|
Moving Beyond Misogyny: Why Do They Hate Us? |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52059"><span class="small">Liza Featherstone, The New Republic</span></a>
|
|
Monday, 04 November 2019 09:32 |
|
Featherstone writes: "The banner of anti-misogyny has proved politically limited even in its ability to nail the worst perpetrators."
MORPH from the series Sweetie & Hansom, 2015. (photo: New Republic)
Moving Beyond Misogyny: Why Do They Hate Us?
By Liza Featherstone, The New Republic
04 November 19
Why do they hate us?
 efore the smoke had cleared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Americans were already asking, “Why do they hate us?” The question felt useless, even whiny. It was also unanswerable, since “our” specific attackers were dead. Yet it persisted. It persisted because of a sense that even with those particular haters gone, the hate itself was lethal, and whoever “they” had been, there was plenty more in store for “us.” Some people speculated guiltily, from the left, about how we might have prompted the hatred with our imperialism. Many more speculated indignantly, buoyed by belligerent patriotism. The question didn’t get us anywhere. In fact, it cemented our national paranoia and sense of victimhood, always a reactionary consciousness. Nevertheless, since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, feminists have been asking, on behalf of women, the same thing about men: Why do “they” hate “us”?
In Kate Manne’s 2018 study of misogyny, Down Girl, the philosopher identifies pervasive hatred of women as a central problem facing society. Manne extensively discusses Elliot Rodger, the angry young incel who, in 2014, killed six people and injured 14 others in a shooting near Santa Barbara, an act that he explained as the result of his rage at having been sexually rejected throughout his life. Manne’s book ends with Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, events Manne insists were also fueled by hatred of women. This view has suffused the liberal feminist mainstream. Right after Trump’s election, Salon published an essay by Amanda Marcotte calling Clinton’s loss a “Misogyny Apocalypse,” blaming white men “consumed with resentment at being expected to treat women and racial minorities as equals.” When #MeToo fervor began a year later, Rebecca Solnit voiced assumptions common to her milieu. Of Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Bill O’Reilly, even mass killers, she wrote, they “are the norms, not the aberrations. This is a society still permeated and shaped and limited by misogyny, among other afflictions.” Jill Filipovic has blamed misogyny not only for Trump’s presidency but also for phenomena as disparate as anti-abortion politics and the far left’s preference for Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren.
No doubt some men do hate women. Yet it’s odd to read the 2016 election as a victory for misogyny. Before Hillary Clinton was defeated in the general election, she first won the nomination of her party, beating a vigorous opponent who had passionate supporters at the grass roots. Though she was favored by the party establishment, sometimes unfairly, she also won the nomination the way a person is supposed to, by getting more votes in more primaries. In the general election, she won the popular vote by almost three million. There couldn’t be more conclusive proof that more Americans wanted her to be president than wanted Donald Trump.
The outcome of the election was less a display of woman-hating than a symptom of a serious structural problem. The electoral college, an institution intended to preserve slave owners’ power and property, still upholds white supremacy by disproportionately representing sparsely populated rural white states such as Wyoming and Idaho, places where conservatism reigns and solidarity among citizens is perhaps undermined by living too far from their neighbors. Hatred of Hillary Clinton could indeed have an ugly, misogynist tinge, as when MAGA hat wearers chanted “Lock her up” at Trump rallies. But it’s dubious to insist that misogyny was the decisive factor in shaping voting patterns when the candidate who won the popular vote—a far better measure of how people feel than the number of electors—was a woman.
Nonetheless, today’s liberal feminists remain passionately invested in the idea of misogyny’s pervasiveness, a conviction that often leads them to fixate with special laser force on progressive men. If misogyny is everywhere, it is not enough to see it in Roy Moore, an extremist Christian fundamentalist who had to be banned from the local mall for creeping on teenage girls. One must zero in, with equal fervor, on the anonymous Bernie bro on the internet who disliked Hillary Clinton a bit too much, and the sexual proclivities of any liberal man deemed to have institutional power, whether in Hollywood, Congress, or the art world.
Indeed, an emphasis on misogyny lends itself to a fixation on men and all the weird, gross things they do, from jacking off into plants to raping, choking, and killing women. It contributes to a view of sexuality that is unrelentingly dark and violent, narrowly heterosexual, and mostly hopeless. And it gives us an unmistakable thrill. We take satisfaction in denouncing the hatred of women. Who wouldn’t? Women should obviously be celebrated, not despised. Misogyny is an easy thing to condemn. Our outrage, in current media industry jargon, “does well” on the internet, meaning that when we are consumed by strong feelings, we do a lot of posting, clicking, and sharing.
Manne’s view of misogyny is better theorized than most. She sees it not as a set of bad attitudes or moral failings but as the enforcement mechanism for patriarchy, the system that gives men power over women. Men hate women who violate patriarchy’s rules: women who seek power too baldly, women who are too slutty, women who don’t act feminine enough. The observation is plainly true, but where does such thinking take us? Can we legislate the feelings men hold in their minds or hearts? How does one fight an emotion?
The feminists of the second wave were less preoccupied with misogyny. Though they wrote about rape and violence, they were not so much interested in sex pests and sickos as in how humans might experience life—including sex—without patriarchy or capitalism. Where contemporary feminists are almost morbidly obsessed with men and their foibles, the second wave was compelled by women and their potential. “The cunt,” Germaine Greer wrote in 1970 in The Female Eunuch, a book the publisher marketed as “the ultimate word on sexual freedom,” “must come into its own.”
Given this emphasis, it’s peculiar that second-wave feminists have in recent decades been tagged as puritanical, anti-sex penis-haters, a myth that could only be sustained by widespread failure to read their books. The second-wave feminists were exuberantly lusty, and desire was central to their often utopian thinking. Indeed, feminist intellectuals of the 1970s ardently believed that after the feminist revolution, everyone would have better sex. Shulamith Firestone, author of the 1970 classic The Dialectic of Sex, agreed with Freud on at least one thing: the centrality of sexuality to our society’s problems. But where Freud saw no solution to human unhappiness in this arena, Firestone envisioned the end of patriarchy. In consciousness-raising sessions, feminists questioned the male supremacy influencing how most humans copulated. Out of such sessions came books like Anne Koedt’s Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, published the same year as Firestone’s treatise. Greer made fun of Koedt (“One wonders just whom Miss Koedt has gone to bed with”), but she was just as eager as her comrades to reimagine this sphere of life. Sexuality, Greer wrote, “must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered … to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people.”
The second-wavers acknowledged that much of what their contemporary society found sexy or romantic depended on the subjugation of women. But they placed great hope in the erotic future. In 1949, the foundational intellectual of the movement, Simone de Beauvoir (to whom Firestone dedicated her Dialectic), wrote:
Assuredly there are certain forms of the sexual adventure which will be lost in the world of tomorrow. But that does not mean that love, happiness, poetry, dream will be banished from it…. New relations of flesh and sentiment of which we have no conception will arise between the sexes; already, indeed, there have appeared between men and women friendships, rivalries, complicities, comradeships—chaste or sensual—which past centuries could not have conceived….
It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting, will never be resolved…. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity … the human couple will find its true form.
Second-wave feminism was powered by desire, erotic but also something more broadly libidinal: The drive, as Greer wrote, to “have something to desire, something to make, something to achieve and at last something genuine to give.” All these lusts powered a collective longing for—and vision of—a better society. Feminist intellectuals explained their views in radical terms. “Women’s liberation,” Greer wrote, “if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly, so let’s get on with it…. It goes much further than equal pay for equal work, for it ought to revolutionize the conditions of work completely.”
Firestone’s utopian vision was wonderfully, even absurdly, detailed. She pictured a world free of both capitalist wage labor and patriarchy, and the abolition of the nuclear family. Pregnancy would not be the only way to reproduce; indeed, it would be rendered obsolete by technology (though she imagined that some people might still want to try it out, as a kind of retro kick). Everyone’s material needs would be met. Everyone would live in small communes, with contracts renewable every decade or so. Each commune would include a mix of children and adults. Children could petition to leave if they didn’t like the grown-ups to whom they’d been assigned. All adults—men and women alike—would care for the children. Because everyone would have young people in their lives, no one would have to join a couple or become pregnant in order to raise kids. Everyone could have sex with anyone, if they liked—because, she wrote, there would “no longer be any reason not to.”
Much of this vision remains appealing, but some of Firestone’s ideas are so wrong by current standards that one cringes to imagine the swift cancellation they would incur today. Firestone saw children as an oppressed class and believed in their radical equality. In her vision of the post-patriarchal society, kids would be allowed to have sex, too, including with adults (even their biological parents) if they so chose. For reasons of physical convenience, she imagined, most people would choose lovers of their own size.
Firestone believed that in such a society, sex would become part of all close relationships. Taboos on homosexuality would disappear. Sex would not be limited to genital fun, nor to monogamous pairs. In fact, contrary to de Beauvoir’s suggestion that the couple would come into its own once we were free of capitalism and patriarchy, Firestone thought we would finally evolve beyond it. “The specifics need not concern us here,” she wrote. “We need only set up the preconditions for a free sexuality: whatever forms it took would be assuredly an improvement on what we have now, ‘natural’ in the truest sense…. Love and sexuality would be reintegrated, flowing unimpeded.”
Writing about this intoxicating moment later, in 1999, Greer recalled that she and many of her cohort had been embarrassed by the contemptuous phrase “women’s lib,” short for “women’s liberation.” Yet she realized that it had signified something essential:
When the name “Libbers” was dropped for “Feminists” we were all relieved. What none of us noticed was that the ideal of liberation was fading out with the word. We were settling for equality.… Women’s liberation did not see the female’s potential in terms of the male’s actual; the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men…. Liberationists sought the world over for clues to what women’s lives could be like if they were free to define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fates.
Freud argued that in children, sexual curiosity is linked to intellectual curiosity. This is almost certainly true of adults as well—and perhaps of whole cultures. Revisiting such feminist classics, it’s hard to deny that today we are in a comparatively low-inquiry moment. Could a creative weirdo like Shulamith Firestone—or such systemic, visionary thinking, free of piety and cant—emerge from our era? In addition to writing books, second-wave activists once occupied a magazine editor’s office, 100 strong, for eleven hours, physically intimidating him, smoking his cigars, and demanding his resignation. Contemporary feminists, by contrast, are more likely to take offense than to give offense. Where current feminism focuses on ridding the workplace of sexual expression, Firestone dreamed of a world where we wouldn’t work at all and would have sex with whomever we pleased. Intellectually and libidinally, it feels like we are in a dry spell.
The lens of misogyny is part of our problem. It forecloses big dreams of political change. Even its leading theorists find little to be done about it. In her conclusion, Manne throws her hands up. “What could possibly change any of this?” she asks with a despairing shrug. “I give up. I wish I could offer a more hopeful message.”
No wonder contemporary feminism is more likely to reference Beyoncé than Freud or Marx. We are all about giving and receiving affirmation, from our “You Go Girl” internet style to the titles of our self-help books (Girl, Stop Apologizing; You Are a F*cking Awesome Mom; You Are a Badass; You Are a Mogul). If our problems are unsolvable and sex mostly a series of atrocities, all we’ve got is self-care: They hate us. So we have to love ourselves.
Yet the intractability of misogyny is precisely its appeal. This absence of solutions feels apolitical, but it is not. The mainstream feminist movement is rooted in the conviction that, as Margaret Thatcher once said, “there is no alternative” to American-style capitalism. A parallel exists in the liberal tendency to fixate on racism as a pervasive force in our common life, an impulse the left political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has criticized. Racial and economic inequality, Reed argues, are material injustices that can be struggled over and sometimes ameliorated, while racism in itself has no solution. Racism and misogyny are easy to condemn. For those who oppose it, bigotry is a renewable resource of righteousness.
Mainstream feminism proposes misogyny as the root cause of all its major concerns: sexual harassment, violence against women, the presidency of Donald Trump. But pervasive hatred of women hardly explains everything, and in any case may not even be the most serious problem we face. Consider low wages; discrimination based on race, sex, or pregnancy; lack of childcare and reproductive health care—might these material pressures not affect most women’s lives more than misogyny does? We can’t end patriarchy and capitalism in a day, but fighting the forces that keep them in place nearly always makes women’s lives better. Indeed, the more economic security we have, the easier it is to get away from the bad boyfriends and bad bosses whose misogyny is most likely to hurt us. And with more social solidarity and support available for everyone, society would probably produce fewer dangerous sad sacks like Elliot Rodger. No doubt they wouldn’t completely disappear. But neoliberal America, it’s worth noting, produces a lot more Isla Vista–style massacres than most other rich countries do.
Nevertheless, those fretting the most about misogyny view efforts at large-scale social transformation with hostility. They were deeply attached to a politician who urged her husband, President Bill Clinton, to enact policies throwing poor women off welfare. As secretary of state, Hillary engaged in reckless right-wing regime change in Honduras, events that led to continuing violence in that country, including an ongoing epidemic of femicide. In response to calls for single-payer health care and other reforms that would vastly improve women’s lives, she insisted, “We’re not Denmark.” In their books and on Twitter, misogyny feminists write dismissively of perhaps the only nationally known politician who has been calling for such reforms for years. They’re pretty sure Bernie Sanders hates women, or that at least a lot of his followers do.
Of course, some liberal feminists seem to feel invigorated by Trump’s odious attitudes, galvanized to donate to his opponents or knock on doors to garner support for them. Tresa Undem, a pollster who tracks gender issues, recently told The New York Times that in focus groups, voters now refer to “misogyny” and “patriarchy,” words that before Trump’s election had never come up in such settings. Yet the most explicitly anti-misogyny candidate was Kirsten Gillibrand, and her campaign didn’t go anywhere; she has already dropped out. Moralistic scolding did not convince Republican women to vote against Trump in 2016 and seems unlikely to do so again. This is no doubt partly because misogyny is so normal as to feel unremarkable, eliciting more eye rolls than gasps. But it’s also because many people, including many women, find it prissy and uptight to take offense at bad words and sexual vulgarity. Such trivialities, the thinking goes, don’t merit the breath wasted on them.
The banner of anti-misogyny has proved politically limited even in its ability to nail the worst perpetrators. Harvey Weinstein will probably walk. Jeffrey Epstein is dead, but his death seems, if anything, a defeat of justice, freeing him from the humiliation of a trial and, worse, letting so many of his far more powerful associates off the hook (hello, Bill Clinton). We may even see Donald Trump not only go unpunished but also get reelected, perhaps once again by a majority of white women.
Equally saliently, misogyny is not limited to conservatives. Dwelling on Trump’s woman-hating can seem hypocritical when you consider the rest of the political class. Epstein’s elaborate links to Democratic politicians and other members of the liberal establishment make it look, bafflingly, like the paranoid fantasies of QAnon or Pizzagate have come true. Misogyny is too widespread and bipartisan a problem, too psychological, too ineffable, to warrant an electoral remedy. And for most people, even women, the stakes are too low. Most of us (thank God) won’t be killed by a mass shooter. Many don’t particularly care how men we don’t know feel about us. We are going to vote for the person who we’re convinced will make our lives better, not the person who hates us the least.
To be sure, Firestone’s utopian calls to abolish the nuclear family wouldn’t be any more electorally popular today than liberal condemnations of misogyny. And the second wave haven’t been right about everything, by any means. Greer, for instance, has in recent years been justly criticized for her cruel and wrongheaded comments about trans women, an ongoing controversy that has cast a shadow on her international reputation. But we will only be as powerful and transformative as the second-wave feminists when we adopt their ambition, envisioning a society without patriarchy and capitalism and fighting to restructure our institutions accordingly. Misogyny is bad, but perhaps the ideals of contemporary mainstream feminism—that we not be raped, strangled, or forced to endure another four years of Trump—are not good enough.
If we can’t change how men feel about women, we can surely change the context in which women experience those feelings. When we lead more comfortable, secure lives, we face less danger from the horror in the hearts and minds of our fellow humans. Yet judging from the demographic of people who appear to care most about misogyny now—namely white women of the professional-managerial class—the more secure we are, the more we seem to be bothered by what other people are thinking about us. The conclusion seems inevitable: Worrying about woman-hating is a privilege, though I must say it doesn’t look like much fun.
 |
|
Facebook and Twitter Spread Trump's Lies, So We Must Break Them Up |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51635"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 03 November 2019 15:07 |
|
Reich writes: "Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook says he'll run political ads even if they are false. Jack Dorsey of Twitter says he'll stop running political ads altogether."
Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
Facebook and Twitter Spread Trump's Lies, So We Must Break Them Up
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
03 November 19
The social media giants have a monopoly on news but no interest in protecting democracy
 ark Zuckerberg of Facebook says he’ll run political ads even if they are false. Jack Dorsey of Twitter says he’ll stop running political ads altogether.
Dorsey has the correct approach but the debate skirts the bigger question: Who is responsible for protecting democracy from big, dangerous lies?
Donald Trump lies like most people breathe. As he’s been cornered, his lies have grown more vicious and dangerous. He conjures up conspiracies, spews hate and says established facts are lies and lies are truths.
This would be hard enough for a democracy to handle without Facebook sending Trump’s unfiltered lies to the 45% of Americans for whom it is the main source of news. Twitter sends them to 66 million users every day.
A major characteristic of the internet goes by the fancy term “disintermediation”. Put simply, it means sellers are linked directly to customers with no need for middlemen.
Amazon eliminates the need for retailers. Online investing eliminates the need for stock brokers. Travel agents and real estate brokers are obsolete. At a keystroke, consumers get all the information they need.
But democracy can’t be disintermediated. We’re not just buyers and sellers. We’re citizens who need to know what’s happening around us in order to exercise our right to self-government, and responsibility for it.
If a president and his enablers are peddling vicious and dangerous lies, we need reliable intermediaries that help us see them.
Intermediating between the powerful and the people was once mainly the job of publishers and journalists – hence the term “media”.
This role was understood to be so critical to democracy that the constitution enshrined it in the first amendment, guaranteeing freedom of the press.
With that freedom came public responsibility, to be a bulwark against powerful lies. The media haven’t always lived up to it. We had yellow journalism in the 19th century and today endure shock radio, the National Enquirer and Fox News.
But most publishers and journalists have recognized that duty. Think of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and, just weeks ago, the exposure of Trump’s withholding $400m in security aid to Ukraine until it investigated his major political rival, Joe Biden.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey insist they aren’t publishers or journalists. They say Facebook and Twitter are just “platforms” that convey everything and anything – facts, lies, conspiracies, vendettas – with none of the public responsibilities that come with being part of the press.
Rubbish. They can’t be the major carriers of the news on which most Americans rely while taking no responsibility for its content.
Advertising isn’t the issue. It doesn’t matter whether Trump pays Facebook or Twitter to post dishonest ads about Joe Biden and his son, or Trump and his enablers post the same lies on Facebook and Twitter. Or even if Russia and Iran repeat the lies in their own subversive posts.
The problem is we have a president who will say anything to preserve his power, and two giant entities that spread his lies uncritically, like global-sized bullhorns.
We can’t do anything about Trump until election day or until he’s convicted of an impeachable offense. But we can and should take action against the power of these two super-enablers. If they’re unwilling to protect the public against powerful lies, they shouldn’t have as much power to spread them.
The reason 45% of Americans rely on Facebook for news and Trump’s tweets reach 66 million is because these platforms are near monopolies, dominating the information marketplace. No TV network, cable giant or newspaper even comes close. Fox News’ viewership rarely exceeds 3 million. The New York Times has 4.7 million subscribers.
Facebook and Twitter aren’t just participants in the information marketplace. They’re quickly becoming the information marketplace.
Antitrust law was designed to check the power of giant commercial entities. Its purpose wasn’t just to hold down consumer prices but also to protect democracy. Antitrust should be used against Facebook and Twitter. They should be broken up.
So instead of two mammoth megaphones trumpeting Trump’s lies, or those of any similarly truth-challenged successor, the public will have more diverse sources of information, some of which will expose the lies.
Of course, a diverse information marketplace is no guarantee against tyranny. But we now have a president who lies through his teeth and two giant uncritical conveyors of those lies. It is a system that invites it.
|
|
|
Elizabeth Warren's Healthcare Plan Has All the Ambition Democratic Voters Should Demand |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 03 November 2019 09:37 |
|
Pierce writes: "It's good to aspire to things. It's good to throw the cap over the wall. It also helps if your plan is as carefully constructed and precisely reasoned as the one Senator Professor Warren put out there on Friday, the one that so thoroughly answers the question, "How're you gonna pay for it?" that people should be embarrassed to ask it again."
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts after an event at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, on Sunday. (photo: Demetrius Freeman/NYT)
Elizabeth Warren's Healthcare Plan Has All the Ambition Democratic Voters Should Demand
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
03 November 19
The senator professor fit healthcare into her core message on corruption and the money power.
 et us get the requisite hunk of cynical reality out of the way right here at the top. Absent the kind of national landslide that killed off the Whigs and Federalists, or a sudden discovery within the Republicans of a vestigial collective conscience, no Democrat's healthcare plan will get through to the president's desk out of a Senate led by Mitch McConnell. Therefore, any debate on the topic within the Democratic primary process is largely aspirational. (After all, only Joe Biden has publicly endorsed the actual existence of that mythical beast: The Republican Who Can Be Reasoned With.)
Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's good to aspire to things. It's good to throw the cap over the wall. It also helps if your plan is as carefully constructed and precisely reasoned as the one Senator Professor Warren put out there on Friday, the one that so thoroughly answers the question, "How're you gonna pay for it?" that people should be embarrassed to ask it again. Dave Dayen at The American Prospect has as good a summary of the 9,300 pages as you can find. (Dayen shrewdly points out that single-payer plans are generally held to a ludicrously high standard by politicians and pundits.) And he makes one magnificent catch: the Warren plan re-institutes a systemic risk fee that was eliminated in the negotiations over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill at the request of...wait for it...Scott Brown. SPW has a plan. She also has a memory. There are three elements of the new plan worth studying right off the top. First of all, it is designed as a mechanism for universal coverage. Long ago, in 2003, I was riding around Iowa with Howard Dean when he still was the only person running for president—George W. Bush hadn't yet announced for re-election—and he emphasized that the primary goal of any overhaul of the healthcare system should be universal coverage and not necessarily cost controls. Warren's plan does that.
Second, it is perfectly consonant with the anti-corruption, anti-monopoly power theme of her entire campaign. The plan aims to bring antitrust enforcement to the healthcare sector. And third, it factors into its calculations a cut in the defense budget, which used to be a big deal for Democrats, but which hasn't been a top-line item in presidential campaigns for a while. And, again, this is premised on the same principles on which is premised her campaign—that the money power has paralyzed self-government to the point at which it is not capable of doing much of anything, a situation with which the money power is more than content. Defense-industry corporations are just as avaricious and just as blind to the public interest as corporations generally are, if not more so. If it does nothing else, the new plan integrates healthcare into a general criticism of economic inequality and disadvantage. It connects healthcare to dozens of other economic "kitchen-table" issues that have arisen since the nation's wealth began its headlong flight upwards in the 1980s. It is a sucker's question to ask how she plans to get this plan through a Republican Senate. Given the likely state of things in January 2021, she probably can't, any more than Presidents Sanders or Buttigieg could get theirs through. Ask yourself, though, what the proper parameters are for a progressive debate on healthcare. If it does nothing else, Senator Professor Warren's plan sets out clearly what she believes those parameters should be, and they are wide and generous. Let the rest of the field explain why their ambitions are more limited.
|
|
The 5 People Who Could Have Stopped Trump |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52046"><span class="small">Michael Kruse, Politico</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 03 November 2019 09:35 |
|
Kruse writes: "In the spring and summer of 1991, a handful of state watchdogs in Atlantic City, New Jersey, considered whether to put an end to Donald Trump."
From left: Commissioners W. David Waters, James Hurley, Frank 'Pat' Dodd, Chairman Steven Perskie, Commissioner Valerie Armstrong. (photo: NJ Casino Control Commission)
The 5 People Who Could Have Stopped Trump
By Michael Kruse, Politico
03 November 19
Gambling regulators once contemplated yanking Trump’s casino licenses. Why they didn’t holds a lesson for lawmakers today.
 n the spring and summer of 1991, a handful of state watchdogs in Atlantic City, New Jersey, considered whether to put an end to Donald Trump.
The members of the Casino Control Commission, in a series of hearings in the Arcade Building on the corner of Tennessee Avenue and Boardwalk, had to determine whether Trump was sufficiently “financially stable” to merit renewals of his licenses to own and operate his three casinos in the perpetually ground-down regional gaming capital. The stakes hardly could have been higher.
Trump was in his mid-40s and only four years earlier had published the pure brand boost of The Art of the Deal, but now he was in trouble. He needed the licenses to keep his casinos open to have any shot at staving off personal bankruptcy and a potentially permanent reputational stain. No licenses would have meant no casinos would have meant less collateral for the banks as Trump tried to dig out from under billions of dollars of debt. And the regulators had overwhelming reason to question his financial stature and overall fitness to continue. In addition to Trump’s dismal individual straits, the cash flow at his debt-riddled casinos wasn’t enough to make them profitable as the industry sagged in the throes of a recession. Trump’s “financial viability,” Steven P. Perskie, the chairman of the commission, stated at a meeting in May, “is in serious peril.” He and his fellow commissioners had a choice to make: renew Trump’s licenses and hope his bottom line improved—or strip him of them and risk delivering a debilitating blow to Atlantic City’s wheezing economy.
Today, more than a generation later and a year out from the 2020 election, Trump in the White House is staring at a fundamentally similar scenario—the growing probability that his fate will be decided by a group of regulators, albeit of a different, more high-profile ilk but nonetheless obligated to determine whether he can remain in office long enough for voters to decide whether he deserves a second term. Just as there are people who are empowered to stop him now—members of Congress, in particular Republicans—there were people who could have stopped him then. And didn’t.
What the casino commissioners—Perskie and Vice Chair Valerie H. Armstrong along with W. David Waters, James R. Hurley and Frank J. Dodd—opted for instead was a different form of oversight, enacting stricter monitoring, mandating a regimen of daily, weekly and monthly updates and reports from Trump and his upper-tier staff. Some of the commissioners, too, engaged in occasional harrumphing and finger-wagging, logging into the record words like “incomplete,” “confusing,” “disappointing” and “disheartening,” sounding at times like precursors to GOP lawmakers’ mostly toothless tsk-tsking toward Trump these past few years. In the end, though, worried about the prospect of shuttered casinos, thousands of jobs lost and general area economic disarray that might have rippled on account of his ousting, they essentially let him skate.
“I move that the commission find the Trump Organization financially stable,” Perskie said at a decisive meeting in late June.
“Aye,” said Dodd.
“Yes,” said Armstrong.
“Aye,” said Hurley.
“Yes,” said Waters.
“And I vote yes,” Perskie said.
Why did five professionals with a combined decade and a half of experience on the commission, attorneys, former state lawmakers, ex-judges and judges-to-be, a World War II veteran, a co-author of the Casino Control Act this entity was created to enforce, discount the mountains of evidence before them and vote above all to let Trump go on?
Two of them are dead. Two of them didn’t return messages. But I did talk to the top regulator. “We had the ability, which we utilized, to inject ourselves into the situation and control what we needed to control … and because we had the ability to do that, and because we chose to do that, we were able to avoid having to do what arguably we could have done, which was to pull the plug,” Perskie told me this week.
“It wasn’t about saving Trump,” he added. “It was about preserving the public interest.”
I spoke also to nearly a dozen Trump watchers and employees from the era. What they saw in the vote of the casino regulators was a version of the decision made also by Trump’s lenders from a cluster of banks, who cut him slack and lengthened his leash not in spite of but in many ways because of his massive debts.
“He was just too big,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump casino executive who resigned in 1990 and wrote a deeply unflattering tell-all book in 1991.
“He was too big to fail,” said Marvin Roffman, a veteran casino analyst who had been outspoken in his predictions that the debt Trump took on to fuel his Atlantic City endeavors was going to lead to collapse and was fired because of it after his company bowed to pressure from the angered developer.
“I think they, the regulators,” O’Donnell continued, “did look at him as a licensee, and say, ‘My lord, he’s got three properties here now with, you know, 10,000-plus employees, and what kind of chaos does it present to the industry if we yank this guy’s license?’”
This dilemma is detectable between the lines of the hundreds of pages of transcripts of the nine hearings from April to August. Eventually, though, at least one of the commissioners would say so explicitly. “One banker told me confidentially,” Dodd said two years later, “that it would be like foreclosing on Uruguay—you bring the whole country down.”
“They were worried about if he went down, Atlantic City would go down with him,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “He was the star of Atlantic City, and it became like regulatory capture”—a term that refers to instances in which a governmental body kowtows to a dominant interest in an industry it’s assigned to regulate.
There was as well something more subtle at play, perhaps, something that speaks more to human nature than selfless concern for casino workers on the edge. If the commissioners had cracked down totally on Trump, it would have accentuated how often before they had given him a pass. To all of a sudden cut him down would have forced questions about the manner in which for years they so reliably had built him up.
“He sniffed that weakness, that they were not going to really, you know, enforce anything,” fellow Trump biographer Gwenda Blair said. “They were not going to take away his license. They couldn’t. It sounds awfully simple-minded, but that’s it. He figures it out so that for people to go against him it’s going to make them look bad: It’s going to make them look bad that they ever approved his casinos, it’s going to make the bankers look bad that they ever gave him his loans, it’s going to make the Republican Party look bad that it ever got behind him.”
This chapter provided a prime and lasting lesson for Trump. As much as the 1980s cemented in the American cultural firmament his name, his image and his vibe of barefaced excess, it was the ‘90s, actually, when he incorporated into his repertoire an uncanny ability that would be no less key. Survival. From his marital infidelities to his iffy fiscal picture, the first half of the decade was for Trump a rolling borderline catastrophe—and yet what he ended up internalizing was a sense of his own invulnerability. In no other span did he learn so much in so concentrated a fashion about what he could get away with and how.
“He learned in Atlantic City that people would always roll over for him,” said Bryant Simon, a local historian and the author of Boardwalk of Dreams.
“He might have thought,” O’Donnell added, “he could get away with anything.”
But pulsing, too, through this episode involving Trump’s regulators from the past are lessons for his regulators of the present. As the latter calculate the advantages and downsides of challenging the most powerful elected official on the planet, they would be wise to recall that Atlantic City’s decision to save Trump was part of a broader effort to save the city itself. And it didn’t work.
Some 120 miles south of Trump Tower and Manhattan, on the wind-whipped New Jersey shore, Atlantic City from the start was a hub of chintzy glitz, of lowbrow, vaudevillian stunts and gags, the cotton candy hawked on the sand-sprayed boardwalk a meager cover for the endemic corruption, the bossism and the racketeering, the grift and the graft. The state’s voters in 1976 had opted to make gambling legal within the confines of the moribund municipality, extending its lengthy history as a lodestone, in the words of O’Brien, in his book Bad Bet, for a “platoon of con artists and snake-oil salesman ready to fleece the unwary.”
In 1981, just a year after he opened the career-floating renovation of the Grand Hyatt at Grand Central station, two years before the completion of his tower on Fifth Avenue, and still relying largely on his father’s clout and Roy Cohn’s help, Trump demanded an expedited regulators’ investigation into his personal and professional past—so he could be licensed atypically quickly. He was “clean as a whistle,” he told them. “If it takes a year, I’m out of here,” he warned. Six months later, the investigation was over; six months after that, he had his first license. And that was after he didn’t tell the regulators the truth that he had been “the subject of an investigation” by a government agency—four times. It was supposed to be disqualifying. “FAILURE TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS COMPLETELY AND TRUTHFULLY WILL RESULT IN DENIAL OF YOUR LICENSE APPLICATION,” the application’s cover cautioned. But it wasn’t for Trump.
His first casino, Harrah’s at Trump Plaza, simply Trump Plaza after he bought out his partner, opened in 1984. It was, he said, as documented by Ovid Demaris in his 1986 book, The Boardwalk Jungle, “the tallest, most spectacular, best-looking casino in town”—brimming with “brass, glass and class.” Cohn was on hand to stoke the hype. “He’s just surrounded,” he said, “by a complete aura of success.”
His second, Trump’s Castle, opened in 1985.
In 1986, a regulator pushed back. It was Armstrong, and she all but labeled Trump a liar. Trump had promised to pay for a road-widening initiative when he acquired the Castle from Hilton, and now he wasn’t making good on the pledge, testifying that Hilton’s attorneys hadn’t made the obligation clear, and that the project, anyway, was “a disgrace” and “a disaster.”
“There is a cloud over this license which must be dispelled,” Armstrong said. “Every week this commission denies licenses to people,” she reminded her colleagues, “because they refused to treat the commission with honesty and openness.” What Trump was saying now, she emphasized, lacked “candor and honesty.” In this case, Armstrong voted against renewing Trump’s license. But hers was the only such vote.
The longer this went, the more obvious it became: In Atlantic City, Trump almost always got what he wanted.
“There were years of them really allowing him to continue to operate,” O’Donnell said.
“He represented capital, right? In a city starved for capital,” Simon said, adding that “his celebrity mattered—somebody famous, investing in the town, giving it his stamp of approval.”
Seeking to be seen as the Las Vegas of the East rather than a tired, small-time resort spot, city shot-callers regarded the up-and-coming Trump as a necessary, even exciting partner—somebody who had if nothing else a genius for generating publicity and pizazz. They sought not only infusions of cash but a share of his shine.
“They wanted him in Atlantic City so bad,” David Sciarra, an attorney from the state’s public advocacy office who countered Trump in the ’86 case, told me. “He came in, took advantage of the situation—and essentially they rolled over.”
And in the late ‘80s, Trump did nothing but get bigger and bigger, with the soaring sales of The Art of the Deal, his shopping-spree acquisitions of a yacht, an entire airline and New York’s Plaza Hotel, and increasing chatter about running for president. Riding high, he was licensed for a third casino, even after Armstrong called his bid “laced with hyperbole, contradictions and generalities.” The opulent Taj Mahal opened in 1990 and made Trump by far the largest operator in Atlantic City—not just the only owner of two properties but the only owner of three.
This was the context in which the hearings of the spring and summer of 1991, over whether to renew Trump’s gambling licenses, took place. But the facts were stark. Trump’s financial status was more than bleak. That year, he was projecting personal income of $1.7 million. In 1992, that number was slated to drop to $700,000. In 1993, $300,000. The Taj had been financed with $675 million in junk bonds. The Plaza had lost $10.6 million in 1990 compared with making a profit of $24.6 million in 1989. The Castle had lost $43.5 million in 1990 compared with losing $6.7 million in 1989.
The commission’s own “Report on the Financial Position of Donald J. Trump” in April noted his “severe cash flow difficulties” and “severely limited financial resources.” It concluded, “Mr. Trump can not be considered financially stable.” But it added, “However, in response to the current financial difficulties, Mr. Trump and representatives of the Trump Organization are negotiating with Mr. Trump’s primary lenders with respect to a restructuring of Mr. Trump’s financial obligations.” If all on that front went well, the report went on, “The Trump Organization might be financially stable.” Perskie and the other commissioners zeroed in on that might.
They listened to testimony from the new CEO of Trump’s casinos and the new presidents of the Plaza and Castle about changes in management that had been made and their implementation of more efficient operations. They listened to testimony from Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Stephen Bollenbach about the deals Trump continued to cut with the banks. They listened to testimony from Wilbur Ross—an investment banker who was representing the Taj bondholders in what would become the facility’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and is now Trump’s Secretary of Commerce. And they listened to Joseph Fusco, Trump’s attorney in the matter, who reminded them in May how they had gotten here—how they had licensed Trump for the Plaza seven years before, how they had licensed Trump for the Castle six years before, how they had licensed Trump himself almost 10 years before. In May, Fusco stressed Trump’s “continuing good faith efforts to consummate agreements with his lender banks and the apparent likelihood that the obligations will be satisfactorily restructured.” In June, he pointed out that Trump and his casinos “comprise one-fourth of this New Jersey industry.” Trump, he said, had “achieved plans,” “workable plans.” Trump was present but did not testify.
By June 20, the five commissioners were ready to vote on the financial stability of the Trump Organization, the Taj Mahal and the Plaza. (A vote on the third would come later.) Perskie cited “the public interest” and reiterated the need for “strict scrutiny and supervision.” Armstrong expressed her displeasure. She said the Trump Organization remained “extremely limited in its financial options.” She complained about “facile generalizations” in the testimony of Trump’s chief deputies. And she described the evidence they presented as “incomplete and confusing.” But then she got to the nub. “Nevertheless,” the vice chair said to Perskie, “and subject to a rigorous schedule of continued monitoring, I can accept your conclusions that significant progress has been made in negotiating deals with the individual banks, and that the record as a whole reveals minimal but sufficient flexibility to justify a finding of financial stability.” She added: “While I am thus able to endorse a finding of financial stability as to these three entities, I must note that I found the entire presentation at this hearing disappointing and disheartening.”
Perskie called for the votes. The motions passed unanimously.
“While a considerable amount of work still needs to be done, especially with respect to the Castle, the progress that has been made is, in many respects, remarkable in light of the complexity of these matters,” Perskie said in wrapping up the hearing. “Obviously, it has taken longer than we would have liked to reach this point, but I have no doubt that all of the parties, including the Trump entities and their creditors, have at all times proceeded and negotiated in good faith. The parties have exhibited a real commitment to abide by our rigid standards. We expect nothing less in the future. Nonetheless, they are to be complimented for their efforts.”
This week, Perskie and I talked about whether he has regrets. “I do not regret, and never have, the decision that we made at that time,” he said. “I regret what happened after it.”
Trump’s close calls in Atlantic City, unsurprisingly, left him not chastened but emboldened. Before the year was even over, he talked confidently about his “comeback,” envisioning future appearances on the cover of Time. He was strutting again in public.
That November, Trump went on a double date with Bill O’Reilly, who back then was a host of the tabloid TV show “Inside Edition.” Marla Maples, the other woman in the publicity-circus breakup of his marriage to the mother of his first three children, apparently was friends with O’Reilly’s girlfriend, and the four of them went to a Paula Abdul concert. It was an eye-opening experience, according to O’Reilly, who would tell this story in his 2000 book. Because Trump didn’t want to stay in their seats in a luxury box. He wanted to walk around the floor. The trip into the teeming crowd, O’Reilly recalled, was “screaming, crowding chaos. … We all got shoved. Most of the guys, of course focused on Marla, who was dressed or sewn into a tourniquet-tight black outfit. They stared in a way that is usually seen only in prison. And then there were those who simply screamed the name ‘Donald’ over and over. He loved it,” O’Reilly wrote. “What I’d seen, if I haven’t made it clear, was Trump’s addiction to fame in full force. … He feasted on that nutty adulation.”
O’Reilly’s pre-United States of Trump takeaway: “Is this society crazy? Yes, it is.”
“He’s Ba-ack,” Business Week said of Trump in 1992.
“Stronger than I was before,” Trump told the South China Morning Post in 1993.
“You’ve got to hand it to Donald Trump. He’s one of the few shooting stars from the ‘80s who can boast of a comeback in the ‘90s,” ABC News’ Sam Donaldson said on “Primetime Live” in 1994.
“I think he is the world’s greatest promoter and P.R. person,” Ross told Vanity Fair that year. “He has captured the public imagination and turned it into a resource for himself. People may joke that he’s always promoting himself, but he’s figured out a way to make it more than an ego trip. He’s turned it into money.”
Other people’s money. Because in 1995 and ’96, Trump took his casinos public—selling stock in himself. “Shareholders and bondholders have to be total fools to ever think that Donald Trump will put their interests ahead of his own,” one financial columnist wrote. Analysts issued warnings: “We are not entirely confident that Mr. Trump will respect the interests and preserve the capital of equity investors in his properties.” Even the prospectus made it plain. While it touted “The Trump Name” and its “widespread recognition,” it also sounded guarded notes: “There can be no assurance that Trump will be successful in repaying or rescheduling his indebtedness or that his assets will appreciate sufficiently to provide a source of repayment for such indebtedness.” It mattered little. “Defying reason,” as Forbes put it, people invested in Trump.
Trump could not have survived without his casinos, and he could not have survived, either, without the casino regulators who let him keep going. In Atlantic City, there were losers everywhere. Trump was not one of them. Unshackled, leaving in his wake what he would call his “blip” or his “glitch,” he now had a runway for what was to come, for a second act and then some—newly armed with useful lessons.
“I think I learned a lot by coming close to the edge,” he told the New York Daily News in 1996.
About himself. “I was able to react really well under pressure,” he told Agence France-Presse, “because you’re talking about potentially losing everything.”
About the press. “As nasty as the press can be,” he told Vanity Fair, “they know that once they’ve cut you down, the best story is to build you back up.”
About the American people. “The general public loves Trump again,” Trump told USA Today. “They really never stopped loving Trump.” Added a stock analyst quoted in the article: “There’s a lot of brand equity in Trump’s name in middle America.”
Trump was back. Free to run for president for a few months as a Reform Party candidate in the 1999. Free to be presented by NBC on “The Apprentice” as the acme of all-American business acumen. Free to run for president for real in the Republican primary beginning in 2015. Down the Trump Tower escalator he came.
In the end, the city’s problems proved much larger than the man whom officials once thought was the key to Atlantic City’s success. That boardwalk town suffered still from the same array of ills: overreliance on casinos and underinvestment elsewhere, plus ever-increasing competition from the proliferation of gambling options throughout the Northeast and beyond. Trump got out after the last of his five casino bankruptcies in 2009. The city was a husk of what it wanted to be when it OK’d casinos and kept greenlighting Trump—the result of “a decades-long losing streak,” as the Washington Post put it last year.
In his campaign, pressed periodically about his record there, Trump congratulated himself while criticizing the place that saved him. “I had the good sense to leave Atlantic City,” he said in the first GOP debate. “I left Atlantic City before it totally cratered, and I made a lot of money in Atlantic City, and I’m very proud of it.” In Atlantic City, there were lots of losers. Not Trump, he said. “Atlantic City fueled a lot of growth for me,” he told the New York Times in 2016. “The money I took out of there was incredible.”
It has come up less during his presidency. There have been more immediate crises to worry about than his history in Atlantic City. At this juncture, though, as Trump attacks power-checking Democrats and angles to maintain sufficient acquiescence from the members of his own party who matter the most, it’s imperative to consider anew the calculations that allowed him to skirt accountability in the spring and summer of 1991. They pack fresh relevance now.
“They should have taken his license, given it to a trustee, and today we wouldn’t be dealing with Donald Trump in the White House,” David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covered Atlantic City and the hearings of ‘91 for the Philadelphia Inquirer, told me. But “they could not bring themselves to go back and acknowledge that they got it completely wrong. They had to protect their position.”
“Jesus, fast-forward to today,” added Sciarra, the public advocate from the ‘80s. “It’s exactly the same core modus operandi, with the way he operates and the way people in authority, people who have a responsibility to make sure laws are properly carried out, whether it be taxing authorities, regulatory authorities, Congress, whatever it might be, you know—just unwilling, or unable, or just fail to properly hold him to account.”
Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, told me Republicans in Congress—especially in the Senate, if and when Trump’s fate comes down to their votes in an impeachment trial—need to do what the casino commissioners in Atlantic City did not. “They need to stand up to him,” she said. “He needs to be held accountable for his actions.”
Perskie argued against the premise of so clean an analogy. “There are significant differences because we had options that the Congress doesn’t have,” he told me. “My perspective from a great distance is that the regulators today have a more black-and-white situation. They have to decide whether conduct does or does not constitute an impeachable standard. They’re going to say yes or they’re going to say no. They can’t say maybe.”
Even so, the broad-brush parallels being what they are, I asked people who know Trump and know Atlantic City if they had any advice for Republicans currently in Congress.
“What they should be thinking about, in my opinion, is that if they think they’ve seen the worst, they’re wrong,” O’Donnell said. “This behavior, so to speak, this outrageousness, whatever you want to call it, this lack of loyalty, is going to escalate.”
“What you could say is, and which is true in Atlantic City, is you gave him a break,” said Simon. “And all he cared about was himself. And in the end, you could give him a break, if you’re a Republican, but he will do you in.”
“Anyone who thinks that Donald Trump is important to their long-term viability is either not very bright or kidding themselves,” O’Brien said. “He never shows any gratitude for the people who cut him slack. He just blames things on them.”
The lesson, then, from 1991?
“That if they tether their future to Donald Trump in the belief that without him they won’t have a bright or successful future,” he said, “they might as well just step right off the cliff with him.”
|
|
he movement for single-payer health care has taken some big strides forward in recent years. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., put the issue at the center of the Democratic Party’s debate with his run for president in 2016. In partnership with the nurses union and other champions, he then got 19 senators to co-sponsor his bill in 2017. After Democrats took back the House of Representatives, we demanded and got hearings in multiple powerful committees on the fantastic bill spearheaded by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. (The successor to that of the progressive hero and former Michigan Rep. John Conyers, who died this week.)
