Farm-To-Table May Feel Virtuous, But It’s Food Labor That’s Ripe For Change

NPR

The Salt Opinion-What’s On Your Table

Farm-To-Table May Feel Virtuous, But It’s Food Labor That’s Ripe For Change

Andrea Reusing July 30, 2017

Mexican farmworkers harvest lettuce in a field outside of Brawley, Calif.

Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images

Novel and thrilling in earlier days, today’s farm-to-table restaurant menus have scaled new heights of supposed transparency. The specificity can be weirdly opaque, much like an actual menu item that recently made the rounds: Quail Egg Coated in the Ashes of Dried Sheep’s S***. Farm-to-table fatigue is most evident in those of us who cook in farm-to-table restaurants — Even We Are Sick of Us.

In the 15 years since Lantern opened, guests at my Asian-influenced farm-to-table restaurant have only rarely asked why a white girl from New Jersey is cooking fried rice in North Carolina alongside a kitchen crew mostly born in Mexico. The food we cook is openly and inherently inauthentic. But guests are sometimes surprised to learn that every single thing we serve isn’t both local and organic, that our relatively expensive menu yields only slim profit or that we can’t afford a group health plan. Diners occasionally comment that our use of Alaskan salmon or California cilantro has detracted from a truly “authentic” farm-to-table experience.

The ubiquity that makes farm-to-table meaningless also gives it its power. It has come to signify authenticity on almost any level, suggesting practices as complicated as adherence to fair labor standards, supply chain transparency or avoidance of GMOs. As farm-to-table has slipped further away from the food movement and into the realms of foodie-ism and corporate marketing, it is increasingly unhitched from the issues it is so often assumed to address.

Farm-to-table’s sincere glow distracts from how the production and processing of even the most pristine ingredients — from field or dock or slaughterhouse to restaurant or school cafeteria — is nearly always configured to rely on cheap labor. Work very often performed by people who are themselves poor and hungry.

Inequality does not affect our food system — our food system is built on inequality and requires it to function. The components of this inequality —racism, lack of access to capital, exploitation, land loss, nutritional and health disparities in communities of color, to name some — are tightly connected. Our nearly 20-year obsession with food and chefs has neither expanded access to high-quality food nor improved nutrition in low-resource neighborhoods.

Only an honest look at how food gets to the table in the U.S. can begin to unwind these connections.

Food workers, as members of both the largest and lowest-paid U.S. workforce, are in a unique position to lead these conversations. Many of us have already helped incubate policy change on wage equality, organic certification and the humane treatment of animals. But a simpler and maybe even more powerful way we can be catalysts for real change in the food system is to simply tell the stories of who we are.

Take immigration. Our current policy renders much of the U.S. workforce completely invisible. This is more true in the food industry than in any other place in American life. There is a widespread disconnect on the critical role recent immigrants play in producing our food and an underlying empathy gap when it comes to the reality of daily life for these low-wage food workers and their families.

The Salt –Cheap Eats, Cheap Labor: The Hidden Human Costs Of Those Lists

Cheap Eats, Cheap Labor: The Hidden Human Costs Of Those Lists

The Salt –Dinner in Appalachia: Finding Common Ground In Trump Country

Dinner in Appalachia: Finding Common Ground In Trump Country

For example, here in North Carolina, over 150,000 immigrant farm and food-processing workers harvest nearly all the local food we eat and export, but their living and working conditions would shock most Americans.

Our state produces half the sweet potatoes grown in the U.S. — 500,000 tons a year — which are all harvested by hand. A worker here has to dig and haul 2 tons to earn about $50. In meatpacking plants, horrific injuries and deaths resulting from unsafe working conditions are widespread. Farmworkers are exposed to far more pesticides than you or I would get on our spinach. Poverty wages allow ripe strawberries to be sold cheaply enough to be displayed un-refrigerated, piled high in produce section towers. Nearly half of immigrant farm workers and their families in North Carolina are food insecure.

When as chefs we wonder whether a pork chop tastes better if the pig ate corn or nuts but we don’t talk about the people who worked in the slaughterhouse where it was processed, we are creating a kind of theater. We encourage our audience to suspend their disbelief.

The theater our audience sees — abundant grocery stores and farmers markets, absurdly cheap fast food and our farm-to-table dining rooms — resembles what Jean Baudrillard famously called the simulacrum, a kind of heightened parallel world that, like Disneyland, is an artifice with no meaningful connection to the real world.

As chefs, we need to talk more about the economic realities of our kitchens and dining rooms and allow eaters to begin to experience them as we do: imperfect places where abundance and hope exist beside scarcity and compromise. Places that are weakened by the same structural inequality that afflicts every aspect of American life.

Roger Ebert described the capacity of movies to be “like a machine that generates empathy.” With more expansive definitions of authenticity and transparency, restaurants can become empathy machines and diners will get a better understanding of the lives of the people who feed us.

Reusing (@AndreaReusing) is the James Beard award-winning chef at Lantern in Chapel Hill, N.C.

About This Essay

This essay was crafted in response to a summit on racism and difference in food, staged at Rivendell Writers Colony by The Southern Foodways Alliance and Soul Summit.

4.5 GPA Valedictorian’s Earth Shattering Secret

4.5 GPA Valedictorian Reveals Secret

Larissa Martinez, a Texas high school valedictorian, reveals that she is an undocumented immigrant in her valedictorian speech.Summary: https://goo.gl/HC19XeCredit: ABC News

Posted by Illumeably on Sunday, July 16, 2017

Home care workers have our lives in their hands. They’re paid only $10 an hour

the guardian

Inequality…Inequality and Opportunity in America

This series is supported by The Rockefeller Foundation

Home care workers have our lives in their hands. They’re paid only $10 an hour

Home care is expected to add more jobs than any other field in the coming years. Caregivers will look after us in old age – but do we care enough about them?

By Sarah Jaffe July 13, 2017

June Barrett’s day as a home care worker starts at 5pm and lasts for 16 hours, overnight. All night long, she checks on her elderly clients, a married couple both in their 90s. They sleep in different parts of their Miami home, and much of Barrett’s job is spent trekking through the corridors, back and forth, to make sure husband nor wife has suddenly taken a turn for the worse. “I’m constantly on my feet,” she says.

Two million workers across the US do the kind of home care that Barrett does – the workforce has doubled in size over the past 10 years, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the field will add more jobs than any other occupation by 2024.

Barrett, a tall woman with short dark hair with a bright red streak and a Jamaican accent, started in the field in 2003, and has worked for her current clients for nearly four years. They require round-the-clock care and so she gets to her clients’ home when the day-shift carer is still there, ready for the handover. She then prepares dinner, helps them eat, and makes sure they get their medication. The wife, Barrett says, doesn’t like to take her pills, so this part of her day requires some finesse.

The husband is able to walk by himself, but the wife needs Barrett to bring her to the bathroom, to wash her and brush her teeth, and to bring her to bed. While her clients sleep, Barrett cleans the kitchen, prepares supplies for the next day, and checks to make sure they have everything they need.

When one of them is ill, the process gets more complicated. “When you do this work, you are responsible for people’s lives,” she says. “One mistake can cost your client his or her life.” Balancing two clients is challenging: when she has to help one bathe, she is worrying about the other’s safety. When things are difficult right now – the wife has slight dementia – she reminds herself that her client was a strong advocate for schools and students when she was younger. “I look at her, I see a warrior woman,” Barrett says.

All things considered, Barrett’s current situation is good. But in the past, she has worked with violent children, people in advanced stages of dementia, and clients who abused her verbally and sexually harassed her.

“Remember now, you and I, we are not sure what is going to happen to us when we become ill,” she says. “We don’t know. So with this work I do, I do it from a place of empathy and from a place of love. I am 53 now. I am giving that care the way that I, June Barrett, would like to get that care when I am old.”

Barrett first came to the US via New York in 2001 and then moved to Miami to join her sister, going straight to her first job interview from a 20-hour Greyhound bus ride. Stepping in to greet her new client, she was met with a racial slur. “I worked my magic and I ended up staying with her for about four months,” she says.

Shortly thereafter, she settled into a live-in job with another elderly couple. At first, she moved her things into the only spare bedroom in the house. But when her client asked where she was sleeping, and Barrett told her, “she said: ‘You must be out of your cotton-picking mind.’ That was the first time I was hearing those words, ‘cotton-picking’. She took everything out from that room. And for five and a half years, I spent those nights sleeping in the study – and I am a tall girl – on a sofa with my feet hanging over.”

She’s also faced sexual harassment on the job – one client demanded she come to bed, groped her and kissed her. “The humiliating part about it was that I wasn’t able to leave right away,” she says. She’d been out of work for a while, and could not afford to leave the job immediately.

Modern home care has its roots in the New Deal era as a way to give work to poor women, explains Eileen Boris, distinguished professor in the department of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-author of Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State.

Home care exploded in the 1970s, she says, with the birth of the independent living movement among disability rights activists, combined with older people’s desire to avoid nursing homes, which were seen as underfunded warehouses.

“What had been a way to relieve the crisis of public hospitals and to give employment to poor women on public assistance became an integral part of the limited healthcare rights that Americans developed with the Great Society,” Boris says.

The Obama administration was a high point for the rights of home care workers, many of whom were still locked out of basic labor protections. In 2013, the labor department extended federal minimum wage and overtime protections to them. Elly Kugler, who leads federal policy work at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, says it was meaningful because it recognized them as workers, and afforded them additional pay. Wages for home care have been largely stagnant, hovering just above $10 an hour on average.

Low wages had often driven people out of the field who otherwise found the work meaningful, Kugler notes. “Though many of our members care deeply for the work they do … they had to go and work in other kinds of jobs. Meaning fast food, other sectors, making a little bit more money.”

I am giving that care the way that I, June Barrett, would like to get that care when I am old

“I think one of the interesting things about home care is that it forces all these different worlds to connect,” Kugler adds. “The world of state funded home care and and healthcare and also worker rights and disability rights and senior rights and racial justice – all these different worlds are connected in home care.”

Nowhere is that more clear than in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, now under fire from the Trump administration and a Republican Congress.

The expansion of Medicaid, which took effect in 2014, meant more funding for home care and more jobs for care workers. The bill also expanded healthcare for the workers themselves – Barrett had never had chicken pox as a child, and when she contracted it as an adult from a client with shingles, it aggravated her asthma.

The Inequality Project: the Guardian’s in-depth look at our unequal world

“Before the Affordable Care Act passed, one in three home care workers was uninsured,” says Josephine Kalipeni, director of policy and partnerships at Caring Across Generations. After its passage, that rate dropped by 26%.

Because of the general forward trajectory, Kugler says, the Obama years had meant that the movement for care workers had gained more public traction with bigger issues, such as immigrants’ rights (many home care workers are immigrants like Barrett), racial justice, and the value of women’s work. Home care workers had joined the Fight for $15, initiated in part by the Service Employees International Union, which represents tens of thousands of home care workers around the country.

Workers who liked their care jobs, like Barrett, could begin to think about their work as a career.

And then came Trump.

“When I think about how work is being talked about right now and by Trump [when he was] on the campaign trail, it is almost like he colors some jobs pink and some jobs blue, even though there are women in the manufacturing sector and men in the care sector,” Kugler says.

Despite the fact that home health care is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the country, “it has colored the tenor of the debate ever since. We still have this very pink and blue tenor to the debate and only the blue ‘boy’ jobs are really getting talked about.”

It would be bad enough if the Trump administration was merely ignoring the efforts of Barrett and others like her. But the administration’s policies seem designed, Kalipeni says, to uphold a “myth around creating jobs” that returns to the values that created entrenched inequality between rich and poor, black and white, men and women.

Discussions about infrastructure tend to focus on bridges and roads – which are important, certainly, but ignore the equally necessary infrastructure of care that allows a workforce to exist in the first place.

Those priorities are clearly demonstrated in the Republican plan to “repeal and replace” the ACA, currently moving through the Senate. Estimates compiled by the National Domestic Workers Alliance range from 1.8 to 3 million jobs lost in just a few years if “Trumpcare” passes; between 305,000 and 713,000 of those will be home care workers.

The latest version of the bill to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office predicts that 22 million people would lose their health insurance by 2026 if the bill were passed as is. Premiums would spike for elderly people like Barrett’s clients, as Medicaid spending would be slashed by $772 billion over 10 years. Changes to Medicaid could include a “per capita cap,” or a limit to how much the federal government pays states per enrollee in the program.

“It is basically saying, ‘Your state can only get so sick. You can only have so much of a disability and then you are just going to have to pay,’” Kugler says. These cuts, Kalipeni notes, will fall squarely on the shoulders of women – the women of color and immigrant women who do the paid home care work, the women who still do most of the unpaid care work that will pick up the slack when the budgets for paid care are cut.

Until such cuts directly affect people’s lives, she says, people often don’t realize the importance of these systems – and by then it is frequently too late.

When Ana Ramirez came to the US from the Dominican Republic, she got a job at the airport, but the work was grueling and the schedule made it difficult for her to take care of her child. She decided to go through training to become a home care worker.

That was 10 years ago. “I am very good at taking care of people,” she says through a translator. “You get very close to them. When I go and take care of people, they want me to come back. There are people who don’t have a family, and the home care attendant becomes their family.”

Ramirez – a warm, motherly woman with reddish-black hair in a ponytail, who greets me with a hug and a kiss on the cheek – works through an agency in Queens that sends her to different clients. She works 10-hour shifts four days a week, but there have been plenty of times when her hours run beyond that.

Sometimes, her clients’ family members demand things that are not in her job description. “There are people whose family believes that the home attendant is their own domestic worker,” she says.

Some of her clients are bedridden, meaning she must bathe and change them, as well as bring food and water. But she says that the thing that many of them value the most is when she sits with them and listens to them talk about their lives. For Ramirez, it is meaningful work.

Still, the low wages (she is paid $11 an hour) and the sometimes harsh conditions led her to the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Her listening skills from years of care work have made her a natural organizer, a role in which she listens to the complaints of other home care workers and brings them into the organization.

One of those complaints in New York, she says, is that many home care workers moved into the field from other low-wage service work, hoping that it would be an improvement. But then Andrew Cuomo, the state governor, increased the minimum wage specifically for fast-food workers, pushing some care workers to consider returning to fast food.

Barrett first heard about domestic worker organizing when the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights passed, in 2010. Then, a year ago, she got a phone call from the Miami Workers Center, and they told her that they were organizing workers like her. When she went to the first assembly, she saw women wearing T-shirts that read “National Domestic Workers Alliance”.

“I can’t explain to you the joy that came to me,” she says of that first meeting. “I’ve always been involved with activism, but I didn’t want it to get involved with work, so I’ve kept my politics, including my queerness, quiet.”

But after the assembly, she says, “I was on fire”. She called her current clients’ daughter, technically her boss, and asked to meet her and her father. In that meeting, she says, she told them that she was going to be a part of the domestic workers’ movement. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but if this movement needs me then I’m going to be there. If you want, you can fire me, but please give me two weeks’ notice so I can get another job.”

To her surprise, they not only did not fire her, but they gave her a check to donate to the National Domestic Workers Alliance. They have supported her membership in the organization, and have even given her paid time off to travel to speak – she has just returned from a trip to Nicaragua. They said they didn’t want Barrett to fight the fight without taking part themselves. They’ve also given her and the other care workers in the household paid sick days and paid vacation time.

Other clients weren’t so supportive. “They didn’t see me as a human being,” Barrett says. Organizing, she says, is the way to change those conditions. “My self-esteem was stripped from me, horrible stuff was said to me,” she says. “Some women just do [home care] because there’s a check at the end of the month. But if they can regain their own self-worth, their own dignity, they can do this work with pride.”

Three weeks ago, Barrett was one of the speakers at a press conference at Senator Marco Rubio’s office, testifying to the positive changes the Affordable Care Act brought to her life. She is angry, as many of her colleagues are, that once again she has to fight for her work to be seen, to be recognized, for her efforts to be counted as real work and not just a budget line to be slashed.

“People look down on you when you do this work,” she says. “They have to remember that they too are going to get old and this work will continue until the end of the world. There is always going to be somebody needing care.”

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The Trump administration isn’t a farce. It’s a tragedy.

Vox: The Trump administration isn’t a farce. It’s a tragedy.

Like Watergate, this is an era of low comedy and high fear.

by Ezra Klein July 11, 2017

This must be what it was like to live through Watergate.

The disorientation, the confusion, the half-truth, the shock, the dark humor. I think of something Elizabeth Drew, the author of one of my favorite books on the era, wrote — “Watergate was a time of low comedy and high fear.” The farce of the story distracts from its horror, and so we take refuge. Twitter is never funnier than when a new Trump-Russia story breaks.

And yet.

This isn’t a scandal as we are used to thinking about it. This isn’t an embarrassment, or a gaffe. This is a security breach. It calls into question whether America’s foreign policy is being driven by the favors President Donald Trump owes Vladimir Putin for his political help or, perhaps worse, whether it’s being driven by the fear that Putin will release far more damning material if Trump crosses him.

This is a story that makes clear nothing the current White House says can be trusted. Donald Trump Jr., who enthusiastically tried to work with Russians to upend the election, called allegations that the Trump campaign would work with the Russians “disgusting” and “phony.” His father tweeted, as recently as May 12, that “the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems.”

These are acts that cast doubt on the basic patriotism of the current White House — a White House that takes, as its slogan, “America First.”

This is a story that reminds us that the last election was often dominated, and perhaps decided, by a crime — Russia’s theft of Democratic emails, which may or may not have happened with the Trump campaign’s support. And it refocuses our attention on the fact that Trump fired the director of the FBI in an attempt to end the investigation into that crime.

The generous interpretation, until now, was that this was all bumbling and idiocy and coincidence. Yes, the Trump campaign had a lot of strange meetings with Russians, and sure, it seemed to routinely forget them during congressional testimony and security checks, and of course, Russia intervened in the election to harm Hillary Clinton. But incompetence, we were assured, was the likelier explanation than conspiracy.

Not anymore.

Donald Trump Jr. knew exactly what he was being offered. The email he got was crystal clear. His source is referred to as a “Russian government attorney.” The invitation for the meeting explains that she will “provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information.” The intermediary assures Trump Jr. that “this is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

His reply, it cannot be said often enough, was “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer” — and late in the summer is exactly when the hacked Democratic emails actually began to be released.

It wasn’t just Trump Jr. Campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner knew, too. They were forwarded the emails. They knew exactly what this meeting was. And they were there. They wanted the documents. They wanted to work with the Russians.

They seem to have known about more than just this meeting. As my colleague Matt Yglesias observes, there is no surprised response on these emails. Neither Trump Jr. nor Manafort nor Kushner react with confusion or interest when informed that Russia wants to help Trump win. The alliance is already credible enough, and already serious enough, that they take the email without further vetting or discussion. No one suggests running it by the foreign policy team or even the FBI.

Did Donald Trump himself know? It would be remarkable if he didn’t. It would mean his son and his son-in-law and his campaign manager had tried to collude with the Russians — endangering his campaign and giving a foreign government blackmail material over his presidency — without telling him. This seems unlikely. But if Donald Trump knew, then it means he knew what he was firing James Comey to hide. Then it is clearly obstruction of justice.

Even if Trump himself did not know, consider all the damning evidence here: We know that his son, son-in-law, and campaign manager at least tried to work with a semi-hostile foreign power to win the election. We know that foreign power conducted a large-scale and successful cyber-espionage effort against the Democratic Party. We know that Trump continues to treat Russia unusually gently — palling around with Vladimir Putin even as he undercuts NATO and weakens the Western alliance.

And so we are faced with a crisis that leaves vast swaths of American politics stained. The election is tainted. The White House is tainted. Our foreign policy is tainted. If impeachment seems impossible, it is only because we believe that Republicans in Congress would sooner protect a criminal administration than risk their legislative agenda to uphold the rule of law — which is all to say, Congress is tainted, too.

The actors in this drama are often comic, pathetic, and incompetent. But the damage they have done, and are doing, is almost beyond imagining. As often as this looks like farce, we should not forget it’s a tragedy.

Donald Trump Jr.’s Love for Russian Dirt

The New Yorker

Donald Trump Jr.’s Love for Russian Dirt

By Amy Davidson July 11, 2017

The President’s son revealed, in his own words, no hesitation to accept information that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

On July 19, 2016, a little more than a month after he met with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who he thought might help to damage Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, Donald Trump, Jr., spoke in support of his father at the Republican National Convention. He had been a visible part of the campaign for months, appearing on television to complain about the elder Trump’s critics or, often enough, firing guns with local politicians—Trump had offered his sons’ record as avid hunters as evidence that he was eager to loosen gun laws. (Donald Jr., who was photographed triumphing over a dead elephant, has decried restrictions on silencers as a restraint on sportsmen.) There was talk, in some quarters, that he might be a more serious politician than his father—whatever that might mean—and a possible future mayor of New York. And his speech included what passed, at the Convention, for classic conservative tropes, such as this:

Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class. Now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers.

There was a brief contretemps after “The Daily Show” pointed out that this was similar to a line in an essay by Frank Buckley, published in The American Conservative, but it turned out that Buckley had also been a writer on the speech, and so the line, if not something earned, was a gift—or, rather, a purchase, not a misappropriation. All of those things can be hard to tell apart in the world of the Trumps—as is the difference between an unqualified dilettante and a political operative working on behalf of a Presidential candidate. But one aspect of the line that Donald Jr., probably came by on his own was his disdain for “Soviet-era department stores.” Shopping malls like the one in Moscow owned by Aras Agalarov, the billionaire who, with his son, a family-subsidized Russian pop star named Emin, were so much better. Whether or not they benefitted the customers, the Agalarovs helped to fund the 2013 run of the Miss Universe pageant, an operation partly owned by Trump, which was held outside of Moscow—and so, if nothing else, they seem to have benefitted the Trumps. Emin had been at the pageant; a Politico piece from last year, looking back at the proceedings, links to a music video that features him in various T-shirts, alongside several contestants in bathing suits and sequined dresses, and Trump, Sr., himself, in business attire.

“Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting,” Rob Goldstone, an “entertainment publicist,” as he was identified by the Times, which broke the story of Donald Juniors meeting with the Russian lawyer, wrote in an e-mail to Donald, Jr., on June 3, 2016. (After the Times said that it had obtained a copy, Trump Jr., tweeted out the exchange.) The e-mail continued, “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

The Times noted that Russia doesn’t have a “Crown prosecutor”—mostly because it does not, or does not exactly, have someone who wears a crown. But Trump Jr., seems to have had no hesitation about the presumption of oligarchical access. It seems to have made sense to everyone involved that a shopping-mall developer should have access to judicial files—just as it made sense, to the Trumps and their circle, that a real-estate billionaire should have access to the White House.

More important, from the perspective of the various investigations currently looking at Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential election—which a number of senators have already said they would like to discuss with Trump, Jr.—is what the Trump team thought the Russians’ interest was. Goldstone’s explanation for why the Agalarovs had been given the information was direct and, one would have thought, troubling: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” he wrote. According to the Times, Trump Jr., replied, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Later in the summer was the time of the Convention and the nomination, followed by the debates and the heart of the Presidential race. The direct result of this outreach from Emin was a meeting with a lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, whom Goldstone identified in another e-mail as a “Russian government attorney.” That took place on June 9th, at Trump Tower; Trump Jr., was joined by Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and now a White House adviser, and Paul Manafort, who was then the Trump campaign’s manager. Trump Jr., has said in various statements that the meeting yielded nothing useful, which he presented as a disappointment. His father’s representatives have portrayed the whole transaction as entirely normal. Veselnitskaya, for her part, has said that her real interest was never the campaign but her clients’ concerns about the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions alleged Russian human-rights abusers. When NBC asked her how Trump associates got the impression that she did have damaging material, she said it was possible that “they wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted.”

And what if Veselnitskaya had come laden with real dirt, obtained in some illegal way—like, say, the hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, that soon emerged? Donald Trump Jr., might have finally felt that the clerks in some post-Soviet intelligence shop were working for him, the customer. Would he have noticed, or cared, how Vladimir Putin, the proprietor of the emporium, was profiting?

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.

In Mexico, massacre of family underlines surging violence

Associated Press World

In Mexico, massacre of family underlines surging violence

Mark Stevenson, Associated Press July 10, 2017

COATZACOALCOS, Mexico (AP) — The bullet-riddled bodies of the Martinez children were found on a bloody floor, huddled next to the corpses of their parents in a rented shack.

The family of six was massacred, authorities believe, because the Zetas cartel suspected the father, an unemployed taxi driver, had played some part in a rival gang’s attack that killed a Zeta gunman.

The response underlines the no-holds-barred tactics of drug gangs that are splintering and battling one another for control in much of Mexico, which recently recorded its highest monthly murder total in at least 20 years.

Despite President Enrique Pena Nieto’s promises of a safer nation when he came to office five years ago, the violence is outpacing even the darkest days of the drug war launched by his predecessor.

“It has taken on the proportions of a ring of hell that would be described in Dante’s ‘Inferno,'” said Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and author of the book “Deal.”

“Their strategy was strictly going after the kingpin. … That was pretty much not the way to go because, you know, you cut off a head and others take its place,” Vigil added. “You have weak institutions, weak rule of law, weak judiciary, massive corruption, particularly within the state and municipal police forces, and all of that contributes to the escalating violence.”

In the first five months of 2017, there were 9,916 killings nationwide — an increase of about 30 percent over the 7,638 slain during the same period last year. In 2011, the bloodiest year of the drug war, the figure for the same January-May period was 9,466.

In some places the bloodshed has accompanied the rise of the upstart Jalisco New Generation cartel and the breakup of the once-dominant Sinaloa cartel into warring factions following the arrest of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was extradited to the United States in January.

At least 19 people died in turf battles pitting Guzman’s son, brother and former allies against each other late last month in the western state of Sinaloa, according to investigators.

In the northern border state of Chihuahua, shootouts last week between Sinaloa gunmen and the gang known as La Linea killed at least 14.

In the Gulf Coast oil city of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz Gov. Miguel Angel Yunes said the slaying of a top gunman in late June prompted the Zetas to kill the entire Martinez family: Clemente; his wife Martimana; 10-year-old Jocelin; Victor Daniel, 8; Angel, 6; and Nahomi, 5.

All died in the house where they washed cars for $1 each.

“They didn’t have anything, not even furniture. They slept on the floor,” grandmother Flora Martinez said, sobbing. “I don’t understand why they did this, why they did this to my little ones. They were innocent, they didn’t know anything.”

For years it was understood that the Zetas were untouchable in this part of the state. Just ask Sonia Cruz, whose son was killed in Coatzacoalcos in July 2016 in a case that remains unsolved.

“They (police) told me that when ‘la mana’ (drug cartels) are involved, that’s where they stop investigating,” Cruz said.

But last year’s election of Yunes, the first opposition candidate to win the governorship from the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, may have broken old alliances between criminals and corrupt officials.

The new governor has shown some willingness to go after the Zetas: The local cartel leader who allegedly ordered the Martinez killings, known as “Comandante H,” was arrested a few days afterward.

Yunes said the man had “operated with absolute freedom in Coatzacoalcos since 2006” and accused business people in the city of acting as fronts for ill-gotten properties that actually belonged to the gangster.

Raul Ojeda Banda, a local anti-crime activist, said that some were forced to go along with the scheme: “Some were pressured, threatened.”

Violence in the area has also been exacerbated by Jalisco cartel incursions and other pressures that have threatened key sources of income for the Zetas.

Part of “Comandante H’s” business model involved large-scale kidnapping for quick ransom, with targets ranging from locals to oil workers to Central American migrants whom gang members tortured to extort payments from relatives in the United States.

But the Zetas abducted so many locals that those who were able moved out of the city, and those who remained began blocking off their neighborhoods at night to keep kidnappers out.

An oil industry slump amid low crude prices resulted in fewer energy workers around to prey upon. And suddenly there were fewer migrants as well. Donald Trump’s election discouraged some from trying to reach the U.S. and others avoided southern Veracruz for fear of being attacked.

“The vast majority of them are robbed. It is a lucky one who isn’t,” said priest Joel Ireta Munguia, the head of a Coatzacoalcos migrant shelter run by the Roman Catholic Church. He estimated the number of Central Americans passing though the city has declined by almost two-thirds.

The wave of violence has also touched regions that were long seen as peaceful.

The Jalisco cartel is believed to have allied with a faction of the Sinaloa gang in a war for the Baja California Sur state cities of Los Cabos and the nearby port of La Paz.

Dismembered bodies, severed heads and clandestine graves have now become almost routine in the once-placid resorts.

Dwight Zahringer, a Michigan native who lives in an upscale neighborhood in Los Cabos, said one victim was found at the entrance to his neighborhood recently.

“That was more of a message that the narco-traffickers wanted to deliver, sort of to say, ‘We can come right up into your Beverly Hills and dump dismembered bodies on your doorstep,'” Zahringer said. “I’m from Detroit. We’re used to seeing crime. But heads being left in coolers — that’s a little extreme.”

Law Professor: The obstruction of justice case against Trump is already a slam dunk

Business Insider-Slate

Law Professor: The obstruction of justice case against Trump is already a slam dunk

Samuel Buell, Slate July 8, 2017

In the weeks since the New York Times reported that President Trump allegedly asked James Comey to drop a pending criminal investigation of Michael Flynn, there has been much debate about whether the president committed obstruction of justice.

Looking at the entire affair from the standpoint of strict legal analysis, there’s just one conclusion: All available evidence says he did.

Under such a plain legal analysis, of the sort my students and I conduct in the law school classroom, it is highly likely that special counsel Robert Mueller will find that there is a provable case that the president committed a federal felony offense.

The Justice Department, as well as many scholars, have opined that a sitting president cannot be indicted and tried for a crime. So the ultimate issue, whatever Mueller’s findings, will come down to the political question of impeachment. But Mueller’s determination will be critical because the crime of obstruction would be the most legally potent charge in any impeachment debate, as it was in the articles of impeachment against both Presidents Nixon and Clinton.

It’s worth looking at the already strong publicly available evidence, as well as the supposed flaws in that case. Even taking into account possible shortcomings, the current case for an obstruction of justice charge is crystal clear.

Looking at it from the perspective of a prosecutor or a law school class, the three basic legal elements of obstruction of justice are satisfied in this case. First, Trump’s alleged directive to his former FBI director would qualify as an effort to interfere with an investigation. Federal courts have said that virtually any act can create such liability for obstruction and that the act need not, by itself, be unlawful or even nefarious.

Second, Trump’s act allegedly was taken with a specific “official proceeding”-the potential prosecution of his former national security adviser-in mind as the object of the effort to obstruct.

It’s important to note that the relevant criminal statute prohibits obstruction of legal proceedings that might not yet be underway at the time of the offense but that could come to fruition-an investigation of Flynn was ongoing at that point, but there may not yet have been a grand jury.

As long as the suspect has a specific potential proceeding in mind-any possible prosecution of Flynn would do here-this requirement is satisfied.

Third, Trump’s alleged actions clearly indicate a “corrupt” intent, which federal court rulings have said is a state of mind meaning “with an improper purpose to obstruct justice.” There have been many federal cases in which efforts to derail or even slow a criminal investigation in order to protect associates were proven in court to meet this requirement. That is what apparently happened here.

There are other issues at play, of course. Some have argued that, elements of the crime aside, the president simply cannot be prosecuted for exercising his power to direct federal law enforcement priorities no matter how malevolent his intentions. This argument disturbingly equates the power to do something with the legality of exercising that power.

The Supreme Court has already acknowledged the inescapable logic that the president’s authority over federal law enforcement does not include the freedom to prevent investigation and prosecution of himself and his close aides, as presidential powers expert Richard Pildes has explained. The opposing line of argument would excuse a parade of horribles including, hypothetically, a president who ordered his FBI director to mire an election opponent in a costly and distracting investigation for political reasons, or a president who ordered the halt to a murder investigation that might implicate a staff member.

A related claim is that the existence of the presidential pardon implies the power to snuff out any investigation at any stage. But no sensible rendition of the constitutional framers’ intention could hold that their actual purpose was to grant the president a monarchical prerogative to ordain any legal outcome, on any subject, and at any time.

The principal defense to date from Trump and his advocates has been on the facts. They have denied much of the sequence of events laid out in Comey’s testimony and in press accounts about his contemporaneous documentation of the meetings in question. Even assuming that this defense eventually points to specific contested facts and somehow resolves the president’s own contradictory statements, the approach is going nowhere.

By the standards of federal criminal cases, Comey’s credibility-on recall, detail, résumé, demeanor, bias, intelligence, contemporaneous documentation, and other standard witness metrics-is exceptionally strong. After watching Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, no experienced federal criminal lawyer, speaking candidly, would say otherwise. The chances of impactful cross-examination are minimal.

Comey’s testimony also appears to be extensively corroborated. In addition to Comey’s own writings, which would be admissible as evidence if Comey’s credibility were attacked, President Trump allegedly made statements to others in the administration, to diplomats, and to the public that would bolster Comey’s account.

A prosecutor would also attempt to corroborate innocent details in Comey’s story as well as incriminating ones, including those that support the credibility of witnesses. For example, Comey’s testimony that he spoke with Attorney General Jeff Sessions the day after his Oval Office meeting and asked not to be left alone with the president again was corroborated by Sessions himself.

Critically, the entire sequence of events-the alleged requests for “loyalty,” the strange White House dinner, the handling of Comey’s firing, the directive to Sessions and others to leave the Oval Office before the alleged Flynn request, even the president’s dealings with others, such as the former U.S. attorney in Manhattan-fit together to portray a consistent and compelling story about the president’s purpose in urging Comey to end the investigation of Flynn.

Another implausible argument advanced on behalf of the president is that his alleged statements to Comey about dropping the Flynn investigation were not a directive because the president said only that he “hoped” Comey would act accordingly. (Trump denies saying even this.)

As a matter of common sense, the argument that a person with immense power cannot mean to influence an underling when making a “mere” suggestion should strike anyone familiar with the milieu of The Sopranos as frivolous.

As a matter of law, expressing “hope” can constitute obstruction of justice. The judicial decisions in obstruction of justice cases are replete with examples of people prosecuted for attempting to influence others subtly and through less than direct orders.

Yet another uninformed point has been made by some that Trump did not actually obstruct the Flynn investigation: Comey took no action, and even after Comey’s firing, the matter goes on. There is probably no point on which the law of obstruction of justice is clearer: The crime consists of the effort to obstruct, not any actual obstruction. The obstruction statutes themselves include the words endeavor and attempt in their definitions of the offense.

In all the challenges to a potential obstruction case, there is only one issue of substance: whether the president can be proven to have acted with “corrupt” intent to obstruct justice when exercising his supervisory power over federal law enforcement personnel and their activities. Trump could try the novel argument that he lacked the “corrupt” mental state in his dealings with Comey because he believed himself to be exercising his lawful authority to control the enforcement of federal law.

The ultimate question is not whether President Trump thought he was legally allowed to cajole Comey about the Flynn investigation-ignorance of the law would be no excuse-but whether, when he did so, the president acted with a purpose that was “improper.”

Clearing the room before he allegedly raised the Flynn matter with Comey is strong evidence the president knew what he was doing was “improper.” It is also impossible to see how Trump’s purpose here can be deemed “proper” without placing the president above the law. Even the president’s keenest defenders must concede that attempting to stop the Flynn matter by offering a bribe to Comey or threatening his family, physically or economically, would have been improper.

Trump’s alleged actions were somewhat less flagrant here. But courts have ruled, for example, that an attorney can be charged with obstruction when engaging in conduct that would otherwise be ordinary and allowable for a lawyer-like filing lawsuits or giving advice to witnesses-if the lawyer does so for the purpose of protecting himself or his associates from prosecution.

Similarly, if a president wields his normally legal executive power for the purpose of halting the investigation of himself or his associates, he acts with an “improper purpose” to obstruct justice.

Moving to the specifics of this case only makes this clearer. Although strong norms place authority over Department of Justice investigations in the attorney general’s hands, a president might argue that he is entitled to order an investigation closed if he thinks it is a meritless waste of resources. But no evidence supports this as President Trump’s motive in this matter. He himself has reportedly said otherwise. In any event, if a live investigation places the president at serious personal risk, legally or politically, it is impossible for him to exercise independent judgment on the merits of the matter.

A last line of defense might be to concede the argument for a legal case for obstruction but claim that no prosecutor would bring it. Individuals who come in contact with criminal investigations commonly engage in behavior intended to thwart the government, with lying being the most common such behavior. Prosecutors let the vast majority of this stuff go.

This is different, though.

Intervention in a potential criminal case against a former top government official by the highest of government officials falls well toward the serious end of the obstruction spectrum.

The president, who swears a constitutional oath to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” should be held to the highest standard where it comes to interference with justice.

One thing is worth reiterating: The question of prosecutorial discretion on obstruction of justice will not be before Mueller while President Trump remains in office.

Given the near-consensus that a sitting president should not be indicted, any court of law in this matter will have to await a private citizen Trump.

So, Mueller will have no reason in the near term to go beyond stating that the president violated the law when he allegedly isolated Comey in the White House and pressured him to drop the Flynn investigation, and that there is a prosecutable case for that conduct. Members of Congress will then have to decide whether the president should be impeached for this crime-a matter of political not prosecutorial discretion.

The huge gap between America’s rich and super-rich exposes a fundamental misunderstanding about inequality

Business Insider

The huge gap between America’s rich and super-rich exposes a fundamental misunderstanding about inequality

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa July 7, 2017

Destabilizing levels of income inequality, once a problem reserved for developing nations, is now a defining social and political issue in the United States.

Donald Trump seized on the issue during the presidential campaign, vowing to become a voice for forgotten Americans left behind by decades of widening wealth disparities.

While America’s enormous gap between rich and poor and the sorry state of its middle class are well-documented, a less prominent trend tells an equally important story about the American economy: the divide between the well-off and the stratospherically rich.

This particular pattern is especially important since some economists and conservative commentators have tried to blame inequality on educational levels, arguing that those with college degrees have fared well in the so-called knowledge economy while those with a high school diploma or less lack the skills to do the jobs available.

Others, however, point to runaway salaries for top executives in industries like energy and finance as the key underlying drivers of inflation, which has been characterized by huge gains at the very top of the income distribution. Executive compensation is driven in large part by corporate boards that have cozy relationships with firms’ CEOs, rather than market forces.

From Aspen, Colorado, the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote:

“There is a structural flaw in modern capitalism. Tremendous income gains are going to those in the top 20 percent, but prospects are diminishing for those in the middle and working classes. This gigantic trend widens inequality, exacerbates social segmentation, fuels distrust and led to Donald Trump.”

Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley and a preeminent researcher of inequality, wasted little time in countering the argument.

“Tremendous gains are not going to the top 20%. They are going to top 1%,” he tweeted at Brooks, adding that this is key to understanding the Republican Party’s agenda.

Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, makes a similar case as Brooks.

“The strong whiff of entitlement coming from the top 20 percent has not been lost on everyone else,” he wrote in a recent opinion piece. His book is titled “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It.”

Nicholas Buffie, an economic-policy researcher in Washington, eloquently took issue with the 20% argument in a blog he wrote when he was at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“The problem with this type of analysis is that it misleads readers into thinking that a large group of well-educated Americans have benefited from the rise in inequality,” Buffie said. “In reality, the ‘winners’ from increased inequality are really a much smaller group of incredibly rich Americans, not a large group of well-educated, upper-middle-class workers.”

In other words, blaming America’s wealth divide merely on educational differences may be easy, but not particularly useful.

The richest US families own a startling proportion of America’s wealth

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa June 28, 2017

Distribution matters.

The United States has long taken pride in being the richest nation in the world. It remains so despite China’s quick game of catch-up and much larger population, at least when it comes to the broadest measure of a country’s economic output, gross domestic product (GDP).

Yet deep inequalities, which became a hot-button political issue in the wake of a deep recession and financial crisis that highlighted those disparities, paint a different picture of how well off most Americans really are.

Research from Berkeley economists has found incomes at the top 0.001% of the income strata surged a whopping 636% between 1980 and 2014, while wages for the bottom half of the population were basically stuck in place.

Critics of that body of work say its use of pre-tax data masks some of the equalizing effects of the tax code, and thus overstates inequality. If that were indeed the case, a look at the distribution of wealth as opposed to just income, while harder to measure, could be a better barometer as to the true state of America’s social divide.

This chart courtesy of Deutsch Bank economist Torsten Slok shows the picture with regards to wealth is even bleaker. The richest 10% of families are worth a combined $51 trillion, equal to 75% of total household wealth. To put that figure in perspective, US GDP totaled $18.5 trillion in 2016.

This eye-popping chart on inequality is a slap in the face of America’s middle class

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa June 13, 2017

Why does the US economy still feel iffy to most Americans despite an eight-year economic expansion and historically low unemployment?

Look no further than this eye-popping chart of income growth between 1980 and 2014 courtesy of Berkeley’s elite-squad of inequality research, including Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman.

Featured in a recent blog from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the graphic highlights just how stratospheric income growth has been for the very wealthiest Americans — and how stagnant, in contrast, wages have been for the rest.

That’s not a typo on the right. Incomes for the top 0.001% richest Americans surged 636% during the 34-year period. Wow.

There’s more. “The average pretax income of the bottom 50% of US adults has stagnated since 1980, while the share of income of US adults in the bottom half of the distribution collapsed from 20% in 1980 to 12% in 2014,” writes Howard Gold, founder and editor of GoldenEgg Investing, in the Chicago Booth blog.

“In a mirror-image move, the top 1% commanded 12% of income in 1980 but 20% in 2014. The top 1% of US adults now earns on average 81 times more than the bottom 50% of adults; in 1981, they earned 27 times what the lower half earned.”

Here’s a link to the full paper for the academically inclined.

This, Right Here. This Is Where Obama Choked.

Esquire

This, Right Here. This Is Where Obama Choked.

The American people had damn near an absolute right to know this information.

By Charles P. Pierce June 23, 2017

It so happens that Friday is an official Ratfcking Holiday, and a very important one. It’s June 23 or, as we who celebrate it like to call it, Smoking Gun Day. It was 45 years ago to the day that H.R. Haldeman stopped by the Oval Office and, with a tape recorder whirring merrily away in a drawer, he and Richard Nixon discussed how to get the CIA to turn off the FBI’s investigation of Watergate because that investigation was moving into “some productive areas.” They talked about ripping scabs open, and “that whole Bay of Pigs thing,” and having Walters tell Gray not to go into this thing any further, period. “All I can conclude,” Patrick Buchanan reportedly said when this tape finally came to light, “is that the old man has been shitting us.”

So, in honor of the day, The Washington Post comes up with an amazing tale of the way ratfcking is done in the modern era. It begins with a top-secret communique delivered to President Barack Obama last August.

Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race. But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.

The dynamite, she go boom.

At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a year. In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.

I seem to remember this remarkable coincidence.

The piece is too long, too well reported, and too detailed to summarize in block quotes, but what it makes sadly clear is that the culture of secrecy within the intelligence community worked invariably to empower the ratfcking, rather than to hinder it.

Over that five-month interval, the Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could “crater” the Russian economy.

All well and good. Go get ’em, tiger.

However, like so many things about the Obama administration, the response to what the Russians did was measured and allegedly proportional. (“I feel like we choked,” one official told the Post.) But, you may ask, what about the election that was going on at the same time the Obama administration was retaliating for Russian interference in its process?

They were concerned that any pre-election response could provoke an escalation from Putin. Moscow’s meddling to that point was seen as deeply concerning but unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election. Far more worrisome to the Obama team was the prospect of a cyber-assault on voting systems before and on Election Day. They also worried that any action they took would be perceived as political interference in an already volatile campaign. By August, Trump was predicting that the election would be rigged. Obama officials feared providing fuel to such claims, playing into Russia’s efforts to discredit the outcome and potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph.

This, right here. This is where they choked. The American people had damned close to an absolute right to the information their government already had. The most fundamental act of citizenship is the right to cast an informed vote. The idea that the Obama administration withheld the fact that the Russians were ratfcking the election in order to help elect a vulgar talking yam is a terrible condemnation of the whole No Drama Obama philosophy. Would Donald Trump have raised hell if the White House released what it knew? Of course, he would have. But, as it was, the American people went to vote with only about half of the information they needed to assess his candidacy. This was a terrible decision.

Before departing for an August vacation to Martha’s Vineyard, Obama instructed aides to pursue ways to deter Moscow and proceed along three main paths: Get a high-confidence assessment from U.S. intelligence agencies on Russia’s role and intent; shore up any vulnerabilities in state-run election systems; and seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders for a statement condemning Moscow and urging states to accept federal help.

Ah, yes. “Bipartisan support.” The brilliant snow-white unicorn pursued by that administration for nearly eight years. How did that work out? How did it ever work out?

On Aug. 15, Johnson arranged a conference call with dozens of state officials, hoping to enlist their support. He ran into a wall of resistance. The reaction “ranged from neutral to negative,” Johnson said in congressional testimony Wednesday. Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, used the call to denounce Johnson’s proposal as an assault on state rights. “I think it was a politically calculated move by the previous administration,” Kemp said in a recent interview, adding that he remains unconvinced that Russia waged a campaign to disrupt the 2016 race. “I don’t necessarily believe that,” he said.

Really, now. How did it ever work out?

The meeting devolved into a partisan squabble.

“The Dems were, ‘Hey, we have to tell the public,’ ” recalled one participant. But Republicans resisted, arguing that to warn the public that the election was under attack would further Russia’s aim of sapping confidence in the system. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) went further, officials said, voicing skepticism that the underlying intelligence truly supported the White House’s claims. Through a spokeswoman, McConnell declined to comment, citing the secrecy of that meeting. Key Democrats were stunned by the GOP response and exasperated that the White House seemed willing to let Republican opposition block any pre-election move.

So they choked a second time, scared out of what they should have done by Mitch McConnell, ace conniver. (What the hell did they expect? Patriotism?) I repeat: the American people needed to know this before they voted, spin and fauxtrage and punditry be damned. They had a right to factor the question, “Why does Putin want this guy to be president?” into their thinking in the voting booth.

When U.S. spy agencies reached unanimous agreement in late September that the interference was a Russian operation directed by Putin, Obama directed spy chiefs to prepare a public statement summarizing the intelligence in broad strokes. With Obama still determined to avoid any appearance of politics, the statement would not carry his signature.

It’s at moments like this that I wish he’d never given that speech in Boston in 2004. It froze him into a public persona and a political stance that made even justifiable partisan politics look like base hypocrisy. It is entirely possible that, at what we must now believe was a critical moment (if not the critical moment) of his presidency, the better angels of a president’s nature were the voices he should have avoided at all cost.

Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s a fascinating window into presidential decision-making on the fly, as well as a look at how intelligence is gathered and managed. The 2016 presidential election was corrupted at its heart, and we do not know yet how fully it was corrupted, and that’s the most lasting scandal of all.

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‘What they’re basically saying is, in America it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because we are black,’ said Noah of the newly released dashcam video.

Daily Beast, Horrifying

‘It Broke Me’: ‘The Daily Show’ Host Trevor Noah’s Emotional Reaction to Philando Castile Dashcam Video

‘What they’re basically saying is, in America it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because we are black,’ said Noah of the newly released dashcam video.

Marlow Stern June 22, 2017

On Friday, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter charges and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm in the shooting death of Philando Castile back on July 6, 2016, in St. Anthony, Minnesota.

Castile, a black man who was beloved by the children at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School in nearby St. Paul, where he worked as a cafeteria supervisor—“He remembered their names. He remembered who couldn’t have milk. He knew what they could have to eat and what they couldn’t,” a teacher at the school told Time—was in the car with his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her 4-year-old daughter when he was shot down by Yanez. Reynolds captured the aftermath on Facebook Live, in a streaming video in which she pleaded with police as Castile lay dying in the vehicle.

Yanez was acquitted in the shooting death of Castile despite the existence of audio and a dashcam video in which Castile can be heard calmly informing the officer that he had a firearm on his person—which he had a license to carry—and that he was “not pulling it out,” a plea echoed by Reynolds, only to have Yanez scream “DON’T PULL IT OUT!” before firing seven shots at Castile, with five of them hitting him, and two of the bullets entering his heart. On Wednesday, the dashcam video of Castile’s death was released.

“Honestly, I thought that I felt all that I could feel about this story—until I got home, and I watched a newly released video,” said host Trevor Noah on The Daily Show Wednesday night. “And if you’ve already watched this video, you don’t have to watch it again. I wouldn’t say anyone has to watch this video. But if you haven’t seen it, it is graphic, and you probably should watch it. And we’re going to play it for you now.”

Noah then played the highly disturbing dashcam video, in which you can see Officer Yanez at the side of Castile’s vehicle along with their exchange—which, at least from an audio standpoint, appeared to align with Reynolds’ testimony. After Castile informs Yanez that he has a weapon on his person and is not reaching for it, you see the policeman scream “DON’T PULL IT OUT!” before firing seven bullets at Castile. Reynolds has claimed that Castile was reaching for his ID.

“I wont lie to you. When I watched this video, it broke me. It just… it broke me,” said Noah, clearly distraught. “You see so many of these videos and you start to get numb, but this one? Seeing the child—that little girl—getting out of the car after watching a man get killed, it broke my heart into little pieces. I thought of every joke people make about, ‘Oh, the most confusing day in the ’hood is Father’s Day. People don’t know where their parents are. Haha. Black dads.’ That’s a black dad that’s gone. That’s a child that grows up not knowing what it’s like to have somebody in their life.”

“You know what’s the most painful thing? For years, people said that there’s a simple solution to a police shooting: Just give the police body cameras, film everything, and then there will be no question about what happened,” Noah continued. “Black people have been saying for years: Just give us an indictment. Just an indictment. Just get us in front of a jury of our peers—of our follow citizens. We’ll show them the video, the evidence, and they will see it, and then justice will be served. And black people finally get there, and it’s like… what? Nothing?”

“You hear the stories but you watch that and—forget race, are we all watching the same video? The video where a law-abiding man followed the officer’s instructions to the letter of the law, and then was killed regardless? People watched that video and then voted to acquit?”

“It’s one thing to have the system against you—the district attorneys, the police unions, the courts—that’s one thing. But when a jury of your peers—your community—sees this evidence and then decides that even this is self-defense? That is truly depressing. Because what they’re basically saying is in America, it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because we are black. And that’s the truth of what we saw with this verdict.”