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Much-vaunted “Internet Trends Report” drops: A glimpse at how Silicon Valley sees the world

Getty/Mike Windle

Do you work in Silicon Valley? Do you know who Mary Meeker is?

If the answer is “no” on both fronts, you can probably be forgiven for your ignorance. For those within the tech industry, however, the annual slide deck from the soothsaying analyst and investor is the Silicon Valley equivalent of Moses reading from the stone tablets handed down from God.

Meeker presents an annual “Internet Trends Report” at ReCode's Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, an event that is closely followed by those in the industry; in their eyes, "Mary Meeker seems to be somewhere between Alan Greenspan when he was running the Federal Reserve and an ancient Greek oracle," as former Salon writer Scott Timberg opined. ReCode called it “the most highly anticipated slide deck in Silicon Valley” and, along with numerous other outlets, reported on its more salient details.

Meeker, it should be noted, is the consummate Silicon Valley insider. A partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Meeker has a vested financial interest in depicting the state of the tech industry as rosy, its intentions as inherently good and government regulation as inherently suspicious.

At casual glance, Meeker’s slide deck — which you can view in full here — is perhaps most notable for its positivity; most of the graphs are going upward, in exponential or linear fashion. Everything is great and everything is growing — well, almost everything. Graphs of anything government-related look sour in Meekerville. Some graph-free slides consist merely of buzzy business-speak argot, single words in a series: “Devices / Access / Simplicity / Payments / Local” etc. It's the kind of stuff that impresses the kind of people who think Steve Jobs was deep.

In any case, it’s worth noting that Meeker's data is cherry-picked; many of the growth curves are for companies that are currently at the top of their markets. Shopify’s active merchants may have an exponential growth curve, and Spotify’s user-base growth looks linear, but we have to ask: Why not include MySpace’s year-to-year active user base for context? Or HomeJoy’s?

But Meeker knows her audience, and that’s part of the point. The Meeker slide deck spectacle is for the VCs and founders who have imbibed the Californian Ideology — what Salon writer Jason Rhode called “the religious creed of Silicon Valley,” and specifically the idea that “the machines would fix everything,” in his words:

Tech is an ideology, although it pretends not to be. Tech is how you get a world obsessed with managerialism, with process over vision. Above all, tech privileges. And so, in the land of California, the paradise to the West, the powerful used the oldest trick in the book: disguising the interests of a few people as the law of nature.

It’s a pretty good summary of Meeker’s slide deck, honestly.

With those enormous caveats out of the way, it’s fair to say that Meeker’s Internet Trends Report talk is, if nothing else, a collection of moderately interesting and generally reliable data points — which, despite being presented in a manner scientifically designed to reassure rich people that they deserve to be rich, still offer some salient details on the state of our digital world. After all, Meeker is a venture capitalist, and VCs need accurate data and good research to know where and how to make their money.

If there's one overarching meta-theme to Meeker’s deck this year, it was, to paraphrase our president, China, China, China. Meeker called eyes to “China’s rising intensity & leadership in Internet-related markets.” To wit: almost 600 million Chinese use mobile payments systems; China is the No. 1 market in the world for online gaming; and Chinese Amazon-equivalent Alibaba is coming closer to matching Amazon in terms of its market capitalization.

Probably the most-reported point from the deck was Meeker's note that the number of Internet users worldwide — 3.6 billion — now represents fully one-half of the planet's population. She surmises this is a reason that smartphone sales aren’t increasing, as the market has been saturated.

Meeker also cites research that daily digital media consumption has hit a high of 5.9 hours per adult user. That sounds high, given that there are only 16 waking hours in a day, but the fine print explains that this data includes “home and work,” so perhaps people like me who are online for eight-plus hours a day at work are skewing the average.

Here's another stat I didn’t know previously: the average Facebook user is worth $34 a year to the company. All those little micro-labor actions you do, from liking to viewing to commenting, are helping make money for Mark Zuckerberg's company. So congratulations to all the unpaid employees — er, users— of Facebook. I guess.

If you want to read through Meeker's entire deck and make your own investment decisions (or whatever), you can find it here.

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Meghan McCain slams White House: “This is not an administration that’s capable of apologizing”

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Meghan McCain blasted President Donald Trump on Thursday, accusing him of attacking her father, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has been battling an aggressive form of brain cancer for nearly a year, in an effort to divert from his own political woes.

"Since the beginning of Trump's campaign there have been extremely personal attacks on my family, on my father," the younger McCain said on ABC's "The View" on Thursday.

"It's really good politics that they're doing right now," she added. "Because they are trying to change the narrative . . . not talking about all the other bad things that are going on . . . It's a real way to gaslight the American public to not focus on the real issues that we should be focusing on."

McCain's comments come two days after Trump slammed her father at a political rally in Nashville, and less than three weeks after White House aide Kelly Sadler disparaged the ailing senator's opinions because he is "dying anyway."

In Nashville, Trump galvanized his audience by firing at the terminally ill senator for his vote last year against a bill that killed the president's hope to repeal and replace Obamacare.

"We had it done folks. It was done, and then early in the morning, somebody turned their hand in the wrong direction," said Trump. "The person that voted that way only talked repeal and replace. He campaigned on it."

Though Trump didn't mention McCain by name, the crowd understood his reference.

"There were boos," Meghan McCain said. "It was elicited by President Trump at the rally."

President Trump and the Arizona senator have had a contentious relationship, but the president had been mum about his political adversary since Sadler's comment was reported earlier this month.

Meghan McCain said Sadler backtracked on a promise to apologize.

"I was promised an apology by Kelly Sadler publicly to my family. I did not receive that," said "The View" co-host, who typically defends Republicans and conservatives on the show. "This is not an administration that's capable of apologizing."

Sadler's comments angered lawmakers on both sides of the political spectrum. Although she was not fired, the White House declined to renounce or publicly apologize for the aide's remark. Instead, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders expressed concern about the leaking of the conversation, which was made during a closed-door meeting.

"I'm not going to validate a leak one way or the other out of an internal staff meeting," Sanders said. When asked why she would not simply apologize to McCain, she said, "I'm not going to get into a back and forth because, you know, people want to create issues of leaked staff meetings."

McCain's friends have previously told the White House that the Arizona Republican does not want President Trump to attend his funeral, and would like Vice President Mike Pence to come instead.

“Child abuse by government”: How child-parent separation at the border is traumatizing kids

AP/Hans-Maximo Musielik

President Trump and his administration acolytes have made it crystal clear that immigrants, refugees — pretty much any human who doesn't fit with their thin, racialized doctrine of acceptability — aren't welcome in the United States. That includes migrant children seeking refuge from an unlivable situation.

Earlier this week a report surfaced that the US Department of Health and Human Services had lost track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children. This was not precisely true; the US Department of Health and Human Services could not conduct thorough follow-ups with 1,500 of 7,635 undocumented minors who were unaccompanied when they crossed the border because their case sponsors were unreachable.

Regardless, the reports brought attention to the issue of undocumented minors and the ways that customs officials treat them, an issue that previously came to public attention in April when Jeff Sessions implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that set to criminally prosecute anyone who failed to cross the border at an official entry port.

Sessions' policy did not require to separate families at the border, but his zero-policy rule, in essence, unofficially mandates it. Thus, the Trump Administration has subtly weaponized the idea of familial separation to install fear in undocumented immigrants. This has led to a surge in family separations. The Washington Post reported there has been a 21 percent increase over the last month of migrant children held in U.S. government custody without their parents.

Politics aside, the fact is children are being separated from their parents in abrupt and injurious ways. In a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union recently filed against the government, a woman from El Salvador recalled the day her children were taken from her in March 2018.

“I was given only five minutes to say goodbye,” she wrote. “My babies started crying when they found out we were going to be separated.”

“In tears myself, I asked my boys to be brave, and I promised we would be together soon. I begged the woman who took my children to keep them together so they could at least have each other.”

There are many legitimate reasons why the government may separate a young child and their parents: sudden death of the parents or child abuse, to name a few possibilities. Yet when child mistreatment is instigated by the government, one that claims to care about children’s rights and well-being, it is worth questioning the government’s ethics. Indeed, substantial research has shown that early separation can cause severe psychological harm to a child.

Irwin Redlener, president emeritus of Children’s Health Fund and a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told Salon that new research over the last 10 to 15 years has shown that the impact of toxic stress can extend beyond psychological consequences. Redlener explained that when someone is stressed (a child or infant) stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released.

If experienced for a short period of time, that is a normal response: It is the body’s way of telling the brain that something dangerous is happening. Yet when experienced for a long period of time, toxic stress can be physically damaging.

“The long-term impact [of toxic stress] on vital organs can make them [children] prone to long-term medical problems like high blood pressure, and heart disease,” Redlener told Salon. “Extensive research has shown that toxic stress can create long-term physical as well as mental health problems.”

Redlener, who is a pediatrician, told Salon that policies calling for forced separation are maliciously abusive.

“We typically think of a child abuse and neglect as something that happens to children when parents or a guardian is over-disciplining, or engaged in acts of violence, sexual exploitation, or extreme neglect,” he said. “The federal government has created a policy which is cruel and abusive. Let’s call it what it is: ‘child abuse by government,’ that’s the only way to describe the consequences of the misguided policy.”

“All Americans should be horrified,” he added.

Dr. Robin Goodman, a licensed clinical psychologist and Executive Director and Program Director of A Caring Hand, said the trauma endured is likely to be different for each child, and it largely depends on how the separation occurred.

“PTSD reactions are certainly possible, and it might be related to how it happened and what was done,” Goodman told Salon. “These reactions will show up in different ways — in relationships with other people, how they think about themselves, negative beliefs beliefs about themselves, negative beliefs about the world, worried thoughts certainly might come... they might have thoughts of self-harm, and be upset and depressed.”

In the situation of separation due to immigration problems, a child can develop symptoms that resemble childhood traumatic grief, a condition that occurs after the death of a parent of guardian.

“Different challenges are present for children whose caregivers are still alive than for those whose caregivers have died,” the National Child Traumatic Stress Network explains. “For example, children with traumatic separation have valid reasons to hope for a reunion with the caregiver even if that reunion could not happen for many years or at all. Hoping for reunification with the caregiver can complicate the child’s ability or desire to adjust to current everyday life and to develop healthy coping strategies.”

The psychological impact can be particularly troubling for children, as their sense of safety and trust are threatened. Judith Cohen, Professor of Psychiatry at Drexel University College of Medicine, said these children have already likely experienced traumatizing events, which can compound the trauma that occurs during a parent-child separation.

“They are already vulnerable,” Cohen told Salon, adding that parental support after a traumatic event is critical and a proven factor in helping children recover. "We are traumatizing these kids through separation and putting them at risk for experiencing another level of trauma.”

Cohen agreed with Redlener that this constitutes an abusive act perpetrated by the government.

“As far as I can tell we are intentionally traumatizing children and harming them,” she said.

These sobering insights have moved some activists to take urgent action.

Glennon Doyle, an author and president of Together Rising, launched a campaign on Tuesday and quickly raised an estimated $1.4 million within 48 hours to hire lawyers and advocates for 60 migrant children who are currently sitting in an Arizona detainment center.

“It is torture,” Doyle told Salon. “We have all agreed that torture is non-negotiable for prisoners of war, but we are actively doing it now to innocent children.”

Doyle, who has also run campaigns to help provide aid to refugees in Aleppo and across Syria, added that it is the act of activism that can heal those who feel helpless in times of despair.

“So much is happening and people are feeling less safe and depressed,” she said. “This right now, this activism is what is healing people, it is what keeping people hopeful right now.”

Celebrity apprentice: Pardons for past cast members?

Getty/Frank Polich/Alex Wong/AP/Evan Agostini

If you want a presidential pardon from President Donald Trump, it helps to be a celebrity. That's the message he is sending with his list of pardons so far: former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, late boxing legend Jack Johnson, right-wing troll Dinesh D’Souza, former Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby. And now, he told reporters Thursday that he's thinking of pardoning Martha Stewart and commuting former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's sentence.

BREAKING: Trump says he's considering commuting sentence of ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, pardoning Martha Stewart.

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 31, 2018

Trump's latest picks for possible leniency, aside from being well-known, were also cast members on his TV show "The Apprentice." Blagojevich, who is serving a 14-year sentence for corruption charges, was a contestant on "Celebrity Apprentice 3" in 2009. He didn't make it far on the reality show, but earned Trump's admiration.

"You have a hell of a lot of guts, I have to tell you," Trump told Blagojevich on the show. "I have a lot of friends where things happen to them, they crawl into a corner, they die. You’re out there punching. So I respect that."

Last Month, Blagojevich's wife, Patricia told Fox News that she was asking Trump to pardon her husband, as he did for Libby. They were both prosecuted by the same person, Patrick Fitzgerald. And just days ago, Blagojevich argued in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, that he is in prison for simply "practicing politics."

"Let me be clear: I never accepted gifts, vacations, clothes, jewelry or flights on fancy jets in exchange for my political influence," he wrote. "Yet here I am in my sixth year of a 14-year prison sentence for the routine practice of attempting to raise campaign funds while governor."

Blagojevich also seemed to appeal directly to Trump, without naming him, but alluding to his feud with the Department of Justice and the FBI concerning the ongoing Russia investigation. "The rule of law is under assault in America," he wrote. "It is being perverted and abused by the people sworn to enforce and uphold it. Some in the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation are abusing their power to criminalize the routine practices of politics and government."

"It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you come from," Blagojevich, a Democrat, added. "Every officeholder who raises money is potentially at risk. Those who value freedom and love our country had better wake up."

"What he did does not justify 18 years in a jail," Trump told reporters Thursday, incorrectly stating the sentence. "If you read his statement, it was a foolish statement. There was a lot of bravado" in talking about selling Barack Obama's Senate seat, but "plenty of other politicians have said a lot worse. And it doesn’t — he shouldn’t have been put in jail."

"I don’t know him other than that he was on 'The Apprentice' for a short period of time," Trump added, but a commutation would free Blagojevich from prison without reversing his conviction. Blagojevich has served six years.

In the case of Stewart, who had a spinoff of "The Apprentice" which lasted for one season, she was prosecuted by former FBI director and Trump nemesis, James Comey. Pardoning her is seen by some conservatives as a way to further stick it to Comey, whom Trump fired.

"I think to a certain extent Martha Stewart was harshly and unfairly treated. And she used to be my biggest fan in the world," Trump said, "before I became a politician. But that’s O.K., I don’t view it that way."

Concerning pardons, Trump appears to be dialed in on what he perceives as celebrities being unfairly treated in the justice system — perhaps as a way to amplify his own grievances with the Russia investigation, which he re-labeled a "witch hunt."

In this vein, there is little hope that he will extend the same compassion to 63-year-old Alice Johnson, serving a life sentence for a first-time nonviolent drug offense, even if the push for leniency is coming from Kim Kardashian West.

Don’t cry for me, Sarah Huckabee Sanders

YouTube/The White House

So detached from reality, so devoid of humanity is the current White House administration that when a member of its staff briefly displays something resembling an empathetic, emotional response, it's headline news.

On Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was momentarily flummoxed when 13-year-old Bay Area student Benje Choucroun asked a question about gun violence. The young Time for Kids reporter had been present for White House Sports and Fitness Day when he piped up during a press briefing. Before he spoke, Sanders pointed to her "young colleague in the back" and quipped, “Hopefully these aren’t as tough as bring-your-kid-to-work-day questions." She did not get the softball she'd expected.

Reading from his notes, Choucroun came in prepared. "At my school, we recently had a lockdown drill,” the boy said. “One thing that affects mine and others’ mental health is the worry that we or our friends could get shot at school. Specifically, can you tell me what the administration has done and will do to prevent these senseless tragedies?"

Lesson number one: Do not. Underestimate. Our kids.

What happened next appears to have surprised Sanders herself. She had remained composed while he posed his question, and by the end of her response she had resumed her usual robot-like demeanor. But somewhere in the middle, the mother of three cracked a little.

Sanders told him, "I think that as a kid and certainly as a parent, there is nothing more terrifying" — and it was right there, at that word "terrifying," that her voice began to break. She continued, "than for a kid to go to school and not feel safe, so I'm sorry that you feel that way." But then the more familiar, evasive Sanders began to assert her dominance again. "This administration takes it seriously," she said, "and the school safety commission that the president convened is meeting this week, again, an official meeting, to discuss the best ways forward and how we can do every single thing within our power to protect kids within our schools and to make them feel safe and to make their parents feel good about dropping them off."

She did not say the word "guns." She did not say anything, in fact, about a tangible, effective plan of action to reduce school violence. She didn't mention the White House's own bonkerballs March statement on "Hardening Our Schools" with initiatives "to enable schools to partner with State and local law enforcement to provide firearms training for school personnel" and to "support the transition of military veterans and retired law enforcement into new careers in education."

What child wouldn't feel safer reading that? Especially undocumented or minority children, who certainly wouldn't have anything to fear from armed adults with a background in law enforcement? The White House also proposes a Federal Commission on School Safety chaired by Secretary Betsy DeVos to explore topics like "entertainment rating systems and youth consumption of violent entertainment." Interestingly, even the proposed "expansion and reform of mental health programs" singles out ways to "identify and treat individuals who may be a threat to themselves or others" without an apparent thought to the generation of traumatized children and teenagers whose mental health, as Choucroun understands, is being eroded by the stress of lockdown drills and the threat of mass violence.

When you have a commander-in-chief who speaks at an NRA convention after a horror like Parkland, one who tweeted earlier this month that "Democrats and liberals in Congress want to disarm law-abiding Americans," no, you don't expect anything stronger than an occasional "thoughts and prayers" to come out of his official mouthpiece.

Sanders, who may or not know how to correctly hold a shotgun, has certainly not gone out of her way to behave like a person who knows how to respond to reasonable outpourings of grief and fear. In a February press briefing, she spent her time trying to defend her boss's bizarre assertion that the FBI failed to stop the Parkland shooter because it was focused on the Russia investigation. She grumpily told reporters, "He's making the point that we would like our FBI agencies to not be focused on something that is clearly a hoax in terms of investigating the campaign." Which is, sure, what you say in your first briefing after 17 young lives are snuffed out.

It's true that this administration already feels longer than and almost as bad as the entire run of "Full House," but reach back into your mind to a time when our leadership showed any emotion other than petulance. Remember Joe Biden dabbing his eyes as his BFF Barack awarded him the Presidential Medal of Honor? Or his intimate conversation about grief and loss to the families of fallen military service people? It was comforting, wasn't it?

Barack Obama cried all the damn time when he was president — even if the right often mocked him for it. He cried when he was re-elected, thanking his support team. He cried, "as a parent," after Sandy Hook, telling America, "They had their entire lives ahead of them…. I can only hope it helps for you to know that you're not alone in your grief. We have wept with you, we've pulled our children tight." He cried at the introduction of new gun laws. He cried with pride in his wife, and he cried dropping his daughter off at college.

Humans cry. They cry in sadness and fear and gratitude and love. They definitely go all out with the waterworks when it comes to their kids. They don't call other humans "animals" and they don't show more outrage over "Kathy Griffin going on a profane rant against the President on 'The View'" than they do over nearly 5,000 dead hurricane victims, many of them children. They don't coolly assert that upholding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is "good news for smuggling organizations and criminal networks."

I'm sure that Sanders sincerely loves her children, and that the thought of her own going off to school and not feeling safe triggered a genuine moment of maternal identification. I'm sure Ivanka and Melania love their kids too. What we have a glaring lack of evidence for, however, is that anyone in this administration has the emotional intelligence to summon an iota of base level empathy for anybody else's. You think Sarah Huckabee Sanders goes home, hugs her children, and thinks, "What can we do for the students in Baltimore with no heat in their classrooms? For kids in Flint with no clean water?" Do you think she wells up with concern then? Or do you think, as Rebecca Traister mused on Twitter Thursday, that "SHS can say w straight & righteous face that a comedian being mean to Ivanka on TV is 'vile' 'vicious' 'appalling' & 'disgusting' but would apply none of those descriptors to administration she's fronting for, which takes CHILDREN AWAY FROM PARENTS."

Huckabee's brief unguarded reaction to a child's legitimate question made headlines precisely because it was so unprecedented and unexpected. More telling, though, is how she managed to turn it around so quickly, resuming her regularly scheduled blah blah blahing in the blink of a slightly moistened eye. Wednesday's display was just further evidence that if you're looking for signs of life inside the White House press room, you're going to remain consistently disappointed. So don't take Huckabee's nanosecond of emotion as a glimmer of hope. Assume instead it was a temporary glitch in a supremely selfish system.

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“Archer” and “Bob’s Burgers” star H. Jon Benjamin is more than just a pretty voice

AP/Fox/Salon

He's known for playing super spy Sterling Archer, family man Bob Belcher and a talking can of mixed vegetables in "Wet Hot American Summer." But if you don't recognize H. Jon Benjamin by sight, it's understandable —  it's his deadpan voice that's his claim to fame.

Now the actor and comic is adding the job of author to his resume, with a new memoir and "demotivational" guide called "Failure Is An Option: An Attempted Memoir."

Benjamin sat down with us Salon's studio to talk about why the road to personal satisfaction is paved with food poisoning and awkward threesomes.

This is an unusual self-help book in the annals of armchair psychiatry or motivational books.

Anti-motivational. It's a kind of a new category.

You start out right from the beginning talking about why failure is an option, and the uses of failure. You even quote Whitman on the case for failure. For those who have not yet read the book, can you give the elevator pitch of why failure can actually make the world a better place?

That's a broken elevator pitch, like a stuck elevator pitch. The book has mainly a bunch of stories of personal failure in my life. But I think I tried and failed to provide the argument that failure works all the time. I went down that road in the beginning opening argument. The book as a whole is a complete failure. Even in my argument for failure —

You're failing.

I failed to offer clarity of an argument.

Let me step in with my interpretation. Around the structure of these accounts, from birth to the present day, of things that you have failed at or been embarrassed by, I think you're being truthful and honest and genuine and empathetic. We become our best selves through our worst mistakes and we become our best selves through the embarrassments of our lives. There's a thing you say at the end that I really love, about how failure forces you forward in a way that success doesn't. We're a such a success-oriented culture, but it's the failures that burn that bridge behind you, and you've got nowhere else to go.

That's good, that was really good. I think you’re on target.

I think that is it. It's certainly the case in my personal history. I think it reflects that. I did get authentic in the end. Even though this started as essentially a demotivational book, then it kind of morphed into something more personal as I was writing it.

Watch our full conversation with H. Jon Benjamin
"Archer" and "Bob's Burgers" star: The face behind the voice

I was like, oh, damn. I think he’s on to something.

I give you one nugget. You had to earn it.

You go through a lot of really embarrassing stories. One example that you have in your personal life of failure is you gave up on music. and then 40 years later you said, “I'm going to come back and I'm going to release a jazz album.”

I did, yes. I wrote about more of the childhood failure of my parents desperately trying to get me to [play]. My mother’s a ballet dancer and she ended up becoming a director of a performing arts school in the hometown where I grew up. The lessons were free. It was readily available for me to take anything I wanted, and I took almost every instrument and failed each time. That was the main course of my childhood failure in music. My dad was a big jazz music fan. I think he wanted that as well for me too. He played clarinet. I couldn't learn the clarinet or the violin or the recorder.

I lived in Massachusetts for two years as a kid and when you brought up the recorder, I was right back there, failing at "Hot Cross Buns." That was my jam.

Is it specific in Massachusetts, the recorder? Is it played nowhere else?

Maybe, I don't know. That was the only recorder period in own life.

It is the sound of the Massachusetts accent, musically.

I had the opportunity to do a jazz album that I did without knowing how to play piano. I hired three musicians who can play jazz and I tried to play with them as best I could.

You got legit musicians to come in. You give the answer in the book, that when someone said "Why?" you were like, "Well, why not?" But there must have been some deeper closure that you wanted to in your music career?

I do comedy. I was doing a bit on stage that was a little like that, and I then realized I could push it further. I think that was the agenda, to push it as far as I could, as in, just make the album. It was because I could.

That's a hallmark of your career, seeing how far you can [push it]. You have a lot of incidents in the book where you talk about that, including the live sex acts that you try to procure for a show. You got hustled a little.

I did, yes. When I had very little money.

You took a loss on because you wanted to have live sex acts —

In a comedy show to surprise the audience. There were a lot of walkouts.

There were a lot of walkouts but the people who stayed were — the word you use and I love it — delighted.

I remember I sat and watched from the back of the room and it was a full room. I did see people leave, and most people left. It went on for a long time. It was also, as far as live sex acts go, maybe too long. I think there might be a limit.

I don't know what the right timeframe for something like that is, but it's probably less than I would think.

Apparently like once you go, six minutes.

That’s just too long for anything. Speaking of that, you talk a lot about your sexual embarrassments. Being recruited in an amateur porn film. Being in what you call a "Benjamin threesome." I would call it a two and a half-some. 

I think I said twosome with a twist. Twosome with me present.

It happened in "Sex and the City" with Charlotte too. You’re Charlotte, Jon. We know the exact same thing happened to her. Now you know, because you're probably a big "Sex and the City" watcher.

I was in it. I think I did a bit.

You write about your sexual exploits, or non-exploits. Was there ever a moment where you said, "You know what? I cannot put this in this book. I cannot talk about this horrifying experience." Do we have to wait for the next book for even more mortifying [tales]?

I think I could probably fill another 300 pages of just sex failures for sure.

Why these then?

I mean, that one was really the one that stood out the most. There’s a few others that I definitely don't want to get into now.

There's a middle-aged man in France somewhere right now who probably still thinks…

That he made out with me. Yes, you want me to clarify?

The quick version is I went to France and I went to a bar and met a man who didn't speak very good English. He immediately thought I was Bruce Willis because I guess I look like slightly like Bruce Willis. He was convinced of it, and the bartender sort of translated for us. I went along with it because I think I just gave him the satisfaction of being with Bruce Willis. We drank a lot, then I told the bartender that I get an early call in the morning for my movie that I was shooting. We went outside and he followed me and he kind of held me and embraced me and kissed me for 20 seconds. I sort of started kissing back, I think.

It was long enough for you to move into a different phase.

Yes, it was my first kiss man on man, and he was a good kisser. He thought I was Bruce Willis.

You gave him that experience.

Then he invited me back to his apartment. I sort of gleaned that like [he thought], "Let's keep this going." And I couldn't. I had to draw the line.

I could’ve had Bruce Willis have sex with that young man.

You gave him enough.

A tease. Bruce, if you're out there, look up.

If this were today, there would be pictures of it all over and it would be a TMZ moment.

Yes.

You just finished the eighth season of "Bob's Burgers" and you were wrapping up the ninth season of "Archer."  You have said you never were particularly directed towards comedy. You never really felt a very strong pull towards voice work. Yet you have succeeded at it. Did you fail into this success?

Yes, that was a big part of it. I think that's a big part of probably why I succeeded. I think because I developed a sense of detachment from wanting to succeed in that specific occupation early on, I sort of learned as I went. There were a lot of people I knew who were doing comedy when I was getting into the animated shows that were very driven to succeed in comedy. I was kind of foreign to that. I do think that attitude helped me adjust slowly and progressively to do what I do. I think that ended up affording me a better attitude.

Maybe a little Buddhist-like detachment?

Little bit of exactly that, yes.

You say, when you die, you will be probably remembered as a success because the success is what people talk about. And yet your life is also so much to the accumulation of all of these little failures along the way. We are having this moment now where I think we're having a reckoning of failures. We were having a reckoning of people looking back at mistakes and bad behavior and part of that process seems to be, then how do we not fail again? How do we, when someone has failed in the industry in any kind of public way, make it better? How do you think we can fail better at this public conversation?

I think, probably the easy and quick answer to that would probably be , yes, there is probably tha idea that you're going to fail again and even after a big failure. I think it's like the boomerang effect. You lessen that load after a failure. I think that's probably at least a little bit of what I talk about in the book at the end. Manage expectations; you will fail again. But don't try too hard to succeed after you fail at something because I think that ends up creating a lot of problems.

Right, and the microscope is on everybody now. We're all living our lives in such a public way so that if someone fails the onus of scrutiny is even more profound.

Yes, that's true. Coming from the other side then, yes. There's a really horrible confluence of the reaction and then the reaction to that. As in, the person who failed being judged quickly and powerfully. I think, yes, that's dangerous. It's hard to learn. I have a kid who's going through, probably every day now, what you're talking about.

When you are watching him now, what is it like for you as a father knowing all the things you do? I know as a parent I can own my failures, but I don't want my kids to experience disappointment or pain. Or like your son eating dog poop. This was not recently though, so it's okay.

I don’t know, he might.

You get a taste for it, you never really lose it.

In the book, I’ve established that I'm not sure it was dog shit. It was shit, but I don’t know.

Dog shit is best case scenario.

I was hoping.

What do you think when you see your kid get disappointed or screw up and make mistakes? How do you roll with that?

He also has an example. I keep writing about failure. I keep making albums where I can't play, so he has this horrible example at all times throughout his life. I'm hoping he reacts the way we were talking earlier about, like he'll change directions and not be like me.

I put minimal pressure applied at all times. Hopefully, we started with musical instruments. He's doing pretty decent in the drums. I think like that's the benchmark.

Yes, just decent.

Thaw and glacial progress through the generations.

You try and encourage them in this way and then they wind up having disasters and in other areas that you didn't even anticipate. It's really exciting in that regard.

You have all kinds of great, great advice for things that we can do moving forward in our lives to lead better lives. I want you to tell anyone out there why you should not have the filet mignon on the plane.

Oh, I would say don't eat anything on a plane. I think that's what I've learned over the years. I don't even eat snacks on a plane anymore.

It was the filet mignon.

It was the filet mignon, I’m in first class. Now granted, that was probably twelve years ago. I don't know if they've improved the food quality, but yes, that the filet mignon gave me food poisoning and then horrific diarrhea in the rental car.

I believe you said you used that car as a diaper?

Yes. I was in shorts. I flew first class. I think that one of the first times I had ever flown first class. I really indulged and then drank all the wine and had the ice cream sundae. That bordelaise sauce or whatever, yes.

You don't want the plane bordelaise because the next thing you know, you're going to have to turn over a car where something horrific has happened to the valet.

Even when I fly first class now I don't. I don't have the meal.

Yes, bring your own snacks and just stick with the water.

Canned pineapple.

Or the mixed vegetables. H. Jon Benjamin. The book is called "Failure Is an Option: An Attempted Memoir." I think it was an excellent attempt. Jon, thank you so much for coming today.

Thanks for having me.

 

 

Roseanne and America’s white victim complex: Why canceling her show isn’t enough

AP/Andy Kropa

On Tuesday, comedian and actress Roseanne Barr took to Twitter and, as she has repeatedly done in the past, channeled the fumes of the right-wing conspiratorial fever swamp by saying that the liberal activist and financier George Soros was a Nazi collaborator.

George Soros is Jewish. Her claims about him are untrue.

Roseanne Barr then proceeded to bloviate about Valerie Jarrett, who was an Obama White House aide, saying that "muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj".

This is not the first time Roseanne Barr has compared black women to apes. In 2013, Barr said that White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice was like “a man with big swinging ape balls.”

This is who she is. Thus, Roseanne Barr's racist comments should have been expected and not at all a surprise.

The reaction to Roseanne Barr's comments was swift. She was publicly shamed and mocked. ABC immediately cancelled her new highly-rated TV show "Roseanne," a revival of the beloved 1990s classic of the same name.

Roseanne Barr offered the obligatory apology. Predictably, Barr's apology was also profoundly insincere. By Tuesday evening she was retweeting messages from her racist supporters which claimed that Valerie Jarrett was not really "black," how Roseanne is actually "more black" than her and that Jarrett is part of a secret Muslim plot to take over America.

The public script that is adhered to when a white celebrity (or other public figure) has revealed themselves (again) to be a racist unfolded as expected.

Conservatives have rallied to her defense.

Roseanne Barr's racism is like catnip for white Trump voters and other conservatives. Sensing their excitement, former Donald Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo has already offered Barr a TV show on his proposed on-demand right-wing TV network.

Barr claimed that she was just joking and this is all some type of misunderstanding. As sociologists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Joe Feagin and Leslie Picca have shown in their research, hiding behind humor and suggesting that "I was just kidding" are common deflections summoned by white racists in "colorblind" post-civil rights America.

Beyond superficial offense, mean words and insults, there is so much more that is contemptible, unacceptable and problematic about Roseanne Barr's racial slurs of Valerie Jarrett.

Roseanne Barr's verbal assault was but one more example of how white people have for centuries taken it upon themselves to try to rob black people of their agency by demarcating the boundaries of blackness in America (some examples: the "one drop rule" of slavery and Jim Crow; Barack Obama and how some whites, both liberals and conservatives, could not accept that he was a proud and confident black man who happened to have a white mother).

Barr equated black women with apes. As historian Winthrop Jordan argued in his widely read and highly respected book "White over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro," this is violent, dehumanizing and white supremacist language which claims that black people — unlike whites — are not fully human. This is the logic that legitimated the murder and enslavement of millions of black people during the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, Jim and Jane Crow, and American Apartheid.

This belief that black people have more in common with apes than human beings also made possible the lynchings of at least 4,400 black people — men, women, boys and girls — across the American South and elsewhere during the 19th and 20th centuries. More than 150 years after the formal end of chattel slavery the racial stereotype of black people being ape-like still lingers on in America and around the world.

Writing at The New York Times, Brent Staples summarized the horrible implications of depicting black people as apes in the following way:

Hitler found quite a bit to admire about this country during its apartheid period. Writing in the early 1930s, he attributed white domination of North America to the fact that the “Germanic” peoples here had resisted intermarriage with — and held themselves apart from — “inferior” peoples, including the Negroes, whom he described as “half-apes.”

He was not alone in these sentiments. The effort to dehumanize black people by characterizing them as apes is central to our national history. Thomas Jefferson made the connection in his notorious book “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in which he asserted fantastically that male orangutans were sexually drawn to Negro women.

By defining Negroes not as human beings but as beasts, the nation rationalized subjugation and cruelty — and justified laws that stripped them of basic human rights. The case for segregation itself rested heavily on the assertion that animal origins made Negroes feebleminded, smelly and intolerably offensive to white sensibilities.

Psychologists have shown that white people subconsciously connect images of apes to black people. Moreover, when white people are shown images of apes they are subsequently more likely to support the death penalty against black people.

Other research has demonstrated that this process of dehumanization is also operating when police use excessive force and other violence in disproportionate ways against black people, the latter being a group who many whites do not believe to be fully human and somehow possessed of extraordinary strength, imperviousness to pain and other magical powers.

Roseanne Barr's use of ape imagery to slur black women is also an example of how racism and sexism intersect with one another. Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice, like so many other black women (most notably Michelle Obama) who have been slurred as being like apes, are being robbed of their femininity and thus made into masculine caricatures. Such a gendered understanding of race in America and Europe has historically deemed that white women are the quintessential example of "femininity" and "beauty" and are to be protected because they are "weak" and "vulnerable." Black women are offered no such safeguards. By that logic, black women can be marginalized, exploited and otherwise abused without guilt or other negative consequences because of both their race and gender.

Roseanne Barr's recent behavior has also made it even more clear how white women have historically in the United States and elsewhere not been the stalwart and universal allies of nonwhite women. White women may experience sexism but they also benefit from white privilege; white women have also been partners with white men in both maintaining and benefiting from both institutional and interpersonal racism.

* * *

The public shaming and condemnation of Roseanne Barr is necessary and deserved. When racists and other bigots are taken down from their public perch, many decent people experience a feeling of cathartic victory. But exiling Roseanne Barr from the public square is an insufficient act in an anti-racist struggle if the ideas, narratives and larger political imagination she was channeling are left unchallenged.

It is a given that Barr's slurs towards Valerie Jarrett are tacky and ignorant. But the allusions Barr chose to make were not accidental or random examples pulled out of the American popular imagination. In reality, they signal to deeper questions of power, politics and identity in Trump's America — a moment of white backlash and white anger, where Whiteness is drunk on paranoia about being under siege from the Other.

"Planet of the Apes" is one of the greatest science fiction films ever made (and would inspire sequels, a TV show and two reimaginings of the original films). As Eric Greene explains in his definitive work "Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture," the original 1968 "Planet of the Apes" was a powerful critique of racial conflict in America during the tumultuous 1960s and the crescendo of the civil rights movement. Subsequent "Planet of the Apes" films would deal even more explicitly with questions of racial conflict, social alienation, the Vietnam War, nuclear Armageddon, political fanaticism and how liberals and conservatives struggle with the "race question."

As an allegory, "Planet of the Apes" intervened against the immorality of white supremacy by inverting the power dynamic between majority white society and black Americans: The apes would be stand-ins for black people while white people — the latter now mute and "primitive" — would be hunted down, exiled and treated as being unintelligent, savage and not worthy of worthy of rights or dignity.

Instead of understanding the "Planet of the Apes" series as being a stinging indictment of racism, the meaning of those films has been reimagined and distorted by white supremacists and other right-wing reactionaries. They instead view the "Planet of the Apes" films as a warning of existential threat and inevitable "racial" annihilation if nonwhites are given equal rights with white people.

Roseanne Barr's mention of the "Islamic Brotherhood" echoes similar existential anxieties. In the white right-wing fantasy world that Roseanne Barr inhabits, "Islam" is code for "terrorist." For Barr and many other conservatives, the "Islamic Brotherhood" is akin to a group of super villains, hiding under the beds of good decent white folks — especially right-wing evangelical Christians — waiting for any opportunity to do them harm.

If "Planet of the Apes" can been reimagined and twisted into a cautionary tale about black on white oppression, the Islamic Brotherhood is a natural part of this fantasy.

As historian Edward Said described in his seminal work "Orientalism," "[T]he Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible."

Collectively the "Islamic Brotherhood" and "Planet of the Apes" are the pictures inside of their heads, key fixtures in Donald Trump's and the broader White Right's life worlds and political imaginations.

To wit.

In a 2016 Public Religion Research Institute poll, 60 percent of whites reported that racism against white people in America is as big a problem than racial discrimination against nonwhites.

Those white Americans who are most anxious about group power and maintaining the superior social status of white people over nonwhites in America voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.

White voters who want to keep America a white Christian nation were also much more likely to vote for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is a professional white victim. His voters and allies are attracted to and support him because of that fact. They share his perverse and unfounded anxieties and fears of white obsolescence and white oppression.

And what does Donald Trump have to say about Roseanne Barr's public racism debacle?

On Wednesday via Twitter, Trump complained that:

Bob Iger of ABC called Valerie Jarrett to let her know that 'ABC does not tolerate comments like those made by Roseanne Barr. Gee, he never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC. Maybe I just didn't get the call?"

His pronouncement is further proof that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist as well as a racist who minimizes the slurs used against Valerie Jarrett by focusing the attention on his own personal grievances. Roseanne Barr has shown herself to be a racist as well. Trump's voters — who are the target demographic for Roseanne Barr's now cancelled TV series — are also more likely to be racist and hostile to black people than other white Americans.

At the core of racism is a type of collective narcissism which deems that one's "racial" group is somehow inherently superior to another "racial" group. In that respect, Roseanne Barr, Donald Trump and their public are in perfect union with one another.

Ultimately, white victimology is endemic to American society. Roseanne Barr exemplified this Wednesday when she declared that, “I’m not a racist, I never was & I never will be. One stupid joke in a lifetime of fighting 4 civil rights 4 minorities, against networks, studios, at the expense of my nervous system/family/wealth will NEVER b taken from me.”

This is a remarkably dangerous sentiment. Nothing good has ever come from when members of a dominant and powerful group believe that they are somehow victims. Such feelings buoyed Donald Trump to the White House and now threaten to tear down American democracy. Roseanne Barr may be "just" an entertainer. But like Trump — who was a TV celebrity (and in many ways still is) before he became president — Roseanne Barr speaks for tens of millions of white Americans who feel that they have "lost" "their America." Popular culture is deeply political. One forgets that truth at his or her own peril.

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Trump says he’ll “have a little fun” as he meets with families of Santa Fe school shooting victims

AP/Evan Vucci

President Donald Trump was caught making glib comments about the families of the victims of the Santa Fe school shooting shortly before departing to meet with them on Thursday.

"We're going to Dallas. We're going to Houston. And we're going to have a little fun today. Thank you very much," Trump told reporters as he prepared to leave for Texas.

"We are going to Dallas, we are going to Houston. We are going to have a little fun today. Thank you very much," President Trump says as he head to Texas to meet with the families of Santa Fe school shooting victims https://t.co/LJJOcM4YsX pic.twitter.com/2sDFcgdoCX

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 31, 2018

The shooting at Santa Fe High School on May 18 led to the deaths of 10 people and injured 13 more, according to The Texas Tribune.

The suspect, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, is believed to have used his father's guns to commit the mass shooting, although because he is 17-years-old it is unlikely that the family will face legal consequences for his actions (he is too old to fall under the state's child-access prevention law).

A poll taken of Texans after the shooting found that 54 percent now want to arm teachers and other school officials, while 49 percent of registered voters want stricter gun control laws. The latter figure actually counts as a decrease in the support for gun control, since 55 percent had said they would support such measures during another poll taken by the same organization (Quinnipiac University) on the previous month. Similarly, the number of people who would oppose stricter gun control laws has slightly increased from 41 percent in April to 45 percent this month.

That said, this doesn't mean that Texans are soft on those who perpetrate gun-related crimes. Sixty-four percent of the state's voters want parents to be held legally responsible if their children commit crimes with guns, with the same number saying that a law should be passed requiring guns to be kept under a lock and key. A whopping 93 percent of Texans want background checks on all gun buyers, roughly the same amount as felt that way during the April survey.

This isn't the first time that Trump has exhibited an empathy deficit for people who are dealing with the issue of mass shootings in American schools.

When meeting with a group of teachers and students about the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February, Trump was found to be hold a note that specifically reminded him to be empathetic, according to The Washington Post. The note included the following questions:

1. What would you most want me to know about your experience?

2. What can we do to help you feel safe?

3. Do you see something effective?

4. Resources? Ideas?

5. I hear you.

Trump has had other high-profile incidents in which he has notably lacked empathy for the suffering of others. In October, he was involved in a public dustup with the widow of a soldier who was killed by Islamist militants in Niger. Myeshia Johnson, the widow, claimed that "the president said that he knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyways... It made me cry because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said it."

She added, "He had my husband's report in front of him, and that's when he actually said La David. I heard him stumbling on trying to remember my husband's name. If my husband is out here fighting for our country and he risks his life for our country, why can't you remember his name?"

The first person to draw attention to Trump's insensitive handling of the situation, Democratic Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, also described the phone call in scathing terms, according to The Washington Post. She described Trump's tone as being "almost like joking. He said, ‘Well, I guess you knew’ — something to the effect that ‘he knew what he was getting into when he signed up, but I guess it hurts anyway.’ You know, just matter-of-factly, that this is what happens, anyone who is signing up for military duty is signing up to die. That’s the way we interpreted it. It was horrible. It was insensitive. It was absolutely crazy, unnecessary. I was livid."

Instead of apologizing for his remarks, Trump insisted that "I didn't say what that congresswoman said. Didn't say it at all. She knows it. And she now is not saying it. I did not say what she said," according to CNN. He later posted a tweet to the same effect.

Democrat Congresswoman totally fabricated what I said to the wife of a soldier who died in action (and I have proof). Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2017

Trump never provided any evidence that Wilson had lied.

That same month, Trump also aroused controversy when he was seen casually tossing paper towels to victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. As CNN reported at the time:

While surveying the damage in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, President Donald Trump visited with survivors and helped distribute supplies -- at one point throwing paper towels into the crowd.

Upon entering a multipurpose room at the Calvary Chapel in the Guaynabo neighborhood of the island, Trump was met with cheers and supportive signs welcoming his presence.

The President began to pick up cans of chicken to show to the crowd and then handed one man a pack of batteries. Next, he held up a flashlight and showed it off while shaking hands with the Puerto Rico residents there to obtain provisions.

"There's a lot of love in this room," Trump said while giving out the supplies. "Great people."

Trump continued to raise different items up in the air for the patrons to see while shaking hands and passing out objects, before grabbing rolls of paper towels. Then Trump began to toss rolls of paper towels into the crowd. Several of the rolls were caught by Puerto Rico residents in the room, but a few fell onto the carpeted floor.

Trump later defended himself by saying that the people in the room wanted him to throw the paper towels, according to NBC News. During an interview with Mike Huckabee on the Christian network Trinity Broadcasting, Trump said that "I came in and there was a crowd of a lot of people. And they were screaming and they were loving everything. I was having fun, they were having fun. They said, 'Throw 'em to me! Throw 'em to me Mr. President!"

It remains to be seen whether Trump's reference to his upcoming trip to Texas as "fun" will create the same controversy as his need for notes on empathy after the Parkland school shooting, his bungling of the phone call to console a veteran's widow or his casual lobbing of goods to the hurricane-ravaged people of Puerto Rico. Even if it doesn't, though, the fact that this pattern exists makes it more likely than not that Trump will find other occasions to remind Americans of his considerable empathy gap.

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Trump sets off a trade war: Mexico, Canada and EU vow retaliation for tariffs

Getty/Salon

The Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would impose hefty metal tariffs on the European Union, Canada and Mexico starting Friday, immediately provoking fears of an international trade war that sent stocks tumbling.

The measure has already been met with vows of retaliation against American businesses and now threatens the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The action, which was first announced in March, would place a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum on the three key trading allies, which supply nearly half of America's imported metal. It will go into effect at midnight on Thursday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on a call with reporters.

The European Union, Canada and Mexico allies had obtained temporary exemptions to the initial metal tariffs when they were first announced two months ago, while the Trump administration lobbied those countries for concessions on other measures to avoid the tariffs. Despite discussions with the Europeans, Ross on Thursday said developments had not warranted either another temporary exemption or a permanent exemption.

The tariffs are meant to make good on the president's long-standing promises to protect American industries, but they guarantee a fierce response from the trading partners, who have all warned the U.S. that they plan to impose retaliatory taxes on U.S. exports in return, as well as American businesses that use steel and aluminum, which are seeing their costs rise as a result of the plan.

Ross defended the measure on Thursday, saying, "We take the view that without a strong economy, you can't have a strong national security." The tariffs have been introduced under a legal measure that centers on protecting America's national security.

The trading partners have fiercely opposed the national security argument, citing their close alliance and defense treaties with the United States. On Wednesday, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called the idea that metal imports from her country would threaten American national security "frankly absurd," according to Politico.

"We look forward to continued negotiations with Canada and Mexico on one hand and with the European Commission on the other hand as there are other issues we need to get resolved," the commerce secretary told reporters on a call. Ross said the White House would need to see the response from Canada, Mexico and the EU before deciding what to do next. He also said that U.S. officials are "quite willing and eager" to have further discussions with the three trading partners.

Mexico has already hit back, imposing wide-ranging "equivalent" measures on farm and industrial products, the country's economy ministry said Thursday. The Mexican measures will be in place until the U.S. government gets rid of its tariffs, the ministry said.

Mexico's response, which targets pork legs, apples, grapes and cheeses, as well as steel, could mark a severe blow to farm states that overwhelmingly support Trump, threatening to establish a new Republican battleground ahead of the midterm elections in November.

The EU announced a similar plan of attack and will launch a case at the World Trade Organization against the United States, Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said in a statement.

"Now that we have clarity, the EU's response will be proportionate and in accordance with WTO rules," said Malmstrom. "We will now trigger a dispute settlement case at the WTO, since these U.S. measures clearly go against agreed international rules." Malstrom said the EU also plans to "impose rebalancing measures and take any necessary steps to protect the EU market from trade diversion caused by these U.S. restrictions."

The 28-European nation bloc is expected to retaliate with promised tariffs on American goods including bourbon, jeans and motorcycles, and on agriculture products of about $3.3 billion, Bloomberg reports.

Canada's Department of Finance announced on Thursday that "in response to these measures, Canada intends to impose surtaxes or similar trade-restrictive countermeasures against up to C$16.6 billion in imports of steel, aluminum, and other products from the U.S"

In preparation to retaliatory measures, Ross said, "If any of these parties retaliate that does not mean that there can’t be continuing negotiations," and noted "there is potential flexibility going forward."

South Korea had previously reached a deal with the Trump administration for an exemption. Australia, Argentina and Brazil have also secured agreements that will exempt them from the tariffs for now.

Trump's announcement came despite months of heavy condemnation from American companies that use metals in their products, like automakers and food manufacturers who told the White House that tariffs could raise their costs, lower their profits and force them to raise prices or lay off workers. Meanwhile, foreign officials warned the tariffs would strain relations and could provoke retaliatory trade responses. It also elicited pushback response from Republican in Congress who are worried penalties from trading partners could pose a blow to American companies, workers — especially farmers — a group which the action would ultimately hurt American companies and workers, especially farmers, a group which the president won by larger margins in November.

Some Republican lawmakers denounced Trump's move to hike tariffs, highlighting how far Trump has moved away from the party's traditions of embracing free and open markets.

Earlier this week, Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, said he was "extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war" and urged the president to drop his tariff proposal. Ryan hails from Wisconsin where motorbike maker Harley-Davidson Inc. is based. Since news of Thursday's tariff measure, the company has seen its sales drop.

Other stocks tumbled in response to the looming tariffs, reigniting fears of a trade war.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 260 points, or 1 percent, and the Standard & Poor's 500 industrial sector fell 1.2 percent immediately after Ross's announcement Thursday morning. Shares of American automakers, all large buyers of steel and aluminum, slipped, as did shares of Boeing, a large exporter that could be hurt if other nations, especially China, hit back against Trump's imposed tariffs.

Most recently, conservative billionaire donors Charles and David Koch denounced the decision to impose the tariffs, urging the White House to "abandon" similar policies.

"Trade barriers make Americas as a whole poorer and they especially harm those already disadvantaged," James Davis, a spokesman for the Koch network, said in a statement to CNBC. "Trade wars hurt everyone. They trigger retaliatory tariffs from our trade partners and that raises prices on American families who need affordable access to household goods. We urge the Trump administration to abandon these tariffs."

And in March, when the tariff hike was first proposed, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called tariffs "a tax hike the American people don’t need and can’t afford."

Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska also blasted Trump's plan, saying "protectionism is weak, not strong."

"Let's be clear: The president is proposing a massive tax increase on American families," said Sasse. "You'd expect a policy this bad from a leftist administration, not a supposedly Republican one."

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Amnesty for drug traffickers? That’s one Mexican presidential candidate’s pitch to voters

INE via AP

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

With over 29,000 murders, 2017 was the deadliest year in Mexico since modern record-keeping began. Nearly two-thirds of Mexicans say crime and violence are the biggest problems facing their country.

A main cause of the bloodshed, studies show, is the Mexican government’s violent crackdown on drug trafficking. Launched in 2006 under President Felipe Calderón, this military assault on cartels has left 234,966 people dead in 11 years.

While numerous drug kingpins have been jailed, cartels fractured under law enforcement pressure, competing for territory and diversifying their business. Kidnapping and extortion have surged. Mexico is now one of the world’s most violent places.

Now one presidential candidate in Mexico is hoping to win over voters with a novel response to the country’s security crisis: amnesty for criminals.

Justice not revenge

The idea, first floated by leftist front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador in August 2016, is undeveloped and quite likely quixotic. López Obrador has yet to even indicate precisely what benefit the Mexican government would get in exchange for pardoning felons.

Still, as a law professor who studies drug policy, I must give López Obrador some credit for originality. His three competitors have mostly frustrated voters this campaign season by suggesting the same tried-and-failed law enforcement-based strategies.

López Obrador, founder and leader of Mexico’s MORENA Party, is a rabble-rousing politician who delights in challenging the status quo. In this, his third presidential bid, he has on several occasions suggested that both members of organized crime groups and corrupt politicians could be pardoned for their crimes.

When pressed for details on the amnesty plan, López Obrador has simply responded that “amnesty is not impunity” or that Mexico needs “justice,” not “revenge.”

Former Supreme Court Justice Olga Sánchez Cordero, López Obrador’s pick for secretary of the interior, has offered a few additional hints about the plan. She says that voters should think of amnesty not as a security policy but as a kind of transitional justice. It would be an instrument used to pacify Mexico.

The opportunity would be time-limited. Criminals would lose their immunity after a specific date if they have not met certain conditions — though these conditions remain undefined. It would also exclude serious crimes such as torture, rape or homicide.

All presidential pardons would need to be approved by Congress, in accordance with the Mexican Constitution.

Amnesty in Colombia

Sound vague? That’s because it is.

López Obrador says that his amnesty idea is still in development, and that his team will work with religious organizations, Pope Francis, United Nations General Secretary António Guterres, Mexican civil society groups and human rights experts to develop “a plan to achieve peace for the country, with justice and dignity.”

Colombia offers one example of how amnesty can be used as an instrument for peace.

In 2016 the Colombian government signed an accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, ending the Marxist group’s violent 52-year rebellion. In exchange for laying down their weapons, FARC fighters were offered protection from prosecution for political crimes committed during the conflict.

The amnesty law is extremely controversial. Colombian conservatives and the United Nations alike have criticized it for prioritizing the rights of guerrillas over those of their victims. Colombia’s peace process has also been fraught by delays, flare-ups of violence and political opposition.

Still, according to the Conflict Analysis Resource Center, a think tank, conflict-related deaths among both civilians and combatants dropped over 90 percent in 2016.

Would amnesty work in Mexico?

Mexico is not Colombia.

López Obrador is proposing amnesty in a different conflict carried out by radically different actors – drug kingpins, corrupt politicians and security forces who for 11 years have waged war with virtual impunity.

It’s unclear, for example, why drug traffickers would abandon their US$40 billion illicit industry – which supports around 500,000 jobs in Mexico — in exchange for a preemptive pardon from authorities.

It is also difficult to reconcile López Obrador’s vows for honest government with his proposal to pardon corruption, though he has committed to finishing all ongoing investigations into public officials accused of corruption.

López Obrador claims to seek a new “moral constitution” for Mexico. He maintains that forgiveness is necessary to construct a “república amorosa” — “loving republic” — in which Mexicans “live under the principle that being good is the only way to be joyful.”

A simple expectation

Mexicans don’t feel joyful right now.

According to a recent IPSOS poll, 89 percent of Mexicans believe the country is on the wrong track. Almost 70 percent disapprove of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s performance.

Journalist and historian Héctor Aguilar Camín has described voters’ current mood as “melancholic.” Rampant corruption, government repression and bloody violence have made them skeptical of politics. But, as Aguilar Camín says, people also need desperately to believe that change is possible.

This discontent has given López Obrador a virtually unbeatable lead in the lead-up to the July election.

To paraphrase the prominent Mexican-American Univision reporter Jorge Ramos, all Mexicans want from their next president is to keep them from being killed. So they’re open to unusual ideas.

During two presidential debates, the only candidate other than López Obrador to propose a radical new crime-fighting tactic is Governor Jaime “El Bronco” Rodríguez, an independent from Nuevo Leon state. He promised “to cut off the hands” of corrupt politicians and criminals, a suggestion that left moderator Azucena Uresti — and most of the country — aghast.

The Mexican Constitution prohibits punishment with mutilation and torture.

Mexico held its first presidential debate on April 23, 2018. Independent Margarita Zavala, far left, dropped out of the race in mid-May.

Electoral advantages of ambiguity

Only López Obrador, with his amnesty suggestion, has questioned whether aggressive law enforcement should even be the core tenet of Mexican security policy.

His competitors have attacked the idea, calling it “madness” and “nonsense.” Some accused López Obrador of being “a puppet of criminals.”

Alfonso Durazo, whom López Obrador’s would nominate to be Mexico’s secretary of security, believes that an amnesty law could end the “cycle of war” in Mexico by setting in motion a process of national reconciliation.

Meanwhile, to actively combat crime, López Obrador says he would merge the police and the military into one unified national guard under direct presidential command.

Maybe forgiveness and justice is what Mexico needs. But, for now, presidential pardons seem like little more than a hollow campaign promise. As Mexican pundit Denise Dresser has put it, López Obrador’s amnesty plan is merely “a blank page on the table, with multiple scriveners working on it.”

Luis Gómez Romero, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory, University of Wollongong

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