newrepublic.com
Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?
By Miguel Salazar
19-24 minutes
On an afternoon in July, nearly 200 people packed into the ballroom of a local community center in northern Oakland for a general meeting of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As they settled into folded chairs on the room’s faded wooden floors, the group ran through the week’s agenda, which included votes on the establishment of a code of conduct, a resolution to meet monthly instead of once every two months, and a proposal to support Cat Brooks, a black activist running for Oakland mayor.
Three miles away at the Marriott City Center, Brooks was working events at the California Democratic Caucus. Brooks, a co-founder of the Anti-Police Terror Project, which provides support to communities of color in response to police violence, had been invited to speak on a panel defending Prop 10, a ballot measure that sought to repeal a 1995 law restricting rent control in Oakland and other cities in California. At the end of the event, Brooks checked her phone and found a stream of texts from people at the DSA meeting. The messages read: “You need to get here right now.”
Minutes later, Brooks stormed into the ballroom. A proposal to “prioritize” two other endorsements—for Prop 10 and a candidate for California’s state assembly—had snowballed into a referendum on Brooks herself, with critics saying she was too compromised to receive the DSA’s backing. The group’s support shouldn’t be given to people who are “a dime a dozen,” Brooks remembered one man saying. Like many of her rivals, she had pledged to expand affordable housing and reduce Oakland’s growing homeless population. Notably, she had insisted on cutting the city’s police budget in half.
At one point, Tur-ha Ak, a black organizer with Brooks’s Anti-Police Terror Project, asked to speak. As his turn approached, the young man who was chairing the meeting asked if Ak was a member. A number of white people had spoken before him, including Forrest Schmidt, 42, who was attending his first DSA meeting. “None of us had our credentials called,” he said. “Nobody said, ‘Are you a DSA member?’” When Ak responded that he was not a member, the chair asked him to take a seat.
The room erupted. The procedural rules were racist, Ak proclaimed, raising his voice over a cacophony of protests and chants. “The energy,” Brooks recalled, “turned into that of a white mob.” She decided to take the floor. “My name is Cat Brooks,” she said. “I’ve been organizing in this city longer than most of you have lived here.” In a brief, piercing speech, she accused the largely white crowd of being gentrifiers and then walked out, leaving members confused and outraged.
The debate quickly moved to Twitter, Reddit, and other corners of the internet. In an online essay, Jeremy Gong, an East Bay member who sits on DSA’s National Political Committee, the organization’s highest decision-making body, argued that Cat Brooks “weaponized” her race to coerce DSA into supporting her candidacy. He would not endorse her. The July DSA meeting, he wrote, was a textbook example of “race reductionism and liberal guilt politics.” By insinuating that white members were “the problem” when it came to Oakland’s gentrification, he claimed, Brooks had mistakenly reduced what was fundamentally a class conflict into a racial one.
Though a dustup among a small group of lefties in Oakland may seem to be a parochial affair, the controversy surrounding Brooks is part of a fierce debate about race within the newly invigorated socialist movement. Since 2016, when it had only 6,500 members, DSA has added nearly 50,000 members and over 125 chapters across the country. In 2018, two of its members—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, both women of color—were elected to serve in Congress, and 21 more won seats in state legislatures. Though DSA is separate from the Democratic Party, some of its members represent both institutions, while DSA itself is at the cutting edge of the broader progressive movement, a loud, insistent voice on issues ranging from universal health care to debt forgiveness.
But unlike other progressive groups, DSA has to contend with internal factions that are very seriously wedded to a certain strain of socialist ideology—one that emphasizes, as Karl Marx did, a churning class war that governs the history of humankind. For these socialists, an anti-capitalist movement must be anti-racist, since capitalism has been instrumental in the subjugation of minorities. But they are also weary of liberal politicians who, they say, exploit race to pander to minority groups, all while skirting the deeper class conflict at work. In the past year, these hard-liners have clashed on numerous occasions with other socialists, often minorities themselves, who contend that righting America’s unique wrongs requires an approach distinct from the universal precepts of historical materialism—one that emphasizes racism’s special impact on inequality, supra-class.
In the Brooks controversy and other incidents, these tensions have come to a head, badly dividing the movement and raising difficult questions about socialism’s potential as a political force in the United States. In important respects, these are the same questions that dogged socialism as an ideology throughout the 20th century—questions that America’s fledgling socialists are openly struggling to answer, on Twitter and in left-wing periodicals like Jacobin. Is socialism, as an ideology, capable of welcoming dissenting opinions? And how central should issues of race be in a socialist movement?
Around the time Cat Brooks stepped into the East Bay DSA meeting in July, a similar controversy broke out in the organization’s Philadelphia chapter. In an email to the chapter’s political education committee, a small group of DSA organizers had proposed a new book by Asad Haider, a University of California graduate student and editor of Viewpoint magazine, for a reading group. The book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, envisions a socialism that both addresses racism head-on and advances a class-based movement.
Haider adopts an understanding of identity politics first introduced by the Combahee River Collective, a black lesbian militant group, which held that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.” The idea is that an authentic socialist movement needed to go beyond a vision of “sexless, raceless workers”; it required centering the identities and lived experiences of marginalized groups, in order to address issues that wouldn’t necessarily be mended through economic reforms alone.
The political education committee responded that it was no longer creating new reading groups. So the organizers, who belonged to a subcommittee created in 2017 to develop local socialist campaigns, held the reading group anyway. On the day before the first meeting, however, they received a letter from the chapter’s leadership. The event, they wrote, was “unrelated” to the subcommittee’s stated purpose; the group was acting “autonomously, apparently as a protest.” Leadership provided an ultimatum: Stay focused on local political campaigns, or resign.
The two sides exchanged correspondence for weeks. Then, in late August, Jacobin published a scathing review of Mistaken Identity, penned by Melissa Naschek, the Philadelphia chapter’s co-chair. Attempting to engage in both class politics and identity politics, she wrote, was the left’s own Third Way: a “lopsided advocacy for particularist demands” that would lead the movement to a dead end. The only path to forging a mass socialist movement, she wrote, was by fighting for “universalist” reforms, like single payer health care and free college tuition.
The essay sparked a heated, sometimes nasty intellectual debate, often conducted in the kind of dogmatic jargon that was once a hallmark of Marxist academia. The DSA members who originally proposed the book for the reading group interpreted the review as a blatant partisan attack. They released a statement arguing that Naschek’s “framing inherently privileges white identity.” On Twitter, Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin’s The Dig podcast, called the review “class reductionism of sort that I hoped only existed in liberal identitarians’ caricatures of the left.” Adolph Reed Jr., a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped Naschek craft her review, blasted Haider’s arguments on a Marxist podcast, saying they “smell like a truckload of rotten fish.” East Bay DSA’s Jeremy Gong also came to Naschek’s defense in an article claiming the workplace to be the “primary strategic site of class struggle.”
R.L. Stephens, a former member of DSA’s National Political Committee, argued that framing issues of racial justice in moral terms made these issues “either subordinate to or outside of class struggle itself.”* Haider himself penned a long, philosophical response to Naschek’s review. His book, he wrote, was “not a political platform, but a work of theory.” (He did, however, get in a jab: “Naschek dismissively proclaims that the [Combahee River Collective] was not a mass movement. Neither is the DSA.”) When I spoke to Haider, he lamented the idea that “there are two isolable, discrete phenomenon that can be parceled out into race and class.”
What seemed to be a drawn-out exercise in academic hair-splitting, however, revealed profoundly different approaches to organizing a mass movement, particularly around issues of race. “A lot of it is postulating more than it is significant differences on the left within DSA,” said Jack Suria Linares, also a National Political Committee member. “But I also think that in the long run those differences might grow.”
These ideological clashes, usually pitting DSA leadership against rank-and-file membership, have been largely limited to East Bay and Philadelphia, the only two major chapters in the country run by the Momentum caucus, a subgroup described in a 2017 Nation profile as the “most explicitly Marxist” within the organization, with a heavy focus on the campaign for Medicare-for-All. Momentum leaders pride themselves on a precise and strategic, if narrow, political vision. While DSA members in other chapters can form working groups to take on autonomous initiatives, that behavior is heavily regulated in the two Momentum-run chapters.
In public and private, DSA members in the East Bay and Philadelphia have expressed frustration at leadership. In October 2017, ahead of a meeting to vote on the endorsement of candidates for local office in Oakland, two East Bay DSA members prepared a statement demanding more agency. “To date, when members have proposed to do work outside of single payer, we have been told that the organization does not have the bandwidth or capacity,” they wrote.
In one notable dispute, a brake light repair initiative in the East Bay DSA was flatly rejected by the chapter’s co-chairs, who refused to put it up for a vote. The repair clinics first sprouted in New Orleans as a strategy to combat police brutality, as people of color are often pulled over for problems as innocuous as broken taillights. These traffic stops can even lead to—as in the case of Philando Castile—killings by the police. While DSA chapters across the country soon began replicating the program, and embraced it as an effective way to build a stronger working-class base, East Bay leadership remained strongly resistant to the campaign. In a private conversation, one East Bay co-chair insinuated to a member of color organizing the clinic that it would look like “white saviorism.” A former member of the chapter’s leadership referred to it as “charity” in a blog post.
In response, over 300 DSA members—a third of whom identified as people of color—from across the country signed a petition urging East Bay leadership to reconsider. “We are alarmed by what increasingly feels like the erasure of our voices and presence within the DSA,” they wrote. Weeks later, East Bay members collected nearly 100 signatures from their chapter, enough to bring the initiative to a vote at a general meeting. Despite protests from some DSA leaders, the resolution passed.
Momentum’s centralized approach stands in stark contrast to the emphasis on mutual aid and direct action in most chapters across the country. Bianca Cunningham, who co-chairs the New York City chapter and helped found DSA’s Afrosocialist caucus, agrees with Momentum leaders like Naschek and Gong that universal policies like Medicare-for-All and free higher education would disproportionately benefit people of color, but argues that they are not sold that way by the mostly white membership rallying behind them. “You have to take that extra step,” she said, “and do more to engage with that community specifically around their own needs and experiences.”
However, the idea that racial justice is a subsidiary issue to class, one exploited by liberal politicians for cynical gain, is common on the left. “It’s crucial that we not let our best impulses be weaponized against our interests,” Briahna Joy Gray wrote in The Intercept, criticizing politicians like Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina who opposed free college tuition on the grounds that it would hurt historically black colleges and universities. Gray also cited the example of Hillary Clinton, who, in a dig at Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primaries, asked, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow ... would that end racism?”
DSA members are understandably wary of such entreaties, which end up pitting working-class people against each other. But the interests of race and class often cross in unexpected ways. Weeks after the East Bay DSA’s July meeting ended in chaos, Cat Brooks submitted a formal endorsement request to the chapter. An electoral subcommittee discovered that, from 2011 to 2014, Brooks had served on the board of GO Public Schools, a pro-charter school nonprofit that has led efforts to destabilize teachers’ unions and promote education privatization in and around the city. Brooks’s critics had found their smoking gun.
Members flooded the DSA’s website with statements and articles urging people to vote against her endorsement. Charter schools, which are publicly owned but privately operated, have had a uniquely destructive effect on Oakland. The city has the highest concentration of charters in the state, which, according to a recent report, has cost the Oakland Unified School District $57 million in funding every year. “I believe in public education. I believe in democratic socialism,” wrote one member in her statement. “I don’t believe that Cat Brooks is right for EBDSA.”
But Brooks had changed her position, and had even told DSA that she supported “a moratorium on charter schools” in Oakland.** Still, DSA members remained unconvinced. Meagan Day, a staff writer for Jacobin and an influential East Bay DSA member, wrote that Brooks’s new position was “fantastic. ... But how can we be certain?” The reversal, she argued, was “too last-minute to constitute a meaningful political transformation.” On September 9, East Bay DSA voted against endorsing her.
The actual story of Brooks’s “political transformation” is more nuanced. Mike Hutchinson, Oakland’s loudest anti-charter activist, who described his relationship with Brooks as “complicated,” recalled that as recently as two years ago, people were calling him “crazy” for his position against charter schools. When charters first began popping up in Oakland in the 1990s, they were sold to residents as a way to give them agency over their own schools. “It was tied into the self empowerment theme that goes back to the Black Panthers,” he said. It was only recently that public opinion shifted, and Brooks’s evolution was representative of that. When she reached out to Hutchinson to consult on her education platform, he was “happily surprised on how she moved away from the charter connections she had in the past.” He ultimately signed on.
The growth of DSA, especially in urban areas, has brought with it a similar set of complications. As of last year, the organization was roughly 90 percent white and composed of people mostly under 35, a palette often associated with gentrification in areas like Oakland, Philadelphia, and New York City. (When I asked DSA for updated numbers, I was told they are not currently collecting demographic data.) It’s a demographic makeup that can be off-putting and even intimidating to leftists of color, many of whom have left DSA or declined to join in the first place. When Cunningham would bring her socialist friends of color to DSA meetings, they would feel uncomfortable. “I would beg them to stay,” she said. She remembered telling them, “‘If you don’t stay, then the next people are going to come in and they’re going to say the same thing.’”
Most leftists agree that, despite the DSA’s overwhelming whiteness, it is committed to recruiting candidates of color like Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez. But such efforts can also border on tokenism. When I spoke with the mostly white members of East Bay DSA’s leadership, some pointed out that, during their July meeting, an older member said this after Brooks stormed out: “If we don’t endorse her, what will black people think of us?”
Online, the debate about race can be particularly alienating to minorities. It is a space where small, intellectualized differences are made insurmountable, and where naked ideology sometimes supersedes the lived experience of organizers who have dedicated their lives to lifting up working-class people. “An organization like DSA might benefit from the kinds of racial sensitivity trainings that we hear about because those are real tendencies that have to get checked,” said Shaun Scott, a DSA member in Seattle. This is particularly true for Momentum, which has an outsized presence within DSA. The group’s modus operandi is predicated on a top-down structure; general meetings are infrequent and subcommittees are limited in their scope. Though small, the group is highly ambitious while also being dismissive of its critics, an attitude seemingly incompatible with DSA’s identity as a “multi-tendency” organization.
On the ground, these battles tend to be fought by proxy, through debates over organizing strategy. Disputes over brake light initiatives and canvassing for Medicare-for-All often have a racial subtext, and tensions between members and the communities they live in can be heightened by DSA’s prescriptive, dismissive attitudes. “As DSA, as relatively new kids on the block, as this predominantly white organization, it’s really paramount that we do that solidarity work,” said Shanti Singh, a co-chair of DSA’s San Francisco chapter, who was one of the signatories on the brake light petition.
Despite DSA’s anti-racist positions, many socialists of color believe there still hasn’t been a full reckoning when it comes to issues of race, nor a resolution between the beliefs of certain socialists and the world we live in. The urgency felt by activists of color doesn’t always exist in white spaces, noted Kristian Hernandez, a 29-year-old Latina DSA member in Texas. In November, two weeks after a gunman killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Proud Boys, a far-right chauvinist group, had planned a demonstration in Philadelphia, which was scheduled during the same time as the local DSA chapter’s general meeting. The organization’s South Jersey chapter had canceled its general meeting to join counter-protesters, but in an email, the Philadelphia chapter’s co-chairs, Melissa Naschek and Scott Jenkins, urged members to attend the meeting instead, to make quorum, calling the protesters “far-right LARPers,” a reference to people who dress up as fictional characters. “We shouldn’t be distracted by their theatrics,” they wrote. “Instead, we should push ahead with our collective goals.”
The decision drew scorn from other socialist leaders. “Countering right-wing anti-Semitism should not be a contentious issue,” Singh tweeted. Ultimately, it’s that attitude of downplaying discrimination, a perspective rooted in privilege, that worries leftists of color. They still need assurances that “at the end of the day, if push comes to shove, people are going to have my back,” Hernandez said. “Particularly white people.”
*A previous version of this article misstated R.L. Stephens’s relationship to DSA. He’s a former member of the National Political Committee, not a current one.
**A previous version of this article misstated when Cat Brooks updated her website platform on charter schools. Brooks notified DSA members of her change in position before the September 9 meeting, but updated her website afterwards.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Trump Is Being Exposed for the Grifter That He Is by Matt Ford
Trump Is Being Exposed for the Grifter That He Is
By Matt Ford
The New Replublic
The
Donald J. Trump Foundation was an audacious grift, even by the
standards of its namesake. Charitable foundations are supposed to
operate under a simple premise: They receive certain tax exemptions when
it comes to receiving and disbursing their funds, and in turn, those
funds will be funneled into good works for society’s benefit. For
Trump’s charity, however, those good works largely amounted to crass
self-enrichment—a guiding principle throughout the president’s life and
political career.
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported two years ago that the Trump Foundation’s most generous expenditure, totaling $264,361, went to renovations for a fountain outside the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel in New York City. Its smallest contribution—just $7—appears to have been used to pay for Donald Trump Jr.’s registration fee for the Boy Scouts of America. In one instance, Trump auctioned off a six-foot-tall painting of himself to charity, then spent $20,000 from the foundation’s funds to purchase it.
New York thinks it can find a better use for the money. Barbara Underwood, the state’s attorney general, announced on Tuesday that the president agreed to shut down the foundation and let state officials disperse its remaining funds to genuine charitable organizations. “This is an important victory for the rule of law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone,” Underwood said in a statement announcing the agreement. Her office is still pursuing more than $2 million in restitution from Trump and restrictions on his family’s involvement in non-profit organizations in the state.
An investigation by Underwood’s office uncovered a clear pattern of instances where the Trump family misused charity funds. The foundation cut checks for well-publicized donations during Trump’s presidential campaign, transmogrifying charitable funds into politically beneficial expenditures. It shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle legal disputes involving Trump himself or his companies. Normal safeguards like an active board of directors, standard accounting practices, and grant-making policies did not exist. The charity itself, investigators said, “is little more than an empty shell.”
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported two years ago that the Trump Foundation’s most generous expenditure, totaling $264,361, went to renovations for a fountain outside the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel in New York City. Its smallest contribution—just $7—appears to have been used to pay for Donald Trump Jr.’s registration fee for the Boy Scouts of America. In one instance, Trump auctioned off a six-foot-tall painting of himself to charity, then spent $20,000 from the foundation’s funds to purchase it.
New York thinks it can find a better use for the money. Barbara Underwood, the state’s attorney general, announced on Tuesday that the president agreed to shut down the foundation and let state officials disperse its remaining funds to genuine charitable organizations. “This is an important victory for the rule of law, making clear that there is one set of rules for everyone,” Underwood said in a statement announcing the agreement. Her office is still pursuing more than $2 million in restitution from Trump and restrictions on his family’s involvement in non-profit organizations in the state.
An investigation by Underwood’s office uncovered a clear pattern of instances where the Trump family misused charity funds. The foundation cut checks for well-publicized donations during Trump’s presidential campaign, transmogrifying charitable funds into politically beneficial expenditures. It shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle legal disputes involving Trump himself or his companies. Normal safeguards like an active board of directors, standard accounting practices, and grant-making policies did not exist. The charity itself, investigators said, “is little more than an empty shell.”
“In sum, the Investigation revealed
that the Foundation was little more than a checkbook for payments to
not-for-profits from Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization,” the attorney
general’s office said in a lawsuit
this summer. “This resulted in multiple violations of state and federal
law because payments were made using Foundation money regardless of the
purpose of the payment. Mr. Trump used charitable assets to pay off the
legal obligations of entities he controlled, to promote Trump hotels,
to purchase personal items, and to support his presidential election
campaign.”
Though the Trump Foundation was an impressively brazen scheme, it’s far from the only one bearing the president’s name. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle a multi-state class-action lawsuit against Trump University, his now-defunct real-estate seminar program. Court filings showed how the seminars preyed on customers’ financial anxieties so they would fork over thousands of dollars for mundane lessons about buying and selling property. This undercut Trump University’s main selling point: that “students” would be able to draw upon its eponymous founder’s reputation for savvy real-estate deals.
Even this reputation isn’t grounded in anything, though. The underlying basis of Trump’s political career is his public image as a self-made real-estate magnate. Careful scrutiny by journalists and investigators, however, has shown this to be largely mythical. It wasn’t business acumen that helped Trump establish a foothold in New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s, but a steady infusion of at least $413 million from his father through dubious tax practices. Trump’s inflated reputation is a source of income in and of itself. Many of the overseas hotels bearing his name don’t even belong to him: He simply licenses his image to real-estate developers overseas, giving a branding edge to them and a reliable stream of profit to him.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an aspect of the president’s life that isn’t marked by grifting. The Trump campaign and its allies heard multiple offers of assistance from Kremlin-linked figures while Trump’s personal lawyer tried to secure a hotel deal in Moscow. His inaugural committee later raked in more than $100 million—more than twice the sum of his predecessors—from wealthy donors that largely went unaccounted for. A ProPublica investigation found that the Trump Organization may have overcharged the committee for use of Trump’s Washington hotel, raising questions about whether any illegal self-enrichment took place. (Federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating the matter.) Foreign governments have also poured money into the Trump Organization’s properties, which may violate a constitutional ban on federal officials receiving foreign profits.
Ironically, some of these schemes likely would have gone unnoticed if Trump had never run for president. Fahrenthold, of the Post, began his Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into Trump’s charitable donations after then-candidate Trump handed out oversized checks to veterans’ groups in campaign stunts. And the illegal hush-money payments that eventually led former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to start cooperating with the federal prosecutors likely wouldn’t have been made if Trump wasn’t trying to win the presidency. Becoming president has subjected Trump’s hollow empire to a level of scrutiny that he never imagined. The question is whether any of it will remain by the time he leaves, or is forced from, the White House.
Though the Trump Foundation was an impressively brazen scheme, it’s far from the only one bearing the president’s name. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle a multi-state class-action lawsuit against Trump University, his now-defunct real-estate seminar program. Court filings showed how the seminars preyed on customers’ financial anxieties so they would fork over thousands of dollars for mundane lessons about buying and selling property. This undercut Trump University’s main selling point: that “students” would be able to draw upon its eponymous founder’s reputation for savvy real-estate deals.
Even this reputation isn’t grounded in anything, though. The underlying basis of Trump’s political career is his public image as a self-made real-estate magnate. Careful scrutiny by journalists and investigators, however, has shown this to be largely mythical. It wasn’t business acumen that helped Trump establish a foothold in New York real estate in the 1980s and 1990s, but a steady infusion of at least $413 million from his father through dubious tax practices. Trump’s inflated reputation is a source of income in and of itself. Many of the overseas hotels bearing his name don’t even belong to him: He simply licenses his image to real-estate developers overseas, giving a branding edge to them and a reliable stream of profit to him.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an aspect of the president’s life that isn’t marked by grifting. The Trump campaign and its allies heard multiple offers of assistance from Kremlin-linked figures while Trump’s personal lawyer tried to secure a hotel deal in Moscow. His inaugural committee later raked in more than $100 million—more than twice the sum of his predecessors—from wealthy donors that largely went unaccounted for. A ProPublica investigation found that the Trump Organization may have overcharged the committee for use of Trump’s Washington hotel, raising questions about whether any illegal self-enrichment took place. (Federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating the matter.) Foreign governments have also poured money into the Trump Organization’s properties, which may violate a constitutional ban on federal officials receiving foreign profits.
Ironically, some of these schemes likely would have gone unnoticed if Trump had never run for president. Fahrenthold, of the Post, began his Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into Trump’s charitable donations after then-candidate Trump handed out oversized checks to veterans’ groups in campaign stunts. And the illegal hush-money payments that eventually led former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to start cooperating with the federal prosecutors likely wouldn’t have been made if Trump wasn’t trying to win the presidency. Becoming president has subjected Trump’s hollow empire to a level of scrutiny that he never imagined. The question is whether any of it will remain by the time he leaves, or is forced from, the White House.
Lobbyists Are Feasting in Trump’s Swamp by Emily Atkin
Lobbyists Are Feasting in Trump’s Swamp
By Emily Atkin
5-7 minutes
Let’s say Washington is a swamp, as Trump calls it. Then lobbyists are the gators, and strong ethics rules are the fence that keeps Americans from getting bit. In President Donald Trump’s swamp, the gators keep getting bigger and the fence is in tatters.
On Saturday, Ryan Zinke submitted his resignation as secretary of the Interior Department, the seventh-largest agency responsible for most of the nation’s natural resources and public lands. Zinke will be replaced—at least temporarily—by David Bernhardt, a former high-profile lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and the Interior’s current second-in-command. As a lobbyist, Bernhardt worked on behalf of several oil companies that he’ll soon be in charge of regulating. He’s been called “a walking conflict of interest” by his critics.
Bernhardt’s ascent follows Trump’s announcement last month that a former lobbyist for the coal industry would soon be nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Andrew Wheeler has been serving as acting administrator since July, after former EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned amid numerous ethical scandals. As a lobbyist, Wheeler represented Murray Energy—a coal company whose CEO literally sent Trump a wish list of all the environmental regulations he wanted dismantled. Trump’s EPA, now led by Wheeler, is on track toward fulfilling almost all those requests.
David Bernhardt, the Interior Department’s new acting chief, has been switching between lobbying jobs and government jobs since the early 1990s.Center for Responsive Politics
It’s alarming to know that two men who became rich by helping polluters dismantle environmental protections are about to lead the two most important federal agencies protecting public lands, wildlife, and human health. Many environmentalists believe that fossil fuel lobbying should disqualify Wheeler and Bernhardt from these positions.
But the mere presence of lobbyists in Trump’s cabinet doesn’t raise the alarm of government ethics experts. “The revolving door is a basic part of the Washington Establishment,” said Laura Peterson, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight. “People go back and forth between the public and private sectors all the time.” It makes sense why they would; government agencies regularly deal with lobbyists when they’re crafting regulations, so they hire people who are familiar with the process.
The Trump administration does, however, seem “particularly comfortable stacking high-level posts with former lobbyists whose policy proposals are like a corporate Christmas list,” said Peterson. As ProPublica revealed in March, “At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to ‘drain the swamp,’ many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of.”
These former lobbyists are not only flooding the government. They’re entering “a wild west environment where anything goes,” said Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, when he resigned out of “disappointment” with Trump.
Shaub emphasized that previous administrations had “a lot” of industry members. “But past Republican presidents were similar to Democratic presidents in at least supporting the government ethics programs,” he said. President Barack Obama, for example, signed an executive order in 2009 prohibiting the government from hiring people who had been a lobbyist in the previous year. Special waivers could be granted, but had to be made public. A hired former lobbyist would also be prohibited from working on any issue on which they had previously lobbied.
Trump repealed Obama’s policy when he took office, replacing it with an executive order that he claimed would more effectively “drain the swamp.” But the ethics order has proven much weaker than Obama’s in practice, Shaub said. Now, lobbyists can be hired for any government position. Lobbyists can also work on issues where they have a direct conflict of interest, provided they get a waiver. And Trump has been giving these waivers out like candy to the most powerful people in his administration—at least 37 “to key administration officials at the White House and executive branch agencies,” according to a March report from the Associated Press.
But the total number of government officials with conflict-of-interest waivers is likely much more than 37, for two reasons: Trump’s ethics policy, unlike Obama’s, does not require waivers to be made public. His waivers are also often extremely vague, said Shaub, who now works for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s impossible to count the number of people listed on a waiver, because they describe the type of person they’re waiving rather than directly naming them,” he said. The waivers granted to ex-lobbyists also “don’t offer any explanation” for why they’re needed.
This secrecy is perhaps the most troubling part of Trump’s lobbying policy. Of course, we want nothing more than to assume that government officials will act in good faith. But American history is littered with examples of those who were able to abuse their power thanks to a lack of transparency and oversight. The current administration is contributing more than its fair share to that ignominious list. Though he ran on a promise to “drain the swamp,” Trump is feeding with gators and letting them roam free—then asking us to trust him that the gators won’t bite.
By Emily Atkin
5-7 minutes
Let’s say Washington is a swamp, as Trump calls it. Then lobbyists are the gators, and strong ethics rules are the fence that keeps Americans from getting bit. In President Donald Trump’s swamp, the gators keep getting bigger and the fence is in tatters.
On Saturday, Ryan Zinke submitted his resignation as secretary of the Interior Department, the seventh-largest agency responsible for most of the nation’s natural resources and public lands. Zinke will be replaced—at least temporarily—by David Bernhardt, a former high-profile lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry and the Interior’s current second-in-command. As a lobbyist, Bernhardt worked on behalf of several oil companies that he’ll soon be in charge of regulating. He’s been called “a walking conflict of interest” by his critics.
Bernhardt’s ascent follows Trump’s announcement last month that a former lobbyist for the coal industry would soon be nominated to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Andrew Wheeler has been serving as acting administrator since July, after former EPA chief Scott Pruitt resigned amid numerous ethical scandals. As a lobbyist, Wheeler represented Murray Energy—a coal company whose CEO literally sent Trump a wish list of all the environmental regulations he wanted dismantled. Trump’s EPA, now led by Wheeler, is on track toward fulfilling almost all those requests.
David Bernhardt, the Interior Department’s new acting chief, has been switching between lobbying jobs and government jobs since the early 1990s.Center for Responsive Politics
It’s alarming to know that two men who became rich by helping polluters dismantle environmental protections are about to lead the two most important federal agencies protecting public lands, wildlife, and human health. Many environmentalists believe that fossil fuel lobbying should disqualify Wheeler and Bernhardt from these positions.
But the mere presence of lobbyists in Trump’s cabinet doesn’t raise the alarm of government ethics experts. “The revolving door is a basic part of the Washington Establishment,” said Laura Peterson, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight. “People go back and forth between the public and private sectors all the time.” It makes sense why they would; government agencies regularly deal with lobbyists when they’re crafting regulations, so they hire people who are familiar with the process.
The Trump administration does, however, seem “particularly comfortable stacking high-level posts with former lobbyists whose policy proposals are like a corporate Christmas list,” said Peterson. As ProPublica revealed in March, “At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to ‘drain the swamp,’ many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of.”
These former lobbyists are not only flooding the government. They’re entering “a wild west environment where anything goes,” said Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, when he resigned out of “disappointment” with Trump.
Shaub emphasized that previous administrations had “a lot” of industry members. “But past Republican presidents were similar to Democratic presidents in at least supporting the government ethics programs,” he said. President Barack Obama, for example, signed an executive order in 2009 prohibiting the government from hiring people who had been a lobbyist in the previous year. Special waivers could be granted, but had to be made public. A hired former lobbyist would also be prohibited from working on any issue on which they had previously lobbied.
Trump repealed Obama’s policy when he took office, replacing it with an executive order that he claimed would more effectively “drain the swamp.” But the ethics order has proven much weaker than Obama’s in practice, Shaub said. Now, lobbyists can be hired for any government position. Lobbyists can also work on issues where they have a direct conflict of interest, provided they get a waiver. And Trump has been giving these waivers out like candy to the most powerful people in his administration—at least 37 “to key administration officials at the White House and executive branch agencies,” according to a March report from the Associated Press.
But the total number of government officials with conflict-of-interest waivers is likely much more than 37, for two reasons: Trump’s ethics policy, unlike Obama’s, does not require waivers to be made public. His waivers are also often extremely vague, said Shaub, who now works for the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s impossible to count the number of people listed on a waiver, because they describe the type of person they’re waiving rather than directly naming them,” he said. The waivers granted to ex-lobbyists also “don’t offer any explanation” for why they’re needed.
This secrecy is perhaps the most troubling part of Trump’s lobbying policy. Of course, we want nothing more than to assume that government officials will act in good faith. But American history is littered with examples of those who were able to abuse their power thanks to a lack of transparency and oversight. The current administration is contributing more than its fair share to that ignominious list. Though he ran on a promise to “drain the swamp,” Trump is feeding with gators and letting them roam free—then asking us to trust him that the gators won’t bite.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
The fixer's toolbox, weaponized. By Josh Marshall
We know that a key, maybe the key to Michael Cohen’s job for Donald Trump was making prob-lems go away, most especially making women who had stories to tell – whether consensual sex-ual encounters or abuse – stay silent. Yesterday I suggested the possibility that this defensive capacity could very easily be weaponized against others. When you consider it, it’s frankly hard to imagine it wouldn’t be. Cohen had close relationships with lawyers for clients with damaging revelations. He had an equally close relationship with The National Enquirer, which is in the busi-ness of damaging revelations but seemed willing to subordinate that business to its transactional relationship with Donald Trump.
We have a couple other odd examples. Trump insider and fundraiser Elliott Broidy had a mistress who became pregnant and then threatened to go to the press. And well, Michael Cohen called up Elliott and told him he had a big problem but Michael could help. For a price. I mentioned this odd set of connections between Jerry Falwell, Jr., Michael Cohen and Jerry’s odd decision to go into business with a 21 year old pool attendant in starting a booze and sex flophouse in South Beach. Is this really happening? Something seems odd and maybe compromising about Falwell’s relationship with Giancarlo Granda. Michael struck up a relationship with Falwell while he was trying to put together a Trump campaign for President in 2012. He got Falwell to endorse Trump in 2016.
It’s all very fuzzy and amorphous, a lot of smoke and a fair amount of fire and who knows? But there is maybe another example of it.
Remember Eric Schneiderman? He was the well-respected and hard-charging New York Attor-ney General who everyone loved until news emerged of abusive behavior towards a number of women and then within a day he had resigned and disappeared. But then a short time later a lawyer who said he’d represented two of Schneiderman’s victims (not the four who came for-ward in the article that led to Schneiderman’s resignation) came forward and said he’d shared the information with Michael Cohen back in 2013.
The lawyer is named Peter J. Gleason. He’s apparently a bit of a self-promoter who often posi-tions himself in proximity to big news stories. In this case he went before Judge Kimba Wood, who was overseeing the exploding Michael Cohen investigation and asked that any documents related to his clients be kept confidential.
At the time, I think it was hard to know what to make of Gleason’s claim because it immediately and inevitably got caught up in suspicions that Schneiderman may have been set up (not really guilty of the accusations) or that Trump or Cohen were behind the stories that brought him down. Those points don’t really need to concern us though. Schneiderman did what he did. He resigned and left public life. How the story made its way into the press doesn’t matter for our purposes. But the fact he went to Cohen and shared the information with him seems highly rel-evant to understand this part of Cohen’s work for Donald Trump. Just for perfect clarity, we treat as a given that Schneiderman did what he did and saw his career collapse because of it. There is also no evidence I can see that Cohen or Trump leaked the information that led to his downfall. (I think the author’s The New Yorker piece specifically said they weren’t the sources.) What we’re concerned with is purely Michael Cohen’s MO and whether he used the tool box and relation-ships he used to protect Trump to attack and control Trump’s enemies or simply those who could help him.
Here’s the portion of a New York Times article that discusses Gleason’s interactions with Cohen, circa 2013 …
In his letter, Mr. Gleason said that after his attempts to assist the women fell on deaf ears, he decided to take their accusations against Mr. Schneiderman to Steve Dunleavy, a former column-ist for The New York Post. According to the letter, Mr. Dunleavy “offered to discuss the matter with Donald Trump.”
Within a day of speaking with Mr. Dunleavy, Mr. Gleason said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cohen.
“In the conversation,” Mr. Gleason recalled, “I said, ‘Listen, I’m looking for somebody to help.’ At the time, Trump was considering running for governor. And Cohen said, ‘If Trump runs and wins, you’ll have an ally for bringing these women forward.’”
Mr. Gleason added, “I’m no fan of Michael Cohen, but he was sympathetic.”
It’s just one example. But the examples or apparent examples are piling up.
We have a couple other odd examples. Trump insider and fundraiser Elliott Broidy had a mistress who became pregnant and then threatened to go to the press. And well, Michael Cohen called up Elliott and told him he had a big problem but Michael could help. For a price. I mentioned this odd set of connections between Jerry Falwell, Jr., Michael Cohen and Jerry’s odd decision to go into business with a 21 year old pool attendant in starting a booze and sex flophouse in South Beach. Is this really happening? Something seems odd and maybe compromising about Falwell’s relationship with Giancarlo Granda. Michael struck up a relationship with Falwell while he was trying to put together a Trump campaign for President in 2012. He got Falwell to endorse Trump in 2016.
It’s all very fuzzy and amorphous, a lot of smoke and a fair amount of fire and who knows? But there is maybe another example of it.
Remember Eric Schneiderman? He was the well-respected and hard-charging New York Attor-ney General who everyone loved until news emerged of abusive behavior towards a number of women and then within a day he had resigned and disappeared. But then a short time later a lawyer who said he’d represented two of Schneiderman’s victims (not the four who came for-ward in the article that led to Schneiderman’s resignation) came forward and said he’d shared the information with Michael Cohen back in 2013.
The lawyer is named Peter J. Gleason. He’s apparently a bit of a self-promoter who often posi-tions himself in proximity to big news stories. In this case he went before Judge Kimba Wood, who was overseeing the exploding Michael Cohen investigation and asked that any documents related to his clients be kept confidential.
At the time, I think it was hard to know what to make of Gleason’s claim because it immediately and inevitably got caught up in suspicions that Schneiderman may have been set up (not really guilty of the accusations) or that Trump or Cohen were behind the stories that brought him down. Those points don’t really need to concern us though. Schneiderman did what he did. He resigned and left public life. How the story made its way into the press doesn’t matter for our purposes. But the fact he went to Cohen and shared the information with him seems highly rel-evant to understand this part of Cohen’s work for Donald Trump. Just for perfect clarity, we treat as a given that Schneiderman did what he did and saw his career collapse because of it. There is also no evidence I can see that Cohen or Trump leaked the information that led to his downfall. (I think the author’s The New Yorker piece specifically said they weren’t the sources.) What we’re concerned with is purely Michael Cohen’s MO and whether he used the tool box and relation-ships he used to protect Trump to attack and control Trump’s enemies or simply those who could help him.
Here’s the portion of a New York Times article that discusses Gleason’s interactions with Cohen, circa 2013 …
In his letter, Mr. Gleason said that after his attempts to assist the women fell on deaf ears, he decided to take their accusations against Mr. Schneiderman to Steve Dunleavy, a former column-ist for The New York Post. According to the letter, Mr. Dunleavy “offered to discuss the matter with Donald Trump.”
Within a day of speaking with Mr. Dunleavy, Mr. Gleason said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cohen.
“In the conversation,” Mr. Gleason recalled, “I said, ‘Listen, I’m looking for somebody to help.’ At the time, Trump was considering running for governor. And Cohen said, ‘If Trump runs and wins, you’ll have an ally for bringing these women forward.’”
Mr. Gleason added, “I’m no fan of Michael Cohen, but he was sympathetic.”
It’s just one example. But the examples or apparent examples are piling up.
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