|
What Do Men Want? Let Me Tell You. |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48687"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Blog</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 24 February 2019 14:46 |
|
Keillor writes: "Ever since the American Psychological Association came out last fall and said what everyone knows - that men are the problem."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: NPR)
What Do Men Want? Let Me Tell You.
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Blog
24 February 19
 ver since the American Psychological Association came out last fall and said what everyone knows — that men are the problem: our stoicism, the crazy aggressive behaviors, the compulsive competitiveness, the rescuer complex — I’ve been watching the women in white in Congress, the Sisters of Mercy out to save the Republic, and enjoying their leaders, Speaker Pelosi and AOC. They’re fearless, free-spirited and often very funny. When AOC addresses her opponents as “Dude,” you know that change is afoot. The old Congress of time-servers and bootlickers is starting to look more like the freewheeling country we love.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now joins the other triple-initial people, like MLK and JFK and FDR and FAO Schwarz, and AOC is a good code name for her. It’s got electricity (AC), a hint of command (C.O.), and a sense of exhilaration (O!). Her story is irresistible: a 29-year-old bartender going to Congress. Of course she’s new and she’ll need to learn a few things. 1. The press is not your friend. 2. Public attention is fleeting. 3. There is manure on the sidewalk: don’t step in it. But (4) you have a fabulous smile, never lose it, it’s your best weapon. We have all the cautious mumblers and harrumphers in dark suits that we need. Time to bring in the sopranos. I saw a picture of her in the Capitol walking down a marble hallway among grim-faced men, an enormous smile on her face. Bernie, your replacement has arrived.
I’ve been a feminist since I was a child. I had 18 aunts. They were more interesting than the uncles. Women told stories; men issued wide-ranging proclamations. Mrs. Shaver and Mrs. Moehlenbrock loved teaching; they ran a tight ship but I looked forward to school and when I stood and pledged allegiance, I was pledging myself to them. Mr. Lewis was scary and exercised power in cruel and willful ways. I was prepared to welcome a woman president by 1952, long before the rest of the country.
I’ve been a guy long enough to know something about the gender and what we want is to be loved. The APA left that out of their study. We’re capable of being jerks, God knows (He really does!), but we are emotionally needy. We are far from being the solo Pathfinder or Deerslayer of Fenimore Cooper’s novels. Chuck Schumer peering over his granny glasses wants to be loved. Barack basks in adoration; it’s one of his problems. And Number 45 Himself, the ultimate ugly American, a guy who whenever he opens his mouth you see big balloons of ignorance and arrogance and self-pity — he told the New York Times he thought the paper should be nicer to him because he is, after all, from New York. No president ever talked like that for the record: “I think you ought to be nice to me.” It’s what girls used to say.
If AOC wants to reduce billionaires to 500-millionaires to pay for universal health care, she needs to make them feel good about themselves. If she attacks them for having destroyer-sized yachts and six homes and being unaware of how to use a vacuum or a dishwasher, they will feel bad and try to crush her. Billionaires are susceptible to beautiful women. Look at Jeff Bezos. If AOC can keep that big smile of hers shining, she can confiscate five of the homes and the confiscatee will shrug and accept it. The townhouse in London was hardly used, ditto the chalet in Provence, and the Jamaican estate had such a small airstrip it was scary to land the Gulfstream. Pacific Palisades will be missed but 10,000 sq. ft. on the 65th floor overlooking Central Park — one can make do.
Men are captivated by women and yearn for their approval. There is no sound so sweet to me as the sound of my wife in the next room laughing at something I wrote. The other day I saw a line in a poem by Marie Howe that twanged my heart. A deliveryman comes with a package and speaks to her in a Jamaican patois and smiles—
A smile so radiant that
Re-entering the apartment I’m
A young woman again, and
The sweetness of the men I’ve loved walks in
Through the closed door.
A woman who looks back at the men in her life and thinks sweetly of them: this, to me, is beautiful beyond words. A man could almost live off that. My wife laughed six times at this column. If you didn’t, be glad we’re not married.
 |
|
Trump's Curious Obsession With Human Trafficking |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50233"><span class="small">Noah Berlatsky, DAME</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 24 February 2019 14:42 |
|
Berlatsky writes: "Human trafficking" is a blurry category that can be defined in numerous ways. But by some definitions, Trump has been involved in various forms of human trafficking throughout his business career."
Rachel Blais appeared in this Elle fashion spread, published in September 2004, while working for Trump's modeling agency without a proper visa. Elle (photo: Getty Elle)
Trump's Curious Obsession With Human Trafficking
By Noah Berlatsky, Dame Magazine
24 February 19
The occupant in the Oval Office claims he’s going after gangs kidnapping women and children and selling them into sexual slavery. The irony.
  uman traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide-open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery,” President Trump declared in his State of the Union address last week.
Last night at his rally in El Paso, he again described his vision of human trafficking in graphic detail.
Many reporters have noted that this claim is wildly inaccurate. It’s also especially hypocritical coming from Trump. “Human trafficking” is a blurry category that can be defined in numerous ways. But by some definitions, Trump has been involved in various forms of human trafficking throughout his business career.
For Trump, human trafficking means dangerous criminal gangs kidnapping women and children and selling them into sexual servitude and slavery. This sensational view of sex trafficking makes exciting headlines and media narrative. The 2012 film Eden, for example, claimed to be based on a true story about a girl kidnapped as a minor and forced into prostitution by a sex slavery ring. The movie garnered accolades for its brave stand against exploitation—until it was discovered to have been largely fabricated.
So what does human trafficking actually look like? The answer is murky in part because, as numerous sex workers have pointed out, current law deliberately conflates trafficking with consensual sex work. For example, researcher and former sex worker Tara Burns found in 2014 that Alaska’s anti-trafficking laws were used almost entirely against consensual sex workers, who were sometimes charged with trafficking themselves.
Further, in the U.S. “any child under the age of 18 who has been involved in a commercial sex act is considered a trafficking victim,” as the San Francisco Human Rights Commission explains. In her 2016 book Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: Beyond Victims and Villains, Alexandra Lutnick notes that these underage trafficking victims aren’t usually people kidnapped and forced into slavery. Instead, they’re youth who have been kicked out of their homes, and trade sex for food or shelter.
“I know we have the narrative in the United States of little white girls in the suburbs being plucked off the map by traffickers driving through their neighborhood or something but that’s just not the reality. That’s not what the data says,” Juniper Fitzgerald, an academic and former sex worker, told me.
Lutnick’s research confirms this: She found that only 10 percent of young people who trade sex are forced to do so, and even in those cases, “it is quite rare even in these situations that the young person had no prior relationship with [the person they had sex with].” Lutnick says that based on her research, young people forced into prostitution aren’t kidnapped by strangers, but are forced into prostitution by someone they know, generally an older boyfriend.
These narratives are, of course, not useful for Trump, who does not want to talk about how a stronger safety net could help youth on the street. Instead, as Fitzgerald says, Trump presents trafficking as cross-border sexual slavery in order to play up “the image he’s trying to construct of migrants being sexual predators.”
It is not migrants, though, but Trump himself who has boasted about being a sexual predator. Trump has also been accused of (and bragged about) walking into dressing rooms where teenage girls were changing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Trump claims he is concerned about the abuse of children, but there is credible evidence that he has sexually harassed minors on numerous occasions.
Trump has also been involved in other endeavors which could be legitimately seen as trafficking. These do not necessarily involve sex trafficking, though.
Sex trafficking accounts for a small percentage of total global human trafficking. A 2017 report from the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 19 percent of trafficking victims worldwide (4.8 million people) are sexually exploited. By contrast, 64 percent (16 million) were exploited for labor in industries like agriculture, domestic service, and construction.
Labor trafficking is enabled by the fact that when people cross borders, they are often extremely vulnerable. As Laura Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, told me, “The reason to hire undocumented workers is to be able to pay them less and without responsibility for their health, safety or other workers’ rights.” You can treat undocumented workers poorly, and they have little or no recourse.
In his graphic memoir The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, for example, Cambodian writer and artist Vannak Anan Prum describes trying to get a job in Thailand. After he crossed the border, he was sold onto a fishing boat, where he was forced to work as a slave to the owner for years. On the boat, men got only three hours of sleep and little food; when men fell overboard, the fishing crew refused to even try to rescue them, and simply let them drown. When Vannak finally escaped to shore in Malaysia, local law enforcement in Thailand jailed him and then sold him to a farmer as a slave.
Labor exploitation involving immigrants occurs in the U.S. as well, and Trump has participated in it. In 1998, he hired 200 undocumented Polish immigrants to demolish a department store on the site of the future Trump Tower. According to David Cay Johnson in The Making of Donald Trump, the men “worked without hard hats. They lacked facemask, even though asbestos… swirled all around them. They didn’t have goggles to protect their eyes.” They were paid $4 or $5 an hour for 12-hour shifts, 7 days a week—at least in theory. In practice, their wages were often not paid. In 1998 Trump had to pay $1.4 million to settle a lawsuit by a union that accused him of using the Polish workers to avoid paying into a pension fund. And over the past few months, as revelations of Trump hiring undocumented workers at his properties in New Jersey and New York, these workers have been systemically fired—and many face deportation.
The Trump Model Management agency was also notorious for mistreating foreign workers, according to a Mother Jones report. In the 2000s the agency would bring in models on travel visas, and then put them to work. Since the models were violating their visas, which did not permit employment in the U.S., they had little leverage over their working conditions. One model, Rachel Blais, says she was put in an “apartment … like a sweatshop,” for which she was charged an exorbitant fee by the Trump agency. “They are the most crooked agency I’ve ever worked for,” she says, “and I’ve worked for quite a few.”
Trump’s involvement in trafficking isn’t the kind that makes dramatic, salacious headlines. Agustín told me that in many cases, “undocumented migrants are glad to get the work and willing to put up with injustice for the opportunity to make money.” The pageant contestants, construction workers, and models in these instances weren’t helpless victims. They were laborers trying their best to make a living and advance themselves despite an abusive boss. Trafficking stories are so focused on perfect victims and nightmare scenarios they make it difficult to focus on the everyday abuse of marginalized people.
That everyday labor abuse is difficult to quantify, but it is pervasive. A 2018 public health report noted that immigrant workers in the United States are concentrated in industries like construction and agriculture which have high rates of injury. The report also points out that the US H-2 Visa structure puts immigrant workers in danger. Since they lose their Visa status if they change employers, they have a huge incentive to stay on the job even under abusive conditions. Ramped up immigration enforcement under Trump has only made the situation worse, as employees fear that they may be reported to ICE if they complain about labor conditions. Bloomberg reports on how working conditions for undocumented blueberry pickers deteriorated in the Trump era; workers weren’t given enough drinking water, had little access to toilets, and were forced to work even when sick or injured.
Trafficking in the U.S. is enabled by our refusal to provide the funding to make housing available to everyone, including youth who find themselves on the streets. It’s enabled by the kind of immigration restrictions Trump champions, which make it hard for immigrants to get documents, and easy to mistreat them. It’s enabled by law enforcement, which targets consensual sex workers rather than focusing on actual criminals. Trump wants us to believe the traffickers are over there, across the border. But the trafficker in chief is sitting in the White House.
|
|
|
FOCUS: Andrew McCabe's Countdown to the Mueller Report |
|
|
Sunday, 24 February 2019 12:49 |
|
Toobin writes: "McCabe's book offers a fitting overture to the next important act in the Trump melodrama: the completion of Mueller's report, which appears imminent."
Andrew McCabe. (photo: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Andrew McCabe's Countdown to the Mueller Report
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
24 February 19
In his new book, the former acting director of the F.B.I. speaks with bracing directness about what was going on in the Trump-Russia investigation and why it matters.
 n “Seven Days in May,” a popular novel from the early nineteen-sixties that became a movie, a cabal of military officers conspire to overthrow the President of the United States, whom they regard as unduly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The story, along with such other Cold War fantasies as “Fail Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove,” belongs to a genre that shares certain assumptions and plot points. The President is a reasonable fellow, doing his best to insure the survival of the planet, and the villains are the defenders of the permanent bureaucracy, usually the military. Things don’t always end well in these sagas—to wit, the destruction of New York City, in “Fail Safe,” and of civilization, in “Strangelove”—but the underlying message is that the President always has the interests of the American people at heart.
The genre received a nonfiction update last week, when Andrew McCabe published “The Threat,” a book about his tenure at the F.B.I., which ended with a brief, tumultuous period as its acting director. The focus of his narrative is not seven but eight days in May of 2017, between President Trump’s firing of James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., and the appointment of Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. McCabe’s tale is like a photo negative of the Cold War stories. Now the contest pits a despotic and, at times, seemingly deranged President against shocked and horrified bureaucrats scrambling to safeguard the basic principles of our democracy.
McCabe’s book offers a fitting overture to the next important act in the Trump melodrama: the completion of Mueller’s report, which appears imminent. If the Justice Department approves its public release—William Barr, the new Attorney General, has waffled on that question—the report could provide the unified narrative that the story of Trump and Russia has so far lacked. The details have emerged incrementally in the past two years, and it’s been difficult for even attentive consumers of the news to keep track. McCabe’s book speaks with bracing directness about what was going on and why it matters. For the most part, he writes in the just-the-facts style that we expect from a career G-man—that’s how Mueller’s report will likely read, too—but that restraint makes his conclusions all the more devastating. Trump, McCabe writes, “has shown the citizens of this country that he does not know what democracy means. He demonstrates no understanding or appreciation of our form of government. He takes no actions to protect it.” Rather, McCabe adds, “The president is doing exactly the thing a president is not supposed to do.”
And what thing is that? Here the story is less complicated than it sometimes appears. Ever since Trump learned, in January of 2017, that the F.B.I. was looking into possible ties between his campaign and Russia, he has sought, if not to end the probe, then at least to curtail it. He demanded “loyalty” from Comey. Then he asked him to be lenient toward Michael Flynn, his original national-security adviser, who later pleaded guilty to lying during an interview with the F.B.I. On May 9th, after Comey’s responses proved unsatisfactory, Trump fired him. McCabe, who was Comey’s deputy, then became the acting director, and Trump’s interactions with him during the next eight days are a study in personal and political pathology.
Virtually everything that Trump tells McCabe he disputes, starting with the claim that he received “hundreds” of messages from F.B.I. employees supporting his decision to fire Comey. Soon convinced that McCabe, like Comey, is disloyal to him, the President begins taunting him in person and on Twitter. The tweets take on an alarmingly unhinged quality, as in: “He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey—McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
McCabe is, perhaps, an imperfect avatar of the truth, because last February the Justice Department’s inspector general found that he had made four false or inaccurate statements in the course of an investigation of his own dealings with the media. Trump’s subordinates used that report as an excuse to fire McCabe on the day before he became eligible for early-retirement benefits, after twenty-one years of service. But anyone who has followed Trump will recognize the accuracy of the portrayal of him in “The Threat.” And Trump’s disrespect for the norms of American democracy extends well beyond his personal dishonesty and pettiness. It can be seen at the level of policy, too, and his transgressions in that realm are now threatening the constitutional order.
In an attempt to force Congress to fund his pet project, a wall along the Mexican border, Trump shut down the government for more than a month. When that bid failed, he signed a budget that contained much less money for border security than he had demanded. Rather than accept a defeat, as previous Presidents have done—Congress has the sole power to authorize spending—Trump invoked the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to reallocate funds for the wall. The law is of dubious constitutionality, but it has never been tested by the courts, because Presidents have used emergency powers in relatively uncontroversial ways. (President Clinton, for example, invoked the Act to ban the importation of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone.) Certainly no President has ever used the law in an explicit effort to overturn the expressed will of the Congress. A number of lawsuits have already been filed, on several grounds, including that the Act violates Congress’s powers under Article I of the Constitution, and that, even if the law is constitutional, Trump has not proved that an emergency exists. Indeed, of all the threats facing the country—global warming, gun violence, voter suppression, to name a few—the absence of a border wall ranks among the least significant.
Still, these days the courts are nearly as tribal in their inclinations as the voters are, and it’s conceivable that the President will achieve this fundamental reordering of our constitutional arrangements—all to build an unnecessary wall and, more to the point, to repair his injured vanity. It’s hardly a surprise that Trump puts his own interests above those of our democracy. We’ve heard this story before; McCabe has now told his version, and Mueller’s variations on the theme are to come. The warnings are familiar. The question that remains is whether, and how, the people and their representatives will respond to this threat from the office that once seemed to be liberty’s foremost guardian.
|
|
FOCUS: 'You're Fired!' America Has Already Terminated Trump |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
|
|
Sunday, 24 February 2019 11:50 |
|
Reich writes: "Robert Mueller's soon-to-be-delivered report will begin months of congressional investigations, subpoenas, court challenges, partisan slugfests, media revelations, and more desperate conspiracy claims by Donald Trump, all against the backdrop of the burning questions: Will he be impeached by the House?"
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty Images)
'You're Fired!' America Has Already Terminated Trump
By Robert Reich, Guardian UK
24 February 19
The Mueller report looms but the president is doomed anyway – no one who screws the people so blatantly can win re-election
 obert Mueller’s soon-to-be-delivered report will begin months of congressional investigations, subpoenas, court challenges, partisan slugfests, media revelations, and more desperate conspiracy claims by Donald Trump, all against the backdrop of the burning questions: Will he be impeached by the House? Will he be convicted by the Senate? Will he pull a Richard Nixon and resign?
In other words, will America fire Trump?
I have news for you. America has already fired him.
When the public fires a president before election day, as it did Jimmy Carter, Nixon and Herbert Hoover, they don’t send him a letter telling him he’s fired.
They just make him irrelevant. Politics happens around him, despite him. He’s not literally gone but he might as well be.
It’s happened to Trump. The courts and House Democrats are moving against him. Senate Republicans are quietly subverting him. Even Mitch McConnell told him to end the shutdown.
The Fed is running economic policy. Top-level civil servants are managing day-to-day work of the agencies.
Isolated in the White House, distrustful of aides, at odds with intelligence agencies, distant from his cabinet heads, Trump has no system to make or implement decisions.
His tweets don’t create headlines as before. His rallies are ignored. His lies have become old hat.
Action and excitement have shifted elsewhere, to Democratic challengers, even to a 29-year-old freshman congresswoman too young to run.
Don’t get me wrong. He’s still dangerous, like an old landmine buried in the mud. He could start a nuclear war.
Yet even America’s adversaries just humor him. Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping give him tidbits to share with the American public, then do whatever they want.
Why did America fire him? If the nation were to write him a letter informing him he’s no longer president, it would go like this:
Dear Mr President,
While many of us disagree on ideology and values, we agree on practical things like obeying the constitution and not letting big corporations and the wealthy run everything.
Your 35-day government shutdown was a senseless abuse of power. So too your “national emergency” to build your wall with money Congress refused to appropriate.
When you passed your tax bill you promised our paychecks would rise by an average of $4,000 but we never got the raise. Our employers used the tax savings to buy back their shares of stock and give themselves raises instead.
Then you fooled us into thinking we were getting a cut by lowering the amounts withheld from our 2018 paychecks. We know that now because we’re getting smaller tax refunds.
At the same time, many big corporations aren’t paying a dime in taxes. Worse yet, they’re getting refunds.
For example, GM is paying zilch and claiming a $104m refund on $11.8bn of profits. Amazon is paying no taxes and claiming a $129m refund on profits of $11.2bn. (This is after New York offered it $3bn to put its second headquarters there.)
They aren’t breaking any tax laws or regulations. That’s because they made the tax laws and regulations. You gave them a free hand.
You’re supposed to be working for us, not for giant corporations. But they’re doing better than ever, as are their top executives and biggest investors. Yet nothing has trickled down. We’re getting shafted.
Which is why more than 75% of us (including 45% who call ourselves Republicans) support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70% tax on dollars earned in excess of $10m a year.
And over 60% of us support Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 2% annual tax on households with a new worth of $50m or more.
You’ve also shown you don’t have a clue about healthcare. You promised us something better than the Affordable Care Act but all you’ve done is whittle it back.
A big reason we gave Democrats control of the House last November was your threat to eliminate protection for people with pre-existing conditions.
Are you even aware that 70% of us now favor Medicare for all?
Most of us don’t pay much attention to national policy but we pay a lot of attention to home economics. You’ve made our own home economics worse.
We’ll give you official notice you’re fired on 3 November 2020, if not before. Until then, you can keep the house and perks, but you’re toast.
Respectfully,
America.
|
|
hina is a leading oppressor of Muslims, so it should come as no surprise that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia — the kingdom that views itself as defender of the Islamic faith — 
