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FOCUS: Donald Trump's Legal Troubles: A Guide |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=59937"><span class="small">Tim Dickinson and Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Monday, 28 June 2021 10:27 |
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Excerpt: "Trump isn't going to be able to buy his way out of criminal charges, which he could soon be facing now that he's the subject of an array of serious criminal investigations."
President Trump. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
Donald Trump's Legal Troubles: A Guide
By Tim Dickinson and Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone
28 June 21
From tax evasion to election tampering to inciting an insurrection, a comprehensive list of the criminal and civil allegations against the former president
 onald Trump is no stranger to legal trouble, but it’s never been anything he couldn’t solve with his checkbook. Just after he won the White House, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle charges that Trump University swindled thousands of students. He later paid another $2 million for misusing his charitable foundation, which was shuttered after authorities documented a “shocking pattern of illegality” and “repeated and willful self-dealing.”
But Trump isn’t going to be able to buy his way out of criminal charges, which he could soon be facing now that he’s the subject of an array of serious criminal investigations — including over shady business dealings and real-estate tax arrangements, as well as his incitement of the January 6th siege of the Capitol. (Trump has made light of the probes against him, writing: “There is nothing more corrupt than an investigation that is in desperate search of a crime.”)
Trump also faces myriad civil actions, ranging from allegations he violated the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act (which prohibits the intimidation of public officials), to multiple claims that he defrauded people, including a family member, an investor that bought into his troubled hotel ventures, and “economically marginalized people” looking to “pursue the American Dream.”
The prosecution of a former president would be unprecedented, and the notion that Trump could face dire consequences is hard to fathom given his ability to elude them. As president, he was shielded from prosecution; this is no longer the case. “This is a significant concern for him because he’s no longer in office,” says Rebecca Roiphe, an NYU law professor and former assistant DA in Manhattan. “If he committed a crime like anyone else, I don’t exactly understand how he could escape it.”
Trump will still be able to cry “witch hunt” as the investigations continue to develop, leading some to believe his legal trouble could actually help him should he decide to run again in 2024. And in case you’re wondering, a federal conviction would not disqualify him from doing so.
Below, we cover the waterfront of Trump’s legal troubles:
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS
Manhattan District Attorney
Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance battled all the way to the Supreme Court to obtain eight years worth of Trump’s tax returns and other records — reportedly comprising millions of pages of documents. Vance now has a team poring over these records, and the two-year investigation that began over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal ahead of the 2016 election now appears to include potential bank and insurance fraud, as well as other potential financial crimes.
In May, a grand jury convened to hear evidence from prosecutors, a signal that the investigation could be entering its final stages. The DA’s office is reportedly zeroing in on longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, probing whether he failed to pay taxes on fringe benefits he received from Trump — including cars, apartments, and private school tuition for his grandchild. The DA’s office has reportedly seized Weisselberg’s personal financial records, and he could be facing charges as soon as this summer, according to The New York Times.
Prosecutors are also investigating whether Trump Organization COO Matthew Calamari enjoyed similar tax-free benefits, indicating the alleged illicit activity could be a company-wide issue. (Neither Weisselberg nor Calamari have commented on the probes or been formally accused of wrongdoing.)
In late June, the Times reported that the DA’s office informed Trump’s lawyers that the entire Trump Organization could be charged in connection with the fringe benefits allegedly provided to Weisselberg. “If this is the way the entire organization is run, then I think we’re getting into the realm where it’s far more dangerous for Trump himself,” says Roiphe, the former assistant DA. “As long as it’s rogue actors and he can push it off on them, then he’s fine. The more pervasive it is and the more people who have high-level responsibility are included, the more likely it is that he’s in some way involved.”
The question now is whether Weisselberg, Calamari, or anyone else the DA’s office may be probing will flip on Trump. Weisselberg has so far refused to do so, but that could change if he’s indicted. “It’s one thing to be loyal to somebody, up until the point where you’re doing jail time for them,” says Roiphe. “It’s quite another when you’re facing that reality.”
New York Attorney General
The state of New York began investigating a civil fraud case against the Trump Organization for its real estate business practices in 2019. But in May of this year, the office of Attorney General Letitia James announced a serious evolution: “We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the company is no longer purely civil in nature,” said spokesperson Fabien Levy. “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA.”
Collaboration between the two offices is unusual, but it makes sense considering the overlap in their probes. According to The New York Times, two assistant AGs from James’ office have joined the DA’s team, and James’ office is not conducting its own independent criminal investigation.
In addition to the Weisselberg issues, James has reportedly been investigating potential financial fraud relating to several Trump Organization properties, including the Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, New York. Trump bought the estate for $7.5 million in 1995, failed to turn it into a golf resort, and later claimed a $21 million tax break for conserving its grounds as open space. Trump is infamous for inflating the paper value of his assets, and he reportedly secured an appraisal that valued the full estate in excess of $56 million. Local authorities, by contrast, believed the entire property, Tudor-style mansion and all, was worth only $20 million, less than the deduction Trump claimed for the protected land.
James’ office is also said to be scrutinizing the Trump Tower in Chicago. One of Trump’s lenders reportedly forgave a debt of $100 million on the property in 2012, and authorities are looking into whether Trump paid the necessary taxes on the debt forgiveness. The finances of Trump Organization properties in Los Angeles (Trump National Golf Club) and New York City (40 Wall Street) also appear under the AG’s microscope.
It may seem like Trump is a sitting duck, but Roiphe, the former assistant DA, stresses the difficulties prosecutors will face. “There are a lot of these sorts of crimes that go unpunished,” she says. “There are times when you can be convinced 100 percent as a prosecutor that a crime has been committed, you can know who committed that crime, and you are incapable of bringing that case. It’s frustrating, but it’s the way it works.”
The greatest challenge is not demonstrating wrongdoing, but criminal intent. “It is extremely hard and extremely resource intensive to prove,” Roiphe adds. “There is still a chance that even if he did all of this, and orchestrated a company that was corrupt through and through, he might get away with it.”
ELECTION TAMPERING
Georgia (criminal)
In his crusade to overturn the results of the 2020 election and promote the Big Lie that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate, Trump turned up the pressure on Georgia election authorities. Fulton County DA Fani Willis is now investigating whether Trump pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on a recorded phone call to “find” sufficient Trump votes to overturn the election violated state law, specifically: election fraud conspiracy, criminal solicitation of election fraud, and/or interference with elections duties.
Read letters sent by the DA announcing the investigation.
Michigan/NAACP (civil)
Voting rights activists in Michigan, joined by the NAACP, are suing Trump for conduct alleged to violate the Voting Rights Act. Trump’s Big Lie pressure campaign included lobbying Wayne County Republican officials against certifying the election totals for the jurisdiction that includes Detroit. The Voting Rights Act forbids the intimidation of voting officials. “[B]y exerting pressure on state and local officials,” the complaint reads, “defendants attempted to and did intimidate and or coerce state and local officials from aiding Plaintiffs and other residents of Detroit, Milwaukee, and other major cities with large Black populations from having their votes ‘counted properly and included in the appropriate totals of votes cast.’”
The suit seeks a declaration that Trump violated the Voting Rights Act and a restraining order forcing the former president to obtain court approval “prior to engaging in any activities related to recounts, certifications, or similar post-election activities.”
Read the complaint.
JANUARY 6th INCITEMENT
Washington, D.C., Attorney General (criminal)
The Attorney General for the District of Columbia announced a criminal investigation into the 45th president’s activities on January 6th, and is reportedly looking at bringing charges against Trump under a local statute that makes it “unlawful for a person to incite or provoke violence where there is a likelihood that such violence will ensue.” The charge reportedly carries a sentence of up to six months in jail.
U.S. Capitol Officers (civil)
Two Capitol police officers who were beaten, maced, poked with flag poles, and pinned against the doors of the Capitol have filed a civil suit against Trump for inciting the violence they endured. “As the leader of this violent mob,” their complaint reads, “Trump was in a position of extraordinary influence over his followers, who committed assault and battery“ on the officers. Conspiracy claims added to the suit allege Trump was in cahoots with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, violent groups whose members stormed the Capitol. “Defendant Trump conspired with the Proud Boys and others to, among other things, incite an unlawful riot on January 6 with the goal of disrupting congressional certification of President Biden’s electoral victory,” it reads. The suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages.
Read the complaint.
Members of Congress (civil)
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the NAACP have filed a civil suit alleging a “violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act” — passed during Reconstruction after the Civil War to beat back violent white supremacists in the South — which forbids conspiracies “to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat” U.S. officeholders from discharging their duties or forcing them to leave the location where those duties must be performed. Thompson and the NAACP claim that “Defendants Trump, Giulini, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers plotted, coordinated and executed a common plan to prevent Congress from discharging its official duties in certifying the results of the presidential election.” The suit seeks a declaration that Trump violated the KKK Act and an order enjoining him from future violations.
Read the complaint.
Former presidential candidate Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) has also sued Trump for inciting the insurrection. “Trump directly incited the violence at the Capitol that followed and then watched approvingly as the building was overrun,” the complaint reads. (Swalwell also names as defendants Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and GOP colleague Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who spoke at the rally and whom Swalwell alleges “directly incited the violence at the Capitol that followed.”)
Read the complaint.
SEX AND LIES
E. Jean Carroll (civil)
In 2019, E. Jean Carroll wrote a book claiming Trump sexually assaulted her in the mid-90s in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room. Trump brushed off the accusation, claiming Carroll was “totally lying,” that he didn’t know her, and that the advice columnist and magazine journalist was “not my type.” Carroll sued for defamation. Trump got the Justice Department to stand in as his legal representation, arguing the allegedly defamatory conduct was committed as part of his official duties. Last October, a federal judge ruled the DOJ shouldn’t be standing in for Trump, writing that the president wasn’t a protected “employee” of the government under the statutes in question and that, “Even if he were such an ‘employee,’ President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements concerning Ms. Carroll would not have been within the scope of his employment.” But the Trump DOJ took the case to federal appeals court. The Biden DOJ is now defending Trump’s claim that the alleged defamation was part of the president’s official conduct.
Carroll’s lawyer Robbie Kaplan tweeted: “The DOJ’s position is not only legally wrong, it is morally wrong since it would give federal officials free license to cover up private sexual misconduct by publicly brutalizing any woman who has the courage to come forward. Calling a woman you sexually assaulted a ‘liar,’ a ‘slut,’ or ‘not my type’ — as Donald Trump did here — is NOT the official act of an American president.” The suit seeks to force Trump “to retract any and all defamatory statements” as well as to pay compensatory and punitive damages.
Read the complaint.
Summer Zervos (civil)
Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, filed a suit alleging Trump defamed her in 2016 when he called her a liar after she accused him of sexual assault in 2007. Zervos was one of several women who publicly accused Trump of sexually predatory behavior prior to the 2016 election, claiming that he kissed and groped her without her consent on multiple occasions. Trump called her story “phony,” prompting the lawsuit. “Donald Trump lied again, and again, and again, and again,” the complaint reads. “In doing so, he used his national and international bully pulpit to make false factual statements to denigrate and verbally attack Ms. Zervos and the other women.”
Trump tried to block the suit, arguing that as president he was immune from legal action. The suit was hung up in the courts for the remainder of Trump’s time in office, but this March the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that it could proceed. The decision could result in Trump being forced to testify under oath. “Now as a private citizen, the defendant has no further excuse to delay justice from Ms. Zervos and we are eager to get back to the trial court and prove her claims,” said Zervos lawyer Beth Wilkinson, according to the Times.
Read the complaint.
FAMILY FORTUNE FIGHT (civil)
Mary Trump, the former president’s niece and author of a tell-all book about her uncle, was an heir to the family fortune when patriarch Fred Trump died. After The New York Times’ 2018 expose about the trajectory of Donald Trump’s fortune and how he routinely manipulated the price of his assets, Mary realized she’d been bought out of her share of the Trump fortune unfavorably. She sued Donald and others in the family, alleging they’d carried out “a complex scheme to siphon funds away from her interests, conceal their grift, and deceive her about the true value of what she had inherited.” Mary, the daughter of Donald’s brother Fred Jr., accused Donald and her other relatives of having “willfully, egregiously, and repeatedly abused their position of trust” to rob her “in order to maximize their own profits.” The suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages.
Read the complaint.
PROFITING FROM HIS OWN INAUGURATION (civil)
The Attorney General of D.C. has sued Trump over diverting 2017 inauguration funds to Trump properties, alleging that the nonprofit inaugural committee “wasted approximately $1 million of charitable funds in overpayment” to Trump businesses that charged exorbitant rates, including $175,000 for a ballroom that usually rented for $5,000. The AG alleges “the Trump Entities … unconscionably benefited from nonprofit funds required to be used for the public good.” The suit seeks to have the ill-gotten gains from the Trump properties donated to public-serving nonprofits.
Read the complaint.
MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING (civil)
In 2018, the Trump family was hit with a class-action lawsuit from a group of anonymous Americans who claimed they were duped by Trump into joining a multi-level marketing scheme — run by a third party called ACN — which Trump was secretly paid to promote. (ACN, itself, is not being sued in this litigation.) The lawsuit alleges that Trump, his company, and his offspring executives Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr. “operated a large and complex enterprise with a singular goal: to enrich themselves by systematically defrauding economically marginalized people looking to invest in their educations, start their own small businesses, and pursue the American Dream.” The suit asks for class-action status, which would allow others to join the litigation, and for “actual, compensatory, statutory [and] consequential damages.” It also seeks the “disgorgement of all ill gotten gains” by the Trumps.
Read the complaint.
HOTEL DEALS GONE BAD (civil)
The Trump Organization managed a 70-story, sail-shaped high-rise hotel and condo complex in Panama City from 2011 to 2018. In 2019, the investment group Ithaca Capital Partners filed a suit alleging it was fraudulently induced to buy a majority stake in the business by Trump, who’d warranted that the luxury complex was well maintained and successful as a business. In fact, the suit alleges, the Trump Organization was “grossly mismanaging its operations of the former Trump International Hotel & Tower Panama including causing intentional damage to the Hotel Amenities Units and failing to pay income taxes to the Panamanian government.” The suit seeks “not less than” $17 million in damages plus attorney fees.
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So It Goes: The Passing of the Present and the Decline of America |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54251"><span class="small">Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 28 June 2021 08:33 |
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Bacevich writes: "Kurt Vonnegut's famous novel about the World War II bombing of the German city of Dresden appeared the year I graduated from West Point."
President Joe Biden in Washington, DC, 2021. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
So It Goes: The Passing of the Present and the Decline of America
By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch
28 June 21
When you’ve finished Andrew Bacevich’s most recent TD piece, consider getting yourself a copy of his eye-opening new book, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. It’s a genuine must-read. (I edited it, so I should know.) As Adam Hochschild has all too aptly commented, “In a sane country, the estimable Andrew Bacevich would be Secretary of a much-shrunken Defense Department. Deepened by his sense of history, this up-to-the-minute book is his answer to the big question: why is the most powerful nation on earth so ill-prepared to deal with the world it faces?” Indeed. Find out for yourself and, if you want to ensure that you’ll continue to read pieces by Bacevich at this site, do consider visiting our donation page and helping TomDispatch keep going in this ever more unsettling world of ours. Tom]
Though he’s seldom thought of that way, Joe Biden was, to my mind, Trumpian in his first global trip as president. After all, he delivered a fantasy to much of the world, as well as his own citizenry. In a phrase, it was: America is back! We once again have an alliance beyond compare, an “updated” version of the Atlantic Charter, with that crucial queen of powers, Great Britain (now, as it happens, heading for the Brexit version of the subbasement of history). NATO is again ours in a world in which a united Europe will ready itself, however dutifully, to face off against the Soviet Union — whoops, my mistake, Russia — and a China that’s been rising all too unnervingly fast. And yes, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a Trumpian figure of the first order, played along. (Why wouldn’t he? His country needs help bad!) And “our” European allies did indeed welcome a Trump-less America back by falling modestly into line, while secretly worrying that the Biden presidency was just part of a holding pattern for Trumpian-style horrors still to come. Think of those initial Biden-esque days abroad, all in all, as the hydroxychloroquine of global diplomacy.
The president then flew on to Geneva where, in an encounter touted as significant beyond belief, he met face to face for several hours with the leader of Russia, a country he — to the thrill of the Russian media — had already called a “great power.” As it happened, his counterpart Vladimir Putin was playing out a similarly Trumpian fantasy: that the leader of an economically bedraggled oil state with a Texas-sized economy is still the equivalent of the Soviet Union and so one of the two (or three) major powers on the planet.
Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping, the head of a distinctly rising power, continues to promote yet another global fantasy, since if his country is indeed rising, it’s on a falling planet, one already heating beyond all expectations. Evidently, in these last weeks, few leaders cared to consider this planet and its “powers” as they really are.
Today, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of the recently published book After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, considers what to make of a country in chaos, confusion, and a new kind of disunion, one that now looks increasingly like the living definition of decline on that declining planet of ours. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
So It Goes
The Passing of the Present and the Decline of America
  asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel about the World War II bombing of the German city of Dresden appeared the year I graduated from West Point. While dimly aware that its publication qualified as a literary event, I felt no urge to read it. At that moment, I had more immediate priorities to attend to, chief among them: preparing for my upcoming deployment to Vietnam.
Had I reflected on Vonnegut’s question then, my guess is that I would have judged the present to be both very wide and very deep and, as a white American male, mine to possess indefinitely. Life, of course, was by no means perfect. The Vietnam War had obviously not gone exactly as expected. The cacophonous upheaval known as “the Sixties” had produced considerable unease and consternation. Yet a majority of Americans — especially those with their hands on the levers of political, corporate, and military power — saw little reason to doubt that history remained on its proper course and that was good enough for me.
In other words, despite the occasional setbacks and disappointments of the recent past, this country’s global preeminence remained indisputable, not just in theory but in fact. That the United States would enjoy such a status for the foreseeable future seemed a foregone conclusion. After all, if any single nation prefigured the destiny of humankind, it was ours. Among the lessons taught by history itself, nothing ranked higher or seemed more obvious. Primacy, in other words, defined our calling.
Any number of motives, most of them utterly wrong-headed, had prompted the United States to go to war in Vietnam. Yet, in retrospect, I’ve come to believe that one motive took precedence over all others: Washington’s fierce determination to deflect any doubt about this country’s status as history’s sole chosen agent. By definition, once U.S. officials had declared that preserving a non-communist South Vietnam constituted a vital national security interest, it became one, ipso facto. Saying it made it so, even if, by any rational calculation, the fate of South Vietnam had negligible implications for the wellbeing of the average American.
As it happened, the so-called lessons of the Vietnam War were soon forgotten. Although that conflict ended in humiliating defeat, the reliance on force to squelch doubts about American dominion persisted. And once the Cold War ended, taking with it any apparent need for the United States to exercise self-restraint, the militarization of American policy reached full flood. Using force became little short of a compulsion. Affirming American “global leadership” provided an overarching rationale for the sundry saber-rattling demonstrations, skirmishes, interventions, bombing campaigns, and large-scale wars in which U.S. forces have continuously engaged ever since.
Simultaneously, however, that wide, deep, and taken-for-granted present of my youth was slipping away. As our wars became longer and more numerous, the problems besetting the nation only multiplied, while the solutions on offer proved ever flimsier.
The possibility that a penchant for war might correlate with mounting evidence of national distress largely escaped notice. This was especially the case in Washington where establishment elites clung to the illusion that military might testifies to national greatness.
Somewhere along the way — perhaps midway between Donald Trump’s election as president in November 2016 and the assault on the Capitol in January of this year — it dawned on me that the present that I once knew and took as a given is now gone for good. A conclusion that I would have deemed sacrilegious half a century ago now strikes me as self-evident: The American experiment in dictating the course of history has reached a dead-end.
How could that have happened over the course of just a few decades? And where does the demise of that reassuring present — arrangements that I and most other Americans once took to be fixed and true — leave us today? What comes next?
Inflection Point
“So it goes.” As Vonnegut recounts the journey of his time-traveling protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in Slaughterhouse-Five, that terse phrase serves as a recurring motif. It defines Vonnegut’s worldview: fate is arbitrary, destiny inexplicable, history a random affair. There is no why. Whatever happens, happens. So it goes.
Such sentiments are deeply at odds with the way Americans are accustomed to thinking about past, present, and future. Since the founding of our republic, if not before, we have habitually imputed to history a clearly identifiable purpose, usually connected to the spread of freedom and democracy as we understand those concepts.
Yet as crises without easy solutions continue to accumulate, Vonnegut’s cynicism – tantamount to civic blasphemy — might warrant fresh consideration. “So it goes” admits to severe limits on human agency. While offering little in terms of remedies, it just might offer a first step toward recovering a collective sense of modesty and self-awareness.
Because he’s president, Joe Biden must necessarily profess to believe otherwise. By any objective measure, Biden is a long-in-the-tooth career politician of no particular distinction. He is clearly a decent and well-meaning fellow. Yet his prior record of substantive achievement, whether as a long-serving senator from Delaware or as vice president, is thin. He is the Democratic Party’s equivalent of a B-list movie actor honored with his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in tribute to his sheer doggedness and longevity.
That said, some Americans entertain high hopes for the Biden presidency. Especially in quarters where Trump Derangement Syndrome remains acute, expectations of Biden single-handedly charting a course back from the abyss toward which his predecessor had allowed the nation to drift are palpable. So, too, is the belief that he will thereby reconstitute some version of American political, economic, and military primacy, even in a world of Covid-19, climate change, a rising China, and a host of other daunting challenges. Despite this very tall order, “so it goes” can have no place in Biden’s lexicon.
During its decades-long interval of apparent global dominion, American expectations about the role presidents were to play grew appreciably. Commentators fell into the habit of referring to the occupant of the Oval Office as “the most powerful man in the world,” presiding over the planet’s most powerful nation. The duties prescribed by the U.S. Constitution came nowhere near to defining the responsibilities and prerogatives of the chief executive. Prophet, seer, source of inspiration, interpreter of the zeitgeist, and war-maker par excellence: presidents were expected to function as each of these.
In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt boosted the morale of Depression-era Americans by assuring them that they had a “rendezvous with destiny.” At the very moment when he entered the White House in 1961, John F. Kennedy thrilled his countrymen with a pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden, [and] meet any hardship” to prevent the extinction of liberty itself globally. In his second inaugural address, delivered in the midst of two protracted wars, George W. Bush announced to his fellow citizens that “ending tyranny in our world” had become “the calling of our time.” Even today, tyranny shows no signs of disappearing. Even so — and notwithstanding four years of Donald Trump — the delusion that presidents possess visionary gifts persists. And so it goes.
As a result, whether he likes it or not — and he probably likes it quite a lot — observers are looking to Biden to demonstrate similarly prophetic gifts. Even though expressing himself in less than soaring terms, he’s sought to oblige. According to the president, the United States — and by implication the world as a whole — has today arrived at an “inflection point,” a technocratic tagline that’s become a recurring motif for both him and his administration.
That “inflection point” conveys little by way of poetry in no way diminishes its significance. Quite the opposite, it expresses Biden’s own sense of the historical moment. Implicit in the phrase is a sense of urgency. Also implicit is a call to action: “Here we are. There is where we need to go. Follow me.” Consider it the very inverse of “so it goes.”
Three Vectors
Given both Biden’s advanced age and his party’s precarious majority in Congress, not to mention the legions of Americans hankering to return Donald Trump to the White House, the opportunity to act on this imagined inflection point may well prove fleeting at best, nonexistent at worst. If Republicans gain control of the Senate or House of Representatives next year, “so it goes” may become the mournful refrain of a lame-duck presidency. Hence, Biden’s understandable determination to seize the moment, before rising inequality at home, a rising China abroad, rising seas everywhere, and a potentially resurgent Trumpism swamp his administration.
So even though the Biden team is not yet fully in place, the inflection point already finds expression in three distinct commitments. Together, they give us a sense of what to expect from this administration — and what we should worry about.
The first commitment bears the imprint of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It assumes that vigorous government action under Washington’s benign and watchful eye can indeed repair a battered and broken economy, restoring prosperity, while redressing deep inequities. Given the necessary resources, that government can solve problems, even big ones, has for more than a century been a central precept of American liberalism. To demonstrate liberalism’s continued viability, Biden proposes to spend trillions of dollars to “build back better,” while curbing the excesses of a neoliberalism to which his own party contributed mightily. The spending and the curbs inevitably elicit charges that Biden has embraced socialism or something worse. So it goes in American politics these days.
The second commitment that derives from Biden’s inflection point centers on the culture wars. Its progressive purpose is to supplant a social order in which white heterosexual males (like Biden and me) have enjoyed a privileged place with a new order that prizes diversity. Creating such a new order implies expunging the non-trivial vestiges of American racism, sexism, and homophobia. Given trends within late modernity that emphasize autonomy and choice over tradition and obligation, this effort may eventually succeed, but rest assured, such success will not come anytime soon. In the meantime, Biden will catch all kinds of grief from those professing to cherish a set of received values that ostensibly formed the foundation of the American Experiment. So it goes.
The third commitment deriving from that inflection point relates to America’s once-and-future role in the world. Suffused with nostalgia, this commitment seeks to return the planet to the heyday of American dominion, putting the United States once more in history’s driver’s seat. Reduced to a Bidenesque bumper sticker, it insists that “America is back.” With decades of foreign policy experience to draw on, the president appears committed to making good on that assertion.
His much ballyhooed first trip abroad put this aspiration on vivid display, while also revealing its remarkable hollowness. As a start, Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson issued a vapid revision of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, in essence posing as ersatz versions of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Few who witnessed the charade were fooled.
Then Air Force One delivered the president to Brussels where he cajoled the members of NATO into tagging China as a looming threat. Doing so meant ignoring the ignominious failure of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan and disregarding French President Emmanuel Macron’s reminder that “NATO is an organization that concerns the North Atlantic,” whereas China just happens to be located on the other side of the world.
The pièce de résistance came when Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a nearly substance-free “summit” in Geneva. Possessing neither the drama of Kennedy vs. Nikita Khrushchev in 1961, nor the substance of Ronald Reagan’s encounter with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, it proved an empty show, even if it did play to a full theater.
Still, the entire trip and the bloated media coverage it generated were instructive. They illuminated what Biden’s inflection point truly signifies for America’s role in the world. The Biden administration yearns to reinstall familiar verities dating from World War II and the Cold War as the basis of U.S. policy. Many members of the press corps share that yearning. Hence the inclination to define the present age in terms of a new Cold War version of great-power competition, while paying little more than lip service to the need for fresh thinking and vigorous action on matters like climate change, environmental degradation, refugee flows, and nuclear proliferation.
Modeled at least in part on a New Deal that Americans remember fondly but inaccurately, Biden’s economic policies will in all likelihood promote growth and reduce unemployment. Even taking into account the risk of unintended consequences such as inflation, the effort is probably worth undertaking.
By wading into the culture wars, Biden might also bring the country closer to fulfilling the aspirations expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No doubt arguments about the proper meaning of freedom and equality will continue. But the correct goal is not utopia. Merely reducing the gap between professed ideals and prevailing practice will suffice. Here, too, the effort is at least worth undertaking.
When it comes to America’s role in the world, however, it becomes difficult to profess even modest optimism. If Biden clings to a calcified and militarized conception of national security — as he appears intent on doing — he will put his entire presidency at risk. Rather than restoring American primacy, he will accelerate American decline.
Harkening back to where the nation was when I received my commission in 1969, I’m struck today by how little we Americans learned from our Vietnam misadventure. Pain did not translate into wisdom. That we have learned even less from our various armed conflicts since appears only too obvious. When it comes to war, Americans remain willfully and incorrigibly ignorant. We have paid dearly for that ignorance and will likely pay even more in the years ahead. So it goes.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
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Hollywood's Long History of Favoring Lighter Skin Has Real World Consequences |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53256"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hollywood Reporter</span></a>
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Sunday, 27 June 2021 13:46 |
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Abdul-Jabbar writes: "It's well known among people of color that Hollywood prefers its coffee with lots of cream, not black."
Abdul-Jabbar. (photo: Getty Images)
Hollywood's Long History of Favoring Lighter Skin Has Real World Consequences
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The Hollywood Reporter
27 June 21
From Hollywood to Bollywood, the media has a long history of favoring lighter skin, "and that message translates into real-world consequences."
t’s well known among people of color that Hollywood prefers its coffee with lots of cream, not black. That casting bias has again been exposed with the recent backlash regarding In the Heights’ exclusion of dark-skinned Afro-Latino characters, who largely populate the real Washington Heights. Unfortunately, when it comes to casting characters who are Black — especially leads — Hollywood prefers to dilute the color to a less threatening coat.
Colorism is so destructive that it has long infested the Black community to the point where there has been discrimination against darker Blacks by lighter-skinned Blacks. And now there’s a movie written and directed by POC, yet it still reflects the popular adage of my youth: “If you’re white, you’re all right. If you’re brown, hang around. If you’re black, get back.”
Undeniably, we have made considerable leaps since that time — politically, socially and culturally. Much more diverse ethnicity is being seen on our screens, heard in our music and read in our books. Then how does something like this happen in Hollywood’s if-not-completely-woke-at-least-waking-up culture?
Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to me to be a very talented, innovative and respectful artist dedicated to cultural inclusion. In the Heights was created by him to give voice to Latin people (especially those with Dominican, Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage), their histories and their dreams. Laudable and necessary. A cause for jubilation. But somewhere along the line, despite hundreds of people involved in making the movie and a $55 million budget, no one pointed a finger at the cast and said, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Ironically, this oversight came on the heels of last summer’s 4,700 Black Lives Matter marches that included up to 20 million people — the film had been completed by then. Yes, Black lives matter in our daily lives, but they also have to matter in our art, in our culture and in the stories we tell, because that’s what informs each generation what values we are trying to celebrate and preserve. When we consistently cast lighter-skinned performers, we’re telling everyone that lighter skin is better, more valuable to our society.
The problem is across all media. We have a history of lightening or darkening Black faces depending on whether we are trying to promote them or villainize them. In 1994, after O.J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, Time and Newsweek ran the same O.J. mug shot on their covers — except the photo on Time had been considerably darkened to make him more the typical image of the Dangerous Black Man Hiding in White Suburbia’s Bushes. Just as sinister is the lightening of skin to sell more issues or products, as was done with Kerry Washington for InStyle, Lupita Nyong’o for Vanity Fair, Halle Berry for Harper’s Bazaar, Beyoncé for a L’Oréal ad and Gabourey Sidibe for Elle.
The message is clear: light skin good, dark skin bad. And that message translates into real world consequences: A Harvard study showed darker skin resulted in “lower socioeconomic status, more punitive relationships with the criminal justice system, diminished prestige and less likelihood of holding elective office.”
We shouldn’t be surprised. In a culture whose most popular stories warn of the Dark Side, whose villains always want to bring darkness to Earth — usually while wearing black leather — and which equates black with death, decay and shadowy nightmares, well, it’s inevitable that black is going to carry some unconscious negative weight. Add to that the fully conscious negative weight of ingrained racism that equates Black skin with crime, hate, laziness and lack of education, and it’s easy to see how all this filters down to Hollywood casting.
America certainly isn’t the only country battling colorism. India and China support a multibillion dollar bleach cream industry whose products are meant to lighten the skin. (Some creams contain poisonous chemicals that can cause kidney failure, meaning that millions would rather risk death than have dark skin.) Bollywood has long enabled mass colorism, too, often by featuring a lighter-skinned actress in the lead while surrounding her with dark-skinned backup dancers to emphasize her fair hue.
Hollywood perpetuates colorism and racism whenever it promotes light skin over dark skin based only on what it thinks consumers prefer. Perhaps this cultural prejudice had influence on director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians), who, when asked in an interview about the lack of Black Latino actors in his latest film, responded, “That was something that we talked about and that I needed to be educated about.” Why would someone personally familiar with racial discrimination need to be educated about it? And why did that “education” not translate into more Black Latino actors in his movie?
We should all worry that the poor box office and lack of enthusiasm from viewers on HBO Max for In the Heights — despite approval ratings on Rotten Tomatoes of 96 percent from critics and 95 percent from audiences — will provide a confirmation bias to Hollywood decision-makers that America isn’t interested in the stories of marginalized people. They can point at this and say, “Well, we tried.” Nor does naming successful dark-skinned entertainers prove we’ve come a long way. That ploy of tokenism has been used for decades to justify keeping out more people of color. Traveling one mile of a thousand-mile journey is not a cause to stop and celebrate.
We need to keep our eyes on where we want to be and recognize what we can do to achieve that. Toward that end, Hollywood needs to aggressively embrace all shades of skin, not just as peripheral or stock characters to fill quotas, but as main characters whose lives and voices matter.
But they already knew that.
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6 Crucial Climate Actions the Senate Left Out of Its Infrastructure Deal |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=59927"><span class="small">Rebecca Leber and Umair Irfan, Vox</span></a>
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Sunday, 27 June 2021 13:40 |
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Excerpt: "This is not the transformative climate deal that activists have been pushing for."
President Biden announced the broad outlines of an infrastructure deal reached with a bipartisan group of senators outside the White House on June 24. (photo: Demetrius Freeman/WP/Getty Images)
6 Crucial Climate Actions the Senate Left Out of Its Infrastructure Deal
By Rebecca Leber and Umair Irfan, Vox
27 June 21
The bipartisan deal is a disappointment on climate change, but it’s only part one. Here’s what could come next.
 his is not the transformative climate deal that activists have been pushing for.
Many of the promises President Joe Biden made on the campaign trail and early in his presidency — to slash rising greenhouse gas emissions and prepare America’s aging infrastructure for a changed climate — were missing from his announcement Thursday that 21 senators had reached a bipartisan $973 billion infrastructure deal.
“It is in no way, shape, or form a substitute for a comprehensive climate bill,” Leah Stokes, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist and adviser to the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, told Vox. On its own, “it could even have some emissions increases, potentially.”
But Stokes added that the infrastructure deal should not be considered on its own, because Democrats have a plan for passing more ambitious climate action.
Facing Republican opposition, the slim Democratic majority in Congress is pursuing its climate agenda on two tracks. Now that they have an initial bipartisan deal, they will try the once-obscure parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation, which allows Congress to pass budget-related matters through a simple Senate majority — which Democrats have. Top Democrats, from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to President Biden, say there will be no infrastructure package without a reconciliation bill that includes many of their priorities that were left out of the Senate deal, including those dealing with climate change.
Getting both done will be tricky — already some Republicans who had signed on to the bipartisan deal are backing away from it after Biden announced the two-pronged approach, and Democrats will face tense internal debates about how big the reconciliation bill should be.
The compromise announced Thursday included a scaled-down version of Biden’s original $2 trillion American Jobs Plan. A large portion of the bipartisan deal, $109 billion, injects funding into repairing and building roads, bridges, and other major projects. There’s $66 billion set aside for passenger and freight rail, $49 billion for public transit, and $55 billion for water infrastructure. Climate actions to lower emissions are among the least ambitious parts of this deal.
While it’s not clear which climate policies are on the table now, what’s missing from the infrastructure deal tells us a great deal about what could be coming next. And it’s possible to identify top Democratic priorities by looking closely at everything that dropped out of Biden’s original American Jobs Plan.
What’s missing from the deal
The bipartisan infrastructure package comes nowhere close to meeting Biden’s goal of cutting US climate pollution 50 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. In some sectors, the funding is a small fraction of what Biden proposed in his American Jobs Plan, and an even smaller fraction of what experts have modeled to transform the economy. But in most cases, there’s no funding at all for cleaning up the power sector and building pollution and addressing racial injustices.
Here are key areas that are missing compared to the original American Jobs Plan:
- The first federal clean electricity standard: This power sector has gotten a lot cleaner the past decade, as natural gas and renewables have become more cost-competitive than coal-fired power plants, but that change is uneven across the country. To go further, the original American Jobs Plan proposed that Congress set a standard for utilities to ratchet up their renewable commitments to reach 80 percent clean energy by 2030. Economists and environmentalists consider it one of the most critical policies to address climate pollution quickly.
- Federal investments and tax credits for clean energy: Congress would have to follow up with serious cash to transform the grid into a clean power sector. Spending could take a few different forms, from direct federal investment to expanding tax credits for renewables.
- A phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies: The federal government actively helps keep fossil fuels artificially cheap through almost $15 billion annually in subsidies for oil, gas, and coal, according to an analysis by the environmental group Oil Change International. That’s far more than the government spends on clean energy subsidies. Every Democratic president in recent memory has pledged to cut these subsidies, including Biden, but budgetary action requires Congress.
- Cleaning up transportation pollution: The investments for electric vehicle infrastructure like charging stations and tax credits are much smaller in the bipartisan deal, at $15 billion compared to $174 billion in the American Jobs Plan. Likewise, the deal allots $28.5 billion less for public transit than the original proposal.
- Investing in communities disproportionately affected by climate change: Biden pledged that the lion’s share of any federal funding — 40 percent — would go to places that are hit hardest by pollution and climate impacts, often communities of color. There were many other commitments to these frontline communities throughout the American Jobs Plan, including $20 billion to reconnect neighborhoods cut off by highways. The bipartisan deal only allots $1 billion for that effort.
- Research and development for climate solutions: Biden previously called for $35 billion in clean energy research, development, and deployment, which didn’t make it into the bipartisan proposal.
“Whether you’re looking at public transit or clean energy, or retrofitting buildings, the economic modeling shows that to meet Biden’s goal of cutting climate pollution in half by 2030, while delivering full employment and advancing racial economic and environmental justice, Congress needs to go much bigger and bolder,” Ben Beachy, director of A Living Economy for Sierra Club, said.
The chart below, based on data gathered by the Sierra Club, compares the two plans. One key piece of the Biden plan that’s missing entirely from the bipartisan deal is $400 billion in energy spending dedicated to clean energy tax credits.
What this deal does do for climate
It’s hard to gauge exactly how much the bill would curb greenhouse gas emissions at this point, but parts of the bipartisan Senate deal would help shrink the US’s carbon footprint.
Funding for public transit, electric school buses, and half a million electric vehicle chargers would help cut carbon dioxide emissions from driving. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the US, and cars and light trucks account for 60 percent of emissions in the sector.
The second-largest source of greenhouse gases in the US is electricity production. The framework doesn’t specifically call for more clean energy on the power grid, but it includes $73 billion for power infrastructure, like transmission. Transmission lines can link areas that need energy with places where wind and solar power are cheap, which can be separated by thousands of miles. This would help boost the business case for wind and solar power. The proposal calls for a new grid authority to facilitate clean energy transmission, and an infrastructure financing authority to help come up with the money to pay for it.
Another key climate provision is what the White House called the “largest investment in addressing legacy pollution in American history” — $21 billion allocated to environmental remediation.
There are more than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the US leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to take just one example. These leaks emit the equivalent emissions of burning 16 million barrels of crude oil per year — and the Environmental Protection Agency says that may be a drastic undercount.
Plugging these wells would therefore go a long way toward reducing the US greenhouse gas emissions. And since many of these wells are in rural areas or places with fossil fuel development, stopping leaks could also be a jobs strategy.
“It can really help with the transition for oil and gas production workers into remediation, and similarly for some of the coal communities, they could employ a lot of people remediating coal mining,” said Dan Lashof, the US director of the World Resources Institute. “That may not be called out as an economic transition strategy, but I think it should be seen as part of that.”
The proposal also calls for $47 billion in spending on resilience, which includes bolstering infrastructure against “the impacts of climate change, cyber attacks, and extreme weather events.”
However, the deal also contains elements that observers worry could undermine progress on climate change. The new construction of roads, bridges, and power lines in the proposal is likely to be resource- and energy-intensive. While the White House calls for these investments to be made with “a focus on climate change mitigation,” it’s not clear yet how this would be enforced.
“If you put a condition on the federal funding for some of these projects that require using low-carbon concrete and steel, that would improve that aspect of it,” Lashof said.
In addition, some of the new infrastructure will go to benefit cars, shipping, and airplanes that use fossil fuels. The proposal calls for $25 billion for airports and $16 billion for ports and waterways, for example.
Whether the emissions reductions from the electric vehicles and other environmental line items in the proposal will outweigh the emissions increases from construction and infrastructure for the fossil-fuel-dependent sectors of the economy remains to be seen. That’s why many Democrats also want a separate climate-focused bill to pass alongside the Senate deal.
Will there be a climate deal?
Many Democrats have rallied around the promise “no climate, no deal.” Biden reinforced the message Thursday, saying he will not sign an infrastructure bill without another bill on his desk addressing climate change, a point echoed by both Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
That means Democrats are publicly betting the farm on advancing the second track of their climate strategy: reconciliation.
“In effect, that means no reconciliation package, no bipartisan deal,” Beachy told Vox. “Congress must move a big, bold infrastructure package that tackles the climate crisis, curbs injustice and creates millions of good jobs before moving any bipartisan deal.”
There are two major caveats to Democrats’ promise: First, the announcement this week was just the broad brushstrokes of a bill, so it’s not a done deal yet. There’s also the mystery about the contents of the reconciliation package — much of which will depend on moderate Democrats such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
But the possibilities open under reconciliation give climate experts hope that Congress may still meet the gravity of the climate crisis.
“I’m very optimistic, to be honest,” Stokes said. “I think that President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Schumer are all deeply committed to climate action and we need to make sure they stay committed. The lines have been drawn, and we will be passing a climate bill this summer. I feel pretty certain about that.”
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