manafort earned from both the party and the oligarchs — and what he did with it — are drawing the attention of investigators. In particular, Manafort advised a Ukrainian political party accused of threatening US Marines and spoiling an international military exercise in 2011.

This raises the possibility of charges of treason or violation of the Logan Act, forbidding U.S. citizens from negotiating with foreign governments that have a dispute with the U.S. government.

3) The Motive

Why did Trump’s people do what they do?

Last week, the Washington Post provided a possible answer: Manafort wanted to get a Russian oligarch off his back and Putin helped him.

“Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman [Manafor] offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin,” the Post reported.

That was oligarch Oleg Deripaska. In another e-mail, the Post reported, Manafort seemed to suggest that he could leverage his new role running Trump’s campaign to settle his multimillion dollars debts with Deripaska

Putin clearly wanted access to Trump and wanted to help him. The emails released in June by Don Trump Jr. show that a Putin emissary informed Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner about “the Russian government’s support for your campaign.”

4) The Means

What was the nature of the Russian support?

The short answer, it is now clear, is secret assistance in the social media space.

Back in July McClatchy News reported Mueller’s investigators “are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton.”

The Trump campaign’s digital operations were overseen by Kushner.

Now corroborating details are emerging. Facebook disclosed that Russian entitites had bought more than 3,000 politically charged ads estimated at $150,000 on its platform during key periods of the presidential campaign. Facebook also linked the ads to a controversial Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency.

While $150,000 is a pittance in a U.S. presidential campaign, a pittance in social media fabrication can yield an enormous political payoff. One fake news story, concocted by a Trump supporter with no Russian connections, reached 6 million people.It cost exactly $5 to produce.

So the Trump campaign gained a blitz of untraceable digital attack ads targeted at motivating Trump voters and discouraging Democratic turnout in key swing states ignored by Hillary Clinton.

One Russian account, reports the Daily Beast

pushed memes that claimed Hillary Clinton admitted the U.S. “created, funded and armed” al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State; claimed that John McCain was ISIS’s true founder; whitewashed blood-drenched dictator Moammar Gadhafi and praised him for not having a “Rothschild-owned central bank”; and falsely alleged Osama bin Laden was a “CIA agent.”

The targeted ads sought to disarms Democrats. Bernie Sanders supporters were encouraged to vote for Jill Stein. Clinton supporters were discouraged from turning out And so on

Whether this digital blitz had impact remains to be seen. But for now, we know the key elements of Mueller’s investigation: the perps, the crimes, the motive and the means.

And there is more to come.

How dangerous people get their weapons in America

FILE - In this Jan. 19, 2016 file photo, handguns are displayed at the Smith & Wesson booth at the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show in Las Vegas. (Credit: AP)

The recent mass shooting in Las Vegas that left dozens of people dead and hundreds injured raises two important questions: How do dangerous people get their guns? And what should the police and courts be doing to make those transactions more difficult?

The fact is that, even leaving aside the assault in Las Vegas and terrorist attacks like the one in San Bernardino, California, in 2015, gun violence is becoming almost routine in many American neighborhoods. The U.S. homicide rate increased more than 20 percent from 2014 to 2016, while last year’s 3.4 percent rise in the violent crime rate was the largest single-year gain in 25 years.

The guns carried and misused by youths, gang members and active criminals are more likely than not obtained by transactions that violate federal or state law. And, as I’ve learned from my decades of researching the topic, it is rare for the people who provide these guns to the eventual shooters to face any legal consequences.

How can this illicit market be policed more effectively?

Undocumented and unregulated transactions

The vast majority of gun owners say they obtained their weapons in transactions that are documented and for the most part legal.

When asked where and how they acquired their most recent firearm, about 64 percent of a cross-section of American gun owners reported buying it from a gun store, where the clerk would have conducted a background check and documented the transfer in a permanent record required by federal law. Another 14 percent were transferred in some other way but still involved a background check. The remaining 22 percent said they got their guns without a background check.

The same is not true for criminals, however, most of whom obtain their guns illegally.

A transaction can be illegal for several reasons, but of particular interest are transactions that involve disqualified individuals – those banned from purchase or possession due to criminal record, age, adjudicated mental illness, illegal alien status or some other reason. Convicted felons, teenagers and other people who are legally barred from possession would ordinarily be blocked from purchasing a gun from a gun store because they would fail the background check or lack the permit or license required by some states.

Anyone providing the gun in such transactions would be culpable if he or she had reason to know that the buyer was disqualified, was acting as a straw purchaser or if had violated state regulations pertaining to such private transactions.

The importance of the informal (undocumented) market in supplying criminals is suggested by the results of inmate surveys and data gleaned from guns confiscated by the police. A national survey of inmates of state prisons found that just 10 percent of youthful (age 18-40) male respondents who admitted to having a gun at the time of their arrest had obtained it from a gun store. The other 90 percent obtained them through a variety of off-the-book means: for example, as gifts or sharing arrangements with fellow gang members.

Similarly, an ongoing study of how Chicago gang members get their guns has found that only a trivial percentage obtained them by direct purchase from a store. To the extent that gun dealers are implicated in supplying dangerous people, it is more so by accommodating straw purchasers and traffickers than in selling directly to customers they know to be disqualified.

The supply chain of guns to crime

While criminals typically do not buy their guns at a store, all but a tiny fraction of those in circulation in the United States are first sold at retail by a gun dealer – including the guns that eventually end up in the hands of criminals.

That first retail sale was most likely legal, in that the clerk followed federal and state requirements for documentation, a background check and record-keeping. While there are scofflaw dealers who sometimes make under-the-counter deals, that is by no means the norm.

If a gun ends up in criminal use, it is usually after several more transactions. The average age of guns taken from Chicago gangs is over 11 years.

The gun at that point has been diverted from legal commerce. In this respect, the supply chain for guns is similar to that for other products that have a large legal market but are subject to diversion.

In the case of guns, diversion from licit possession and exchange can occur in a variety of ways: theft, purchase at a gun show by an interstate trafficker, private sales where no questions are asked, straw purchases by girlfriends and so forth.

What appears to be true is that there are few big operators in this domain. The typical trafficker or underground broker is not making a living that way but rather just making a few dollars on the side. The supply chain for guns used in crime bears little relationship to the supply chain for heroin or cocaine and is much more akin to that for cigarettes and beer that are diverted to underage teenagers.

There have been few attempts to estimate the scope or scale of the underground market, in part because it is not at all clear what types of transactions should be included. But for the sake of having some order-of-magnitude estimate, suppose we just focus on the number of transactions each year that supply the guns actually used in robbery or assault.

There are about 500,000 violent crimes committed with a gun each year. If the average number of times that an offender commits a robbery or assault with a particular gun is twice, then (assuming patterns of criminal gun use remain constant) the total number of transactions of concern is 250,000 per year.

Actually, no one knows the average number of times a specific gun is used by an offender who uses it at least once. If it is more than twice, then there are even fewer relevant transactions.

That compares with total sales volume by licensed dealers, which is upwards of 20 million per year.

All in the family

So how do gang members, violent criminals, underage youths and other dangerous people get their guns?

A consistent answer emerges from the inmate surveys and from ethnographic studies. Whether guns that end up being used in crime are purchased, swapped, borrowed, shared or stolen, the most likely source is someone known to the offender, an acquaintance or family member.

For example, Syed Rizwan Farook – one of the shooters in San Bernardino – relied on a friend to get several of the rifles and pistols he used because Farook doubted that he could pass a background check. That a friend and neighbor was the source is quite typical, despite the unique circumstances otherwise.

Also important are “street” sources, such as gang members and drug dealers, which may also entail a prior relationship. Thus, social networks play an important role in facilitating transactions, and an individual (such as a gang member) who tends to hang out with people who have guns will find it relatively easy to obtain one.

Effective policing of the underground gun market could help to separate guns from everyday violent crime. Currently it is rare for those who provide guns to offenders to face any legal consequences, and changing that situation will require additional resources to penetrate the social networks of gun offenders.

Needless to say, that effort is not cheap or easy and requires that both the police and the courts have the necessary authority and give this sort of gun enforcement high priority.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Jan. 15, 2016.

How Harlem residents found a unique way to fight gentrification

In this July 28, 2016 photo, people walk by the Renaissance Fine Art gallery and Long Gallery in New York's Harlem neighborhood. The neighborhood already is home to about a dozen galleries. In the fall it's getting two more, transplants from Lower Manhattan. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) (Credit: AP)

Ten years ago, East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem, was a vibrant, predominantly Latin American neighborhood. People from Puerto Rico and Mexico lived there, as well as people hailing from Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and the Dominican Republic. African Americans lived there too, and there was a population of elderly Italian Americans. White Americans made up about 3% of the population. Almost all of the residents — even in the single-family, owner-occupied late-19th century townhouses on sleepy Pleasant Avenue — were working class.

But the last 10 years have seen significant development take hold. Where multiple generations of diverse families had called East Harlem home, upwardly mobile young white people have started moving into — and then moving out of — the neighborhood. Often, it’s said on the street, they leave because of the neighborhood’s proximity to NYCHA housing and its black and brown tenants — East Harlem is home to the largest concentration of public housing in the city of New York.

This upwardly mobile transient class has been steadily driving up rents. While a two-bedroom in 2007 could be found for $1500 a month or less, today two bedrooms start at about $2500 a month. A Costco, Home Depot, Target, and an Applebee’s have moved into an old vacant lot off Pleasant Avenue, making the once-quiet neighborhood with small local businesses loud with traffic and people from outside the neighborhood. Franchises are replacing the family business storefronts. Other vacant lots, and single-family homes, have been purchased and developed, with modern condo buildings rising in their place.

With this influx of people and franchises, the old neighborhood is losing its architecture, its history and its culture.

Now a group of concerned citizens is taking action to preserve the neighborhood’s vibrant Latin American spirit. While many are also involved in local coalitions and demonstrations, and are vocally expressing their opposition to the city’s rezoning plans that would further gentrify the neighborhood, Landmark East Harlem is working quietly and methodically, seeking historic district and landmark status on properties across the neighborhood.

Kathy Benson is a founding member of the group, whose purpose is to give the community an ongoing voice in how the neighborhood is developed, and to support development that preserves its unique cultural and historic significance.

“We’re more proactive than reactive,” Benson explains. “We didn’t form because we knew rezoning was happening. We came together because we knew [historic and cultural preservation] was important.”

But there is an added benefit to their work: If a building is on the state or national register, or if it’s in process with the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), “It gives us some level of protection. So if a developer is looking at a site, and thinking about tearing it down, it will cause the developer to find a different site, or to renovate the interior rather than tear it down. There are lots and lots of buildings we don’t want to lose. They have architectural and cultural significance.”

“It’s a lengthy process,” she adds, pointing to St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church on East 117th Street. “The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s first public hearing on the building took place in 1966, and only one organization testified on its behalf. It then got pushed farther and farther down the list of properties to be considered for landmark status and wasn’t subject to another public hearing until 2015, when it attracted much more support. It was finally designated in June 2016.”

Had Landmark East Harlem or a similar organization been around earlier, St. Paul’s might have been landmarked years ago, Benson says, as they could have rallied the community to testify at the hearings: “Much of our work involves educating the community about landmarking as a way to preserve the neighborhood . . . to inform the people of East Harlem that there are officially designated landmarks in their neighborhood and that there is a chance that more buildings and even clusters of buildings that they care about can be preserved with their support.”

If the Landmarks Preservation Commission thinks a property merits consideration, it goes on a list, and then people in the neighborhood are able to testify on behalf of landmarking. Currently there are only 22 designated historic buildings in the neighborhood, and no historic district.

One of the sites Landmark East Harlem is seeking status for is the former Banca Commerciale Italiana on Second Avenue and 116th St., a property that sat vacant for years, but now houses a 7-Eleven. They are also seeking historic status for seven brick houses across from the Harlem Court House, at least one of which, according to local lore, was populated by working girls who serviced the courthouse judges.

And they are seeking historic status for Taino Towers, a federal housing complex completed in 1976 that’s comprised of four 35-story towers, each named for a different Taino leader. The complex “came out of the great society and war on poverty,” says Benson, and was, at the time, “called luxury housing for the poor.”

The group is also working to nominate areas for historic district status on state and national historic registers. “It takes quite a bit of research,” says Benson. “You need to know the owner of every single property within a district, and then the state sends out a letter to every single owner explaining that their building is situated in a nominated historic district.”

The process on the city level is similarly long for historic districts. “The Historic Districts Council told us that it would take at least 10 years. On the state/national level, the process does not usually take as long, but the research involved is similarly detailed and time-consuming. For city, state and national designation, the owner of the building must be in favor of landmarking/historic district designation,” though Benson notes there is a petition process to landmark a building over an owner’s objections.

The advantage to landmarking — aside from preserving cultural heritage and putting developers on hold for what could be years — is that a building’s exterior is preserved and renovations must adhere to the original look. Though a building’s owner might see that as disadvantageous, to a community that wants its space preserved, it is meaningful.

A potential problem, however, is when the LPC drags its heels.

“The Landmarks Preservation Commission has not done anything to advance any landmarking proposals in advance of rezoning,” says Chris Cirillo, executive director of Lott Community Development. Cirillo points to other, whiter neighborhoods where LPC “landmarked some buildings to protect them” before they were rezoned for further development.

An LPC spokesperson says they are “continuing to study the area in conjunction with the rezoning proposal to identify eligible properties for future consideration.”

Kathy Benson stresses that Landmark East Harlem also wants “to call the attention of the city, state and national preservation entities to the other architectural, historical, and cultural treasures of the neighborhood. And we want developers to be aware that we value the look and feel of the neighborhood as it is, that we are actively seeking to preserve its treasures, and that we invite well-designed, contextual new development that will enhance rather than destroy the community we love.”

And that labor of love might just help preserve what is still a vibrant community.

“Resistant to meaning”: CNN, Fox & MSNBC struggle with a story that defies the coverage pattern

(Credit: FOX News)

The problem is that Stephen Paddock didn’t fit the pattern.

Paddock was not brown or black, had no obvious affiliations with any political movements, religious groups or terrorist organizations.

Paddock was not a member of an economically or culturally marginalized group. He was 64, white, retired, a millionaire with no criminal record — not even a traffic ticket, cable news viewers were told time and again throughout the day on Monday.

Paddock lacked the usual Internet trail as far as the media could discern — no Facebook page, no Twitter threads, no obvious postings to message boards or participation in threads. His neighbors describe him as quiet. His own brother says he sent their mother massive boxes of cookies.

No stranger to the Las Vegas strip, Paddock was a high stakes gambler. Yet headlines declaring him to be “no angel” or speaking to a “checkered history” did not emerge on Monday. He legally obtained at least some of the 23 firearms recovered from his hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, as well as the 19 additional weapons found at his home 81 miles way in Mesquite, Nevada.

As of Tuesday evening nobody knows the reason why Paddock pointed a series of automatic or modified semi-automatic rifles at a crowd of some 22,000 people attending a country music concert on Sunday night, raining hundreds of bullets down on them at a furious clip. And in the first day of coverage, reporters and pundits on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel were visibly  flummoxed by this mystery.

“I wish I can tell you this is the last time I’m ever going to report to you about the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, but I cannot tell you that,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper, as he opened Monday’s telecast of “The Lead.”  “I wish I could report that lawmakers are huddling right now to try to figure out how to do everything they constitutionally can to keep these weapons of mass murder out of the hands of violently insane individuals who will use them to harm innocent people.  But they are not doing that.”

Tapper conveyed his frustration evenly and with a reasonable level of frustration at having to walk through the beats of an all-too-familiar tragedy. But that was early in the day, and Tapper is a journalist.

Contrast this with Sean Hannity’s “very, very important” opening monologue for his Monday night Fox show, which predictably informed us that “the left has no shame!” before ranting about NBC’s Tom Brokaw, a tweet Hillary Clinton shared about silencers, and a CBS employee’s idiotic and heartless post that rightfully got her fired. The actions of a single criminal should not affect millions of gun owners, but the statements of these and others portray the viewers of the opportunistic left. “The media, Democrats, have rushed to politicize this tragedy in an absolutely despicable display,” Hannity brayed. “ . . . Shameful!”

At least some aspects of a mass shooting can be forced to fit the pattern.

Early coverage followed the structure as one would expect, revealing details as they emerged and pausing respectfully to convey the miserable toll upon Las Vegas and the 59 families who lost loved ones. But from there. . . well, MSNBC’s “Christopher Hayes aptly summed up the challenges presented by the case, saying “the fact pattern of today . . . feels like an earthquake or a tsunami, in some ways, because it’s resistant to meaning.”

He went on to explain that if Paddock were connected to ISIS, a rumor law enforcement officials refuted after the group initially claimed responsibility, “there’s a neat conceptual category, there’s a sense of political rhetoric, and there’s going to be a bunch of people saying, ‘This is what we have to do to defeat ISIS.’”

ISIS, or any other terrorist organization, would have made unraveling Paddock’s motivation so much simpler. The 24-hour news cycle knows exactly what to do with mass murders committed in the name of terrorism, even when the allegiance of the perpetrator does not fall under the government’s definition of terrorism. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for her part, spoke with New York Times reporter Rukmini Maria Callimachi and at that time did not rule out the involvement of ISIS.

Even if he is found to be part of the organization, however men like Paddock are still “lone wolves,” anomalies. A quiet guy who listened to country music. People of color who are extremists, you see, impugn the motives of entire groups of people.

Authorities have questions about how much Paddock’s girlfriend Marilou Danley knows. She was overseas while her lover was committing mass murder in Vegas. She’s also a Filipino-born Australian. On Monday Greg Gutfeld of Fox News’ show “The Five” wondered aloud if she could be connected to ISIS, but reporter Trace Gallagher knocked the wind out of that musing right away.

We will never know if Gutfeld would have asked that if Danley had resembled Nicole Kidman.

But give him credit for attempting to follow the pattern. He simply wanted to build the perpetrator’s profile in the way he’s been taught by, for example,  gleaning details from social media postings. Such things are instrumental in helping pundits create narratives that are often partially fictionalized at first. All Danley’s Facebook page indicates is that she photographs well and was very comfortable with telling the world how much she loves being a grandma (Mind you, this was before authorities learned Paddock wired $100,000 to the Philippines a week ago).

In the midst of this, profiles of heroes emerge reminding us of the human capacity for courage and generosity in the midst of violence and chaos. This is a necessary and welcome part of Monday’s coverage avalanche which, for much of the day, consisted of montages of chilling cell phone footage taken by survivors while fleeing for their lives. The audible tat-tat-tat of rapid rifle fire served as background noise as survivors such as Russell Bleck calmly recounted his experience to news outlets.  “It was a battle zone,” he told Fox News’ Shepard Smith, “like nothing you can even process in your brain.”’

Another survivor, Bryan Hopkins, remembered turning to a friend with whom he hid in a freezer and saying, “Everything is going to be OK.” To which his friend replied, “No, it’s not.”

Usually psychologists are called upon to make snap diagnoses about the killer’s “mindset” but, being a rich white guy with no record of psychological instability, forensics specialists and security experts pulled the weight of recreating the logistical how and why of the event.

By mid-afternoon it became obvious that such enlightenment was not forthcoming, leading cable news to skip along to the stage with which they’re most comfortable: partisan screaming matches.

Fox News gamboled through the pattern’s checkpoints at a predictable clip, beginning with Smith’s even-keeled reporting the details of the event as they emerge, adding at one point, “So, many of you appear to be dabbling in conspiracy theories on this. The FBI is warning us they believe there is one shooter. And he is dead.”

From there Fox seeded the field for rancor as Dana Perino echoed Sarah Huckabee-Sanders’ declaration that resurfacing the need to discuss gun control hours after the worst mass shooting in modern history was inappropriate.  Fox even procured a “good guy with a gun” spokesmodel in Big & Rich performer John Rich, who told the story of handing his gun to an unarmed off-duty Minneapolis police officer who was a patron at his bar, Redneck Riviera. Rich said the officer asked him if he was carrying, “I have my concealed weapons permit and I said, ‘Yes, I am armed.’ He said, ‘Can I have your firearm so I can hold point on this front door?'”

This came up again during “The Five” as Jesse Watters screamed down Juan Williams’ attempt to broach gun control . . . but only after suggesting that perhaps, in the future, snipers should be posted on the perimeter of events with large crowds.

This, at least, fits a pattern the pundits have down cold. When all else fails, stir up divisions and use the blunders of a few to tar wide swaths of people on the opposite side of the political divide.

The nightmarish crime Paddock committed upon the families and friends of the 59 dead and 527 wounded, and our collective sense of safety, is the top story regardless of the tenor supplemental coverage takes. But without that pattern the media was left shrugging or vamping, in the cases of CNN and MSNBC, or in Fox’s case, attacking with increasing levels of ire and absurdity.

On MSNBC Rachel Maddow launched into her program wearing an expression of vexed frustration as she listed the large number of gun shows in the Las Vegas area, a segment that would be alarming to anyone unfamiliar with Vegas and Nevada’s general atmosphere of loose regulations and excess. “Maybe there was a gun show around now,” she said after asking how Paddock was able to bring “an armory’s worth of high-powered rifles into a civilian space like a hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Casino.”

“ . . . It’s a reasonable line of inquiry, from a distance, until you look at real gun culture and the what it’s manifest in a place like this.” It made for an unnerving entry into her show and is precisely the kind of reporting that drives some gun owners crazy.

On the other hand, tracing the plunge in empathy and civility from the beginning of the day to “Hannity” really is an incredible journey. We could start, perhaps, with NBC News’ anchor emeritus Tom Brokaw stating the obvious about our refusal to have a meaningful national dialogue “that we can have in a calm and reasonable way” about gun control on “Today.”

Brokaw, who led with saying, he has owned guns all of his life, said “No other Western nation has the number of gun deaths that we have in America, and we need to talk about it.

He went on to add, “We can’t have that conversation because it immediately becomes so emotional between the gun owners of America who are protected by the NRA, and other people who are saying there ought to be a more reasonable middle ground. I’m a gun owner. I’ve got a closet full of ‘em in Montana, but I don’t have one of the AR-15s. I don’t need ‘em, because I’m not going to be shooting that kind of thing. But almost all my friends out there have that kind of weapon.”

Cut to Tucker Carlson later in the day: While speaking to Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, who declared he doesn’t believe in gun control, he asked, “We don’t even know the basic answers to the questions of why this happened. Does it seem a little premature to you to wade right into a complex debate like gun control within hours of this happening?”

Cuellar agreed, of course, pointing out that such carnage — inflicted on hundreds of people from a man 32 floors up and many yards in the distance — could have been inflicted by a plane, a knife truck . . . “Or,” Carlson helpfully pipes in, “a pressure cooker.”

Conservative commentator Tammy Bruce added her two cents to the pile by guessing that the problem could very well be prescription drugs. Which she doesn’t know, of course, but it’s definitely not guns, which nobody should be talking about. “It immediately divides,” she said of the gun control debate.

At one point Carlson said to Cuellar, “It’s just when people come out immediately after an event like this, without knowing any of the facts, it suggest to the rest of us that they’ve been kind of waiting for the opportunity to push a pre-existing agenda on the country, and it makes people really nervous. Can you see why?”

Yes. It makes people who peddle division for ratings very nervous, especially when their pre-existing agenda cannot handily explain why a wealthy man who fits their target viewer demographic would arbitrarily commit mass carnage on American soil.

Carlson went on to observe that there’s something going on in American society that’s leading to these happening with more frequency. It has nothing to do with “guns,” he said, but it has everything to do with attitudes.

“This is exactly what Americans are tired of,” Bruce said.

Certainly not the far-too-frequent wall-to-wall, predictably structured coverage of mass shooting

Honor the victims of Las Vegas by taking on the NRA

People scramble for shelter after gunfire at a country music festival on October 1, 2017. (Credit: Getty/David Becker)

On Sunday night, a gunman in Vegas opened fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas, and injuring more than 515 others. In response, President Donald Trump addressed the nation saying, “In times such as these I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness. The answers do not come easy. But we can take solace knowing that even the darkest space can be brightened by a single light, and even the most terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.”

The statement was kind of poetic from a monosyllabic guy who is usually the exact opposite. I’d never question Trump’s ability to empathize, even after his harsh Puerto Rico comments. But his message was off. We don’t need poems right now; we need action.

Paul Ryan also released a tweet that was just as, if not more, ineffective as the statement from the White House.

“America woke up to heartbreaking news from Las Vegas. We stand united in our shock, our condolences, & our prayers.”

America woke up to heartbreaking news from Las Vegas. We stand united in our shock, our condolences, & our prayers. https://t.co/dKqjJqPIpu pic.twitter.com/B67cklsBkS

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) October 2, 2017

Poetic statements, tweets and prayers are not going to solve any problems. There are too many people on Capitol Hill and around the White House too scared to take a firm stance against senseless gun violence, introduce policy or do anything more than run their mouths. When will they wake up? When will they stand up to the biggest impediment to tougher gun laws in this country: The National Rifle Association?

And exactly where is the NRA anyway?

For an organization that says it wants guns everywhere, an event like this results in little pushback.

Whenever these mass shootings occur, the gun lobby doesn’t do anything of substance. There are the empty statements omitting their role in the tragedies and ignoring that the victims died at the hands of that which the NRA loves so much: the guns purchased at the shows they promoted, showcased on their social media and celebrated as a part of their culture.

But then, the NRA gets defensive when someone talks about tougher gun laws, telling people to not be so hasty, while using the same tired arguments about hunting and protecting their families. To them I ask: What are your families doing that’s so extreme you need guns for protection, especially if you live in the middle of America? Hunters and recreational shooters don’t need semi-automatic weapons. Gun owners who ignore these horrific events are a part of the problem.

Yes, I do understand that all gun owners aren’t participating in mass shootings, but too many are happening. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have already been over 270 mass shootings in America this year. (The site defines mass shooting as four or more individuals being shot or killed at the same general time and location.) It’s way too easy to shoot someone these days.

Here’s where the NRA’s favorite talking point falls short: Even if everyone were armed at the festival, this shooting could not have been prevented, because no one knew where the bullets were coming from.

Trump and Ryan — and every other politician who refuses to challenge the NRA and gun culture in general — will forever have blood on their hands for not trying to stop the NRA.

They can keep their prayers and well wishes to themselves, because that won’t bring back any of the people we lost.