Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File.
It’s a very old saying, the rich are different. It’s true, they are, by virtue of money, and the power money purchases. If they are different as people, it’s because money allows them to be arrogant, compassion free, unethical assholes without consequence. No, not every rich person on the planet is a truly shitty person, but they are rare birds in the flock of the rich. Rich people are accustomed to getting their way, using the time-honored method of greasing palms and opening doors with wedges of cash and promises. Now that we have someone in the white house who wouldn’t know an ethical behaviour if it bit him on the balls, the slime trail of the rich is visible from space.
According to a New York Times piece published on Saturday, Trump’s son Eric told the newspaper that Mar-a-Lago admits about 20 to 40 new members each year. Considering that Mar-a-Lago raised its initiation fees to $200,0000 after Trump’s presidential inauguration, that’s up to $8 million dollars coming in from new members per year. And that doesn’t include taxes or the $14,000 charge for each member’s annual dues.
Trump and his closest advisers have repeatedly denied there’s anything improper about Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach. They say it doesn’t amount to paying for access to President Trump because the club is social, not political. And they argue the powerful people who pay for membership have other avenues of communicating with the president.
That’s an argument? I fail to see it.
“He has not and will not be discussing policy with club members,” White House spokesperson Holly Hicks said in a statement provided to the New York Times.
But reporting from the Times and from Politico suggests otherwise.
Real estate executive Bruce Toll told the New York Times that he does occasionally discuss national policy issues — specifically, Trump’s plans to increase spending on infrastructure projects — when he sees Trump at Mar-a-Lago. According to Toll, Trump sometimes receives advice from other club members about what he should do policy-wise.
Developer Richard LeFrak, a close friend of Trump’s, recounted a discussion at Mar-a-Lago last weekend during which Trump asked him for help with the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump was unhappy with the projected cost of the wall, wanted to come up with a way to build it more cheaply, and suggested that the head of the Department of Homeland Security would give LeFrak a call to talk about it.
And according to an audio tape obtained by Politico from one of Trump’s New Jersey clubs that was also published on Saturday, Trump has asked his club members for their guidance selecting his cabinet appointees.
“We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?” Trump said to a member, according to the tape.
[…]
This weekend, Trump is planning to use Mar-a-Lago to meet with potential candidates he’s considering to fill the National Security Adviser position recently vacated by Michael Flynn.
Of course, it’s not unusual for world leaders to surround themselves with rich and powerful people. But it is unique to be able to pay $200,000 for entry into a private club where multiple sources close to the president have confirmed he’s at his most relaxed and ready to mingle.
Applications to Mar-a-Lago have surged since Trump won the presidency.
Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have demanded more information about who holds a membership at Mar-a-Lago and how closely they have been vetted. The urgency increased after last weekend, when Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe discussed a potential North Korea crisis in full view of the diners and waiters at his club.
Trump has spent the past three weekends at Mar-a-Lago even though he promised during the campaign that he would “rarely leave the White House.”
The system of government in the States has always been susceptible to corruption, it’s not the most well thought out system. I would say that no sitting president has ever been as open to corruption, and so willing to embrace it in full view of the public at large as the Tiny Tyrant. Donny isn’t capable of governing, he isn’t even capable of running a proper business, and hates being in the white house, acting as president. No, he only feels capable when he’s immersed in the foul cronyism of the monied, who he can slither over to for ‘advice’ on how to president, as he is utterly bankrupt when it comes to the little things, like intelligence, planning, and knowledge.
Via Think Progress.
From a Native American’s perspective, Trump is acting more like the Founding Fathers than Hitler.
Donald J. Trump has been called a lot of things. A bigot. A misogynist. A racist.
And I agree with these descriptions of the new president. He’s earned those titles, especially given all he has spewed over the decades about women and racial minorities, and just about anyone he disagrees with, or who disagree with him.
But Mr. Trump is also unoriginal.
Many of the controversial policies and plans he’s setting into motion have already been executed in this country.
Think about it.
Mr. Trump has vowed to evict millions of undocumented individuals. Brown folks, mostly.
But, of course, this wouldn’t be the first time a sitting U.S. president would forcibly and eagerly evict the indigenous peoples of this continent from their homes.
One of the first of such evictions in this country’s shady history occurred in the 19th century, back in 1830, when president Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which coercively extirpated thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands.
The brutal act prompted the “Trail of Tears,” a vicious campaign that resulted in a forced westward march of men, women, and children through ice, snow, and freezing temperatures. More than four thousand Native Americans died during that rotten trudge.
“But Mexicans aren’t Indians,” a white man recently said to me at an eatery on the north side of Denver, Colorado, during an impromptu discussion on Trump’s unoriginality.
Religious Right bootstomper Carol Swain is quite upset about that dreaded gay thing. Specifically, her life is just being ruined, ruined I say, because some people might think she and a friend might be gay, oh no! I can’t even work up a response to this. Who the fuck cares? I’d assume people who actually know her know that she’s a bigoted piece of goods, along with her being hetero or whatever. Why would she care if strangers might have a random, passing thought about her? Not that I expect that happens much.
Last week, Religious Right activist and college professor Carol Swain spoke at the Family Research Council about her latest book, “Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children’s Hearts and Minds,” where she complained that she cannot even go out in public with her female friends without worrying that people might think that they are gay.
[…]
Even now, as an adult, Swain complained that when she goes out in public with her female friends, “we have to wonder, do people think we’re gay?”
“We don’t care,” she said, “but just the fact that we live in a culture where you can’t have close relationships between men and women with women without wondering whether someone is going to think there is more to it, that is not the way society is supposed to operate.”
Oh yes, you do care. You care very much. After all, you have to have something to keep the edge of your unspeakable bigotry nice and sharp. You have to find yet another way to try and get small minded people panicky, so they’ll fork over money…to you. Convenient, that. I’m happily and visibly bisexual, and I don’t care if people think I’m hetero, nor do I care if they think I’m gay. Haven’t you heard, Carol? Love, it makes the world go ’round. You should try it sometime. Go ahead, go out with a friend, and hold her hand! It feels nice, especially when you don’t care what people think.
In Ms. Swain’s book, she opines about how when she was a little girl, she never had any thoughts about whether or not she might marry her best friend, and thinks openness and acceptance are just fucking everything up. That’s not the case, Ms. Swain. You didn’t think about marrying your best friend because she was a girl, and you were hetero. Other girls had a boy for a best friend, and if they were hetero, they may well have thought about marrying their best friend. Other girls thought about marrying their best girlfriend because they were not hetero. And so on. Y’see, everyone isn’t hetero, and you don’t get to use your personal experience to extrapolate a justification for oppression, bigotry and hatred.
Via RWW.
Gilles Cenazandotti Polar Bear, 2016.
Fusing a story of sustainability and animal welfare, the chromatic and playful sculptures fabricated from found objects ponder the future of the environment. Each of Gilles Cenazandotti‘s sculptures and assemblages are composed of polyurethane material culled from the Mediterranean Sea. The style of sauvegarde art, or safeguarding, is a unique environmental method that draws upon the French artist’s love for the environment and his love for forming art from unconventional materials. Formerly the head of a design company, the artist quit his day-job and sold the company four years ago in order to create detritus-amassed art.
Gilles Cenazandotti Black Panther.
“I imagine this universe in my sculptures, of the cities moving to what is necessary to the survival of the men. What will it occur when the tide will overflow of our rejected products? When will pollution touch so many species that life will be decreased? This science fiction is near where one already sees the animals changing territory. One can wonder what they will become, like so many already disappeared species, if they do not find any more spaces to live.”
Gilles Cenazandotti Baboon, 2015.
Gilles Cenazandotti, Briquets Triptych , 2016. 47.25 x 11 inches each. Lighters Found from the Sea on Altuglass.
Remarkable work, and work with a very strong message. We need to stop being unthinking apes and be mindful humans. All of the work is deeply poignant, but it’s the lighters that get to me. FFS, is it that much to expect people to not treat our oceans like a convenient trash can?
Gilles Cenazandotti at Contessa Gallery.
Via The Creators Project.
Dark-eyed Junco, from Kengi. Click for full size.
© Kengi, all rights reserved.
© C. Ford.
Oh man, it’s amazing that you can manage to forget the godsawful stench of gesso in between uses. If anything can turn you off doing art work, it’s that fuckin’ goop. Ugheeesh. (Yes, I messed with the photo, it doesn’t actually look like that, just smells like that.) What does it smell like? Rotten horseradish soaked in formaldehyde and pissed on by cats for 6 months. Ugh.
Avaaz has a global letter going, and they’d like to get 6 million signatures. I’ve signed. Please, sign yourself, and boost the signal! We can make our voices heard.
With the Muslim ban, Trump has shown that the worst fears about his Presidency are true. Add your voice to the open letter below to join the resistance — then spread it far and wide:
—-
Dear Mr. Trump,
This is not what greatness looks like.
The world rejects your fear, hate-mongering, and bigotry. We reject your support for torture, your calls for murdering civilians, and your general encouragement of violence. We reject your denigration of women, Muslims, Mexicans, and millions of others who don’t look like you, talk like you, or pray to the same god as you.
Facing your fear we choose compassion. Hearing your despair we choose hope. Seeing your ignorance we choose understanding.
As citizens of the world, we stand united against your brand of division.
Sincerely,
[Add your name!]
There are many language options at the site.
President Donald Trump, living alone inside the White House, often hungers for friendly interaction as he adjusts to the difficult work of governance. At his clubs, he finds what’s missing.
That showed last November at a cocktail and dinner reception celebrating longtime members of his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. Deep into the process of meeting potential Cabinet nominees, the president-elect invited partygoers to stop by the next day to join the excitement.
“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump told the crowd, according to an audio tape of his closed-press remarks obtained by POLITICO from a source in the room. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”
For Trump, the “Winter White House” of Mar-a-Lago offers him more than a warm and gilded setting outside of Washington, D.C. — it puts the isolated president back in the mix with his club family, where friends said he feels most like himself.
“So, this is my real group,” Trump said at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, on November 18, according to the audio tape. “These are the people that came here in the beginning, when nobody knew what this monster was gonna turn out to be, right?”
He added: “I see all of you. I recognize, like 100 percent of you, just about.”
[…]
Turning to a longtime club member that night, he said: “We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?”
The supportive crowd ate it up as the relaxed Trump, in his element, gave them a close-up view of how he was setting up the government. “You are the special people,” he told the crowd of about 100 members, who mingled around a sushi station served by a waiter wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” cap.
Politico has the full story on this, and it should upset the hell outta people. It upsets me, and it’s fucking infuriating. The only thing that matters to Trump is being the center of attention, and that attention is best when people are paying obscene amounts of money to be one of the Tiny Tyrant’s “friends.” The special people – filthy rich lickspittles. Obviously, the rest of us don’t matter in the flaky crust of Trump’s manufactured reality.
Via Simon Moya-Smith.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers assist a child from a family that claimed to be from Sudan as they walk across the U.S.-Canada border into Hemmingford, Canada, from Champlain in New York. REUTERS/Christinne Muschi.
Here’s a contrast and compare: Canadian cops who smile and assist people seeking refuge, and ugly American border cops who want to catch those seeking refuge, so they can lock them up and deport them. This one’s a no brainer, seriously. There’s a family who will now receive help, settle in, and become productive Canadian citizens. Here’s the thing – this family was living in Delaware for two years, being productive citizens in the U.S., but they weren’t legal, and given the current climate, had no hope of becoming legal. So, it’s one big fucking loss for the country with no compassion, and a net win for the country with it.
America is going full tilt manic ugly these days, and warm & fuzzies ain’t easy to come by. My thanks to Canadians for this one.
Think Progress is also covering this story, in-depth. I don’t like the descent into full court ugly here in uStates, but I am grateful people seeking refuge have a place to go where they are welcomed and taken care of by decent peoples.
Twitter.
So many Trump supporters think he’s a good businessman, and that’s why they retain a great deal of faith in him, but Trump’s no businessman, never has been. He started out with not a silver spoon, but a whole set. He’s dismissed his trust fund, and the “little” loan of a million bucks from daddy. For reasons beyond my understanding, supporters don’t seem disturbed in the slightest about any of that, or the numerous failed “businesses”, the open frauds, or the lawsuits. This myth of the “good businessman” persists. Trump sucks at business, and he’s not worth what he claims, either, one of the reasons he doesn’t want those tax returns seen by anyone. I’m sure that’s not the only reason.
Bert Spector has an excellent article up at The Conversation, explaining how Trump does not have business chops, in detail. There’s a big difference between being the CEO of a company, answerable not only to a board, but to shareholders as well. Trump has never done that. He has an LLC, which basically allows him to run a family business, which is not answerable to anyone, so there’s no need to do things in the proper manner, at least not until you get caught. When it comes to Trump, he’s been caught, numerous times, and eventually leaks money out in a settlement, then goes right back to scamming again. The article is in-depth, so just a bit here.
Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made much of his business experience, claiming he’s been “creating jobs and rebuilding neighborhoods my entire adult life.”
The fact that he was from the business world rather than a career politician was something that appealed to many of his supporters.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of a president as CEO. The U.S. president is indisputably the chief executive of a massive, complex, global structure known as the federal government. And if the performance of our national economy is vital to the well-being of us all, why not believe that Trump’s experience running a large company equips him to effectively manage a nation?
Instead of a “fine-tuned machine,” however, the opening weeks of the Trump administration have revealed a White House that’s chaotic, disorganized and anything but efficient. Examples include rushed and poorly constructed executive orders, a dysfunctional national security team and unclear and even contradictory messages emanating from multiple administrative spokespeople, which frequently clash with the tweets of the president himself.
Senator John McCain succinctly summed up the growing sentiment even some Republicans are feeling: “Nobody knows who’s in charge.”
So why the seeming contradiction between his businessman credentials and chaotic governing style?
Well for one thing, Trump wasn’t a genuine CEO. That is, he didn’t run a major public corporation with shareholders and a board of directors that could hold him to account. Instead, he was the head of a family-owned, private web of enterprises. Regardless of the title he gave himself, the position arguably ill-equipped him for the demands of the presidency.
If, like me, your understanding of just how businesses work isn’t all that, go have a read, and learn why the whole “I’m a businessman!” rhetoric from Trump is nothing more than another lie.
