Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 97

Louisiana legislators are earning big money from government agencies

Getty/kali9

This article originally appeared on ProPublica.

This article was produced in partnership with The Advocate, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

When the Louisiana Legislature isn’t in session in Baton Rouge, state Sen. Danny Martiny spends his days in his small law office 80 miles away defending law enforcement agencies.

His biggest client, bar none, is the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office.

In 2016, the Sheriff’s Office and its insurance company paid Martiny’s firm $836,266 for this work, according to public records. But on legally mandated disclosure forms that legislators must file with the state ethics office, Martiny listed far more modest earnings from the sheriff that year: $13,328.

Martiny, a Metairie Republican, is complying with the state’s ethics laws, but the wide gulf between what he was paid and what he disclosed shows how these rules are full of loopholes and allow legislators to minimize the income they’ve received from public sources, ethics experts said.

“People can write down whatever they want,” said Elliot Stonecipher, a Shreveport-based pollster and government watchdog. “The whole thing has been boiled down to an honor system.”

Martiny isn’t the only one whose forms don’t tell the whole story.

State Sen. Eric LaFleur, a Democrat from Ville Platte, is a bond attorney in the law firm Mahtook and LaFleur. More than 100 times since 2005, he has represented local governments and other public entities issuing bonds. On his state disclosures, however, there is no mention of the vast array of public contracts his firm has — or how much money he has earned from them.

The same goes for state Rep. Stephen Dwight, a Republican from Lake Charles. His online biography calls him the general counsel for the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office. But his disclosure doesn’t list any income from the sheriff.

Martiny, LaFleur and Dwight all say they are following the law.

Gov. Bobby Jindal hailed Louisiana’s ethics laws as a “gold standard” of transparency when he persuaded the Legislature to pass them a decade ago. Among other things, the laws require legislators to disclose their direct earnings from public agencies to ensure that the public knows when a lawmaker has a potential conflict of interest. Part-time legislators often work in the public sector or have contracts with public entities, and these two worlds can intersect when they’re casting votes in the state Capitol.

But the laws appear to be easy to circumvent because they allow public agencies to route money through third parties — including a public official’s own private firm — removing, in effect, any onus for meaningful disclosure.

“The notion that you could get public money and not report it in our flim-flammery of an ethics system is ridiculous,” Stonecipher said. “What they do for a living matters, and people who pay those taxes should always know.”

The gap between Martiny’s pay and what he disclosed came to light recently during a contentious election for Jefferson Parish sheriff, one of the most powerful political posts in the state. Joe Lopinto, a former legislator who ultimately won the election, previously worked for Martiny’s law firm. And Lopinto’s opponent in the race, John Fortunato, sought to make hay of the millions of dollars paid by the Sheriff’s Office to Martiny’s firm over the years, including while Lopinto worked there.

Martiny, the sole owner of the firm, said he employs between three and five other attorneys at any given time. He said the firm handles about 40 cases from the Sheriff’s Office each year.

From 2005 to 2016, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office and its insurance company paid Martiny’s firm $7.8 million in attorneys’ fees and costs, according to public records. But over the same period of time, on his disclosure forms, Martiny reported receiving just $1.2 million.

In an interview, Martiny said the money he disclosed over the years — the $1.2 million — was what was paid to him directly by the Sheriff’s Office. (A public records request to the Sheriff’s Office confirmed Martiny accurately reported the fees collected directly from the agency.)

The other $6.6 million was paid to his firm through a third-party administrator — a quasi-public organization called the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Law Enforcement Program. The program was put into state law so sheriffs could group together and self-insure for lawsuits and liability claims filed against their deputies and employees.

“Quite frankly, I don’t like that I have to disclose anything,” Martiny said, “but they say that you have to disclose any money paid to you directly from a public agency, and that’s what I report.”

“I’ve done that since I was in the Legislature. No one has ever questioned it. No one has ever audited it.”

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office isn’t the only public client Martiny has had. The Louisiana Sheriff’s Law Enforcement Program also paid Martiny & Associates about $82,000 for representing the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s Office from 2014 to 2016, according to data obtained through a public records request filed by The Advocate. That money did not have to be reported — and was not — on Martiny’s financial disclosures.

Martiny said he cleared his reporting process directly with the state Ethics Board.

Kathleen Allen, an Ethics Board administrator, said she was unfamiliar with the specifics of Martiny’s situation, but noted that the question about whether he was accountable for reporting the money came down to the exact wording in state law.

The Louisiana Sheriffs’ Law Enforcement Program operates on the public dime. It’s run by a board of sheriffs who are public officials. It must abide by public records laws and is subject to auditing by the state Legislative Auditor’s Office. But it’s not technically considered a “political subdivision,” like a sheriff’s office or a local government entity is, according to a 2015 state attorney general opinion.

And according to ethics laws, public officials need to disclose in detail only the money they receive from political subdivisions or from the state. The law also requires elected officials to identify the private sources of their income, but they don’t have to list the exact income they receive, only broad salary ranges that max out at “more than $100,000.”

Robert Travis Scott, president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, a good-government nonprofit, said it’s an area of the law that may need tweaking.

“This is a lot of money unreported,” he said of Martiny’s income. “If this is income from a political subdivision that is just passing through a third party, that’s worth the Legislature taking a look at. Especially if it’s routine, and it’s large sums of money.”

Because public money is often paid to elected officials indirectly, particularly through contracts with private firms, it’s easy for legislators not to report it on their disclosures.

LaFleur, for example, isn’t just a bond attorney. He’s also a member of the state Bond Commission, which must approve bonds issued by local governments. In that capacity, he frequently has to recuse himself from votes because either he or another member of his firm is representing the project seeking funding.

LaFleur said in an email that he is in total compliance with the law, even though his personal finance disclosures don’t mention his array of public contracts. He said public finance work makes up less than 10 percent of his income from the law firm. (The LaFleur in the law firm’s name is not him.)

“I make all required disclosure regarding my personal income, including my wife’s income and income related to other business interests,” he said. “None of the clients represented by the law firm I work for are prohibited by law.”

Dwight, whose online biography calls him the general counsel for the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office, also said he’s following the rules. In an interview, he clarified that the law firm owned by his father, where he works, actually serves as general counsel.

Dwight said the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office is one of the firm’s top clients — making up about 25 percent to 30 percent of its business — but because he’s not paid directly by the sheriff, he doesn’t have to disclose the relationship in his ethics forms. He also noted he collects a set salary from the firm, so he wouldn’t be able to break down what portion of his earnings is derived from the Sheriff’s Office.

“When I first got elected I called and asked what the rules were,” he said, adding that he was told, “If you don’t own the firm, you don’t have to disclose it.”

Some lawmakers said they disclose any public money they receive in an abundance of caution, even if the law doesn’t require it. State Sen. Rick Ward, R-Port Allen, does legal work for the West Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office and other local government bodies. On his 2016 disclosure, he reported receiving a monthly salary of $1,000 for work for the Plaquemine City Court and $32,400 a year from the Sheriff’s Office.

Ward noted that he’s not an employee of the Sheriff’s Office and represents it via a contract through his law firm. So he’d be within his legal right to simply list the name of his law firm and check a broad salary range for his annual income, as Dwight and others do.

“But it just makes me more comfortable to lay it all out there, since this is public money, and try to be as transparent as possible,” Ward said. “It seems to me that’s the better way to go.”

When Jindal ran for governor in 2007, he campaigned on a promise to overhaul Louisiana’s weak ethics laws and clean up the state’s reputation for political corruption. He said a trustworthy and transparent government would improve economic development because the state would be more attractive to outside businesses.

Upon taking office, Jindal’s administration helped usher in laws that required elected officials to disclose their personal finances, curbed out-of-control lobbyist expenditures and established rules on the entry of government officials into the private sector.

At the time it was passed, the Center for Public Integrity gave Louisiana’s new personal finance disclosure law 99 out of a possible 100 points, ranking it one of the top such laws in the nation.

Before the ethics reforms were put into place, Scott said, “you didn’t even know what legislators were doing.”

“You didn’t know what their income sources were at all. None of their bios would tell you very much,” he said.

But it didn’t take long for Jindal’s “gold standard” to begin losing its luster.

Within a year, the chairman of the state legislative committee whose job it was to oversee ethics laws was charged by the new state Ethics Board with seven violations. The board charged that it was a conflict of interest for then-state Rep. Rick Gallot, D-Ruston, to represent a nonprofit that frequently did business with Grambling University and the University of Louisiana system board, of which his mother was a sitting member.

Gallot, who is now Grambling’s president, eventually got all of the charges dropped because the Ethics Board waited too long to prosecute them. Under a law that was pushed by Gallot’s committee, the deadline to pursue charges by the Ethics Board shrank from two years to one.

By 2015, the Center for Public Integrity was no longer complimenting Louisiana. It gave the state an “F” for integrity, ranking it 41st in the country on measures including legislative accountability and lobbying disclosure. In particular, it dinged Louisiana’s laws for loopholes that weakened enforcement.

What’s become apparent over the years is that even if a lawmaker is caught breaking the rules, at worst the offender faces a late fee.

Allen, the ethics board administrator, said there’s no penalty under the law for listing incorrect information on personal finance disclosures. If her staff of five finds mistakes, or if complaints are filed about falsehoods, the office can issue a seven-day notice to update the information accurately.

If lawmakers don’t file the change by the deadline, they can be subjected to a late fee of $100 a day, with a maximum penalty of $2,500. Allen said her office issues fines routinely.

Allen also acknowledged that her staff is primarily looking for surface-level mistakes, such as missing information, and making sure the forms are correctly filled out. It does not routinely investigate the veracity of the reports in any detail.

Even obvious mistakes often go unnoticed.

For instance, legislators sometimes fail to report the salaries they earn for the office they hold — the position that triggers the reporting requirement in the first place.

During the recent Jefferson Parish sheriff’s race, Lopinto admitted to making such an oversight on his 2014 disclosure, after being called out by his opponent. He failed to report $37,800 he earned as a state representative that year.

But nobody called out the omission until this year’s campaign.

It’s perhaps a minor mistake, but Stonecipher says it shows lawmakers and other elected officials that no one is watching.

“Worn as it is, the question still screams … how fast do people drive when they know there are no speed traps or police?” he asked. “As fast as they want to.”

Thomas Eakins: Brilliant painter, gifted photographer … sexual predator?

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The recent toppling of a string of powerful figures for sexual abuse and harassment raises the question of how these people managed to conceal their behavior so long, in some instances after abusing hundreds of victims.

Why didn’t the victims speak up? And why, when they did, was justice so slow?

Clearly, there’s a powerful human instinct to ignore or cover-up allegations of this sort, whether they appear in politics, entertainment, sports, academia or media.

The art world isn’t immune.

Thomas Eakins is one of the most revered 19th-century American artists. His brooding portraits seem to strip his sitters of all pretension, revealing an inner vulnerability. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman described Eakins’ huge rendering of a grisly medical operation, “The Gross Clinic,” as “hands down, the finest 19th-century American painting.”

But over the last few decades, enough evidence has emerged to suggest that Eakins was a sexual predator. Not only did he cross a number of lines with his subjects and students, but a disturbing pattern of alleged abuse has also emerged. Curiously, the very group that one would have expected to speak up – feminist art historians – have been notably silent.

How should this sort of information be dealt with when it emerges? What’s behind the urge to suppress it? And how should it color our view of an artist?

Eakins quietly fired

The son of a Philadelphia instructor in penmanship and calligraphy, Eakins went on to study art in Paris. Upon returning to his hometown in 1870, he rose quickly to a position of local eminence. In 1882, at the age of 38, he was appointed director of the art school of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1886, however, he was abruptly fired from the Pennsylvania Academy with no public explanation. He then spent the rest of his life as an outcast from proper Philadelphia society. He’d gift portraits to his sitters, who would routinely destroy them. Critics derided his art as ugly and depressing.

But at the turn of the century, a dramatic shift occurred. Painters such as society portraitist John Singer Sargent came to be viewed as superficial and dishonest, while Eakins was seen as a paragon of the authentic. The first biography of Eakins, published in 1933 by art historian Lloyd Goodrich, depicted him as an exemplar of sober honesty and moral probity.

For more than half century, Goodrich’s monograph remained the primary source on Eakins for a curious reason. Shortly after the biography came out, the documents Goodrich had drawn on disappeared and were presumed destroyed. This meant that in subsequent books, Goodrich’s account needed to be used as the authoritative source.

In 1985, however, Eakins’ papers were rediscovered among the effects of his pupil Charles Bregler and shortly thereafter became fully accessible to scholars. In addition, after Goodrich died in 1987, his notes from interviews with people who had known Eakins became available. They included a great deal of material he had excluded from his published account.

While some cracks in Goodrich’s account had come to light earlier, the Bregler Papers and Goodrich’s notes made it clear that nearly everything about Eakins’ life and art needed a major reassessment.

A disturbing pattern of behavior emerges

Loosely speaking, the accusations against Eakins fit into two categories.

The first involves nudity. Eakins seems to have been an exhibitionist voyeur — someone who exposes themselves in unlikely or inappropriate situations to shock others and perhaps achieve some sort of psychological dominance.

He often undressed in front of his students or inappropriately exposed himself in front of his subjects. For example, according to his student Samuel Murray, he once walked completely naked into a room where a young woman was posing for her portrait and declared, “I don’t know if you ever saw a naked man before. I thought you might like to see one.”

Goodrich’s unpublished notes detail repeated instances in which he pressured women to undress in front of him, from his young female students to the elderly women who posed for his portraits.

He collected a large number of nude photographs of himself and his students, and he had photographs taken in which he is carrying a naked female model while unclothed. In his classes he often used obscene language, told dirty jokes, and spoke at great length about the male genitals in anatomical dissections.

The second deals with episodes that are much more troubling and bizarre.

The most disturbing involves Eakins’ niece Ella Crowell. In 1897, she committed suicide with a shotgun. The Bregler Papers revealed that she had once accused Eakins of sexually molesting her and that Ella’s parents believed her account.

The papers disclosed another troubling series of events. One of Eakins’ students, Lillian Hammitt, was picked up by the police on the streets of Philadelphia wearing a bathing suit and claiming that Eakins had promised to marry her. In 1886, Eakins’ brother-in-law, Charles Stephens, accused him of incest with his sister Margaret, who had died a few years before. Eakins’ sister Caroline also reported that he would repeatedly enter her bedroom wearing a shirt but no pants. Once, when she fled to a more distant part of the house to escape him, he shot and killed her cat.

By the end of his life, Eakins wasn’t on speaking terms with any of his siblings. Another brother-in-law, Will Crowell, admitted in a letter that he had threatened to kill Eakins.

While Eakins disparaged those who attacked him, he was a little like someone who starts a fight in a bar and then ducks out the back door. He consistently avoided specifically addressing the charges against him. Instead, he let his students, associates and family members engage in arguments about his behavior.

Silence still reigns

The belief that Eakins engaged in some form of sexual abuse is not based on conjecture but on large numbers of concrete accusations made in his lifetime.

What’s striking, however, is the persistent avoidance of these issues.

This material is still left out — surely deliberately left out — of most standard sources on American art. No textbook breathes a word on the subject. Even the Wikipedia article on Eakins systematically omits his sexual transgressions.

How can we explain this?

One possible explanation is simply that issues like sexual abuse are highly disturbing. They make one queasy. Moral issues like theft are not hard to think about in a logical way. With incest and sexual abuse, a more primitive instinct of avoidance seems to come to the fore.

Another possible explanation is that people often have trouble admitting that they were wrong. During the period before the discovery of the Bregler Papers, effusive praise of Eakins was expected of scholars in the American field, and a great many women and men engaged in it.

In 1983, for example, art historian Elizabeth Johns won the Mitchell Prize for a book celebrating Eakins as a moral, disciplined, self-made man. Though this was written before the Bregler Papers were discovered, she has never publicly changed her stance.

Even Linda Nochlin, a major figure in feminist art history, wrote an essay praising the way Eakins pictured women who look abused and declared that she felt he would have been sympathetic to her as a Jewish girl at Vassar. Sadly, this was unlikely. According to Weda Cook, a sitter for one of Eakins’ most famous portraits, the painter “didn’t like Jews.” He was also a friend and ally of the reactionary arts administrator Harrison Morris, who believed that modern art was a conspiracy of Jewish artists and art dealers.

In the past, I’ve written about Eakins’ pattern of sexual misconduct. One surprise has been the hostility of many female art historians to this criticism.

Why does it matter? Ella Crowell has been dead for more than a century. Why should we care if she was sexually abused?

My own feeling is that there’s a moral dimension to this question — that presenting a sexual predator as a moral paragon is unhealthy and that to do so twists our moral values.

But I would also argue for a somewhat different position. When we deal with contemporary events, it’s easy for a sort of witch-hunt mentality to take over. With an artist long dead, we can maintain a more dispassionate approach and search for understanding the mechanisms of unhealthy behavior.

While we can recognize that Eakins was a sexual predator, we can also point to another long-suppressed fact of Eakins’ life: His mother suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his childhood and died of “mania” shortly after he returned from Paris. As a child, Eakins had spent long periods with his mother and was charged with caring for her while his father worked.

Bipolar illness has a strong hereditary component, and we know that Eakins himself sought medical help for depression. Surely, spending long periods with a mentally ill woman must have been traumatic.

Finally, there’s the issue of Eakins’ paintings, which are widely regarded as one of the great achievements of American art. No American painter made works that are so extensively autobiographical, and so much a portrait of himself, his family and his intimate circle.

If we’re going to grasp what makes these paintings so tragically powerful, we should be honest and open in examining the man who made them and the impulses that drove him.

Henry Adams, Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History, Case Western Reserve University

My boyfriend wastes so much water. Am I wasting my time on him?

Sean Pavone via Shutterstock

This post originally appeared on Grist.

Q. Dear Umbra,

My boyfriend has a horrible habit of leaving the tap running while brushing his teeth. He will walk around the apartment, scroll through his phone, maybe even pour himself a glass of water FROM THE OTHER TAP IN THE KITCHEN all while brushing his teeth with the tap running.

We live in California, and I think about the drought a lot — like, all the time — and I believe that it’s everyone’s responsibility to do what they can to conserve water. But my boyfriend thinks that it doesn’t matter what he does.

How do I make him see the error of his ways? I feel like I’ve tried everything.

Sincerely,

Stoked Anger, Dampened Spirits

San Diego, California

 

A. Dear SADS,

Cohabitation is the uneven process of learning exactly how to make your significant other happy, and exactly how to make them very, very upset. It sounds like your boyfriend — let’s call him Al — has landed with remarkable precision on the latter. It also sounds like Al is being kind of a dick, but we’ll get to that.

A divide in a relationship starts with a very small difference in how each of you has always done things. You’ve always turned the tap off, he never gave it a thought. It’s so inconsequential! But if you’re anything like me, maybe you waited just a little too long to tell him about what that difference means to you. You had already built up some resentment about that little faucet. The impact of which, incidentally, is not that little. It’s about 4-5 gallons of water per minute. That’s about 140 gallons a week, if you’re brushing responsibly!!!

But facts, unfortunately, never outweigh feelings, and it’s the feelings that are in play here. The longer your frustrations persist, the more that little fissure between your faucet attitudes grows to a chasm. It expands to contain the furthest logical extension of Al’s disregard for your values: He doesn’t care about water conservation. He doesn’t care about the environment. He doesn’t care about you! He wants you and every other living thing on the planet to die a parched and lonely death!

You say you’ve tried everything. If you’re positioning Al’s daily tap habits as a massive affront to global water conservation, I can’t imagine they’ve gone very well. I’m giving Al the benefit of the doubt here, but if you have an otherwise healthy and loving relationship, the act of turning on two sinks at once is sociopath-level bizarre. It’s the kind of behavior that might be set off in retaliation to you telling Al that his offhand water waste is single-handedly responsible for sucking the state aquifers dry.

It sounds like Al is trying to prove a point — which is that he thinks that you’re being silly and unfair — and, again, he’s being kind of a dick about it.

But this is an issue that, even though it’s technically global, feels very personal for you. You said it yourself: You think about the threat of drought all the time! This is an issue that has taken up residence in your brain — it is very close to you. And you can’t see an errant running tap or carelessly dumped-out water glass without turning on that anxiety switch. It actually hurts you.

It’s probably hard for Al to understand that, because it’s hard to articulate! “The idea of climate change hurts me personally” feels very foolish to say out loud, but I think we have to get better at it. Until then, however, I think you should explain to Al that you’re actually not blaming him for all of climate change, or for even for a state-wide drought. Simply tell him that wasting water is important to you, SADS, the person — not the entire world — and the fact that he’s been ridiculing that has been hurtful.

If Al is an even average boyfriend, he’ll realize that he’s been disrespecting your feelings and amend his ways. If he refuses to do that, well, I think you’d be within your rights to consider hanging him out to dry.

Conservatively,

Umbra

A small-time scam artist gave Trump a mansion for $0. Why?

Getty/Chip Somodevilla

This article originally appeared on Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting

In this enclave of celebrity and tremendous wealth, it was a real estate megadeal that made little sense.

In 2008, an Egyptian man with a reputation for small-time financial scams bought an opulent 10,400-square-foot mansion on famed Rodeo Drive.

Sale price, according to public records: $10.3 million.

Then, six weeks later, he transferred the mansion to a shell company set up by a brash New York billionaire — for no money at all.

The billionaire was Donald Trump. The home was next door to another mansion he’d purchased for $7 million a year earlier and just down the street from The Beverly Hills Hotel, where two women say they had affairs with Trump around the same time.

Trump held the property for less than a year, then sold it for $9.5 million — completing what, on paper at least, appears to be the best real estate deal Trump ever made.

But people involved in the sale say it was all a mistake.

In a filing with Los Angeles County, Egyptian émigré Mokless Girgis claimed that his name was put on the deed to the mansion by mistake. That’s why no money changed hands when he deeded the property to Trump, the document says.

This swirl of transactions involving the future U.S. president defied the norms for high-end real estate deals, according to five real estate lawyers who reviewed the deal for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

All the experts said they had seen mistakes on deeds — but only minor errors of spelling and punctuation. None had ever heard of a mistake in which a multimillion-dollar property was deeded to the wrong buyer.

The sale of a luxury home typically involves brokers, notaries, lawyers and agents for title and escrow, the experts said. Trump and his team are no strangers to major real estate deals. With all that scrutiny, the experts asked, how could everyone fail to see the wrong name was on the deed?

“You are very careful to make sure the deed is accurate,” said San Francisco lawyer Kevin Rose, who handles major real estate transactions. “The first thing you check is, ‘Is it going to the right party?'”

But people involved in the Rodeo Drive transaction say that it happened and that Trump actually did pay for the property.

“Human error is not implausible and happens all the time,” said Igor Korbatov, the Los Angeles attorney who brokered the sale. “Notwithstanding the opinion of your experts.”

The Trump Organization declined to comment.

Ross Delston, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant on financial crimes to the International Monetary Fund, said the deal included “many facets that don’t add up.” He said the deal warrants further scrutiny.

“Anyone investigating the transactions of the president and his minions would want to follow up on the numerous oddities and red flags that this series of transactions raises,” he said.

In the years leading up to the Beverly Hills transactions, Trump’s business empire was under financial siege over troubled projects funded with piles of debt. There were problems, too, in a high-profile outpost: Ratings for Trump’s reality television show, “The Apprentice,” were in steep decline.

Looking for a spark, NBC moved the New York-based program to Los Angeles for the 2007 season. While the show was in production, the New York billionaire played the part of local celebrity — and L.A. booster.

“L.A. is sex, movies and cars,” Trump declared in the opening episode.

When in L.A., Trump stayed in a rented mansion on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills, near where his show’s contestants were housed.Episodes were filmed on Santa Monica Beach, at the Hollywood Bowl and even in the press room of the Los Angeles Times. Off camera, Trump was a man about town: He attended the Golden Globe awards and was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Trump also went shopping for luxury real estate. In February 2007, he paid $7 million cash for a five-bedroom Colonial on North Canon Drive across the street from The Beverly Hills Hotel. He still owns the house, though he sometimes stayed at the hotel, the locale of his alleged liaisons with adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.

About a year later, the place around the corner from his home came up for sale.

Behind tall hedges, the Rodeo Drive home’s gleaming white exterior featured Greek Revival-style porticos. It had six bedrooms, six bathrooms and a half-acre lot with a pool, spa and tennis court.

For decades, it had been owned by the family of Omar Bongo, the late dictator of the African nation of Gabon. In March 2007, it sold for $10.5 million to a trust controlled by Leonard and Selma Fisch.

The Fisches are prominent Los Angeles real estate investors and political donors. They have given more than $250,000 to GOP candidates and causes, records show. They were guests at the White House when George W. Bush was president and accompanied him on a trip to Israel, Selma Fisch said in a phone interview. Their daughter, Lisa Korbatov, is a GOP activist and president of the Beverly Hills Unified school board.

The Fisches never lived in the home, Selma Fisch said, but they threw some big parties there. A year after buying it, records show they sold the mansion to a company called Global Management Alliance, which Mokless Girgis had set up in Nevada.

People who encountered Girgis in Los Angeles in those years recall a glib, handsome man who drove a Mercedes and spun self-aggrandizing stories: He was a pop star in Egypt; he was a big-time real estate developer. Sometimes, those false stories were part of an effort to attract cash for bogus business schemes, unhappy investors complained. At the time, he was earning about $48,000 per year as the pastor of a tiny church, according to a private investigator hired by creditors.

The Fisches signed the deed transferring the home to Girgis’ company in March, but it wasn’t until July 11, 2008, that they finally filed the deed with the county.

The sellers paid $11,385 in transfer tax, due when a property changes owners. No loan documents were filed, indicating a cash sale. At that point, the mansion seemingly belonged to Girgis, free and clear.

Then, on Aug. 27, 2008, Girgis went to an escrow office in Beverly Hills and signed a new deed, transferring ownership of the mansion to a Delaware corporation called 806 Acquisitions LLC. The name of the man behind that shell company wasn’t made public at the time, but a year later, Trump signed a filing with the state of California identifying himself as the owner.

A second sale of the mansion would have triggered another hefty transfer tax payment, experts said. But when Girgis filed the new deed, he declared that no tax was due because the ownership of the mansion had not changed: He merely wanted to correct the name of the property owner.

Igor Korbatov, who is the Fisches’ son-in-law, said Girgis had been a prospective buyer and made an offer on the mansion earlier in 2008. Anticipating a sale, the Fisches signed a deed, but the deal fell through, he said.

“Some time goes by, and that transaction falls apart. He doesn’t have the funds to close it,” Korbatov said. The signed paperwork was filed away and not submitted to the county.

Months later, when Trump bought the property, the wrong deed — the one with Girgis’ company name on it — was filed, he said. A corrected deed was filed when the error was discovered, Korbatov said.

He said the mistake was made by the real estate companies that processed the transactions and his in-laws had nothing to do with it.

“It appears from our records that the error was completely our responsibility,” the title company, First American Title Insurance, said in a statement.

The company provided no details and didn’t answer follow-up questions asking how the error was made.

Another real estate firm, Escrow of the West, also was involved in the transactions, records show. In essence, the company’s job was to make sure the buyer actually had paid for the property before the deed was filed.

At the time, a senior escrow officer named Susan B. Nichols supervised the company’s Beverly Hills office. In an interview, Nichols, who is now retired, said she reviewed every deed processed by the office but had no memory of the Trump deals.

In looking over copies of the deeds, Nichols said she never would have approved filing the document granting the house to Girgis unless she had seen a sales contract with Girgis’ name on it — and only after payment had been deposited in an escrow account. She also said she would have approved signing the house over to Trump only if “it was kosher.”

The experts consulted by Reveal said this outcome was theoretically possible — but so implausible that they had never heard of such a thing.

“They would have so much liability,” said Linda Alioto, a real estate attorney in California’s wine country, “which is why I find it hard to believe they would be so sloppy.”

More than anything else, it was Girgis’ presence in the deal that raised red flags for the experts consulted by Reveal.

How did a preacher with a $48,000-a-year salary become a prospective buyer in the first place? High-end real estate companies vet the net worth of prospective buyers before even showing them luxury homes: Typically, they want a lender’s preapproval for a mega-mortgage or proof of funds if a cash deal is contemplated.

Nor did the experts understand why the sellers would sign their names to a deed giving the house to Girgis before he put up the money to buy the house.

“The big question is, how did he get in the middle of this?” said San Francisco lawyer Anthony D. Ratner.

Girgis was born in Egypt in 1966, records show, son of a devout member of the nation’s Coptic Christian minority. The family came to the U.S. when Girgis was a boy and eventually settled in Los Angeles.

Girgis sold real estate, set up a trucking company and met with failure and financial problems. A real estate client accused him of a $16,000 fraud, and he settled out of court. A leasing company won a $43,000 judgmentafter Girgis stopped making payments on his trucks. The government hit him with nearly $17,000 in tax liens, public records show.

In 2000, Girgis was hired as the pastor of Westside Baptist Church, a 15-member congregation where his father once had preached. He began moonlighting, pitching investment schemes to parishioners and other acquaintances.

In a lawsuit, parishioner Richard Higginson said he loaned $150,000 to Girgis in 2006 so the pastor could move forward with a can’t-miss project: a multimillion-dollar chain of “five-star assisted living centers” for governors, actors and other wealthy retirees.

Girgis promised he soon would turn that investment into $250,000. Higginson said he invested at the urging of his then-girlfriend, Charlene Capetillo, who sang at the church.

“I thought he was a man of God,” Capetillo said.

To her, Girgis confided that he was more than a small-time pastor. A pop CD he had recorded was a huge hit in the Arab world, and he had become “the No. 1 recording artist in the Middle East,” she quoted him as saying. Fans mobbed him at overseas airports, he claimed.

He also claimed he was a real estate magnate, saying a teardown was underway on a property in Beverly Hills. He never revealed the address, Capetillo said.

No celebrity retirement homes were built, and Girgis never repaid the loan, though Higginson and Capetillo often called him about the money. If they got him on the phone, he would promise to repay them soon, they said. Eventually, they took Girgis to court, where a judge ruled in 2012 that he had committed fraud. Higginson is still after his $150,000.

Some people who were on the inside of the Beverly Hills home sale professed not to know Girgis. Selma Fisch, the mansion’s former co-owner, said Trump had bought the house and she knew nothing about an Egyptian man being involved.

Berta Negari, who was listed as the buyer’s real estate agent, said, “I don’t know about the Egyptian guy.”

After one season on the West Coast, “The Apprentice” moved back to New York. Trump never lived in the Beverly Hills mansion. In the summer of 2009, he sold the home for $9.5 million — $800,000 less than the previous year’s price — to a Swiss entity associated with the family of Eka Widjaja, an Indonesian billionaire financier. The sale was in cash.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen filed the legal papers for the shell company involved in the mansion’s purchase, and he notarized the deed when Trump sold the property, records show. He didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

As Trump was selling the home, Girgis lost his job at the church.

Outside of this one transaction, he has no known connection to Trump. According to acquaintances, the 51-year-old Girgis now lives in either Egypt or Belgium. He did not respond to multiple voice, email and Facebook messages or to a message left with his brother.

In 2012, records show he was working as “ambassador to the United States” for a Brussels-based foundation set up to aid Arab refugees.

Its founder is a man who claims great wealth and styles himself “His Highness Prince Jamal Al Noaimi.”

Al Noaimi’s foundation briefly was registered with a United Nations agency that promotes ethical business practices, but it was delisted for breaches of U.N. integrity measures.

“Subsequent research associated the foundation with scams,” a U.N. spokesman wrote in an email.

Nor is Al Noaimi related to the royal House of Saud, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia says.

“Al Noaimi is not a member of the royal family,” a spokeswoman for the kingdom wrote in an email. “Therefore, it would not be appropriate to refer to him as a ‘Prince.’ ”

Last month, a reporter inquired about Girgis at the charity’s office in Brussels. But officials there said they thought Girgis was in the U.S. — and they were looking for him, too.

“He has all the documents for the organization in the United States, and we don’t know what he’s doing with them,” said Hecham Abdulkarim, the charity’s vice president.

Lawyers keep secrets locked up — so they get asked to do the dirty work

AP/Andrew Harnik

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Lawyers seem to at the center of lot of scandals lately.

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, whose office and hotel were raided by the FBI, is only the latest example. Harvey Weinstein’s law firm hired the private investigator who spied on Rose McGowan, one of his sexual assault accusers. A series of lawyers were involved in the hiring of former spy Christopher Steele, who produced the infamous Russian dossier.

Why does it seem that whenever something unravels in the news, there’s a lawyer in the mix?

A cynical take might be that the legal profession attracts people willing to cut moral corners. Or that it’s more of an Anakin Skywalker story, where the legal profession is so corrosive that it turns good people into jerks.

Based on my academic work, and as a lawyer myself, I actually think there’s a different explanation, that has less to do with the people and more to do with the laws governing secrecy.

Legal secrets

I recently taught a course called legal secrets, where we explored the rules governing all sorts of confidential matters, from trade secrets to classified information.

The course revealed that every type of legal secret is susceptible to misuse. The stronger the legal protection, the greater the potential for misuse.

And attorney secrecy rules offer the strongest protection of all.

There are actually three different types of legal rules that work together to protect secrets entrusted to lawyers.

How the law protects your secrets

First, there’s the attorney-client privilege — declared “dead” by the president after the Cohen raid — which protects communications between lawyers and clients seeking legal advice.

The concept of a “privilege” is similar to the way it is used in everyday life — for example, warning your teenager that having a cellphone is a “privilege.” It’s a special perk not available to everyone. The attorney-client privilege affords lawyers the freedom to withhold these communications from disclosure in a legal proceeding like a trial.

It’s hard to convey how ridiculously valuable the privilege is when you’re in the middle of a lawsuit. In civil cases, procedural rules require both sides to disclose all information that might be relevant. That can include information that is embarrassing or financially sensitive, or even a company’s trade secrets. But legal communications with a client are exempt and don’t have to be shared with the other side.

Secrecy related protections extend beyond just legal proceedings, however.

Legal ethics rules prohibit lawyers from disclosing any “information relating to the representation of a client” without the client’s consent. A lawyer that violates this ethical rule risks losing her license to practice law.

This ethics rule is powerful because it adds credibility to the lawyer’s promise of secrecy. It’s what Nobel prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling called a “commitment strategy” — taking some action that makes it very costly to renege on a promise or threat. In the same way that an army might burn a bridge to prove it won’t retreat, the threat of disbarment serves to persuade clients that lawyers will keep secrets safe.

Attorneys have a third secrecy shield at their disposal rather clunkily called the “attorney work product doctrine.”

This principle shields written materials prepared by a lawyer in connection with litigation, although it is not absolute. The doctrine is also used to justify a rule that shields a lawyer’s communications with outside “experts,” as long the expert is not slated to testify in litigation.

Armor-plated attorneys

This trifecta of secrecy-related protections makes lawyers the transportation equivalent of an armored car with tinted windows. It is intended to convey and provide security for its occupants when they are at their most vulnerable (assuming, of course, they can afford it).

At its best and most iconic, attorney secrecy protections are a cherished part of our justice system. They represent the difference between an innocent criminal defendant who provides a vindicating piece of evidence to her lawyer and one too worried to reveal it.

But armored cars are also valuable to those who would misuse them to avoid scrutiny or accountability. Cigarette companies discussed the toxicity of tobacco smoke in emails inappropriately labeled as “privileged” or “work product” in hopes that they would later be shielded from discovery in litigation. Likewise, people like Harvey Weinstein have an incentive to use lawyers to hire outside investigators in hopes that the lawyer’s status as intermediary will shield the arrangement from view.

That is why there are a few limited exceptions to the rules regarding attorney secrecy, including what is known as the “crime-fraud exception.” In other words, all of the protections fall away when a lawyer’s services are used to perpetuate a crime or fraud.

Lawyers are expected to serve as zealous advocates for their clients, but they also have broader duties to maintain the integrity of the justice system. A powerful client who goes too far may discover, perhaps too late, that the keys to the privilege can be taken away.

Elizabeth C. Tippett, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Oregon

AARP, a critic of scams aimed at seniors, draws flak over its membership marketing practices

Spencer Platt

This piece originally appeared on FairWarning.

In its newsletters and magazines, in congressional testimony and on its website, AARP warns seniors about deceptive direct mail and other dubious marketing come-ons as part of its mission to protect members from financial abuses.

But the huge advocacy group’s own aggressive efforts to coax seniors to join or renew their memberships also have drawn a burst of criticism this year.

Angry members say AARP’s barrage of solicitation letters and social media posts can mislead or confuse aging consumers, some of whom struggle with memory and managing their financial affairs. Hundreds have complained about getting false warnings that their memberships would soon expire, and at least some people have unwittingly paid for duplicate memberships.

The critics include Kathy Portie, senior editor of the Big Bear Grizzly weekly newspaper in Southern California. In January, she received a sponsored post from AARP in her Facebook feed that read: “Your membership is about to expire. . . . ACT FAST — Time is running out.”

Her terse reply, mirroring the grievances of dozens of others who received the same post, was, “No it’s not. It is valid through 2020. So stop it.”

Wendi Fein fumes about the experience of her octogenarian parents, Ruth and Richard Schwartz. She said the two, who live in Nevada City, Calif., have cognitive issues but, like many in their generation, pay their bills promptly without asking questions.

In January, Fein wrote to the Better Business Bureau that she had discovered that her parents sent in a check to AARP five times after receiving mailings last year. “Every time,” she said, “they paid the $16,” which covers an annual membership for two.

The extra payments have since been refunded, Fein said, and the organization was asked twice by phone to stop hounding her parents. Even so, she said, the couple received another notice and wrote out yet another check that would have been mailed if her sister hadn’t intercepted it.

“For an organization that’s primary goal is senior advocacy, their practice of multiple renewal notices is the antithesis of this goal,” Fein wrote in her complaint to the Better Business Bureau.

Over the last three years, more than 425 complaints about membership solicitations have been received by the Better Business Bureau and consumer help websites, or posted as comments on AARP’s Facebook ads and online community forum. In the last three months alone, there have been more than 120 negative comments in response to AARP membership ads on Facebook. On AARP’s community forum, the renewal practices have been criticized as ” deceptive,” “a waste,” “stupid” and “an obscenity.”

AARP declined requests by FairWarning for an interview with a senior official to discuss complaints. Via email, AARP spokesman Josh Rosenblum said AARP membership cards include expiration dates. He said the group has discontinued some of the social media language that has been criticized. He also said members who complain about multiple renewal notices will get a single mailing 30 days before the renewal deadline.

“AARP is dedicated to listening to and caring for our 38 million members, but if an issue arises as it sometimes does, we take action to solve it and learn from it, which is why we have an A+ Better Business Bureau rating,” Rosenblum wrote.

AARP is only one of the many membership groups, publishers and charities that bombard consumers with letters or online communications. Their reasoning is that “sometimes, people don’t see it the first time,” said Ira S. Kalb, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California.

Still, Kalb said, an organization like AARP has to be careful not to seem cavalier or irresponsible. “If it’s to provide you with good service and it’s time to update, that’s the positive side. If they’re taking advantage of elderly people, it’s not good. . . . Their reputation is based on protecting the elderly.”

That’s where AARP has gone wrong, critics say. In a recent email, Portie told FairWarning that “AARP is supposed to be an organization that protects seniors from scams, but I feel it’s hypocritical when they practice such questionable marketing tactics themselves.”

“Why can’t they say ‘Is your AARP membership about to expire?’ rather than ‘Your AARP membership is about to expire.’ Simple fix, right?”

Kathy Glaspy, 81, a retired accountant from Norwalk, Ohio, raises similar grievances.

“I have 3 memberships now and still get notices saying my subscription is about to expire,” Glaspy wrote in a comment on an AARP Facebook post.

Asked in a phone interview how often she gets renewal pitches, Glaspy said “too often,” and laughed. “I got another one just the other day telling me it’s about to expire — and I’m waiting for them to say it has and I’m going to . . . ask them which one, because there are just too many.”

Once known as the American Association of Retired Persons, and still mostly focused on members age 50 or older, AARP is a giant among membership groups. It also wields clout in Washington and in states across the nation. The annual $16 membership charge provides subscriptions to the organization’s magazine and newsletter as well as shopping discounts.

AARP declined to say how many people might have inadvertently paid for multiple memberships. (Full disclosure: My wife and I recently discovered that we have had two dual memberships for several years. We recently received multiple warnings that one was about to expire, even though we paid for a five-year renewal on the other membership last June.)

AARP’s January Facebook post warning people that their memberships were about to expire brought a flurry of protests. While AARP says its renewal alerts on Facebook begin 60 days before memberships are due to expire, many of those who complained said they had been inundated by AARP’s mailed notices far earlier.

“You obviously have my address where you send a half dozen prods, requests, orders. And postage is not a problem for you,” responded Agnes Schaefer of Livingston, Mont., on Facebook.

“I’m 92 and never know if I will make it through to the next year. However, after six months, I start getting mail saying my membership is about to expire,” Schaefer explained in a phone interview. “You can write and ask them not to and you’re completely ignored. I’m furious with those people.”

Another member, Carol Rosenblatt, a former financial specialist from San Antonio, Texas, wrote that she and her husband “have really enjoyed our membership, but we have NOT enjoyed the tremendous amount of mail you guys had been sending us for the last 6 months! We really don’t need 2 renewal reminders a week, 6 months early.”

Even though it gives AARP its highest rating, the Better Business Bureau reports receiving more than 400 complaints over the last three years, with roughly 40 percent concerning excessive mailings or similar membership issues. The BBB said its grading formula takes into account such factors as the number of complaints, the size of the enterprise and its responsiveness.

When it comes to questionable marketing tactics by others, AARP takes a firm stance. In its mission statement, AARP describes itself as a “social welfare organization” that “fights for the issues that matter most to families — such as health care, employment and income security, and protection from financial abuse.” AARP’s publications over the past year have warned readers about “holiday shopping scams” as well as crooked car repair shops and technical support services.

AARP officials have also testified in Congress about misleading mailings that target seniors.

“The Association has had a longstanding interest in the issue from both the legislative and consumer perspectives,” declared then-AARP board member Betty Severyn, at a 2001 hearing before the Subcommittee on Social Security of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“Many of these mailings exploit the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of older Americans, their faith in the government, and their concern about finances,” said Severyn, who died earlier this year. “AARP believes that all citizens should be educated about and receive adequate protection from fraudulent, deceptive and misleading mail.”

5 food trends that are changing Latin America

AP Photo/Fernando Llano

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Latin America’s economy has grown enormously over the past two decades. However, unemployment in the region still hovers at 8 percent, double that of the United States.

Youth joblessness is even higher — almost 15 percent among Latin Americans under the age of 18. Sixty percent of young people between the ages of 16 and 24 work informally, without a contract, benefits or social security.

The region also has among the world’s highest violence levels, a problem some scholars have connected to high joblessness. In Brazil, for example, studies show that a 1 percent rise in male unemployment leads murders to rise an additional 2.1 percent.

Some Latin American restaurateurs think they can help.

These pioneering chefs are stepping out of the kitchen and into public service, going beyond feeding customers to creating jobs, boosting economies and preventing violence.

This movement — dubbed “social gastronomy” by Brazilian chef David Hertz — is the focus of my academic research on the politics of food.

Here are five Latin American culinary ventures you should know about.

1. Brazil: Cooking to prevent violence

Hertz first realized that food could help alleviate the poverty and violence of São Paulo’s poorest neighborhoods over a decade ago.

In 2006 he launched a project called Gastromotiva, urging local gang members to come train with him and start their lives anew as chefs.

“By interacting with other people through cooking, you learn confidence, discipline, collaboration,” he told me recently. “So why not use gastronomy to empower people?”

So far, Hertz’s social gastronomy program has trained 1,850 young men and women, 80 percent of whom have gone on to get jobs in the restaurant industry.

Working with the World Economic Forum, chef Hertz urges leaders across Latin America to use culinary training as a violence prevention tactic. Gastromotiva has expanded to Rio de Janeiro, Mexico and El Salvador.

During the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, Hertz worked with Italian chef Massimo Bottura to launch a Brazilian version of Bottura’s pop-up soup kitchen in Milan called Refettorio. The Brazilian venture turned food waste from Olympic Village food stands into hot meals for Rio’s poorest residents.

The project continues today, staffed by volunteer chefs and supplied, for free, by Rio food companies.

2. Venezuela: Feeding the hungry

At night, Venezuelan chef Carlos García runs , a swanky restaurant in the capital of Caracas. But by day he directs Barriga Llena, Corazon Contento — “Full Belly, Full Heart” — a foundation that delivers daily meals to schools in Caracas’ poorest neighborhood.

Venezuela’s three-year-long economic crisis has led to widespread food shortages. Venezuelans lost an average of 20 pounds each in 2017. Childhood malnutrition has spiked.

Against this backdrop, “each day we prepare meals for 260 children and 100 of their grandparents,” Chef García told me. The Venezuelan government won’t let the group serve inside schools, so kids line up for food in a nearby building.

The foundation also serves 160 people at the J.M. de los Rios Children’s Hospital, where parents often cannot afford to feed their children while they receive treatment for cancer. García feeds 30 doctors as well.

More than an act of charity, García says, he sees feeding starving people as the professional obligation of a chef.

García won’t disclose how he gets ingredients every day in a country with empty grocery store shelves and an inflation rate of over 450 percent. But his project’s crowdfunding campaign, seven co-chefs and a wide circle of allies surely help.

3. The Amazon: Creating a rainforest-to-table movement

Perhaps the most innovative social gastronomy project in Latin America is Cumari, a collaboration of several nonprofit environmental organizations based in the Amazon rainforest of Peru and Brazil.

With 40,000 species of plants, thousands of kinds of fish and 3,000 different fruits, the Amazon is bursting with ingredients. But traditional food production is threatened by development and the rise of industrial agriculture.

Cumari’s founders hope that demand for local ingredients will rise as more people get to know Amazonian cuisine. A bigger market for rainforest foods should, in turn, protect this biodiverse environment.

Working together to attract influential Latin American chefs into the jungle, the Cumari collaborative places them in kitchens across the region. There, the chefs prepare meals spotlighting traditional Amazonian flavors — from super healthy fruits like acai berry and sacha inchi to fleshy river fish — in indigenous village lunch spots and big city restaurants.

This is rainforest-to-table dining.

4. Peru: Fighting inequality with gastronomy

Chef Gastón Acurio put Peru on the map as a culinary destination in the early 2000s, opening outposts of his award-winning Lima restaurant Astrid y Gastón in London, Bogota and beyond.

Now, he’s using global interest in Peruvian food to help young people back home. Acurio’s Fundación Pachacutec Culinary Institute, which opened in Lima in 2007, offers scholarships to budding chefs from marginalized communities in Peru and pays them a living wage while they train.

“Peru is a developing country. Many who dream of being a chef don’t have the opportunity,” Acurio says.

Though its economy is growing quickly, 9 percent of Peruvians still live on less than US$2.50 a day. Acurio believes that education is Peru’s most powerful weapon against inequality, which remains very high.

Today, the institute’s more than 300 graduates showcase their Peruvian cooking skills in many of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, including El Celler de Can Roca in Spain and Acurio’s own Astrid y Gastón.

5. Bolivia: Reclaiming indigenous cuisine

Latin American cooks aren’t alone in seeing the social power of the region’s food.

In 2013 Claus Meyer, the Danish founder of Copenhagen’s award-winning restaurant NOMA, wanted to open a great restaurant abroad that could also make a difference.

Bolivia is the Western Hemisphere’s second poorest country, after Haiti. Over half the population lives in poverty.

The Andean country of 11 million also has a large indigenous population. An estimated 40 to 60 percent of people identify as a member Bolivia’s 36 recognized indigenous communities.

Meyer launched Gustu in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, in 2013. The restaurant’s menu highlights the “unreleased potential” of indigenous Bolivian cuisine.

“Bolivia may have the most interesting and unexplored biodiversity in the world,” he told The Guardian newspaper when it opened. All ingredients are locally sourced.

Gustu also runs a culinary training program that recruits students from La Paz’s poorest neighborhoods. Meyer pays them well above the country’s $143 a month minimum wage, pulling them out of the informal economy and, hopefully, keeping them there for the long term.

Johanna Mendelson Forman, Scholar in Residence, American University School of International Service

What a fresh hell this is: “The Handmaid’s Tale” returns

Hulu/George Kraychyk

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” returning for its second season on Wednesday, is at its fiercest and most devastating when it prioritizes showing the horror over having characters discuss it. The opening moments of the second-season premiere are largely a dialogue-free affair, and it is one of the most terrifying sequences I’ve seen in quite some time.

All of the Handmaids who defied their totalitarian captors in the first-season finale are muzzled like animals and driven en masse toward the gallows. A rope waits for each of them, illuminated by cold floodlights. Sealing the dread of this scenario is the fact that it takes place inside a landmark many recognize as quintessentially American.

The women don’t face their deaths quietly, but they have been muted. Somehow this sharpens the agony of bearing witness.

It’s not a spoiler to say Elisabeth Moss’s character Offred/June survives this passage, even though the lack of specificity of the title means the series could continue with another Handmaid’s story. It’s not as if series leads of Moss’s caliber are growing like weeds in the fields, so yeah, big surprise, her character lives on. But she’s definitely not OK.

The same can the said of those who look to “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a dramatization of one worst-case scenario of what America might become. The white wings and red robes of the Handmaids are not part of the visual language of resisting the seemingly incessant attack on our democracy. And the deliberate, quiet refusal to stone a peer last season is an exhilarating image of resistance.

It’s also a speck of light within the grimmest tale in serialized entertainment.

Based on what happens in the first six episodes of the new season, the second season has no intention of easing up on that darkness.

Gilead is not a place that rewards protest. That act of defiance initiated by Moss’s Handmaid comes with a heavy cost, and Offred/June may never finish paying for it. Long after the state is satisfied she’ll still be indebted to her deeply internalized guilt, a weight her oppressors — primarily Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) — crush her with again and again.

Perhaps it doesn’t need to be said that this series cannot be characterized as an easy binge. Heartbreaking, miserable, frightening -- any of those descriptors are more accurate than easy. Hulu releases its episode in lots of two, which, psychologically speaking, is probably for the best.

What saves “The Handmaid’s Tale” from feeling like a wallow in despair is Bruce Miller’s unsparing yet compassionate script, the drama’s wealth of phenomenal performances, and production's commitment to keeping the story moving at a rapid clip.

Little of the series' greatness is lost in these new hours, thanks to Moss and her co-stars Dowd and Alexis Bledel, who plays Ofglen, all of whom rightfully earned Emmys for their work. (Miller and the show itself also won Emmys.) Their performances gain even more depth and power in this sophomore run, as does Yvonne Strahovski, whose icy and conflicted Serena Joy receives more development. The actor proves she’s up to the challenge of that expanded focus.

One less-than-desirable outcome, however, is a decreased amount of screen time for Samira Wiley’s Moira, best friend to June in the recent past, where we took our freedoms for granted.

Using June to refer to Moss’s character in reference to Moira is intentional. One of the main conflicts of this new season involves the Handmaid’s battle for ownership over her identity. In previous episodes June wears Offred as a disguise, biding her time to escape her slavery. Now the state seeks to remove even that birthright not merely from records but from her mind.

This is probably why Offred/June seems to speak far less this season than in the first. Mind you, the directors compensate for that silence by making the highest use of Moss’s talent for expressing a library of emotions through her eyes and lips. Offred says the most when she says nothing at all.

Even the feisty spunk in her voice-overs fades, which seems appropriate given her lot, but her black humor added a bass note to the series that’s noticeably absent now. Offred’s world is dark and grows bleaker by the moment. And the new warning about Gilead seems to be that nobody can truly escape Gilead, not even Offred/June’s husband Luke (O. T. Fagbenle) or Moira, though both escaped to the safety of Canada. America’s new order envelops them and everyone else like an invisible fog.

Miller doesn’t have to go completely off-book in the second season, because a number of details about Gilead, such as life in the Colonies, have only been mentioned up to this point. This allows season 2 to take us into the bowels of this deathscape of yellowed horror up through the travails of Ofglen, now one of the “Unwomen” sent to be worked to death in camps.

Bledel capably evokes the nightmare of her character’s plight, although the burned-out hazy palette of its land, made to look even more poisonous and devoid of color by cinematographer Colin Watkinson, is a powerful player by itself.

Despite everything that makes “The Handmaid’s Tale” great, its shortcomings remain. Fagbenle, Joseph Fiennes’ Commander Waterford and Max Minghella’s Nick mostly seem to be there to prove there is a patriarchy holding these women in place even as their performances are anything but diminished.

Season 2 also continues the drama’s device of using flashbacks to fill in the histories of its characters and the world before, and the effectiveness of that tool is subjective these days; a lot of viewers are tired of it. Then again, the novel pulled at threads of the past without going into extensive depth, enough for Miller and producers to hang new storylines on. To be fair, it’s difficult to think of what could replace that stratagem; we all want an explanation of how, exactly, it all went to hell so we can note the warning signs and avert a similar fate.

Before Hulu’s version, the widest-reaching pop culture legacy of Margaret Atwood’s story was one famously inspirational phrase found within its pages: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. “Don't let the bastards grind you down.” Like so many inspirational phrases, this is easier said than done, as we’re discovering in reality and as Offred shows us in this fiction.

Human beings can only take so much. And the new season of "The Handmaid's Tale" takes special delight in allowing bubbles of hope to surface in this opaque, sorrowful mire, only to submerge them before they can break open. Taken in large doses this makes for tough, wearying viewing. It’s also worth every moment of discomfort it dishes out. For now, we can take it.

There are no rules for Sean Hannity at Fox News

Getty/Saul Loeb

This article originally appeared on Media Matters.

“It seems that there’s no limit at all into the fishing expedition that [special counsel Robert] Mueller is now engaged in,” Sean Hannity claimed last Monday, after FBI investigators raided the home, office, and hotel room of Michael D. Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer. “And if he has access to everything that his personal attorney has, I can only imagine where that’s going to lead.”

Seven days later, it led to Hannity himself, as an attorney for Cohen revealed that the Fox News host was Cohen’s mystery legal client, whose identity the lawyer had tried to keep concealed.

That association raises many questions, not least of which is how Fox could have allowed Hannity to vigorously defend Cohen on the network’s airwaves without disclosing that he had been Cohen’s client.

That is a serious breach of journalistic ethics that, in any normal newsroom, would lead to a suspension or even firing. “Going to find out what kind of org Fox is today,” NBC News’ Chuck Todd tweeted this morning. “No serious news org would allow someone this conflicted to cover this story.”

It’s unclear what we could learn from Fox today that we didn’t already know several years ago.

The rules are different at Fox News — indeed, it often appears that there are no rules at all governing the behavior of the network’s top talent. This is, after all, a network that was happy for years to pay off employees who reported host Bill O’Reilly for sexual harassment in order to keep them quiet. Because Fox does not hold its stars to the most basic codes of ethical behavior, let alone the standard principles of journalistic conduct, criticshoping for accountability have little recourse but to appeal directly to the network’s advertisers.

The Hannity-Cohen story is a classic case study. Reporters and experts agree that Hannity’s actions are a drastic violation of journalistic norms that demand a severe response. But network executives aren’t answering questions about whether they were aware of Hannity’s conflict of interest or whether he will be subject to any disciplinary action. Fox’s hosts have filled that void: Hannity used last night’s program to say that he hadn’t done anything wrong. And his Fox colleagues have largely rallied behind him.

None of this is new. Hannity’s unwillingness to hew to journalistic ethics conventions has been causing the network problems for years.

At times, Fox has tried to rein him in: Hannity’s plan to broadcast from a tea party fundraiser was canceled, and after Hannity appeared in an ad for Trump’s presidential campaign, a network spokesperson said it would not happen again. But Fox executives never formally reprimanded Hannity for his actions, much less suspended him.

The last two years have only strengthened Hannity’s hand within the network. Trump’s election gave him direct access to the president of the United States. With O’Reilly gone, Hannity has the network’s most popular show and is the only remaining prime-time link to Fox’s founding. And the firings of Fox founder Roger Ailes, who hired Hannity, and Bill Shine, who was Hannity’s producer before climbing the network’s corporate ladder, removed two Fox executives to whom Hannity might have listened.

Meanwhile, increasing competition from conservative cable network Newsmax and Sinclair Broadcast Group means that Hannity would have options if he and Fox were to cut ties.

As a largely unrestrained power at Fox who has flipped back and forth on the question of whether he is a journalist who must abide by basic ethics rules, Hannity has been getting into trouble. The network’s response has been damage control, alternatively covering for him or even encouraging his actions.

Last May, Hannity spent several programs championing the conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee staffer had been murdered for leaking emails to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. But as advertisers fled his program, Fox stood behind Hannity. The network subsequently announced an internal investigation into its reporting on the story, but that review has yet to be made public, suggesting that the probe was a public relations tactic.

In the fall, Hannity hosted O’Reilly for a series of interviews in which the former host attacked the women who reported him for sexual harassment. Fox responded by heavily promoting O’Reilly’s appearance on Hannity’s Fox program.

And the network appears blissfully unconcerned about the biggest ongoing Hannity ethical disaster of all: his simultaneous status as a personal adviser to Trump and the host of a nightly program on which he worships the president and condemns his perceived foes.

In fact, Fox has rewarded Hannity for his actions, apparently hiring several conservative commentatorsspecifically to regularly appear on Hannity’s program and those of a small circle of Hannity’s fellow travelers.

The network’s decision to prioritize Hannity over maintaining basic standards hasn’t sat well with the Fox employees who consider themselves serious journalists instead of Trump propagandists. Fox staffers have privately told reporters at other outlets that they are embarrassed and disgusted by Hannity’s antics. Fox’s Shep Smith has even publicly feuded with Hannity; he also has repeatedly run segments that appear to directly rebut arguments made on Hannity’s program.

“They don’t really have rules on the opinion side,” Smith told Time magazine last month. “They can say whatever they want.” Fox’s handling of Hannity’s Cohen conflict of interest demonstrates that they can apparently do whatever they want as well.

UPDATE: A Fox News statement on Hannity claims that the network was unaware of Hannity's conflict of interest, and now that they know, they don't particularly care.

Climate change could alter ocean food chains, leading to far fewer fish in the sea

AP

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Climate change is rapidly warming the Earth and altering ecosystems on land and at sea that produce our food. In the oceans, most added heat from climate warming is still near the surface and will take centuries to work down into deeper waters. But as this happens, it will change ocean circulation patterns and make ocean food chains less productive.

In a recent study, I worked with colleagues from five universities and laboratories to examine how climate warming out to the year 2300 could affect marine ecosystems and global fisheries. We wanted to know how sustained warming would change the supply of key nutrients that support tiny plankton, which in turn are food for fish.

We found that warming on this scale would alter key factors that drive marine ecosystems, including winds, water temperatures, sea ice cover and ocean circulation. The resulting disruptions would transfer nutrients from surface waters down into the deep ocean, leaving less at the surface to support plankton growth.

As marine ecosystems become increasingly nutrient-starved over time, we estimate global fish catch could be reduced 20 percent by 2300, and by nearly 60 percent across the North Atlantic. This would be an enormous reduction in a key food source for millions of people.

Ocean food production and the biological pump

Marine food production starts when the sun shines on the ocean’s surface. Single-celled, mostly microscopic organisms called phytoplankton — the plants of the oceans — use sunlight to photosynthesize and grow in a process called net primary production. They can only do this in the sunlit surface layer of the ocean, down to about 100 meters (330 feet). But they also need nutrients to grow, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, which can be scarce in surface waters.

Phytoplankton are consumed by zooplankton (tiny animals), which in turn provide food for small fish, and so on all the way up the food chain to top predators like dolphins and sharks. Unconsumed phytoplankton and other organic matter, such as dead zooplankton and fish, decompose in surface waters, releasing nutrients that support new phytoplankton growth.

Some of this material sinks down into the deeper ocean, providing food for deep sea ecosystems. Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients in this sinking organic matter ultimately are decomposed and released at depth.

This process, which is known as the biological pump, continually removes nutrients from surface waters and transfers them to the deeper ocean. Under normal conditions, winds and currents cause mixing that eventually brings nutrients back up to the sunlit surface waters. If this did not happen, the phytoplankton eventually would completely run out of nutrients, which would affect the entire ocean food chain.

Sea ice, winds and nutrient upwelling

Nutrients that sink to the deep ocean eventually return to the surface mainly in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. North of Antarctica, strong westerly winds push surface waters away from Antarctica. As this happens, deep ocean waters that are rich in nutrients rise up to the surface all around Antarctica, replacing the waters that are being pushed away. The zone where this upwelling occurs is called the Antarctic Divergence.

Today there isn’t a lot of phytoplankton growth in the Southern Ocean. Heavy sea ice cover prevents much sunlight from reaching the oceans. Concentrations of iron (another key nutrient) in the water are low, and cold water temperatures limit plankton growth rates. As a result, most nitrogen and phosphorus that upwells in this area flows northwards in surface waters. Eventually, when these nutrients reach warmer waters throughout the lower latitudes, they support plankton growth over most of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans.

Trapping nutrients in the deep ocean

Our study demonstrated that sustained, multicentury global warming could short-circuit this process, leaving all ocean areas to the north of this Antarctic zone increasingly starved for nitrogen and phosphorus.

We used a climate model simulation that assumed nations continued to use fossil fuels until global reserves were exhausted. This climate path would raise mean surface air temperature by 9.6 degrees Celsius (17.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2300 — nearly 10 times the warming beyond pre-industrial levels recorded up to the present. Scientists already know that the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, and in this scenario that pattern continues. Eventually the oceans would no longer freeze over near the poles, even in winter.

Warmer ocean waters without sea ice, aided by shifts in winds that are also driven by strong climate warming, would greatly improve growth conditions around Antarctica for phytoplankton. This increased growth would trap nutrients that well up near Antarctica, preventing them from flowing northwards and supporting low-latitude ecosystems worldwide.

In our simulation, these trapped nutrients eventually mix back to the deep ocean and accumulate there. Nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in the upper 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) of the ocean steadily decrease. In the deep ocean, below 2,000 meters, they steadily increase.

Far fewer fish

As marine ecosystems become increasingly nutrient-starved, phytoplankton growth and net primary production throughout most of the world’s oceans would decline. We estimate that as these impacts ripple up the food chain, global fish catches could be reduced 20 percent by 2300, with decreases of more than 50 percent across the North Atlantic and several other regions. Moreover, at the end of our simulation net transfer of nutrients to the deep ocean was still taking place, which suggests that ecosystem productivity and potential fisheries catch would decline even further beyond 2300.

Eventually, after more than a thousand years, most of the carbon dioxide that human activities have added to the atmosphere will be absorbed by the oceans, and the Earth’s climate will cool back down. Sea ice will return to polar oceans, suppressing phytoplankton growth around Antarctica and allowing more upwelled nutrients to flow north once again to lower latitudes. But even then, it will take centuries more for ocean circulation to fully replenish nutrients in the upper ocean.

Ocean resources are already stressed today. About 90 percent of the world’s marine fisheries are fully fished or overfished. World population is projected to increase from 7.3 billion in 2015 to 11 billion in 2100. The impacts that we found in our study would have serious implications for global food security. Expanding aquaculture, or even more drastic steps such as directly fertilizing the oceans to spur plankton growth, would not even come close to making up for the loss of nutrients to the deep ocean driven by sustained global warming.

Our simulation was based on a strong climate warming scenario. More research is needed to explore just how warm the climate has to get to melt sea ice and initiate Southern Ocean nutrient trapping. But clearly this is a tipping point that we don’t want to cross.

Jefferson Keith Moore, Professor of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine