Trump Continues to Misrepresent Coronavirus

In a rare press conference today, Trump tried to deny that he called the coronavirus emergency a hoax, misidentified the nation's first virus victim as a woman and continued to misstate the number of U.S. patients identified as contracting the coronavirus.  Despite what Trump continues to say, the current number of cases is 67 (of those, 6 have recovered and 1 has died).  The breakdown is as follows:

3 cases of people who contracted the virus in Wuhan and were repatriated to the U.S. and 44 people who contracted the virus while quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan and were repatriated to the Travis Air Force Base in California, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center near Camp Ashland in Nebraska.

As of Trump's press conference today, there are 20 additional cases of those who were diagnosed/identified with the virus here in the States:

• 1 case in Washington County, OR who contracted the virus from another (unknown) person (being treated at the Kaiser Westside Medical Center)
• Another case in Snohomish County, WA who contracted the virus from another (unknown) person (recovering at home in isolation)
• 2 patients in King County, Washington (1 of whom has died)
• 1 case in Solona County, California, who likely contracted the virus from CDC employee who entered the Travis Air Base quarantine area without protection and then was allowed to leave the base (being treated in the UC Davis Medical Center)
• Another case in Santa Clara, CA, who contracted the virus from another (unknown) person (being treated in the El Camino Hospital)
• 1 case in Snohomish County, WA who had traveled to Wuhan (and has recovered)
• 1 case in Chicago, IL who had traveled to Wuhan (and has recovered)
• 1 case in Orange County, CA who had traveled to Wuhan (and has recovered)
• 1 case in Los Angeles, CA who had traveled to Wuhan (status unknown)
• 1 case in Tempe, AZ who had traveled to Wuhan (and has recovered)
• 1 case in Chicago, IL who contracted the virus from his wife (above) and has recovered
• 1 case from Santa Clara, CA who had traveled from Wuhan (and has recovered)
• 1 case from Boston, MA who had traveled from Wuhan (recovering at home in isolation)
• 1 additional (unrelated) case from Santa Clara, CA who had traveled from Wuhan
• (recovering at home in isolation)
• 2 cases from San Benito, CA who had traveled from Wuhan (both recovering in the hospital)
• 1 case from Madison, WI who had traveled from Beijing (recovering at home in isolation)
• 1 case in Humboldt County, CA who had traveled from China (recovering at home in isolation)
• 1 case in Sacramento, CA who had traveled from China (recovering at home in isolation)

Husband of Russian Instagramer Dies in Freak Dry Ice Accident

Three people were killed and six were in intensive care after an incident at Instagram influencer Ekaterina Didenko's 29th birthday in Moscow.  Her husband, Valentin Didenko, had unloaded 55 pounds of dry ice into the swimming pool in order to create a dramatic "visual effect."

The sudden infusion of dry rice resulted in a release of carbon dioxide large enough to induce acute poisoning of nearby partygoers-- essentially suffocating them.  Some guests were also reported to have suffered from chemical burns.  The 32-year-old Didenko was also among the dead.

Party-goers Natalia Monakova and Yuri Alferov, both 25, were confirmed dead at the scene.   The distraught Russian blogger who lost her husband and two friends in the horrific incident posted a video announcing their deaths.

According to reports, Valentin wanted the dry ice "to create an impressive steam show" as party guests jumped into the pool.  But as soon as the ice was poured, people started fainting.  Reports said Natalia Monakova and Yuri Alferov died from pulmonary edemas after breathing excessive carbon monoxide. Valentin Didenko was taken to intensive care but later died in the hospital.  The Russian Investigative Committee confirmed a case was opened into causing death by negligence.

Is There a Doctor in the House?

Let's get real on the coronavirus thing.  Mike Pence, who was criticized for his handling of Indiana's HIV outbreak, will now be leading the U.S. response to the virus.  He is also the guy that once said that smoking does not kill.  He's the guy who once (and possibly still) believes that you can "pray the gay away."

 

Just four out of the 15 people on the coronavirus task force are doctors-- one of whom was named the morning of the meeting and was not at the meeting.  Those on the task force include Larry Kudlow, the Trump economic adviser who earlier in the week said the U.S. was "airtight" from the virus  Also on the taskforce is Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary who had tweeted a complaint that he could not find a map of coronavirus' spread. 

 While Pence met with his task force, Nero fiddled away in the Oval office.   Trump spent nearly an hour with actors Dean Cain, Kristy Swanson and playwright Phelim McAleer.   He later met with black supporters, including Diamond and Silk, Candace Owens and ex-'Grey's Anatomy' actor Isaiah Washington.  At that meeting he called the country's response to coronavirus an 'incredible achievement' and said that NBC News was 'racist'

Back in the real world, the stock market lost another 1,190 points, making this the worst week for investors since the Bush recession

We also now have coronavirus cases in Norway, Nigeria, Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, Romania for the first time-- joining Italy, Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, North Macedonia, Spain, Sweden and Britain.  And in France cases have doubled.  The virus is now said to have entered Iran in an unknown manner and the number of cases could be much higher than known-- even a vice president and members of the Iranian parliament have now tested positive.

Infections have now been found in patients in Germany and the United States who had no known risk factors, like having traveled to an affected area, suggesting that the virus could be spreading undetected in a manner known as "community spread."

And now we know (thanks to a whistleblower) that Federal government health workers were not given proper medical training or protective gear when they were sent to assist Americans who had been quarantined for possible exposure to the coronavirus.

Staff members without protective gear or proper training entered quarantine areas at Travis Air Force Base and March Air Reserve Base in California and interacted with the people who were in isolation and who had tested positive for the coronavirus. These same staffers then moved freely around and off the bases, the complaint said.

The whistle-blower, described as a senior leader at the Department of Health and Human Services, said at least one worker stayed in a nearby hotel and left California on a commercial flight, potentially exposion hundreds (if not thousands) more people.
In addition, many of the health workers were unaware of the need to test their temperatures three times a day, the whistleblower added.  The employees were not given training in safety protocols until five days after they were ordered into quarantined areas, including a hangar where evacuees from coronavirus hot zones in China and elsewhere were being received. 

Who is in charge here?  Mike Pence, Deborah Birx (who was named as the White House’s “coronavirus response coordinator”) or HHS SecretaryAlex Azar, who says he is the Chair of the Task Force?  Whoever it is, get your act together!

Outrage Over Ivanka's Freeloading on State Visit to India

Like Bush Bungled Katrina, Trump is Blowing It on Coronavirus

If you haven't been worried about the coronavirus before now, you better sit up and take notice.  The financial markets are certainly paying attention-- as evidenced  by the two-day slide in the stock market, which wiped out all gains year-to-date.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, one of the top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the public, saying, "We expect we will see community spread in this country.  It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness."

But is the Trump administration ready?  "I think that's a problem that's going to go away," Trump said about the virus while he was in India-- less than a few days after global infections exploded in South Korea, Italy, Austria, Croatia and Iran.  In that same news conference, Trump insisted that "we're very close to a vaccine." Well that's yet another Trump lie-- there's no available evidence that a vaccine is "close," in fact, most infectious disease experts say developing a vaccine for the coronavirus is roughly a year away. Trump also claimed that all the U.S. coronavirus patients "are getting better ... they're all getting better."  However, Dr. Messonnier, told reporters that the Americans hospitalized in Japan are still "seriously ill."

So where are we actually?  Let's start by going back to early 2018, when the Trump White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs.  The Trump administration then also eliminated $15 billion in national health spending and cut the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS.  In addition, the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.

Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.

Obama's "epidemic czar" Ronald Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”

The next epidemic is now here; we’ll soon know the costs imposed by the Trump administration’s early negligence and present panic. On Jan. 29, Trump announced the creation of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, an all-male group of a dozen advisors, five from the White House staff. Chaired by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, the task force includes men from the CDC, State Department, DHS, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Transportation Department. It’s not clear how this task force will function or when it will even convene.

In the absence of a formal structure, the government has resorted to improvisation. In practical terms, the U.S. government’s public health effort is led by Daniel Jernigan, the incident commander for the Wuhan coronavirus response at the CDC.  Jernigan is responsible for convening meetings of the nation’s state health commissioner, but it is unclear if that has happened.  In the meantime, state-level health leaders are telling reporters that they have been sharing information with one another and deciding how best to prepare their medical and public health workers without waiting for instructions from federal leadership.

Preparing a country for infectious disease is a complicated process—to do it right will require sustained attention and resources, and it’s unlikely that a comprehensive plan will materialize in time to make a real difference as the coronavirus spreads.

Trump Launching Assault Against "Disloyal" People-- Are Loyalty Oaths Next?

Since being acquitted by the Senate, Trump has embarked on a disturbing purge of anyone not deemed to be sufficiently loyal..  Last week, acting national intelligence director Joseph Maguire was ousted for the crime of briefing lawmakers on Russia’s attempts to meddle in the 2020 election and replaced by loyalist Richard Grenell, who, by all accounts has approximately zero relevant experience.

Before that, decorated war veteran Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who cooperated with the impeachment investigation, was escorted out of the building and reassigned (his twin brother was removed from his job too).  U.S. attorney Jessie Liu was removed from the Andrew McCabe case and had her nomination for a top treasury role withdrawn.

Axios’s Jonathan Swan reports the White House and its allies have assembled “detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust—along with trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.”  These lists, created by a network of conservative activists called Groundswell that include Republican Senate staffer Barbara Ledeen and Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have made their way to Trump and shaped his views on who he can trust and who should be fired.

For instance, a memo on Liu laid out 14 reasons why she was unfit for the Treasury job Steven Mnuchin had selected her for and included the fact that she hadn’t acted on criminal referrals of some of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers.  In addition, the memo faulted Liu for recommending jail time for Michael Flynn (who, incidentally, pleaded guilty twice), and for holding a leadership role in a networking group characterized as “pro-choice and anti-[Samuel] Alito.”  Liu was also deemed disloyal because she didn’t indict former deputy FBI director and Trump enemy Andrew McCabe and dismissed charges against supposedly “violent inauguration protesters who plotted to disrupt the inauguration.”

Another terrifying memo written by Groundswell included a list of suggested hires previously rejected by the presidential personnel office-- including Sheriff David Clarke, who is recommended for a senior Homeland Security position, despite suggesting that habeas corpus be suspended and calling Black Lives Matter activists “subhuman creeps.”

As the New York Times noted over the weekend, “in some of the most critical corners of the Trump administration, officials show up for work now never entirely sure who will be there by the end of the evening—themselves included.”  Last week, John McEntee (Trump's former body man who was fired in 2018 but recently rehired) reportedly gathered White House liaisons from cabinet agencies and asked them to identify political appointees within the government believed to be anti-Trump, having been empowered by the president himself to get rid of the “bad people.”  As NYU professor Paul C. Light put it, “Trump appears to be launching the biggest assault on the nation’s civil service system since the 1883 Pendleton Act ended the spoils system.”

Former Limo Driver Dies in Homemade Rocket Trying to Prove Earth is Flat

Former limousine drive Mike Hughes died yesterday in an accident while trying to prove that the earth is flat.

The self-styled daredevil perished after a rocket in which he launched himself into the air crashed into the ground without its parachute.  Hughes' rocket crashed on private property near Barstow, California.  The homemade rocket appeared to rub against the launch apparatus, which caused the parachutes to be left behind at launch. View the launch below (warning-- the end of the video may be hard to watch):

 The 64-year-old was a conspiracy theorist who believed the earth was flat and hoped to launch himself into space to prove it.   His plan had been to prove the earth was flat by triggering a balloon to carry him to the Karman line (the 62-mile barrier that separates the atmosphere from space) where he could observe for himself that the earth extended in a flat line, rather than curve downward.

Waldo Stakes, a colleague who was at the rocket launch, confirmed that Hughes was killed when the rocket slammed into the ground..  “It was unsuccessful, and he passed away,” Stakes told reporters.

The crash occurred during filming for a future series on the Science Channel called “Homemade Astronauts.” Hughes’ launch was to be one of three featured on the new show, which follows three self-financed rocket-building teams.

It is widely believed that Hughes' stunt will place him among the finalists of the 2020 Darwin Awards.  Darwin Awards recognize individuals who have contributed to human evolution by removing themselves from the gene pool by eliminating themselves in an extraordinarily idiotic manner, thereby improving our species' chances of long-term survival.

This wasn't Hughes' first brush with death.  In March 2018 he faced a near-fatal catastrophe when he attempted to propel himself into the air in a rocket made using mostly spare parts.  The wanna-be engineer launched himself 1,875 feet into the sky but his descent went awry, when it began to plunge at a speed of 350 mph.  He misjudged the deployment of his parachute and crash landed in the Mojave Desert, just east of Los Angeles.

Trump Now Resorting to Giveaways to Buy Votes

Farmers are continuing to suffer at the hands of Trump's failed trade policies and shortsighted tariffs.  Trump is now so desperate to get the agriculture vote he is resorting to outright giveaways.  In an all-cap tweet, he is basically offering up socialist giveaways to farmers-- funded by the tariffs he foolishly placed on China, Mexico and Canada.  The basic problem with this scheme is that tariffs are actually paid for by consumers and go to the pockets of foreign supplier-- none of that money goes into the Treasury. 

So basically, Trump is putting the screws to farmers and consumers-- and then resorts to government welfare to buy back votes.  But this isn't the first time that Trump is resorting to outright cash giveaways to buy voters.

Allies of Donald Trump have begun holding events in black communities where organizers lavish praise on the president as they hand out tens of thousands of dollars to lucky attendees.

The first giveaway took place in Cleveland, where recipients whose winning tickets were drawn from a bin landed cash gifts in increments of several hundred dollars, stuffed into envelopes. A second giveaway scheduled for January in Virginia was postponed after media reports began surfacing-- but more are said to be in the works, regardless.

The cash giveaways are organized under the auspices of an outside charity, the Urban Revitalization Coalition, permitting donors to remain anonymous and make tax-deductible contributions.  The organizers say the events are run by the book and intended to promote economic development in inner cities. But the group behind the cash giveaways is registered as a 501(c)3 charitable organization.  One leading legal expert on nonprofit law said the arrangement raises questions about the group’s tax-exempt status, because it does not appear to be vetting the recipients of its money for legitimate charitable need.

"Charities are required to spend their money on charitable and educational activities,” said Marcus Owens, a former director of the Exempt Organizations Division at the Internal Revenue Service who is now in private practice at the law firm Loeb & Loeb. “It's not immediately clear to me how simply giving money away to people at an event is a charitable act.”

Asked about the legality of the giveaways in a phone interview with Politico, the Urban Revitalization Coalition’s CEO, Darrell Scott, admitted that most gifts were limited to between $300 and $500, in order to get around federal law requiring fax forms for payments over $600.  He did not respond to follow-up questions about how the giveaways were structured and whether they met the legal standard for a charitable act.  Scott also declined to name the donors funding the effort.

China Showing a Thin Skin Over Its Botched Response to the Coronavirus

China has ordered three foreign journalists of the Wall Street Journal to leave the country over an opinion piece it said was "racist".

The editorial published earlier this month  criticized the country's response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak.  The Chinese foreign ministry said it had asked the newspaper to apologize several times but it had declined.  The newspaper said the journalists (who had not written the opinion piece) were given five days to leave China.

The WSJ article called the authorities' initial response "secretive and self-serving" and said global confidence in China had been "shaken".  China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the article was "racist" and "denigrated" China's efforts to combat the outbreak that has killed more than 2,000 people in the country.  "The Chinese people do not welcome media that publish racist statements and maliciously attacks China," Geng said, without naming the journalists being expelled.

The newspaper's publisher, William Lewis, said in a statement that he was "deeply disappointed" with the decision and emphasised the "complete separation" between the outlet's opinion and news departments.

"Our opinion pages regularly publish articles with opinions that people disagree - or agree with - and it was not our intention to cause offense with the headline on the piece," Mr Lewis said. "However, this has clearly caused upset and concern amongst the Chinese people, which we regret."

It is the first time in more than two decades that journalists holding valid credentials have been ordered to leave China,  The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China called the decision "an extreme and obvious attempt by the Chinese authorities to intimidate foreign news organizations".

Last year, the government declined to renew the credentials - necessary for the work of foreign journalists in the country - of another Wall Street Journal reporter.  The journalist, a Singaporean national, had co-written a story that authorities in Australia were looking into activities of one of China's President Xi Jinping's cousins suspected of involvement in organised crime and money laundering.

And in 2018, the Beijing bureau chief for BuzzFeed News Megha Rajagopalan was unable to renew her visa after reporting on the detention of Muslim minority Uighurs and others in China's Xinjiang region.

Meanwhile, two Chinese citizen journalists who disappeared last week after covering the coronavirus in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak in Hubei province, remain missing.  Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi had been sharing videos and pictures online from inside the quarantined city.

Saweetie & Galxara - Sway With Me

HR Meeting of the Future

New Details on Trump's Ties to Russian Money Laundering Revealed

"Dark Towers", a book by David Enrich (finance editor of the New York Times), was released yesteday-- and it exposes a great deal of the underbelly of Donald Trump's criminal enterprise.  It has long been an open secret that after years and years of defaulting on loans and bankrupting real estate ventures, virtually no bank was willing to do business with Donald Trump.  By the late 1990s however, German-based Deutsche Bank was trying to make a name for itself on Wall Street.  Its investment-banking division went on a hiring binge, looking to shore up profits by getting a foothold in the New York real estate market.  After Deutsche approved an initial $125 million loan to pay for gut renovations of 40 Wall Street, Trump's Art Deco tower in Lower Manhattan, Trump came around again looking for a $300 million loan to refinance the Trump Marina, a struggling Atlantic City casino.

Not long afterward, Edson Mitchell, a top bank executive, discovered that the signature of the loan official who had approved the Trump Marina deal had been forged-- the credit officer whose signature was on the paperwork said that he'd never approved the loan commitment, much less signed it.  Bank officials had extensive internal discussions about the potential pitfalls of the bank's Trump relationship, and they were worried.  They talked about Trump's well-documented ties to the organized crime world.  Eventually, Deutsche began steering very rich Russians into the Trump ventures, according to people who were involved in the deals. 

When Trump partnered in 2006 with a Los Angeles developer to build a Trump-branded resort in Hawaii, Deutsche organized get-togethers in London and elsewhere to connect Trump and his partners with wealthy clients who used anonymous shell companies to buy blocks of units in the sprawling Waikiki hotel complex.   The bank played the same behind-the-scenes matchmaking role when Trump sought to drum up interest in a planned resort in Baja, Mexico.  In both cases, Deutsche steered very rich Russians into the Trump ventures, according to people who were involved in the deals-- just a couple of years after American regulators had punished the bank for whisking Russian money into the U.S. financial system via Latvia.

Senior executives at Deutsche Bank had long discussed the potential pitfalls of the Trump relationship, and they were worried.  It wasn't only the not-insignificant risk that Trump would default on loans.  The bankers also knew how filthy the New York real estate industry could be.  They talked about Trump's well-documented ties to the organized crime world, and the possibility that Trump's real estate projects were laundromats for illicit funds from countries like Russia.

And then along came Tammy McFadden.  Ms. McFadden had worked in Deutsche's Jacksonville offices for eight years when, in the summer of 2016, some suspicious Jared Kushner transactions landed in her inspection queue.  Deutsche's computer systems automatically scanned thousands of transactions every day, looking for any hints of impropriety, and then sent those flagged transactions to experts for review.  McFadden, a veteran anti-money laundering compliance officer attached to Deutsche's private banking division, was one of those experts.

Earlier that year (2016) McFadden had noticed that many customers of the bank (including a few super-rich clients of Rosemary Vrablic, a New York private banker hired by Deutsche ten years earlier)  didn't have the proper documentation attached to their accounts.  This was especially problematic for customers who were classified as "politically exposed persons"-- a designation that is supposed to subject them to extra vetting because of the heightened risk that they could be involved in bribery or other public corruption.

McFadden did a broader review and found more than a hundred politically exposed clients who didn't have the requisite documentation showing things like where their money came from.  Among those customers, she realized, were Donald Trump and his family members.  When McFadden altered her superiors, they told her not to worry about it.   Now, in the summer of 2016, with Trump having clinched the Republican nomination and Kushner serving as his advisor, McFadden was assigned the task of reviewing a number of transactions in the Kushner companies' accounts that had triggered alerts in Deutsche's computer system.  Right off the bat, she could see why the transactions tripped up the software:  Kushner's real estate company was moving money to a number of Russian individuals.

McFadden did some research, looked into the recipients of the money and into the Kushner Companies' history of moving funds overseas and concluded that the appropriate response was for Deutsche to file a "suspicious activity report" with FinCEN, the arm of the Treasury Department responsible for policing financial crimes.  This didn't strike McFadden as an especially close call-- she typed up the report and sent it to her superiors.  Word traveled back to McFadden that her report was being killed-- by managers in the bank.  McFadden was pretty sure this was an example of the bank trying to preserve its lucrative relationship with the Kushners (and therefore the Trumps), at the cost of not adhering to anti-money laundering laws.  Soon, she was transferred to another division and then, in April 2018, fired.

McFadden had found something important.  The Kushners-- with their long-standing ties to Deutsche-- were moving money to Russians at the same time that Russia was interfering in the American presidential election, trying to tilt it in favor of Jared Kushner's father-in-law.  It was hard not to be a little suspicious.  What exactly were the purposes of the transactions that McFadden had spotted?  What did they show about the interests of Kushner, Trump, or his presidential campaign in Russia?  With McFadden gone and her suspicious activity report deleted, the answers to those questions vanished inside Deutsche's computer systems.

There was no doubt that Deutsche Bank had extensive dealings with Russia, and those dealings included acting as a conduit for dirty money to get out of Russia and into the Western financial system.  Perhaps this was more than a coincidence.  Maybe Deutsche was what connected Trump to Russia.  The rumor that had been ricocheting around Washington, New York and London was that VTB (one of leading global banks in Russia) had in the recent past funneled dirty Russian money to Trump via Deutsche.  VTB certainly seemed connected to Trump.  Russian-American mobster Felix Slater had already claimed that VTB was facilitating travel and other arrangements for Trump's team in 2016 as they discussed a possible Trump Tower project in Moscow.  And there was no doubt that VTB had deep, long-standing ties to Deutsche. 

Now the theory was that one of the reasons Deutsche had been willing to take such risks on loans to Trump was that it wasn't actually taking the risks at all:  VTB  had agreed to secure the loans-- and if Trump defaulted, Deutsche could collects whatever it was owed from the Russian bank.  In effect, that meant that VTB was the one lending to Trump-- a direct financial connection between the Russian government and the American president.  Deutsche executives insisted this was false. 

Nevertheless, David Enrich's book lays out a plethora of storylines and tantalizing clues as to just how deeply entangled Deutsche was with Russian and-- despite everything that is already public (thanks to Deutsche's repeated scrapes with Western law enforcement and regulatory agencies)-- just how little was really known about what the bank was up to.  Those answers lay hidden deep inside Deutsche.  Short of theft or a very lucky break with a disgruntled employee, the only way to crowbar open those electronic vaults is for a government body to issue a subpoena.    Such a subpoena will be argued in the Supreme Court on March 31-- stay tuned.

French Racists Taunt Player During Soccer Match

The striker for Portugal’s Porto soccer team walked off the field Sunday after being subjected to racist taunts by fans.  Agence France Presse reported that spectators made monkey chants after Marega scored the winning goal over Vitória Guimarães.

The Guardian reports that Moussa Marega, who was born in France to Malian parents, gave the crowd the middle finger as he left and later posted on Twitter: “I would just like to tell these idiots who come to the stadium to make racist chants, go fuck yourself. I hope I never see you on a football field again. You are a disgrace!  And I also thank the referees for not defending me and for giving me a yellow card because I defend my skin colour.”

Head coach Conceição said: “We are a family regardless of nationality, skin color, hair color. We are human, we deserve respect. What happened here is unfortunate,. We are completely indignant with what happened. I know the passion that exists for Vitoria and I think that most of the fans do not see themselves (as having the same) attitude of some people who insulted Moussa since the warm-up.”

Sick of Having a Misogynist in the White House? Vote for Another One!

Newly unearthed lawsuits against Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg that have either been settled or dismissed paint a disturbing picture of misogynistic behavior. The never-before-seen legal briefs were provided to the Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act and include complaints by a number of women that were followed up by attempts to keep them quiet.

In one high-profile complaint, saleswoman Sekiko Sakai Garrison alleges that, when told of a male colleague’s impending marriage, Bloomberg suggested to female salespeople, “All of you girls line up to give him blow jobs as a wedding present.” That suit also alleges that, on a number of occasions, Bloomberg said, “I’d fuck that in a second” when he saw certain women.

In another incident, Garrison said Bloomberg “was unhappy with the outcome of a business meeting. He said to a newly-hired female Company sales person, ‘If [clients] told you to lay down and strip naked so they could fuck you, would you do that too?’” Garrison said Bloomberg made similar remarks for all six years of her employment.

 Bloomberg also allegedly said about Garrison that he would have sex with her “in a minute,” but he regretted that she didn’t have “legs and an a-- ” like a certain actress.

Garrison alleged that Bloomberg berated female employees who got pregnant. “What the hell did you do a thing like that for?” Bloomberg allegedly told one pregnant employee. On another occasion, the lawsuit said, Bloomberg berated a female employee who had trouble finding a nanny. “It’s a f------ baby! . . . All you need is some black who doesn’t have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building.”

When Bloomberg learned on April 11, 1995, that Garrison was pregnant, he allegedly said to her, “Kill it!” Garrison asked Bloomberg to repeat what he said, and she said he responded, “Kill it! Great! Number 16!,” which she took as a reference to the number of pregnant women and new mothers at the company.   Bloomberg has denied her allegation under oath, and he reached a confidential settlement with the saleswoman.

Shortly after Garrison left the company, an employee named Mary Ann Olszewski sued Bloomberg LP in 1996, alleging that she was drugged and raped by her supervisor. She said that employees from Bloomberg on down engaged in a pattern and practice of “sexual degradation of women” and that Bloomberg made comments about employees such as, “I’d like to do that piece of meat.”

A number of the cases have either been settled, dismissed in Bloomberg’s favor or closed because of a failure of the plaintiff to meet filing deadlines. The cases do not involve accusations of inappropriate sexual conduct; the allegations have centered around what Bloomberg has said and about the workplace culture he fostered.

The lawsuits, which were filed long before the era of #MeToo, work to undercut Bloomberg’s criticisms of President Trump’s often vulgar behavior towards women. They also call into question his methods in attempting to keep the allegations quiet. A spokesman told the Post that Bloomberg would not release anyone from a confidentiality agreement, and that he did not intend to release his depositions in any of the newly revealed cases.   Sen. Elizabeth Warren has said that nondisclosure agreements are “a way for people to hide bad things they’ve done.” She called on Bloomberg to release women from such agreements.

The Washington Post has also published a book of Bloomberg's most infamous quotes, which was first put together in 1990 as a gag gift.  The most notable are as follows:

“If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s”

Characterizing a competitor in New York’s financial industry:  “Cokehead, womanizing, fag.”

“What do I want? I want an exclusive, 10-year contract, an automatic extension, and I want you to pay me. And I want a blow job from Jane Fonda. Have you seen Jane Fonda lately? Not bad for fifty.”

On salesmanship: “Make the customer think he’s getting laid when he’s getting fucked.”

On computers: “You know why computers will never take the place of people? Because a computer would say that the sex of the person giving you a blow job doesn’t matter.”

"The Royal family-- what a bunch of misfits-- a gay, an architect, that horsey faced lesbian, and a kid who gave up Koo Stark for some fat broad."

On his company’s financial information computers “[They] will do everything, including give you a blow job. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.”

William Barr's Interview Does Little to Stifle Calls for His Resignation

In ABC's much publicized interview with William Barr this week, the Attorney General said that Trump’s tweeting was making it “impossible “ to do his job.  Suddenly, Barr was reported in some media as having recovered some of his reputation-- but is that really true?  Hardly.  Ari Melber, chief legal correspondent at MSNBC, offered up a more accurate rewording of what Barr actually meant: “I stand by intervening to help a convicted Trump adviser, but I wish Trump did not admit what we are doing on Twitter.”

What is not being reported on by the media is the ongoing subservience of the Justice Department to the will and power of the president-- that is what Barr is working to implement. Barr believes in the centralization of presidential power—just to the point, critics say, where the president is effectively above the law.   A year ago, when the Senate voted to confirm Barr, his views were hardly a secret; we just chose not to emphasize them. Since then, a succession of magazine articles—in the New Yorker, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere—have elucidated his troubling judicial philosophy.

But day-to-day reporting still tends to overlook it, or to mention it only in passing. That’s regrettable, since Barr’s conception of the presidency will likely have consequences that outlast Trump. “If those views take hold, we will have lost what was won in the Revolution—we will have a chief executive who is more powerful than the king,” Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, told the New Yorker. “That will be a disaster for the survival of the Republic.”

Barr's efforts to weaken the independence of DOJ and the rule of law in favor of the President has now prompted action by over 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials.   In an open letter, the former officials say Barr broke Justice Department rules when he overruled federal prosecutors in Stone’s criminal case, seeking a far more lenient sentence than the potential nine years prosecutors originally recommended. 

“It is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President,” they said.  In their call for Barr’s resignation, the former Justice Department officials suggested his behavior is a threat to democracy.  “Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies,” they wrote.  The letter went on to say, "an independent, nonpolitical Justice Department is vital to the “Department’s sacred obligation to ensure equal justice under the law.”

“Mr. Barr’s actions in doing the President’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words. Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.” 
 

Protests in Mexico City Over Murders of Womena and Sensationalism in the Press

Large crowds of people gathered in Mexico City yesterday to protest against the murder of a young woman.  25-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was stabbed to death by a man she lived with, who then mutilated her body in an attempt to hide the evidence.

Forensic workers leaked grisly images of her corpse to the city's largest daily newspaper, La Prensa.  The editors of the paper have been criticized harshly for publishing one of the pictures of the skinned and dismembered corpse on its front page, with the headline 'It was cupid's fault". The cover sparked anger not only at the gory display, but also the jocular tone over a crime for which Escamilla's domestic partner has been arrested.

Femicide, the gender-based killing of women, is on the rise in Mexico.  More than 700 cases are currently being investigated, but activists say the number of women killed because of their gender is much higher.

The protesters, most of them women, moved through the Mexican capital holding placards calling for "responsible journalism," and chanting slogans like "not one more murder".   The group gathered outside of the city's National Palace, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador lives with his family.  "It seems to me the president has evaded the issue constantly," one protester, Alejandro Castillo, said.  "It is not a personal issue against him.  We believe he has the possibility of raising several things on the agenda and has not done so."  Protesters spray-painted slogans such as 'femicide state' and 'We won't be silenced' on the doorway of the National Palace as President Obrador was holding his daily news conference inside.  The protesters released a statement which said, "it enrages us how Ingrid was killed, and how the media put her body on display."

Earlier this month, many Mexicans flooded social media with photos of wildlife and natural landscapes, using the hashtag #IngridEscamilla to drown out the photos of her body circulating online.  Her murder has shocked the country, but is only the latest in a string of slayings that have brought the issue of femicide into public debate.  Last year a record high of 3,825 women were killed in Mexico, according to official figures - up 7% from 2018.  Activists are critical of the fact that the vast majority of cases are never solved and only a tiny percentage of perpetrators are brought to justice.

Billie Eilish - No Time to Die

U.N. Publishes List of Companies Facilitating Illegal West Bank Settlements

The UN human rights office has issued a long-awaited report on companies linked to Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The report names 112 business entities that have been determined to be facilitating the ongoing existence of illegal settlements, or facilitating the expansion of illegal settlements.  Among those entities are the following companies:

• Airbnb
• Expedia
• General Mills
• Motorola
• Tripadvisor

The Palestinians said the report was a "victory for international law."

About 600,000 Jews live in about 140 settlements built since Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. The settlements are considered illegal under international law.

Many have long called for the removal of the settlements, arguing that their presence on land Palestinians claim for a future independent Palestinian state makes peace in the region a near impossibility.

Human Rights Watch said the list "should put all companies on notice: to do business with illegal settlements is to aid in the commission of war crimes."

DOJ's Attorney General is Obviously Running Political Interference for Trump

Attorney General Barr is abandoning any pretense of being an independent law enforcement official and making it evident that he is acting at the personal behest of Donald Trump.

Trump started off the day by tweeting this about Roger Stone, "This is a horrible and very unfair situation. The real crimes were on the other side, as nothing happens to them. Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!"

And mere hours later, DOJ announced that it would be submitting a second sentencing memo in the Roger STone case, displacing the first.  The U.Sl Attorney originally had recommended a sentence of 7-9 years in prison.  The second memo said that a sentence "far less" than seven to nine years in prison "would be reasonable under the circumstances." It did not make a specific recommendation.

Barr's  political interference in the case was made obvious when the four federal prosecutors then unexpectedly withdrew from the case.  The top Stone prosecutor, Aaron Zelinsky, reportedly resigned from DOJ “effective immediately.”   Former Justice Department officials and others characterized the department’s abrupt shift on the Stone case as an egregious example of the president and his attorney general manipulating federal law enforcement to serve their political interests.

Trump told reporters that he hadn't asked the Justice Department for a reduced sentence for Stone-- but his tweet and the timing of DOJ's actions show that to be a lie. Trump's critics blasted what they called the president's attempt to influence what are supposed to be the independent workings of the Justice Department.  House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., vowed in his own Twitter post that the panel would investigate.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called on the Justice Department's inspector general to investigate the events leading up to the submission of the second sentencing memo.

President Pimp Daddy Gonna Approve All Federal Architecture

You might've missed this during all the other crap this week, but Donald Trump is now dabbling in architecture.  He needs a hobby to help him wind down after a stressful day of treason.  The president is preparing an executive order that would mandate a "classical style" for federal buildings in Washington DC and other parts of the country.  This would discourage boring, elitist "modern" design, or boring, elitist "Art Deco," like the Bonwit Teller building whose friezes Trump famously (and some say, illegally) demolished.  The group that actively appealed to Trump's cultural resentment is the National Civic Art Society.  The non-profit believes contemporary architecture has fostered an environment that's "degraded and dehumanizing."  If all this doesn't sound familiar, it should.  Trump's prolonged presence in DC is the problem-- but let's blame the buildings.

In a statement, the society's chair, Marion Smith said, "For too long architectural elites and bureaucrats have derided the idea of beauty, blatantly ignored public opinions on style, and have quietly spent taxpayer money constructing ugly, expensive, and inefficient buildings.  This executive order gives voice to the 99 percent — the ordinary American people who do not like what our government has been building."

The executive order would discourage modern forms of architecture--  like the Brutalist FBI building, which Trump hates -- and promote classical design.  If actual, professional architects want to design a building in a style other than classic, they'd have to first receive approval from a presidential "re-beautification" committee.  God help us if Ivanka Trump is on this committee.  Not surprisingly, Architects roundly hate this idea, especially because the order would override the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which were developed in the 1960's.  These principles discouraged an "official style" for federal buildings, and provided that federal design must flow from the architectural profession to the federal government.  The Trump order, however, would dictate style to the architectural profession.  You can imagine this  "re-beautification" committee rejecting proposals because they don't incorporate enough Melanias on pianos.

Even if we replace Trump with a president who isn't a crass, vulgar blight on the nation, the executive order could force architects to consider short-term political whims over long-term artistic goals. Thom Mayne, a California architect and Pritzker Prize winner, expressed his concerns with a poetic eloquence that would make Trump's ears bleed, saying: "We are a society that is linked to openness of thought, to looking forward with optimism and confidence at a world that is always in the process of becoming. Architecture's obligation is to maintain this forward thinking stance."

Em-Peached?