Gabrielle Bluestone was executive producer of the documentary Fyre. At The Washington Post, she writes—The college admissions scam is the perfect scandal in the golden age of grifters:
The desperation of the Varsity Blues scam is astounding, especially given that it involves enormously wealthy and influential people, who in a prior generation might have taken more legal, but no less forceful, actions to get their children into college. Why would so many respected people allegedly risk so much for something that ultimately matters so little?
I suspect for the same reasons the Fyre Festival exploded — a pervasive culture of influence, surface appearances and the fear of missing out so great that you’ll do anything, even scam your child’s way into college, to avoid it. If you’re born on third base and don’t make it home, the whole team ends up looking a little silly.
Part of what makes the Varsity Blues scandal so resonant is that it bluntly exposed workarounds that already exist to undermine higher education’s facade of meritocracy. It has long been legal — if distasteful — for wealthy parents to bribe colleges, a fact federal prosecutors helpfully highlighted in a news conference Tuesday.
William M. Arkin at The Guardian writes—Don't let America turn North Korea into another Iraq:
The Trump-Kim breakup in Hanoi was almost as sudden as the engagement – a huge sigh of relief pouring forth from the national security establishment. Donald Trump did not give away the store. But more important, to the experts, the collapse of the summit proved that a marriage that should never have happened in the first place was over.
And what do the experts want now? Reduce the scope of American ambitions and return to “managing the problem”, wrote Richard Fontaine of the establishment Center for a New American Security. Accept that North Korea is a nuclear nation, others whisper. Supercharge efforts to deter, undermine and then even force the North to capitulate. Congress, meanwhile, newly presses legislation – the Brink Act – that would impose even greater sanctions.
But something else is going on here. Almost every day, stories appear in the news reporting that the North is secretly doing this and that, that nuclear materials and warheads are still being built, and that new WMD sites are being worked on and being discovered. I’m all for holding North Korea accountable, and I’m all for vigilance and verification in not being blind to the regime’s actual behavior. But the news now seems to have taken on a larger theme: that North Korea is only stringing the United States along. The drumbeat and the controlled leaks feel very similar to what unfolded with Iraq in 2002.
Moira Donegan at The Guardian writes—Tucker Carlson's sexist rants reveal an ugly truth:
What might be more revealing about the recordings are Carlson’s frequent, repeated and apparently unsolicited defenses of Warren Jeffs, the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon sect that practiced polygamy and ritualized child molestation. “I should make the laws around here,” Carlson says when the conversation turns to Jeffs, who recorded himself raping a 12-year-old girl and telling her to “feel the spirit of God”. “Warren Jeffs would be out on the street.” He also suggests that polygamy should be legal, and calls the then-ongoing criminal charges against Jeffs – who is currently serving a life sentence – “bullshit”. Child marriage is different and less severe than stranger rape, Carlson asserts, because “the rapist made a lifelong commitment” to “take care of the person”. He also exhibits a conspicuously thorough knowledge of state consent law. [...]
In the worst instances, an everyday predator moves from Carlson-like fantasies about underage girls into actual relationships with them. [...]
It is not especially surprising to hear Tucker Carlson saying disgusting things in these newly rediscovered recordings. Scandal is quickly becoming not only a frequent part of his career, but a seemingly deliberate one – after all, he is fresh off the heels of a number of his major advertisers withdrawing from his show, following his racist comments that immigrants make America “dirtier”. He has shown us who he is before – he shows us on cable television, every weeknight, for an hour. But he has also shown us something about ourselves, about the things we tolerate men saying to men, and about the ways that we are willing to sacrifice young girls to grown men’s worst impulses. These comments are controversial now, and they were disgusting then, but the Media Matters report does not reveal anything new about Carlson. After all, he made these comments more than 10 years ago. It didn’t hurt him then, either.
Erik Wemple at The Washington Post writes—The invisible CEO of Fox News:
Jane Mayer of the New Yorker last week wrote the definitive investigative story on the state of Fox News, which is an increasingly shrill and shameless organ for the agenda of President Trump. “Now a direct pipeline has been established between the Oval Office and the office of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born billionaire who founded News Corp and 21st Century Fox,” Mayer wrote, on the links between Fox News’s founder and Trump.
Through an article detailed with the symbiosis between Trump and Fox News host Sean Hannity, as well as other indicia of the network’s corruption, Mayer mentioned the current Fox News boss just once. “Under the leadership of Fox’s current C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, a longtime deputy of [former network president Bill] Shine’s, the prime-time lineup has become more one-sided than ever,” wrote Mayer toward the end of her story.
There’s no knock on Mayer here. It’s just that Scott appears to govern Fox News with no public profile whatsoever, a leadership style that has clouded the company’s handling of the ongoing crisis surrounding prime-time host Tucker Carlson. [...]
Absent from the defense was a statement from the company, or from Scott. During his show on Monday, Carlson plugged this omission: “Fox News is behind us, as they have been since the very first day. Toughness is a rare quality at a TV network, and we are grateful for that. We will never bow to the mob, ever, no matter what."
The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times concludes—Gavin Newsom’s death penalty moratorium could turn the abolitionist tide in California:
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to suspend executions in California for as long as he is governor is, for the time being, a symbolic act. No one has been executed in San Quentin’s death chamber since Jan. 17, 2006, and few believe the next execution would have happened any time soon, given the array of legal hurdles embroiling the system. But Newsom’s moratorium — technically, he granted reprieves to each of the 737 people on death row — at a minimum adds further delays to the resumption of the machinery of death, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun once described it. And that’s a good thing.
Newsom cited his family’s connection with Peter Pianezzi, who was convicted in 1940 of a mob hit but later cleared and whose campaign for a pardon was championed by Newsom’s father and grandfather. That led to the evolution of a personal rejection of the death penalty. “I can’t sign my name to that,” he said. “I can’t be a part of that.” [...]
Death sentences imposed in California are no less arbitrary than elsewhere. A killing that would have led to a non-capital murder charge in Los Angeles would in the recent past have likely been a death penalty case in neighboring Riverside County, a measure of the unjustifiable geographic variation in the application of capital punishment. And that a change in district attorneys in Riverside County led to a significant decrease in capital cases is further evidence that the impulses of prosecutors have an inordinate influence on who gets a death sentence. You can’t get much more arbitrary than that.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times concludes—A Pause on the Nation’s Biggest Death Row. The California governor’s moratorium on executions in the state should signal the demise of a barbaric practice:
While the state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, it has the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere, a quarter of America’s death row population. Six in 10 prisoners on California's death row are people of color, a disparity Mr. Newsom cited in his rationale for the moratorium.
What’s more, the death penalty system is so dysfunctional and costs so much to run that Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court wondered in 2016 whether these “fundamental defects” warrant a deeper look at the constitutionality of letting inmates languish on death row for decades. [...]
In due time, this growing chorus against a system of punishment that has been shown to be discriminatory, prone to error and ineffective as a crime-fighting tool should spell its demise once and for all.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Don’t focus on impeachment. Focus on Trump’s vile budget:
Please, Tom Steyer, stop spending all that money on impeachment ads. If you want to run spots against President Trump, target his shameful 2020 budget.
In the meantime, the rest of us should quit pretending there is a big debate among Democrats about impeachment. There isn’t. There is actually consensus, which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won broad support when she pushed back against impeachment during an interview with The Post.
True, there is an intellectually legitimate case that the House has a moral and constitutional responsibility to start the impeachment process now, given what we know about Trump’s misdeeds and lies. Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor at the Atlantic, has advanced this argument forcefully and thoughtfully.
But the vast majority of Democrats recognize that they did not win control of the House last fall on a promise of impeachment. To the extent that Democrats who flipped House seats (and thus the majority) campaigned on holding Trump accountable, it was by endorsing the traditional inquiries being carried out now. Before you risk tearing the political system apart, you have to lay the groundwork with your constituents. This has not happened yet.
Leanna First-Arai at Yes! magazine writes—Why Students of Color Are Stepping Up to Lead Climate Strikes.The youth-led movement builds on the momentum of the increasingly Black and Brown leadership behind the Green New Deal:
Charlemagne says the climate strike national leaders often discuss the importance of including people of color, but he says the leadership structure is first and foremost based on connections, experience, and willingness to step up and do the work. Of the state leaders she is tasked with managing, Hirsi says, “I guess a majority of our state leaders are students of color. Wisconsin, California, Connecticut, New York, Georgia,” she says. National coleader Coleman, who is White, adds, “We didn’t want it to be just a ton of White people leading it, because communities of color—they’ve been doing work to fight climate change just as much as we have.”
Across the country, the students leading the climate strike have connections with activist groups like Zero Hour, Extinction Rebellion, and March For Our Lives. But the organizing model the team uses is deliberately independent of any single organization and horizontal. It builds on the momentum of the increasingly Black and Brown leadership behind the Green New Deal, driven by organizations like Justice Democrats and the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
“Our generation grew up watching the segregation of the environmental movement and its inability to bridge across generations, race, class, etc.,” says Varshini Prakash, the co-founder and executive director of Sunrise.
“There was a lack of diversity at the upper levels of leadership,” adds Nakisa Glover of North Carolina, referring to when she started working in environmental organizing.
Benjamin Kunkel at The New Republic writes—Can American Foreign Policy Be Greened?
...many American leftists conceive of the ideal foreign policy of a future progressive administration—that of President Sanders or, one day, Ocasio-Cortez—in essentially negative terms. Despairing of the United States ever sincerely and effectively advancing a program of international progress, they instead hope the country will simply refrain from current conduct (arming and underwriting Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, Israel’s apartheid-style administration of its Palestinian subjects, General el-Sisi’s imprisonment and execution of dissidents in Egypt, etc.). Aziz Rana has advocated a foreign policy along the lines of the Hippocratic oath: “Do no harm” would be “a key principle” of such a “non-imperial approach.” More specifically, progressive writers have praised Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy in light of his successful sponsorship of a resolution in the Senate to end assistance to the Saudi war in Yemen—a genuine but fundamentally negative triumph, promoting a decent abstention from a foreign adventure over indecent participation in it. [...]
And yet . . . The ecological predicament of global—capitalist—civilization has become so dire and urgent that demanding the mere retreat of the United States from foreign entanglements is its own kind of irresponsibility. A domestic Green New Deal would need to be complemented by an international Green Marshall Plan (or whatever U.S. politicians choose to call it) promoting the greening of capitalist economies over the next dozen years or so, not only to keep global warming within tolerable bounds but to preserve capitalist civilization for its ultimate socialist or communist takeover. The adjective “green” is of course as susceptible to abusive and hypocritical invocation as any other high-sounding slogan, but some such—still capitalist, merely reformist, finally inadequate—U.S. foreign policy will likely be necessary in order for us to save the world, for its workers to win.
The ecological predicament has become so dire and urgent that demanding the mere retreat of the United States from foreign entanglements is its own kind of irresponsibility.
Nato Green at In These Times writes—Why Unions Must Bargain Over Climate Change:
Union contract negotiations include mandatory and permissive subjects of bargaining. Employers are required by law to negotiate over mandatory subjects—wages, benefits and working conditions. Permissive subjects, such as decisions about which public services will be provided and how, have historically been the purview of management. We only negotiate over how managerial decisions affect members’ jobs. Employers may voluntarily agree to negotiate permissive subjects, but unions can’t legally strike over them.
In recent years, some unions have embraced “bargaining for the common good,” which use the union campaign to win broad, righteous public benefits. The best current example of this is the Los Angeles teachers’ strike, which opposed the underfunding, privatization and overcrowding of schools—all of which hurt students. Common good goals often bump against the constraints of what is legally bargainable. [...]
The looming timeline of the IPCC report means unions must have a right to bargain over climate change, especially in the public sector. What good is it to negotiate the assignment of overtime when the sky is on fire? Does a public employer really want to claim that its direct complicity in the potential collapse of civilization has no bearing on working conditions? Can government claim that abandoning its workforce to die or flee their homes doesn’t affect working conditions? If employers don’t accept that every choice made today affects the near future, they’re denying science. Local and state governments in Democratic strongholds may find it politically challenging to posture about resisting Republicanism nationally while denying the local implications of that stance.
Paul Street at TruthDig writes—It’s the Green New Deal or Else:
I suppose we all owe UCLA economist and Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee Ohanian a debt of gratitude for telling us how it is. The “free market” propagandist recently took to the pages of The Hill, a Washington, D.C., journal for political insiders, to explain that the holy laws of economics dictate that humanity must consent to its own extermination. In a piece titled “The Green New Deal is a Pipe Dream,” Ohanian drowned climate activists’ overheated dreams of ecological salvation in the icy waters of bourgeois reality, arguing that the proposed legislation’s advocates are, in fact, nefarious, big-government “command-and-control” zealots—eco-Stalinists—who want “to impose their social and economic preferences on others at an extravagantly high economic cost.” [...]
Cost-benefit analysis? The Green New Deal is, if anything, insufficiently radical. It does not go to the full class-rule taproot of the many deadly ecological rifts (the climate crisis is only the most urgent) opened by capitalism’s relentless, totalitarian drive to commodify everything on earth. Progressive-Democrat Green New Deal advocates have yet to join serious ecosocialists in calling for green investments to be garnered from massive reductions in the U.S. military budget, which eats up more than half of federal discretionary spending and sustains a global military empire that is the world’s single largest institutional carbon emitter. The Green New Deal’s sponsors have yet to call (as they will have to if they are serious about environmental reconversion) for their program to be funded and protected from capital flight by the nationalization of the United States’ leading financial institutions.
Jeff Hauser and Eleanor Eagan at The American Prospect write—Richie Neal and Trump’s Taxes:
As most House Democrats enthusiastically jump on the long-dormant congressional oversight train, one senior lawmaker has conspicuously chosen to stay on the platform. Under the leadership of Representative Richard Neal, the House Committee on Ways and Means has shown none of the zeal for oversight exhibited by its counterparts.
The announcement two weeks ago that Neal would finally request Trump’s tax returns, after a good deal of pressure from the Democratic Caucus, might have appeared to be a welcome reversal. But look at the fine print and you’ll see that the committee’s strategy is basically a continuation of Neal’s obstinate refusal to deliver on Democrats’ 2018 campaign promises.
Not only is Neal’s request still set for some uncertain time in the nearish future (approximately two and a half or more months too late), the request he is contemplating is wildly inadequate.
That is because Neal plans to disregard tax law experts and request only the president’s personal returns.
Neal’s lame excuse is that business returns for Trump’s over 500 Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) are too complex. Neal is right that understanding Trump’s finances will be unjustifiably arduous, but as one of the few people in the country with the power to gather the resources and expertise to conquer this task, surrender in the face of this complexity is a cowardly dereliction of duty.
Raina Lipsitz at The Nation writes—Progressive ‘Piss and Vinegar’ Takes On Albany:
It’s a new day in Albany. Democrats finally have full control of the legislature; rising stars like Alessandra Biaggi and Julia Salazar are injecting the state capital with much-needed progressive energy; and the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a group that for decades stymied progressive legislation by caucusing with the Republicans, has finally been neutered. Of its members, only Senators David Carlucci and Diane Savino survived the last election cycle, and even they have rejoined the true-blue fold. Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins became the Senate majority leader, and has since been working closely with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to transform bills that passed the Assembly year after year, only to languish in the Senate, into laws.
Spend a few days in Albany, and you can tell right away that the energy has changed. The marble halls of the Legislative Office Building are adorned with blue-and-white signs illustrated with a gender-neutral parent figure cradling an infant. They list 10 nursing and baby-changing facilities and explain where to find refrigerated storage, presumably for breast milk or formula (the facilities have existed since 2008; the practice of breastfeeding on the floor of the Assembly has not). A “pbd kitchen” sandwich board in the food court advertised “cutting edge, chef inspired, natural” sandwiches underneath an all-caps demand: “housing justice for all.” [...]
Thanks to these new and newly empowered lawmakers, the legislature has, in less than two months, passed key voting reforms, gun-safety measures, the Reproductive Health Act, the Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act (which has yet to be delivered to the governor), the Child Victims Act, and the Dream Act. “I have found that this has been the most productive six weeks of state government that I have been a part of in the last seven years,” [31-year-old newly minted state senator James] Skoufis said. He likened his time in the Assembly to Groundhog Day: “We’d just sort of go through the motions, year after year.”
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—The Trudeau Scandal Happens All the Time in America. Politically influential companies have been avoiding criminal prosecution since long before Trump became president:
The most acute political scandal in North America—the one with the greatest chance of toppling the head of government anytime soon—is occurring not in the United States, but Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is barely hanging on to power after being accused last month of pressuring his attorney general to abandon the criminal prosecution of an influential company that hails from Quebec, his political stronghold.
Political media in the U.S. can’t comprehend how this can be so damaging. “There’s no money, no sex and nothing illegal happened,” wrote Rob Gillies of the Associated Press. “This is what passes for a scandal in Canada.”
It should also pass for a scandal in America, but selective prosecution—which spares the powerful while punishing those without connections—has become all too common in this country, and notably so under President Obama. As Democratic candidates seek to save America from President Trump’s kleptocracy, they ought to acknowledge that this era of unaccountability long predates him, and be as indignant about it as our Canadian neighbors.