#that time he was publicly executed in the middle of the scramble crossing??? i still think that was kind of morbidly funny

[strawberrah]

letting you know that I've received your ask! Usually I'd answer immediately, but given the question, I need some time to be thorough... but an answer is coming. you have no choice in the matter.

I understand. The topic of Beat is serious and deserves much careful deliberation

[thedevourers]

THE DEVOURERS - Chapter 1

The Commonwealth sits on the edge of annihilation. War presses down from the north, monsters bleed up from the southern seas, madness creeps out from the forests to the west, and at the center of the realm the capital shakes as the cracks of the world begin to widen.

A council of mages watches over the growing chaos, opening its doors to five new souls who might mean the difference between destruction and survival. Five new hearts to break or bind together. You are one of these mages raised up from a life of poverty and hardship. Before, you were nothing but a criminal, just another mouse in the labyrinth. Now, you hold power over your own fate, and it’s heady, but the higher you climb the great Spire of Cheredeme, the more you see the truth--that this apocalypse is darker than even the doomsayers of your old life could possibly imagine.

The Cincelion Council hides many secrets and snakes, none more dangerous than the mage now tied to your instruction and your fellow peers, each one of whom hides their own motivations and desires.

Who do you trust? How do you rule? And how far do you follow the unraveling threads of a realm built on lies? 

The Devourers is a communal “choose your own story” serial web novel.

Introductory post.

[translations at bottom]

Over the years you’ve thought a lot about how you would die.

Jumping off a roof in a heart-pounding chase, misjudging the distance and tumbling to the ground where your brains join the rest of the filth washing into the sewers.

Beaten bloody by one of your rivals, maybe Jeweley’s thugs or the bootlickers from Madame’s Ward in Lower City.

Maybe you’d go out fighting a squad of Gazarti, taking down dozens before one finally got lucky, passing over secure in the knowledge that your name will be remembered for years, whispered in breaking, terrified voices, eulogized in warnings and stories that scare the uniformed fuckers for decades to come.

You hoped it’d be marvelous. The kind of story that sticks around like the rats who run this city—eternal, relentless, bloody fucking magnificent.

For some reason, you never thought it would begin with you getting caught with both hands ass-deep in the Magistrate’s financial records, waiting for a warning that you realized in a sick twist of nausea would never come. You never thought you’d be betrayed. After ten years’ painful careful rise to the upper echelons of the gangs that rule the underbelly of the Commonwealth’s Crown City, you thought you’d made a name for yourself as someone to trust, someone serious enough not to fuck around with. Someone no one would think about crossing.

But if fulfilled hopes were coin you’d be just as fucking broke as you’ve always been.

Marching, or more accurately being marched, up to the Last Confessional, a quaint name for the guillotine sitting right in the middle of Aurilaco’s Merchant Plaza where the lawmakers of the Freebright Chambers can watch and pat each other on their powdered backs as they celebrate their justice from a safe distance, you hope Emmanuelle Caine is watching. You hope she’s sitting in her office watching as they decapitate the first thief to ever breach her private quarters. You hope she remembers your face for the rest of her sorry life.

You’re waiting at the back of the platform, two Gazarti holding your arms behind your back so tightly you’d worry they might pull something if you weren’t about to be decapitated. As it is, it’s just annoying. The metal cuffs dig into your wrists and every time you shift your chains clank against the cobblestones. You’ve gone over the options dozens of times but you still can’t work your way out of this mess. The locks aren’t quick picks and the chains won’t let you run and even if you knocked out both Gazarti, there are more lining the plaza. They took your knives, your iron knuckles, your hair pin, your hidden razors. They took the lock picks you made yourself and perfected over the years until they were another appendage on your hand. You had eleven fingers once. Now you only have eight and two which could not even generously be considered fingers anymore, not after the warden got tired of your ‘sass’ and decided to introduce his baton to both your thumbs. They took everything. If you’ve been in a worse spot, you can’t remember it, not as the sick slice and thud of the guillotine marks another criminal sacrificed to the crowd.

You used to watch these blood baths. You never liked them, but you thought if someone was stupid enough to get caught they deserved this public renunciation. It was cathartic, after a long night, to rest easy in the certainty that you were too good for this. You were better than all these poor, pathetic louts. They would never catch you.

You’re starting to wonder if you aren’t a bit of a fool.

Cheers and laughter and roaring encouragement fill the air and for the first time since getting caught three days ago, you realize that no one’s coming for you. You’re on your own again, right back where you started as a scared kid in the gutters of Lower City, running from smiling strangers with wandering hands and hunger in their eyes.

The truth settles softly into your gut. You weren’t fast enough to outrun your fate.

No, fate just decided to lean in and fuck you. Fate didn’t want you hanging around because you kept beating the odds. You’re the best fucking thief in this realm, and you’re going to die because you were too good to let live.

How in all the Nine Hells is that fair?

“Next!”

The chains jerk and you’re pulled into motion, bare feet scrambling as you try to get your footing. One of the Gazarti behind you laughs. She’s a brute of a woman and you would have hated her anyway for the tattoo on her face—the mark of the new fanatics making noise and scaring kids in the Shantytowns north of the city—but her breath also reeks and you can’t get over the fact that this is the last person you’ll ever touch. This…fucking…dog.

The crier stands on the dais in ornate blue robes. Rings and jewels glitter on his hand and he wears the expression of someone who thinks they’re above all this messy business. “For crimes too numerous to list,” he calls out over the settling crowd, hundreds and hundreds of faces all eager and bloodthirsty, “Prisoner 965 shall face the guillotine. May your soul—”

Prisoner 965. Thirty four people between you and a thousand. That might have helped. Being the thousandth criminal to be publicly executed would have softened the blow to your ego. Prisoner 965 is just crushed at the bottom of a bloody mound of rotting corpses. No one remembers the 965th anything.

They never even bothered to ask your fucking name.

That’s when you spot it right there in the front of the crowd. The face of your partner, the bitch who was supposed to be watching your ass while you did the hard work of cracking open the damn Magistrate’s Manse. She’s pale and looks like she’s going to be sick, and this pushes you right over the edge. You’re angry now. This little snake is the reason all your waiting and scheming and struggling just so you could stay alive has gone to shit. This child is the reason you’ll be forgotten.

Saints, but you want to rip her throat open.

You grin when she sees you staring and her eyes go wide in terror. She tries to back away, but the crowd is too thick and it’s not budging for anything.

The crier is still reading your final benediction and the bells of the Palais overhead chime the midday hour. The suns are absent behind the heavy cloud cover and all you can see is red.

“—if the confessor wishes to speak—”

“I see you, Delphine,” you cry out, your voice cracking like a whip across the square. “You coward!”

The girl cringes and keeps trying to flee, but the people around her won’t move. They’re like a wall, seething and writhing and they taste blood just as much as you do.

“You think this is over? I’ll wait for you on the other side, bitch!” The crier gives you a wearily disapproving stare but you ignore him. “You and I aren’t finished—”

“Yes, yes,” the crier says as if chastising an overwrought child, “you’ve said your peace and now to your Saints we send—”

“RINIEMNIC*,” you shout, and the plaza reels. Knowing the Old Tongue has only ever brought you more trouble than its worth, but every now and then you thank whoever decided to teach you before you were thrown onto the streets with no money and no one to go to, with no memory of who you were before you were alone. It’s effective when you’re trying to make a point. It also scares the shit out of most people.

The crier is the first to recover, face purpling in outrage. “How dare—”

“MOURMOE SIN BREAB,” you scream, eyes fixed on Delphine where she’s frozen, horrified, “eblita sidre.**”

The plaza swells with tension, like water rising against a levy, creaking, buckling. Your voice echoes along with the bells. The last note hangs in the air, suspended.

You don’t know what it is—if your words conjured some thread of light, if your rage was enough to catch something else’s attention—but there’s a quiet rush of air past your face. It’s cold and fresh like the first brush of autumn at the end of summer.

You go quiet. The world shakes around you.

Later, you’ll wonder if all of this wasn’t imagined, if you didn’t see what you wanted to see because the sheer scale of destruction was too much for even you to comprehend. You’re not a monster, you’re a thief, and if intention is the way this works, you struggle to think how this came out of you.

You wonder if it wasn’t you at all, but something else. Something looking for a door, an open lock.

You’ve always been good at opening locks.

Kneeling on the dais in the center of the Merchant Plaza in chains, you don’t see the tendrils of grey light that shoot into the crowd and steal life from their lips. You don’t see the stone crack and the guillotine fall. You don’t see the clouds part and the light of both suns burn away your chains.

All you know before you pass out is bliss. For the first time ever, you don’t feel anything.

—

It takes you three days to wake up.

That’s what they tell you, anyway, the people in white robes who refuse to explain what the bloody fuck is going on. They just look at you, or you think they do, they wear veils over their eyes so it’s somewhat difficult to see what they’re actually doing but it feels like they’re staring at you. The only reason you haven’t done something about it is because you haven’t been able to manage walking just yet.

Since the…event—you still don’t know if it was real or imagined, and no one will answer you when you ask—you’ve had trouble remembering how to move your own limbs. Sometimes you think this body was switched with a different one while you were sleeping, but that’s not exactly helpful, especially since it looks like your body. You’ve got the scar on your stomach from being stabbed by the first person you ever stole from. There’s the long burn on your calf that still stings sometimes when the hard, smooth skin pulls. And your thumbs are still broken. So it must be you.

Even if you’re having a hard time believing it was ever, actually, you.

It’s another three days until you manage to drink from a glass on your own, and then two more until the damn white robed monsters don’t have to carry you to the bath. You’re on your own for the first time since waking up in this nondescript hole in the ground and the water is too hot and you feel like something is moving under your skin, but you’re alone.

You’re alone, and you’re crying—something you haven’t allowed yourself to do in years.

Piece by piece you slowly pull yourself back together. You lose track of the days after twelve because you’re tired and going a bit mad and you still feel like your bones have grown too large for your body.

The dreams don’t help. In fact, they make everything ten times worse, because in your dreams you can’t lie to yourself.

You’re known there, in that twilit space between falling asleep and waking up. You’ve always had weird dreams and you learned a long time ago that some dreams aren’t meant to be shared or remembered. Dreams where blood covers your hands and darkness snakes vines up your legs, where you see the faces of all the people you’ve killed to stay alive.

Before the day of your execution you knew every face.

You don’t now. You couldn’t even begin.

But you know other things. Like the sound of a heartbeat under the white robes of your minders. You can hear it if you listen carefully, and then you begin to hear it all the time, even if they aren’t in the room with you. You run your hands over the wall and feel wood beneath your finger tips. It’s painted white, but you know it’s wood because you can see the tree it once was. You know the wood is from more than one tree. You spend two days counting how many, running your fingers over every inch of the walls. You build yourself a small forest to block out the noise. You know when, one day, your minders unwittingly bring in an insect with your midday meal. It hums so loud you can’t ignore it. You catch it and in a surge of anger, crush it.

Yellow liquid seeps out from its cracked red shell and you stare because you felt the moment it died. There was humming, and then there wasn’t. You’re alone again in your prison of trees.

You don’t finish the rest of your meal.

You don’t let yourself realize what you must now be.

After days and days of isolation, of mapping the new landscape of your mind and body, the truth finds you.

A knock startles you from your examination of the floor—it’s covered in motes of gold and bronze dust and you’re not sure what they’re meant to be.

You surge upright, heart racing. Your minders don’t knock.

Before you can open your mouth, the door bursts open on a gust of smoke. Waves of it sweep into the room and you feel terror you’ve never felt before, not when you were about to die, not in all the years of dancing on the knife’s edge of life, not even in the endless stretch of days since you were brought here when you let yourself wonder if maybe your memory wasn’t an embellishment at all.

Under the fear, though, you hear something strange. It’s the beating of a heart but it’s echoing. It’s almost melodic in its sound, as if it were wind brushing through the tops of trees and rustling leaves.

You blink, and the smoke is gone. The door is closed. A person stands in front of it, waiting.

And where your anger was there’s nothing but calm. It isn’t until this moment that you realize you haven’t been calm since the day you killed all those people.

“Accepted it yet?”

The voice is high and rough like a crow’s. Their shoulder-length black hair sways slightly as if stirred by wind. Their body is long and lithe, cut sharply in a military-style jacket and trousers, their boots fine leather that probably cost more money than you’ve ever seen. You meet their eyes—pearl-white and unblinking.

This isn’t a person at all.

The figure makes a small click with their tongue. “Rude.”

You stand in alarm, in anger. “You—”

“Yes.” They cock their head, the movement quick and unsettling. “You think very loudly, little sonneusera***. It’s hardly my fault if I skim something off the top.”

Everything about them screams other and the word for what they are brands itself to the front of your mind.

One of their dark brows arches.

It’s real. You know it’s real. It has to be—

“Which one are you?”

Their mouth slides into an amused smile. “Well done. I thought it might take you longer to dive in.”

Something about this smarts. “Good thing I had weeks and weeks to think about it then. Which one?”

You know you’re pushing the boundaries of sanity at this point because you’re clearly standing in front of a Brightspire who could probably end your life in less time than it would take you to scream. A Brightspire who can read your mind, just like all the worst nightmares you’ve heard over the years, thinking they were bullshit and even if they weren’t it wasn’t as if you were ever going to meet one.

All the fucking Saints, but this is mad.

They watch you for what feels like an hour before they straighten from the door and walk slowly toward you. Their every movement is precise and sharp and you begrudgingly admire it for a moment before you shut the thought down. It got through, though, if the continued smile on their face is any indication.

They stop closer to you than you’d like. You try not to let your discomfort show, but again—

“You’re really going to need to work on that,” they say quietly. “Fortunately for you, I can help.”

This close their eyes are rather beautiful. Like moonstones. There’s no sign of an iris or pupil. You wonder if they’re blind.

They don’t say anything to this. They just watch you.

“You still haven’t told me your name,” you say just as quietly.

Their mouth twitches but you can’t tell if it’s because they’re still amused or growing annoyed.

“You’d know if it was the second.”

“Stop,” you say before you can help yourself. “Fucking—stop.” You exhale slowly, trying to gather your composure again. It’s like you can feel them in your mind, picking you apart, and you hate it.

Their lashes lower and they turn away, walking toward the wall on the other side of your bed.

Without their gaze you can breathe, even while you’re left strangely bereft without their attention.

“You’ll need to cultivate some patience, sonneusera.” They throw you a smirk before examining the wall again. “I don’t mind, obviously, but there are others on the Council who will not be so lenient.”

Your chest catches fire at the patronizing tone “You don’t—mind?”

“I wouldn’t have chosen you if I did. You reek of insolence and the poor breeding of a life spent without structure. Your tongue is unschooled, you look a mess, and anyone with a basic understanding of magic would be able to hear you because you’re practically shouting.”

Heat flares along your neck and you’re about to do something very, very stupid, when they spear you with their uncanny gaze.

“I can make your new life very difficult. I might find your fledgling anger amusing but even my indulgence has a limit.”

They’re still staring at the wall, their voice calm and measured and—oddly affected, you realize for the first time. There’s a trace of the North in their accent. You’ve heard it in the slums on the tongues of refugees who choke the Shantytowns, the ones who carry nothing on their backs but stories of war and smoke and blood.

A chill seeps down your spine.

They cock their head once more. You recognize the gesture as a raptor considering its prey. The veil around them drops and you glimpse just a piece of them fully for the first time.

You used to wonder why people worshipped Brightspires as gods.

You don’t anymore.

In their eyes you see centuries of war and fear. Their face is unlined and it might have once been beautiful, but there is too much in that face for beauty now. It is ageless. Eternal.

You are nothing. How did you never realize how little you hold?

They are the Bloodweaver of the North. The monster who wages war against the undead so the Commonwealth might live on. One of the First Five. The nightmare who walks amongst dreams and wears them like a crown.

“Cesarne,” you whisper, feeling young and small and so very foolish. You taste ash on your tongue and hear the distant sound of bells, ringing, ringing.

The Brightspire of War regards you for a moment more. They lift their hand, fingers twitching. The air around you shifts and you stand on one of those fields. Bodies lay piled around you. Smoke curls tender tendrils into the blackened sky. There’s a knife in your hand that drips blood onto your bare feet.

You lick dry, broken lips. “And you call me reaper?”

The vision fades and you stand again in the white prison. Except it isn’t a prison, not anymore. A window looks out over Aurilaco—higher up than you’ve ever been before. You’ve walked and ran those streets your whole life, you know them better than anyone, yet you’ve never seen them like this before. The city spills out from the cliffs which bind it, the great river flowing through into the black seas. It looks both bigger and smaller than you ever knew when you thought you were one of them.

Trapped in a maze.

“Are you beginning to understand now?”

You swallow down your heart, eyes fixed on what you thought was your whole world. “I’m not sure I ever will.”

Cold fingers catch your chin. You don’t jerk back, but you can’t help the gooseflesh running down your arms and back. Cesarne pulls your face until you’re looking up into theirs. You see the imprint of feathers in their hair now, a mantle of darker black along their brow. You feel their scrutiny deep into your very soul. Their nails cut into your cheek and neck and you wonder if this is how you die, drowning in a pearl-white sea while blood runs down your throat.

“There is hunger in you, sonneusera,” they murmur. Their breath smells of cold autumn winds. “It will eat you alive if you let it.”

Their grip softens and you pull your face back. Before you can move, they do. You’re left standing alone at the window, staring out across the city you once thought to master.

“Perhaps you need more time to settle your thoughts,” Cesarne says almost gently, their boots striking a beat as they make for the door. “Perhaps I expected too much.”

You turn, anger flashing.

They’re waiting at the door, watching you closely.

Conflict swells up inside you and you don’t know if you want to scream or sob.

“We need not be enemies, you and I,” they murmur. “I didn’t choose you to break, but I will if you make me.”

“Why did you choose me, then?”

A slow smile tugs at their lips. Even now, though, you can hear the drums of war. The Bloodweaver does not ask and entreat. They do not speak softly and smile.

“You have so much to learn.”

You don’t know if it’s a reason or a response to your thoughts, but it pricks you right where they meant it to—you thought you were standing on the top of your tower, and now…

Cesarne waits. You stare.

You aren’t leaving this room without them, that much is clear. And you want to learn. You need to. You don’t know how but you’re here. You’re special. You mean something. And if anyone could teach you how to win, it’s the fucking Brightspire of War.

But you thought you could trust before, and where did it get you? You were nearly killed for putting your fate in the hands of someone else, you know better now, don’t you?

The world is waiting.

The question is how much you’re willing to give in order to get it.

1. Do you trust Cesarne and accept their help willingly?

2. Or are you ready to play the pupil but never to trust Cesarne?

Reply to this post to cast your vote for option 1 or 2. Voting ends on Sunday 8th at Midnight! Don’t forget you can also vote on my patreon if you’d like an extra vote <3

* rinienmic -- lit. soul traitor, one of the worst things you can call someone in the Old Tongue ** Mourmoe sin breab eblita sidre. -- "Die in shadow, forgotten and cold." *** sonneusera -- reaper

[pagesoflauren]

Siren’s Call (Steve Rogers x reader; Pirate AU) - Ch. 5

Warnings: mentions of hangings/executions

Summary: Summary: Steve Rogers wants to make a name for himself by joining the Navy. He has the ideal life planned out and is ready to achieve it. You were raised on the sea and your spirit greatly resembles it. Every time you cross paths with a certain officer of His Majesty’s Navy, things only get more and more interesting. 

Previous Chapter

Siren’s Call Masterlist

You held your chin up high as you were stripped of your weapons. They took your pistol, your sword and dagger. You were vulnerable. Captain Rogers kept a firm grip on your arm as he led you off the ship, giving commands to other members of his crew to seize the ship. You wondered why he didn’t shackle you.

“Take inventory of what you can, transfer the useful goods to the Avenger. Put the ship in tow. We’ll bring it to Port Royal in Jamaica.” 

“Captain, shouldn’t we stop over to make sure we won’t be followed?” 

“No,” you heard him say harshly, “we’ll go straight there.” 

When he saw your smug look at their disagreement, his face hardened and he shoved you forward again. “Move.” 

His ship was on the next dock over. He was much taller than you, taking longer strides than yours, causing you to stumble quite often. 

As luck would have it, your crew was returning, carrying barrels and boxes of goods you needed. You whistled, unfamiliar to Captain Rogers, but your first mate recognized the tune. 

He instructed your crew to draw their swords, which they did and they made straight for you.

“No!” you called, “the ship! Take the ship back!” 

The last word was muffled as your captor covered your mouth with his and used more force as he pushed you forward, almost sending you to the ground before you got your footing properly.

“Captain, I can take it from here,” the first mate said.

The Captain refused as he brought you below decks to the brig. Once there, he opened the cell door and all but threw you in. You fell to the ground and heard the cell door click closed behind you.

“Get comfortable,” he said sarcastically, “You’ll be here a while.”

You sat up and crossed your legs, back leaning against the solitary column that stood in the middle of the cage. Your eyes take in your surroundings, noticing the half-barrel hinges on the door. Across the bars, he still stood there. 

“Why do you linger, Captain? Afraid I’m going to disappear in a puff of smoke before your eyes?”

“No.”

“Afraid I’m going to manage to toss you overboard again?”

“No.”

“Worried I’m going to steal your sword again?” “Is everything a joke to you?”

“Only men when they get angry,” you smirked.

You watched his expression relax, though he kept a white-knuckle grip on the hilt of his sword.

“You know killing me now would do you no good right?” you asked rhetorically, assuming a more comfortable position. “Isn’t it your modus operandi to kill pirates publicly? Hanging us from ropes like pigs in a butcher?”

Steve wasn’t expecting you to know Latin. If there’s one thing he couldn’t fault you for, it was your intelligence. He hated it.

“Where did you learn Latin?” he asked dumbly, avoiding the taunt you previously fired at him.

“My father,” you said easily.

A moment of silence passes between you two. His gut twists with the way your right cheek hollows as you bite the inside of it.

“I noticed something very peculiar at Playa Blanca. We made port there last week. There was a new ‘wanted’ poster ordered by you. But that’s not the peculiar part. Care to know what it is?” you teased. 

He didn’t answer. You continued. 

“The peculiar part was how well the poster captured my likeness. It was almost like looking in a mirror. Though, there was no name. Just a title. ‘Captain of The Siren’s Call.’”

“I don’t need to know your name to order a ‘wanted’ poster for you.”

You chuckled at that statement, getting up from your seated position and standing in front of the bars, arms crossed. 

“Well, Captain Rogers, you will need to know my name in order to make a proper report to your superior about the location of my ship, my capture and my escape.”

“Your esc--”

“And I don’t feel like telling you my name unless you tell me yours.”

There’s no explanation for the rush of willingness that comes from him as he openly gives you his name.

“Captain Steven Rogers.” 

Again with that damn smirk.

Something comes over him, he’s sure of it. He hangs onto the way your lips shape around the sounds in your name and revels in the way that it sounds like the prettiest violins and piano fortes. He can’t help the feeling that your parents were so correct in giving you that name because it suits you so well. 

He shakes his head. Get it together!

“Pleasure to meet you,” you say, sticking your hand through the vertical bars. 

He only stares at it for a moment. 

“You’re supposed to take my hand in yours; you know, like the first night we met--”

“I know what I’m supposed to do,” he bites, “I refuse to shake hands with a pirate.” 

“Hm, and here I thought officers of the navy were gentlemen. It appears I’m wrong.”

He’s had enough of your sarcasm. He begins telling you the conditions of your imprisonment. 

“You will stay down here and only here for the duration of the voyage. You will be offered two meals a day and a vessel of fresh water. You may relieve yourself in the bucket behind you. It will be emptied every morning. At every hour, an officer of His Majesty’s Navy will come down to check on you. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes, Captain,” you say, rolling your eyes. 

He swallows the lump in his throat. He can’t stand that he likes the way those words sound coming from your mouth. He shakes the thought from his head and turns on his heel to leave.

“What does your wife think of the idea of you chasing around a pirate woman all the through the Caribbean?”

You smile when he turns around, taking the bait you’ve laid. 

“Pardon?” “Your wife. Does she not think it’s odd that you’ve sent out ‘Wanted’ posters all over the Caribbean looking for me?”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“Your intended, then.” 

“I don’t have an intended, either.”

“Hm. I would have been certain there was someone on this Earth you loved,” you sigh. “Though I imagine the woman would be very unlucky to receive such affections since you’re so focused on me.”

“Well, what does your husband think?” he says, throwing the question back at you, “You’re always taunting me.”

“In what manner?” you feign innocence, widening your eyes and blinking owlishly at him.

You don’t miss the deep gulp that runs down his throat.

“Blowing kisses, smiling...you’ve been driving me mad.” 

“Have I now?” you say in a distracted tone, pretending to fuss over a fraying string on the cuff of your coat. 

“You know you have!” he shouts, taking you by surprise when he marches forward and grips the bars. He’s positively fuming now. 

Men are too easy, you think. 

“I assure you, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Captain Rogers,” you smile, reaching a hand up to caress his cheek. You’re shocked when your breath hitches, your heart flutters. 

Shock gives way to satisfaction when there’s a loud exploding sound and people are shouting on the levels above you. You assume it’s the soldiers scrambling to get ready to fight; you’re certain your crew has come to save you. 

Steve turns away and your palm tingles from where it made contact with his skin. When he makes for the steps to ascend to the top deck of the ship, you speak again.

“It was lovely talking to you, Captain. I’d say we’ll talk some more later, but I’m certain I won’t be here when this battle is over.” 

You watch as he pauses, thinking about saying something, but someone is shouting for him to come to the deck quickly. 

Little do you know that the spot where you touched his face feels as if it’s on fire.

Tagging: @ontheoddoccasioniwritestuff​ @steverogersxreader​ @chljmntgy​ @chaoticfiretaconerd​

[mrsrcbinscn]

Based on a photograph Franny found of her mother, and her mother said she was singing You’re so Vain in the photo

 CW: mentions of war and genocide but no descriptions; the film takes place before 1975 so it wasn’t actively happening

Title: Dear Phnom Penh

Executive produced by: Franny Sor Robinson

Release date: April 22nd (Cambodia); May 6th (special screening at Pride U), May 8th (worldwide)

 Franny produced and selected the music for a movie set in pre-Khmer rouge Cambodia with dialogue in Khmer, French, and a little in English. The backdrop of the film is Cambodia, 1973, two years before the start of the Cambodian genocide.The main character is a university student named Pen Chenda, in the midst of her coming of age during the Cambodian Civil War (1968-1975) that led into the Khmer Rogue years (1975-1979) and subsequent genocide. Chenda almost can’t remember what life was like before there was war. Her older siblings tell her and their younger siblings stories of what peacetime was like, but her oldest brother laughs and says it wasn’t peacetime at all. Her oldest brother supports the communists, her father is a Lon Nol supporter, this causes tensions in their family mostly through snide comments at dinner and muffled shouting heard from outside her bedroom while she works on her coursework in one scene, and then is getting dressed to party in another.

 The Cambodian Civil War is in the background of the film, it is not a film about the Cambodian Civil War. It’s about Pen Chenda, a twenty year old university student, trying to pass her classes, earn money at her part-time job at a hotel for European tourists, maintain a social life, and keep her father and brother from ripping each other’s throats out while carrying on a clandestine romance with San Mittapheap / “Pierre” San, a journalist five years older than her who speaks fluent French and English and often works with French, American, and Australian journalists covering the war. One of her sisters snitched to their parents that she was sweet on a journalist because she blamed Chenda for telling her parents that she sneaked out of the house one night, but really it was another sister who ratted on her, and her parents forbade her from seeing him.

 “You know what happens to journalists and their families because they can’t keep their noses where they belong. Do you want to be collateral damage to your husband’s folly?”

 But Chenda is in looooooove and he’s so intelligent, and insightful, and he’s helping her improve her French and English!

 There’s a scene at a bar where Chenda sings You’re So Vain, like Franny’s mother in the picture, when a wealthy classmate of hers is being rude and hitting on her despite her repeatedly rejecting him that night, and even earlier in the movie.

 There’s another brief scene in the bar where Chenda’s dancing with her friends, then she sees the time and is abruptly like “gotta go bye!”

 After Chenda leaves the bar, she meets Pierre for street food instead of going straight home. They munch on chicken skewers and walk through Phnom Penh. A banana seller who clearly lost one of his legs to war hobbles on crutches and drunk!Chenda directly acknowledges the times they live in for the first time in the film.

 “Do you think the communists are right?” She asks Pierre after the man passes.

 Pierre is silent for a long moment, and the film’s score even fades out. It’s dead silent before he replies. “I think Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol aren’t friends of the people. But I don’t know that Pol Pot is either. I think Ho Chi Mihn in Vietnam has better ideas than Pol Pot has got. And I think any leader that calls for blood louder than he calls to end suffering does not deserve to be a leader. I’ve heard rumors that he himself isn’t even one of the downtrodden he claims to fight for.”

 “Do you think Cambodia will be at war forever?”

 “I think France and America had no business being in our land in the first place, and war won’t ever stop if they’re still here. And if they leave...I don’t know that it will either. It’s like they’re begging us to flee to their borders to survive, but I’ve been to the West. They hate us there. Don’t destroy our homeland, and we will stay in it.”

 “My father supports Lon Nol. My oldest brother supports the communists. My sisters and I aren’t allowed to have an opinion on politics, but I’m afraid I have one and it’s that both Ba and Akrun are idiots. I’m worried most about the war destroying my family. Is that selfish?”

 “You love your family, don’t you?”

 “Yes.”

 “That’s why you’re worried, yes?”

 “Yes?”

 “Then no, I wouldn’t call that selfish. Love isn’t selfish. If it’s selfish, it isn’t love.”

 “The Bible. Are you just now telling me you are a Christian?”

 “No, just familiar with them. I happen to think they had the right idea about that quote. Are you?”

 “No, just familiar with them.”

 “I shouldn’t walk any close to your house. Your father will give you hell if he sees me...I’ll watch you walk in from here.”

 Chenda kisses Pierre and tells him she loves him, waves goodbye, and runs the rest of the way to her front door.

 The film ends in the next scene, with Chenda riding her bicycle to school the next day. She stops at a newspaper stand while waiting to cross a street and happens to look over. She spots a paper with the front page story having Pierre’s by line and she scrambles to pay for it before she’s clear to cross the street. 

 “My husband writes for this paper,” she fibs. “I want to keep his articles for our children.”

 “You have children, student?” says the newspaper stand guy.

 “Someday.” She manages to roll the paper up and put it in her backpack just before her time to cross the street.

 The camera slowly zooms out to reveal a scene of a bustling 1973 city and ultimately fades to black and the credits roll.

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~

 A selection of questions and answers Franny’s answered about the film in interviews:

 What made you want to make this film? And how did you do it? You have some background in acting, but this is your first time being with a project from start to finish.

 Thank you, that’s a great question. So, the idea’s been with me for a long time. As anybody that’s followed my career will know, or who knows me in my personal life, I can’t shut up about three things. Cambodia, social justice, and banjos. When I was about to get married, my mother and I were goin’ through her photos that she managed to get her hands on from Cambodia. There was a picture of her at a bar singing with a microphone in her hand. I had no idea she liked to sing, at least not publicly, so I was like “Mak, this you? For real?” And I asked her if she was singing, like, a Pen Ran song or something. She looked at the picture and said, “No, no, I was singing...Carly Simon. You know the one. The-” and then she starts singing You’re So Vain! I know that American music found its way around the world even in the 1970s but I really did not expect that to be the story of that photograph.

 I’ve always wanted to make a film or a tv show about pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. All of the content about that country that we really see in the West is like...it’s Genocide porn. Films like The Killing Fields, and First They Killed My Father, those are important. Those are both great films. But Cambodia is more than that now and it was more than that then. I wanted to tell a story about young people in Cambodia right before everything went to hell; in a way, I wanted to make a film that was a love letter to my mother’s and my aunts’ and uncles’ youth. I wanted to pay homage to the ones I got to meet, and the ones who didn’t make it out the other side alive. That photograph of my mother put the idea in my head when I was 22, but for years it didn’t develop very far.

 Six years ago, I sat down with my go-to music video director for my Cambodian-market content, and one of his friends who had directed a few low-budget films in Cambodia, and I told them what I wanted to do, and all I need is to meet with some film writers to discuss a storyline, and who would the two of them recommend. They linked me up with two film writers, one that was very in demand in their indie film market, and one who did some more mainstream work. They became the two main writers on the project.The director my friend introduced me to was the director, and my friend became the AD. I’d already conducted interviews with all of my relatives who were willing to speak on their experiences in Cambodia in the 60s and 70s. You know, my cousins and I’ve worked on several projects together. A documentary and a couple books about our family history. So I already had a wealth of recorded interviews worth of research.

 We spent two years workshopping the script and storyline, and finally were ready to start casting.

About the ending. Why did you and the director and screenwriter choose to end it like that?

I wanted the film to end abruptly with no neat tie-a-ribbon-around-it ending. This isn’t a story about the end of a life, or even the end of a specific season in someone’s life. It starts and ends in the middle of a period of Pen Chenda’s life. It’s a slice of life period film that has a love story, a family story, and politics and war seemingly in the background but by the end, you realize that the conflict in her country was in the foreground of the film all along. It’s a story about a young woman trying to live her damn life in the middle of a civil war.

What do you say to people who say the film trivializes the conflict at the time? I’d ask them why they think every other aspect of life at the time doesn’t matter. Life doesn’t stop just because war’s come to your country...until your city, your town, your village is hostin’ the fightin’, you still go to work, you go to school, you fight with your mom and dad, you fall in love. Some of my mother’s oldest siblings got married in the middle of the Cambodian Civil War. They had babies.  My mother was a university student in Phnom Penh just like Chenda is in the film. This isn’t a film about the bloodshed of war; it’s a movie about the people it affects long before they see violence with their own eyes.

 I can’t help but wonder what happens to Chenda and Pierre after the movie’s ending. Do you have any insight into that?

 I think with the way the movie ended, with them on very good terms, we can assume that they got married. I think history clues us in on the rest. Considering Pierre’s a trilingual journalist and Chenda is a university student...they would have had to flee before the fall of Phnom Penh or lied their asses off to have any shot at surviving the Khmer Rouge years. 

 How important was it for you to find an all Cambodian cast for the movie?

 Oh, it was vital. I wanted Cambodia Cambodians as much as possible too, and not oversea Cambodians like me, so that their accents would be authentic. I had some potential investors back out when I refused to hold auditions in the US and France to pull from the Cambodian diaspora there. But this isn’t a story set in a time period where a whole lot of Cambodians would’ve gone abroad to travel much less live. 

 The actor that plays Pierre, actually, when we cast him we had to rework the character a little. Originally, he just had a Cambodian name. But the actor, Jean Sok, is French-Cambodian. He was born in France to first generation French-Cambodians, but went to school in Cambodian from age seven through eighteen, studied acting and music in France and London, and he now lives in Cambodia full time. His Khmer is excellent, but there is this very slight -- his time abroad shows. Not as badly as mine when I speak Khmer, but there’s just this little tinge of a French accent that I frankly can’t notice but the local Cambodians on the project did. So we slipped into the script several reminders that he studied abroad in France, that he’s very steeped in French language, even gave him a French name he goes by that he adopted because of his dealings with Western journalists. 

 Apart from him, all of the main cast are Cambodians born and raised in Cambodia. And there is only one other actress with a speaking role that’s an overseas Cambodian.

I read that you’ve recently quit your day job teaching at Pride University in England to focus on your creative career. Are there more film and tv projects in the future from you?

 I have ideas, yes. I’m of course mainly focusing on music, but I am in talks to work on various projects in some capacity. Mostly curating the soundtracks, but there’s acting roles and possible producing credits down the pipe, yes.

[bountyofbeads]

TOP 10 SIGNS OF CREEPING AUTHORITARIANISM, REVISITED

By Stephen M. Walt | Published July 27, 2017 | Foreign Policy Magazine | Posted February 17, 2020

Top 10 Signs of Creeping Authoritarianism, Revisited.... Is the president looking more like a dictator after six months in the White House?

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, I wrote a column(Read Below) listing possible “warning signs” of democratic breakdown under his leadership. A few other people did, too. I wasn’t predicting Trump would become a dictator — although some of his statements and actions during the campaign were worrisome; the column was simply a checklist of warning signs that would tell us how well U.S. political institutions were holding up in unusual circumstances (and with a most unusual president).

We’re now a bit more than six months(3 1/2 years) into Trump’s presidency, and it is high time to review the list and see how America is doing. Has Trump undermined America’s constitutional order?(YES) Is he consolidating executive power the way democratically elected leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have?(YES) Or are U.S. institutions holding up reasonably well, either because they have proved to be surprisingly resilient or because Trump has been less adept at politics than he claimed to be?(NO)

The record is mixed. Although some of the warning signs are flashing red, others are glowing yellow (at worst), and one or two don’t seem that worrisome at all. My worst fears of further democratic breakdown have not ( HAVE) been confirmed — thus far — though in some cases it is not for want of trying.

Grab your No. 2 pencil and go down my original list. Feel free to keep score at home.

SYSTEMATIC EFFORTS TO INTIMIDATE THE MEDIA: CHECK ✔️

There’s little doubt that Trump and his associates have repeatedly tried to intimidate mainstream media organizations, whether through tweets deriding the supposedly “failing” New York Times, the repeated references to the “Amazon Washington Post,” or White House chief strategist and former Breitbart head Stephen Bannon’s referring to media organizations as “the opposition party.” Trump and Fox News also falsely accused the Times of thwarting efforts to kill or capture top Islamic State leaders, and the White House has arbitrarily excluded reporters of some organizations from press pools, press conferences, and other events. The obvious message: Play ball with us a bit more or expect to be marginalized. And that’s just a small sample of Trump’s war on the press.

But, on the other hand, these efforts don’t seem to be working very well. A few media organizations have made ritual acts of appeasement (e.g., CNN keeps hiring Trump apologists as on-air talent), but Trump’s presidency has given most media organizations a renewed sense of purpose and a growing audience. And the administration’s continued shenanigans, conflicts of interest, ever-changing rationalizations, and sheer buffoonery have created a target-rich environment: The same outrageous behavior that helped boost Trump’s 2016 campaign has given the media a mother lode of material to mine and an eager audience for everything they can dig up. So the good news is that while Trump clearly likes to browbeat media outlets that aren’t reliably in his corner and would undoubtedly like to discredit them, his efforts to date have mostly failed.

BUILDING AN OFFICIAL PRO-TRUMP MEDIA NETWORK: Partial check.(FLASHING RED🚨🚨🚨 FOX NEW)

 Back in November, I speculated that Trump might “use the presidency to bolster media that offer him consistent support” or even try to create a government-funded media agency to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda. There’s little doubt Trump has tried to favor outlets that embrace him, which is why the White House gave press credentials to the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit and has given the reliably wacky and pro-Trump  Breitbart privileged access. And as one might expect, the Trump administration has backed the expansion plans of the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. Apart from the White House press office itself (which has been a train wreck from Day One), there’s no sign that the president intends to build a publicly funded pro-Trump media organization. But with Fox News and Sinclair and the various alt-right websites in his corner, he may not need one. 

POLITICIZING THE CIVIL SERVICE, MILITARY, NATIONAL GUARD, OR THE DOMESTIC SECURITY AGENCIES: PARTIAL CHECK. (CHECK✔️)

An obvious counterweight to executive overreach are career civil servants who remain sensitive to precedents, have lots of expertise, and tend to follow the rule of law. And as Samuel Huntington pointed out many years ago, an important barrier to excessive militarization is having a professional military whose direct political role is limited. My concern in 2016 was the possibility that Trump would try to politicize the civil service in various ways or turn the military and the intelligence and domestic security agencies into tools of the White House instead of independent defenders of the Constitution.

Once again, I’d score this one as mixed. Trump has tried to put his stamp on key government agencies by demanding that senior officials resign or by firing people who declined to do his bidding, such as (now former) Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey. He has declined to make top appointments in a number of agencies, at one point telling Fox News, “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary.” And if Comey and others are to be believed (and, on this issue, I think they are), Trump seems to think civil servants and his own appointees should be more loyal to him than to the Constitution, even though it is the latter they swore an oath to defend. Trump has also questioned the integrity of the nonpartisan and highly respected Congressional Budget Office, and he crossed another line last weekend by telling uniformed military personnel to call Congress and lobby for his defense spending and health care proposals.

But there’s a silver lining here, too: You can’t run the federal government without lots of help, and most people don’t like being dissed and intimidated by a group of wealthy insiders who clearly view them with contempt and seem to regard the country as their personal plaything. Combine that with Trump’s world-class ability to sow divisions within his own team, and you have a recipe for the veritable Niagara of leaks that have made life easier for journalists and kept the White House scrambling from scandal to scandal. (Of course, the White House could have avoided all this by telling the truth from the start and by learning how to fill out security clearance forms properly the first time.) As with his effort to intimidate the media, in short, thus far Trump’s desire to get the government bureaucracy to dance to his tune hasn’t gone so well.

USING GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE AGAINST DOMESTIC POLITICAL OPPONENTS: Nothing yet.(PARTIAL CHECK)

As Richard Nixon taught us, some presidents have been all too willing to use the CIA or FBI to go after their political opponents. There’s no reason to think such actions would lie outside Trump’s ethical framework, but, as far as we know, he has not been using the National Security Agency, CIA, FBI, or other security agencies to gather dirt on his opponents. His legal team is reportedly trying to find ways to impugn the reputation of special counsel Robert Mueller and his staff (good luck with that!), but that’s not the same as asking the CIA to dig up dirt on Democrats or anti-Trump protestors.

Of course, there’s an obvious reason why Trump hasn’t gone that route: His relations with these agencies are already deeply troubled, and it’s unlikely that they would do his bidding if he asked. Trump has insulted the CIA and NSA on numerous occasions, and his decision to fire Comey (who was popular within the agency) has put him at odds with the FBI, too. So this warning sign is still green, at least for now.

USING STATE POWER TO REWARD CORPORATE BACKERS AND PUNISH OPPONENTS: Worrisome, but not a big problem so far.(BLINKING RED)

All presidents accommodate powerful interest groups that backed them, and Trump is no exception. It might not be good for the country to have such a business-heavy group of cabinet officials, or for Trump to have appointed so many secretaries who oppose the mission of the agencies they are now leading, but by itself that is not a threat to America’s system of government.

As noted above, it is more worrisome to watch Trump favor corporate media interests that support him, and no doubt proposals for tax reform will be heavily skewed toward the 1 percent and provide little relief for middle-class voters who (mistakenly) put their trust in him. But here again, that’s just bad public policy, not a threat to the Constitution. But Trump’s recent tweets attacking the “Amazon  Washington Post” and suggesting Congress go after Amazon’s tax status have the clear whiff of the authoritarian intimidation that autocrats like Turkey’s Erdogan have practiced.

More importantly, the growing sense that Trump lacks the skill to deliver on his promises is going to erode his clout in the corporate world as well. He got some early wins from companies that thought he might shake things up in positive ways, and they were willing to let him take undeserved credit for “saving” jobs while they sought to stay on his good side. But now that he has failed on health care, has done squat on infrastructure, is behind schedule on tax reform, and has low approval ratings at home and abroad, corporate America isn’t going to be as eager to curry favor with him. The bottom line: We are still a long while from Russian- or Turkish-level intimidation of business interests, which is a good thing.

STACKING THE SUPREME COURT: PARTIAL CHECK (CHECK✔️)

 As I warned six months ago, Trump has already had one chance to fill a Supreme Court seat and he could easily have several more. We don’t yet know what sort of justice Neil Gorsuch will turn out to be or whom Trump might appoint down the road, but it’s a safe bet they won’t be progressives. But the real issue is how Gorsuch or any other appointees would vote on key constitutional questions involving the power of the executive branch. I’m not terribly concerned at the moment, but turning the judiciary into a tame tool is right out of the aspiring autocrats’ playbook, and the issue bears watching as relevant cases begin to work their way through the courts.

ENFORCING THE LAW FOR ONLY ONE SIDE: BLINKING RED. 🚨🚨

When Trump was elected, I was worried he might direct law enforcement officials to crack down on protests and other activities by his opponents but turn a blind eye toward illegal activities by potential supporters. A systematic crackdown on left-wing opposition has not occurred, but Trump & Co. do not seem at all concerned by the growing level of right-wing extremism in the country and utterly indifferent to such tendencies abroad. Trump has been quick to condemn terrorist attacks by Muslims and the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) in June but said nothing after a disturbed right-wing sympathizer murdered an innocent black American and a Israeli-American teenager issued a series of bizarre threats against Jewish synagogues and community centers. Even more disturbingly, it took the golfer-in-chief more than two full days to respond to the brutal knife attack by a white supremacist that killed two people in Portland, an act he described laconically as “unacceptable.”

Trump’s disregard for the rule of law is pretty well-established by now, and he has made it clear that he doesn’t think he, his family, or his closest aides should be subject to much legal scrutiny. Yet Trump also likes to portray himself as a “law and order” guy and has backed “beleaguered” Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s controversial campaign to reimpose draconic prison sentences. It is hard to escape the impression that Trump thinks the law is something that applies to other people — and mostly to those who probably didn’t vote for him.

REALLY RIGGING THE SYSTEM : BLINKING RED🚨🚨

Trump lost the popular vote by a considerable margin — really! — but he became president due to the peculiarities of the Electoral College. But make no mistake: Given the rules of the system, he was duly elected. As I noted in my original column, the demographics of the U.S. electorate give him (and the Republican Party) a big incentive to try to stack the deck in his favor, and that incentive only increases the lower his approval ratings go. How else can one explain the transparently bogus “voter fraud commission,” headed by die-hard voter suppression advocate Kris Kobach, which held its first meetings this month? No serious scholar of U.S. voting behavior believes that electoral fraud is widespread or politically consequential, but Trump, Kobach, and others would like to make it as hard as possible for people they deem unlikely to vote their way to actually go to the polls. The effort may go nowhere in the end (in part because local officials from both parties are declining to provide data to the commission), but that’s no reason not to be concerned about it.

FEARMONGERING: Check.(FLASHING RED 🚨🚨🚨)

As he did during the campaign, Trump has continued to issue dark warnings about various dangers from which he supposedly needs to protect us. His inaugural address conjured up a weird, Gothamesque description of “American carnage,” and a recent speech in Poland openly asked whether “the West” still had the will to defend itself. He has continued to rail against Muslims (except for the rich ones in Saudi Arabia whom he seems to like) and to inflate threats from North Korea and Iran.

But, to be fair, here Trump is not that different from most of his predecessors. All modern presidents have inflated threats on occasion, and some of them, like George W. “Axis of Evil” Bush, were serious practitioners of this timeless art. Even St. Barack Obama did it on occasion, telling his Nobel lecture audience, “Make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world,” and justifying the “surge” in Afghanistan with overstated worries about terrorist “safe havens.” So Trump’s tendency to inflate threats is part of a well-established tradition. The good news is that Trump hasn’t been given an opportunity — like a big terrorist attack — to exploit for political purposes. One can only hope that such a pretext never arises … for all the obvious reasons.

DEMONIZING THE OPPOSITION: Check✔️ (but he’s not alone).(FLASHING RED🚨🚨🚨)

No American president has been as prone to treat his opponents with contempt, disregard, and blatant hostility. Trump spent the campaign belittling his Republican opponents and vowing to “lock up” Hillary Clinton. He has continued to blame America’s problems on everyone but himself, accuse anyone who opposes him of betraying the country, and offer self-pitying tweetstorms about the vast opposition he faces from his supposed enemies (some of whom used to be allies).

Unfortunately, some of Trump’s opponents are now imitating his polarizing disinterest in compromise or in genuine give-and-take. The United States was deeply divided before the election, but it’s even worse now. The country’s two political parties are not equally responsible for this development — just consider that Obamacare included nearly 190 GOP amendments while the Republicans have refused to let Democrats play any role in their efforts to replace it — but Trump’s opponents are sometimes guilty of demonizing or dissing their fellow citizens who happen to support him. Needless to say, this is not a healthy condition for any republic.

Where does this leave us? By my score card, there are worrisome developments on nearly all of the 10 indicators, but some of them are only “blinking red,” and in many cases Trump’s efforts to expand his power have not made much progress.

I draw three conclusions from the record thus far.

First, President Trump does not have much respect for the existing constitutional order, especially when it impinges on his personal power or threatens his own position. He has been enabled (thus far) by a mostly supine Congress, but many of his efforts to extend his power have backfired or been thwarted. The vitality of some of America’s democratic institutions is therefore reassuring, but I wouldn’t take success for granted just yet.

Second, the situation would be far more dangerous if Trump were a smarter, more disciplined, and more effective politician. The crude irreverence that made him an appealing alternative to Clinton (and the mostly colorless GOP field) has been a major handicap to his presidency. Were Trump a better manager or more skilled at concealing his worst tendencies, the threat he poses to the existing political order would be much larger. Trump’s incompetence isn’t good for America’s position in the world, but it may help the American order survive his presidency.

Third, Trump still has at least three-plus years in office, and every day he spends there redefines the expectations for how presidents can or should behave. The real danger may not be the rapid slide into authoritarianism, but rather the possibility that a new generation of Americans — such as those unfortunate Boy Scouts — grows up thinking that it’s perfectly OK for presidents to lie, to use the White House as a vehicle to advance their business interests while in office, to see the presidency as the employer of first resort for their unqualified relatives, and to believe that public servants are to be loyal not to the public interest or the Constitution but to whoever happens to be sitting in the Oval Office. That is the way American democracy is most likely to end: not with a bang, but a whimper.

*********

10 Ways to Tell if Your President Is a Dictator

Just because the United States is a democracy now, it doesn’t mean it will stay that way.

By Stephen M. Walt | Published November 23, 2016, 9:02 AM ET | Foreign Policy Magazine | Posted February 17, 2020 |

There are good reasons to worry about how Donald Trump will handle foreign policy, but there are also reasons to think he won’t be any worse than some other administrations. The neoconservatives who dominated foreign-policy making in George W. Bush’s administration had lots of prior experience, God knows, and look at all the harm they did. My fears about Trump’s foreign policy have always been two-fold: that he might pursue a more sensible grand strategy but do it incompetently, thereby weakening America’s international position, or that he will eventually get co-opted by the foreign-policy establishment and repeat the Blob’s most familiar mistakes. Based on some of his early appointments — like Islamaphobe Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security advisor — we might even get the worst of both worlds: unrealistic goals pursued ineptly.

But if you live in the United States, what you should really worry about is the threat that Trump may pose to America’s constitutional order. His lengthy business career suggests he is a vindictive man who will go to extreme lengths to punish his opponents and will break a promise in a heartbeat and without remorse. The 2016 campaign confirmed that he has little respect for existing norms and rules — he refused to release his tax returns, lied repeatedly, claimed the electoral and political systems were “rigged” against him, threatened to jail his opponent if he won, among other such violations — and revealed his deep contempt for both his opponents and supporters. Nor does he regret any of the revolting things he did or said during the campaign, because, as he told the Wall Street Journal afterward, “I won.” For Trump, it seems, the ends really do justify the means.

To make matters worse, plenty of people in Trump’s camp appear to believe America is now under siege from a coalition of liberal elites, people of color, immigrants of all sorts, and shadowy foreign influences. They also understand demography is not on their side: The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections (Bush in 2004 was the exception), and the percentage of older white Americans that forms the GOP base will continue to decline. This situation will tempt some of them to use any and all means to hang on to power, justified by their (mistaken) belief that the country must be “saved” from all these alleged enemies.

Add to this mix Trump’s expressed admiration for “strong” leaders like Vladimir Putin, along with the penumbra of extremist advisors he has surrounded himself with, most notably white nationalist Steve Bannon, and you have a recipe for undermining democracy over time. Trump’s personal obsession with “winning” and his deep fear of humiliation make me wonder how he will react when his approval ratings sink, the bond market rebels, or when he isn’t able to deliver on his promises. Every president has faced sharp swings in popularity — this was true of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, Barack Obama, and even Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Trump will be no exception. But when his approval ratings tank and even a Republican-controlled Congress refuses to give him everything he wants, will he trim the sails and adjust — as normal presidents do — or will he double down, lash out, and look for ways to insulate himself?

Public accountability is inherent to America’s constitutional system, but that doesn’t mean Trump won’t try to escape it. It’s not as if he doesn’t have role models for this sort of operation. In Russia, Putin has won a series of elections and retains high approval ratings, largely because he has eliminated, intimidated, or marginalized anyone who might challenge his control while feeding the Russian people a steady diet of pro-Kremlin propaganda. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done the same thing in Turkey, in part by exploiting rural conservatism but also by strangling the press and seizing every opportunity to arrest, threaten, coerce, or eliminate opponents and critics. You can see similar formulas at work in Hungary and in Poland, albeit to a lesser extent, and in the recently ended reign of Italian media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who kept getting elected in Italy despite an abysmal record as prime minister and his own checkered history as a sexual predator.

These fears may strike many of you as alarmist, and it’s entirely possible that Trump will uphold his oath to defend the Constitution and stay within legal lines. But given his past conduct, expressed attitudes, and bomb-throwing advisors, I think there are valid reasons to think the constitutional order that has prevailed in the United States for more than two centuries could be in jeopardy. And that should worry all Americans. The constitutional reality never lived up to the Founding Fathers’ hopes and ideals, of course, but the system has had a self-correcting quality that has served the nation well. Equally important, the Constitution has helped the United States avoid the self-destructive excesses and extreme injustices that are common in authoritarian countries.

To repeat: I am not saying this dark scenario of subverted democracy is likely, only that it is far from impossible. Democracy has broken down in plenty of other countries, and there is no reason to think the United States is completely immune from this danger. For a good rundown of the political science literature on this topic, check out this useful list by Jeff Colgan of Brown University. The good news is that the United States doesn’t suffer from some of the traits that make democratic breakdowns more likely: It isn’t poor, its political institutions have been around for a long time, and it is not in the middle of a deep economic crisis. The bad news is that the United States has a presidential system (which appears to be more prone to this problem than parliamentary orders) and also one where executive authority has grown steadily over time. And we’ve never had a president remotely like this one.

To repeat: I am not saying this dark scenario of subverted democracy is likely, only that it is far from impossible.

Given what is at stake, one of the most important things we can all do is remain alert for evidence that Trump and those around him are moving in an authoritarian direction. For those who love America and its Constitution more than they love any particular political party or any particular politician, I offer as a public service my top 10 warning signs that American democracy is at risk.

1. SYSTEMATIC EFFORTS TO INTIMIDATE THE MEDIA.

As George Orwell emphasized so powerfully in 1984, autocrats survive by controlling information. A free, energetic, vigilant, and adversarial press has long been understood to be an essential guarantee of democratic freedoms, because without it, the people in whose name leaders serve will be denied the information they need to assess what the politicians are doing. Trump sailed to the presidency on a The Top of lies and exaggerations, and there’s no reason to think he’ll discover a new commitment to the truth as president. The American people cannot properly judge his performance without accurate and independent information, and that’s where a free and adversarial press is indispensable. If the Trump administration begins to enact policies designed to restrict freedom of the press, or just intimidate media organizations from offering critical coverage, it will be a huge (or if you prefer, yuge) warning sign.

What sort of steps do I have in mind? For starters, Trump has already proposed “opening up” libel laws so that public figures can sue the press more easily. This step would force publishers and editors to worry about costly and damaging lawsuits even if they eventually win them, and it would be bound to have a chilling effect on their coverage. Or he could try to use the regulatory power of the Federal Communications Commission to harass media organizations that were consistently critical. He could go even further than Obama did in pursuing government whistleblowers and leakers and in prosecuting journalists who use confidential sources. His administration could deny access to entire news organizations like the New York Times if they were too critical of Trump’s policies or just too accurate in documenting his failures. Just because the First Amendment guarantees free speech doesn’t mean some parts of the media can’t be stampeded into pulling punches or once again indulging in “false equivalence.”

2. BUILDING AN OFFICIAL PRO-TRUMP MEDIA NETWORK.

A second warning sign is a corollary of the first: While trying to suppress critical media outlets, Trump could also use the presidency to bolster media that offer him consistent support. Or he could even try to create an official government news agency that would disseminate a steady diet of pro-Trump coverage. As Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group told a Harvard Kennedy School audience this month, if Putin can have an outlet like RT, why wouldn’t Trump want something similar for himself? In Trump’s ideal world, Americans would get their news from some combination of Breitbart, Fox News, and the president’s own Twitter feed, which would keep the public bamboozled and go a long way toward insulating him from the consequences of his own mistakes. Congress would probably refuse to fund a public broadcaster that was reliably in Trump’s pocket, but if it did, look out.

3. POLITICIZING THE CIVIL SERVICE, MILITARY, NATIONAL GUARD, OR THE DOMESTIC SECURITY AGENCIES.

One of the obstacles to a democratic breakdown is the government bureaucracy, whose permanent members are insulated from political pressure by existing civil service protections that make it hard to fire senior officials without cause. But one can imagine the Trump administration asking Congress to weaken those protections, portraying this step as a blow against “big government” and a way to improve government efficiency. I’ll bet the Wall Street Journal op-ed page would be quick to endorse this idea, on the grounds that firing a few senior bureaucrats would encourage the rest to work harder and better. But if the president or his lieutenants can gut government agencies more or less at will, the fear of being fired will lead many experienced public servants to keep their heads down and kowtow to whatever the president wants, no matter how ill-advised or illegal it might be. And when you consider that Trump seems to be appointing loyalists to top posts even when they lack the obvious qualifications (Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has never worked in the federal government), this possibility gets scarier still.

And don’t assume the military, FBI, National Guard, or the intelligence agencies would be immune to this sort of interference. Other presidents (or their appointees) have fired generals who questioned their policy objectives, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld did during George W. Bush’s first administration when he removed Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who had the temerity to tell a congressional committee that the occupation of Iraq was going to need a lot more people than Rumsfeld had claimed. Other generals and admirals got the message and stayed out of Rumsfeld’s way for the rest of his disastrous tenure as defense secretary. There have also been fights in the past over control of the National Guard, but a move to assert greater federal authority over the guard would give Trump a powerful tool to use against open expressions of dissent.

Because there are precedents for the various tactics I’ve just described, some people might be inclined to give Trump a pass if he moves in this direction. That would be a serious mistake.

4. USING GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE AGAINST DOMESTIC POLITICAL OPPONENTS. 

This step wouldn’t be entirely new either, insofar as Nixon once used the CIA to infiltrate anti-war organizations during the Vietnam War. But the government’s capacity to monitor the phones, emails, hard drives, and online activities of all Americans has expanded enormously since the 1960s. And as Edward Snowden revealed a few years ago, these activities still lack adequate oversight and have sometimes broken the law.

As far as we know, however, no one has yet tried to use these new powers of surveillance to monitor, intimidate, embarrass, deter, or destroy political opponents. I don’t know if the exposure of the indiscretions of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer or former CIA Director David Petraeus is an example of this problem or not, but it certainly demonstrates how an ambitious and unscrupulous president could use the ability to monitor political opponents to great advantage. He would need the cooperation of top officials and possibly many underlings as well, but this only requires loyal confederates at the top and compliant people below. The White House had sufficient authority, under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, to convince U.S. government employees to torture other human beings. In comparison with that, convincing some officials to monitor emails and phone calls and online searches in order to dig up damaging dirt on the president’s rivals should be child’s play.

5. USING STATE POWER TO REWARD CORPORATE BACKERS AND PUNISH OPPONENTS. 

A hallmark of corrupt quasi-democracies is the executive’s willingness to use the power of the state to reward business leaders who are loyal and to punish anyone who gets in the way. That’s how Putin controls the “oligarchs” in Russia, and it is partly how Erdogan kept amassing power and undermining opponents in Turkey. As Matthew Yglesias argues in Vox, that is also how Berlusconi operated in Italy, and it helped wreck the Italian economy and made endemic corruption even worse.

I know, I know: Corruption of this sort is already a problem here in the Land of the Free —whether in the form of congressional pork or the sweet deals former government officials arrange to become lobbyists once they leave office — so why single out Trump? The problem is that Trump’s record suggests he thinks this is the right way to do business: You reward your friends, and you stick it to your enemies every chance you get. So if the Washington Post runs a lot of critical articles about Trump, and Post owner Jeff Bezos suddenly learns federal officials are contemplating new regulations that would hurt his main business (Amazon), none of us should be all that surprised. But we should be really, really worried.

6. STACKING THE SUPREME COURT.

Trump will likely get the opportunity to appoint several Supreme Court justices, and the choices he makes will be revealing. Does he pick people who are personally loyal and beholden to him or opt for jurors with independent standing and stellar qualifications? Does he pick people whose views on hot-button issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and campaign financing comport with his party’s, or does he go for people who have an established view on the expansiveness of executive power and are more likely to look the other way if he takes some of the other steps I’ve already mentioned? And if it’s the latter, would the Senate find the spine to say no?

7. ENFORCING THE LAW FOR ONLY ONE SIDE.

Effective liberal democracies depend on the rule of law being implemented in a politically neutral fashion. That’s an ideal that no society achieves completely, and there are many ways in which the U.S. judicial system falls well short. But given the nature of Trump’s campaign and the deep divisions within the United States at present, a key litmus test for the president-elect is whether he will direct U.S. officials to enforce similar standards of conduct on both his supporters and his opponents. If anti-Trump protesters are beaten up by a band of Trump’s fans, will the latter face prosecution as readily as if the roles were reversed? Will local and federal justice agencies be as vigilant in patrolling right-wing hate speech and threats of violence as they are with similar actions that might emanate from the other side? I don’t know about you, but I do not find the nomination of Jeff Sessions for attorney general reassuring on this point. If Trump is quick to call out his critics but gives racists, bigots, and homophobes a free pass because they happen to like him, it would be another sign he is trying to tilt the scales of justice in his favor.

8. REALLY RIGGING THE SYSTEM.

Back when he appeared likely to lose, Trump started telling audiences that the system was “rigged” and threatened not to accept the outcome if he lost. If anything, of course, the system turned out to be rigged in his favor, insofar as he lost the popular vote and benefited from a number of obvious efforts to suppress the vote in areas where support for Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, was high. Be that as it may, given the promises he has made and the demography of the electorate, Trump and the GOP have every incentive to use the next four years to try to stack the electoral deck in their favor. Look for more attempts to gerrymander safe seats for House Republicans and more efforts to prevent likely Democratic voters from getting to the polls in 2018 and 2020. Needless to say, such interference is fundamentally at odds with true democracy.

9. FEARMONGERING.

Stoking public fears about safety and well-being is a classic autocratic tactic, designed to convince a frightened population to look to the Leader for protection. Trump played this card brilliantly in the campaign, warning of “Mexican rapists,” foreign governments that “steal our jobs,” “scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism,” and so on. He also hinted that his political rivals were somehow in cahoots with these various “enemies.” A frightened population tends to think first about its own safety, and forget about fundamental liberties, and would be more likely to look the other way as a president amassed greater power.

The worst case, of course, would be an Erdogan-like attempt to use a terrorist attack or some other equally dramatic event as an excuse to declare a “state of emergency” and to assume unprecedented executive authority. Bush and Cheney used 9/11 to pass the Patriot Act, and Trump could easily try to use some future incident as a — with apologies for the pun — trumped-up excuse to further encroach on civil liberties, press freedoms, and the other institutions that are central to democracy.

10. DEMONIZING THE OPPOSITION.

Trying to convince people that your domestic opponents are in league with the nation’s enemies is one of the oldest tactics in politics, and it has been part of Trump’s playbook ever since he stoked the “birther” controversy over Obama’s citizenship. After he becomes president, will he continue to question his opponents’ patriotism, accuse them of supporting America’s opponents, and blame policy setbacks on dark conspiracies among Democrats, liberals, Muslims, the Islamic State, “New York financial elites,” or the other dog whistles so beloved by right-wing media outlets like Breitbart? Will he follow the suggestions of some of his supporters and demand that Americans from certain parts of the world (read: Muslims) be required to “register” with the federal government?

Again, these are the same tactics Erdogan and Putin have used in Turkey and Russia, respectively, to cement their own authority over time by initiating a vicious cycle of social hostility. When groups within a society are already somewhat suspicious of each other, extremists can trigger a spiral of increasing hostility by attacking the perceived internal enemy in the hope of provoking a harsh reaction. If the attacked minority responds defensively, or its own hotheads lash out violently, it will merely reinforce the first group’s fears and bolster a rapid polarization. Extremists on both sides will try to “outbid” their political opponents by portraying themselves as the most ardent and effective defenders of their own group. In extreme cases, such as the Balkan Wars in the 1990s or Iraq after 2003, the result is civil war. Trump would be playing with fire if he tries to stay in power by consistently sowing hatred against the “other,” but he did it in the campaign, and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t do it again.

This list of warning signs will no doubt strike some as overly alarmist. As I said, it is possible — even likely — that Trump won’t try any of these things (or at least not very seriously) and he might face prompt and united opposition if he did. The checks and balances built into America’s democratic system may be sufficiently robust to survive a sustained challenge. Given the deep commitment to liberty that lies at the heart of the American experiment, it is also possible the American people would quickly detect any serious attempt to threaten the present order and take immediate action to stop it.

The bottom line: I am by no means predicting the collapse of democracy in the United States under a President Donald J. Trump. What I am saying is that it is not impossible, and there are some clear warning signs to watch out for. Now, as always, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Or to use a more modern formulation: If you see something, say something.

*********

[newssplashy]

World: As affordable housing crisis grows, HUD sits on the sidelines

WASHINGTON — The country is in the grips of an escalating housing affordability crisis. Millions of low-income Americans are paying 70 percent or more of their incomes for shelter.

The Trump administration’s main policy response, unveiled this spring by Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development:

A plan to triple rents for about 712,000 of the poorest tenants receiving federal housing aid and to loosen the cap on rents on 4.5 million households enrolled in federal voucher and public housing programs nationwide, with the goal of moving longtime tenants out of the system to make way for new ones.

As city and state officials and members of both parties clamor for the federal government to help, Carson has privately told aides that he views the shortage of affordable housing as regrettable, but as essentially a local problem.

A former presidential candidate who said last year that he did not want to give recipients of federal aid “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say, ‘I’ll just stay here; they will take care of me,'” he has made it a priority to reduce, rather than expand, assistance to the poor, to break what he sees as a cycle of dependency.

And when congressional Democrats and Republicans scrambled to save his department’s budget and rescue an endangered tax credit that accounts for 9 out of 10 affordable housing developments built in the country, Carson sat on the sidelines, according to legislators and congressional staff members.

Local officials seem resigned to the fact that they will receive little or no help from the Trump administration.

“To be brutally honest, I think that we aren’t really getting any help right now out of Washington, and the situation has gotten really bad over the last two years,” said Chad Williams, executive director of the Southern Nevada Regional Housing Authority, which oversees public housing developments and voucher programs that serve 16,000 people in the Las Vegas area.

Nevada, ground zero in the housing crisis a decade ago, is now the epicenter of the affordability crunch, with low-income residents squeezed out of once-affordable apartments by working-class refugees fleeing California’s own rental crisis.

“I think Carson’s ideas, that public housing shouldn’t be multigenerational, are noble,” Williams said. “But right now these programs are a stable, Band-Aid fix, and we really need them.”

Underlying the conflict between Carson and officials like Williams are fundamental disagreements over the role the federal government should play.

Carson believes federal aid should be regarded only as a temporary crutch for families moving from dependency to work and sees the rent increases as a way to expand his agency’s budget. Low-income renters and many local officials who run housing programs see the federal assistance as a semi-permanent hedge against evictions and homelessness that needs to be expanded in times of crisis.

This year, the White House proposed to slash $8.8 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s most important housing programs. While aides say Carson privately pushed for a restoration in programs for seniors and disabled people, he publicly supported the gutting of his own department, reiterating to lawmakers last month that he felt as much responsibility toward taxpayers as tenants.

“I continue to advocate for fiscal responsibility as well as compassion,” Carson told a House committee in June. He declined to comment for this article.

Under Carson’s most significant policy proposal as secretary, maximum rents paid by the poorest households in public housing would rise to $150 a month from $50.

His proposal has received little support from local housing operators. Over the past month, Carson has huddled with Rep. Dennis A. Ross, R-Fla., who is drafting less stringent legislation that would allow, but not mandate, local housing authorities to raise rents and carry out reforms to streamline the process of verifying the poverty of applicants, aides said.

Still, both proposals represent a paradigm shift in federal housing policy, ending the requirement that low-income tenants spend no more than 30 percent of their net income on rent.

Tying rents to incomes has been a central part of the system since 1981, especially for the Section 8 housing voucher program, enabling 2.1 million low-income families to rent private apartments they could not otherwise afford. Carson’s proposal would peg rents to 35 percent of gross income for all tenants. The Ross bill excludes voucher recipients, at the request of local housing authority officials.

“We need sensible reforms to make the system more efficient for agencies and residents,” said Adrianne Todman, chief executive of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. “But now is not the time for arbitrary federal rent hikes.”

“This isn’t about dependence,” said Diane Yentel, president of the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition, a Washington-based advocacy group that has released several recent reports documenting the affordability crunch. “Today’s housing crisis is squarely rooted in the widening gap between incomes and housing costs.”

The crisis didn’t begin under Trump’s presidency.

Median national rents rose 32 percent in constant dollars from 2001 to 2015, while wages remained flat, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. The pace has picked up over the last few years, buoyed by an improving economy.

The rent increases are hitting poor and elderly people, African-Americans and low-income wage earners the hardest. A survey by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that a worker earning the state minimum wage could afford a market-rate one-bedroom apartment in only 22 of the country’s 3,000 counties.

The Obama administration initially proposed steep increases for Section 8 and other programs, but pulled back after the Republicans won control of the House in 2010.

During the 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama promised to fund an affordable housing trust fund for the construction of new units. But the $200-million-a-year program, funded by the profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was blocked by Republican lawmakers until 2014. In 2017, it was on track to finance the construction of about 1,000 units of affordable housing in 32 states, according to federal data.

Its sister program, the Capital Magnet Fund, which has leveraged private investment to create 17,000 new units, is in the cross hairs of Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who tried to cut it by $141.7 million this year as part of his unsuccessful budget recession effort this summer.

Under Trump, funding for public housing, vouchers and new construction has risen slightly — against the president’s wishes.

In March, Republican and Democratic negotiators rejected Trump’s budget, adding $1.25 billion to HUD’s rental assistance programs and injecting an additional $425 million to the HOME program, which funds state, local, nonprofit and private partnerships to build affordable housing.

Those moves, while significant, are likely to have a limited impact on the larger problem of the increasing number of families who cannot afford a place to live.

While prices are cooling at the high end of the market in many big cities, the low- and middle-income housing markets in Nevada, Texas, California, Florida and Colorado are so hot, local officials say, that landlords routinely reject subsidized tenants because they can charge more to other renters.

Rental construction has focused on attracting high-income tenants. From 2001 to 2013, the number of rental apartments for high-wage earners increased 36 percent, while units for poor people shrank nearly 10 percent, according to federal housing statistics.

With affordable stock scarce, prices are spiking. An estimated 12 million Americans, most of them poor, now spend more than half of their earnings on housing, according to HUD statistics.

One of them is Judith Toro Fortyz, 75, who receives $848 a month in Social Security and pays $594.88 of it to remain in the small two-bedroom apartment on Staten Island that she once shared with her mother.

Toro Fortyz has been turned down for federal vouchers, reflecting a shortage in assistance that has shut out 3 of every 4 eligible applicants for Section 8. Even with an additional housing stipend from the city, she is spending 70 percent of her income on rent.

That has forced her to make wrenching decisions, like forgoing her favorite fruit, oranges, after a price spike at her local supermarket.

“I stay home a lot. I’d rather not go out because going out means you have to spend money,” said Toro Fortyz, a retired data storage worker. “I have a friend who gets Section 8 and, oh my God, they pay $200 a month. I can’t even imagine having that much money to live on.”

Carson’s proposal alarmed many low-income tenants, especially older ones, who could face significant rent increases under the plan. “We basically wouldn’t be able to get by,” said Patrick Greene, 69, a retired truck driver who lives in a small HUD-subsidized apartment with his wife in Montgomery, Alabama.

A more immediate threat to affordable housing, critics say, is the huge tax bill passed by Congress last year, which imperils one of the most important sources of long-term funding, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit.

Novogradac & Co., a firm that provides analytics for the construction and finance industries, estimated that demand for the $9-billion-a-year credit could dry up as investors realize savings through the tax cuts. The firm estimates that nearly 235,000 fewer apartments could be built over the next decade as a result of the tax code rewrite.

A bipartisan coalition, led by Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was able to expand the credit by an additional $400 million. But that is not likely to offset the damage done by the tax measure.

The administration is observing these efforts from the sidelines. Trump, scion of a New York real estate family that made its fortune in the 1950s and 1960s building affordable housing for white working-class neighborhoods, has shown little interest in tackling the problem.

He made only passing mention of the issue during the 2016 campaign and has pressed Carson to move more aggressively to impose work requirements on federal aid recipients.

For his part, Carson publicly acknowledges the crisis in most of his speeches. “Alarmingly high numbers of Americans continue to pay more than half of their incomes toward rent,” he told a House panel in October. “Many millions remain mired in poverty, rather than being guided on a path out of it.”

But he is focused less on federal solutions than on prodding local governments to ease barriers to construction. He has ordered his policy staff to come up with proposals to push local governments to reduce zoning restrictions on new projects, especially low-cost manufactured housing. HUD will also begin working with landlords around the country to come up with ways to make housing vouchers more attractive and more inclusive, aides said.

“Subsidies are a piece of the puzzle,” said Raffi Williams, a spokesman for Carson, “but we must also address the regulatory barriers relative to zoning and land use in higher-cost markets that are preventing the construction of new affordable housing. This is not just a federal problem — it’s everybody’s problem.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Glenn Thrush © 2018 The New York Times

source http://www.newssplashy.com/2018/07/world-as-affordable-housing-crisis_29.html