29 October 20
An All-Out Effort to Finish this Fundraiser
We cannot let this fundraiser drag on any longer. We must pull out all the stops to - end this now. The vast majority of you have not donated. If you are going to stay, chip-in.
Very important now.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
28 October 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Jesse Jackson | Black Americans Won't Fall for Trump's Big Con
Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun-Times
Jackson writes: "Comparing Trump to presidents who actually made things better is to fall into his trap. Trump hasn't done things for African Americans, he has done things to them."
Proud Boys and other rightwing demonstrators rally in Portland, Oregon, in August last year. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
Andrea Mazzarino | How the War Came Home: Big Time, Perspectives From a Military Spouse
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Mazzarino writes: "To anyone who is listening in elected office anywhere in America: I hope you have a plan for a peaceful transition of power, since the 'law-and-order' president is, of course, anything but that when it comes to sustaining our democracy, rather than his presidency."
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US and Japanese journalists walk across the grounds of Mar-a-Lago during Abe's April 2018 visit. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Ballrooms, Candles and Luxury Cottages: During Trump's Term, Millions of Government and GOP Dollars Have Flowed to His Properties
David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey, Jonathan O'Connell and Anu Narayanswamy, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "President Trump welcomed the Japanese prime minister at Mar-a-Lago, in front of a towering arrangement of roses. The two could have met in Washington, but Trump said his private club was a more comfortable alternative."
EXCERPT:
‘The 45th President’: One in a series looking back at the Trump presidency
“It is, indeed, the Southern White House,” Trump said, greeting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in front of the press in April 2018.
For Trump, there was another, hidden benefit. Money.
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s company would get paid to host his summit.
In the next two days, as Trump and Abe talked about trade and North Korea, Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., club billed the U.S. government $13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements.
Trump’s club even charged for the smallest of services. When Trump and Abe met alone, with no food served, the government still got a bill for what they drank.
“Bilateral meeting,” the bill said. “Water.” $3 each.
Those 2018 payments, revealed here for the first time, are part of a long-running pattern whose scope has become clear only in recent months.
Since his first month in office, Trump has used his power to direct millions from U.S. taxpayers — and from his political supporters — into his own businesses. The Washington Post has sought to compile examples of this spending through open records requests and a lawsuit.
In all, he has received at least $8.1 million from these two sources since he took office, those documents and publicly available records show.
The president brought taxpayer money to his businesses simply by bringing himself. He’s visited his hotels and clubs more than 280 times now, making them a familiar backdrop for his presidency. And in doing so, he has turned those properties into magnets for GOP events, including glitzy fundraisers for his own reelection campaign, where big donors go to see and be seen.
Trump says the reason is comfort. “People like my product, what can I tell you, can’t help it,” he told reporters last year.
But documents show that visits by Trump, his family and his supporters have turned the government and the Republican Party into regular customers for the family business.
In the case of the government, Trump’s visits turned it into a captive customer, newly revealed documents show. What the government needed from Trump’s properties, it had to buy from Trump’s company.
So the more he went, the more he got. Since 2017, Trump’s company has charged taxpayers for hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides. And water.
Since Trump took office, his company has been paid at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government, according to documents obtained by The Post.
In addition, Trump’s campaign and fundraising committee paid $5.6 million to his companies since his inauguration in January 2017. Those payments — turning campaign donations into private revenue — continued even this year, as Trump fell behind in polls and his campaign ran short of money.
The combined total of these payments was more than Trump’s hotels in Vancouver and Hawaii brought him during the same period, according to financial disclosures.
The Trump Organization is not prohibited from accepting the payments. But the payments did break a key promise from 2016: Trump’s pledge that he would “completely isolate” himself from his business once in office, and put his voters’ interests above his own.
“If I win, I may never see my property — I may never see these places again,” Trump said on the campaign trail then. “Because I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me.”
Trump still owns his businesses, but says he’s given day-to-day control to his eldest sons. There is no official total of what Trump’s company has been paid by the government and Trump’s campaign since he took office. The company and the campaign have both declined to say and did not respond to questions for this story.
White House spokesman Judd Deere also declined to give a total.
“Any suggestion that the President has used his own official travel or the federal government as a way to profit off of taxpayers is an absolute disgrace and lie,” Deere said in a statement.
Without an official accounting of these payments, The Post has sought to compile its own.
It relied on public databases of campaign spending, and hundreds of pages of federal spending records — obtained via public-records requests, public-records lawsuits and other means.
The result is a never-before-seen portrait of the presidency as a revenue stream.
While Trump was publicly donating his $400,000 annual presidential salary, he was privately using his power to bring his businesses far more than that.
“Americans elect a president to serve the people, not profit off them. Yet President Trump exploits his office to line his pockets with taxpayer dollars,” said Ryan Shapiro of the group Property of the People, whose lawsuits and public-records requests helped bring to light some of the earliest details of this spending.
Much spending remains hidden, because some federal agencies — including the State Department, and the White House itself — have declined to release records. “The amounts we’re seeing are just the tip of the iceberg,” Shapiro said.
Taxpayer payments
The payments from taxpayers to Mar-a-Lago started in Trump’s first full month on the job, February 2017.
He was meeting Abe at the club. His aides would need rooms. According to federal policy, the most they could pay was $182.
But Mar-a-Lago was not charging $182.
“[There’s] a five bedroom house that three of the senior staff are staying in at $2,600 per night,” State Department employee Michael Dobbs wrote his colleagues, in an email later released to the public. “The two other Senior staffers (Bannon and Walsh) are expected to be charged $546 for their rooms.”
Within the State Department, emails show, officials did not seem inclined to fight. Federal rules allowed them to pay up to three times the normal limit — $546, in this case — with authorization. And the White House had authorized it. (Months later, Mar-a-Lago lowered the rate it charged the State Department to $396.15 per night, and provided partial refunds for some of the earlier charges above that.)
Within the White House, one former official said, some officials grumbled about holding the events at Mar-a-Lago. The events required dozens of staffers and enormous logistics, which had to be shoehorned into a private club on a narrow island full of other, nosy, paying guests. And there were some ethics concerns about the president repeatedly visiting his own properties.
“It’s a hell of a lot easier to do it at the White House, which is set up for it,” the former official said, speaking — like others — on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s a pain in the [posterior] having those guys down there for the staff.”
Foreign leaders also sought the prestige of visiting the president at his vacation home because they believed it showed a close bond with the United States, two former officials said.
Trump returned, two months later, with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“He was truly of the opinion that his property was better than anyone else’s property. And he wanted you to know it,” the former official said.
And Mar-a-Lago’s bills only got bigger that time, according to State Department records newly obtained by The Post. Now, there were florist bills: When Trump visited with Xi Jinping of China in April 2017, the club had started charging for flowers, and $50 per palm for decorative palm trees.
That same weekend, a group of White House staffers gathered in a Mar-a-Lago bar adorned with a large portrait of Trump wearing tennis whites. They kicked out the bartender “so they could speak confidentially,” according to an email Mar-a-Lago’s catering director sent to the State Department later.
The group then helped themselves to the contents of the bar: 26 servings of Patron and Don Julio tequila, 22 Chopin vodkas, and 6 glasses of Woodford Reserve bourbon, documents show.
The bill to the government: $1,005.60, including service charge. The State Department refused to pay, emails show. But ProPublica — which first revealed this bill — reported that the White House eventually did. (The White House has not responded to questions asking how much it has paid Trump’s clubs out of its own budget).
But the most expensive — and most famous — event of the weekend was the formal dinner for 30, where Trump informed Xi about U.S. missile strikes against Syria during dessert. “The most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen,” Trump later said in an interview with Fox Business Network.
Taxpayers likely paid for that: Mar-a-Lago charged $7,700 for that dinner, a charge that appears to have covered Trump’s food, as well.
Trump returned to the club a year later for another summit with Abe. The mood that time was more tense, with North Korean missile threats looming over the two leaders.
In preparation, Mar-a-Lago bought $6,000 worth of floral arrangements.
The list of preparations filled a full page: There were three kinds of candles (votive, floating, candelabra), centerpieces, vases — and a floral plan for even the smallest of meetings. Even “National Security Council pre-briefs” got their own centerpieces, the bill showed.
Taxpayers were billed for all of it, records show.
Mar-a-Lago’s florist, Julie Miner, declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, defended Trump, saying “the President has hosted near 100 head of state/government visits since 2017” and only a fraction were at his own properties.
But, last year, Trump sought to award his own company a much bigger event: the massive Group of Seven summit, which Trump gave to his Doral golf club in Miami. That event would have brought hundreds of foreign and U.S. officials to that property. Trump reversed the decision days later, retreating under public pressure — and resistance from his own aides.
His visits brought another customer: The Secret Service.
Breonna Taylor's family and the lawyer Ben Crump, right, said the charges a Kentucky grand jury agreed upon in the police killing of Ms. Taylor were not enough. (photo: Change W. Lee/The New York Times)
Breonna Taylor Grand Jurors Say Police Actions Were "Criminal"; Never Given Chance to Indict Cops
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Two members of a Kentucky grand jury convened after the Louisville police killing of Breonna Taylor have spoken on camera for the first time, calling the actions of the Louisville officers responsible for Taylor's death 'criminal' and saying the state's Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron never gave them the option to consider murder or manslaughter charges against the police officers involved."
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The Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga., on Sept. 24, 2020. (photo: Aileen Perilla/The New York Times)
Number Alleging ICE Doctor Misconduct Nearly Triples
John Washington and José Olivares, The Intercept
Excerpt: "At least 17 women treated by a doctor alleged to have performed unnecessary or overly aggressive gynecological procedures without proper informed consent remain in detention at Irwin County Detention Center."
EXCERPTS:
In the Senate briefing, the doctors and former detainees outlined a pattern of gynecological operations conducted by Dr. Mahendra Amin, the doctor at the center of the allegations, and the “uniform absence of truly informed consent,” according to materials submitted on Capitol Hill by the coalition of attorneys, advocates, and women recently detained in Irwin. After allegations of the medical abuses came to light in September, following the whistleblower complaint first reported by The Intercept, ICE said it stopped referring patients to Amin.
The materials submitted to Congress were compiled by on-the ground organizations; attorneys, including Owings; and advocates, led by the South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, Project South, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, Georgia Detention Watch, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative.
Overall, the attorneys counted 57 confirmed patients of Amin, 17 of whom remain at Irwin as of October 25. (The Intercept was able to speak with attorneys who represented at least 52 of those women.) None of them have received any follow-up gynecological care since ICE stopped sending patients to Amin five weeks ago.
Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó adjusts his mask while giving a speech at the Venezuelan Medical Federation on September 10, 2020 in Caracas, Venezuela.(photo: Carolina Cabral/Getty)
US Sanctions on Venezuela Are Deadly - and Facing Mass Resistance
Steve Ellner, Jacobin
Excerpt: "For years, right-wingers have sought to destabilize Venezuela, and even proclaimed their own rival 'president,' Juan Guaidó. But average Venezuelans understand that US sanctions hurt them - and should be resisted."
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Stockton Street in the Chinatown district of San Francisco on Sept. 9, 2020, a time when air quality was affected by wind and wildfires. (photo: David Paul Morris/Getty)
New Study Points to Invisible Killer of Infants
Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR
s wildfires raged up and down the Pacific Coast last month, families across California and Oregon lived in – and breathed in — smoky, toxic air for weeks. Many days, the region's air quality ranked among the worst in the world.
Officials warned residents that the air pollution could exacerbate many health issues, such cardiovascular disease, asthma and other respiratory diseases. And it could increase the risk catching COVID-19.
But what about the youngest members of society? How does air pollution affect pregnant women and their newborn babies?
Now an international team of researchers have a better understanding of that answer. Air pollution, both inside and outside the home, contributed to the deaths of about 500,000 newborns in 2019, the team reports in the State of Global Air 2020.
"The number is just staggering," says epidemiologist Rakesh Ghosh at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study. Each year about 2.42 million infants die within the first 27 days of life. The new study suggests air pollutions contribute to about 20% of those deaths
Most of these deaths occurred in poor countries, with nearly half in sub-Saharan Africa. And about two-thirds of the deaths were associated with air pollution inside of people's homes, when they burn coal and wood to cook or stay warm. But pediatrician Susan Niermeyer says the air pollution problem is, by no means, exclusive to low-income regions or where people cook with hard fuels.
"I think you can easily dismiss this finding as something that only happens to people who live far away in thatched roof houses and not to us," says Niermeyer, a professor at the University of Colorado Medicine. "But air pollution effects our babies, as well."
For example, families who live right near a highway can be exposed to large amounts of fine particulates, called PM 2.5, and carbon monoxide, Niermeyer says. And several studies have clearly linked air pollution exposure around airports to an increased risk of premature birth here in the U.S.
Fine particulates, or PM 2.5, are especially dangerous forms of pollution because the particles are small enough to reach deep into a person's lungs and even absorb into the bloodstream, as well.
Once inside the bloodstream of a pregnant woman, PM 2.5 pollutants may behave like tobacco smoke. They can trigger inflammation in the blood, which, in turn, can decrease the transfer of oxygen and nutrients across the placenta, Niermeyer says. "This inflammation can impact growth of the fetus. And if it's significant enough, inflammation can trigger preterm labor."
In the new research, Rakesh Ghosh and colleagues analyzed data from more than 20 studies, which linked exposure to PM 2.5 during pregnancy to an increase risk of giving birth prematurely or to a low-weight baby (that is, a baby weighing less than 5.5 pounds). Both conditions reduce a child's chance of surviving the first month of life.
For each 10 unit increase in PM 2.5 over the course of pregnancy, a woman's risk of giving birth to a low-weight baby increases by about 6%, Ghosh and his team report in the journal The Lancet.
"This risk might appear small," Ghosh says, "but when you multiply that 6% by the enormous amount of exposure that moms have in some countries, their risk multiples by orders of magnitude."
The findings raise awareness about an invisible killer of newborns, says epidemiologist Xueying Zhang at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
"Doctors will never say person died of air pollution," Zhang says. "They will say the cause of death is cancer, a stroke or respiratory disease. But air pollution is an important cause of cancer, strokes and respiratory syndromes."
And with this new report, policy makers and health officials can see that air pollution is also an important cause of premature and low-weight births. "Once people see how much air pollution threatens babies, they are more likely to look for ways to protect them."
And a first step could be as simple as teaching families that cooking over coal fires could be as harmful as tobacco smoke. Then, says Zhang, perhaps they will be more likely to switch to cleaner fuels or better ventilate their homes.
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