Category: Trump effect

April 2, 2019

Los Angeles and the broader hip-hop community were left reeling by the senseless, cold-blooded execution of rapper and entrepreneur, Nipsey Hussle, on Sunday.  Hussle was killed outside of his Marathon Clothing store in broad daylight, (Source:  “Grammy-Nominated Rapper Nipsey Hussle Shot and Killed at 33,” by the Associated Press, The New York Times, 3/31/19).  Hussle, born Ermias Asghedom, was a loving father of two and a loving partner to Lauren London, mother of his youngest child, (Source:  “Rest In Power, Neighborhood Nip,” by Panama Jackson, Verysmartbrothas.theroot.com, 4/1/19).

Article after article showcased Hussle’s entrepreneurial spirit, detailing how he sold limited edition mixtapes for $100, rather than sign with a major label. Just last year, Hussle opened up Vector 90, a co-working space and STEM center in South Central.  In Hussle’s words, “In our culture, there’s a narrative that says, ‘Follow the athletes, follow the entertainers.’ And that’s cool, but there should be something that says, ‘follow Elon Musk, follow Zuckerberg,” (Source:  “With a new STEM Center and a revolutionary marketing strategy, Nipsey Hussle is music’s biggest disruptor,” by Sonaiya Kelley, The Los Angeles Times, 3/16/18). Continue reading “RIP Nipsey Hussle”

March 28, 2019

 

In the last forty-eight hours, the news media has been consumed with the latest developments in the Jussie Smollett case.  On Tuesday, prosecutors dropped all of the charges against him and sealed his record, apparently in exchange for Smollett’s forfeiture of his $10,000 bond and doing sixteen hours of community service, (Source:  “Why the prosecutors dismissed the charges against Jussie Smollett,” by Deanna Paul, The Washington Post, 3/28/19).  Countless hours were devoted to venting anger over the speculation that Smollett had gotten away with something. The Chicago Police Department was furious and Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared the case disposition a “whitewash.”

Their performance is proof positive that irony is dead.  We should believe that the same Chicago Police Department that operated a secret facility from 1974-1991, where Police Commander Jon Burge tortured Black men in order to extract confessions from them, is outraged at this supposed miscarriage of justice?(Source:  “A Digital Archive Documents Two Decades of Torture by Chicago Police,” by Juleyka Lantigua-Williams, TheAtlantic.com, 10/26/16).  We should believe that Rahm Emanuel, who buried the video of the murder of Laquan McDonald by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke for a year, is an advocate for greater transparency? (Source:  “Laquan McDonald was shot down by the police, and he took the mayor’s career down with him,” by Dahleen Glanton, The Chicago Tribune,  9/6/18). Continue reading “Whitewash?”

March 26, 2019

 

We have all been sitting in stunned silence since the Mueller report landed with a thud, wondering how two years of investigations could have ended like this.  Mueller maintained his monk-like silence, content to deliver his confidential report to Attorney General Bill Barr, a reliable Republican hatchet man with a reputation for erasing Republican scandals.  True to form, Barr condensed an 87 page report into a four page summary which never quoted a complete sentence from Mueller, but managed to definitively state that there was no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government and to conclude that, in his own judgement, Trump had not obstructed justice, (Source:  “4 things we learned from Barr’s summary of the Mueller report,” by Daniel Bush, PBSNewshour.org, 3/24/19).

Those of us who foolishly pinned all of our hopes on Mueller delivering the coup de grace to this lawless, wildly unfit charlatan were left deflated.  Yet, rank speculation aside, there is no way to know from the snippet taken out of context what doomed a collusion finding. The only way to really know what Mueller concluded is to read the actual report in its entirety. Proof that the truth is far more complicated than Barr would have you believe is evident in how quickly McConnell blocked Chuck Schumer’s effort to release the full report, (Source:  “McConnell blocks Schumer effort to call for public release of Mueller report,” by Rebecca Shabad and Frank Thorp V, NBCNews.com, 3/25/19). Continue reading “Slow motion coup”

March 24, 2019

    Friday at 5:00 p.m.  the news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had delivered his final report to Attorney General William Barr.  In his letter to Congress, Barr stated that he “remained committed to as much transparency as possible,” and that he could brief them on the report’s “principal conclusions” as soon as this weekend, (Source:  “Mueller Delivers Report on Trump-Russia Investigation to Attorney General,” by Sharon LaFraniere and Katie Benner, The New York Times, 3/22/19).

    Despite the complete lack of any actual knowledge of the contents of the report, the news media felt compelled to report on this bombshell news.  Word from an anonymous senior Justice Department official that no further indictments would be forthcoming fueled speculation that Mueller’s final report could be a “massive boon”  to Trump.  Once again, the press defaulted to lazy sports world analogies, without having seen so much as a syllable of the actual report themselves. Continue reading “Us”

March 20, 2019

    While we were still reeling from the aftershock of the racist terrorist attack in New Zealand, or busily grabbing our popcorn to watch the Twitter feud between Trump and Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that may have flown under the radar.  Nielsen v. Preap is an ominous sign of how each branch of government is contributing to a two-tiered white supremacist society, with insurmountable barriers for Black and Brown people.

      In Nielsen v. Preap, the Court ruled, by a 5-4 majority, that ICE could detain immigrants indefinitely, without bond, if they had previously been convicted of a crime.  In the case at hand, the respondent, Mony Preap, was a lawful permanent resident with two drug convictions. Although Preap was released from custody for those offenses in 2006, ICE used them as the rationale for his apprehension in 2013, seven years later, after Preap was released from jail following an arrest, (Source:  Nielsen v. Preap, 586 U.S.___ (2019)). Continue reading “Choose wisely”

    Three days after the massacre of 50 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a white supremacist terrorist, we remain numb with shock and horror.  We are sickened by the act itself, as well as by the canny way the murderer harnessed modern media to amplify his message of hate, uploading his 74 page “manifesto” to the internet and outfitting himself with a body camera in order to stream the carnage in real time, (Source:  “A Mass Murder of, and for, the Internet,” by Kevin Roose, The New York Times, 3/15/19).

     The footage went viral before people could fully process what they were watching.  Images of men, women and children being senselessly slaughtered while in the midst of Jumu’ah will be seared in the consciousness of the countless people who clicked unthinkingly on the retweets and shares that raced ahead of the social media platforms’ efforts to take them down. Continue reading “White supremacy—our greatest global threat”

March 13, 2019

 

Yesterday’s news was dominated by the announcement of the indictment of 50 people in a massive criminal operation by which wealthy and prominent parents cheated and bribed their children’s way into elite schools, including Stanford, U.S.C., Georgetown and Yale.  The unsealed indictment announced by the U.S. Attorney in Boston detailed a complex scheme that involved cheating on standardized tests (after claiming a disability to obtain extra time); lying about participation and achievement in sports such as crew, tennis, soccer and water polo; and bribing college coaches to falsely state that the students were being recruited, (Source:  “College Admissions Scandal:  Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged,” by Jennifer Medina, Katie Benner and Kate Taylor, The New York Times, 3/12/19).

It is hard to even know where to begin in cataloguing the myriad ways in which this sprawling scheme is enraging.  There is the fact that parents invented athletic records, making a mockery of the thousands of parents who placed a racket or a bat in their toddler’s hands and spent the next fifteen years shuttling them to farflung games and tournaments chasing the dream of recruitment by a top college or university, in order to secure their children’s future.  Then there is the fact that the vehicle for the payments to cheating standardized test proctors and lying college coaches was a nonprofit foundation, giving these wealthy reprobates tax deductible criminality. Continue reading “The myth of meritocracy”

March 11, 2019

 

Late last week, the dramatic injustice of our “justice” system was once again made evident by the extraordinarily light sentence meted out to Paul Manafort by Judge T.S. Ellis of the Eastern District of Virginia.  Diverging wildly from the sentencing guidelines, which recommend 19-24 years, Ellis sentenced Manafort to a mere 47 months, citing his “otherwise blameless life” as a rationale, (Source:  “The ‘Otherwise Blameless’ Life of Paul Manafort,” by Franklin Foer, TheAtlantic.com, 3/7/19).  As Franklin Foer and others have detailed, far from leading a blameless life, Manafort made a career lobbying for brutal authoritarians, bilking both his erstwhile business partners and banks and lying about all of it to save his sorry hide.  In addition, Manafort displayed none of the contrition that is normally a precondition for a lenient sentence.

None of that mattered, as Judge Ellis seemed eager to help Manafort evade responsibility.  Compare that with the sentence that Judge Ellis handed down to African American Congressman William Jefferson in 2009.  Jefferson, who was convicted of bribery and arrested with $90,000 in cash in his freezer, was sentenced to 13 years in prison, (Source:  “Paul Manafort’s Sentencing Produced One Last Awful Thing,” by Charles P. Pierce, Esquire.com, 3/8/19). Manafort’s light sentence is merely the latest in a long line of travesties proving that there are two sets of rules in this country depending on your race. Continue reading “Freedom is elusive”

March 4, 2019

     The Germans have a word for it— Weltschmerz.  Black people invented an entire genre of music to describe it— the bone deep weariness of being trapped in circumstances that you feel powerless to change.  

      Over the weekend, the news cycle was dominated by the performance of the demented clown in the center ring of the CPAC circus.  While numerous journalists devoted hundreds of words to dissecting Trump’s rambling, overlong, angry screed,  Black people were forced, once again to process our anger and incredulity over a decision showing just how little our lives matter.

     Saturday, Sacramento prosecutor, Anne Marie Schubert, announced that the police officers who murdered Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard for allegedly being guilty of vandalism, would not face charges.  Despite the fact that Stephon Clark was unarmed. Despite the fact that police officers fired 20 times. Despite the fact that video shows that the cops continued to shoot him when he fell and provided no medical assistance for six minutes, (Source:  “No Charges in Sacramento Police Shooting of Stephon Clark,” by Jose A. Del Real, The New York Times, 3/2/19).  None of that was sufficient to dislodge the default assumption that Black people are criminals per se, so any harm we suffer at the hands of the police is deemed justified. Continue reading “Inner City Blues”

February 28, 2019

 

Yesterday we were transfixed by the spectacle of Michael Cohen’s blistering Congressional testimony.  Cohen gave us preview of what to expect in the opening statement released Tuesday night, in which he dubbed his former idol “a racist,” a “con man” and a “cheat,” (Source:  “Michael Cohen Testifies That President Trump is a ‘Con Man,’ a ‘Cheat’ and a ‘Racist.’  Read His Opening Statement,” by Katie Reilly, Time.com, 2/27/19).  Trump’s blustering former fixer, who lied and threatened people on Trump’s behalf for a decade appeared yesterday, chastened and contrite.

It may have been a performance, but Cohen brought receipts.  The exhibits that accompanied his testimony included copies of  a check that Trump wrote during his presidency to reimburse Cohen for the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.  He brought copies of Trump’s financial statements from 2011, 2012, and 2013, to demonstrate how Trump inflated the value of his assets in an effort to secure a loan from Deutsche Bank to buy the Buffalo Bills.   Cohen submitted documents showing that Trump recruited a straw bidder to drive up the price of his portrait at a charity auction, and then reimbursed that bidder out of the funds of his charitable foundation, to show that Trump may have committed tax fraud (Source:  “Here are the documents Michael Cohen brought to Congress,” by Katie Mettler, The Washington Post, 2/27/19). Continue reading “Ruin or redemption?”