Untitled
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That’s not justice
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Why Trump’s Private Transactions are Terrifying
Trump has described the payments his bag man, Michael Cohen, made to two women during the 2016 campaign so they wouldn’t discuss their alleged affairs with him, as “a simple private transaction.”
Last Saturday, when ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Cohen if Trump knew the payments were wrong and were made to help his election, Cohen replied “Of course … . He was very concerned about how this would affect the election.”
Even if Trump intended that the payments aid his presidential bid, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he knew they were wrong.
Trump might have reasoned that a deal is a deal: The women got hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for agreeing not to talk about his affairs with them. So where’s the harm?
After two years of Trump we may have overlooked the essence of his insanity: His brain sees only private interests transacting. It doesn’t comprehend the public interest.
Private transactions can’t be wrong or immoral because, by definition, they require that every party to them be satisfied. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a deal.
Viewed this way, everything else falls into place.
For example, absent a public interest, there can’t be conflicts of interest.
So when lobbyists representing the Saudi government paid for an estimated 500 nights at Trump’s Washington, D.C.hotel within a month of his election, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman rented so many rooms at theTrump International Hotel in Manhattan that its revenues rose in 2018 after years of decline, Trump saw it as half of a private transaction.
The other half: Trump would continually go to bat for Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince, even after the Senate passed a resolution blaming the Crown Prince for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million,” Trump told a crowd at an Alabama rally in August 2015. “Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”
Ethics smethics. Without a public interest, no deals can be ethical violations. All are just private transactions.
So someone donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and subsequently received a $5 billion loan from the Energy Department. What’s the problem? Both parties got what they wanted. (Federal prosecutors are now investigating this.)
Trump aide and former Fox News executive Bill Shine continues to rake in millions each year from Fox News, and Fox News continues to give Trump the positive coverage he wants. What’s the worry? It’s a good deal for both sides.
This private transactional worldview also helps explain Trump’s foreign policy.
According to Trump, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un writes him such “beautiful letters,” that “we fell in love.”
So what if Kim continues to develop nuclear missiles? Trump gets bragging rights as the first American president to have a good private relationship with the North Korean president.
He and Russian President Vladimir Putin have a “beautiful relationship,” presumably opening the way to all sorts of private transactions.
In July 2016, after emails from the Democratic National Committee were leaked to the public, Trump declared “Putin likes me” and thinks “I’m a genius.” Trump then publicly called on Russia to find emails Hillary Clinton had deleted from the private account she used when she was secretary of state.
That same day, Russians made their first effort to break into the servers used by her personal office, according to an indictment from the special counsel’s office charging twelve Russians with election hacking.
So what? Trump asks.
Even as evidence mounts that Trump aides were in frequent contact with Russian agents during this time, Trump insists he wasn’t involved in any collusion with Putin.
Collusion means joining together in violation of the public interest. If Trump’s brain comprehends only private interests, even a transaction in which Putin offered explicit help winning the election in return for Trump weakening NATO and giving Russia unfettered license in Ukraine wouldn’t be collusive.
When private deals are everything, the law is irrelevant. This also seems to fit with Trump’s worldview.
If he genuinely believes the hush money he had Cohen pay was a “simple private transaction,” Trump must not think the nation’s campaign finance laws apply to him. But if they don’t, why would laws and constitutional provisions barring collusion with foreign powers apply to him?
As we enter the third year of his presidency, Trump’s utter blindness to the public interest is a terrifying possibility. At least a scoundrel knows when he is doing bad things. A megalomaniac who only sees the art of the deal, doesn’t.
(via whatareyoureallyafraidof)
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Hey, this post may contain sexually explicit content, so we’ve hidden it from public view.
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HBO’s Insecure has mastered the cinematographic art of properly lighting black faces. Diversity matters!
I love this can I please get more of this on my dash people
(via arievogues)
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Black women are taking over film right now and I am so fucking excited.
(via theblackpoets)
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The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (2008)
“It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as ‘cool’. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that ‘cool’ is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and ‘ordinary’ black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies.
Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 1934 self-portrait by African-American artist Malvin Gray Johnson, this study looks at the ways in which the diaspora experience is expressed through self-image.
Spanning the late nineteenth century to the modern day, the book draws on ready-made and homemade fashion, photographs, paintings and films, published and unpublished biographies and letters from Britain, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States to consider how personal style statements reflect issues of racial and cultural difference. The Birth of Cool is a powerful exploration of how style and dress both initiate and confirm change, and the ways in which they expresses identity and resistance in black culture.”
by Carol Tulloch
Get it now here
Carol Tulloch is a writer and curator with a specialism in dress and black identities. She is a member of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre (TrAIN) and is the TrAIN/V&A Fellow in the Research Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Tulloch was the Principal Investigator of the Dress and the African Diaspora Network, an international endeavour to develop critical thinking on this subject.
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(via superheroesincolor)
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🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
(via kingmebey)
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Oluseye: ORI - In Conversation with the Artist.
There are many theories as to how we humans came into existence, each as fantastical and mysterious as the next, but one in particular makes me smile. The one that starts with the Almighty God sitting beneath the shaded trees of some paradisiacal garden, legs apart, filling omnipotent hands that had already formed planets and constellations with rich earthy mud still wet with divine saliva. Moulding with the greatest intent His most amazing and terrible creation - Man.
Even the evolutionists who mock the veracity of the Creationist theory put forward that the continent of Africa birthed the first humans to walk the Earth. Taking in Oluseye: Ori, the phenomenal debut of Nigerian visual artist Oluseye Ogunlesi at Gallery 151 in New York City, I couldn’t help but daydream of that scene in the Garden of Eden. The overpowering eyes, seductive lips, strong backs, and sharp angles of the Yoruba men that stared back at me didn’t coincidentally evolve from tadpoles in sulphuric vats of boiling water. Our design, the preeminent human template, is deliberate.
There was something detached from mere art-being-exhibited-in-a-gallery about Ori. Something that expressed a crescendo from the minimalist sketches of cheekbones and noses I had seen on brothers from Cap-Haïtien to the Bronx. An evolution, of man. With each sculptural piece, that narrative, the clay moulding that had started one afternoon in a garden, became more emotional and physically complex. Using geometric shapes for legs, cocks, and abdomens, gloriously sculpted Black bodies came to life. The real centrepiece, however, were the heads.
Ori, literally translated as ‘head’ in Yoruba, the ethnic west African group to which the artist belongs, serves as the nucleus of our idiosyncratic human existence. Our awareness of life, both intrinsic and extrinsic takes form from the ori. Our intellect and imagination, our memory and conscience, sexuality, spirituality, past, present, and future all play out within it. The soulful (and I don’t use that term lightly) eyes of Oluseye’s men reflect a living homage to Iwa-pele, the Yoruba doctrine that holds that self-actualisation is realised only where there is balance amongst these various constituents.
For its metaphysical explorations and irresistible sexuality, I found Oluseye: ORI to be an emotive and masterful debut by the Toronto based artist. With a style maturely his own and a voice that rings out in the open space of a gallery, Ori is truly a stunning beginning for Mr. Ogunlesi.
(via dynamicafrica)
