Music: Gabin ft. Zee Gachette — ‘Slow Dancing Dans La Maison’
A Trump empire built on inside connections and $885 million in tax breaks
The New York Times reports: The way Donald J. Trump tells it, his first solo project as a real estate developer, the conversion of a faded railroad hotel on 42nd Street into the sleek, 30-story Grand Hyatt, was a triumph from the very beginning.
The hotel, Mr. Trump bragged in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best seller, “was a hit from the first day. Gross operating profits now exceed $30 million a year.”
But that book, and numerous interviews over the years, make little mention of a crucial factor in getting the hotel built: an extraordinary 40-year tax break that has cost New York City $360 million to date in forgiven, or uncollected, taxes, with four years still to run, on a property that cost only $120 million to build in 1980.
The project set the pattern for Mr. Trump’s New York career: He used his father’s, and, later, his own, extensive political connections, and relied on a huge amount of assistance from the government and taxpayers in the form of tax breaks, grants and incentives to benefit the 15 buildings at the core of his Manhattan real estate empire.
Since then, Mr. Trump has reaped at least $885 million in tax breaks, grants and other subsidies for luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings in New York, according to city tax, housing and finance records. The subsidies helped him lower his own costs and sell apartments at higher prices because of their reduced taxes. [Continue reading…]
Hate crimes against American Muslims most since post-9/11 era
The New York Times reports: Hate crimes against American Muslims have soared to their highest levels since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to data compiled by researchers, an increase apparently fueled by terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad and by divisive language on the campaign trail.
The trend has alarmed hate crime scholars and law-enforcement officials, who have documented hundreds of attacks — including arsons at mosques, assaults, shootings and threats of violence — since the beginning of 2015.
While the most current hate crime statistics from the F.B.I. are not expected until November, new data from researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent over the course of 2015. Attacks on those perceived as Arab rose even more sharply.
Police and news media reports in recent months have indicated a continued flow of attacks, often against victims wearing traditional Muslim garb or seen as Middle Eastern.
Some scholars believe that the violent backlash against American Muslims is driven not only by the string of terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States that began early last year, but also by the political vitriol from candidates like Donald J. Trump, who has called for a ban on immigration by Muslims and a national registry of Muslims in the United States. [Continue reading…]
The hardening of Hillary
Todd S Purdum writes: Slowly, inexorably over the years, she has grown a harder and harder shell until, like Marley’s ghost, she now wears the chain she’s forged in life, link by link and yard by yard. The effects of that armor plating are obvious. A desire for privacy has congealed into a demand for secrecy. Candor is dangerous; artifice is safe. Full disclosure is for suckers; hunkering down is the only way to win. Above all, too much honesty about yourself brings you only more grief.
It’s a lesson that’s been drummed into Clinton over and over again for the past quarter century. Reporters threw her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech — in which she said her class was “searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living — back at her as an example of self-indulgent ‘60s gobbledygook. In the 1992 campaign, when she said defended her career by saying that she “could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas,” and defended her straying husband by saying she was “not sitting here — some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she was excoriated in many quarters (if praised in some others).
So, little by little, she gave in. And shut down. And clammed up. Even, perhaps, covered up a bit. She drafted her proposed overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system in almost complete secrecy, and paid a terrible political price. She stonewalled on inquiries into her and her husband’s business dealings, eventually all but assuring the appointment of the special prosecutor whose sprawling inquiry ultimately led to impeachment.
And now she is reluctant even to hold news conferences — on Thursday, after weeks of public pressure culminating in the health-scare imbroglio, she held one of the very few she’s had all year.
I witnessed the gradual Hardening of Hillary myself, as a reporter for The New York Times who covered the Clinton White House. On her first solo trip abroad — to South Asia in 1995 — she talked to me and other reporters traveling with her on almost every leg of the journey. But she insisted that all conversations be off the record, so it was almost impossible to reflect her curiosity and sometimes earthy sense of humor, including a long middle-of-the-night ramble about public obsession with her hair styles. When reporters told her at one point how impressive Chelsea, then 15, had been, she sighed, “Ah, yes, but now I have to take her home and put her back in purdah,” referencing the Muslim and Hindu practice of secluding women behind curtains and veils.
For all the public grind of this campaign, for all her public presence on the world stage over the past two decades, Clinton herself has increasingly spent her days in a kind of purdah, suppressing spontaneous utterances and surrounded by loyalists whose chief role is her care and feeding. She communicates only through a veil of unyielding self-protection, surrounded by a curtain of defensiveness.
So nowadays, almost no one outside Clinton’s innermost circle ever sees the tender side that loyal aides and friends insist is such a palpable part of her personality, but I can attest that it is there. When my father took his own life 20 years ago, she left me a solicitous voice mail, recommended books on suicide and months later was still asking how my family and I were coping. She shared her own grief over the suicide of her friend Vince Foster in an utterly unguarded way.
No more.
Today, Clinton is within reach of her longtime dream, becoming the first female president. But the latest polls show that she is still struggling against a GOP candidate whom even many of his fellow Republicans have described as unfit and whom most smart money says she would be trouncing if she didn’t have serious candor and credibility issues of her own. That’s the Hillary Clinton who provokes roughly 6 in 10 voters into repeatedly telling pollsters they do not see her as honest and trustworthy. The Hillary Clinton who can’t seem to get out of her own way, even when it comes to a simple story of whether she had the flu (her husband’s account) or pneumonia, and whether she was fine or not. [Continue reading…]
Does Donald Trump pay any income taxes at all?
John Cassidy writes: The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold is rightly getting a lot of attention for his stellar reporting on Donald Trump’s charitable giving, or the lack thereof. Fahrenthold and his colleagues have spent more than six months contacting hundreds of charities that Trump claims to have given money to through his family charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
“So far, the Post’s search has turned up little,” Fahrenthold and Danielle Rindler wrote in August. “Between 2008 and this May — when Trump made good on a pledge to give $1 million to a veterans’ group — its search has identified just one personal gift from Trump’s own pocket.” As Fahrenthold and Rosalind S. Helderman had already revealed, in April, many of the donations that Trump claimed to have made turned out to be gifts in kind from his businesses, such as free rounds of golf for charity auctions.
Fahrenthold’s latest revelation, which the Post published on Sunday, was that Trump has “found a way to give away somebody else’s money and claim the credit for himself.” Apparently, the Trump Foundation raises money from other charities, and from individuals with whom Trump has done business. Then it gives away the money with Trump’s name on the check. The last donation Trump made to his charity, Fahrenthold reported, came in 2008. Since then, nada.
Which brings us back to an interesting question: Is it possible that Trump is also paying nothing in income tax? A number of journalists and tax experts who have looked at Trump’s finances think it may well be. [Continue reading…]
Why the cease-fire in Syria won’t help
Christoph Reuter writes: First came two quiet nights. Then another 48 hours without bombs, a few days in which the people trapped in Aleppo and elsewhere could live without the constant fear of approaching jets. So great is the yearning for peace that people everywhere rejoiced in the peace this week — despite coming just a short time after markets and hospitals had been bombed, leaving dozens dead.
The cease-fire that went into effect on Monday night in Syria is fueling the wish around the world for an end to this war. The desire is so great that each additional day of calm is being commented on as if it were a break in the weather, a natural dynamic trending toward peace. But it’s not.
In contrast to the three previously announced agreements, the American and Russian negotiating partners have limited the duration of this cease-fire to seven days. Not with the intention of immediately beginning further negotiations, but instead to conduct joint air strikes against all groups they will have by then identified as terror groups.
Starting at the beginning of next week, the plan calls for Russian and American military leaders to meet in the Joint Implementation Center to exchange target coordinates, voice objections and then deploy warplanes from both air forces to conduct strikes. As such, the agreement represents a reversal of Western policy. If implemented, the US will be flying sorties together with Russia against Assad’s enemies. [Continue reading…]
Mourning the Syria that might have been
Christian Caryl writes: Earlier this week, when the latest ceasefire in Syria’s long-running civil war took effect, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seized the opportunity to embark on a triumphant tour of a place that has long defied him. He paid a visit to the city of Daraya, a Damascus suburb where rebels managed to resist his forces for four long years until they finally agreed to give up control in the last week of August.
For those four years the government threw everything it had at Daraya. The troops surrounding it tried to starve it out, refusing to let aid convoys bring food to residents. Syrian helicopters pounded the city with barrel bombs, weapons of indiscriminate terror that have little or no military utility. In August, the Syrian air force used rockets and napalm to obliterate the city’s last surviving hospital. Some observers believe this was part of a calculated effort to make the place completely uninhabitable.
We’ve seen the same brutality in far too many places in this war. But there was something different about Daraya — something that helps to explain why Assad was so keen to celebrate its fall.
If you only follow the headlines, you can be forgiven for seeing this war primarily as a fight between two equally nasty alternatives: the totalitarian Baath Party regime of Assad or the totalitarian theocracy of the Islamic State and other jihadist groups. But this is a drastic simplification — one that both Assad and the terrorists want their own supporters, and the world, to believe. But it is certainly truer today than it was back at the beginning of the conflict. By their very nature, civil wars have a tendency to foster extremes. The ruthless are rewarded, while the moderates and the evolutionary reformers tend to get culled out.
That’s exactly what has happened in Syria. Today, five years later, it’s easy to forget that Syria’s revolution started off amid the optimism of the Arab Spring. The first protests against Assad’s dictatorship were peaceful: Demonstrators were demanding democracy, not rule by Al Qaeda.
And Daraya was one of the birthplaces of this movement. In the revolution’s early stages it was the home of the activist Ghiyath Matar, known as “Little Gandhi” for his quixotic embrace of non-violence. When Assad’s soldiers arrived to crush local protests, he greeted them with flowers and water. They responded by torturing him to death. His corpse was later returned to his family with its throat torn out. The country’s downward spiral began.
In The Morning They Came for Us, her bloodcurdling account of the early stages of the war, journalist Janine di Giovanni explains what happened next. When she visited Daraya in 2012, locals gave her detailed accounts of a massacre conducted by government troops who had briefly managed to wrest the town away from the rebels. “It was punished,” she told me, “because it was a symbol of peaceful resistance.”
Yet even amid the descending darkness, the people of the city tried to hold on to their ideals. When Assad’s generals realized they couldn’t take the place back, they placed it under siege. Hunger became the government’s most potent weapon. “‘What did you eat today?’ I’d ask them,” di Giovanni recalls. “‘Grape leaves, some salt.’ They took leaves from the trees and made soup out of them.” Much of the population left, but several thousand locals, many of them activists, remained. In October 2012 they set up a council to govern themselves, and in the years that followed, even as life became nearly impossible, they persisted in holding regular elections — “every six months, inside every single office and department of the local government,” says Hussam Ayash, a spokesperson for the local council.
Most importantly of all, he told me, the local government persisted in maintaining its independence from the city’s militia, a non-jihadist unit of the rebel Free Syrian Army. In many other rebel-controlled parts of Syria, Ayash explained, local governments have frequently fallen under the sway of fighters, many of them Islamist extremists. By contrast, Al Qaeda and its ilk never managed to get a foothold in Daraya. “We had no services,” says Ayash. “We had no communications. We had no water. But also nobody could get in or get out. The only fighters in Daraya were the local people. So we had no jihadists.”
Ayash spoke to me on Skype from northern Syria, where he is now living after being “evacuated” from Daraya by government forces in the days following the city’s surrender on August 25. When the Syrian army managed to capture a key position on the outskirts of the city, Daraya’s leaders saw the writing on the wall, and accepted a government offer of safe passage to the north in return for their surrender of control over the community. This uncharacteristically lenient gesture by Assad was a shrewd move, one that enabled him to finally seize control of a key rebel stronghold at relatively low cost to his own troops. It was also calculated to undermine the resolve of rebel holdouts in other hard-pressed areas, who may now see a deal with the government as a more palatable option than continued resistance.
It’s hard to overestimate the psychological impact of the city’s fall. [Continue reading…]
Pope says welcoming refugees keeps us safe from terrorism
Catholic News Agency reports: Pope Francis has encouraged Europeans to welcome refugees, calling authentic hospitality “our greatest security against hateful acts of terrorism.”
Francis Saturday spoke to alumni of Jesuit schools in Europe who were in Rome for a conference on refugees.
The pope said: “I encourage you to welcome refugees into your homes and communities, so that their first experience of Europe is not the traumatic experience of sleeping cold on the streets, but one of warm welcome.”
He said each refugee “has a name, a face and a story, as well as an inalienable right to live in peace and to aspire to a better future” for their children.
“At this place and time in history, there is great need for men and women who hear the cry of the poor and respond with mercy and generosity,” the pope told a group of Jesuit alumni Sept. 17.
He noted how there are “tragically more than 65 million” forcibly displaced persons around the globe, calling the number “unprecedented” and “beyond all imagination.” [Continue reading…]
The Trek: A new life in Germany
40% of the global population have no access to education in a language that they understand
By Anna Childs, The Open University
Almost a year after a new set of Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 were finalised, the first report tracking global progress towards its goal for education and lifelong learning shows just how far there is still to go to make sure nobody is left behind.
The SDGs replaced the Millennium Development Goals, which reached the end of their 15-year focus in 2015. While the previous goal that focused on education had only one target – to achieve universal primary education – the equivalent SDG has seven, including on expanding secondary and university education.
So UNESCO’s 2016 Global Education Monitoring report is the first in a new era, bringing us the inaugural set of evidence to track progress to achieve these new targets.
UNESCO draws on 2014-15 data to show conclusively what we already know: that the world has failed to achieve universal primary education. In fact on current trends, only 70% of children in low income countries will complete primary school in 2030, the year of the SDG deadline. The target to achieve universal primary education, which remains within the broader SDG on education, won’t happen until 2042. On the same trajectory, the new target for universal lower secondary education will come about in 2059 and universal upper secondary in 2084.
UN GEM 2016
Less than a year into the new agenda of “leave no-one behind”, the data already predicts that we will be half a century late for the first of the 2030 education targets.
Egypt freezes assets of several human rights advocates
The New York Times reports: An Egyptian court dealt a heavy blow to the country’s human rights activists on Saturday by freezing the assets of five prominent human rights defenders and three nongovernmental organizations.
The freeze is part of a criminal investigation into the funding and work of prominent activists, including Hossam Bahgat and Gamal Eid, and advocacy groups, like the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, which document state abuses.
The human rights defenders are accused of using money acquired illegally from foreign governments to spread lies and harm national security. The charges can result in a sentence of life in prison.
“We don’t regret what we did, and we won’t be silenced,” Mr. Bahgat, who was briefly detained by the military last year and now works as a journalist, told reporters outside the courtroom. “This order was expected, although we fought it.” [Continue reading…]
England’s forgotten Muslim history
Jerry Brotton writes: Britain is divided as never before. The country has turned its back on Europe, and its female ruler has her sights set on trade with the East. As much as this sounds like Britain today, it also describes the country in the 16th century, during the golden age of its most famous monarch, Queen Elizabeth I.
One of the more surprising aspects of Elizabethan England is that its foreign and economic policy was driven by a close alliance with the Islamic world, a fact conveniently ignored today by those pushing the populist rhetoric of national sovereignty.
From the moment of her accession to the throne in 1558, Elizabeth began seeking diplomatic, commercial and military ties with Muslim rulers in Iran, Turkey and Morocco — and with good reasons. In 1570, when it became clear that Protestant England would not return to the Catholic faith, the pope excommunicated Elizabeth and called for her to be stripped of her crown. Soon, the might of Catholic Spain was against her, an invasion imminent. English merchants were prohibited from trading with the rich markets of the Spanish Netherlands. Economic and political isolation threatened to destroy the newly Protestant country.
Elizabeth responded by reaching out to the Islamic world. Spain’s only rival was the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Sultan Murad III, which stretched from North Africa through Eastern Europe to the Indian Ocean. The Ottomans had been fighting the Hapsburgs for decades, conquering parts of Hungary. Elizabeth hoped that an alliance with the sultan would provide much needed relief from Spanish military aggression, and enable her merchants to tap into the lucrative markets of the East. For good measure she also reached out to the Ottomans’ rivals, the shah of Persia and the ruler of Morocco. [Continue reading…]
Music: Slow Train Soul — ‘Trail of Dawn’
Bernie Sanders: ‘This is not the time for a protest vote’
The Washington Post reports: Anyone driving into Bernie Sanders’s rally here, anyone with a radio tuned to ABC News, could hear the low-key voice of Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson. In 60-second radio spots, the former governor of New Mexico introduces himself as a pragmatist who, like most voters, resented a presidential choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
“Our economic challenges will be conquered not by force, but by cooperation and mutual respect,” Johnson says in one of the ads. “For the independent majority of Americans who feel as I do, I say: Why wait one more day?”
At the rally itself, Sanders continued making the pitch he’s been honing since he returned to the campaign trail: This isn’t a year to vote third party. Mentioning Clinton’s name sparingly, Sanders told several hundred voters — many still wearing gear from the Democratic primary — that their votes could stop the election of a Republican “who thinks climate change is a hoax.”
Sanders, who was the most prominent independent in American politics even before his run, is gradually embracing a role as a third-party critic, a spoiler of the spoilers. [Continue reading…]
Democrats should panic … if the polls still look like this in a week
Nate Silver writes: Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls has been declining for several weeks, and now we’re at the point where it’s not much of a lead at all. National polls show Clinton only 1 or 2 percentage points ahead of Donald Trump, on average. And the state polling situation isn’t really any better for her. On Thursday alone, polls were released showing Clinton behind in Ohio, Iowa and Colorado — and with narrow, 3-point leads in Michigan and Virginia, two states once thought to be relatively safe for her.
It’s also become clearer that Clinton’s “bad weekend” — which included describing half of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” on Friday, and a health scare (followed by news that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia) on Sunday — has affected the polls. Prior to the weekend, Clinton’s decline had appeared to be leveling off, with the race settling into a Clinton lead of 3 or 4 percentage points. But over the past seven days, Clinton’s win probability has declined from 70 percent to 60 percent in our polls-only forecast and by a similar amount, from 68 percent to 59 percent, in our polls-plus forecast.
That’s not to imply the events of the weekend were necessarily catastrophic for Clinton: In the grand scheme of things, they might not matter all that much (although polling from YouGov suggests that Clinton’s health is in fact a concern to voters). But when you’re only ahead by 3 or 4 points, and when some sequence of events causes you to lose another 1 or 2 points, the Electoral College probabilities can shift pretty rapidly. [Continue reading…]
America the plunderer
Timothy Egan writes: Because he’s being graded on a doofus curve that is unprecedented in presidential politics, Donald Trump said more than a dozen outrageous, scary or untrue things in the last 10 days and got away with all of them. But with at least one statement, marking a profound shift in how the United States would interact with the rest of the world, Trump should be shamed back to his golden throne.
He wants the United States to become a nation that steals from its enemies. He’s already called for war crimes — killing family members of terrorists, torturing suspects. He would further violate the Geneva Conventions by making thieves out of a first-class military.
“It used to be to the victor belong the spoils,” Trump complained to the compliant Matt Lauer in the now infamous commander-in-chief forum. Oh, for the days when Goths, Vandals and Nazis were free to rape, pillage and plunder. So unfair, as Trump said on an earlier occasion, that we have “all sorts of rules and regulations, so the soldiers are afraid to fight.”
As with everything in Trump’s world, his solution is simple: loot and pilfer. [Continue reading…]
His grip still secure, Bashar al-Assad smiles as Syria burns
The New York Times reports: On the day after his 51st birthday, Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, took a victory lap through the dusty streets of a destroyed and empty rebel town that his forces had starved into submission.
Smiling, with his shirt open at the collar, he led officials in dark suits past deserted shops and bombed-out buildings before telling a reporter that — despite a cease-fire announced by the United States and Russia — he was committed “to taking back all areas from the terrorists.” When he says terrorists, he means all who oppose him.
More than five years into the conflict that has shattered his country, displaced half its population and killed hundreds of thousands of people, Mr. Assad denies any responsibility for the destruction.
Instead, he presents himself as a reasonable head of state and the sole unifier who can end the war and reconcile Syria’s people.
That insistence, which he has clung to for years even as his forces hit civilians with gas attacks and barrel bombs, is a major impediment to sustaining a cease-fire, let alone ending the war. [Continue reading…]
1.5 billion birds missing from North American skies, ‘alarming’ report finds
The Canadian Press reports: North American skies have grown quieter over the last decades by the absent songs of 1.5 billion birds, says the latest summary of bird populations.
The survey by dozens of government, university and environmental agencies across North America has also listed 86 species of birds — including once-common and much-loved songbirds such as the evening grosbeak and Canada warbler — that are threatened by plummeting populations, habitat destruction and climate change.
“The information on urgency is quite alarming,” said Partners In Flight co-author Judith Kennedy of Environment Canada. “We’re really getting down to the dregs of some of these populations.”
The report is the most complete survey of land bird numbers to date and attempts to assess the health of populations on a continental basis. It concludes that, while there are still a lot of birds in the sky, there aren’t anywhere near as many as there used to be. [Continue reading…]