Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 900

January 7, 2016

“If Donald Trump is president of the United States it will be the end of the world”: 4 times J. Law got all leftie on us

Actress Jennifer Lawrence has a history of speaking freely and liberally on current events. In Glamour's latest issue, the "Joy" star spoke of the horrific nature of the November Planned Parenthood Colorado Springs shooting, especially since she used the organization for birth control as a teenager. Watch for more of her leftie heart.

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Published on January 07, 2016 14:10

No compassion: This amazing Ted Cruz video proves that “compassionate conservatism” is truly dead

If you’re left of center (and if you’re reading Salon, I think it’s fair to guess that you are) you won’t want to do what I’m about to ask of you — but stick with me and do it anyway. Take your mind back to the halcyon days of American Empire, when the economy was humming, wages were growing, crime was dropping, and the nation was at peace. It was a time before Facebook, before Twitter; before iPods and iPhones and Chrome and Google Glass. It was a time when you were still supposed to like Bill Cosby; a time when a reference to “nine-eleven” presumably meant someone was trying to call an ambulance or the cops. Yes, I’m asking you to return in your mind to the year 2000, when life — for many Americans, at least — was better, politics was nicer, and everyone was coming to terms with the fact that the new Star Wars movie sucked. Why am I asking you to do this? Not because I want to relive those days, myself (I was 9 at the time; I assure you that I do not). Rather, I want you to turn the clock back to 2000 in order to remind yourself of a concept that is not only all but forgotten in our politics, but is, with every new cycle, beginning to look increasingly absurd. It was called “compassionate conservatism,” and it was, we were told, the game-changing, barrier-breaking P.R. coup of a generation, one that would put Republicans — and a Bush, no less — in the Oval Office once again. Compassionate conservatism was always much more of a branding exercise than an actual political philosophy (though it does have some roots within American right-wing Catholicism). Its purpose, generally understood, was to allow its main office-holding proponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, to distinguish himself from regular conservatism, which at the time was largely associated with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It was an attempt, in other words, to persuade Americans that a person could be conservative — and a person could vote for a conservative — without being a dick. Now let’s fast-forward to 2016. The Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner is Donald Trump. The candidates are fighting over who is going to be “strongest” on all manner of moochers — the young and the poor, of course; but especially immigrants. Compassion is not part of the equation. In fact, it’s a hindrance: One of Jeb Bush’s biggest “gaffes,” as far as many Republicans are concerned, was calling immigrating to America “an act of love.” This is the context in which you need to understand this video, which garnered some attention on Thursday when it was posted to Twitter. It shows Sen. Ted Cruz, the candidate most likely to supplant Trump — at least in Iowa, where the video was shot — responding to a question from a so-called “dreamer” (an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the country by their parents at a young age and effectively grew up as an American). Her question, in essence, was whether Cruz, if he became president, would try to have her deported. It’s a question that other dreamers have asked other Republican candidates — and one that GOPers are generally loathe to answer, because the “right” answer for a Republican primary electorate is the exact opposite of the “right” answer for the American electorate, at large. But Cruz, perhaps to his credit, didn’t shirk from answering. He told her, in so many words, that he would indeed want to deport her. Not because doing so would do either her or the United States any good, but because, he said, she had broken the law. He tried to do this while adopting the soft, plaintive, “I-feel-your-pain” pose that countless politicians have tried in the years since Bill Clinton made it into an art. But the takeaway — yes, I will deport you — was clear all the same:

Ted Cruz looks a young woman brought to the US as a child in the eye and tells her he’ll deport her. It’s chilling. https://t.co/n6onPPT3FI

— Matthew McGregor (@mcgregormt) January 7, 2016
This, by the way, is why Democrats would be nearly as excited to see Cruz win the GOP’s nomination as they would be if the nominee were Trump. Because what this clip says to millions of Latinos and Hispanics is, quite simply, that they are not welcome in Ted Cruz’s United States of America — even if it is the only country they’ve ever really knows; even if they did nothing wrong. That’s what “conservatism” means in the Republican primary. Compassion was once sold as a feature. But those days are over; now it is a bug.  If you’re left of center (and if you’re reading Salon, I think it’s fair to guess that you are) you won’t want to do what I’m about to ask of you — but stick with me and do it anyway. Take your mind back to the halcyon days of American Empire, when the economy was humming, wages were growing, crime was dropping, and the nation was at peace. It was a time before Facebook, before Twitter; before iPods and iPhones and Chrome and Google Glass. It was a time when you were still supposed to like Bill Cosby; a time when a reference to “nine-eleven” presumably meant someone was trying to call an ambulance or the cops. Yes, I’m asking you to return in your mind to the year 2000, when life — for many Americans, at least — was better, politics was nicer, and everyone was coming to terms with the fact that the new Star Wars movie sucked. Why am I asking you to do this? Not because I want to relive those days, myself (I was 9 at the time; I assure you that I do not). Rather, I want you to turn the clock back to 2000 in order to remind yourself of a concept that is not only all but forgotten in our politics, but is, with every new cycle, beginning to look increasingly absurd. It was called “compassionate conservatism,” and it was, we were told, the game-changing, barrier-breaking P.R. coup of a generation, one that would put Republicans — and a Bush, no less — in the Oval Office once again. Compassionate conservatism was always much more of a branding exercise than an actual political philosophy (though it does have some roots within American right-wing Catholicism). Its purpose, generally understood, was to allow its main office-holding proponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, to distinguish himself from regular conservatism, which at the time was largely associated with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It was an attempt, in other words, to persuade Americans that a person could be conservative — and a person could vote for a conservative — without being a dick. Now let’s fast-forward to 2016. The Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner is Donald Trump. The candidates are fighting over who is going to be “strongest” on all manner of moochers — the young and the poor, of course; but especially immigrants. Compassion is not part of the equation. In fact, it’s a hindrance: One of Jeb Bush’s biggest “gaffes,” as far as many Republicans are concerned, was calling immigrating to America “an act of love.” This is the context in which you need to understand this video, which garnered some attention on Thursday when it was posted to Twitter. It shows Sen. Ted Cruz, the candidate most likely to supplant Trump — at least in Iowa, where the video was shot — responding to a question from a so-called “dreamer” (an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the country by their parents at a young age and effectively grew up as an American). Her question, in essence, was whether Cruz, if he became president, would try to have her deported. It’s a question that other dreamers have asked other Republican candidates — and one that GOPers are generally loathe to answer, because the “right” answer for a Republican primary electorate is the exact opposite of the “right” answer for the American electorate, at large. But Cruz, perhaps to his credit, didn’t shirk from answering. He told her, in so many words, that he would indeed want to deport her. Not because doing so would do either her or the United States any good, but because, he said, she had broken the law. He tried to do this while adopting the soft, plaintive, “I-feel-your-pain” pose that countless politicians have tried in the years since Bill Clinton made it into an art. But the takeaway — yes, I will deport you — was clear all the same:

Ted Cruz looks a young woman brought to the US as a child in the eye and tells her he’ll deport her. It’s chilling. https://t.co/n6onPPT3FI

— Matthew McGregor (@mcgregormt) January 7, 2016
This, by the way, is why Democrats would be nearly as excited to see Cruz win the GOP’s nomination as they would be if the nominee were Trump. Because what this clip says to millions of Latinos and Hispanics is, quite simply, that they are not welcome in Ted Cruz’s United States of America — even if it is the only country they’ve ever really knows; even if they did nothing wrong. That’s what “conservatism” means in the Republican primary. Compassion was once sold as a feature. But those days are over; now it is a bug.  If you’re left of center (and if you’re reading Salon, I think it’s fair to guess that you are) you won’t want to do what I’m about to ask of you — but stick with me and do it anyway. Take your mind back to the halcyon days of American Empire, when the economy was humming, wages were growing, crime was dropping, and the nation was at peace. It was a time before Facebook, before Twitter; before iPods and iPhones and Chrome and Google Glass. It was a time when you were still supposed to like Bill Cosby; a time when a reference to “nine-eleven” presumably meant someone was trying to call an ambulance or the cops. Yes, I’m asking you to return in your mind to the year 2000, when life — for many Americans, at least — was better, politics was nicer, and everyone was coming to terms with the fact that the new Star Wars movie sucked. Why am I asking you to do this? Not because I want to relive those days, myself (I was 9 at the time; I assure you that I do not). Rather, I want you to turn the clock back to 2000 in order to remind yourself of a concept that is not only all but forgotten in our politics, but is, with every new cycle, beginning to look increasingly absurd. It was called “compassionate conservatism,” and it was, we were told, the game-changing, barrier-breaking P.R. coup of a generation, one that would put Republicans — and a Bush, no less — in the Oval Office once again. Compassionate conservatism was always much more of a branding exercise than an actual political philosophy (though it does have some roots within American right-wing Catholicism). Its purpose, generally understood, was to allow its main office-holding proponent, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, to distinguish himself from regular conservatism, which at the time was largely associated with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It was an attempt, in other words, to persuade Americans that a person could be conservative — and a person could vote for a conservative — without being a dick. Now let’s fast-forward to 2016. The Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner is Donald Trump. The candidates are fighting over who is going to be “strongest” on all manner of moochers — the young and the poor, of course; but especially immigrants. Compassion is not part of the equation. In fact, it’s a hindrance: One of Jeb Bush’s biggest “gaffes,” as far as many Republicans are concerned, was calling immigrating to America “an act of love.” This is the context in which you need to understand this video, which garnered some attention on Thursday when it was posted to Twitter. It shows Sen. Ted Cruz, the candidate most likely to supplant Trump — at least in Iowa, where the video was shot — responding to a question from a so-called “dreamer” (an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the country by their parents at a young age and effectively grew up as an American). Her question, in essence, was whether Cruz, if he became president, would try to have her deported. It’s a question that other dreamers have asked other Republican candidates — and one that GOPers are generally loathe to answer, because the “right” answer for a Republican primary electorate is the exact opposite of the “right” answer for the American electorate, at large. But Cruz, perhaps to his credit, didn’t shirk from answering. He told her, in so many words, that he would indeed want to deport her. Not because doing so would do either her or the United States any good, but because, he said, she had broken the law. He tried to do this while adopting the soft, plaintive, “I-feel-your-pain” pose that countless politicians have tried in the years since Bill Clinton made it into an art. But the takeaway — yes, I will deport you — was clear all the same:

Ted Cruz looks a young woman brought to the US as a child in the eye and tells her he’ll deport her. It’s chilling. https://t.co/n6onPPT3FI

— Matthew McGregor (@mcgregormt) January 7, 2016
This, by the way, is why Democrats would be nearly as excited to see Cruz win the GOP’s nomination as they would be if the nominee were Trump. Because what this clip says to millions of Latinos and Hispanics is, quite simply, that they are not welcome in Ted Cruz’s United States of America — even if it is the only country they’ve ever really knows; even if they did nothing wrong. That’s what “conservatism” means in the Republican primary. Compassion was once sold as a feature. But those days are over; now it is a bug.  

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Published on January 07, 2016 14:04

Is drinking urine a new health trend or just outrageously disgusting?

So called 'Urine Therapy' has been cited throughout history for certain therapeutic purposes, however, there is no scientific research to back this up. Urine has also been cited as an extreme survival technique in cooling body temperature and quenching thirst. None of these reasons were the catalyst for the subjects of a recent BuzzFeed video in which people tasted their own urine simply because they had never done it before. Salon hit the streets of New York City to find out if pee is the next H2O. (Furthermore, a recent Loyola University study showed that, contrary to popular belief, urine is not sterile.)So called 'Urine Therapy' has been cited throughout history for certain therapeutic purposes, however, there is no scientific research to back this up. Urine has also been cited as an extreme survival technique in cooling body temperature and quenching thirst. None of these reasons were the catalyst for the subjects of a recent BuzzFeed video in which people tasted their own urine simply because they had never done it before. Salon hit the streets of New York City to find out if pee is the next H2O. (Furthermore, a recent Loyola University study showed that, contrary to popular belief, urine is not sterile.)

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Published on January 07, 2016 14:01

Fawning over the male feminist: When Ryan Coogler says “women are better filmmakers,” people actually listen

The next time you see a little girl playing with her dolls, don't tell her she's going to make a good mommy or a good big sister or a wonderful thrower of tea parties. Tell her that she could be the next great film or TV director, because that's all directing is — dolls and feelings. I wish I could take credit for that gem, but “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway said it in this powerfully good read at The New Yorker. In a conversation with Ariel Levy, the Golden Globe winner verbally dismantled the patriarchal structure masquerading as the TV and film industry:
“Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: ‘We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?’”
If you're like me, you read that quote and you wanted to see it go viral, because it makes so much sense it’s infuriating. You wanted to log on to Facebook and see everyone you know posting it with a one-word comment: "Yes." (Or "Yasss.") But that’s not exactly what happened. And although many people read and shared that interview, Soloway's quote didn't seem to inspire new headlines in other magazines and responses from Twitter like the ones we're seeing now that Ryan Coogler made a very similar statement about female directors in a recent Variety interview. Like most others, I was excited to see that the "Creed" director, recently announced as the director of Marvel's upcoming "Black Panther" movie, was so bold as to say this aloud: “I really feel like, you know—this is off the record—I feel like women are better filmmakers than men.” At the suggestion of writer Kristopher Tapley, Coogler decided to go ahead and put it on record, and further expounded upon his feelings about why women are better equipped, emotionally and otherwise, to bring a stories to film. The headlines that followed highlighted this quote above all the others in the interview. That's exciting. And that's important. And Ryan Coogler is currently one of my favorite directors — I believe that he meant what he said. But I also know that he's not the first to say it, and it’s the round of applause from the internet over this quote (and not what Coogler himself said) that should be interrogated. Because our tendency to listen to one man, when hundreds of women—or even one equally qualified woman—have said the same thing (let alone when they say the opposite thing) is a dangerous practice that affects nearly every facet of our society. Coogler's quote is really just another plea to let female directors in the room. The world of filmmaking—as wonderful as it already is—will be infinitely better with more women telling stories. Yes, these are facts. But because men and women are still programmed to take the word of a man (even on a woman's issue, or especially on a woman’s issue) over the word of a woman, it seems like we are going to be waiting for many more men like Coogler to speak out and say—on the record—that they want a film industry that includes more women auteurs. The myth that we continue to embrace here is that a man has no stakes in supporting a woman, so his words are somehow more pure. Consider what might have happened if a female comic, instead of Hannibal Buress, made that same joke about Bill Cosby being a rapist in 2014. The response would have been very different, or even nonexistent. It would have sounded, to many ears, like another woman standing by her complaining little girlfriends (which is still, for many, the basic definition of feminism). But when Buress says something, well — it must be true or at least worth investigating, because no man would ever speak out for women merely for the sake of doing so. He stands to gain nothing—as if women speaking out for women are more likely to be doing so to get ahead, or to secure some privilege for themselves. Many have already noted how we (we, as in the media, and the public) didn't even take the word of all those women together—but needed the casual statement of a man who seemingly stood to gain nothing by lying (again, as if women, on the other hand, are more likely to lie in an attempt to spread rumors about great men so that they might... take over the world?). Similarly, Coogler saying that women make better directors than men seems like it would be counterproductive for Coogler, a man, who surely wouldn't suggest a studio pass him over for a coveted project just because of his gender without a very good reason. When Soloway makes a similar suggestion—and she’s cosigned by the many other women around her, demanding room—it sounds opportunist to ears that have been tuned to hear women's demands in that way. The reality is that Coogler stands to lose nothing at all by saying what he’s said—hell, if anything, he gains the admiration of women the world over (myself included). But the next question for these men who believe women directors belong in the film world is whether or not they’d take a real risk to stand behind this belief. Some of the biggest male names in the comic book world quickly banded together and organized a boycott of the prestigious Grand Prix d’Angoulême when no female comic creators were nominated. Would any of our acclaimed male directors decline their Oscar nominations if the director category proves to be another boys-only affair (as it was last year)? Bradley Cooper, who pledged to work with the women he co-stars with in films to close the pay gap, might be the one example we have of such a move, but even his promise isn’t likely to cost him anything. And again, one has to ask, isn’t he simply doing the right thing here? How much credit must we give another privileged man for speaking up for the women around him? It all comes down to whose words hold value in our society. Even when a group of people is saying the same thing, who do we choose to listen to? Who gets the clout and the privilege of cast public acknowledgement and exaltation? When we celebrate men for supporting women, it’s not unlike celebrating white people for speaking out against racism. If a black actor took a selfie with the book “The New Jim Crow,” and urged his followers to read it, he might be met with some applause, but nothing like the thunderous, viral reception of which Matt McGorry was on the receiving end recently. Is it wonderful that he's reading Michelle Alexander’s text and encouraging his fans to do the same? Absolutely. Does that make him a better white male celebrity than, say, Stephen Amell? Yes, I think so. But isn't it also troubling how much attention Matt McGorry gets for learning about how much attention he gets as a white man, and how that privilege is on the other end of a spectrum where black children’s killers go unpunished? As a white man of privilege (and an actor who starred on "Orange is the New Black"), Matt McGorry is exactly the kind of person who should be reading “The New Jim Crow.” And yet, we can't help but celebrate his doing so, because we've been taught to expect less—in the same way that we can’t help but be grateful for Hannibal Buress and Ryan Coogler. We've been taught to expect so little from men and from male directors, that when one of them speaks out and states the obvious, echoing so many other women the world over, we want to scream the news from the mountaintops. It's another way of saying, "See? We're not crazy. It's not just Jill Soloway and Gina Prince-Bythewood demanding that women direct. It's also a man—and a man who just made the latest “Rocky” movie, no less!" This is a fair reaction, but it's also the result of a dangerous message we are continuously sent about the worth of women in this and so many other industries—that such worth is difficult to measure, without the weight of a man's voice behind it. But there’s also another way of looking at the choice words of these two directors, who I admit I’ve singled out as a huge fan of both their works (and, interestingly enough, Coogler mentions Soloway in the Variety piece, as one of his reasons for wanting to explore TV directing). Although their overall message is the same, it has to be said that Coogler and Soloway deliver it very differently. Soloway doesn’t merely say that women should be directing—she goes so far as to feminize (insomuch as the feminine is as performative as the masculine) the act of filmmaking. She implies that filmmaking is for women, perhaps even more than it is for men. This is even more bold than simply suggesting that women should be embraced, because they are great filmmakers too. It almost makes the world of filmmaking a stolen domain that women have to reclaim; whether they ever visibly dominated it or not is irrelevant. But if we accept such an interpretation, and manage to convince a few women that, not only do they belong in the room, but the room was rightfully theirs to begin with, we’ll just be asking for trouble. Better to stick with the idea that this industry, too, is a man’s world, but women have some great stuff to contribute to it, and should be given the chance to do so. Right?The next time you see a little girl playing with her dolls, don't tell her she's going to make a good mommy or a good big sister or a wonderful thrower of tea parties. Tell her that she could be the next great film or TV director, because that's all directing is — dolls and feelings. I wish I could take credit for that gem, but “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway said it in this powerfully good read at The New Yorker. In a conversation with Ariel Levy, the Golden Globe winner verbally dismantled the patriarchal structure masquerading as the TV and film industry:
“Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: ‘We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?’”
If you're like me, you read that quote and you wanted to see it go viral, because it makes so much sense it’s infuriating. You wanted to log on to Facebook and see everyone you know posting it with a one-word comment: "Yes." (Or "Yasss.") But that’s not exactly what happened. And although many people read and shared that interview, Soloway's quote didn't seem to inspire new headlines in other magazines and responses from Twitter like the ones we're seeing now that Ryan Coogler made a very similar statement about female directors in a recent Variety interview. Like most others, I was excited to see that the "Creed" director, recently announced as the director of Marvel's upcoming "Black Panther" movie, was so bold as to say this aloud: “I really feel like, you know—this is off the record—I feel like women are better filmmakers than men.” At the suggestion of writer Kristopher Tapley, Coogler decided to go ahead and put it on record, and further expounded upon his feelings about why women are better equipped, emotionally and otherwise, to bring a stories to film. The headlines that followed highlighted this quote above all the others in the interview. That's exciting. And that's important. And Ryan Coogler is currently one of my favorite directors — I believe that he meant what he said. But I also know that he's not the first to say it, and it’s the round of applause from the internet over this quote (and not what Coogler himself said) that should be interrogated. Because our tendency to listen to one man, when hundreds of women—or even one equally qualified woman—have said the same thing (let alone when they say the opposite thing) is a dangerous practice that affects nearly every facet of our society. Coogler's quote is really just another plea to let female directors in the room. The world of filmmaking—as wonderful as it already is—will be infinitely better with more women telling stories. Yes, these are facts. But because men and women are still programmed to take the word of a man (even on a woman's issue, or especially on a woman’s issue) over the word of a woman, it seems like we are going to be waiting for many more men like Coogler to speak out and say—on the record—that they want a film industry that includes more women auteurs. The myth that we continue to embrace here is that a man has no stakes in supporting a woman, so his words are somehow more pure. Consider what might have happened if a female comic, instead of Hannibal Buress, made that same joke about Bill Cosby being a rapist in 2014. The response would have been very different, or even nonexistent. It would have sounded, to many ears, like another woman standing by her complaining little girlfriends (which is still, for many, the basic definition of feminism). But when Buress says something, well — it must be true or at least worth investigating, because no man would ever speak out for women merely for the sake of doing so. He stands to gain nothing—as if women speaking out for women are more likely to be doing so to get ahead, or to secure some privilege for themselves. Many have already noted how we (we, as in the media, and the public) didn't even take the word of all those women together—but needed the casual statement of a man who seemingly stood to gain nothing by lying (again, as if women, on the other hand, are more likely to lie in an attempt to spread rumors about great men so that they might... take over the world?). Similarly, Coogler saying that women make better directors than men seems like it would be counterproductive for Coogler, a man, who surely wouldn't suggest a studio pass him over for a coveted project just because of his gender without a very good reason. When Soloway makes a similar suggestion—and she’s cosigned by the many other women around her, demanding room—it sounds opportunist to ears that have been tuned to hear women's demands in that way. The reality is that Coogler stands to lose nothing at all by saying what he’s said—hell, if anything, he gains the admiration of women the world over (myself included). But the next question for these men who believe women directors belong in the film world is whether or not they’d take a real risk to stand behind this belief. Some of the biggest male names in the comic book world quickly banded together and organized a boycott of the prestigious Grand Prix d’Angoulême when no female comic creators were nominated. Would any of our acclaimed male directors decline their Oscar nominations if the director category proves to be another boys-only affair (as it was last year)? Bradley Cooper, who pledged to work with the women he co-stars with in films to close the pay gap, might be the one example we have of such a move, but even his promise isn’t likely to cost him anything. And again, one has to ask, isn’t he simply doing the right thing here? How much credit must we give another privileged man for speaking up for the women around him? It all comes down to whose words hold value in our society. Even when a group of people is saying the same thing, who do we choose to listen to? Who gets the clout and the privilege of cast public acknowledgement and exaltation? When we celebrate men for supporting women, it’s not unlike celebrating white people for speaking out against racism. If a black actor took a selfie with the book “The New Jim Crow,” and urged his followers to read it, he might be met with some applause, but nothing like the thunderous, viral reception of which Matt McGorry was on the receiving end recently. Is it wonderful that he's reading Michelle Alexander’s text and encouraging his fans to do the same? Absolutely. Does that make him a better white male celebrity than, say, Stephen Amell? Yes, I think so. But isn't it also troubling how much attention Matt McGorry gets for learning about how much attention he gets as a white man, and how that privilege is on the other end of a spectrum where black children’s killers go unpunished? As a white man of privilege (and an actor who starred on "Orange is the New Black"), Matt McGorry is exactly the kind of person who should be reading “The New Jim Crow.” And yet, we can't help but celebrate his doing so, because we've been taught to expect less—in the same way that we can’t help but be grateful for Hannibal Buress and Ryan Coogler. We've been taught to expect so little from men and from male directors, that when one of them speaks out and states the obvious, echoing so many other women the world over, we want to scream the news from the mountaintops. It's another way of saying, "See? We're not crazy. It's not just Jill Soloway and Gina Prince-Bythewood demanding that women direct. It's also a man—and a man who just made the latest “Rocky” movie, no less!" This is a fair reaction, but it's also the result of a dangerous message we are continuously sent about the worth of women in this and so many other industries—that such worth is difficult to measure, without the weight of a man's voice behind it. But there’s also another way of looking at the choice words of these two directors, who I admit I’ve singled out as a huge fan of both their works (and, interestingly enough, Coogler mentions Soloway in the Variety piece, as one of his reasons for wanting to explore TV directing). Although their overall message is the same, it has to be said that Coogler and Soloway deliver it very differently. Soloway doesn’t merely say that women should be directing—she goes so far as to feminize (insomuch as the feminine is as performative as the masculine) the act of filmmaking. She implies that filmmaking is for women, perhaps even more than it is for men. This is even more bold than simply suggesting that women should be embraced, because they are great filmmakers too. It almost makes the world of filmmaking a stolen domain that women have to reclaim; whether they ever visibly dominated it or not is irrelevant. But if we accept such an interpretation, and manage to convince a few women that, not only do they belong in the room, but the room was rightfully theirs to begin with, we’ll just be asking for trouble. Better to stick with the idea that this industry, too, is a man’s world, but women have some great stuff to contribute to it, and should be given the chance to do so. Right?The next time you see a little girl playing with her dolls, don't tell her she's going to make a good mommy or a good big sister or a wonderful thrower of tea parties. Tell her that she could be the next great film or TV director, because that's all directing is — dolls and feelings. I wish I could take credit for that gem, but “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway said it in this powerfully good read at The New Yorker. In a conversation with Ariel Levy, the Golden Globe winner verbally dismantled the patriarchal structure masquerading as the TV and film industry:
“Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: ‘We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?’”
If you're like me, you read that quote and you wanted to see it go viral, because it makes so much sense it’s infuriating. You wanted to log on to Facebook and see everyone you know posting it with a one-word comment: "Yes." (Or "Yasss.") But that’s not exactly what happened. And although many people read and shared that interview, Soloway's quote didn't seem to inspire new headlines in other magazines and responses from Twitter like the ones we're seeing now that Ryan Coogler made a very similar statement about female directors in a recent Variety interview. Like most others, I was excited to see that the "Creed" director, recently announced as the director of Marvel's upcoming "Black Panther" movie, was so bold as to say this aloud: “I really feel like, you know—this is off the record—I feel like women are better filmmakers than men.” At the suggestion of writer Kristopher Tapley, Coogler decided to go ahead and put it on record, and further expounded upon his feelings about why women are better equipped, emotionally and otherwise, to bring a stories to film. The headlines that followed highlighted this quote above all the others in the interview. That's exciting. And that's important. And Ryan Coogler is currently one of my favorite directors — I believe that he meant what he said. But I also know that he's not the first to say it, and it’s the round of applause from the internet over this quote (and not what Coogler himself said) that should be interrogated. Because our tendency to listen to one man, when hundreds of women—or even one equally qualified woman—have said the same thing (let alone when they say the opposite thing) is a dangerous practice that affects nearly every facet of our society. Coogler's quote is really just another plea to let female directors in the room. The world of filmmaking—as wonderful as it already is—will be infinitely better with more women telling stories. Yes, these are facts. But because men and women are still programmed to take the word of a man (even on a woman's issue, or especially on a woman’s issue) over the word of a woman, it seems like we are going to be waiting for many more men like Coogler to speak out and say—on the record—that they want a film industry that includes more women auteurs. The myth that we continue to embrace here is that a man has no stakes in supporting a woman, so his words are somehow more pure. Consider what might have happened if a female comic, instead of Hannibal Buress, made that same joke about Bill Cosby being a rapist in 2014. The response would have been very different, or even nonexistent. It would have sounded, to many ears, like another woman standing by her complaining little girlfriends (which is still, for many, the basic definition of feminism). But when Buress says something, well — it must be true or at least worth investigating, because no man would ever speak out for women merely for the sake of doing so. He stands to gain nothing—as if women speaking out for women are more likely to be doing so to get ahead, or to secure some privilege for themselves. Many have already noted how we (we, as in the media, and the public) didn't even take the word of all those women together—but needed the casual statement of a man who seemingly stood to gain nothing by lying (again, as if women, on the other hand, are more likely to lie in an attempt to spread rumors about great men so that they might... take over the world?). Similarly, Coogler saying that women make better directors than men seems like it would be counterproductive for Coogler, a man, who surely wouldn't suggest a studio pass him over for a coveted project just because of his gender without a very good reason. When Soloway makes a similar suggestion—and she’s cosigned by the many other women around her, demanding room—it sounds opportunist to ears that have been tuned to hear women's demands in that way. The reality is that Coogler stands to lose nothing at all by saying what he’s said—hell, if anything, he gains the admiration of women the world over (myself included). But the next question for these men who believe women directors belong in the film world is whether or not they’d take a real risk to stand behind this belief. Some of the biggest male names in the comic book world quickly banded together and organized a boycott of the prestigious Grand Prix d’Angoulême when no female comic creators were nominated. Would any of our acclaimed male directors decline their Oscar nominations if the director category proves to be another boys-only affair (as it was last year)? Bradley Cooper, who pledged to work with the women he co-stars with in films to close the pay gap, might be the one example we have of such a move, but even his promise isn’t likely to cost him anything. And again, one has to ask, isn’t he simply doing the right thing here? How much credit must we give another privileged man for speaking up for the women around him? It all comes down to whose words hold value in our society. Even when a group of people is saying the same thing, who do we choose to listen to? Who gets the clout and the privilege of cast public acknowledgement and exaltation? When we celebrate men for supporting women, it’s not unlike celebrating white people for speaking out against racism. If a black actor took a selfie with the book “The New Jim Crow,” and urged his followers to read it, he might be met with some applause, but nothing like the thunderous, viral reception of which Matt McGorry was on the receiving end recently. Is it wonderful that he's reading Michelle Alexander’s text and encouraging his fans to do the same? Absolutely. Does that make him a better white male celebrity than, say, Stephen Amell? Yes, I think so. But isn't it also troubling how much attention Matt McGorry gets for learning about how much attention he gets as a white man, and how that privilege is on the other end of a spectrum where black children’s killers go unpunished? As a white man of privilege (and an actor who starred on "Orange is the New Black"), Matt McGorry is exactly the kind of person who should be reading “The New Jim Crow.” And yet, we can't help but celebrate his doing so, because we've been taught to expect less—in the same way that we can’t help but be grateful for Hannibal Buress and Ryan Coogler. We've been taught to expect so little from men and from male directors, that when one of them speaks out and states the obvious, echoing so many other women the world over, we want to scream the news from the mountaintops. It's another way of saying, "See? We're not crazy. It's not just Jill Soloway and Gina Prince-Bythewood demanding that women direct. It's also a man—and a man who just made the latest “Rocky” movie, no less!" This is a fair reaction, but it's also the result of a dangerous message we are continuously sent about the worth of women in this and so many other industries—that such worth is difficult to measure, without the weight of a man's voice behind it. But there’s also another way of looking at the choice words of these two directors, who I admit I’ve singled out as a huge fan of both their works (and, interestingly enough, Coogler mentions Soloway in the Variety piece, as one of his reasons for wanting to explore TV directing). Although their overall message is the same, it has to be said that Coogler and Soloway deliver it very differently. Soloway doesn’t merely say that women should be directing—she goes so far as to feminize (insomuch as the feminine is as performative as the masculine) the act of filmmaking. She implies that filmmaking is for women, perhaps even more than it is for men. This is even more bold than simply suggesting that women should be embraced, because they are great filmmakers too. It almost makes the world of filmmaking a stolen domain that women have to reclaim; whether they ever visibly dominated it or not is irrelevant. But if we accept such an interpretation, and manage to convince a few women that, not only do they belong in the room, but the room was rightfully theirs to begin with, we’ll just be asking for trouble. Better to stick with the idea that this industry, too, is a man’s world, but women have some great stuff to contribute to it, and should be given the chance to do so. Right?

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Published on January 07, 2016 13:50

“A culture of exclusion and unconscious bias”: Gender inequality is cannibalizing the sciences

Scientific American Last October news broke of allegations that University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Geoff Marcy had for years harassed female students. (Marcy, who denied some of the allegations, resigned.) The news reminded me of an experience I had in school. I admired an instructor and was honored when he took me out for a celebratory dinner near the end of the course. After walking me home, he put his arms around me, and alarm bells began to ring. When I rebuffed the advance, he complied, but later my grade changed from “outstanding” to “pass.” It was a painful lesson, and I never spoke about it to anyone. I went on to complete my training in internal medicine and infectious diseases and embarked on a career as an HIV physician. I conducted research on virus-induced immunosuppression under the tutelage of two outstanding male professors. I felt supported by my mentors, usually men, who nurtured my clinical and research paths. But even as my career progressed, I observed that many of my female colleagues were disproportionately dropping out of academic medicine careers. The statistics bore out my hunch. Although the percentage of doctorates awarded to women in life sciences increased from 15 to 52 percent between 1969 and 2009, only about a third of assistant professors and less than a fifth of full professors in biology-related fields in 2009 were female. Women make up only 15 percent of permanent department chairs in medical schools and barely 16 percent of medical school deans. The pipeline to leadership is leaking. The problem is not only outright sexual harassment—it is a culture of exclusion and unconscious bias that leaves many women feeling demoralized, marginalized and unsure. In one study, science faculty were given identical résumés in which the names and genders of two applicants were swapped; both male and female faculty judged the male applicant to be more competent and offered him a higher salary. Unconscious bias also appears in the form of “microassaults” that women scientists are forced to endure daily. This is the endless barrage of purportedly insignificant sexist jokes, insults and put-downs that accumulate over the years and undermine confidence and ambition. Each time it is assumed that the only woman in the lab group will play the role of recording secretary, each time a research plan becomes finalized in the men's lavatory between conference sessions, each time a woman is not invited to go out for a beer after the plenary lecture to talk shop, the damage is reinforced. When I speak to groups of women scientists, I often ask them if they have ever been in a meeting where they made a recommendation, had it ignored, and then heard a man receive praise and support for making the same point a few minutes later. Each time the majority of women in the audience raise their hands. Microassaults are especially damaging when they come from a high school science teacher, college mentor, university dean or a member of the scientific elite who has been awarded a prestigious prize—the very people who should be inspiring and supporting the next generation of scientists. If we are to achieve the full promise of science and medicine, we must use all the brainpower available to us by ensuring the full participation of women. We must reprimand blatant harassment, but we must do much more than that. We must change the culture of our organizations so that women feel the value they bring to science will be encouraged and celebrated.

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Published on January 07, 2016 00:45

Did the makers of “Making a Murderer” leave out key evidence against Steven Avery?

AlterNet From start to finish, Netflix’s "Making a Murderer" is a riveting watch, a true-crime docuseries that has turned us into a nation of amateur sleuths. The series has all the key ingredients that keep you from turning away: unexpected twists and turns, slow reveals, a possible conspiracy, and an irresistible appeal to our deepest sense of empathy and justice. Since it first became streamable on December 8 (in a stroke of genius, Netflix recognized there’s no season like the holiday season for offering binge-worthy fare), it’s become a topic of widespread discussion, with everyone from Reddit regulars to celebrities weighing in. Essentially, this is the finest example of can’t-miss TV we’ve seen in a while. In case you haven’t yet watched the series, here’s a quick primer (warning: spoilers abound). Steven Avery was sent to jail in 1985 for a rape he didn’t commit. After spending 18 years behind bars, he was exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. What becomes immediately clear about his conviction is that the police and other officials in Manitowoc, Minn., the small town where Avery and his family have long lived on the margins, were at best careless in their investigation and at worst guilty of suppressing exculpatory evidence. Upon his release, Avery filed a $36 million lawsuit against the county. Even as town officials were being deposed in the case, Avery was charged with a new crime—the grisly murder of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach. "Making a Murderer" is a 10-part series shot over 10 years, so there’s no way I can distill everything that happens. Suffice it to say that filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos masterfully build a case suggesting Avery is again being railroaded by a system that disenfranchises the poor and mentally impaired for reasons both financial and political. Police misconduct and a system of criminal injustice star right alongside the film’s human subjects. LikeThe Thin Blue Line or Paradise Lost, "Making a Murderer" goes beyond merely documenting to reveal something more. What I can tell you, though, is that I was incensed when the series ended. Like the more than 270,000 people who have signed a petition to have Avery exonerated, I was pretty solidly convinced of Avery’s innocence. But as I’ve read more—particularly Dustin Rowles' recent article for Pajiba on what the filmmakers left out—I’ve had to remember that even the most earnest and well-meaning artists have a point of view, and that leaves us with an incomplete picture. Here are some of the key points Rowles uncovered that weren’t included in the documentary, though they were presented at trial. This may not necessarily sway your opinion (obviously, it likely had an impact on the jury) and it doesn’t erase questions about official misconduct in the case, but it does make Steven Avery’s innocence less absolute. I still have deep concerns about how this case was handled, the ethics of trying mentally challenged people for crimes, the way the confessions were obtained, the conflict of interest among multiple officials who overstepped the rules and took part in both cases, sleazy sexting prosecutors, and so much else. But what follows is information worth knowing while you consider every aspect of the case. To quote Rowles:
The documentary said that part of Avery's criminal past included animal cruelty. To my recollection, it didn't specify exactly what that animal cruelty was....He doused a cat in oil and threw it on a bonfire (this is not relevant to the murder trial, but it certainly diminishes the sympathy some of us felt for him). Past criminal activity also included threatening a female relative at gunpoint. (This is mentioned in the documentary.) In the months leading up to Halbach's disappearance, Avery had called Auto Trader several times and always specifically requested Halbach to come out and take the photos. Halbach had complained to her boss that she didn't want to go out to Avery's trailer anymore, because once when she came out, Avery was waiting for her wearing only a towel (this was excluded for being too inflammatory). Avery clearly had an obsession with Halbach. On the day that Halbach went missing, Avery had called her three times, twice from a *67 number to hide his identity. The bullet with Halbach's DNA on it came from Avery's gun, which always hung above his bed. Avery had purchased handcuffs and leg irons like the ones Dassey described holding Halbach only three weeks before (Avery said he'd purchased them for use with his girlfriend, Jodi, with whom he'd had a tumultuous relationship—at one point, he was ordered by police to stay away from her for three days). Here's the piece of evidence that was presented at trial but not in the series that I find most convincing: In Dassey's illegally obtained statement, Dassey stated that he helped Avery moved the RAV4 into the junkyard and that Avery had lifted the hood and removed the battery cable. Even if you believe that the blood in Halbach's car was planted by the cops (as I do), there was also non-blood DNA evidence on the hood latch. I don't believe the police would plant—or know to plant—that evidence.

In an update to his piece, Rowles adds more evidence to the fire, so to speak. He points out that Angenette Levy, one of the reporters we see throughout the film in the press room, noted that, “Teresa's camera and palm pilot were found in Avery's burn barrel.” This fact goes unmentioned in the film. He also links to the transcript of a conversation between Avery’s teen nephew and alleged co-conspirator, Brendan Dassey, who says Avery molested him several times before the crime took place. Obviously, this doesn’t connect Avery to the murder, but it doesn’t help in terms of his character, either.

None of this is airtight proof of anything. If Steven Avery gets a new trial—though he doesn’t have much recourse left at this point—here’s hoping justice is done. The reason this case has created so much impassioned outcry is because, in a world full of chaos, it feels like there’s a rare chance to right a wrong. Here’s hoping that if that should happen, the filmmakers, who have been steadfast in their commitment to what they did and didn’t include, will be there to shoot another documentary. Surely, it'll be as fascinating and infuriating as the series that launched it all.

(h/t Pajiba) AlterNet From start to finish, Netflix’s "Making a Murderer" is a riveting watch, a true-crime docuseries that has turned us into a nation of amateur sleuths. The series has all the key ingredients that keep you from turning away: unexpected twists and turns, slow reveals, a possible conspiracy, and an irresistible appeal to our deepest sense of empathy and justice. Since it first became streamable on December 8 (in a stroke of genius, Netflix recognized there’s no season like the holiday season for offering binge-worthy fare), it’s become a topic of widespread discussion, with everyone from Reddit regulars to celebrities weighing in. Essentially, this is the finest example of can’t-miss TV we’ve seen in a while. In case you haven’t yet watched the series, here’s a quick primer (warning: spoilers abound). Steven Avery was sent to jail in 1985 for a rape he didn’t commit. After spending 18 years behind bars, he was exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. What becomes immediately clear about his conviction is that the police and other officials in Manitowoc, Minn., the small town where Avery and his family have long lived on the margins, were at best careless in their investigation and at worst guilty of suppressing exculpatory evidence. Upon his release, Avery filed a $36 million lawsuit against the county. Even as town officials were being deposed in the case, Avery was charged with a new crime—the grisly murder of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach. "Making a Murderer" is a 10-part series shot over 10 years, so there’s no way I can distill everything that happens. Suffice it to say that filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos masterfully build a case suggesting Avery is again being railroaded by a system that disenfranchises the poor and mentally impaired for reasons both financial and political. Police misconduct and a system of criminal injustice star right alongside the film’s human subjects. LikeThe Thin Blue Line or Paradise Lost, "Making a Murderer" goes beyond merely documenting to reveal something more. What I can tell you, though, is that I was incensed when the series ended. Like the more than 270,000 people who have signed a petition to have Avery exonerated, I was pretty solidly convinced of Avery’s innocence. But as I’ve read more—particularly Dustin Rowles' recent article for Pajiba on what the filmmakers left out—I’ve had to remember that even the most earnest and well-meaning artists have a point of view, and that leaves us with an incomplete picture. Here are some of the key points Rowles uncovered that weren’t included in the documentary, though they were presented at trial. This may not necessarily sway your opinion (obviously, it likely had an impact on the jury) and it doesn’t erase questions about official misconduct in the case, but it does make Steven Avery’s innocence less absolute. I still have deep concerns about how this case was handled, the ethics of trying mentally challenged people for crimes, the way the confessions were obtained, the conflict of interest among multiple officials who overstepped the rules and took part in both cases, sleazy sexting prosecutors, and so much else. But what follows is information worth knowing while you consider every aspect of the case. To quote Rowles:
The documentary said that part of Avery's criminal past included animal cruelty. To my recollection, it didn't specify exactly what that animal cruelty was....He doused a cat in oil and threw it on a bonfire (this is not relevant to the murder trial, but it certainly diminishes the sympathy some of us felt for him). Past criminal activity also included threatening a female relative at gunpoint. (This is mentioned in the documentary.) In the months leading up to Halbach's disappearance, Avery had called Auto Trader several times and always specifically requested Halbach to come out and take the photos. Halbach had complained to her boss that she didn't want to go out to Avery's trailer anymore, because once when she came out, Avery was waiting for her wearing only a towel (this was excluded for being too inflammatory). Avery clearly had an obsession with Halbach. On the day that Halbach went missing, Avery had called her three times, twice from a *67 number to hide his identity. The bullet with Halbach's DNA on it came from Avery's gun, which always hung above his bed. Avery had purchased handcuffs and leg irons like the ones Dassey described holding Halbach only three weeks before (Avery said he'd purchased them for use with his girlfriend, Jodi, with whom he'd had a tumultuous relationship—at one point, he was ordered by police to stay away from her for three days). Here's the piece of evidence that was presented at trial but not in the series that I find most convincing: In Dassey's illegally obtained statement, Dassey stated that he helped Avery moved the RAV4 into the junkyard and that Avery had lifted the hood and removed the battery cable. Even if you believe that the blood in Halbach's car was planted by the cops (as I do), there was also non-blood DNA evidence on the hood latch. I don't believe the police would plant—or know to plant—that evidence.

In an update to his piece, Rowles adds more evidence to the fire, so to speak. He points out that Angenette Levy, one of the reporters we see throughout the film in the press room, noted that, “Teresa's camera and palm pilot were found in Avery's burn barrel.” This fact goes unmentioned in the film. He also links to the transcript of a conversation between Avery’s teen nephew and alleged co-conspirator, Brendan Dassey, who says Avery molested him several times before the crime took place. Obviously, this doesn’t connect Avery to the murder, but it doesn’t help in terms of his character, either.

None of this is airtight proof of anything. If Steven Avery gets a new trial—though he doesn’t have much recourse left at this point—here’s hoping justice is done. The reason this case has created so much impassioned outcry is because, in a world full of chaos, it feels like there’s a rare chance to right a wrong. Here’s hoping that if that should happen, the filmmakers, who have been steadfast in their commitment to what they did and didn’t include, will be there to shoot another documentary. Surely, it'll be as fascinating and infuriating as the series that launched it all.

(h/t Pajiba)

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Published on January 07, 2016 00:30

10 more reasons Wall Street would hate Bernie Sanders

AlterNet Bernie Sanders has declared war on the biggest players in Wall Street’s financial sector. He says they are overrun with “greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance,” and criticizes his top rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as being naïve about what needs to happen to create a financial system that “works for all Americans.” On Tuesday, he upped the ante. “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear,” Sanders said in a midtown Manhattan speech. “Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation. And here is a New Year’s resolution that I will keep if elected president: If you do not end your greed, we will end it for you.” Sanders laid out a 10-point program to deeply change the nature of the financial sector, while occasionally digressing to emphasize how much more sweeping his proposals are compared to Clinton's. As always, he started by recounting how the “20 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans”—and said the finance industry has spent “billions” to get Congress and federal agencies to deregulate almost all areas of the financial industry while weakening consumer protection laws. “They spent this money in order to get the government off their backs and to show the American people what they could do with that new-won freedom,” he said. “They sure showed the American people. In 2008, the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street nearly destroyed the U.S. and global economy. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings.” Sanders continued, “While Wall Street received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world with no strings attached, the American middle class continues to disappear, poverty is increasing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider.” Here are the 10 major components to Sanders’ Wall Street reforms. 1. End too-big-to-fail. The underlying logic of this federal policy is that the biggest banks cannot fail and shut down, even if they make terrible investments or wreak great harm to the economy, because the U.S. economy and millions of ordinary people would become financially destitute. Sanders said this “scheme...is nothing more than a free insurance policy for Wall Street.” Compared to before the crash of 2008, the biggest banks in the country are larger than ever, he said, adding, “if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” “In 2008, the taxpayers of this country bailed out Wall Street because we were told they were ‘too big to fail,’” Sanders said. “Yet, today, three out of the four largest financial institutions [JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo] are nearly 80 percent bigger than before we bailed them out. Incredibly, the six largest banks in this country issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards and more than 35 percent of all mortgages. They control more than 95 percent of all financial derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits. Their assets are equivalent to nearly 60 percent of our GDP. Enough is enough!” Sanders concluded, “A handful of huge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country. If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust-buster, were alive today, he would say, break ‘em up. And he would be right.” 2. Break up the biggest banks. If elected, Sanders said he would direct the Treasury Department to compile a list of the institutions “whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.” Using the power of executive authority, he would break up these institutions. “Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy as authorized under Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.” 3. Pass a 21st-century Glass-Steagall Act. This Depression-era law, which was repealed by Congress under President Bill Clinton, prevented commercial banks from investing in risky and arcane financial instruments, such as bundled home loans during the housing market bubble that predated the 2008 financial market collapse. “Secretary Clinton says that Glass-Steagall would not have prevented the financial crisis because shadow banks like AIG and Lehman Brothers, not big commercial banks, were the real culprits,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton is wrong. Shadow banks did gamble recklessly, but where did that money come from? It came from the federally insured bank deposits of big commercial banks—something that would have been banned under the Glass-Steagall Act.” Moreover, Sanders said his work as a senator revealed that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department “provided more than $16 trillion in short-term, low-interest loans to every major financial institution in the country” to stop the global economy from imploding after the 2008 crash. “Secretary Clinton says we just need to impose a few more fees and regulations on the financial industry. I disagree.” 4. End too-big-to-jail. Sanders said that the government needs to run Wall Street, not the other way around, which he said is the reality today. He said that “equal justice under the law” means that banking and finance executives whose reckless gambles damaged people’s lives must face real criminal penalties including prison. “The average American sees kids being arrested and sometimes even jailed for possessing marijuana or other minor crimes,” Sanders said. “But when it comes to Wall Street executives, some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country, whose illegal behavior caused pain and suffering for millions—somehow, nothing happens to them. No police record. No jail time. No justice.” He noted that “not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy," and that "will change under my administration.” 5. Criminalize Wall Street’s business model. One of Sanders' most incisive comments concerned Wall Street’s ways of doing business, which he said are based on intentionally ripping off average Americans and engaging in all kinds of unethical and illegal behaviors. He said the government must do more to penalize companies that routinely rip off the public and richly reward the executives overseeing that process. “The reality is that fraud is the business model on Wall Street,” Sanders said. “It is not the exception to the rule. It is the rule. And in a weak regulatory climate the likelihood is that Wall Street gets away with a lot more illegal behavior than we know of. How many times have we heard the myth that what Wall Street did may have been wrong but it wasn’t illegal? Let me help shatter that myth today.” Sanders read from a dozen business page headlines to underscore that the banks most Americans use have been fined $204 billion since 2009 for malfeasance. “And that takes place in a weak regulatory climate,” he said. “And, when I say that the business model of Wall Street is fraud, that is not just Bernie Sanders talking. That is what financial executives told the University of Notre Dame in a studyon the ethics of the financial services industry last year.” He continued, “According to this study, 51 percent of Wall Street executives making more than $500,000 a year found it likely that their competitors have engaged in unethical or illegal activity in order to gain an edge in the market. More than one-third of financial executives have either witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace. Nearly one in five financial service professionals believe they must engage in illegal or unethical activity to be successful.” Sanders said he would appoint regulators who are not afraid to tackle this caldron of corruption. “I will nominate and appoint people with a track record of standing up to power, rather than those who have made millions defending Wall Street CEOs. Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks will not be represented in my administration.” 6. Tax the casino culture. Sanders said one of the keys of reforming Wall Street was ending its culture of financial speculation. He said he would do that by imposing a transaction tax aimed at high-speed, high-volume traders who are not investing “in the job-creating economy.” Those funds would then be used for cutting the cost of higher education. “We will use the revenue from this tax to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. During the financial crisis, the middle class of this country bailed out Wall Street. Now, it’s Wall Street’s turn to help the middle class.” 7. Reform the financial rating agencies. This is the industry that not only rates people on their personal financial credit but also rates investments—and before the 2008 crash falsely labeled as credible many of the risky investments that failed. These firms are like foxes guarding the hen house, Sanders said, and cannot base their profits on getting paid by the companies whose products they are rating. “We will turn for-profit credit rating agencies into non-profit institutions, independent from Wall Street. No longer will Wall Street be able to pick and choose which credit agency will rate their products.” 8. Cap credit card interest and ATM fees. Banks and credit card companies must be stopped “from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees,” Sanders said. “It is unacceptable that Americans are paying a $4 or $5 fee each time they go to the ATM. It is unacceptable that millions of Americans are paying credit card interest rates of 20 or 30 percent.” “The Bible has a term for this practice. It’s called usury,” Sanders said. “And inThe Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates. Today, we don’t need the hellfire and the pitch forks, we don’t need the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law.” Interest rates should be capped at no more than 15 percent for borrowed money, he said, pointing to a now-repealed 1980 law with that threshold. He also said ATM fees should be capped at $2. “People should not have to pay a 10 percent fee for withdrawing $40 of their own money out of an ATM. Big banks need to stop acting like loan sharks and start acting like responsible lenders.” 9. Let the USPS offer banking. The post office’s money order service could be greatly expanded “to give Americans affordable banking options,” Sanders said. “The reality is that, unbelievably, millions of low-income Americans live in communities where there are no normal banking services.” “Today, if you live in a low-income community and you need to cash a check or get a loan to pay for a car repair or a medical emergency, where do you go?” he asked. “You go to a payday lender who could charge an interest rate of over 300 percent and trap you into a vicious cycle of debt. That is unacceptable.” 10. Reform the Federal Reserve. Sanders said this arcame institution that regulates the flow of the U.S. currency and interest rates charges to banks must be reformed so that its primary purpose is serving the public, not private bankers. “When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Federal Reserve acted with a fierce sense of urgency to save the financial system,” he said. “We need the Fed to act with the same boldness to combat unemployment and low wages.” “it is unacceptable that the Federal Reserve has been hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating,” Sanders said. “I think the American people would be shocked to learn that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, served on the board of the New York Fed at the same time that his bank received a $391 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve. That is a clear conflict of interest that I would ban as president. When I am elected, the foxes will no longer be guarding the henhouse at the Fed.” Just the Beginning As striking as Sanders’ reforms sound, he said they were unlikely to be sufficient to ensure that American capitalist excesses do not harm the country again. “No president, not Bernie Sanders or anyone else, can effectively address the economic crises facing the working families of this country alone,” he said. “The truth is that Wall Street, corporate America, the corporate media and wealthy campaign donors are just too powerful.” But Sanders said that new rules of the financial game could be written and that government could force Wall Street to follow them. “Yes, we can make our economy work for all Americans,” he said. “And so my message to you today is straightforward: If elected president, I will rein in Wall Street so they can’t crash our economy again. Will they like me? No. Will they begin to play by the rules if I’m president? You better believe it.” AlterNet Bernie Sanders has declared war on the biggest players in Wall Street’s financial sector. He says they are overrun with “greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance,” and criticizes his top rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as being naïve about what needs to happen to create a financial system that “works for all Americans.” On Tuesday, he upped the ante. “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear,” Sanders said in a midtown Manhattan speech. “Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation. And here is a New Year’s resolution that I will keep if elected president: If you do not end your greed, we will end it for you.” Sanders laid out a 10-point program to deeply change the nature of the financial sector, while occasionally digressing to emphasize how much more sweeping his proposals are compared to Clinton's. As always, he started by recounting how the “20 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans”—and said the finance industry has spent “billions” to get Congress and federal agencies to deregulate almost all areas of the financial industry while weakening consumer protection laws. “They spent this money in order to get the government off their backs and to show the American people what they could do with that new-won freedom,” he said. “They sure showed the American people. In 2008, the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street nearly destroyed the U.S. and global economy. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes and their life savings.” Sanders continued, “While Wall Street received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world with no strings attached, the American middle class continues to disappear, poverty is increasing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider.” Here are the 10 major components to Sanders’ Wall Street reforms. 1. End too-big-to-fail. The underlying logic of this federal policy is that the biggest banks cannot fail and shut down, even if they make terrible investments or wreak great harm to the economy, because the U.S. economy and millions of ordinary people would become financially destitute. Sanders said this “scheme...is nothing more than a free insurance policy for Wall Street.” Compared to before the crash of 2008, the biggest banks in the country are larger than ever, he said, adding, “if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” “In 2008, the taxpayers of this country bailed out Wall Street because we were told they were ‘too big to fail,’” Sanders said. “Yet, today, three out of the four largest financial institutions [JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo] are nearly 80 percent bigger than before we bailed them out. Incredibly, the six largest banks in this country issue more than two-thirds of all credit cards and more than 35 percent of all mortgages. They control more than 95 percent of all financial derivatives and hold more than 40 percent of all bank deposits. Their assets are equivalent to nearly 60 percent of our GDP. Enough is enough!” Sanders concluded, “A handful of huge financial institutions simply have too much economic and political power over this country. If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trust-buster, were alive today, he would say, break ‘em up. And he would be right.” 2. Break up the biggest banks. If elected, Sanders said he would direct the Treasury Department to compile a list of the institutions “whose failure would pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.” Using the power of executive authority, he would break up these institutions. “Within one year, my administration will break these institutions up so that they no longer pose a grave threat to the economy as authorized under Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.” 3. Pass a 21st-century Glass-Steagall Act. This Depression-era law, which was repealed by Congress under President Bill Clinton, prevented commercial banks from investing in risky and arcane financial instruments, such as bundled home loans during the housing market bubble that predated the 2008 financial market collapse. “Secretary Clinton says that Glass-Steagall would not have prevented the financial crisis because shadow banks like AIG and Lehman Brothers, not big commercial banks, were the real culprits,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton is wrong. Shadow banks did gamble recklessly, but where did that money come from? It came from the federally insured bank deposits of big commercial banks—something that would have been banned under the Glass-Steagall Act.” Moreover, Sanders said his work as a senator revealed that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department “provided more than $16 trillion in short-term, low-interest loans to every major financial institution in the country” to stop the global economy from imploding after the 2008 crash. “Secretary Clinton says we just need to impose a few more fees and regulations on the financial industry. I disagree.” 4. End too-big-to-jail. Sanders said that the government needs to run Wall Street, not the other way around, which he said is the reality today. He said that “equal justice under the law” means that banking and finance executives whose reckless gambles damaged people’s lives must face real criminal penalties including prison. “The average American sees kids being arrested and sometimes even jailed for possessing marijuana or other minor crimes,” Sanders said. “But when it comes to Wall Street executives, some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country, whose illegal behavior caused pain and suffering for millions—somehow, nothing happens to them. No police record. No jail time. No justice.” He noted that “not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy," and that "will change under my administration.” 5. Criminalize Wall Street’s business model. One of Sanders' most incisive comments concerned Wall Street’s ways of doing business, which he said are based on intentionally ripping off average Americans and engaging in all kinds of unethical and illegal behaviors. He said the government must do more to penalize companies that routinely rip off the public and richly reward the executives overseeing that process. “The reality is that fraud is the business model on Wall Street,” Sanders said. “It is not the exception to the rule. It is the rule. And in a weak regulatory climate the likelihood is that Wall Street gets away with a lot more illegal behavior than we know of. How many times have we heard the myth that what Wall Street did may have been wrong but it wasn’t illegal? Let me help shatter that myth today.” Sanders read from a dozen business page headlines to underscore that the banks most Americans use have been fined $204 billion since 2009 for malfeasance. “And that takes place in a weak regulatory climate,” he said. “And, when I say that the business model of Wall Street is fraud, that is not just Bernie Sanders talking. That is what financial executives told the University of Notre Dame in a studyon the ethics of the financial services industry last year.” He continued, “According to this study, 51 percent of Wall Street executives making more than $500,000 a year found it likely that their competitors have engaged in unethical or illegal activity in order to gain an edge in the market. More than one-third of financial executives have either witnessed or have firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace. Nearly one in five financial service professionals believe they must engage in illegal or unethical activity to be successful.” Sanders said he would appoint regulators who are not afraid to tackle this caldron of corruption. “I will nominate and appoint people with a track record of standing up to power, rather than those who have made millions defending Wall Street CEOs. Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks will not be represented in my administration.” 6. Tax the casino culture. Sanders said one of the keys of reforming Wall Street was ending its culture of financial speculation. He said he would do that by imposing a transaction tax aimed at high-speed, high-volume traders who are not investing “in the job-creating economy.” Those funds would then be used for cutting the cost of higher education. “We will use the revenue from this tax to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. During the financial crisis, the middle class of this country bailed out Wall Street. Now, it’s Wall Street’s turn to help the middle class.” 7. Reform the financial rating agencies. This is the industry that not only rates people on their personal financial credit but also rates investments—and before the 2008 crash falsely labeled as credible many of the risky investments that failed. These firms are like foxes guarding the hen house, Sanders said, and cannot base their profits on getting paid by the companies whose products they are rating. “We will turn for-profit credit rating agencies into non-profit institutions, independent from Wall Street. No longer will Wall Street be able to pick and choose which credit agency will rate their products.” 8. Cap credit card interest and ATM fees. Banks and credit card companies must be stopped “from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and outrageous fees,” Sanders said. “It is unacceptable that Americans are paying a $4 or $5 fee each time they go to the ATM. It is unacceptable that millions of Americans are paying credit card interest rates of 20 or 30 percent.” “The Bible has a term for this practice. It’s called usury,” Sanders said. “And inThe Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates. Today, we don’t need the hellfire and the pitch forks, we don’t need the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law.” Interest rates should be capped at no more than 15 percent for borrowed money, he said, pointing to a now-repealed 1980 law with that threshold. He also said ATM fees should be capped at $2. “People should not have to pay a 10 percent fee for withdrawing $40 of their own money out of an ATM. Big banks need to stop acting like loan sharks and start acting like responsible lenders.” 9. Let the USPS offer banking. The post office’s money order service could be greatly expanded “to give Americans affordable banking options,” Sanders said. “The reality is that, unbelievably, millions of low-income Americans live in communities where there are no normal banking services.” “Today, if you live in a low-income community and you need to cash a check or get a loan to pay for a car repair or a medical emergency, where do you go?” he asked. “You go to a payday lender who could charge an interest rate of over 300 percent and trap you into a vicious cycle of debt. That is unacceptable.” 10. Reform the Federal Reserve. Sanders said this arcame institution that regulates the flow of the U.S. currency and interest rates charges to banks must be reformed so that its primary purpose is serving the public, not private bankers. “When Wall Street was on the verge of collapse, the Federal Reserve acted with a fierce sense of urgency to save the financial system,” he said. “We need the Fed to act with the same boldness to combat unemployment and low wages.” “it is unacceptable that the Federal Reserve has been hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating,” Sanders said. “I think the American people would be shocked to learn that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, served on the board of the New York Fed at the same time that his bank received a $391 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve. That is a clear conflict of interest that I would ban as president. When I am elected, the foxes will no longer be guarding the henhouse at the Fed.” Just the Beginning As striking as Sanders’ reforms sound, he said they were unlikely to be sufficient to ensure that American capitalist excesses do not harm the country again. “No president, not Bernie Sanders or anyone else, can effectively address the economic crises facing the working families of this country alone,” he said. “The truth is that Wall Street, corporate America, the corporate media and wealthy campaign donors are just too powerful.” But Sanders said that new rules of the financial game could be written and that government could force Wall Street to follow them. “Yes, we can make our economy work for all Americans,” he said. “And so my message to you today is straightforward: If elected president, I will rein in Wall Street so they can’t crash our economy again. Will they like me? No. Will they begin to play by the rules if I’m president? You better believe it.”

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Published on January 07, 2016 00:00

January 6, 2016

He’s made the Middle East worse: Let’s be honest, Obama bears as much responsibility for this mess as predecessors who shaped them

It is all there now for us to see. Decades of cynical, poorly devised policy in the Middle East, vacant of any principle our indispensable nation purports to advance, return as we speak to bite our president and his foreign policy cliques on their backsides. The shambles that now ensues serves them right, absolutely. With the sudden ignition of smoldering hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia last weekend—the Iranians managing this more correctly than the Saudis—at last the veil drops to expose the gross duplicity, not to say stupidity, of Washington’s alliances in the region. At last we can talk about the unclothed emperor. And it is our responsibility to do so. One would never argue that the chaos into which the Middle East now descends is all President Obama’s doing. It is not, by a long way. The music simply stopped on his watch, and it is he who is left to grope for a chair. No solicitude and no empathy, however. The bitter reality is that our hope-and-change president, as a drone-addicted assassin signing death warrants on a routine basis, bears as much responsibility for the messes he now confronts as any of those predecessors who shaped them. If there is a single moment that crystallized all that has been wrong in America’s conduct across the Middle East for many decades, it came at the weekend, when the administration’s spokesmen could not bring themselves even to comment directly on, to say nothing of condemn, Riyadh’s purposely provocative beheading of a prominent Shiite cleric, a principled critic of the regime, last Saturday. Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, took as few words as he could get away with to say nothing whatsoever. When John Kirby, the dim bulb who fronts for the State Department, noted only “the need for leaders throughout the region to redouble efforts aimed at de-escalating regional tensions,” one knew the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of American policy in the Middle East were both perfectly intact. Numerous readers have written over the months to assert that I assign the U.S. too much responsibility for the Middle East’s violence and turmoil. This is my form of exceptionalism, they suggest. There is a long history of abuse and inhumanity in the region that has nothing to do with America, I am reminded. It has never been my intent to argue otherwise. The new regime in Riyadh, to take an example readily to hand, beheaded 47 people last weekend against the Obama administration’s vigorously rendered advice. And I agreed with Kirby, weirdly, when he told journalists after the executions, “Real, long-term solutions aren’t going to be mandated by Washington, D.C.” My problem—ours, indeed—is that Kirby is a liar to suggest State, the White House or anyone in the defense and intelligence bureaucracies believes this to be so. The hands-off pose, the shrug of the powerless, is default position when the going gets too patently sordid. And that is all it is. No, I will not step back from my contention that the U.S. is the primary author of the disorder and deadly hostility that now engulf the entire region. * One could go back to prewar decades to trace the roots of Washington’s errors and lawlessness in the Middle East. We leave this to the historians for now. For my money, the ridiculous soufflé the Obama administration has made of Middle East policy began to collapse last August, when a Marine general—not a diplomat—negotiated and signed an accord certifying the Erdoğan government in Turkey as an ally in the fight against the Islamic State. Wrong times a hundred. By last year the U.S. had been using Turkey to convey weapons to the imaginary “moderate opposition” fighting the Assad government in Syria for three years. But it had been plain for nearly as long that the proto-fascist Erdoğan intended to turn this policy to his own purposes, which no one of any decency could countenance. Seymour Hersh’s pieces in the London Review of Books have been revelatory in this context. In April 2014 he gave persuasive evidence that, in an attempt to frame Assad, Erdoğan provided extremist Sunni militias with the crudely concocted poison gas that exploded in a Damascus suburb the previous August. In his latest piece, Hersh documents the Pentagon’s many failed efforts to pull the administration off its obsession with developing a coup in Damascus and recognize Islamic terrorists as the threat that matters in Syria. “The assessment was bleak,” Hersh writes of a classified document the Joint Chiefs brass sent the White House in 2013. “There was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the U.S. was arming extremists…. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria.” One cannot agree more heartily. At this point, the alliance with Turkey represents a festival of cynicism our media flatly refuse to describe in any detail or with any substantive accuracy. It is the height of naiveté to think Washington does not understand the perverse uses Erdoğan makes of it. The ink was not dry before the Turkish president took his new pact with the superpower as license to make war against the Kurdish populations of Turkey, Syria and Iraq and pursue a Sunni nationalist agenda while assisting the Islamic State all but overtly in its campaign to destabilize Damascus. Unequivocally, this guy—who favorably cited Hitler as a political model just a few days ago—takes his place in the long line of repellent dictators the cliques in Washington almost always prefer to democrats. For said cliques it is the Cold War redux with the Turks, as the generals at the Pentagon suggested. Once again Washington recruits Turkey as a spear-carrier in its great-power game—previously against the Soviets, now against the Russian Federation. The bitterest truths are now evident: 1) no post-Cold War administration has yet proven capable of new, 21st century thinking of even the most basic kind, and 2) in consequence of 1) Obama has been purposely ineffectual against the Islamic State these past 18 months because he has refused to abandon plans to topple Assad so as to push Russia decisively out of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean. Humanitarian angst? Wasted lives, the worst suffering on the planet in our time, the shock-horror of Assad’s alleged cruelties? These have nothing to do with what Washington is up to in Syria, and the alliance with Ankara stands as evidence of this. We must consider the downing of a Russian jet in late November by Turkish pilots flying American-made F-16s in this context. After Obama delivered an almost humorously hypocritical defense of this wildly irresponsible act—“Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its air space”—Washington and its clerks in the corporate media made this incident disappear but quick. We have since been treated to a media blackout as brazen as any since the coup in Ukraine two years ago next month. And when you consider the facts available in non-American media, it is no wonder. There has been fulsome coverage of the Turkish incident in the Russian press, needless to say. Before offering even a brief summary of it, this: One may accept it at face value or question it, but there are no grounds for dismissing it or ignoring it altogether, as our media have, simply because the assertions made are Russia’s. They deserve scrutiny and further investigation at the very least, and they have had neither. Most interesting is the “why” of the incident. What lay behind President Putin’s blunt charge that the downing of a Russian plane while it was flying an anti-terror mission in Syria was “a stab in the back by accomplices of terrorists”? I find the answer in one simple fact: Russian jets, it is not to be missed, had begun targeting convoys of trucks carrying oil into Turkey just before the Turks took one of them out of the sky. Moscow has practically gushed with evidence and accusations since shortly after its Su-24 went down. Putin, at a press conference with French President François Hollande, showed reconnaissance footage of truck convoys and strikes against oil-storage facilities in Raqaa, the Islamic State’s declared capital. Hollande, roused by the attacks in Paris at the moment I describe, assented as Putin spoke:
“Vehicles, carrying oil, [are] lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” Putin asserted . “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there—empty. We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas and not any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going.”
Other reports alleged that this activity is not the doing merely of middlemen operating on the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev alleged “direct financial interest of some Turkish officials relating to the supply of oil products refined by plants controlled by ISIS.” It soon emerged that the chain of beneficiaries may well run up to the presidential palace by way of Erdoğan’s son and son-in-law: Between them, they run Turkey’s largest energy-trading company and the energy ministry. There is no need to take the Russians’ word for this, although I find the evidence presented in Moscow persuasive, and the activities of Erdoğan’s family members are a matter of record. David Cohen, Treasury’s undersecretary for financial intelligence, had already made the Russian case in October—a month before the matter got as hot. Cohen put the Islamic State’s income from oil sold directly or indirectly into Turkey at $1 million a day. A few days after the incident, I had a lengthy note from a very well-placed source with extensive interests in, and therefore knowledge of, European investment and commodity markets. What he or she wrote fits like a glove with what had then begun to emerge. Here is some of it, in the form it arrived. The oil prices stated obtained at the time:
For more than 2 yrs I have heard from contacts in Turk,—contacts among people who would know about such things—that the oil was delivered to the Turks and that it was then run through the system, with some of it entering the pipeline which carries crude to the Medit coast for then delivery to W. Europe...  I am told that there is a handsome profit of around 15$/bar on this—that is, for example, they buy it from Daesh [the Islamic State] through middlemen at a discount of 30$ and then, “cleaned,” it hits world markets at 45$....  The trade runs on the basis of this 15$ spread. If it is, say 25K bar/day, that = 136M$ for yr (15x25Kx365). So it is not just small change. I understand that the money goes through Turk and Qatari banks. Once the oil is “cleaned,” they don't even need to launder it through Qatari banks, or any other banks. I further hear that much of the proceeds are then recycled into real estate in W. Europe. So if you are draining off 136M$/yr and, say, you leverage that 2:1, as is typical for commercial real estate, that would mean that after 3 yrs, you are running a 1.2B$ real estate portfolio....
“Surely Treasury knows all this,” concluded my source, whom I have known for more than 25 years. “Eyes wide shut!” Given I cannot name this source, let me apply the same criterion to his or her information that I suggested for the Russian accounts just summarized: You can take it as it is or not, but you cannot leave it without investigation unless you are into chicanery: The implications are simply too large. But we have had none and heard nothing. Within a day or so of the Su-24’s downing, Sigmar Gabriel, vice-chancellor in Angela Merkel’s coalition cabinet, exclaimed thus in an interview with DPA, the German press agency: “This incident shows fir the first time that we are dealing with an actor who is unpredictable…. That is not Russia. That is Turkey.” Gabriel was right about the revelatory aspect of the Nov. 24 events. The American alliance with Turkey makes no sense whatever if you take the administration’s word that it earnestly desires to defeat the Islamic State and restabilize Syria. But it makes perfect sense if, with 1979-80 Afghanistan in mind, you look past all the lies and conclude that, now and probably into the future, Washington finds extremist militias in Syria useful in its pursuit of another “regime change.” I had an interesting note from a source in Moscow the other day, and I offer it as the take-home on this topic. Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict in late September, he or she suggested, has effectively put Washington on notice: There is to be no more “regime change” for the Americans without vigorous Russian response. My source’s reasoning is interesting, and suggestive of Moscow’s gravity on the matter: Between Ukraine and Syria, he or she said, Putin knows perfectly well that the regime the U.S. truly wants to change is his. * The Saudis, of course, are the other American allies in the Middle East in the cause of who can say what at this point, and suddenly this relationship, too, is exposed in all its abhorrent aspects. I predicted in this space three autumns ago, when the just-elected Hassan Rouhani appeared at the U.N. to extend Iran’s hand westward, that any opening to the Islamic Republic was fated to shake loose all of Washington’s bedrock relations in the region. I was thinking, optimistically, of U.S.-Israeli ties, but correcting these will take much more time. The Saudi case, plainly, is upon us now. I have no expertise in Saudi politics, but I wonder if the old alliance between Washington and the House of Saud might have survived the tensions caused by the success of last year’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran had King Abdullah not died a year ago next week. He was 90 and had been high in the Saudi political scene for decades. A tried-and-true relationship, based on Saudi oil and Washington’s silence in the face of the kingdom’s anti-democratic repressions, had been in place since the 1930s. King Salman has proven to be a few things his predecessor was not since he acceded to the throne. He is 80 but seems to have the temperament of a hot-blooded youth—“more interested in action than deliberation,” as Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution told the New York Times the other day. He is even more nervous about Iran’s emergence as a regional power than Abdullah was, the nuclear accord having been signed seven months into his watch. And he is plainly more extreme in his intolerance of dissent at home and his determination to assert Wahhabist ideology, the radically conservative interpretation of Islam that now informs Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State. In short, with Salman’s accession the longstanding Saudi component of American policy in the Middle East was bound to come a-cropper. And with the beheading last weekend of Nimr al-Nimr, the Shiite critic of the Saudi regime, so it has with a resounding crash. One truly would not want to be on the Middle East desk at State or any White House adviser tasked now with keeping this relationship in place and explaining why the fatal flaws at its core from the first remain acceptable. There is Riyadh’s false commitment to eradicating the Islamic State as a keystone member of the coalition formed against it. There is the criminally indiscriminate air campaign against Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Coalitions being the fashion these days, Riyadh announced just before the holidays that it had formed one of 34 Muslim nations to fight terrorism. The proposition reeks. Who can say what the Saudis mean when they say they are going to fight “terrorism” wherever it may arise? Some nations the Saudis listed among its ranks immediately said they had heard nothing about it. Even if we take the membership count at face value, it is 100 percent Sunni. We are to look forward to a first round of talks bringing all parties to the Syrian conflict to the table later this month. Look at this lineup: Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the two hood ornaments Washington mounts to betoken a regional commitment to oppose ISIS, are hopelessly compromised—beyond retrieval, in my view. If the talks come off at all, and this remains a question, I predict a short-run circus with too many rings to count. I can only wager on this point at the moment, but like a careful horseplayer I have a $2 saver on it: It could be that King Salman took off al-Nimr’s head last weekend as part of a strategy to scuttle the Syria talks, wherein Saudis are to sit opposite Iranians—if not before they convene, quickly after they do. * There is a certain consistency to Obama’s Middle East position, one has to say. It is perverse, but it holds: Ally with those subverting your cause—or the cause you declare, at any rate—and subvert those who are your natural allies. Russia and Iran qualify in this latter category, but let me restrict this commentary to those in the region. The Iranians were clear as bells during the long negotiations on the future of their nuclear program. They were pleased to open the door to the West, having suffered decades of difficult isolation, but they had no intention of abdicating any of their rights under international law. Washington, in particular, was to have no room to make it up as it went along—suggesting as it did, for instance, that Iran had no right to enrich uranium because the U.S. had not conferred it. Tehran reiterated this point within a month of signing the nuclear accord. Last August it announced completion of a new surface-to-surface ballistic missile, the Fateh 313. The point should have been clear. Since then, the Iranian military has tested the Fateh twice, and the point should have been clearer: We have enemies in the neighborhood, Iranian officials have explained incessantly. The need to maintain a modernized defense is self-evident. I wondered from the first whether the Obama administration was up to managing the running consequences that were certain to emerge after the nuclear accord was concluded. It is not, we must now conclude. There is simply no dexterity in the thinking within the policy cliques. Russia and Iran, strange as this may sound to readers of corporate-owned newspapers, are natural allies across a range of shared interests. The United States is simply incapable of (1) understanding this and (2) making good use of opportunities. To wit: In response to Iran’s missile tests, the Obama administration now threatens a new round of sanctions against the Iranians. The White House acknowledges that the tests do not contravene the terms of the nuclear agreement, and good enough it stays with the truth this far. Instead, it argues that the tests run afoul of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed in 2010, wherein it was agreed “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.” Did Iran violate UNSC Resolution 1929 last fall? Given the language above it seems open and shut that it has, and Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador at the U.N., asserts this with the evangelical vehemence we have come to expect of her. The greater Power’s convictions, the warier one must be: The rule never seems to fail. Read further in the document, please. Get to the part no one seems eager to mention, where it states that the U.N. “shall suspend the implementation of measures if and for so long as Iran suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.” In plain English: Halt your enrichment operations and the sanctions declared herein will drop. As all concerned acknowledge, Iran has shut down its centrifuges and shipped its uranium stockpiles to Russia, per the July accord. Ben Rhodes, who worked hard to get the nuclear deal done, was traveling with Obama in Hawaii last weekend and said this: “I would expect the Iranians to complete the work necessary to move forward with implementation [of the accord] in the coming weeks.” Let me get this straight, Ben. The Iranians have now responded to 1929, which means they are no longer in violation of the resolution. They are in compliance with the nuclear accord, too, which means they are incapable of building a nuclear device, and this means, in turn, your president is prepared to begin lifting sanctions. At the same time, your president proposes to impose new sanctions because Iran has tested a missile capable of bearing one of the nuclear warheads it is incapable of building. I think I have it right. Hassan Rouhani does, this is for sure. On January 1 the Iranian president—he who lit the peace pipe three years ago and took many political risks to get the nuclear pact signed—responded to the suggestion that new sanctions were in the works by asserting their illegality under international law and ordering the Fateh missile program to be expanded and accelerated as quickly as possible. He meant to say “Happy New Year,” surely, to all the “folks” in the Obama White House. What a kettle of something more pungent than fish. I still contend that the confrontation with Russia, conjured from nothing and now the object of something close to national hysteria, will be the ugliest, most consequential feature of the Obama legacy on the foreign side. But the havoc in the Middle East this president has done so much to worsen is coming up fast.It is all there now for us to see. Decades of cynical, poorly devised policy in the Middle East, vacant of any principle our indispensable nation purports to advance, return as we speak to bite our president and his foreign policy cliques on their backsides. The shambles that now ensues serves them right, absolutely. With the sudden ignition of smoldering hostilities between Iran and Saudi Arabia last weekend—the Iranians managing this more correctly than the Saudis—at last the veil drops to expose the gross duplicity, not to say stupidity, of Washington’s alliances in the region. At last we can talk about the unclothed emperor. And it is our responsibility to do so. One would never argue that the chaos into which the Middle East now descends is all President Obama’s doing. It is not, by a long way. The music simply stopped on his watch, and it is he who is left to grope for a chair. No solicitude and no empathy, however. The bitter reality is that our hope-and-change president, as a drone-addicted assassin signing death warrants on a routine basis, bears as much responsibility for the messes he now confronts as any of those predecessors who shaped them. If there is a single moment that crystallized all that has been wrong in America’s conduct across the Middle East for many decades, it came at the weekend, when the administration’s spokesmen could not bring themselves even to comment directly on, to say nothing of condemn, Riyadh’s purposely provocative beheading of a prominent Shiite cleric, a principled critic of the regime, last Saturday. Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, took as few words as he could get away with to say nothing whatsoever. When John Kirby, the dim bulb who fronts for the State Department, noted only “the need for leaders throughout the region to redouble efforts aimed at de-escalating regional tensions,” one knew the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of American policy in the Middle East were both perfectly intact. Numerous readers have written over the months to assert that I assign the U.S. too much responsibility for the Middle East’s violence and turmoil. This is my form of exceptionalism, they suggest. There is a long history of abuse and inhumanity in the region that has nothing to do with America, I am reminded. It has never been my intent to argue otherwise. The new regime in Riyadh, to take an example readily to hand, beheaded 47 people last weekend against the Obama administration’s vigorously rendered advice. And I agreed with Kirby, weirdly, when he told journalists after the executions, “Real, long-term solutions aren’t going to be mandated by Washington, D.C.” My problem—ours, indeed—is that Kirby is a liar to suggest State, the White House or anyone in the defense and intelligence bureaucracies believes this to be so. The hands-off pose, the shrug of the powerless, is default position when the going gets too patently sordid. And that is all it is. No, I will not step back from my contention that the U.S. is the primary author of the disorder and deadly hostility that now engulf the entire region. * One could go back to prewar decades to trace the roots of Washington’s errors and lawlessness in the Middle East. We leave this to the historians for now. For my money, the ridiculous soufflé the Obama administration has made of Middle East policy began to collapse last August, when a Marine general—not a diplomat—negotiated and signed an accord certifying the Erdoğan government in Turkey as an ally in the fight against the Islamic State. Wrong times a hundred. By last year the U.S. had been using Turkey to convey weapons to the imaginary “moderate opposition” fighting the Assad government in Syria for three years. But it had been plain for nearly as long that the proto-fascist Erdoğan intended to turn this policy to his own purposes, which no one of any decency could countenance. Seymour Hersh’s pieces in the London Review of Books have been revelatory in this context. In April 2014 he gave persuasive evidence that, in an attempt to frame Assad, Erdoğan provided extremist Sunni militias with the crudely concocted poison gas that exploded in a Damascus suburb the previous August. In his latest piece, Hersh documents the Pentagon’s many failed efforts to pull the administration off its obsession with developing a coup in Damascus and recognize Islamic terrorists as the threat that matters in Syria. “The assessment was bleak,” Hersh writes of a classified document the Joint Chiefs brass sent the White House in 2013. “There was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the U.S. was arming extremists…. In their view, Obama is captive to Cold War thinking about Russia and China and hasn’t adjusted his stance on Syria to the fact both countries share Washington’s anxiety about the spread of terrorism in and beyond Syria.” One cannot agree more heartily. At this point, the alliance with Turkey represents a festival of cynicism our media flatly refuse to describe in any detail or with any substantive accuracy. It is the height of naiveté to think Washington does not understand the perverse uses Erdoğan makes of it. The ink was not dry before the Turkish president took his new pact with the superpower as license to make war against the Kurdish populations of Turkey, Syria and Iraq and pursue a Sunni nationalist agenda while assisting the Islamic State all but overtly in its campaign to destabilize Damascus. Unequivocally, this guy—who favorably cited Hitler as a political model just a few days ago—takes his place in the long line of repellent dictators the cliques in Washington almost always prefer to democrats. For said cliques it is the Cold War redux with the Turks, as the generals at the Pentagon suggested. Once again Washington recruits Turkey as a spear-carrier in its great-power game—previously against the Soviets, now against the Russian Federation. The bitterest truths are now evident: 1) no post-Cold War administration has yet proven capable of new, 21st century thinking of even the most basic kind, and 2) in consequence of 1) Obama has been purposely ineffectual against the Islamic State these past 18 months because he has refused to abandon plans to topple Assad so as to push Russia decisively out of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean. Humanitarian angst? Wasted lives, the worst suffering on the planet in our time, the shock-horror of Assad’s alleged cruelties? These have nothing to do with what Washington is up to in Syria, and the alliance with Ankara stands as evidence of this. We must consider the downing of a Russian jet in late November by Turkish pilots flying American-made F-16s in this context. After Obama delivered an almost humorously hypocritical defense of this wildly irresponsible act—“Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its air space”—Washington and its clerks in the corporate media made this incident disappear but quick. We have since been treated to a media blackout as brazen as any since the coup in Ukraine two years ago next month. And when you consider the facts available in non-American media, it is no wonder. There has been fulsome coverage of the Turkish incident in the Russian press, needless to say. Before offering even a brief summary of it, this: One may accept it at face value or question it, but there are no grounds for dismissing it or ignoring it altogether, as our media have, simply because the assertions made are Russia’s. They deserve scrutiny and further investigation at the very least, and they have had neither. Most interesting is the “why” of the incident. What lay behind President Putin’s blunt charge that the downing of a Russian plane while it was flying an anti-terror mission in Syria was “a stab in the back by accomplices of terrorists”? I find the answer in one simple fact: Russian jets, it is not to be missed, had begun targeting convoys of trucks carrying oil into Turkey just before the Turks took one of them out of the sky. Moscow has practically gushed with evidence and accusations since shortly after its Su-24 went down. Putin, at a press conference with French President François Hollande, showed reconnaissance footage of truck convoys and strikes against oil-storage facilities in Raqaa, the Islamic State’s declared capital. Hollande, roused by the attacks in Paris at the moment I describe, assented as Putin spoke:
“Vehicles, carrying oil, [are] lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” Putin asserted . “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there—empty. We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas and not any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going.”
Other reports alleged that this activity is not the doing merely of middlemen operating on the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev alleged “direct financial interest of some Turkish officials relating to the supply of oil products refined by plants controlled by ISIS.” It soon emerged that the chain of beneficiaries may well run up to the presidential palace by way of Erdoğan’s son and son-in-law: Between them, they run Turkey’s largest energy-trading company and the energy ministry. There is no need to take the Russians’ word for this, although I find the evidence presented in Moscow persuasive, and the activities of Erdoğan’s family members are a matter of record. David Cohen, Treasury’s undersecretary for financial intelligence, had already made the Russian case in October—a month before the matter got as hot. Cohen put the Islamic State’s income from oil sold directly or indirectly into Turkey at $1 million a day. A few days after the incident, I had a lengthy note from a very well-placed source with extensive interests in, and therefore knowledge of, European investment and commodity markets. What he or she wrote fits like a glove with what had then begun to emerge. Here is some of it, in the form it arrived. The oil prices stated obtained at the time:
For more than 2 yrs I have heard from contacts in Turk,—contacts among people who would know about such things—that the oil was delivered to the Turks and that it was then run through the system, with some of it entering the pipeline which carries crude to the Medit coast for then delivery to W. Europe...  I am told that there is a handsome profit of around 15$/bar on this—that is, for example, they buy it from Daesh [the Islamic State] through middlemen at a discount of 30$ and then, “cleaned,” it hits world markets at 45$....  The trade runs on the basis of this 15$ spread. If it is, say 25K bar/day, that = 136M$ for yr (15x25Kx365). So it is not just small change. I understand that the money goes through Turk and Qatari banks. Once the oil is “cleaned,” they don't even need to launder it through Qatari banks, or any other banks. I further hear that much of the proceeds are then recycled into real estate in W. Europe. So if you are draining off 136M$/yr and, say, you leverage that 2:1, as is typical for commercial real estate, that would mean that after 3 yrs, you are running a 1.2B$ real estate portfolio....
“Surely Treasury knows all this,” concluded my source, whom I have known for more than 25 years. “Eyes wide shut!” Given I cannot name this source, let me apply the same criterion to his or her information that I suggested for the Russian accounts just summarized: You can take it as it is or not, but you cannot leave it without investigation unless you are into chicanery: The implications are simply too large. But we have had none and heard nothing. Within a day or so of the Su-24’s downing, Sigmar Gabriel, vice-chancellor in Angela Merkel’s coalition cabinet, exclaimed thus in an interview with DPA, the German press agency: “This incident shows fir the first time that we are dealing with an actor who is unpredictable…. That is not Russia. That is Turkey.” Gabriel was right about the revelatory aspect of the Nov. 24 events. The American alliance with Turkey makes no sense whatever if you take the administration’s word that it earnestly desires to defeat the Islamic State and restabilize Syria. But it makes perfect sense if, with 1979-80 Afghanistan in mind, you look past all the lies and conclude that, now and probably into the future, Washington finds extremist militias in Syria useful in its pursuit of another “regime change.” I had an interesting note from a source in Moscow the other day, and I offer it as the take-home on this topic. Russia’s entry into the Syrian conflict in late September, he or she suggested, has effectively put Washington on notice: There is to be no more “regime change” for the Americans without vigorous Russian response. My source’s reasoning is interesting, and suggestive of Moscow’s gravity on the matter: Between Ukraine and Syria, he or she said, Putin knows perfectly well that the regime the U.S. truly wants to change is his. * The Saudis, of course, are the other American allies in the Middle East in the cause of who can say what at this point, and suddenly this relationship, too, is exposed in all its abhorrent aspects. I predicted in this space three autumns ago, when the just-elected Hassan Rouhani appeared at the U.N. to extend Iran’s hand westward, that any opening to the Islamic Republic was fated to shake loose all of Washington’s bedrock relations in the region. I was thinking, optimistically, of U.S.-Israeli ties, but correcting these will take much more time. The Saudi case, plainly, is upon us now. I have no expertise in Saudi politics, but I wonder if the old alliance between Washington and the House of Saud might have survived the tensions caused by the success of last year’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran had King Abdullah not died a year ago next week. He was 90 and had been high in the Saudi political scene for decades. A tried-and-true relationship, based on Saudi oil and Washington’s silence in the face of the kingdom’s anti-democratic repressions, had been in place since the 1930s. King Salman has proven to be a few things his predecessor was not since he acceded to the throne. He is 80 but seems to have the temperament of a hot-blooded youth—“more interested in action than deliberation,” as Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution told the New York Times the other day. He is even more nervous about Iran’s emergence as a regional power than Abdullah was, the nuclear accord having been signed seven months into his watch. And he is plainly more extreme in his intolerance of dissent at home and his determination to assert Wahhabist ideology, the radically conservative interpretation of Islam that now informs Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State. In short, with Salman’s accession the longstanding Saudi component of American policy in the Middle East was bound to come a-cropper. And with the beheading last weekend of Nimr al-Nimr, the Shiite critic of the Saudi regime, so it has with a resounding crash. One truly would not want to be on the Middle East desk at State or any White House adviser tasked now with keeping this relationship in place and explaining why the fatal flaws at its core from the first remain acceptable. There is Riyadh’s false commitment to eradicating the Islamic State as a keystone member of the coalition formed against it. There is the criminally indiscriminate air campaign against Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Coalitions being the fashion these days, Riyadh announced just before the holidays that it had formed one of 34 Muslim nations to fight terrorism. The proposition reeks. Who can say what the Saudis mean when they say they are going to fight “terrorism” wherever it may arise? Some nations the Saudis listed among its ranks immediately said they had heard nothing about it. Even if we take the membership count at face value, it is 100 percent Sunni. We are to look forward to a first round of talks bringing all parties to the Syrian conflict to the table later this month. Look at this lineup: Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the two hood ornaments Washington mounts to betoken a regional commitment to oppose ISIS, are hopelessly compromised—beyond retrieval, in my view. If the talks come off at all, and this remains a question, I predict a short-run circus with too many rings to count. I can only wager on this point at the moment, but like a careful horseplayer I have a $2 saver on it: It could be that King Salman took off al-Nimr’s head last weekend as part of a strategy to scuttle the Syria talks, wherein Saudis are to sit opposite Iranians—if not before they convene, quickly after they do. * There is a certain consistency to Obama’s Middle East position, one has to say. It is perverse, but it holds: Ally with those subverting your cause—or the cause you declare, at any rate—and subvert those who are your natural allies. Russia and Iran qualify in this latter category, but let me restrict this commentary to those in the region. The Iranians were clear as bells during the long negotiations on the future of their nuclear program. They were pleased to open the door to the West, having suffered decades of difficult isolation, but they had no intention of abdicating any of their rights under international law. Washington, in particular, was to have no room to make it up as it went along—suggesting as it did, for instance, that Iran had no right to enrich uranium because the U.S. had not conferred it. Tehran reiterated this point within a month of signing the nuclear accord. Last August it announced completion of a new surface-to-surface ballistic missile, the Fateh 313. The point should have been clear. Since then, the Iranian military has tested the Fateh twice, and the point should have been clearer: We have enemies in the neighborhood, Iranian officials have explained incessantly. The need to maintain a modernized defense is self-evident. I wondered from the first whether the Obama administration was up to managing the running consequences that were certain to emerge after the nuclear accord was concluded. It is not, we must now conclude. There is simply no dexterity in the thinking within the policy cliques. Russia and Iran, strange as this may sound to readers of corporate-owned newspapers, are natural allies across a range of shared interests. The United States is simply incapable of (1) understanding this and (2) making good use of opportunities. To wit: In response to Iran’s missile tests, the Obama administration now threatens a new round of sanctions against the Iranians. The White House acknowledges that the tests do not contravene the terms of the nuclear agreement, and good enough it stays with the truth this far. Instead, it argues that the tests run afoul of a U.N. Security Council resolution passed in 2010, wherein it was agreed “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.” Did Iran violate UNSC Resolution 1929 last fall? Given the language above it seems open and shut that it has, and Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador at the U.N., asserts this with the evangelical vehemence we have come to expect of her. The greater Power’s convictions, the warier one must be: The rule never seems to fail. Read further in the document, please. Get to the part no one seems eager to mention, where it states that the U.N. “shall suspend the implementation of measures if and for so long as Iran suspends all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.” In plain English: Halt your enrichment operations and the sanctions declared herein will drop. As all concerned acknowledge, Iran has shut down its centrifuges and shipped its uranium stockpiles to Russia, per the July accord. Ben Rhodes, who worked hard to get the nuclear deal done, was traveling with Obama in Hawaii last weekend and said this: “I would expect the Iranians to complete the work necessary to move forward with implementation [of the accord] in the coming weeks.” Let me get this straight, Ben. The Iranians have now responded to 1929, which means they are no longer in violation of the resolution. They are in compliance with the nuclear accord, too, which means they are incapable of building a nuclear device, and this means, in turn, your president is prepared to begin lifting sanctions. At the same time, your president proposes to impose new sanctions because Iran has tested a missile capable of bearing one of the nuclear warheads it is incapable of building. I think I have it right. Hassan Rouhani does, this is for sure. On January 1 the Iranian president—he who lit the peace pipe three years ago and took many political risks to get the nuclear pact signed—responded to the suggestion that new sanctions were in the works by asserting their illegality under international law and ordering the Fateh missile program to be expanded and accelerated as quickly as possible. He meant to say “Happy New Year,” surely, to all the “folks” in the Obama White House. What a kettle of something more pungent than fish. I still contend that the confrontation with Russia, conjured from nothing and now the object of something close to national hysteria, will be the ugliest, most consequential feature of the Obama legacy on the foreign side. But the havoc in the Middle East this president has done so much to worsen is coming up fast.

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Published on January 06, 2016 15:45

Keep your man-child antiheroes: The new crush-worthy guy is the quietly competent, grown-up man

“A decade ago,” wrote Liesl Schillinger, “when a close friend of mine was going through a wrenching period in his personal life, and asked me if, as a critic, I could recommend a recent novel in which the male protagonist was not unhappy, was not drug-addicted or selfish, was not cynical, was not negative, did not screw up his relationships and let people down, was not on some level a bastard—who did not, in short, fail as a human, I was startled to realize that I could not think of one.” As she points out, a good man is indeed “difficult to write,” because fatal flaws create dramatic tension. Even if they’re not serial killers or drug lords, male literary protagonists tend to be good at getting rich but suck at everything else. What’s the point of “A Little Life” except to uncover the main character’s deep dark secrets? What would be left of Christian Grey without his vanilla kinks? Nobody would read a book about him arguing the finer points of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” with Anastasia, even if he did it while counting out his billions. Yet it’s not entirely the writers’ fault that touchstone male protagonists are jerks. Storytellers create characters, but it’s the public that buys them—or not. Conventional wisdom says that stories about nice guys don’t sell. And so we have reached a point where fantasy narratives have eaten the planet, and antiheros and superheroes are one and the same. Ironman/Tony Stark is a narcissistic womanizing asshole; Batman/Bruce Wayne is a self-absorbed prick; and Steve Jobs/Steve Jobs is a genius but a lousy human being. One man is real, one man is partially based on a historical figure, and one man is totally invented. But all three are filthy rich, fatally flawed (white) men who have achieved mythic status because flawed men are easy to write and the public is all too willing to live vicariously through their unselfconscious, fat-free adventures. Yet escapism offers nothing by way of emulation, which is partly how we learn to participate in a functional society. We cannot aspire to be Superman or Wolverine because they have Powers, even as we are increasingly too-aware of our own political and economic powerlessness. More to the point, why would we want to be them? When they sit by themselves alone, glowering in the dark, these guys wallow in existential misery, as do all of the X-men and the Avengers. Cartoonish, these characters wrestle with personified inner demons, making them fun to watch yet utterly unsuitable as role models for being human. Which is why we are awash in larger-than-life manly men yet Max Olesker could write: “It feels as if, as the traditional ideals of the 20th-century man–strong, stoic, repressed–begin to fade away, nothing has stepped in to replace them. In today’s pop-culture landscape there’s no single archetypal ideal that we’re supposed to emulate.” Arguably, however, there hasn’t been a hegemonic masculine ideal since the aftermath of the World Wars. We may reflexively turn to the Western as the definitive model for American masculinity, but the genre began to critique its own simplistic moral universe with “The Searchers,” 1956, which turned the archetypal white-hat cowboy, John Wayne, into a violent racist antihero. The western has been fracturing and refracting ever since, with the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) ironically taking the director’s chair and crafting revisionist films such as “Unforgiven.” Today, “cowboys” are rugged romantics on Brokeback Mountain, and at least four of the models playing the Marlboro Man have died of lung cancer. Meanwhile, in the cities, the 21st century birthed the hipster, the metrosexual, the lumbersexual, the ammosexual and other -sexuals, these labels working to create a taxonomy of everyday types in the manner of 19th-century commentators trying to make sense of rapid social change. But even as doofus dads and sad sacks were busily taking selfies and trying mightily to draw attention to themselves, an unlikely new hero has been caught, however unwilling, on camera: the competent white male.

***

On the small screen, there have always been competent white male characters, though more often than not they’re supporting members of the cast. That secondary status started to change with BBC’s “Sherlock.” The breakthrough wasn’t Benedict Cumberbatch’s eponymous Holmes, who is a veritable catalog of literary male shortcomings, but Martin Freeman’s calmly effective army doctor, Watson. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Watson is also the chronicler of their adventures, making it clear that he has the power to write himself as the hero of these stories, yet his ego does not require it. The man in the center of everyone’s attention—the brilliant, charismatic Holmes--is there because Watson put him in that position, thereby complicating the power dynamic between them. The success of “Sherlock” landed Martin Freeman on the 10-episode “Fargo: The Series,” where he played the screw-up, Lester Nygaard. It wasn’t until Season 2 of “Fargo: The Series” returned with an entirely new cast that it became a cultural phenomenon, and the surprise was State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson)-- a “new kind of male protagonist.” Noted Alan Sepinwall for Slate, Wilson “managed to turn Lou Solverson’s quiet decency and assured competence—traits that fly against most of what Quality Drama has taught us make for interesting characters—into riveting TV, in a leading-man performance I didn’t know Wilson had in him.” A veteran of the Vietnam War, Trooper Solverson loves his wife and kids, and tries to do the right thing in an obscenely violent world. So do some of the defense attorneys in the Netfllix series “Making a Murderer,” which focuses on convicted murderer and rapist Steven Avery. Over the course of the 10-hour series, even as many viewers were so outraged by Avery’s situation that a petition was circulated calling for Gov. Scott Walker to pardon him, women found themselves developing a crush on Dean Strang, the convict’s bespectacled, middle-aged defense attorney. Why? The word that comes up, over and over again, is the same word used to describe Trooper Solverson: competent. “I think what I love in particular is he [Strang] is the only competent one in this entire mess,” Lizzie Breyer says. “He fights hard for this guy who everyone else scorns, which is really appealing." “It seems like half the Internet has fallen in love with these two non-descript, middle-aged professionals,” writes Molly Fitzpatrick, noting that the other defense attorney working on Avery’s case, Jerome “Jerry” Buting, has been getting fangirls too. “Buting and Strang are unfailingly brilliant, compassionate, and fiercely competent.” Freeman, Wilson, Strang and Buting are middle-aged white men with pretty good hair, but the other common factor in their unexpected status as sex symbols is that they became more appealing the longer viewers stayed with them. It was their character, not their looks, that captured female hearts (and doubtless a few male hearts, too). It’s in juxtaposition to criminality and incompetence that guys like this start to look really good. “Fargo,” a fiction, purports to be based on real events, even as “Making a Murderer" is a documentary whose persuasive power comes, at least in part, from its low-budget patina of authenticity. The evidence seems real; the various individuals appear sincere. But there is at least a whiff of nostalgia in the rise of the competent white man, who stands for a time when institutional whiteness wasn’t oppressive but just the way things were. But these men are not retrograde even if their values are traditional. They are adults with families and children, accepting responsibility and its consequences, and even accepting social change too. But slowly. As slowly as these series unfolding at a glacial pace, at least by the goldfish attention-span standards of the Internet. It’s not irrelevant that the American locales—Minnesota, Wisconsin--for "Fargo" and "Making a Murderer" are Midwestern rural. In real life, the situation unfolding at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is producing similar contrasts between #Y’allQaeda and #VanillaISIS on the one hand, and the competent white sheriff on the other. Faced with absurd and dangerous events, David Ward has emerged as a caring man focused on “protecting the residents” of the town and keeping the peace instead of provoking violence. The question isn’t whether these anti-government actors would have been shot if they were black. The question is why more lawmen everywhere, including in the urban areas, aren’t acting more often as officers of the peace. So let’s hope that we see more of the competent white man in all aspects of everyday life, doing jobs that get done because they have to. It’s not that these men are perfect. It’s that they do their damnedest to be decent men because they know that humans are capable of doing terrible things. The more we can focus on and acknowledge people doing the right thing, the better we will all be for it.“A decade ago,” wrote Liesl Schillinger, “when a close friend of mine was going through a wrenching period in his personal life, and asked me if, as a critic, I could recommend a recent novel in which the male protagonist was not unhappy, was not drug-addicted or selfish, was not cynical, was not negative, did not screw up his relationships and let people down, was not on some level a bastard—who did not, in short, fail as a human, I was startled to realize that I could not think of one.” As she points out, a good man is indeed “difficult to write,” because fatal flaws create dramatic tension. Even if they’re not serial killers or drug lords, male literary protagonists tend to be good at getting rich but suck at everything else. What’s the point of “A Little Life” except to uncover the main character’s deep dark secrets? What would be left of Christian Grey without his vanilla kinks? Nobody would read a book about him arguing the finer points of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” with Anastasia, even if he did it while counting out his billions. Yet it’s not entirely the writers’ fault that touchstone male protagonists are jerks. Storytellers create characters, but it’s the public that buys them—or not. Conventional wisdom says that stories about nice guys don’t sell. And so we have reached a point where fantasy narratives have eaten the planet, and antiheros and superheroes are one and the same. Ironman/Tony Stark is a narcissistic womanizing asshole; Batman/Bruce Wayne is a self-absorbed prick; and Steve Jobs/Steve Jobs is a genius but a lousy human being. One man is real, one man is partially based on a historical figure, and one man is totally invented. But all three are filthy rich, fatally flawed (white) men who have achieved mythic status because flawed men are easy to write and the public is all too willing to live vicariously through their unselfconscious, fat-free adventures. Yet escapism offers nothing by way of emulation, which is partly how we learn to participate in a functional society. We cannot aspire to be Superman or Wolverine because they have Powers, even as we are increasingly too-aware of our own political and economic powerlessness. More to the point, why would we want to be them? When they sit by themselves alone, glowering in the dark, these guys wallow in existential misery, as do all of the X-men and the Avengers. Cartoonish, these characters wrestle with personified inner demons, making them fun to watch yet utterly unsuitable as role models for being human. Which is why we are awash in larger-than-life manly men yet Max Olesker could write: “It feels as if, as the traditional ideals of the 20th-century man–strong, stoic, repressed–begin to fade away, nothing has stepped in to replace them. In today’s pop-culture landscape there’s no single archetypal ideal that we’re supposed to emulate.” Arguably, however, there hasn’t been a hegemonic masculine ideal since the aftermath of the World Wars. We may reflexively turn to the Western as the definitive model for American masculinity, but the genre began to critique its own simplistic moral universe with “The Searchers,” 1956, which turned the archetypal white-hat cowboy, John Wayne, into a violent racist antihero. The western has been fracturing and refracting ever since, with the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) ironically taking the director’s chair and crafting revisionist films such as “Unforgiven.” Today, “cowboys” are rugged romantics on Brokeback Mountain, and at least four of the models playing the Marlboro Man have died of lung cancer. Meanwhile, in the cities, the 21st century birthed the hipster, the metrosexual, the lumbersexual, the ammosexual and other -sexuals, these labels working to create a taxonomy of everyday types in the manner of 19th-century commentators trying to make sense of rapid social change. But even as doofus dads and sad sacks were busily taking selfies and trying mightily to draw attention to themselves, an unlikely new hero has been caught, however unwilling, on camera: the competent white male.

***

On the small screen, there have always been competent white male characters, though more often than not they’re supporting members of the cast. That secondary status started to change with BBC’s “Sherlock.” The breakthrough wasn’t Benedict Cumberbatch’s eponymous Holmes, who is a veritable catalog of literary male shortcomings, but Martin Freeman’s calmly effective army doctor, Watson. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Watson is also the chronicler of their adventures, making it clear that he has the power to write himself as the hero of these stories, yet his ego does not require it. The man in the center of everyone’s attention—the brilliant, charismatic Holmes--is there because Watson put him in that position, thereby complicating the power dynamic between them. The success of “Sherlock” landed Martin Freeman on the 10-episode “Fargo: The Series,” where he played the screw-up, Lester Nygaard. It wasn’t until Season 2 of “Fargo: The Series” returned with an entirely new cast that it became a cultural phenomenon, and the surprise was State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson)-- a “new kind of male protagonist.” Noted Alan Sepinwall for Slate, Wilson “managed to turn Lou Solverson’s quiet decency and assured competence—traits that fly against most of what Quality Drama has taught us make for interesting characters—into riveting TV, in a leading-man performance I didn’t know Wilson had in him.” A veteran of the Vietnam War, Trooper Solverson loves his wife and kids, and tries to do the right thing in an obscenely violent world. So do some of the defense attorneys in the Netfllix series “Making a Murderer,” which focuses on convicted murderer and rapist Steven Avery. Over the course of the 10-hour series, even as many viewers were so outraged by Avery’s situation that a petition was circulated calling for Gov. Scott Walker to pardon him, women found themselves developing a crush on Dean Strang, the convict’s bespectacled, middle-aged defense attorney. Why? The word that comes up, over and over again, is the same word used to describe Trooper Solverson: competent. “I think what I love in particular is he [Strang] is the only competent one in this entire mess,” Lizzie Breyer says. “He fights hard for this guy who everyone else scorns, which is really appealing." “It seems like half the Internet has fallen in love with these two non-descript, middle-aged professionals,” writes Molly Fitzpatrick, noting that the other defense attorney working on Avery’s case, Jerome “Jerry” Buting, has been getting fangirls too. “Buting and Strang are unfailingly brilliant, compassionate, and fiercely competent.” Freeman, Wilson, Strang and Buting are middle-aged white men with pretty good hair, but the other common factor in their unexpected status as sex symbols is that they became more appealing the longer viewers stayed with them. It was their character, not their looks, that captured female hearts (and doubtless a few male hearts, too). It’s in juxtaposition to criminality and incompetence that guys like this start to look really good. “Fargo,” a fiction, purports to be based on real events, even as “Making a Murderer" is a documentary whose persuasive power comes, at least in part, from its low-budget patina of authenticity. The evidence seems real; the various individuals appear sincere. But there is at least a whiff of nostalgia in the rise of the competent white man, who stands for a time when institutional whiteness wasn’t oppressive but just the way things were. But these men are not retrograde even if their values are traditional. They are adults with families and children, accepting responsibility and its consequences, and even accepting social change too. But slowly. As slowly as these series unfolding at a glacial pace, at least by the goldfish attention-span standards of the Internet. It’s not irrelevant that the American locales—Minnesota, Wisconsin--for "Fargo" and "Making a Murderer" are Midwestern rural. In real life, the situation unfolding at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon is producing similar contrasts between #Y’allQaeda and #VanillaISIS on the one hand, and the competent white sheriff on the other. Faced with absurd and dangerous events, David Ward has emerged as a caring man focused on “protecting the residents” of the town and keeping the peace instead of provoking violence. The question isn’t whether these anti-government actors would have been shot if they were black. The question is why more lawmen everywhere, including in the urban areas, aren’t acting more often as officers of the peace. So let’s hope that we see more of the competent white man in all aspects of everyday life, doing jobs that get done because they have to. It’s not that these men are perfect. It’s that they do their damnedest to be decent men because they know that humans are capable of doing terrible things. The more we can focus on and acknowledge people doing the right thing, the better we will all be for it.

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Published on January 06, 2016 15:40

Obama’s tears, America’s tragedy: Behind Fox News mockery lies uncomfortable truth about our failed politics

For a man to shed tears is often presented as a taboo in American culture, a violation of the masculine code. If so, it’s a taboo honored more in the breach than the observance, in our endlessly sentimental nation with its endlessly sentimental notions of masculinity. Saying that American men don’t cry is like the supposed rule in Greek mythology that living people cannot visit the Land of the Dead: It never happens, except for all the times that it happens. So if right-wing commentators (or anyone else) describe Barack Obama’s televised tears during his Tuesday national address on gun control as unmanly or unpresidential or anomalous, we have to figure out what they really mean. Tears define the pathos and profundity of American masculinity, to a large extent. Men cry in beer commercials and at football games. Reports differ as to whether Douglas MacArthur personally cried during his Farewell Address to Congress in 1951, after Harry Truman had fired him for openly yearning to invade China and launch World War III. But when MacArthur delivered his last public speech, at West Point 11 years later — and what a bizarre, turgid and fantastical masterwork of masculine ideology that was — a reporter on the scene observed “tears in the eyes of big strapping Cadets who wouldn’t have shed one before a firing squad.” I can remember standing next to a posse of Texas A&M undergraduates of intimidating size and bulk (bear in mind that I am 6-foot-4 and close to 200 pounds) on the floor of the infamous 1992 Republican convention in Houston, while they wept uncontrollably during Ronald Reagan’s last major public appearance. In cases like these, of course, it’s all about who is doing the crying, and why. Those West Point cadets and College Station frat boys had unlimited license to blubber like 8-year-old girls because they were manly men confronted with the immeasurable mythic greatness of America, which is of course the best possible reason for tears. (Seriously, that MacArthur speech? It’s like a Tarantino movie, full of stuff Donald Trump would think was too crazy. It has an army of zombies leaping from their graves, and a galactic war against space aliens. It has a mangled quotation from Plato, “that wisest of all philosophers.” It has “the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille.”) Barack Obama does not have permission to cry, for a bunch of obvious reasons and some that maybe less so. Given his well-known socialistic, Islamophile leanings and his funny name, his tears are inherently suspicious. (Under the conventions of old-school American masculinity, I mean.) We perceive — correctly, I would say — that whether the Bears win the Super Bowl or go 1-15 is for Obama a subject for sardonic commentary, not profound emotion. The president did not shed tears over the abundant glories of America this week, nor did he melt before the hypnotic power of MacArthur’s patriotic mantra “Duty — Honor — Country.” He cried because terrible things have happened, and he has been unable to prevent them. In the most literal sense, it was an admission of weakness. That, of course, is the least acceptable reason of all. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote on Wednesday, many people in the conserva-troll commentariat seemed offended or outraged by Obama’s evident emotion, to a suspicious and psychologically revealing degree. I don’t want to give those people more virtual ink, but we have heard Twitter suggestions that the president had rubbed Ben-Gay in his eyes to produce “fascist tears,” that he was indulging in “bad political theater,” and that ISIS was sure to see our weepy chief executive as yet another sign of America’s decadence and weakness. Obama obviously does not possess “the pathological lack of empathy” required to be leader of the Free World, as Marcotte put it. Now, for people affiliated with a political party whose leading presidential candidates are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to complain about “bad political theater” — dude! I don’t even know what term could describe that. That goes way beyond ironic or ludicrous, into the terrain of shameful hypocrisy and murderous insanity. It would be perfectly respectable, and indeed advisable, for a manly man to let a few rugged tears leak down his rugged cheeks at a memorial to the Americans who were killed in the Benghazi raid, for example. Their sacrifice stands as a monument to freedom, or something. But for the president to cry because a disturbed young man bought assault weapons at the mall and shot a bunch of first-graders for no reason — and because we did nothing to stop it from happening and then did nothing to stop it from happening again, over and over — that’s pussified and infantile and effeminate. Still, I have to say this: When right-wingers perceive something mysterious lurking behind Obama’s Zeitgeist-shaping tears, something unexplained that goes beyond the proximate cause, they’re not wrong. They may not be right in the way they think they’re right, but that’s nothing new. There is no contradiction in believing that Obama felt genuine grief over Sandy Hook and Charleston and Aurora and the other mass shootings that have haunted his presidency (even in an era, as I have previously observed, when violent crime is near an all-time low) and that larger and more far-reaching questions were also involved. It sounds like a cheap partisan argument to suggest that Obama was crying over seven years of near-total political paralysis, and over the dubious or underwhelming presidential legacy he will soon leave behind. I can feel you recoiling in horror, O Salon reader, because that's pretty much what they’re saying on Fox News: Obama cried because his presidency has been a failure. I’m not using that word, because we honestly won’t know that for some time, and I’m not claiming that some other plausible president would have been a whole lot better. Indeed, I’m not claiming that the country is governable, in its present disordered and self-deluded condition. But Barack Obama is one of the most intelligent and analytical people ever to occupy the White House, and I feel pretty sure he can see the situation clearly. Our social and cultural and political failure to control the private ownership of lethal weapons, which is unique among advanced nations and has caused no end of carnage and tragedy, is grievous enough all by itself. But it’s also a symptom of deeper endemic failures that have bedeviled America during the Obama years: failures of justice, failures of decision-making and responsibility, failures of compassion, failures of both reason and imagination. This is the guy who ran for president promising to get us out of Iraq, close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and reduce government spying and government secrecy. Maybe those things were never possible or practical; whatever the sober men in the dark suits told him between election night in November of 2008 and Inauguration Day in January of 2009 was some scary shit. But it was possible and practical to become the first president to order the push-button, long-distance summary execution of an American citizen, and I’m afraid that one will live in infamy. Whatever you make of the Obama administration at the seven-eighths pole — and yes, I know, the Affordable Care Act and the Iran treaty and the climate deal are not nothing — his presidency began on a huge wave of optimism and devolved into a tragic and peculiar tale. He has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to manage an unmanageable situation and negotiating with people who did not want to negotiate. He wanted to change the course of American history and has done so, in Victor Frankenstein fashion, by driving the Republican Party into madness and enabling the monstrous rise of Donald Trump. Was any of that his fault? Maybe not, but it’s a pretty good reason for a grown man to cry. Watch President Obama's five most emotional moments: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/ObamaM..." image="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/Screen... a man to shed tears is often presented as a taboo in American culture, a violation of the masculine code. If so, it’s a taboo honored more in the breach than the observance, in our endlessly sentimental nation with its endlessly sentimental notions of masculinity. Saying that American men don’t cry is like the supposed rule in Greek mythology that living people cannot visit the Land of the Dead: It never happens, except for all the times that it happens. So if right-wing commentators (or anyone else) describe Barack Obama’s televised tears during his Tuesday national address on gun control as unmanly or unpresidential or anomalous, we have to figure out what they really mean. Tears define the pathos and profundity of American masculinity, to a large extent. Men cry in beer commercials and at football games. Reports differ as to whether Douglas MacArthur personally cried during his Farewell Address to Congress in 1951, after Harry Truman had fired him for openly yearning to invade China and launch World War III. But when MacArthur delivered his last public speech, at West Point 11 years later — and what a bizarre, turgid and fantastical masterwork of masculine ideology that was — a reporter on the scene observed “tears in the eyes of big strapping Cadets who wouldn’t have shed one before a firing squad.” I can remember standing next to a posse of Texas A&M undergraduates of intimidating size and bulk (bear in mind that I am 6-foot-4 and close to 200 pounds) on the floor of the infamous 1992 Republican convention in Houston, while they wept uncontrollably during Ronald Reagan’s last major public appearance. In cases like these, of course, it’s all about who is doing the crying, and why. Those West Point cadets and College Station frat boys had unlimited license to blubber like 8-year-old girls because they were manly men confronted with the immeasurable mythic greatness of America, which is of course the best possible reason for tears. (Seriously, that MacArthur speech? It’s like a Tarantino movie, full of stuff Donald Trump would think was too crazy. It has an army of zombies leaping from their graves, and a galactic war against space aliens. It has a mangled quotation from Plato, “that wisest of all philosophers.” It has “the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille.”) Barack Obama does not have permission to cry, for a bunch of obvious reasons and some that maybe less so. Given his well-known socialistic, Islamophile leanings and his funny name, his tears are inherently suspicious. (Under the conventions of old-school American masculinity, I mean.) We perceive — correctly, I would say — that whether the Bears win the Super Bowl or go 1-15 is for Obama a subject for sardonic commentary, not profound emotion. The president did not shed tears over the abundant glories of America this week, nor did he melt before the hypnotic power of MacArthur’s patriotic mantra “Duty — Honor — Country.” He cried because terrible things have happened, and he has been unable to prevent them. In the most literal sense, it was an admission of weakness. That, of course, is the least acceptable reason of all. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote on Wednesday, many people in the conserva-troll commentariat seemed offended or outraged by Obama’s evident emotion, to a suspicious and psychologically revealing degree. I don’t want to give those people more virtual ink, but we have heard Twitter suggestions that the president had rubbed Ben-Gay in his eyes to produce “fascist tears,” that he was indulging in “bad political theater,” and that ISIS was sure to see our weepy chief executive as yet another sign of America’s decadence and weakness. Obama obviously does not possess “the pathological lack of empathy” required to be leader of the Free World, as Marcotte put it. Now, for people affiliated with a political party whose leading presidential candidates are Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to complain about “bad political theater” — dude! I don’t even know what term could describe that. That goes way beyond ironic or ludicrous, into the terrain of shameful hypocrisy and murderous insanity. It would be perfectly respectable, and indeed advisable, for a manly man to let a few rugged tears leak down his rugged cheeks at a memorial to the Americans who were killed in the Benghazi raid, for example. Their sacrifice stands as a monument to freedom, or something. But for the president to cry because a disturbed young man bought assault weapons at the mall and shot a bunch of first-graders for no reason — and because we did nothing to stop it from happening and then did nothing to stop it from happening again, over and over — that’s pussified and infantile and effeminate. Still, I have to say this: When right-wingers perceive something mysterious lurking behind Obama’s Zeitgeist-shaping tears, something unexplained that goes beyond the proximate cause, they’re not wrong. They may not be right in the way they think they’re right, but that’s nothing new. There is no contradiction in believing that Obama felt genuine grief over Sandy Hook and Charleston and Aurora and the other mass shootings that have haunted his presidency (even in an era, as I have previously observed, when violent crime is near an all-time low) and that larger and more far-reaching questions were also involved. It sounds like a cheap partisan argument to suggest that Obama was crying over seven years of near-total political paralysis, and over the dubious or underwhelming presidential legacy he will soon leave behind. I can feel you recoiling in horror, O Salon reader, because that's pretty much what they’re saying on Fox News: Obama cried because his presidency has been a failure. I’m not using that word, because we honestly won’t know that for some time, and I’m not claiming that some other plausible president would have been a whole lot better. Indeed, I’m not claiming that the country is governable, in its present disordered and self-deluded condition. But Barack Obama is one of the most intelligent and analytical people ever to occupy the White House, and I feel pretty sure he can see the situation clearly. Our social and cultural and political failure to control the private ownership of lethal weapons, which is unique among advanced nations and has caused no end of carnage and tragedy, is grievous enough all by itself. But it’s also a symptom of deeper endemic failures that have bedeviled America during the Obama years: failures of justice, failures of decision-making and responsibility, failures of compassion, failures of both reason and imagination. This is the guy who ran for president promising to get us out of Iraq, close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and reduce government spying and government secrecy. Maybe those things were never possible or practical; whatever the sober men in the dark suits told him between election night in November of 2008 and Inauguration Day in January of 2009 was some scary shit. But it was possible and practical to become the first president to order the push-button, long-distance summary execution of an American citizen, and I’m afraid that one will live in infamy. Whatever you make of the Obama administration at the seven-eighths pole — and yes, I know, the Affordable Care Act and the Iran treaty and the climate deal are not nothing — his presidency began on a huge wave of optimism and devolved into a tragic and peculiar tale. He has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to manage an unmanageable situation and negotiating with people who did not want to negotiate. He wanted to change the course of American history and has done so, in Victor Frankenstein fashion, by driving the Republican Party into madness and enabling the monstrous rise of Donald Trump. Was any of that his fault? Maybe not, but it’s a pretty good reason for a grown man to cry. Watch President Obama's five most emotional moments: [jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/ObamaM..." image="http://media.salon.com/2016/01/Screen...]

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Published on January 06, 2016 15:15