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newstfionline · 5 years ago

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Headlines

Three Hours Longer, the Pandemic Workday Has Obliterated Work-Life Balance (Bloomberg) Six weeks into a nationwide work-from-home experiment with no end in sight, whatever boundaries remained between work and life have almost entirely disappeared. With many living a few steps from their offices, America’s always-on work culture has reached new heights. The 9-to-5 workday, or any semblance of it, seems like a relic of a bygone era. Long gone are the regretful formalities for calling or emailing at inappropriate times. Burnt-out employees feel like they have even less free time than when they wasted hours commuting. People are overworked, stressed, and eager to get back to the office. In the U.S., homebound employees are logging three hours more per day on the job than before city and state-wide lockdowns, according to data from NordVPN, which tracks when users connect and disconnect from its service. Out of all countries that NordVPN tracks, U.S. workers had tacked on the most hours. In France, Spain, and the U.K. the day has stretched an additional two hours, NordVPN’s data found. Italy saw no change at all.

Coronavirus relief pushing US deficits to staggering heights (AP) Spend what it takes, Washington said as it confronted the coronavirus. Well over $2 trillion later, it’s unclear where that spending will end. One of the lasting legacies of the coronavirus pandemic will be staggering debts and deficits on the U.S. balance sheet, with shortfalls hitting levels that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. It’s a fiscal clamp that is likely to persist for a generation, or even into perpetuity, with debt levels having passed the point of easy return in a capital where lawmakers are increasingly incapable, or unwilling, to constrain them. The latest, and dire, projection from the Congressional Budget Office, released Friday, states the U.S. deficits will mushroom to $3.7 trillion in 2020, fueled by the four coronavirus relief bills signed into law by President Donald Trump. A fifth bill is already in the works, and will be “expensive,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Trump says he will block coronavirus aid for U.S. Postal Service if it doesn’t hike prices immediately (Washington Post) President Trump on Friday threatened to block an emergency loan to shore up the U.S. Postal Service unless it dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers, an unprecedented move to seize control of the agency that analysts said could plunge its finances into a deeper hole. “The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. To obtain a $10 billion line of credit Congress approved this month, “The post office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times,” he said. Trump for years has alleged the Postal Service has charged too little for packages and personally pushed the head of the agency to charge far more to ship goods for big online retailers. Several administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said Trump’s criticism of Postal Service rates is rooted in a desire to hurt Amazon in particular. They have said that he fumes publicly and privately at Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, for news coverage that Trump believes is unfair.

Turmoil in Brazil: Bolsonaro Fires Police Chief and Justice Minister Quits (NYT) Brazil’s justice minister, Sergio Moro, a former federal judge who became the face of a powerful anti-corruption crackdown that swept Latin America, resigned Friday after accusing President Jair Bolsonaro of seeking to assert improper control of the federal police for political gain. Mr. Moro’s acrimonious departure was a volatile and unexpected development in Brazil, where the rapid spread of the coronavirus has overwhelmed hospitals and roiled the political establishment. Mr. Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the gravity of the virus, last week fired his health minister after the two clashed over strict quarantine measures to slow the contagion. Mr. Moro was the eighth minister to leave Mr. Bolsonaro’s cabinet during the 15 months he has been in office.

Spain’s kids prepare for taste of freedom after six-week lockdown (Reuters) Spain released guidelines on Saturday allowing children to go outside after six weeks living under one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns, as figures confirmed a daily coronavirus death toll running well below the peak seen early this month. Children were trying out their masks in anticipation of their first taste of fresh air since Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez declared a state of emergency on March 14. The government said under 14s will from Sunday be allowed up to one hour of supervised outdoor activity per day between 9am and 9pm, staying within one kilometre of their home.

Pakistani prime minister sidelined on coronavirus (Financial Times) Imran Khan has been sidelined by Pakistan’s powerful military after failing to act decisively on the coronavirus crisis or impose a lockdown in an attempt to curb the spread of cases. On March 22, the prime minister told the nation that his government would not institute a sweeping lockdown, arguing it would put millions out of work and leave families struggling to find enough food to eat. But less than 24 hours later, military spokesman Major General Babar Iftikhar announced that the army would oversee a shutdown to halt the spread of infections in the world’s fifth most populous country of more than 200 million people.

India reopens stores, speeding easing of virus lockdowns (AP) A tentative easing around the world of coronavirus lockdowns gathered pace Saturday with the reopening in India of neighborhood stores that many of the country’s 1.3 billion people rely on for everything from cold drinks to mobile phone data cards. The relaxation of the super-strict Indian lockdown came with major caveats. It did not apply to hundreds of quarantined towns and other hotspots that have been hit hardest by the outbreak that has killed at least 775 people in India. Last week, India also allowed manufacturing and farming activities to resume in rural areas to ease the economic plight of millions of daily wage-earners left without work by the country’s lockdown imposed March 24. India’s stay-home restrictions have allowed people out of their homes only to buy food, medicine or other essentials.

In Japan, children of nurses face discrimination, exclusion over virus fears (AP) Children of Japanese medical professions face discrimination or even exclusion from day-care centers over fears they might have the novel coronavirus, increasing the stresses on front-line workers as the country’s health-care system nears collapse, according to media reports. Although most schools and day-care centers around the country are closed, some remain open. Bloomberg reported that children of medical workers were being excluded or asked to prove they didn’t have the virus. Kyodo News reported that some medical professionals had been forced to quit their jobs because of the discrimination against their family members, deepening the crisis in a profession where staff are already under massive pressure and working round-the-clock. “There’s growing prejudice and discrimination against people in the medical field,” said Shigeru Omi, the deputy head of the government’s advisory panel on the virus, according to Bloomberg. “It’s even extending to their families.”

Gaza factories roar back to life to make protective wear (AP) For the first time in years, sewing factories in the Gaza Strip are back to working at full capacity—producing masks, gloves and protective gowns, some of which are bound for Israel. It’s a rare economic lifeline in the coastal territory, which has been blockaded by Israel and Egypt since the Hamas militant group seized power from rival Palestinian forces in the strip in 2007. The blockade, and three wars between Hamas and Israel, have devastated the local economy, with unemployment hovering around 50%. Rizq al-Madhoun, owner of the Bahaa garment company, said he has produced more than 1 million masks in the past three weeks, “all for the Israeli market.” Gaza may not have the advanced machinery seen in other places, but he said residents’ sewing skills are unmatched. “Gaza workers are distinguished in handiwork and they are better than workers in China or Turkey,” he said.

Ghana’s dancing pallbearers (Washington Post) You may have seen them on the Internet: six men in black suits, sunglasses and patent leather shoes grooving to a techno beat while carrying a coffin. They are Ghana’s dancing pallbearers, a crew of funeral performers who have long sought to make mourners grin through grief. But as the coronavirus pandemic rages, they’ve become the accidental faces of a stay-at-home movement—comedic grim reapers edited into footage of risky behavior as a warning. Reopening a mall when cases are mounting? Cue the dancing pallbearers. Protesting a lockdown in a covid-19 hot spot? Cue the dancing pallbearers. Forget to wash your hands before eating? Cue the dancing pallbearers. People in China, Brazil and the United States have shared video after video since the outbreak began, garnering millions of clicks and an international fan base for the group. Benjamin Aidoo, who leads the group, isn’t sure how it happened. He woke up one March morning and saw his signature moves everywhere. “It’s a bit scary, but it’s funny, too,” said Aidoo, 32, who lives in Accra, the capital of Ghana. “People are saying, ‘I’d rather stay home than have these guys bury me.’ ”

#headlines #news

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running-batty · 1 year ago

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It would make sense you don't know it because your bio says you are 18, you would have been a little kid when these things were making national news and I made this post about it in 2015.

In the Jennifer Gale case happened in 2008. They refused to house her unless she stayed with men despite the fact that she was at high risk of assault. She was found dead right outside their building after a blizzard.

In 2014 they refused to help another trans woman get housing because she had not received gender reassignment surgery

Here's an article detailing more of the history of discrimination from 2019

Most of the stories of shelters kicking people out for being gay come from people sharing their issues. I know when I was a homeless teen with my mother and siblings we were outright told to avoid the Salvation army shelter in town because they required you to convert for services and they would clock me and refuse us service. Multiple families warned us of this, many from experience with their own queer children.

The Salvation Amry has released their own press releases to argue that they are not Homophobic, Transphobic or Racist yet even their own arguments in their defense use loaded language.

Here the Wikipedia page if you'd like to look at their list of controversies over the years with even more sources

In 2013 They referred gay people to conversion camps after claiming for years that they aren't discriminating against queer people.

They pulled that down as soon as they got backlash.

News article from 2020 where they are continuing their discrimination while claiming still that everyone else is lying on their main page.

It took this woman blasting her shelter on Twitter and thousands of people sharing their same situation for The Salvation Army to do anything at all about the situation going on at the shelter she was at. Including black mold throughout the building and staff taking residents property and selling it with donations. Something that happens at shelters all over the world.

Here's a link to them only paying disabled people $1 A WEEK for full time work while calling it therapy. They force people to drop food stamps(EBT) and and other government aid including housing assistance. They are forbidden from getting work anywhere else while in the "work training program".

They have to stay in shelters, eat provided food only and can only get clothes from their donation centers.(Better hope they have what you need)

The comments of this post are filled with people talking about their own negative experiences with the Salvation Army. If nothing else I hope this will convince you to choose a different charity to donate to.

It’s that time of year to say no to the Salvation Army.

Never forget they let a Trans woman die instead of helping her.

Never forget they have tossed entire families on the street for having an LGBT child.

Never forget they tell non Christian families that unless they convert they will not help them.

Never forget that the Salvation Army is bigoted and hateful, many of the bell ringers routinely heckle and harass LGBT couples.

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omfgtrump · 4 years ago

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The Tale of Two Viruses: Part 13

First a little Clorox to clean the soul, then some UV light, for some insight, and now a dose of hydroxy (chloroquine) for some moxie.

The Don’s declaration during one of his Bozo the Clown press conferences, that he was doing hydroxy as a preventive, like some club drug, was another page in “How irresponsible and stupid can you be?”

But wait. Was this spontaneous admission that he was taking hydroxy true? Who knows. But hey, why not once again hype a drug already to have no known impact on the virus, but that does have serious side effects, particularly on morbidly obese individuals with heart issues? This is what he said about taking it:

“I’m not going to get hurt by it. It has been around for 40 years for malaria, for lupus, for other things. I take it. Front-line workers take it. A lot of doctors take it.”

If you are a doctor please raise your hand if you are doing hydroxy, as I want to report you to the licensing board so your license to practice medicine can be revoked. (Since that inane statement Lancet, a world renowned medical journal, published a study, which included 96,000 Covid-19 patients and found that not only was it ineffective, but people taking it had a higher mortality rate!)

Didn’t you just love Nancy Pelosi’s statement of concern that our president was “morbidly obese.” When asked about this comment she said: “I gave him a dose of his own medicine. He’s called women one thing or another over time, and I thought he thinks that passes off as humor in certain cultures,”

I know Nancy talks about praying for the president: she has high moral standards, but she is also very clever. Remember The Don’s State of the Union address when she mocked him while ostensibly praising him with applause. Well, maybe her taunting him about his health was a coy ploy to get him to double the dosage in defiance. Prod The Don to show her how the healthiest 73 year old in the world, was invincible.

youtube

Say it out loud, say it proud to your doped-up masses (remember the new polling saying that 45 percent of Protestants believe that The Don was God’s idea?) Liberate them and send them out with their guns to storm pharmacies so they can get some of that good stuff.

Even old reliable Fox News had to defy The Don and say “Um no, don’t do that.” Their disloyalty ticked him off and he pined for the good ole days of Roger Ailes and his sexual assault bandits. Even Fox has its limits regarding how many people it wants to die.

But let’s return to whether The Don is even taking the drug. Many doubt it. How disturbed do you have to be to say you are taking a drug that is dangerous, when you are not? And why? Because you were angry at Dr. Bright’s testimony to Congress regarding the drug’s lack of efficacy? It’s like a parent telling a two year old not to eat dog shit, but in a fit of obstinacy and defiance, he shovels it in to his mouth. That’ll show you, nervous Nancy.

During the press conference, The Don had to remind the nation that even though he was doing an infomercial about the drug, he didn’t own the company. But the government did buy 29 million doses.

Let’s move from the world of drugs that can kill you, to the no federal guideline plan to “Open up America” or from my point of view “Open Up the Veins of America.” In the parlance of harm reduction, you make sure people who are cutting themselves are doing it safely-not cutting too deep or near a vein. The maxim is: If you are going to cut because you are compelled to, be intentional and careful; the same strategy should be employed for opening up the country. The bottom line is that The Don doesn’t care how many people cut their veins and bleed out as long as they are out there showing the world that America is opening up.

All over the country essential workers at meat processing plants and other businesses, where density of workers is a serious problem, positive cases are erupting like wildfire. Lacking national guidelines puts workers lives in jeopardy.

Workers are pawns whose lives do not matter; the majority of these workers are black and brown. They are widgets in a system that wants to protect businesses against law suits when forcing workers to go to work and cancelling their unemployment if they refuse; the rich Republican business men are as much behind the reopening as the freedom fighters are. American greed and capitalism to its rotten core.

As far as interesting new twists in The Don’s version of “Survivor,” how about certain nursing homes refusing to release infection rates because it would be bad publicity for business. Um, but what happens if you have harbored fantasies of matricide for an abusive mother and have finally find a legal way to do the deed? I call foul.

Or how about The Don’s Secretary of Health Alexander Azar blaming black people for having pre-existing conditions that exacerbate the impact of the virus increasing death totals. The numbers are inflated because of those people. What nerve!

Or what of The Don’s threat to withhold federal money for the epidemic from Michigan and a few other states run by Democratic governors if they go ahead with plans to support democracy by ensuring mail-in ballots. Is that Impeachment Part two? Like with Ukraine, quid pro quo? You stop the mail-in initiative or else you get no money?

The Don is so freaked out about the election that he has finally decided to use the full weight of the government, not for testing, but to have his base remove mailboxes in Democratic states so no one will receive a ballot.

Speaking of opening up veins, in a nod to his base, The Don declared that governors had to let religious institutions open up. Praise the Lord. Sing out. Spray your spirit. Have a wafer. Have some wine, the blood of Christ.

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ljones41 · 5 years ago

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"The Sokovia Accords: A Narrative Blunder"

"THE SOKOVIA ACCORDS: A NARRATIVE BLUNDER" Three years ago, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), along with Marvel Films and the Disney Studios, introduced to the world the thirteenth entry of the movie franchise, "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR". Although the movie is officially regarded as a Captain America solo film, many moviegoers and critics tend to view it as an unofficial Avengers film. The film also introduced a new story arc to the franchise called the Sokovia Accords.

In reality, the Sokovia Accords is supposed to be a cinematic version of the Marvel Comics legislative law called the Mutant Registration Act and was the main focus behind the famous 2006-2007 seven-issue story arc known as "Civil War". In this story, the U.S. government passed a Superhero Registration Act, ostensibly designed to have super powered individuals act under official regulation, somewhat akin to law enforcement. Those superheroes opposed to the act, led by Captain America, found themselves in conflict with those like Iron Man and Ms. Marvel who supported the act. Spider-Man found himself caught in the middle and the X-Men took a neutral stance. About a decade later, the MCU released "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR" and introduced the world to the Sokovia Accords. For a while, I had wondered why Kevin Feige had allowed this story arc to be introduced in the middle of the franchise's on-going Infinity Stones arc. Then I had stumbled across an ARTICLE in which directors Anthony and Joe Russo had claimed the plot for the third Captain America movie was changed to compete against the DCEU's 2016 movie, "BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE". In this film, the U.S. government and the United Nations created the Sokovia Accords to regulate the actions of the Avengers and other enhanced beings in the wake of a deadly incident in Lagos, Nigeria; after Captain America and his team prevented a group of HYDRA terrorists from stealing biological weapons. Some of the Avengers - including Iron Man, War Machine, Black Panther and the Black Widow - supported the Accords for their own personal reasons. And some of them - the Falcon, Scarlet Witch and Captain America - refused to sign it. This schism between the Avengers, along with a bombing incident at the document's ratification in Vienna, widened the schism between the former teammates. Especially when Captain America's former best friend, Bucky Barnes aka the Winter Soldier, became the number one suspect behind the bombing. "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR" managed to successfully compete against "BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE". The MCU proved to be more financially successful. And it managed to acquire critical acclaim from most film critics, unlike the DCEU movie, which had received a good deal of negative review. And yet . . . the movie had failed to succeed with me. I found this surprising back in 2016, considering that I was more of a MCU fan than one of the D.C. Comics franchise. At least before I saw "BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE". Whereas I found myself harboring a low opinion of "CIVIL WAR", I became a fervent fan of the Zack Snyder film. And over the next three years, I have found it increasingly difficult to maintain my high opinion of the MCU. And a major factor of my burgeoning disappointment with the franchise proved to be the Sokovia Accords.

Ever since 2016, I have harbored many misgivings about the Sokovia Accords arc. My first misgiving proved to be its portrayal in "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR". I had assumed that the document would be the main factor to divide the Avengers. Instead, screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely included another subplot regarding the hunt for Bucky Barnes to divide the Avengers even further - especially Captain America and Iron Man - in the most contrived manner. One of the first advocates of the Sokovia Accords was King T'Chaka of Wakanda (father of the current Black Panther). Why? When the Avengers had prevented Brock Rumlow and other HYDRA operatives from stealing from that biological weapons lab in Nigeria, Scarlet Witch had used her telekinesis to divert the explosion from Rumlow's suicide bomb to another building that contained several Wakandan humanitarian workers. The problem with is scenario is that the 2018 movie, "BLACK PANTHER" made it clear that Wakanda was an isolationist country around the time of "CIVIL WAR" that did NOT involve itself in the affairs of other countries - including those on the African continent. Great. "BLACK PANTHER" managed to contradict certain plot points of "CIVIL WAR" and no one realized this. More importantly, King T'Chaka no longer had a reason to be an advocate of the Sokovia Accords. And the mistakes kept on going.

A major blooper regarding the Sokovia Accords had manifested in the 2018 movie, "ANT-MAN & THE WASP". In this film, Scott Lang aka Ant-Man found himself near the end of his house arrest, which manifested from his involvement with Captain America in "CIVIL WAR" and his violation of the Sokovia Accords. While incarcerated in the Raft (U.S. underwater prison for enhanced beings), Scott had mentioned Dr. Hank Pym, the first Ant-Man and creator of the Ant-Man suit. After being rescued from the Raft by Captain America; both Ant-Man and Clint Burton aka Hawkeye made a deal with the Federal courts and settled for two years of house arrest for violating the Accords. Both Hank Pym and his daughter Hope van Dyne became Federal fugitives because Hank had failed to register the Ant-Man suit. This proved to be problematic in so many ways. One, the Accords had not been ratified by the United Nations around the time of Scott's arrest, due to the bombing in Vienna. Two, Hank had first created the Ant-Man suit back in the 1980s and had been unaware of Scott’s use of the suit during the Avengers' battle at the airport in Berlin. After being freed by Steve, Scott had shrunken the suit and mailed it to his daughter Cassie, while declaring that it had been destroyed. If the suit was officially considered destroyed, why was Scott arrested anyway without the crucial evidence any prosecutor would need to convict him? Why were Hank and Hope declared as fugitives for failing to register a suit that officially no longer existed? Why did they become fugitives in the first place? Scott had used the Ant-Man suit without Hank's permission, something that he could or may have easily pointed out. The latter had created the suit some thirty years ago. And the Federal authorities remained unaware of Hank's creation of the Wasp suit and Hope's use of it. And she had played no role in the creation of the Ant-Man suit. Also, the writers did not need the Sokovia Accords as a reason for Scott to face conviction and house arrest. He had violated his parole when he left the United States to help Captain America, the Falcon, the Winter Soldier and others to deal with the potential threat of other HYDRA-created "Winter Soldiers".

Ever since I first saw "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR", I found myself wondering about Thaddeus Ross' role in this story arc. By the time of the 2016 movie, he was no longer a general in the U.S. Army. He had become the new Secretary of State. It was Ross who had delivered the news of the Sokovia Accords to the Avengers. In his argument, he had pointed out the collateral damage caused - in his eyes and the eyes of others - by the Avengers. I found this idea ridiculous . . . to a certain extent. Asgardian Loki and a Chitauri army were mainly responsible for the damage inflicted upon downtown Manhattan in 2012's "THE AVENGERS". Malekith and the Dark Elves were responsible for the damage inflicted upon Greenwich, England in 2013's "THOR: THE DARK ELVES". The Royal Air Force had contributed to the damage . . . along with Thor. Obadiah Stane and his armored suit was responsible for the damage inflicted in downtown Los Angeles in 2008's "IRON MAN". As for the events in "THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON" . . . only two Avengers were responsible, Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Dr. Bruce Banner (the Hulk). They were the ones who had created the artificial intelligence (A.I.) known Ultron. The other Avengers were forced to help them clean up their mess. I noticed that no one had bothered to point this out. I also noticed that Ross had failed to bring up the Harlem battle between the Hulk and Abomination (Emil Blonsky) in 2008's "THE INCREDIBLE HULK". It seemed only natural that he would avoid the topic, considering that he played a major role in the creation of both the Hulk and Abomination. Also, the U.S. Army had managed to inflict a good deal of damage upon Harlem, while battling Abomination. I found it odd that neither Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff, who both knew about Ross' role in the event, had said a word. Then again, I found it odd that Ross had become President Matthew Ellis's new Secretary of State in the first place. Why on earth did President Ellis select Ross to be his Secretary of State? Why did he think that a narrow-minded, uber-aggressive personality like Ross’ would be the right man for that particular position? Why did the MCU writers?

There is another aspect of the MCU's portrayal of the Sokovia Accords that I found mind boggling is that it was barely mentioned in the franchise's films between "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR" and "THE AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR". I could understand that the document was not mentioned in films like "GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, VOL. 2" and "THOR: RAGNAROK". Both were set on worlds other than Earth. Well, Manhattan appeared briefly in the third film, but not long enough for the topic of the Accords to be brought up. However, I found it odd that Sokovia Accords were never mentioned in films like "DOCTOR STRANGE", "SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING" and "BLACK PANTHER", especially since these films were set on Earth. Considering that King T'Chaka's role in the creation of the Sokovia Accords had inadvertently led to his death, I found it odd that the document was never brought up in the 2018 movie. Did Wakanda drop its advocacy of the document, considering that the new King T'Challa gave refuge to Bucky Barnes? If not, why?

Even most of the MCU television shows had failed to mention the Sokovia Accords. In fact, I can only mention one that did - "AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D." - and one that vaguely referenced the document - "JESSICA JONES". Most or all of the characters in Season Four of "AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.", including then former Director Philip J. Coulson, seemed to support the document. And I found this disappointing. Coulson and his team were willing to protect Inhumans and other enhanced people from xenophobic bigots like the organization called the Watchdogs. Season Four began with Inhuman Daisy Johnson aka Quake being on the run for her vigilante activities after leaving S.H.I.E.L.D. Seven episodes later, then S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Jeffrey Mace had cleared her name of past crimes . . . after she had agreed to sign the Sokovia Accords and re-join the agency. Everyone seemed fine with that, including Coulson. I found that disturbing. Season Two of the Marvel Netflix series, "JESSICA JONES", the Raft was mentioned as a possible destination for the title character's mother, another enhanced being who was proving to be dangerous to New York City's citizens and her adoptive sister, a talk-show host-turned dangerous vigilante. And yet . . . not one character managed to express disapproval of the Accords or that damn Raft. The Marvel Netflix franchise had featured three attorneys as major characters - Matt Murdock aka Daredevil, Franklin "Foggy" Nelson and Jeri Hogarth. and not one of them had discussed the legal ramifications of the Accords.

Ironically, only one person had ended up questioning the Sokovia Accords after "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR". That person was Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes, USAF aka War Machine. What I find disturbing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that only one person has expressed disapproval of the Sokovia Accords since "CIVIL WAR". And that was James “Rhodey” Rhodes aka War Machine in "THE AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR". Yes, he had supported the Sokovia Accords in "CIVIL WAR". I did not find that surprising, since he was an Air Force officer. But nearly two years later, he had rejected the Accords when he had refused to obey Ross' order to arrest Captain America, the Falcon, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, Vision and the Hulk following their return to the Avengers headquarters in "THE AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR". It took six films after "CIVIL WAR" for a MCU protagonist to either express disapproval of the Sokovia Accords or refuse to adhere to it. Yet, at the same time, Rhodey never really went into details over his eventual rejection of the document.

Why? Why did it take the MCU so long to find characters others than Captain America or the Falcon to express disapproval of the Accords? Why was the MCU so reluctant explore the legal ramifications of this document, especially since the franchise had went out of its way to introduce it in the first place? As several articles, including THIS ONE, have made clear - the Sokovia Accords is a violation of a citizen's right. It is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Period. Any attorney, civil rights activist or civil rights organization could have easily pointed this out in any of the other Phase Three movies or MCU television shows. McFeely, Markus and other screenwriters could have easily pointed the unconstitutional aspect of the Sokovia Accords in "CIVIL WAR", "AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.", "JESSICA JONES", "INFINITY WAR" or any other MCU production set on Earth. Either McFeely, Markus and these other writers were idiots or for some reason, Kevin Feige had lost interest in exploring the consequences of the Accords. Perhaps Feige simply wanted to use the Accords as a plot device to battle "BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE" at the box office.

There is another aspect of the Sokovia Accords that many do not seem aware of or willing to discuss. The Sokovia Accords should not have been presented as a law in the MCU. Why? Because an accord is an agreement, not a law. Those enhanced beings who did not sign the Accord should NOT have been held accountable for using their powers, unless the latter were used for the usual crimes – robbery, burglary, kidnapping, murder, etc. Now, many would dismiss this criticism, claiming that "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR" was a movie set in the world of comic books. Well, so were other similar documents. The Marvel Comics series, "Civil War" had the Mutant Registration Act. The document that affected enhanced beings and costumed vigilantes in Alan Moore's comic novel, "Watchmen" and Zack Snyder's 2009 movie adaptation of it was called the Keene Act. And "act" is a law. Mark Millar, Alan Moore and Zack Snyder had managed to get it right. Why had Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely failed to do so? The problem with this is that if an enhanced being does not sign this accord, agreement or treaty; then their actions should not be dictated by it. The Sokovia Accords is an agreement, not a decree or a law. If an enhanced or non-enhanced vigilante, who did not sign the accord, practices vigilantism, then that individual should be asked to cease such activity or face imprisonment for practicing vigilantism. To me, a vigilante is like a person pursuing a criminal or going into a foreign country to find a criminal without contacting the police or government agency. Nothing more, nothing less. Which is why I find it odd that in "SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME", Spider-man aka Peter Parker was never pursued by the police for his vigilante activities. Had he signed the Sokovia Accords and agree to cooperate with law enforcement? Do the Accords still exist by this latest MCU entry? If not, why is Spider-man practicing vigilantism without law enforcement breathing down his back? In the end, I get the feeling that Kevin Feige and the MCU seem undecided on what to do with the Sokovia Accords arc. Worse, the franchise seems incapable of utilizing this story arc with any real competency. How can it if its writers do not know the difference between an accord and a law? But the more I think about the Sokovia Accords, the more I cannot help but feel that its creation was one of the biggest mistakes made by the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

#anti mcu #anti sokovia accords #anti marvel cinematic universe #anti captain america civil war #anti kevin feige #zack snyder #batman v supeman: dawn of justice #Don Cheadle #war machine #marvel netflix #william hurt #thaddeus ross #agents of shield season 4 #anti agents of s.h.i.e.l.d.#phil coulson #clark gregg #jessica jones #u.s. constitution

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ojpovkjopsk · 3 years ago

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I slashed one man’s face open when he laid his hands upon me, and rode through the others

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workingontruth · 5 years ago

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Our 2 Kings 7 Kind of Life

Don’t you love it when God shows up?

Have you ever missed it when God showed up?

What about now?

Today, opinions are a dime a dozen. Talk to a dozen people, and you’ll get a dozen different angles on any of a dozen subjects. But in spite of our differences of opinion on any of a wide range of topics, I think we all agree on one thing these days; had I interrupted your Christmas celebration this past December (whether or not I were wearing camel’s hair and in need of a good flossing to extract locust legs from between my teeth), telling you the following list of things would all come true in less than 90 days, you would have labeled me a complete crazy man and would’ve told me to go back beneath the rock from which I had come.

“In less than 90 days,…”

1. You, over there in the Free Enterprise motor coach pullover (that would’ve been me) … you will be returning to the University of Indianapolis with the Men’s Lacrosse team from South Carolina before playing the final game of your trip–but oddly enough, both teams will be fully healthy, the weather will be ideal, and the trip will have been coasting along without a hitch. Oh, and the university’s administration will also require the other eight remaining U Indy teams, participating in their various collegiate sporting events from Florida to California and everywhere in between, to immediately return to campus as well. And, once you return, your entire fleet of buses will be emptied of fuel, removed from insurance plans, and put out of service–though all machines are mechanically sound and all drivers are healthy and available to drive.

2. And you, in the red Community Hospital valet shirt (that would’ve be my wife) … you will be in your new role in the front office of the Center for Genetic Health. But having been asked not to congregate with your co-workers in the perfectly suited and newly designed office space the hospital had just finished, you and all of your co-workers will be working from home to reschedule all patient appointments sixty days or more into the future–unless they are willing to conduct their appointment over the phone or via video-chat.

3. The NBA post-season will never happen, and the balance of the season itself will be stopped cold in its tracks at half-time of a game in the Mountain Time Zone on Wednesday, March 11th.

4. All NCAA spring athletic events will be cancelled for the remainder of the school year and March Madness won’t happen.

5. There will be no date set to begin the MLB season.

6. Grocery stores will have been unable to keep chicken, ground beef, bread and toilet paper on their shelves.

7. Gasoline will, in some places, be under a dollar a gallon, but few will be filling up.

8. The nation’s restaurants will be closed for all dine-in experiences while the fortunate will try to stay in business by doing carry-out or drive-through business only.

9. All shopping malls, strip malls, barber shops and hair and nail salons will be closed.

10. The Federal Government will be sending $1,200 tax-free cash gifts to the vast majority of American citizens.

11. The world will have a drastic shortage of personal protective equipment.

12. The Down Jones Industrial Average will suffer 3 of its worst days since the “Black Monday” market crash in 1987 in the span of less than a week, losing roughly one-third of its value in a matter of about eight days.

13. State governors will be requesting their citizens “shelter in place” by remaining home but for essential trips for food or health-related emergencies, while in some states it will be a finable offense to travel anywhere but to secure such.

14. The President and VP of the United States will be holding daily, 2-hour press briefings for weeks on end.

15. Frequent air travel will be little but a memory, international travel banned, airfares costing less than a good meal out (which will no longer be happening).

16. The President will sign a presidential memorandum that will require the likes of General Motors to begin manufacturing respiratory ventilators.

17. Dozens of privately held companies like Michael Lindell’s “My Pillow,” will be transformed into N-95 facemask factories.

18. Samaritan’s Purse will have set up and be running a fully-functioning hospital in the middle of New York City’s Central Park.

19. The United States Naval Hospital Ship “Comfort” will have been deployed to New York to help in the cause.

20. Most people will be wearing PPE masks everywhere they go.

21. All public concerts world-wide will be on hold.

22. Churches will be asked not to meet, and nearly all will comply without resistance.

23. Employees representing nearly every U.S. industry will be furloughed, let go or kept on payrolls with forgivable loans from the Fed.

24. People will be asked to stand in lines outside Lowe’s stores at six-foot intervals to ensure active shopper customer quotas are kept while both one-way entries and exits are monitored.

25. Many stores will be required to close down public access to much of their merchandise not deemed “essential,” to help support the cause.

26. Pork, chicken and other meat packing plants in the U.S. will be closing down.

27. U.S. unemployment will be at the highest rate since the Great Depression as new weekly filing claims will be counted not in the hundreds of thousands, but in the millions.

28. The nation’s, and most of the world’s movie theaters, will be closed.

29. People without facemasks will be shunned and avoided by “mask-wearers.”

30. Neighbors will be sitting in their driveways and on FRONT porches again.

31. College students will be home with their families, taking part in online classwork since all university campuses will be closed prior to semesters’ end.

32. In lieu of our celebrating athletes and Hollywood types, doctors, nurses and healthcare workers will be the new heroes.

33. People in some industries will be earning more to stay at home than while working full time.

34. The Fed will be paying the unemployed an additional $600/week over and above the state provisions.

35. All elective surgeries will be halted while hospital ORs remain unused.

36. Online church “attendance” will skyrocket, leading to thousands and thousands of new believers.

37. American celebrity musicians will be holding online “Global Citizen” concerts to raise millions of dollars to give to the World Health Organization which is being held liable for its part in enabling the death of hundreds of thousands in nearly 200 countries world-wide.

Would any of these things been plausible just a few months ago?

Obviously, this is only a partial list, and one to which most of us could quickly add another dozen. And NOTE they’re not all bad! Isn’t it just like God to orchestrate blessing in the face of difficulty?

But in my mind, these “90-days-ago incomprehensible occurrences” are not unlike the similarly baffling predictions that Elisha, in 2 Kings Chapter 7, was revealing to the king and his officer.

Here’s the short version:

Elisha replied, “Hear the word of the Lord. This is what the Lord says: About this time tomorrow, a seah [probably about 7 lbs] of the finest flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.”

The officer on whose arm the king was leaning said to the man of God, “Look, even if the Lord should open the floodgates of the heavens, could this happen?”

“You will see it with your own eyes,” answered Elisha, “but you will not eat any of it!”

The officer was utterly confounded. “Really? How could this be?” And to be sure, there is no way, given their circumstance at the time, they could have concocted such an unlikely series of events.

(Read verses 3-13 to learn how this mystifying prophecy actually took place.)

But then, the verdict is recorded in the later verses...

“So they selected two chariots with their horses, and the king sent them after the Aramean army. He commanded the drivers, “Go and find out what has happened.” They followed them as far as the Jordan, and they found the whole road strewn with the clothing and equipment the Arameans had thrown away in their headlong flight. So the messengers returned and reported to the king. Then the people went out and plundered the camp of the Arameans. So a seah of the finest flour sold for a shekel, and two seahs of barley sold for a shekel, as the Lord had said.”

Now the king had put the officer on whose arm he leaned in charge of the gate, and the people trampled him in the gateway, and he died, just as the man of God had foretold when the king came down to his house. It happened as the man of God had said to the king: “About this time tomorrow, a seah of the finest flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.” ...but your officer will not eat any of it.

What’s my point?

God often does things in ways no man would ever script. What we deem impossible is a drop in the bucket of God’s immeasurable and endless power and insight. After all, He knows the future!

But here’s what WE do.

If told of how the above-mentioned improbables would come true by late-March, we would have responded, “Oh I see. What a tragic series of events. But I understand now how that will happen. It all makes sense.”

And because it “makes sense” in hindsight, we disregard the overriding variable of the supernatural God into the equation and chalk up the now-plausible circumstance as nothing more than the “natural” occurrence of things.

No matter how crazy things get, when viewing world events on merely the natural plane, most won’t need a God to “see it.” It will all make logical, cause-and-effect sense.

In the same way, I believe much of what will lead up to Revelation 12 and is told us in Daniel 11:31 and following, will likewise “make good sense” to the mind of mankind at the time. Going so far as to think of the Anti-Christ to come, we have to assume he will not come into power forcefully, but peaceably, with the full support of a global community…one that is now forming rapidly. Yes, it will all “make perfect sense,” for the answers and charismatic leadership of the one we know is to come will help to solve what will have become the world’s most pressing and previously unsolvable complexities. And the world community will give him his prominent role.

Still, for those in Christ, let me be clear that these can be days of amazing intrigue and anticipation, not fear and worry.

But, you see, my point is that this is how God usually chooses to bring about his plans, through a course of events that will be laced in the common sense of man … so much so that even the elect would be deceived were it possible (Matthew 24:24).

BUT, He gives light to the eyes of his children. Our great and unshakeable God has let us in on his plans. We are his friends if we do what He commands (John 15:14). And as friends of the Son of God, the Son has made known us to his agenda (John 15:15).

Now, my intention is not to insinuate we are absolutely on the cusp of the rapture of the Church, or teetering at the edge of the Tribulation–though I’m also not saying that we couldn’t be, for the Father alone only knows the day of Jesus’ return for his children (Matthew 24:30-42).

What I am saying is that if we can learn anything from history, and from an acquaintance with the scriptures, we can assume that the initial events predicted in the Bible will likely “make sense” in the moment to the mind of unregenerate man.

So, one last question.

Given our current sermon series at my home church, Northview Church, I am wondering if you are listening, watching and fellowshipping with the Holy Spirit living inside you? It’s something about which I wrote in great length as well in SET FREE.

Do you know the mind of Christ? Do you have the mind of Christ?

If not, it’s time to change that. If not, you may be missing that God himself is showing up right now on planet Earth.

Place your trust in Jesus Christ. He is ready to open your eyes.

Maybe it’s time you learn more about the God who is doing something incredible right now in the midst of this unprecedented time. Maybe it’s time you gain in you the Resource that dispells anxiety and replaces it with a calm assurance the world will never understand.

You can learn more about having a relationship with Jesus here. Or, reach out to a pastor at Northview Church by texting “NEXT” to 85379 and selecting Option 2.

God is showing up right now. Don’t miss him in the details.

Keep watching.

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allofbeercom · 6 years ago

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How Trump walked into Putin’s web

The long read: The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russias influence on Trump and uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years

Moscow, summer 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is in power. Official relations with the west have softened, but the KGB still assumes all western embassy workers are spooks. The KGB agents assigned to them are easy to spot. They have a method. Sometimes they pursue targets on foot, sometimes in cars. The officers charged with keeping tabs on western diplomats are never subtle.

One of their specialities is breaking into Moscow apartments. The owners are always away, of course. The KGB leave a series of clues – stolen shoes, women’s tights knotted together, cigarette butts stomped out and left demonstratively on the floor. Or a surprise turd in the toilet, waiting in grim ambush. The message, crudely put, is this: we are the masters here! We can do what the fuck we please!

Back then, the KGB kept watch on all foreigners, especially American and British ones. The UK mission in Moscow was under close observation. The British embassy was a magnificent mansion built in the 1890s by a rich sugar merchant, on the south bank of the Moskva river. It looked directly across to the Kremlin. The view was dreamy: a grand palace, golden church domes and medieval spires topped with revolutionary red stars.

One of those the KGB routinely surveilled was a 27-year-old diplomat, newly married to his wife, Laura, on his first foreign posting, and working as a second secretary in the chancery division. In this case, their suspicions were right.

The “diplomat” was a British intelligence officer. His workplace was a grand affair: chandeliers, mahogany-panelled reception rooms, gilt-framed portraits of the Queen and other royals hanging from the walls. His desk was in the embassy library, surrounded by ancient books. The young officer’s true employer was an invisible entity back in London – SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6.

His name was Christopher Steele. Years later, he would be commissioned to undertake an astonishing secret investigation. It was an explosive assignment: to uncover the Kremlin’s innermost secrets with relation to Donald Trump. Steele’s findings, and the resulting dossier, would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Steele had arrived in Moscow via the usual establishment route for upwardly mobile British spies: the University of Cambridge. Cambridge had produced some of MI6’s most talented cold war officials. A few of them, it turned out – to great embarrassment – had secret second jobs with the KGB. The joke inside MI6 was that only those who had never visited the Soviet Union would wish to defect.

Steele had studied social and political sciences at Girton College. His views were centre-left; he and his elder sister were the first members of his family to go to university. (Steele’s paternal grandfather was a coal miner from Pontypridd in south Wales; his great-uncle died in a pit accident.) Steele wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity. He became president of the Cambridge Union, a debating society dominated by well-heeled and well-connected young men and women.

It’s unclear who recruited Steele. Traditionally, certain Cambridge tutors were rumoured to identify promising MI6 candidates. Whatever the route, Steele’s timing was good. After three years at MI6, he was sent to the Soviet Union in April 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc across eastern Europe.

It was a tumultuous time. Seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution, the red empire was crumbling. The Baltic states had revolted against Soviet power; their own national authorities were governing in parallel with Moscow. In June 1991, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Food shortages were not uncommon.

There was still much to enjoy. Like other expatriates, the Steeles visited the Izmailovsky craft market, next to an imperial park where Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexei, had established a model farm. Here you could buy lacquered boxes, patchwork quilts, furry hats and Soviet kitsch. Steele acquired samovars, carpets from central Asia, a papier-mache Stalin mask and a hand-painted Tolstoy doll set.

Much of the Soviet Union was off-limits to diplomats. Steele was the embassy’s “internal traveller”. He visited newly accessible cities. One of them was Samara, a wartime Soviet capital. There, he became the first foreigner to see Stalin’s underground bunker. Instead of Lenin, he found dusty portraits of Peter the Great and the imperial commander Mikhail Kutuzov – proof, seemingly, that Stalin was more nationalist than Marxist. Another city was Kazan, in Tatarstan. There a local correspondent, Anatoly Andronov, took a black-and-white photo of Steele chatting with newspaper editors. At weekends, Steele took part in soccer matches with a group of expats in a Russian league. In one game, he played against the legendary Soviet Union striker Oleh Blokhin, who scored from the halfway line.

Christopher Steele in early 1991, with newspaper editors in the Tatar city of Kazan. Photograph: Anatoly Andronov

The atmosphere was optimistic. It seemed to Steele that the country was shifting markedly in the right direction. Citizens once terrified of interacting with outsiders were ready to talk. The KGB, however, found nothing to celebrate in the USSR’s tilt towards freedom and reform. In August 1991, seven apparatchiks staged a coup while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea. Most of the British embassy was away. Steele was home at his second-floor apartment in Gruzinsky Pereulok. He left the apartment block and walked for 10 minutes into town. Crowds had gathered outside the White House, the seat of government; thus far the army hadn’t moved against them.

From 50 yards away, Steele watched as a snowy-haired man in a suit climbed on a tank and – reading from notes brushed by the wind – denounced the coup as cynical and illegal. This was a defiant Yeltsin. Steele listened as Yeltsin urged a general strike and, fist clenched, told his supporters to remain strong.

The coup failed, and a weakened Gorbachev survived. The putschists – the leading group in all the main Soviet state and party institutions – were arrested. In the west, and in the US in particular, many concluded that Washington had won the cold war, and that, after decades of ideological struggle, liberal democracy had triumphed.

Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. His MI6 colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, break-ins and harassment.

The regime changed. The system didn’t.

By the time Steele left Moscow in April 1993, the Soviet Union had gone. A new country, led by Yeltsin, had replaced it: the Russian Federation. The KGB had been dissolved, but its officers hadn’t exactly disappeared. They still loathed the US and were merely biding their time.

One mid-ranking former KGB spy who was unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had been posted to Dresden in provincial East Germany in the mid-80s, and had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev’s reformist ideas. He had now returned to the newly renamed St Petersburg and was carving out a political career. He mourned the end of the USSR, and once called its disappearance “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.

A post-communist spy agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, had taken over the KGB’s main functions. Back in the UK, Steele would soon move into MI6’s purpose-built new office – a large, striking, postmodern pile of a building overlooking the River Thames in London. Staff called it Vauxhall Cross. This gaudy Babylonian temple was hard to miss; in 1994, the government officially acknowledged the existence of MI6 for the first time. The FSB would become its bitter adversary.

From London, Steele continued to work on the new Russia. He was ambitious, keen to succeed, and keen to be seen to succeed. He was also, perhaps, less posh than some of his upper-class peers. Steele’s father, Perris, and his mother, Janet, met when they worked together at the UK Met Office. Perris was a forecaster for the armed services. The family had lived on army bases in Aden, where Steele was born, on the Shetland Islands (where he found an interest in bird-watching) and – twice – in Cyprus.

Steele’s education had been varied. He went to a British forces school in Cyprus. He did sixth form at a college in Berkshire. He then spent a “seventh” or additional term at Wellington College, an elite private boarding school. There he sat the entrance exam for Cambridge.

At MI6, Steele moved in a small world of Kremlin specialists. There were conferences and seminars in university towns like Oxford; contacts to be made; émigrés to be met, lunched and charmed. In 1998 he got another posting, to the British embassy in Paris. He had a family: two sons and a daughter, born in France, where Steele was officially First Secretary Financial.

At this point, his career hit a bump. In 1999, a list of MI6 officers was leaked online. Steele was one of them. He appeared as “Christopher David Steele, 90 Moscow; dob 1964”.

The breach wasn’t Steele’s fault, but it had unfortunate consequences. As an exposed British officer, he couldn’t go back to Russia.

In Moscow, the spies were staging a comeback. In 1998 Putin became FSB chief, then prime minister, and in 2000, president. By 2002, when Steele left Paris, Putin had consolidated his grip. Most of Russia’s genuine political opposition had been wiped out, from parliament as well as from public life and the evening news. The idea that Russia might slowly turn into a democracy had proved a late-century fantasy. Rather, the US’s traditional nuclear-armed adversary was moving in an authoritarian direction.

At first, George W Bush and Tony Blair viewed Putin as a respectable ally in the war against terror. But he remained an enigma. As Steele knew better than most, obtaining information from inside the presidential administration in Moscow was tough. One former member of the US National Security Council described Putin as a “black box”. “The Brits had slightly better assets than us. We had nothing. No human intelligence,” the source said. And, with the focus on fighting Islamists, Russia was downgraded on the list of US-UK intelligence priorities.

By 2006, Steele held a senior post at MI6’s Russia desk in London. There were ominous signs that Putin was taking Russia in an aggressive direction. The number of hostile Russian agents in the UK grew, surpassing cold war levels. Steele tracked a new campaign of subversion and covert influence.

And then two FSB assassins put a radioactive poison into the tea of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned London-based dissident. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come. MI6 picked Steele to investigate. One reason for this was that he wasn’t emotionally involved with the case, unlike some of his colleagues who had known the victim. He quickly concluded the Russian state had staged the execution.

Alexander Litvinenko, whose poisoning in London in 2006 Christopher Steele was chosen to investigate. Photograph: Natasja Weitsz

Steele’s gloomy view of Russia – that under Putin it was not only domestically repressive but also internationally reckless and revisionist – looked about right. Steele briefed government ministers. Some got it. Others could scarcely believe Russian spies would carry out murder and mayhem on the streets of London.

All told, Steele spent 22 years as a British intelligence officer. There were some high points – he saw his years in Moscow as formative – and some low ones. Two of the diplomats with whom he shared an office in the embassy library, Tim Barrow and David Manning, went on to become UK ambassadors to the EU and the US respectively.

Steele didn’t quite rise to the top, in what was a highly competitive service. Espionage might sound exciting, but the salary of a civil servant was ordinary. And in 2009 he had faced a personal tragedy, when his wife died at the age of 43 after a period of illness.

That same year, Steele left MI6 and set up his own business intelligence firm, Orbis, in partnership with another former British spy, Christopher Burrows. The transition from government to the private sector wasn’t easy. Steele and Burrows were pursuing the same intelligence matters as before, but without the support and peer review they had in their previous jobs. MI6’s security branch would often ask an officer to go back to a source, or redraft a report, or remark: “We think it’s interesting. We’d like to have more on this.” This kept up quality and objectivity.

Steele and Burrows, by contrast, were out on their own, where success depended more on one’s own wits. There was no more internal challenge. The people they had to please were corporate clients. The pay was considerably better.

The shabby environs of Orbis’s office in London’s Victoria, where I first met Christopher Steele, were a long way away from Washington DC and the bitterly contested 2016 US presidential election. So how did Steele come to be commissioned to research Donald J Trump and produce his devastating dossier?

At the same moment Steele said goodbye to official spying, another figure was embarking on a new career in the crowded field of private business intelligence. His name was Glenn Simpson. He was a former journalist. Simpson was an alluring figure: a large, tall, angular, bear-like man who slotted himself easily on to a bar stool and enjoyed a beer or two. He was a good-humoured social companion who spoke in a nasal drawl. Behind small, oval glasses was a twinkling intelligence. He excelled at what he did.

Simpson had been an illustrious Wall Street Journal correspondent. Based in Washington and Brussels, he had specialised in post-Soviet murk. He didn’t speak Russian or visit the Russian Federation. This was deemed too dangerous. Instead, from outside the country, he examined the dark intersection between organised crime and the Russian state.

By 2009, Simpson decided to quit journalism, at a time when the media industry was in all sorts of financial trouble. He co-founded his own commercial research and political intelligence firm, based in Washington DC. Its name was Fusion GPS. Its website gave little away. It didn’t even list an address.

Simpson then met Steele. They knew some of the same FBI people and shared expertise on Russia. Fusion and Orbis began a professional partnership. The Washington- and London-based firms worked for oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs. This might involve asset tracing – identifying large sums concealed behind layers of offshore companies.

Later that year, Steele embarked on a separate, sensitive new assignment that drew on his knowledge of covert Russian techniques – and of football. (In Moscow he had played at full-back.) The client was the English Football Association, the FA. England was bidding to host the 2018 soccer World Cup. Its main rival was Russia. There were joint bids, too, from Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands and Belgium. His brief was to investigate the eight other bidding nations, with a particular focus on Russia. It was rumoured that the FSB had carried out a major influence operation, ahead of a vote in Zurich by the executive committee of Fifa, soccer’s international governing body.

Steele discovered that Fifa corruption was global. It was a stunning conspiracy. He took the unusual step of briefing an American contact in Rome, the head of the FBI’s Eurasian serious crime division. This “lit the fuse”, as one friend put it, and led to a probe by US federal prosecutors. And to the arrest in 2015 of seven Fifa officials, allegedly connected to $150m (£114m) in kickbacks, paid on TV deals stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean. The US indicted 14 individuals.

The episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than 100 reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the US state department, and sent up to secretary of state John Kerry and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the US response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine. Many of Steele’s secret sources were the same people who would later supply information on Trump.

One former state department envoy during the Obama administration said he read dozens of Steele’s reports. On Russia, the envoy said, Steele was “as good as the CIA or anyone”.

Steele’s professional reputation inside US agencies would prove important the next time he discovered alarming material.

Trump’s political rise in the autumn of 2015 and the early months of 2016 was swift and irresistible. The candidate was a human wrecking ball who flattened everything in his path, including the Republican party’s aghast, frozen-to-the-spot establishment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz – all were batted aside, taunted, crushed. Scandals that would have killed off a normal presidential candidate made Trump stronger. The media loved it. Increasingly, so did the voters. Might anything stop him?

In mid-2015, the Republican front-runner had been Jeb Bush, son of one US president and brother of another. But as the campaign got under way, Bush struggled. Trump dubbed the former Florida governor “low-energy”. During the primaries, a website funded by one of Trump’s wealthy Republican critics, Paul Singer, commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump.

After Trump became the presumptive nominee in May 2016, Singer’s involvement ended and senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary Clinton took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Clinton’s campaign, Marc E Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports. The world of private investigation was a morally ambiguous one – a sort of open market in dirt. Information on Trump was of no further use to Republicans, but it could be of value to Democrats, Trump’s next set of opponents.

Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele, his friend and colleague. Steele began to scrutinise Paul Manafort, who would soon become Trump’s new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusion’s anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He had no idea what he would find. He later told David Corn, Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones: “It started off as a fairly general inquiry.” Trump’s organisation owned luxury hotels around the world. Trump had, as far back as 1987, sought to do real estate deals in Moscow. One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: “Are there business ties to Russia?”

Paul Manafort, who Steele started investigating in spring 2016. Last month Manafort was indicted on 12 charges including conspiracy against the United States. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Over time, Steele had built up a network of sources. He was protective of them: who they were he would never say. It could be someone well-known – a foreign government official or diplomat with access to secret material. Or it could be someone obscure – a lowly chambermaid cleaning the penthouse suite and emptying the bins in a five-star hotel.

Normally an intelligence officer would debrief sources directly, but since Steele could no longer visit Russia, this had to be done by others, or in third countries. There were intermediaries, subsources, operators – a sensitive chain. Only one of Steele’s sources on Trump knew of Steele. Steele put out his Trump-Russia query and waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing; “hair-raising”. As he told friends: “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.”

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US – raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination – but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.

In June 2016, Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail. The headline read: US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin. Its text began: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.”

“So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.

“Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.

“A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.”

The memo was sensational. There would be others, 16 in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016. At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months – during the first half of the year – Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July, as Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.

If Steele’s reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down “various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia”, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didn’t necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russia’s leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump – and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.

On the eve of the most consequential US election for generations, one of the two candidates was compromised, Steele’s sources claimed. The memo alleged that Trump had unusual sexual proclivities, and that the FSB had a tape. If true, this meant he could indeed be blackmailed.

When I met Steele in December 2016, he gave no hint he had been involved in what was the single most important investigation in decades.

Steele’s collaborators offered salacious details. The memo said that Russian intelligence had sought to exploit “TRUMP’s personal obsessions and sexual perversion” during his 2013 stay at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The operation had allegedly worked. The tycoon had booked the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel “where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia”.

There, the memo said, Trump had deliberately “defiled” the Obamas’ bed. A number of prostitutes “had performed a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him”. The memo also alleged: “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”

As well as sex, there was another fascinating dimension to this alleged plot, categorically denied by Trump. According to Steele’s sources, associates of Trump had held a series of clandestine meetings in central Europe, Moscow and elsewhere with Russian spies. The Russians were very good at tradecraft. Nonetheless, could this be a trail that others might later detect?

Steele’s sources offered one final devastating piece of information. They alleged that Trump’s team had co-ordinated with Russia on the hacking operation against Clinton. And that the Americans had secretly co-paid for it.

Donald Trump and Gabriela Isler, winner of Miss Universe 2013, in Moscow. Photograph: Kommersant/Getty

Steele wrote up his findings in MI6 house style. The memos read like CX reports – classified MI6 intelligence documents. They were marked “confidential/sensitive source”. The names of prominent individuals were in caps – TRUMP, PUTIN, CLINTON. The reports began with a summary. They offered supporting detail. Sources were anonymous. They were introduced in generic terms: “a senior Russian foreign ministry figure” or “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin”. They were given letters, starting with A and proceeding down the alphabet.

How certain was Steele that his sources had got it right and that he wasn’t being fed disinformation? The matter was so serious, so important, so explosive, so far-reaching, that this was an essential question.

As spies and former spies knew, the world of intelligence was non-binary. There were degrees of veracity. A typical CX report would include phrases such as “to a high degree of probability”. Intelligence could be flawed, because humans were inherently unreliable. They forgot things. They got things wrong.

One of Steele’s former Vauxhall Cross colleagues likened intelligence work to delicate shading. This twilight world wasn’t black and white; it was a muted palette of greys, off-whites and sepia tones, he told me. He said you could shade in one direction – more optimistically – or in another direction – less optimistically. Steele was generally in the first category.

Steele was adamant that his reporting was credible. One associate described him as sober, cautious, highly regarded, professional and conservative. “He’s not the sort of person who will pass on gossip. If he puts something in a report, he believes there is sufficient credibility in it,” the associate said. The idea that Steele’s work was fake or a cowboy operation or born of political malice was completely wrong, he added.

The dossier, Steele told friends, was a thoroughly professional job, based on sources who had proven themselves in other areas. Evaluating sources depended on a critical box of tools: what was a source’s reporting record, was he or she credible, what was the motivation?

Steele recognised that no piece of intelligence was 100% right. According to friends, he assessed that his work on the Trump dossier was 70-90% accurate. Over eight years, Orbis had produced scores of reports on Russia for private clients. A lot of this content was verified or “proven up”. As Steele told friends: “I’ve been dealing with this country for 30 years. Why would I invent this stuff?”

In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here – except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.

The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness – the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.

But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’ – the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.

That summer, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at “director level”, face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, later confirmed the “sensitive” stream of intelligence from Europe. After a slow start, Brennan used the GCHQ information and other tip-offs to launch a major inter-agency investigation. Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving disturbing warnings from Steele.

At this point, Steele’s Fusion material was unpublished. Whatever the outcome of the election, it raised grave questions about Russian interference and the US democratic process. There was, Steele felt, overwhelming public interest in passing his findings to US investigators. The US’s multiple intelligence agencies had the resources to prove or disprove his discoveries. He realised that these allegations were, as he put it to a friend, a “radioactive hot potato”. He anticipated a hesitant response, at least at first.

In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had co-operated over Fifa. His information started to reach the bureau in Washington. It had certainly arrived by the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, when WikiLeaks first began releasing hacked Democratic emails. It was at this moment that FBI director James Comey opened a formal investigation into Trump-Russia.

Trump and Putin at the Apec summit in Vietnam this week. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS

In September, Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. Their response was one of “shock and horror,” Steele said. The bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports, and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.

Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, it moved cautiously. The agency told him that it couldn’t intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent. Steele’s frustrations grew.

Later that month, Steele had a series of off-the-record meetings with a small number of US journalists. They included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN. In mid-October he visited New York and met with reporters again.

Comey then announced he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. At this point, Steele’s relationship with the FBI broke down. The excuse given by the bureau for saying nothing about Trump looked bogus. In late October, Steele spoke to the Mother Jones editor David Corn via Skype.

The story was of “huge significance, way above party politics”, Steele said. He believed Trump’s Republican colleagues “should be aware of this stuff as well”. Of his own reputation, Steele said: “My track record as a professional is second to no one.” Steele acknowledged that his memos were works in progress, and was genuinely worried about the implications of the allegations. “The story has to come out,” he told Corn.

At this point Steele was still anonymous, a ghost. But the ghost’s message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washington’s spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and thinktanks. Democratic senators now apprised of Steele’s work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clinton’s reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.

One of those who was aware of the dossier’s broad allegations was the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In August Reid, had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign”. In October, Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms. In a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”

But all this frantic activity came to nought. Just as Nixon was re-elected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing. Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the US public knew nothing about it. In November, his dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late.

The same month a group of international experts gathered in Halifax on Canada’s eastern seaboard. Their task: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s stunning victory. One of the delegates attending the Halifax International Security Forum was Senator John McCain. Another was Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador to Russia. Wood was a friend of Steele’s and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassador’s advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me: “I took it seriously.”

On the margins of the Halifax conference, Wood briefed McCain about Steele’s dossier – its contents, if true

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/how-trump-walked-into-putins-web/

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erikonymous · 8 years ago

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Donald J. Trump, a reality-television star erecting a mausoleum for himself behind the first-hole tee of a golf course he owns in New Jersey, first declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the atrium of Trump Tower, which he built in the 1980s with labor provided by hundreds of undocumented Polish workers and concrete purchased at an inflated price from the Gambino and Genovese crime families. “The American dream is dead,” Trump said to the audience members, each of whom he paid $50 to attend. During Trump’s primary campaign, he told his supporters that he knew “all about crazies,” loved “Wall Street guys” who are “brutal,” planned to “use the word ‘anchor baby,’ ” and preferred to pronounce “Qatar” incorrectly. Trump, who in 1999 cut his sick infant grandnephew off the Trump Organization’s health-care plan and in 2011 compared being gay to switching to a long-handled golf putter, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and said he’d consider trying to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage. Trump said that his book The Art of the Deal was second in quality only to the Bible and that he never explicitly asked God for forgiveness. At a church in Iowa, he placed a few dollar bills into a bowl filled with sacramental bread, which he has referred to as “my little cracker.” Trump, who once dumped a glass of wine on a journalist who wrote a story he didn’t like, told his supporters that journalists were “liars,” the “lowest form of humanity,” and “enemies,” but that he did not approve of killing them. “I’m a very sane person,” said Trump, who once hosted a radio show in which he discussed the development of hair-cloning technology, the creation of a vaccine for obesity, the number of men a gay man thinks about having sex with on his morning commute, and the dangers of giving free Viagra to rapists. Trump denied being the voice of John Miller, one of several fictional assistants he had previously admitted pretending to be, in a recording of himself telling a reporter that he had “zero interest” in dating Madonna; that he had three other girlfriends in addition to Marla Maples, with whom he had been cheating on his wife; and that he had an affair with Carla Bruni, who later responded by describing Trump as “obviously a lunatic.” Trump, who once offered the city of New York vacant apartments in his building to house homeless people in hopes they would drive away rent-controlled tenants, sent a bumper sticker to a group of homeless veterans whom he had previously declined to help and asked them to campaign for him. Trump, whose companies have been cited 24 times since 2005 for failing to pay workers overtime or minimum wage, said the federal minimum wage should go up, and then said it should not. Trump referred to 9/11 as “7-Eleven,” and called Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren “the Indian” and “Pocahontas.” Trump, who had previously labeled a deaf contestant on his reality-TV show The Apprentice “retarded,” and had described poor Americans as “morons,” said the country was on course for a “very massive recession,” one resembling the U.S. recession of 2007 to 2009, which Trump once said Americans could “opt out of” by joining Trump Network, a multilevel-marketing company that sold a monthly supply of multivitamins purportedly tailored to customers based on a test of their urine. Trump submitted his financial-disclosure form to the Federal Election Commission, on which he swore under oath that his golf course in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which was being sued by the town for causing flooding, was worth $50 million, despite having sworn in a previous property-tax appeal that it was worth $1.4 million; and swore that his golf course in Palos Verdes, California, which he was suing for five times its annual revenue, was worth more than $50 million, despite previously having filed papers with Los Angeles County stating it was worth $10 million. Trump claimed he made $1.9 million from his modeling agency, which a foreign-born former model accused of “modern-day slavery,” alleging that the agency forced her to lie about her age, work without a U.S. visa, and live in a crowded apartment for which she paid the agency as much as $1,600 a month to sleep in a bed beneath a window through which a homeless man once urinated on her. Trump sought to exclude a recording of himself telling the nephew of former president George W. Bush that he grabs women “by the pussy” from a fraud suit filed against Trump University, a series of real-estate seminars taught by salespeople with no real-estate experience, which was housed in a Trump-owned building that the Securities and Exchange Commission said also housed the country’s most complained-about unregistered brokerages, and whose curriculum investigators in Texas described as “inapplicable.” Trump announced that he would win the Latino vote, and tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl from Trump Grill in Trump Tower with the message “I love Hispanics!” Trump referred to a black man at one of his rallies as “my African American,” and pledged his support for black people at a gathering of mostly white people in Wisconsin, whom he often referred to as “the forgotten people.” “I am the least racist person,” said Trump, who was sued twice by the Justice Department in the 1970s for allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black tenants, whose Trump Plaza Hotel was fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1992 for removing black dealers from card tables, who allegedly told a former employee that he hated “black guys counting my money,” who in 2005 floated the idea of pitting an all-black Apprentice team against an all-white one to reflect “our very vicious world,” and who was endorsed by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, one of whom said, “What he believes, we believe.” Trump tweeted statistics credited to a fictional government agency falsely claiming that the majority of white murder victims in the United States are killed by black people. Trump tweeted a photoshopped picture of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who Trump had said “had blood coming out of her wherever,” standing next to a Saudi prince, who tweeted back that he had “financially rescued” Trump twice, including once in 1990, when the prince purchased Trump’s 281-foot yacht, which was formerly owned by a Saudi arms dealer with whom Trump often partied in Atlantic City, and with whom Trump was implicated in a tax-evasion scheme involving a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. Trump disputed former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s claim that Trump magazine is defunct, showing as proof an annual circular for his clubs that was not Trump magazine, which folded in 2009. Trump republished his book Crippled America with the title Great Again. Trump told and retold an apocryphal story about a U.S. general who executed Muslim soldiers with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and proposed that Muslims be banned from entering the country. At the first primary debate, Trump praised his companies’ bankruptcies, including that of Trump Entertainment Resorts, in which lenders lost more than $1 billion and 1,100 employees lost their jobs, and that of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a publicly traded company that Trump used to purchase two casinos for almost $1 billion, and from which he resigned after the company went bankrupt for the first time, but before it went bankrupt for the second time. “I made a lot of money,” said Trump. At the fifth primary debate, Trump defended the idea of retaliating against America’s foreign aggressors by killing non-combatant members of their families, saying it would “make people think.” At the eleventh primary debate, Trump told the crowd there was “no problem” with the size of his penis. Trump said that he knew more about the Islamic State than “the generals,” and that he would “rely on the generals” to defeat the Islamic State. Trump said he would bring back waterboarding and torture because “we have to beat the savages.” Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted protesters at his rallies, denied making the offer, then made the offer again after a 78-year-old white supporter in North Carolina punched a 26-year-old black protester in the eye and said, “Next time we see him we might have to kill him.” Trump, who in 1999 called Republicans too “crazy right” and in 2000 ran on a Reform Party platform that included creating a lottery to fund U.S. spy training, said that the 2016 primaries were “rigged,” then clinched the Republican nomination for president, receiving more votes than any Republican in history. “I was the one who really broke the glass ceiling,” said Trump when his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, became the first woman to lead a major party’s ticket. Trump hired Steve Bannon, the editor of the white-nationalist website Breitbart, to replace his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who ran a firm that once lobbied for the military dictator of Zaire, and who himself replaced Corey Lewandowski, who resigned from the campaign not long after he was filmed grabbing a Breitbart reporter by the arm to prevent her from asking Trump any questions. Trump selected as his running mate Indiana governor Mike Pence, who previously backed a bill that would allow hospitals to deny care to critically ill pregnant women, and who once criticized the Disney character Mulan as a “mischievous liberal” created to persuade Americans that women should be allowed to hold combat positions in the military. In his general-election campaign, Trump said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, and called on Russia to hack into Clinton’s email account. Trump said that he doesn’t pay employees who don’t “do a good job,” after a review of the more than 3,500 lawsuits filed against Trump found that he has been accused of stiffing a painter and a dishwasher in Florida, a glass company in New Jersey, dozens of hourly hospitality workers, and some of the lawyers who represented him. “I’m a fighter,” said Trump, who body-slammed the WWE chairman at WrestleMania 23 in 2007, and who attended WrestleMania IV with Robert LiButti, an Atlantic City gambler with alleged mafia ties, who told Trump he’d “fucking pull your balls from your legs” if Trump didn’t stop trying to seduce his daughter. Trump, whose first wife, Ivana, accused him in divorce filings of rape, and whose special counsel later said rape within a marriage was not possible, said “no one respects women more than I do.” Trump threatened to sue 12 women who accused him of sexual misconduct, including one who recalled Trump trying “like an octopus” to put his hand up her skirt on an airplane 35 years ago; four former Miss Teen USA contestants, who alleged that Trump entered their dressing room while girls as young as 15 were changing and said, “I’ve seen it all before”; the winner of Miss Utah USA in 1997, who alleged that Trump forcibly kissed her on the lips and then told her, “Twenty-one is too old”; an adult-film star, who alleged that at a golf tournament in Tahoe in 2006 Trump offered her $10,000 and the private use of his jet to spend the night with him; and a People magazine reporter, who alleged that while she was writing a story on Trump and his current wife, Melania, on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, Trump pushed her against the wall and forcibly kissed her before telling her, “We’re going to have an affair.” “What I say is what I say,” said Trump, who previously told a pair of 14-year-old girls that he would date them in a couple of years, said of a 10-year-old girl that he would date her in 10 years, told a journalist that he wasn’t sure whether his infant daughter Tiffany would have nice breasts, told the cast of The View that if Ivanka weren’t his daughter “perhaps I would be dating her,” told radio host Howard Stern that it was okay to call Ivanka a “piece of ass” and that he could have “nailed” Princess Diana, and tweeted that a former winner of his Miss Universe pageant, whom Trump once called “Miss Piggy,” was disgusting. “Check out sex tape,” tweeted Trump, who once appeared in a soft-core pornographic film breaking a bottle of wine over a limousine. Trump did not comment on reports that he used over $200,000 in charitable contributions to the Trump Foundation to settle lawsuits against his businesses, $20,000 in contributions to the Trump Foundation to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself, and $10,000 in contributions to buy a smaller painting of himself, which he hung on the wall of his restaurant Champions Bar and Grill. “I’m the cleanest guy there is,” said Trump, who once granted the rights to explore building Trump-branded towers in Moscow to a mobster convicted of stabbing a man in the face with the stem of margarita glass, who was mentored by the former lead counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Gambino and Genovese crime families, who once purchased a nightclub in Atlantic City from a hit man for a Philadelphia crime family, who once worked with a soldier in the Colombo crime family to outfit Trump Golden and Executive Series limousines with a fax machine and a liquor dispenser, and who once purchased helicopter services from a cigarette-boat racer named Joseph Weichselbaum, who was charged with drug trafficking in Ohio before being moved to Trump’s sister’s courtroom in New Jersey, where the case was handed off to a different judge, who gave Weichselbaum a three-year prison sentence, of which he served 18 months before moving into Trump Tower. Trump told journalists he “made a lot of money” when he leased his house in Westchester to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. “I screwed him,” said Trump. Trump, who in 2013 said that he did “have a relationship” with Vladimir Putin, said in 2016, “I don’t know Putin.” Trump, who wrote in 1997 that concern over asbestos was a mob conspiracy, who in the 1990s spent $1 million in ads to bolster the theory that a Native American tribe in upstate New York had been infiltrated by the mafia and drug traffickers, who once implied that Barack Obama’s real name is Barry Soetoro and that he won reelection by making a secret deal with Saudi Arabia, and who in 2012 tweeted that global warming was a “hoax” created by “the Chinese” to weaken U.S. manufacturing, suggested to his supporters that the Islamic State paid the phone bills of Syrian refugees, that his primary opponent Ted Cruz’s Cuban father was involved in a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and that U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia may have been suffocated with a pillow. During the first debate of the general election, Trump said that Rosie O’Donnell had deserved it when he called her “disgusting both inside and out,” “basically a disaster,” a “slob,” and a “loser,” someone who “looks bad,” “sounds bad,” has a “fat, ugly face,” and “talks like a truck driver.” At the second general-election debate, Trump invited three women who have accused Clinton’s husband of sexual misconduct to sit in the front row; claimed that Clinton had once laughed about the rape of a 12-year-old girl, which audio showed not to be true; claimed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had endorsed him, which it had not; and afterward suggested that his opponent had been on drugs during the debate. Trump, who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, told his supporters that Clinton could shoot one of them and not be prosecuted. Trump told the audience at a Catholic charity dinner that Clinton “hates Catholics,” and told his supporters that she is “the devil” and that Mexico was “getting ready to attack.” Trump, who once kept a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, told his supporters that the election was “rigged” against him, won the election despite losing the popular vote by a margin of almost 3 million, claimed that he had in fact won the popular vote, and then announced that he would be staying on as executive producer of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, which a year earlier had fired him because he called Mexicans “rapists.” “Our country,” said Trump at a victory rally, “is in trouble.” Tower of Babble

#Harper's #Joe Kloc #Donald Trump

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jobsearchtips02 · 4 years ago

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As big corporations state ‘black lives matter,’ their performance history raise uncertainty

Financing, tech and retail companies are declaring assistance for a demonstration motion that has galvanized the American public amid a pandemic that has disproportionately declared black lives and incomes

Pushed by staff members in many cases, and in others by a fear of losing consumers, corporations are being required to examine their functions in perpetuating inequalities in hiring, pay and promo, cultivating hazardous office cultures and consumer discrimination. Their performance history have raised apprehension about whether they will certainly present the type of change that would make this moment a turning point for racial equity.

” There’s a great deal of performative allyship going around,” said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, president and creator of diversity consulting company ReadySet. “No one’s requesting a CEO to take a knee. You take the knee after you change your policies.”

The image of Dimon, hands gripped over his right knee, was suggested to communicate his “support for social justice,” said JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman Patricia Wexler. “Our leaders and our business have actually done a lot more than kneel, investing hundreds of countless dollars in combined humanitarian and company resources to resolve some of the most consistent challenges dealing with the black neighborhood,” she stated, highlighting the bank’s programs to help black-owned organisations, construct budget-friendly housing and hire individuals with rap sheets.

After George Floyd was eliminated in the custody of Minneapolis cops last month, hundreds of business blanketed social networks with statements knocking discrimination and professing their commitment to racial justice.

Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Twitter and Square, stated Juneteenth (June 19) a business holiday to celebrate completion of slavery, a relocation more companies are making. Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who is wed to tennis star Serena Williams, resigned from the board to give way for the first black director in the company’s history. Bank of America guaranteed to spend $1 billion over the next 4 years to address “ financial and racial inequality sped up by a worldwide pandemic“

Walmart, the country’s biggest seller, vowed to stop locking up “multicultural” hair and charm products in display cases, and Sephora committed to committing at least 15 percent of its rack space to black-owned beauty brands. Toymaker LEGO suspended marketing for police-themed sets after video emerged revealing an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes.

Popular opinion on policing and racial equity has shifted quickly considering that the 2014 protests versus police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.

Surveys now show a large bipartisan majority of Americans support the protests. That’s a dramatic departure from three years ago when few of the business speaking up now voiced assistance for the NFL gamer protests, and President Trump called for a boycott over players kneeling throughout the pregame national anthem. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell now states the league was wrong for not listening to players.

But activists, employees and variety specialists say they question how much business promises to “do more” will assist upend a system of economic variation in which a normal black family has just one-tenth the net worth of a normal white household.

Part of closing the racial wealth gap, they state, indicates ensuring chances for black workers to get in and rise in rewarding industries such as finance and tech, whose leadership has actually long been dominated by white executives and board members.

” I value your Black Lives Matter post. Now follow that up with an image of your senior management team and your board,” stated Brickson Diamond, president of variety consulting company Big Responses and previous chief operating officer of the Executive Leadership Council, a nonprofit concentrated on increasing the variety of black executives.

After viewing countless protesters march past his Manhattan apartment, James Gorman, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, held a conference call with a few of the bank’s highest-ranking black executives, and announced the promotion of two black women to positions on its operating and management committees.

This period “will not be quickly forgotten in history, and it should not be,” Gorman stated “God ready, it will be seen as a turning point in race relations.”

However like a number of the nation’s biggest and most prominent banks, Morgan Stanley has actually struggled to increase variety within its ranks. Only 2.2 percent of its senior executives were black in 2015.

Just 4 percent of JPMorgan Chase’s top executives are black, despite years of public, prominent efforts to increase its variety. Wells Fargo saw the portion of black senior executives fall from 8 percent in 2015 to 3.5 percent in 2019.

And at Bank of America, which paid a $ 4.2 million settlement in 2015 after being accused of victimizing black, Hispanic and female job applicants, about 5 percent of senior leaders are black. The business denied allegations of discrimination.

Goldman Sachs, which just announced a fund to support system that deal with racial injustice and financial variation, had actually paid $9 million in 2019 to settle federal claims of racial and gender pay bias. The firm said at the time that it disagreed with the government’s analysis and was dedicated to equivalent pay for workers.

The scarcity in diversity extends throughout the business world. Of the business in the Standard & Poor’s 500- stock index, 187 did not have a black board member, according to a 2019 analysis by Black Enterprise publication.

African Americans consist of a fraction of the senior leadership at the largest tech firms– 3.1 percent at Facebook, 3.6 percent at Google, 4.4 percent at Slack, 5.3 percent at Twitter and 2.7 percent of executives at Microsoft, according to business information. Amazon did not reveal the demographics of senior leadership, however their report shows that 8.3 percent of U.S. managers are black. (Amazon founder and president Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The numbers are lower in the world of equity capital. One percent of endeavor funding went to black start-up creators in 2018, according to a study carried out by Silicon Valley Bank and others. And 1 percent of decision-makers at the top 100 venture capital companies were black in 2018, according to a yearly study by the Details, a tech news site.

In addition to employing and pay disparities, banks have actually come under fire for supposedly victimizing minority customers. Some have settled claims in recent years for targeting black and Hispanic home purchasers with dangerous, expensive loans. Homeownership, one of the most essential ways to build wealth, has remained essentially the same for African Americans since 1968.

” These are a few of the very same banks that ripped a lot wealth from black and Latino communities throughout the foreclosure crisis,” said Maurice BP-Weeks, co-executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a nonprofit focused on racial and financial justice.

Business statements supporting Black Lives Matter stand empty, he said, without significant actions such as directing earnings back into black neighborhoods, removing racial pay variations, increasing hiring from black neighborhoods and promoting black staff members. “All of these things would reveal that this is more than just platitudes.”

The American Bankers Association said in a statement that the market “condemns discrimination of any kind in the financing market, the office and beyond” and that banks of all sizes are devoted to “enhancing variety, equity and addition within the industry” and attending to “racial oppression and injustice in the nation.”

JPMorgan Chase has actually fought allegations of discrimination against black monetary consultants and customers, most just recently in recordings obtained by the New York Times in2019 The bank has actually stated it was examining how it operates “so that we could acquire a much deeper understanding of what more we can do to root out bigotry and discrimination anywhere it exists.”

At Wells Fargo, which paid $10 million last year to settle a suit filed by the city of Philadelphia accusing the bank of steering black and Hispanic customers into riskier, more costly home mortgages, a committee of senior executives is fulfilling daily to develop recommendations for addressing social inequalities facing black employees and clients. The bank rejected claims of victimizing minority customers.

” As a white guy, as much as I can try to understand what others are feeling, I understand that I can not actually appreciate and understand what individuals of color experience and the impacts of prejudiced behavior others should cope with,” Charlie Scharf, chief executive of Wells Fargo, wrote to staff members

Feeling pushed by what they want to be a transformative minute, black workers are more willing to speak out about their experiences of discrimination in the office and pressure supervisors for change.

Black tech workers are openly voicing grievances that their business are counting on their “complimentary labor” to help with hiring and recruiting. At social networks platforms, worker groups established to support members of color are asked to double as a voice for black users, an unsettled job they however feel called to satisfy.

Since the protests began, this sideline has actually become much more stuffed, according to interviews with group leaders from tech companies in the Bay Area and New York City. SoFi, the venture-backed finance business, and others have tasked black employees with choosing where business contributions ought to go and participating in company listening sessions about race. Requested for remark, SoFi indicated its declaration on Twitter that said it dedicates to “defending diversity and addition.”

” You can not stunt on social saying that you do not endure bigotry at your company then leave the labor of fixing your race problem [to] fall on your black employees,” Raki Wane, who formerly led Twitter’s resource group for black employees, Blackbirds, and now operates in policy interactions at Instagram, posted on Twitter.

To indicate its assistance for the movement, Amazon put a “Black Lives Matter” banner on its home page and at the top of Prime Video. Later on, Bezos posted angry consumer emails about the banner to his Instagram account. “Dave, you’re the sort of client I enjoy to lose,” Bezos composed in one caption.

To critics, these public statements masked the harmful effects Amazon’s items and practices have actually had on the black community, consisting of profiting from the sale of white supremacist propaganda as well as selling facial recognition innovation to authorities departments, which the company recently revealed it would suspend for one year.

Black tech employees are even sharing stories declaring bias at Slack, which established a reputation as a welcoming environment when CEO Stewart Butterfield sent four black female engineers onstage to accept an award on his behalf for the fastest-growing tech start-up in2016 This month, the very same black engineers confronted Butterfield on Twitter about their experiences at Slack.

Duretti Hirpa, an engineer who helped start an internal group for staff members of color, shared that she had actually been informed her work was considered an extracurricular activity when it came time for promotions, regardless of the company publicizing her group as proof of its inclusive culture. When Butterfield reacted that he was sorry her diversity work was not valued, Hirpa tweeted back, “Alas, you’re simply a CEO in the position of power to change that!”

Black workers working for consumer brand names are speaking up as well.

At Adidas, Julia Bond, a 25- year-old assistant designer for guys’s clothing, said the demonstrations assisted influence her to email senior executives on June 3 seeking a “public apology for the bigotry and discrimination that they have actually freely made it possible for and perpetuated across the brand.”

A number of months after joining the sports clothing firm in 2015, Bond said she was provided a design packet that included a picture of a man wearing a T-shirt with a Confederate flag. Seeing that image at work “was truly traumatizing,” Bond remembered. “If our greatest style motivation [includes] a Confederate flag, how are we ever going to reach black customers?”

In an Instagram post, another Adidas designer alleged a colleague had actually utilized the n-word. And in an e-mail to senior management posted on social media, Aaron Ture, a worker who works for Reebok, which is owned by Adidas, stated that he remembered Karen Parkin, head of global human resources at Adidas, dismissing a concern about internal bigotry during a 2019 conference as “sound we only hear in North America.”

Parkin on Friday sent a message to staff members promising to enhance company culture to “ensure equity, variety and chance.” As the company’s personnels executive, she wrote, “it was my obligation to explain our conclusive stance against discrimination, and this I did not. Must I have actually upset anyone, I apologize.”

Adidas stated that the company would need a minimum of 30 percent of all open positions in the United States to be filled with black and Latino employees and invest $120 million in programs for the black neighborhood over the next 4 years.

Bond said speaking out has actually made her “exceptionally worried.” But there’s “strength in numbers,” she stated. “I believe everyone can feel that. The numbers are showing up, and that’s what’s pushing this wave of modification.”

Adidas said the company has actually promised to “continually and actively” fight bigotry.

After L’Oreal Paris just recently posted a message stating “Speaking up deserves it,” model Munroe Bergdorf accused the cosmetics company of hypocrisy. She stated L’Oreal dropped her from a project in 2017 for speaking up versus bigotry and white supremacy following the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville. L’Oreal reacted by rehiring her to serve on its recently formed UK Variety and Inclusion Advisory Board, the business posted on Instagram.

” I are sorry for the absence of dialogue and support the business showed Munroe around the time of termination,” L’Oreal Paris Brand president Delphine Viguier composed. “We ought to have likewise done more to develop a discussion for modification as we are now doing.”

Staff members at other companies are promoting the elimination of leaders for habits they state perpetuates racism– some with fast success.

More than 100 staff members at Estee Lauder are demanding the ouster of the founder’s boy and successor, Ronald Lauder, from the board– asserting that his political contributions to Trump are harming the business’s relationship with its black staff members and with the black community at large. In action, the business said it would double the amount it invests in contracts with black-owned suppliers and recruit and promote more black workers.

CrossFit’s founder and CEO, Greg Glassman, was forced to retire over several remarks he made about Floyd’s death, including a recording of him on a conference call stating: “We’re not mourning for George Floyd– I do not believe me or any of my staff are.” In a statement, Glassman stated he had actually “developed a rift in the CrossFit community and inadvertently harmed much of its members.”

The CEO of the Wing, a private club for ladies to work and interact socially, and the editors in chief of Refinery29, a fashion and charm blog site, and Bon Appétit publication, which is owned by Condé Nast, all resigned in recent days after black and brown workers described a work environment swarming with pay variations and discrimination.

” It’s a turning point,” Diamond said. “My biggest fear is we are going to get to a location real quickly where the establishment states, ‘Well, that was uneasy. No more, thank you. Now let’s return to work.’ “

Find Out More

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/as-big-corporations-state-black-lives-matter-their-performance-history-raise-uncertainty/

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deniscollins · 5 years ago

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U.A.W. Corruption Case Widens as Former Chief Is Charged

If you were a union official, what would you do if, after reaching a labor agreement with Fiat Chrysler, Fiat offered to pay for the union negotiating team’s $7,000 dinner: (1) accept the offer, (2) reject the offer? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

For five years, federal investigators have pieced together a broad pattern of corruption within the United Automobile Workers. They documented the diversion of dues for high living by union officials and found a conspiracy that may have compromised dealings with a leading automaker.

Now prosecutors have taken aim at their biggest target yet, charging a former U.A.W. president with embezzlement of union funds. And they left no doubt that there may be more to come — possibly including a federal takeover of the union, a pillar of the nation’s labor movement.

In a criminal filing unsealed Thursday, the former president, Gary Jones, is accused of misusing more than $1 million of union money for extravagant meals, golf outings, cigars, apparel and other purposes over several years before his election in 2018.

He is the highest-ranking U.A.W. official to be prosecuted in the inquiry, in which more than a dozen people have pleaded guilty, including several former union officers and three former Fiat Chrysler executives. One of those executives, the company’s chief labor negotiator, was found to have used funds from a training program for union workers to buy a Ferrari and renovate his home.

“We stand before you because of greed — greed of men in positions of power,” Steven M. D’Antuono, a federal special agent who worked on the case, said on Thursday at a news conference in Detroit.

On their own, the various elements of the scandal, which came to light through an investigation that began in 2015, appear lurid but relatively small-time. In one case, a senior union official who once held a seat on G.M.’s board has pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks from companies that supplied the union with commemorative watches.

But the combined effect of the wrongdoing outlined by prosecutors and cited in other court filings suggests a highly insular culture in which officials rose to power by doing illicit favors for one another. Some made decisions affecting the entire industry that may have been influenced by improper spending.

For example, General Motors has accused Fiat Chrysler of bribing union officials to get a leg up on G.M. in contract negotiations, contending in a lawsuit that its competitor paid for the union’s negotiating team to have a $7,000 dinner shortly after concluding a labor agreement. Fiat Chrysler has called the suit meritless.

Despite declining numbers in recent decades, the U.A.W. remains one of the nation’s leading unions, with more than 400,000 active members. It has distanced itself from Mr. Jones, who resigned in November, and denounced the activity attributed to him.

“This is a violation of trust, a violation of the sacred management of union dues, and goes against everything we believe in as a union,” it said in a statement Thursday. It declared that the union was “continuing to implement the critical reforms necessary to ensure our union is free from the type of corrosive corruption we have witnessed.”

But at a news conference in Detroit, the U.S. attorney overseeing the investigation, Matthew Schneider, said he could not rule out a federal takeover of the union. Another union faced with corruption allegations, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, wound up under government oversight for a quarter-century.

Mr. Schneider alluded to that episode and said oversight could be a “good model here.” While he said it was premature to elaborate on that prospect, he declared, “We are another step closer to ridding the U.A.W. of its corrupt leadership and returning it to its hard-working members.”

The prosecutor also suggested that there could be more revelations relating to how the corruption may have infected an industry that produces hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue. He said that there was an “ongoing investigation touching on all the auto companies” but that it was “difficult to explain what else is out there” and that investigators were still collecting tips from the public and U.A.W. members.

The charges against Mr. Jones could be an important step toward further pulling back the curtain. A guilty plea could lead to cooperation with prosecutors seeking to bring further charges, though Mr. Schneider said he would have to “wait and see” when asked if he expected such cooperation.

Bruce Maffeo, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, declined to comment. Mr. Jones’s last known home, in Canton, Mich., appeared empty of furniture on Thursday, with a for-sale sign in front and a lock box on the door handle. The asking price for the 3,500-square-foot home is $530,000, according to the realty company handling the sale.

Among the union officials whose activities Mr. Jones could illuminate are Dennis Williams, his predecessor as president. A plea agreement in February with a onetime deputy to Mr. Jones indicated that “Official B” had urged the use of union money to benefit himself and other officials. Union officials have confirmed that “Official B” in court filings referred to Mr. Williams.

The union has emphasized that the government has never indicated that its current president, Rory Gamble, is a target of the investigation, and that no current U.A.W. official or board member is implicated in the charges against Mr. Jones. But at his news conference, Mr. Schneider pointedly declined to rule out Mr. Gamble as a target.

“Our focus is on any corrupt activities within the U.A.W.,” Mr. Schneider said. “It doesn’t matter who is operating it.”

Mr. Jones faces two counts: that he diverted union funds to support spending that benefited him and other union officials, and that this embezzlement conspiracy resulted in tax fraud.

For example, the filing asserts that in 2017, Mr. Jones and others orchestrated the transfer of more than $500,000 in union funds to four resorts throughout the country, and that more than $290,000 of that amount went to illegitimate uses like meals and cigars. It says that this caused a U.A.W. official to unknowingly file a false tax form with the Internal Revenue Service omitting the $290,000 as reportable income to the union’s officers.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Jones could face up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine for each of two counts. If convicted, he would also have to forfeit any property or money he obtained through the conspiracy.

Last fall, Mr. Jones guided the union through a 40-day strike against General Motors that ended with substantial pay increases, promises of large investments in plants in the United States and a process for temporary workers to become permanent employees.

Mr. Jones, who had previously led the union’s sprawling Region 5, resigned as U.A.W. president on Nov. 20 after the union’s executive board found he had submitted false and misleading expense records and took steps to oust him. His home had been raided in August by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On the day of that raid, federal agents also searched other locations, including the union’s 1,000-acre retreat, known as Black Lake, in Onaway, Mich.; the Hazelwood, Mo., office of U.A.W. Region 5, which Mr. Jones once led; and Mr. Williams’s home in Corona, Calif.

Among the sites searched at the Michigan retreat was a lakeside cabin being built for the exclusive use of Mr. Williams, who led the union from 2014 to 2018.

Mr. Williams, who joined the union as a welder, later served as a regional leader and secretary-treasurer. When the charges involving the misuse of training funds to benefit Fiat Chrysler and U.A.W. officials emerged in 2017, he said the union “had absolutely no knowledge of the fraudulent activities detailed in this indictment until they were brought to our attention by the government.”

As the case widened this year, an associate of Mr. Jones’s in Region 5, Edward N. Robinson, was charged on Oct. 31 with diverting more than $1.5 million from union accounts over several years and sharing the money with a person prosecutors identified as U.A.W. “Official A,” which union officials confirmed was Mr. Jones.

Two days later, the U.A.W. board convened and announced that Mr. Jones would take a paid leave. Mr. Gamble, a union vice president who led the bargaining with Ford, was named interim president.

Vance Pearson, who led the Region 5 office after serving as Mr. Jones’s lieutenant there, pleaded guilty on Feb. 7 to conspiring with union officials to embezzle funds after agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors in the investigation.

The plea agreement stated that a request by Mr. Jones’s predecessor, Mr. Williams — again referred to as “Official B” — was “to a great extent” behind an order for more than $13,000 worth of cigars and cigar paraphernalia in 2016. The agreement also said that Mr. Williams had directed Mr. Pearson to procure a private villa for him in California for months at a time, and that Mr. Pearson also helped arrange for Mr. Williams’s wife to charge expenses to the union through a resort.

A lawyer for Mr. Williams did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

#Unions #Corruption

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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President Trump has made it no secret that he’s courting the labor vote. He awkwardly hosted steelworkers at his press conference earlier this year after announcing steel tariffs, and his trade representative has worked closely with labor stalwarts like Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. He won the 2016 election with a greater share of union members voting red than anyone in at least a generation.

The latest overture to the working class came last month, when the administration dropped its remake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which is now called the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement, or USMCA. For the first time in a trade deal, a certain percentage of auto production will be required to be made by workers paid $16 an hour in order to take advantage of duty-free benefits. Unlike the original NAFTA, labor rights provisions are now in the core of the agreement, and Mexico has agreed to undertake reforms on collective bargaining.

All of these changes seem geared toward the administration’s stated goal of having the support of “a huge number of Democrats” when Congress votes on the deal next year.

But don’t break out the party streamers just yet. As Vox reported, enforceability of the labor rights rules remains a major question mark. The $16-an-hour rules only apply to one industry, and auto importers have already identified ways to circumvent them. More fundamentally, these reforms seem almost retro in a period when progressive domestic labor policy is flourishing for the first time in decades — with ambitious proposals for more sectoral bargaining or mandating worker spots on corporate boards.

At a more fundamental level, Trump’s trade moves put unions in a tricky bind. If they support him for meeting longstanding demands, they deliver a win to their political enemy. If they balk, then they allow Trump to claim that he — not unions — is the true voice of the working class. If there was any doubt that Trump was seeing this through a political lens, this evaporated when he attacked the head of the AFL-CIO (who had offered qualified support for the NAFTA remake)… on Labor Day weekend.

Labor needn’t accept these no-win terms of the debate. Instead of asking for trade deals that hurt their workers marginally less, labor could ask for international agreements that directly help. Here’s a model for how: a new international labor treaty modeled on the Paris climate deal that puts labor at the center.

Before getting into the meat of this new international labor treaty, consider why the underlying goal of helping labor makes sense domestically. A growing body of research shows that a decline in union power leads to economic inequality, weakened democracy, and political instability. The benefits of a union to workers is obvious, with research consistently showing a 20 percent wage premium for unionized employees over those that aren’t organized.

But the benefits also accrue more broadly. Economists at the International Monetary Fund have concluded that a 10 percent drop in union density is associated with a 5 percent increase in the top 10 percent’s income shares, in part because of the influence that organized labor can have on disciplining managers and executives from running off with an unfair share of corporate revenues. Sociologist Jake Rosenfeld of the University of Washington in St. Louis estimates that the decline in union density accounted for 30 percent of the overall growth in private sector wage inequality among men and approximately 20 percent of that for women.

These benefits don’t stop at the water’s edge. Around the world, the decline of unions has opened up a space for populist authoritarians to claim to be the true voice of workers. A 2016 study of 16 European countries found that unions — especially those with strong ties to social democratic parties — help keep workers from tilting to the right.

A 2018 article looking at similar survey data for a subset of these countries hypothesized why: While right-wing populism thrives on “welfare chauvinism” (or social democracy only for native whites), unions preach a gospel of solidarity among all workers and offer a political networking space to debate and disarm the siren call of the right. In the US case, historian Timothy Minchin emphasizes how anti-racist education by industrial unions in the Midwest helped white workers overcome anxiety over voting for a black candidate named Barack Hussein Obama.

This rise in the far right doesn’t just destabilize the home front; it also destabilizes internationally. In the United Kingdom, pressure from the UK Independence Party led the Tories to hold the Brexit referendum, which attracted numerous working-class voters and is now fraying the European project. In Italy, the former regionalist Northern League successfully catapulted into government after switching its rhetoric from attacking Rome to attacking Brussels. As deputy prime minister, League leader Matteo Salvini has taken to undermining common European positions on migration. While stronger unions alone couldn’t solve all these ills, the economic gains and sense of class solidarity could help lessen the appeal of the right in the first place.

A new Worker Power Agreement would function similarly to the Paris climate deal: Nations would commit to target increases in the union density rate in the same way they target inflation rates or carbon emissions. For a country like the United States with an abysmal unionization record of 11 percent, the targets would be ambitious — say, an increase in union density of 5 percent every five years. Iceland, with around 90 percent union density, is already near a ceiling, so its commitments would involve maintaining what’s working and offering technical assistance to other countries. Every five years, countries and nongovernmental groups would take stock of progress and any mitigating factors that might be blocking it — all in a transparent setting for the world to see.

Under this agreement, nations would commit to a specific “end,” say, boosting the number of workers in a union, but the “means” of getting there — the exact mix of laws and practices — would be nationally determined. Unlike the Paris pact, this new treaty would have greater incentives to collaborate and penalties for failing to do so. If a government or firm was frustrating the national target, labor unions could launch arbitration claims against them, much as foreign investors can do over violations of investment rights in trade deals today. To preserve a balance between objectively verifiable commitments and respect for sovereignty, sanctions could only be applied against violators if multiple countries agreed.

All of this international enforcement apparatus is necessarily linked to domestic policy change. There’s a range of ways countries have increased their unionization rate in the past that could be updated for the modern era. For instance, in 2009 the Obama administration came into office promising to make procurement by federal agencies more friendly to labor. But by 2017, many of these executive orders were still tied up in lawsuits brought by business interests. The script needs to be flipped: Incorporation benefits and subsidies should be made contingent on companies being better actors with their workforce.

Europe also has practices worthy of following. Austria and Luxembourg, for instance, have nationwide “labor chambers” where every worker is compulsorily a member, can run for office in the chamber, and pays dues through their taxes. The body represents the interests of workers, giving out legal and consumer advice to its members and commenting on national legislature proposals.

While importing this exact model to other countries could prove challenging, a similar role could be played by existing labor organizations. For instance, organizations like the AFL-CIO already “score” legislation by whether it helps or hurts workers. Instead of having to find what they think on some labor webpage, Congress could put labor’s score on the text of the legislation itself.

Finally, countries can make union membership the default rather than the exception. In some nations, union membership could be compulsory, much like membership in Austria’s labor chamber. In the US — with our constitutional skepticism of forced affiliation — the mechanism be an opt-out form, so that when workers are hired, they would have to affirm that they do not want protection of their rights.

A Paris deal for labor would have another advantage: It would set clear progressive markers for evaluating policy proposals that are less susceptible to being weaseled out of, and that, if met, would lead to discernible improvement in people’s lives.

Effective policymaking is best thought of as a feedback loop: Good policies create constituencies that will support them. If, having supported a policy change, voters see no benefit, this can create cynicism about the political process and ultimately disengagement. Any policy passed is thus more susceptible to reversal.

In the Worker Power Agreement, policy is political — in a good way. By emphasizing institutions, empowering workers, and sidelining opposing interests (whether in C-suites or supreme courts), this new treaty can help globalization be not only less resisted but actively supported. What could be better for peace and tranquility?

Todd N. Tucker is a political scientist and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the author of Judge Knot, a book about the role of lawyers in globalization. Find him on Twitter @toddntucker.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> Why labor is a foreign policy issue

via The Conservative Brief

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maryturck · 7 years ago

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Caricature used under Creative Commons license

Trump says undocumented immigrants are flooding into the country to take advantage of DACA. Except that in real life, DACA was only available to young immigrants who were here for at least five years before 2012. He clearly does not know what he is talking about—and doesn’t care.

In other news: One district court rules that a lawsuit against the administration’s DACA decision can continue; another requires USCIS to give asylum seekers clear direction on time limits for applying; social media accounts and extreme vetting; and real people’s individual stories, including deportation of Minnesota Somalis.

Venting on Immigration, Trump Vows ‘No More DACA Deal’ and Threatens Nafta (New York Times, 4/1/18)

“‘NO MORE DACA DEAL’?!!” Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota wrote on Twitter. “You were never doing a DACA deal. Your actions gave you away: cancelling DACA with no plan, making racist comments about Black/Brown immigrants, ejecting several by bipartisan deals. You didn’t fool anybody.”

Trump’s Easter morning Twitter tirade was probably triggered by a Fox news segment about this story: A huge caravan of Central Americans is headed for the US and no one in Mexico dares to stop them (Buzzfeed, 3/30/18)

“For five days now hundreds of Central Americans — children, women, and men, most of them from Honduras — have boldly crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases, and police in a desperate, sometimes chaotic march toward the United States. Despite their being in Mexico without authorization, no one has made any effort to stop them.

“Organized by a group of volunteers called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants.”

Social media screening and extreme vetting

14 million visitors to U.S. face social media screening (New York Times, 3/30/18)

“Last September, the Trump administration announced that applicants for immigrant visas would be asked for social media data, a plan that would affect 710,000 people or so a year. The new proposal would vastly expand that order to cover some 14 million people each year who apply for nonimmigrant visas.

“The proposal covers 20 social media platforms. Most of them are based in the United States: Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine and YouTube. But several are based overseas: the Chinese sites Douban, QQ, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo and Youku; the Russian social network VK; Twoo, which was created in Belgium; and Ask.fm, a question-and-answer platform based in Latvia.”

Hand over my social media account to get a U.S. visa? No, thank you. (The Guardian, 3/31/18)

“The government doesn’t need to ask for people’s social media handles in order to vet them. Bar China, perhaps, the US is the world’s most powerful surveillance state – thanks, largely, to Obama’s expansion of the government’s surveillance powers. This new proposal has nothing to do with national security. It’s about cracking down on free speech.

“If you’re planning a trip to the US you are probably going to start thinking twice about criticising Trump online now. It’s a warning to the world to watch how you talk about the US if you ever want to set foot in the place.

“And while this new proposal may be directed at visitors, it also sends a message to residents and citizens that you ought to watch what you say online.”

U.S. to require would-be immigrants to turn over social media handles (CNN, 3/29/18)

“According to notices submitted by the State Department on Thursday, set for formal publication on Friday, the government plans to require nearly all visa applicants to the US to submit five years of social media handles for specific platforms identified by the government — and with an option to list handles for other platforms not explicitly required.

“The administration expects the move to affect nearly 15 million would-be immigrants to the United States…”

Other extreme vetting measures have already begun. State Department enhances vetting of skilled immigrants (Detroit News, 4/1/18)

“Still, businesses have noticed a change.

“We’ve got employees that are going through the process, who have gone through such a level of scrutiny and interrogatory that is unprecedented,” said Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, which advocates for H1B visas and has had one of its own workers have to move back overseas because of delays in approving the requisite visa.”

In other news

Citing Trump’s ‘racial slurs,’ judge says suit to preserve DACA can continue (New York Times, 3/29/18)

“One might reasonably infer,” Judge Garaufis wrote, “that a candidate who makes overtly bigoted statements on the campaign trail might be more likely to engage in similarly bigoted action in office.”

District Court Issues Favorable Nationwide Ruling on Behalf of Thousands of Asylum Seekers (American Immigration Council, 3/28/18)

“A federal district court judge in Washington State ruled today that the federal government’s failure to notify asylum seekers that they must apply for asylum within one year of arriving in the United States violated their right to due process and ordered the government to provide such notice….

“In addition, the Court ordered Defendants to accept as timely any asylum application from a class member filed within one year of receiving such notice. Finally, the Court ordered the government to create a uniform, procedural mechanism to ensure that all class members have a meaningful opportunity to file their asylum applications in a timely manner.”

Real people, real stories

Man freed after wrongful conviction only to be taken into custody by immigration authorities (Chicago Tribune, 3/29/18)

“In the two decades since Ricardo Rodriguez was convicted of murder, he has maintained his innocence.

“This week, the Cook County state’s attorney agreed to drop the case against him amid allegations that a discredited police detective manipulated witnesses.…

“Before he was sent to prison for a 1995 murder, Rodriguez was a lawful permanent resident. His status was revoked when he was convicted, his attorneys said. Now he faces the possibility of being deported despite being freed.”

Deported U.S. Army veteran wins fight for U.S. citizenship (NBC, 3/29/18)

“A deported veteran who launched a health clinic for other deported veterans in Tijuana, Mexico, has been granted citizenship in the United States.

“Hector Barajas-Varela was deported 10 years ago. On Thursday, in uniform and surrounded by supporters and fellow deported veterans, Barajas-Varela received the news from the Department of Homeland Security.

“Barajas-Varela was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and arrived in the U.S. with his parents when he was 7. He grew up in the United States and enlisted in the Army in 1995.”

He spoke out against Somalia’s terrorist groups. Now ICE has deported him there. (The Intercept, 3/31/18) Minnesotan Guled Muhumed, was one of the planeload of deportees in last year’s aborted deportation attempt. On Thursday, Muhumed and other Somalis were again loaded on a plane bound for Somalia. Before he left, The Intercept interviewed him and tells his story:

“In interviews this week, Muhumed recounted his experiences in West Texas, and the terror he has been living through, faced with the serious possibility of being separated from his wife and children and dropped off in a war-ravaged nation that he has not seen since he was a child.

“Muhumed also described the anguish of watching mistakes he made when he was a young man come back around more than a decade later to wreak havoc on his adult life. As a high school administrator and youth counselor, Muhumed spearheaded a program in his community to turn refugee children, particularly young Somalis, away from drugs, crime, and radicalism. He has spoken out publicly against the terrorist groups that wield considerable power in Somalia, making the fact that the U.S. government has treated him like some sort of national security threat, while working hard to drop him off on the very turf where those groups operate, all the more ironic and terrifying.”

She fled LIberia’s civil war 24 years ago. Now Trump wants her to go back. (Guardian, 4/1/18) Trump’s order ending DED will separate Magdalene Menyongaro and her daughter.

“Gabrielle Gworlekaju, 16, is a sophomore in high school in Minnesota, a cheerleader and an A student. She wants to pursue a career in medicine and, in about a year’s time, she’ll begin the process of choosing a university.

“There’s one person she leans on more than most for advice in such decisions – her mother, Magdalene Menyongaro, 48, who came to the US from Liberia 24 years ago, fleeing the country’s civil war. ”

Manhattan church shields Guatemalan woman from deportation (New York Times, 3/28/18)

“The strategy can work. Of the 39 immigrants who sought public sanctuary nationally in 2017, nine were granted reprieves from deportation, according to a database kept by the organization. Of the 12 who have sought sanctuary in 2018, six have gotten reprieves.”

April Fool tweets again Trump says undocumented immigrants are flooding into the country to take advantage of DACA. Except that in real life, DACA was only available to young immigrants who were here for at least five years before 2012.

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shg11 · 7 years ago

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The UNs Philip Alston is an expert on deprivation and he wants to know why 41m Americans are living in poverty. The Guardian joined him on a special two-week mission into the dark heart of the worlds richest nation

Los Angeles, California, 5 December

You got a choice to make, man. You could go straight on to heaven. Or you could turn right, into that.

We are in Los Angeles, in the heart of one of Americas wealthiest cities, and General Dogon, dressed in black, is our tour guide. Alongside him strolls another tall man, grey-haired and sprucely decked out in jeans and suit jacket. Professor Philip Alston is an Australian academic with a formal title: UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

General Dogon, himself a veteran of these Skid Row streets, strides along, stepping over a dead rat without comment and skirting round a body wrapped in a worn orange blanket lying on the sidewalk.

The two men carry on for block after block after block of tatty tents and improvised tarpaulin shelters. Men and women are gathered outside the structures, squatting or sleeping, some in groups, most alone like extras in a low-budget dystopian movie.

We come to an intersection, which is when General Dogon stops and presents his guest with the choice. He points straight ahead to the end of the street, where the glistening skyscrapers of downtown LA rise up in a promise of divine riches.

Heaven.

Then he turns to the right, revealing the black power tattoo on his neck, and leads our gaze back into Skid Row bang in the center of LAs downtown. That way lies 50 blocks of concentrated human humiliation. A nightmare in plain view, in the city of dreams.

Alston turns right.

Philip Alston in downtown LA. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian

So begins a two-week journey into the dark side of the American Dream. The spotlight of the UN monitor, an independent arbiter of human rights standards across the globe, has fallen on this occasion on the US, culminating on Friday with the release of his initial report in Washington.

His fact-finding mission into the richest nation the world has ever known has led him to investigate the tragedy at its core: the 41 million people who officially live in poverty.

Of those, nine million have zero cash income they do not receive a cent in sustenance.

Alstons epic journey has taken him from coast to coast, deprivation to deprivation. Starting in LA and San Francisco, sweeping through the Deep South, traveling on to the colonial stain of Puerto Rico then back to the stricken coal country of West Virginia, he has explored the collateral damage of Americas reliance on private enterprise to the exclusion of public help.

The Guardian had unprecedented access to the UN envoy, following him as he crossed the country, attending all his main stops and witnessing the extreme poverty he is investigating firsthand.

Think of it as payback time. As the UN special rapporteur himself put it: Washington is very keen for me to point out the poverty and human rights failings in other countries. This time Im in the US.

David Busch, who is currently homeless on Venice beach, in Los Angeles. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian

The tour comes at a critical moment for America and the world. It began on the day that Republicans in the US Senate voted for sweeping tax cuts that will deliver a bonanza for the super wealthy while in time raising taxes on many lower-income families. The changes will exacerbate wealth inequality that is already the most extreme in any industrialized nation, with three men Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet owning as much as half of the entire American people.

A few days into the UN visit, Republican leaders took a giant leap further. They announced plans to slash key social programs in what amounts to an assault on the already threadbare welfare state.

Look up! Look at those banks, the cranes, the luxury condos going up, exclaimed General Dogon, who used to be homeless on Skid Row and now works as a local activist with Lacan. Down here, theres nothing. You see the tents back to back, theres no place for folks to go.

California made a suitable starting point for the UN visit. It epitomizes both the vast wealth generated in the tech boom for the 0.001%, and the resulting surge in housing costs that has sent homelessness soaring. Los Angeles, the city with by far the largest population of street dwellers in the country, is grappling with crisis numbers that increased 25% this past year to 55,000.

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.

Given all that, its remarkable how positive Finley remains. What does she think of the American Dream, the idea that everyone can make it if they try hard enough? She replies instantly: I know Im going to make it.

A 41-year-old woman living on the sidewalk in Skid Row going to make it?

Sure I will, so long as I keep the faith.

What does making it mean to her?

I want to be a writer, a poet, an entrepreneur, a therapist.

Ressy Finley, who lives in a tent on 6th Street in Downtown LA. Photograph: Dan Tuffs for the Guardian

Robert Chambers occupies the next patch of sidewalk along from Finleys. Hes created an area around his tent out of wooden pallets, what passes in Skid Row for a cottage garden.

He has a sign up saying Homeless Writers Coalition, the name of a group he runs to give homeless people dignity against what he calls the animalistic aspects of their lives. Hes referring not least to the lack of public bathrooms that forces people to relieve themselves on the streets.

LA authorities have promised to provide more access to toilets, a critical issue given the deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A that began in San Diego and is spreading on the west coast claiming 21 lives mainly through lack of sanitation in homeless encampments. At night local parks and amenities are closed specifically to keep homeless people out.

Skid Row has had the use of nine toilets at night for 1,800 street-faring people. Thats a ratio well below that mandated by the UN in its camps for Syrian refugees.

Its inhuman actually, and eventually in the end you will acquire animalistic psychology, Chambers said.

He has been living on the streets for almost a year, having violated his parole terms for drug possession and in turn being turfed out of his low-cost apartment. Theres no help for him now, he said, no question of making it.

The safety net? It has too many holes in it for me.

Of all the people who crossed paths with the UN monitor, Chambers was the most dismissive of the American Dream. People dont realize its never getting better, theres no recovery for people like us. Im 67, I have a heart condition, I shouldnt be out here. I might not be too much longer.

That was a lot of bad karma to absorb on day one, and it rattled even as seasoned a student of hardship as Alston. As UN special rapporteur, hes reported on dire poverty and its impact on human rights in Saudi Arabia and China among other places. But Skid Row?

I was feeling pretty depressed, he told the Guardian later. The endless drumbeat of horror stories. At a certain point you do wonder what can anyone do about this, let alone me.

And then he took a flight up to San Francisco, to the Tenderloin district where homeless people congregate, and walked into St Boniface church.

What he saw there was an analgesic for his soul.

San Francisco, California, 6 December

The Gubbio project at St Boniface in San Francisco. The church opens its doors every weekday at 6am to allow homeless people to rest until 3pm. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

About 70 homeless people were quietly sleeping in pews at the back of the church, as they are allowed to do every weekday morning, with worshippers praying harmoniously in front of them. The church welcomes them in as part of the Catholic concept of extending the helping hand.

I found the church surprisingly uplifting, Alston said. It was such a simple scene and such an obvious idea. It struck me Christianity, what the hell is it about if its not this?

It was a rare drop of altruism on the west coast, competing against a sea of hostility. More than 500 anti-homeless laws have been passed in Californian cities in recent years. At a federal level, Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who Donald Trump appointed US housing secretary, is decimating government spending on affordable housing.

Perhaps the most telling detail: apart from St Boniface and its sister church, no other place of worship in San Francisco welcomes homeless people. In fact, many have begun, even at this season of goodwill, to lock their doors to all comers simply so as to exclude homeless people.

As Tiny Gray-Garcia, herself on the streets, described it to Alston, there is a prevailing attitude that she and her peers have to contend with every day. She called it the violence of looking away.

Coy Catley, 63, in her homeless box made of cardboard sheets on a sidewalk of Tenderloin, San Francisco. Photograph: Ed Pilkington for the Guardian

That cruel streak the violence of looking away has been a feature of American life since the nations founding. The casting off the yoke of overweening government (the British monarchy) came to be equated in the minds of many Americans with states rights and the individualistic idea of making it on your own a view that is fine for those fortunate enough to do so, less happy if youre born on the wrong side of the tracks.

Countering that has been the conviction that society must protect its own against the vagaries of hunger or unemployment that informed Franklin Roosevelts New Deal and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. But in recent times the prevailing winds have blown strongly in the youre on your own, buddy direction. Ronald Reagan set the trend with his 1980s tax cuts, followed by Bill Clinton, whose 1996 decision to scrap welfare payments for low-income families is still punishing millions of Americans.

The cumulative attack has left struggling families, including the 15 million children who are officially in poverty, with dramatically less support than in any other industrialized economy. Now they face perhaps the greatest threat of all.

As Alston himself has written in an essay on Trumps populism and the aggressive challenge it poses to human rights: These are extraordinarily dangerous times. Almost anything seems possible.

Lowndes County, Alabama, 9 December

Aaron Thigpen discusses the poor sewage conditions in Butler County. Improper treatment has put the population at risk of diseases long believed to be extinct in the US. Photograph: Bob Miller for the Guardian

Trumps undermining of human rights, combined with the Republican threat to pare back welfare programs next year in order to pay for some of the tax cuts for the rich they are rushing through Congress, will hurt African Americans disproportionately.

Black people are 13% of the US population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.

The racial element of Americas poverty crisis is seen nowhere more clearly than in the Deep South, where the open wounds of slavery continue to bleed. The UN special rapporteur chose as his next stop the Black Belt, the term that originally referred to the rich dark soil that exists in a band across Alabama but over time came to describe its majority African American population.

The link between soil type and demographics was not coincidental. Cotton was found to thrive in this fertile land, and that in turn spawned a trade in slaves to pick the crop. Their descendants still live in the Black Belt, still mired in poverty among the worst in the union.

You can trace the history of Americas shame, from slave times to the present day, in a set of simple graphs. The first shows the cotton-friendly soil of the Black Belt, then the slave population, followed by modern black residence and todays extreme poverty they all occupy the exact same half-moon across Alabama.

There are numerous ways you could parse the present parlous state of Alabamas black community. Perhaps the starkest is the fact that in the Black Belt so many families still have no access to sanitation. Thousands of people continue to live among open sewers of the sort normally associated with the developing world.

The crisis was revealed by the Guardian earlier this year to have led to an ongoing endemic of hookworm, an intestinal parasite that is transmitted through human waste. It is found in Africa and South Asia, but had been assumed eradicated in the US years ago.

Yet here the worm still is, sucking the blood of poor people, in the home state of Trumps US attorney general Jeff Sessions.

A disease of the developing world thriving in the worlds richest country.

The open sewerage problem is especially acute in Lowndes County, a majority black community that was an epicenter of the civil rights movement having been the setting of Martin Luther Kings Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965.

Philp Alston talks to a resident. Many families in Butler and Lowndes counties choose to live with open sewer systems made from PVC pipe. Photograph: Bob Miller for the Guardian

Despite its proud history, Catherine Flowers estimates that 70% of households in the area either straight pipe their waste directly onto open ground, or have defective septic tanks incapable of dealing with heavy rains.

When her group, Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (Acre), pressed local authorities to do something about it, officials invested $6m in extending waste treatment systems to primarily white-owned businesses while bypassing overwhelmingly black households.

Thats a glaring example of injustice, Flowers said. People who cannot afford their own systems are left to their own devices while businesses who do have the money are given public services.

Walter, a Lowndes County resident who asked not to give his last name for fear that his water supply would be cut off as a reprisal for speaking out, lives with the daily consequences of such public neglect. You get a good hard rain and it backs up into the house.

Thats a polite way of saying that sewage gurgles up into his kitchen sink, hand basin and bath, filling the house with a sickly-sweet stench.

Given these circumstances, what does he think of the ideology that anyone can make it if they try?

I suppose they could if they had the chance, Walter said. He paused, then added: Folks arent given the chance.

Had he been born white, would his sewerage problems have been fixed by now?

After another pause, he said: Not being racist, but yeah, they would.

Round the back of Walters house the true iniquity of the situation reveals itself. The yard is laced with small channels running from neighboring houses along which dark liquid flows. It congregates in viscous pools directly underneath the mobile home in which Walters son, daughter-in-law and 16-year-old granddaughter live.

It is the ultimate image of the lot of Alabamas impoverished rural black community. As American citizens they are as fully entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Its just that they are surrounded by pools of excrement.

This week, the Black Belt bit back. On Tuesday a new line was added to that simple graphic, showing exactly the same half-moon across Alabama except this time it was not black but blue.

blue belt south

It depicted the army of African American voters who turned out against the odds to send Doug Jones to the US Senate, the first Democrat from Alabama to do so in a generation. It delivered a bloody nose to his opponent, the alleged child molester Roy Moore, and his puppetmasters Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.

It was arguably the most important expression of black political muscle in the region since Kings 1965 march. If the previous entries in the graphic could be labeled soil, slavery and poverty, this one should be captioned empowerment.

Guayama, Puerto Rico, 10 December

So how does Alston view the role of UN rapporteur and his visit? His full report on the US will be released next May before being presented to the UN human rights council in Geneva.

Nobody expects much to come of that: the world body has no teeth with which to enforce good behavior on recalcitrant governments. But Alston hopes that his visit will have an impact by shaming the US into reflecting on its values.

My role is to hold governments to account, he said. If the US administration doesnt want to talk about the right to housing, healthcare or food, then there are still basic human rights standards that have to be met. Its my job to point that out.

Alstons previous investigations into extreme poverty in places like Mauritania pulled no punches. We can expect the same tough love when it comes to his analysis of Puerto Rico, the next stop on his journey into Americas dark side.

Three months after Maria, the devastation wrought by the hurricane has been well documented. It tore 70,000 homes to shreds, brought industry to a standstill and caused a total blackout of the island that continues to cause havoc.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extreme-poverty-un-special-rapporteur

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rawskruge · 7 years ago

Text

werds

The fact that chimps share 99% of their DNA with us is really impressive until you realize that string beans share 50% of it

mosquitos are like dirty used needles that can fly

the top 2000 m of the world ocean warmed about0.09 C degrees during the time period from 1970 to 2013. It also reports the UK’s Met Office calculated that if the same amount of energy had gone into the lower atmosphere, it would have raised its temperature about 36 C degrees!

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Understanding time:

- Oxford University is older than the Aztecs.

- In the span of 66 years, we went from taking flight to landing on the moon.

- There is more processing power in a TI-83 calculator than in the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon.

- The first pyramids were built while the woolly mammoth was still alive.

- The fax machine was invented the same year people were traveling the Oregon Trail.

- Everything in this 1991 RadioShack ad exists in a single smartphone.

- There was more time between the Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex than between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and you.

- If the history of Earth were compressed to a single year, modern humans would appear on December 31st at about 11:58pm.

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Asker or guesser:

We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.”

Neither’s “wrong”, but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it’s a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they’re diehard Askers.

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the multiple benefits of organic farming — what Europeans call multifunctionality. For one, farmers benefit because instead of needing to purchase costly chemicals, genetically engineered seeds and synthetic fertilizer, they can largely work with the ecological systems of their own farmscapes to fend off pests and promote fertility. Organic farming benefits the rest of us too. These low-input practices promote biodiversity (key to food security), protect pollinators (key to one-third of the food we eat), reduce farm energy use while storing more carbon in the soil (key to fixing climate change) and foster clean water and air (key to, well, everything).

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tower of babble (from Harpers)

Donald J. Trump, a reality-television star erecting a mausoleum for himself behind the first-hole tee of a golf course he owns in New Jersey, first declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the atrium of Trump Tower, which he built in the 1980s with labor provided by hundreds of undocumented Polish workers and concrete purchased at an inflated price from the Gambino and Genovese crime families. “The American dream is dead,” Trump said to the audience members, each of whom he paid $50 to attend. During Trump’s primary campaign, he told his supporters that he knew “all about crazies,” loved “Wall Street guys” who are “brutal,” planned to “use the word ‘anchor baby,’ ” and preferred to pronounce “Qatar” incorrectly. Trump, who in 1999 cut his sick infant grandnephew off the Trump Organization’s health-care plan and in 2011 compared being gay to switching to a long-handled golf putter, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and said he’d consider trying to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage. Trump said that his book The Art of the Deal was second in quality only to the Bible and that he never explicitly asked God for forgiveness. At a church in Iowa, he placed a few dollar bills into a bowl filled with sacramental bread, which he has referred to as “my little cracker.” Trump, who once dumped a glass of wine on a journalist who wrote a story he didn’t like, told his supporters that journalists were “liars,” the “lowest form of humanity,” and “enemies,” but that he did not approve of killing them. “I’m a very sane person,” said Trump, who once hosted a radio show in which he discussed the development of hair-cloning technology, the creation of a vaccine for obesity, the number of men a gay man thinks about having sex with on his morning commute, and the dangers of giving free Viagra to rapists. Trump denied being the voice of John Miller, one of several fictional assistants he had previously admitted pretending to be, in a recording of himself telling a reporter that he had “zero interest” in dating Madonna; that he had three other girlfriends in addition to Marla Maples, with whom he had been cheating on his wife; and that he had an affair with Carla Bruni, who later responded by describing Trump as “obviously a lunatic.” Trump, who once offered the city of New York vacant apartments in his building to house homeless people in hopes they would drive away rent-controlled tenants, sent a bumper sticker to a group of homeless veterans whom he had previously declined to help and asked them to campaign for him. Trump, whose companies have been cited 24 times since 2005 for failing to pay workers overtime or minimum wage, said the federal minimum wage should go up, and then said it should not. Trump referred to 9/11 as “7-Eleven,” and called Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren “the Indian” and “Pocahontas.” Trump, who had previously labeled a deaf contestant on his reality-TV show The Apprentice “retarded,” and had described poor Americans as “morons,” said the country was on course for a “very massive recession,” one resembling the U.S. recession of 2007 to 2009, which Trump once said Americans could “opt out of” by joining Trump Network, a multilevel-marketing company that sold a monthly supply of multivitamins purportedly tailored to customers based on a test of their urine. Trump submitted his financial-disclosure form to the Federal Election Commission, on which he swore under oath that his golf course in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which was being sued by the town for causing flooding, was worth $50 million, despite having sworn in a previous property-tax appeal that it was worth $1.4 million; and swore that his golf course in Palos Verdes, California, which he was suing for five times its annual revenue, was worth more than $50 million, despite previously having filed papers with Los Angeles County stating it was worth $10 million. Trump claimed he made $1.9 million from his modeling agency, which a foreign-born former model accused of “modern-day slavery,” alleging that the agency forced her to lie about her age, work without a U.S. visa, and live in a crowded apartment for which she paid the agency as much as $1,600 a month to sleep in a bed beneath a window through which a homeless man once urinated on her. Trump sought to exclude a recording of himself telling the nephew of former president George W. Bush that he grabs women “by the pussy” from a fraud suit filed against Trump University, a series of real-estate seminars taught by salespeople with no real-estate experience, which was housed in a Trump-owned building that the Securities and Exchange Commission said also housed the country’s most complained-about unregistered brokerages, and whose curriculum investigators in Texas described as “inapplicable.” Trump announced that he would win the Latino vote, and tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl from Trump Grill in Trump Tower with the message “I love Hispanics!” Trump referred to a black man at one of his rallies as “my African American,” and pledged his support for black people at a gathering of mostly white people in Wisconsin, whom he often referred to as “the forgotten people.” “I am the least racist person,” said Trump, who was sued twice by the Justice Department in the 1970s for allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black tenants, whose Trump Plaza Hotel was fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1992 for removing black dealers from card tables, who allegedly told a former employee that he hated “black guys counting my money,” who in 2005 floated the idea of pitting an all-black Apprentice team against an all-white one to reflect “our very vicious world,” and who was endorsed by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, one of whom said, “What he believes, we believe.” Trump tweeted statistics credited to a fictional government agency falsely claiming that the majority of white murder victims in the United States are killed by black people. Trump tweeted a photoshopped picture of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who Trump had said “had blood coming out of her wherever,” standing next to a Saudi prince, who tweeted back that he had “financially rescued” Trump twice, including once in 1990, when the prince purchased Trump’s 281-foot yacht, which was formerly owned by a Saudi arms dealer with whom Trump often partied in Atlantic City, and with whom Trump was implicated in a tax-evasion scheme involving a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. Trump disputed former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s claim that Trump magazine is defunct, showing as proof an annual circular for his clubs that was not Trump magazine, which folded in 2009. Trump republished his book Crippled America with the title Great Again. Trump told and retold an apocryphal story about a U.S. general who executed Muslim soldiers with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and proposed that Muslims be banned from entering the country. At the first primary debate, Trump praised his companies’ bankruptcies, including that of Trump Entertainment Resorts, in which lenders lost more than $1 billion and 1,100 employees lost their jobs, and that of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a publicly traded company that Trump used to purchase two casinos for almost $1 billion, and from which he resigned after the company went bankrupt for the first time, but before it went bankrupt for the second time. “I made a lot of money,” said Trump. At the fifth primary debate, Trump defended the idea of retaliating against America’s foreign aggressors by killing non-combatant members of their families, saying it would “make people think.” At the eleventh primary debate, Trump told the crowd there was “no problem” with the size of his penis. Trump said that he knew more about the Islamic State than “the generals,” and that he would “rely on the generals” to defeat the Islamic State. Trump said he would bring back waterboarding and torture because “we have to beat the savages.” Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted protesters at his rallies, denied making the offer, then made the offer again after a 78-year-old white supporter in North Carolina punched a 26-year-old black protester in the eye and said, “Next time we see him we might have to kill him.” Trump, who in 1999 called Republicans too “crazy right” and in 2000 ran on a Reform Party platform that included creating a lottery to fund U.S. spy training, said that the 2016 primaries were “rigged,” then clinched the Republican nomination for president, receiving more votes than any Republican in history. “I was the one who really broke the glass ceiling,” said Trump when his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, became the first woman to lead a major party’s ticket. Trump hired Steve Bannon, the editor of the white-nationalist website Breitbart, to replace his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who ran a firm that once lobbied for the military dictator of Zaire, and who himself replaced Corey Lewandowski, who resigned from the campaign not long after he was filmed grabbing a Breitbart reporter by the arm to prevent her from asking Trump any questions. Trump selected as his running mate Indiana governor Mike Pence, who previously backed a bill that would allow hospitals to deny care to critically ill pregnant women, and who once criticized the Disney character Mulan as a “mischievous liberal” created to persuade Americans that women should be allowed to hold combat positions in the military. In his general-election campaign, Trump said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, and called on Russia to hack into Clinton’s email account. Trump said that he doesn’t pay employees who don’t “do a good job,” after a review of the more than 3,500 lawsuits filed against Trump found that he has been accused of stiffing a painter and a dishwasher in Florida, a glass company in New Jersey, dozens of hourly hospitality workers, and some of the lawyers who represented him. “I’m a fighter,” said Trump, who body-slammed the WWE chairman at WrestleMania 23 in 2007, and who attended WrestleMania IV with Robert LiButti, an Atlantic City gambler with alleged mafia ties, who told Trump he’d “fucking pull your balls from your legs” if Trump didn’t stop trying to seduce his daughter. Trump, whose first wife, Ivana, accused him in divorce filings of rape, and whose special council later said rape within a marriage was not possible, said “no one respects women more than I do.” Trump threatened to sue 12 women who accused him of sexual misconduct, including one who recalled Trump trying “like an octopus” to put his hand up her skirt on an airplane 35 years ago; four former Miss Teen USA contestants, who alleged that Trump entered their dressing room while girls as young as 15 were changing and said, “I’ve seen it all before”; the winner of Miss Utah USA in 1997, who alleged that Trump forcibly kissed her on the lips and then told her, “Twenty-one is too old”; an adult-film star, who alleged that at a golf tournament in Tahoe in 2006 Trump offered her $10,000 and the private use of his jet to spend the night with him; and a People magazine reporter, who alleged that while she was writing a story on Trump and his current wife, Melania, on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, Trump pushed her against the wall and forcibly kissed her before telling her, “We’re going to have an affair.” “What I say is what I say,” said Trump, who previously told a pair of 14-year-old girls that he would date them in a couple of years, said of a 10-year-old girl that he would date her in 10 years, told a journalist that he wasn’t sure whether his infant daughter Tiffany would have nice breasts, told the cast of The View that if Ivanka weren’t his daughter “perhaps I would be dating her,” told radio host Howard Stern that it was okay to call Ivanka a “piece of ass” and that he could have “nailed” Princess Diana, and tweeted that a former winner of his Miss Universe pageant, whom Trump once called “Miss Piggy,” was disgusting. “Check out sex tape,” tweeted Trump, who once appeared in a soft-core pornographic film breaking a bottle of wine over a limousine. Trump did not comment on reports that he used over $200,000 in charitable contributions to the Trump Foundation to settle lawsuits against his businesses, $20,000 in contributions to the Trump Foundation to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself, and $10,000 in contributions to buy a smaller painting of himself, which he hung on the wall of his restaurant Champions Bar and Grill. “I’m the cleanest guy there is,” said Trump, who once granted the rights to explore building Trump-branded towers in Moscow to a mobster convicted of stabbing a man in the face with the stem of margarita glass, who was mentored by the former lead council for Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Gambino and Genovese crime families, who once purchased a nightclub in Atlantic City from a hit man for a Philadelphia crime family, who once worked with a soldier in the Colombo crime family to outfit Trump Golden and Executive Series limousines with a fax machine and a liquor dispenser, and who once purchased helicopter services from a cigarette-boat racer named Joseph Weichselbaum, who was charged with drug trafficking in Ohio before being moved to Trump’s sister’s courtroom in New Jersey, where the case was handed off to a different judge, who gave Weichselbaum a three-year prison sentence, of which he served 18 months before moving into Trump Tower. Trump told journalists he “made a lot of money” when he leased his house in Westchester to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. “I screwed him,” said Trump. Trump, who in 2013 said that he did “have a relationship” with Vladimir Putin, said in 2016, “I don’t know Putin.” Trump, who wrote in 1997 that concern over asbestos was a mob conspiracy, who in the 1990s spent $1 million in ads to bolster the theory that a Native American tribe in upstate New York had been infiltrated by the mafia and drug traffickers, who once implied that Barack Obama’s real name is Barry Soetoro and that he won reelection by making a secret deal with Saudi Arabia, and who in 2012 tweeted that global warming was a “hoax” created by “the Chinese” to weaken U.S. manufacturing, suggested to his supporters that the Islamic State paid the phone bills of Syrian refugees, that his primary opponent Ted Cruz’s Cuban father was involved in a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and that U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia may have been suffocated with a pillow. During the first debate of the general election, Trump said that Rosie O'Donnell had deserved it when he called her “disgusting both inside and out,” “basically a disaster,” a “slob,” and a “loser,” someone who “looks bad,” “sounds bad,” has a “fat, ugly face,” and “talks like a truck driver.” At the second general-election debate, Trump invited three women who have accused Clinton’s husband of sexual misconduct to sit in the front row; claimed that Clinton had once laughed about the rape of a 12-year-old girl, which audio showed not to be true; claimed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had endorsed him, which it had not; and afterward suggested that his opponent had been on drugs during the debate. Trump, who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, told his supporters that Clinton could shoot one of them and not be prosecuted. Trump told the audience at a Catholic charity dinner that Clinton “hates Catholics,” that she is “the devil,” and that Mexico was “getting ready to attack.” Trump, who once kept a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, told his supporters that the election was “rigged” against him, won the election despite losing the popular vote by a margin of almost 3 million, claimed that he had in fact won the popular vote, and then announced that he would be staying on as executive producer of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, which a year earlier had fired him because he called Mexicans “rapists.” “Our country,” said Trump at a victory rally, “is in trouble.”

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