As the one-year anniversary of the Trump Insurrection approaches, we still have not held accountable those who planned, financed, orchestrated and implemented the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, which resulted in Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump’s reelection efforts. We may soon know…

Hundreds of persons who invaded the Capitol on 1/6/2021, or who did harm to others outside the Capitol, have now been indicted or indicted and convicted regarding their involvement in the Insurrection. But who caused it to happen? Here are my conclusions:

After over 60 lawsuits were lost, the Trump team realized that these efforts would not be successful as the year 2020 neared Its end. New strategies were needed, and several Texas Trumpsters came up with the idea of using the phrase “Stop the Steal” (coined years before by Roger Stone regarding an earlier election) to stimulate diehard Trumpsters to gather in Washington, D.C. before the election was certified on January 6, 2021, to protest the result.  

The organizers of the “Stop the Steal” effort, including Ali Alexander, put together a dry run rally in D.C. to see if this strategy would work. Funds were obtained to get the permits for the upcoming rallies in D.C and to help the Trumpster loyalists to travel to D.C for the rallies to be held on December 12 and in early January. The House Select Committee is investigating exactly who provided the seed money to finance the Insurrection.

Shortly after the new year, several rabid Trumpster Members of Congress, most likely Congressmen Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks, and Andy Biggs and new Members Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, organized “tours” of the Capitol buildings for organizers of the upcoming “Stop the Steal” Rally scheduled on the Ellipse shortly before Congress gathered in the Capitol to certify the election. Were members of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers also invited? What was the purpose of these tours?  Could it have been to familiarize the persons who took the tours as to how to infiltrate the Capitol and find out where important Democrat Members of Congress had their offices in the Capitol, and how to get to the House and Senate chambers? 

Trump retreated to his Florida palace and surrounded himself with his lawyers and the money of his Trumpster supporters

Trump loyalists Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, both pardoned by Trump for their past crimes supporting Trump, organized rallies on the day before the electoral votes were to be certified, aided by InfoWars head Alex Jones and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and others.  Separate rallies were held that day, a “Freedom Rally” organized by Michael Flynn which had religious overtones, and another rally organized by Roger Stone and his Proud Boys goons, who had “guarded” Stone for years.  Their jobs were to stir up emotions in the Trumpsters gathered from around the country (such as soon-to-be-killed at the Capitol Ashli Babbitt, who was trying to penetrate the House chamber) about how the election was stolen from Trump. The crowds were brought to a frenzy…

In the “Presidential Suite” at the Trump International Hotel, late on the evening of 1/5, gathered the Trump boys, Don Jr. and Eric, Junior’s main squeeze, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, Ali Alexander, Michael Flynn, 'My Pillow guy' Mike Lindell, Trump’s former campaign staffers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, and Senator Tommy Tuberville and possibly other Senators (Josh Hawley? Ted Cruz?), and other hangers-on, including Phil Waldron (a person of recent interest to the Select Committee). Trump joined in the meeting by speakerphone. What did they discuss? According to one attendee, Twxwire CEO Daniel Beck, it was “what to expect on the Hill [the Capitol] tomorrow”. 

After the Trump Hotel meeting ended, Giuliani went over to the Willard Hotel to meet with the real behind-the-scene operatives regarding what was going to happen later that day, which was planning the coup attempt: law professor John Eastmen, Boris Epshteyn, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone. Trump called in to speak to the assembled coup plotters at the Willard. What did they discuss? This is why the White House call logs are wanted by the Select Committee. 

Early in the day, Stone appeared outside the Willard with his Proud Boy goons, including Mike Simmons, Roberto Minuta, Jonathan Walden, Mark Grods, and Ethan Nordean, and then sent them off to the Capitol, but not to attend the “Stop the Steal” Rally about to happen. Their job at the Capitol, led by Nordean, was to penetrate the Capitol building with the help of the Oathkeepers, dressed in combat uniform, and QAnon members hyped up by member Michael Flynn (some say Flynn was in fact “Q”).  Stone in fact fled town later that day, and did not appear at the Capitol; nor did Michael Flynn. 

The permit for the Rally did not authorize a march to the Capitol, but Trump, when he spoke at the Rally, said he would lead them down to the Capitol (of course, he did not). He also on one occasion during his speech said that the participants in the Rally, after marching to the Capitol, should participate in a “peaceful demonstration”. He did not mean it, but he wanted to say it to try to cover himself from future responsibility for the violence he knew was about to happen. Giuliani and Eastman, as well as 

Congressman Mo Brooks, among others, also spoke at the Rally.

The Rally participants made their way to the Capitol, meeting up with the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and other Trump militants whose charter was: after they penetrated the Capitol, to disrupt the certification of electors proceedings; to locate, capture and destroy the ballots certifying the election; and to kill Pence and Pelosi (possibly by gassing the tunnels between the Capitol and the House and Senate Office Buildings to which the Members of Congress would have fled after the Capitol was breached). The Capitol was soon breached and the Insurrection commenced; the Members of Congress all escaped, with the help of the Secret Service and the Capitol Police.

After the breach of the Capitol, panic calls were made from Congressional leaders to the heads of the Defense Department to activate their National Guard troops and stop the Insurrection now in progress. The calls incredibly came in to the brother of Michael Flynn, Brigadier General Charles Flynn (still on active duty to this day as the head of the Army in the Pacific area!), who slow-walked any effective response for hours. The Capitol and Metropolitan Police on site at the Capitol were initially diverted to address bomb scares at the headquarters of the RNC and DNC near the Capitol as the rioting was beginning there. 

The White House operative in contact with the coup plotters, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, deflected calls to the President to “do something!!!”, even calls from his son Don Jr. It wasn’t until much later that Trump was finally convinced to send a message to his loving supporters to “stand down”.  Trump took calls during his time of inaction that afternoon from panicked Republican leaders in Congress, and had a heated phone conversation with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who used the “F word” on the President.  

After this, the coverup began. The certification process resumed, Biden’s election as President was certified, he was inaugurated, and Trump retreated to his Florida palace and surrounded himself with his lawyers and the money of his Trumpster supporters for the battle ahead, which hopefully will result in his going to JAIL. ...Read More

Dec 29, 2021 - In December 2008, a coal plant in Tennessee experienced a dike breach which led to the largest industrial spill North America has ever seen. In the middle of the night, more than 7.3 million tons of coal ash sludge barreled into neighboring homes and waterways. Coal ash, the toxic byproduct made from producing coal energy, is chock-full of radioactive uranium and poisonous heavy metals including arsenic, chromium, mercury, and lead.

The coal plant in question was the Kingston Fossil Plant, which is owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA. After the dike breach, the TVA hired a Texas contractor with a history of lawsuits alleging worker endangerment to facilitate the cleanup. In an egregious violation of human health, dignity, and consent, the contractor hid the extent of the toxicity of the sludge from the workers they’d hired to do the job. The contractor refused to provide or even allow workers to use personal protective equipment, such as masks or protective suits, during the cleanup.

As a result, more than 50 people (as of August 2020) who worked to clean up the coal ash spill have died and at least 400 are seriously sick. They have experienced cancers, respiratory diseases, rare blood disorders, birth defects, high blood pressure, hormonal imbalances, nerve damage, and bleeding sores. Some family members of workers have fallen ill as well, thanks to the coal ash coming home on their loved one’s clothing and hanging in the air, on the furniture, and throughout their homes.

Where was all the “cleaned-up” coal ash from TVA’s coal plant going? To a landfill in the rural, low-income, 90 percent Black community of Uniontown, Alabama. Residents soon experienced skyrocketing health problems of their own, leading them to file a civil rights claim against Alabama officials for allowing the toxic waste to be dumped near their homes. The EPA rejected the claim in 2018.

This sounds like the plot of a depressing apocalypse movie. But it’s very real, and it all happened because a well-intended New Deal program got corrupted by an avaricious fossil fuel industry. The TVA was established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 as part of the New Deal. It is a federally owned, public electric utility corporation governed by a White House-appointed, nine-member board.

TVA could have been a successful, publicly accountable regional planning agency. But, from the beginning, it has hurt many of the people it is supposed to help. From its hydropower construction that harms ecosystems and human communities to its sourcing of fossil energy wreaking havoc on the climate, the TVA has not lived up to its potential. But President Joe Biden could change that. He is now the ultimate authority as to who leads the agency—and thus has an opportunity to make it work for rural America, as well as align it with his administration’s stated goal of a carbon emission–free power grid by 2035.

While the TVA is a public utility (the largest in the country), it receives no taxpayer funding and essentially operates like a for-profit firm. That means it functions much like the profit-hungry company you pay each month to keep your lights on and your home warm. The TVA currently provides electricity to 10 million people in Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

TVA’s creation was intended to revitalize the Depression-struck Tennessee Valley region with employment opportunities and, long-term, to provide electricity generation and flood control services to the region’s residents. At the time of its creation, many people had grown distrustful of private utilities, which they felt were overcharging for power, and had warmed to the idea of public ownership of electric utilities.

Roosevelt also envisioned the TVA as a renewable energy powerhouse—one that would use hydroelectric dams to produce energy. The execution of this part of the plan led to the displacement of thousands of families as the TVA was authorized to acquire lands along the Tennessee River and its tributaries for construction of any dam, reservoir, transmission line, or power plant it wanted to build. While that part of the TVA’s legacy is a cautionary tale, the vision of a bold government project generating gigawatts of clean energy and creating regional landmarks in the process is exactly the sort of thing that Democrats should remember they are capable of doing.

The TVA currently generates a measly 3 percent of the electricity it sells to local power companies and large industrial customers from renewable solar and wind energy. Meanwhile, its nonrenewable fleet is enormous—39 percent of its energy comes from nuclear energy, 26 percent from methane gas, and 21 percent from coal. The TVA plans to retire less than 25 percent of its coal fleet by 2030 and expand operations at two methane gas plants. By TVA’s own projections, it will emit over 34 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2038. Thirty-four million tons—a number with no real meaning for most of us—is more than 136 countries’ annual carbon dioxide emissions. And while TVA’s emissions-reductions “plan” is to “aspire to achieve net-zero carbon emissions,” it has no specific policies or proposals to achieve this goal. For example, there’s no plan to mitigate methane emissions, which are 86 times more potent than carbon emissions during their first 20 years in the atmosphere. Where an agenda should exist, there are only empty, meaningless aspirations.

Worse, local power companies contracted with TVA have complained (and filed a legal complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC) that TVA is blocking them from purchasing power from other suppliers. Federal law requires utilities to provide open (paid) access to their transmission system, but TVA is refusing to do so. That means local power companies that would prefer to get their energy elsewhere, and simply pay TVA to use the only transmission system in the area, are blocked from potentially lowering both energy costs and emissions.

FERC decided in a 3–1 vote that they did not have the authority to address the case and punted the issue to Congress. Congress, of course, has done nothing on the issue since it involves neither electoral fundraising nor television cameras. It may be in the best interest of the petitioners to seek a rehearing and appeal the ruling.

TVA has fought ruthlessly to lock in its local power distributor customers forever—literally. Because of a recent TVA decision, utilities are stuck in contracts that require a 20-year notice to terminate. The contracts also renew automatically every year, preventing the contract from ever expiring. The Southern Environmental Law Center, or SELC, is challenging this decision in federal court, saying it deprives utilities of the opportunity to renegotiate with TVA for cheaper, cleaner electricity and discourages TVA from becoming independent from fossil fuels.

TVA’s record speaks for itself. Unfortunately, it also makes sense considering who sits on the board. The current chair, William Kilbride, was recently President and CEO of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, which prides itself on supporting legislation that “positions Tennessee as one of the most business-friendly states in the nation” and environmental policies that are “not unnecessarily burdensome to business.” The former chair, John Ryder, served as General Counsel and Chair of the Redistricting Committee for the Republican National Committee.

The board also boasts Kenneth Allen, a Peabody Energy and Armstrong Coal alum with a 50-year career in the coal industry; A.D. Frasier, a financial services industry manager who served as the director of both R.J. Reynolds Tobacco and oil and gas developer Apache Corp.; and Beth Harwell, a former chair of the Tennessee Republican party. TVA President and CEO Jeff Lyash, who is the highest-paid federal employee and received a compensation package of a whopping $7.3 million in 2020, is a former executive vice president at Duke Energy who incorrectly blamed wind energy for Texas’ energy blackouts last winter.

In a rare bout of good news, Biden has nominated four new members to the TVA board—two to fill empty seats and two to replace members whose terms expired in May. The Senate has yet to confirm these members, or even set a date for a committee hearing, due to both the aforementioned lack of fundraising and television cameras and a Republican strategy of starving the federal government of appointees who could execute the law and improve peoples’ lives. These nominations (and their eventual confirmations) are a good start, but they’re not enough. TVA board members serve at the will of the president, meaning Biden could fire them at any point. Trump fired two members during his term; it would not be unheard of.

Biden should absolutely ensure there are only climate- and energy-justice champions on the TVA board. The board could then begin the TVA’s transition to 100 percent renewable, clean electricity. This would be welcome news not just for environmentally-aware residents of the Tennessee Valley area, but for every person who just doesn’t want coal ash in their drinking water.

In order to align with necessary emissions reductions and environmental justice needs, TVA needs to immediately close coal plants, cease all new gas development, and expand distributed renewables and energy efficiency programs. More than 80 groups urged the Department of Energy earlier this year to utilize the existing National Renewable Energy Laboratory or other available authorities to develop a roadmap for TVA to achieve 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. If the largest federal electric utility authority moves quickly away from fossil fuels, other public and private utilities throughout the country might see the writing on the wall—and have a concrete leader to follow to do the same.

Biden is missing an enormous opportunity here. He is far from powerless. Giving the TVA his trust and attention along with a mandate of clean energy and environmental justice is simple, straightforward, and could have a huge impact on nationwide emissions from the electricity sector. It would also give Democrats an inroad back into the rural communities they’ve lost to the Republican Party and the means to earn back the trust of those voters. The Tennessee Valley Authority should be a national model and a catalyst for the clean energy transformation so desperately needed across the country—an FDR-sized achievement that improves on the original.

Dorothy Slater is a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project where she focuses on climate issues throughout the executive branch. ...Read More

George Lakoff: 'Conservatives Don't Follow The Polls, They Want To Change Them … Liberals Do Everything Wrong'

George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this precis: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."

Lakoff predicted all this in Moral Politics, first published in 1996. In it, he warned that "if liberals do not concern themselves very seriously and very quickly with the unity of their own philosophy and with morality and the family, they will not merely continue to lose elections but will as well bear responsibility for the success of conservatives in turning back the clock of progress in America." Since then, the left has cleaved moderately well to established principles around the politics of the individual – women are equal, racism is wrong, homophobia is wrong. But everything else: a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, the essential dignity of all humans, even if they're foreign people or young people, education as a public good, the natural world as a treasure rather than an instrument of our convenience, the existence of motives besides profit, the pointlessness, and poison of privatization, the profundity, worth and purpose of pooling resources … this stuff is an embarrassment to center-left parties, even when they're in government, let alone when they're in opposition. When unions reference these ideas, they are dismissed as dinosaurs.

It is, plainly, the longstanding failure to protect nature that powers Lakoff's exasperation with liberals. "They don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world." ...Read More

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Dec 30, 2021 - Few people counted down to anything until the 1960s and 1970s—and yes, that included the new year. Celebrations and midnight kisses on December 31, of course. Countdowns, no. How, then, did countdowns go from almost nonexistent to ubiquitous in the latter half of the 20th century? And why are we so drawn to them now, especially to mark one year’s end and another’s beginning?

Countdowns, as we know them today, serve many purposes. The New Year’s Eve countdown might be characterized as a “genesis countdown”: After time runs out, it starts over again. The wait for the new year—with its predictions, resolutions and parties—is typically generative, optimistic, and hopeful. But there are also “apocalyptic countdowns,” in which after time runs out, disaster ensues. Today, we wonder how much time we have until the next Covid-19 variant, natural disaster, or terrorist attack. Both of these countdown types took form during the Atomic Age.

Though disaster has always been a part of American life, the threat of nuclear annihilation introduced pervasive existential fears. Notably, in 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists introduced the Doomsday Clock, which to this day provides a visual reckoning of just how close we are to the apocalypse. In the years that followed, these same scientists were the ones who brought the term “count down” to the American lexicon. A 1953 San Francisco Examiner article reported on an atomic bomb test in the nearby Nevada desert: “[A] designated official on a loudspeaker and short-wave radio hookup announces at intervals the time remaining before the explosion. At the very end, he intones ‘minus 10 seconds, minus 5 seconds and minus 4 seconds’ and so on down to the moment of the explosion.”

A few years later, Alfred Hitchcock domesticated the atomic countdown in the 1957 made-for-television movie Four O’Clock, transplanting it into the basement of a suburban home wired with explosives in the minutes and seconds before the eponymous time. The televised countdowns of the 1950s, whether real or fictional, were frightening temporal experiences in which time was distended and stretched, and then extinguished.

But on May 5, 1961, the countdown got its first major positive association. Some 45 million Americans watching the national nightly news heard the countdown to the successful launch of America’s first manned space flight. The blast-off was followed by astronaut Alan Shepard saying, “Roger, liftoff and the clock has started.” Time did not end, as apocalyptic countdowns had threatened; instead, a new clock began.

The countdown associated with rocket launches had its origins in the Weimar Republic, where Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Woman in the Moon featured an extended countdown to a moon rocket launch. No one had ever heard of or seen anything like the launch before—or the countdown. The lavish science fiction multi-reel film had an outsized impact on Germany’s rocket scientists, who after World War II became central to the American space program. One of the advisors on the film was early space travel enthusiast Willy Ley, who later immigrated to the United States, where he worked for NASA, orchestrating its rocket launches.

With each televised rocket launch during the 1960s, the countdown accumulated more and more positive associations with the public, building up to the historic countdown and liftoff of Apollo 11, the spaceship that took a crew of three men to the moon. The elements of the genesis countdown as we know it today were etched in history on July 16, 1969, when at least 500 million people around the world tuned in to hear a loud and clear countdown give way to an exciting, daring and transformative objective.

During the 1970s, the countdown moved beyond atomic test sites and space missions and onto radio and television shows—and away from the nihilism of a bomb blast toward the triumph of a rocket launch. The popular Australian music show “Countdown,” which debuted in 1974, inspired similar shows in the United States and Europe. By counting down to the latest greatest hit, these shows slowed the rush of time and demarcated the recent past. Their terrain was not time, but rather “the top” or “the most popular,” organized sequentially and leading not to “zero” but to “number one.” Other kinds of countdown programs amplified the race against time. In the long-running British game show “Countdown,” for example, contestants try to complete number and word problems in a set amount of time. A very large analog clock, reminiscent of the Doomsday Clock, hangs over the show’s set. In this iteration, the show’s triumphant contestants demonstrate that the race against time can be won—that is, that disaster can be averted.

The apocalyptic and the genesis countdowns eventually made way for the ultimate celebratory countdown: the one to the new year. Americans celebrated New Year’s Eve publicly in various ways beginning in the 1890s, including with the ringing of bells (mostly at churches) at midnight. The first ball dropped on the roof of One Times Square to mark the arrival of 1908, and in the 1930s and 1940s, commercial radio broadcasts heralded the arrival of the new year to rural and urban audiences alike. But the first countdown I have identified was in the late 1950s. During the last few seconds of 1957, broadcaster Ben Grauer proclaimed to a national radio audience from a perch overlooking Times Square, “’58 is on its way, 5-4-3-2-1. The ball is starting to slide down the pole, and it is the signal that ’58 is here.” He didn’t get much traction: The extant recording features a crowd making merry but definitely not counting down.

Through the 1960s, Grauer tried to introduce New Year’s Eve countdowns on television, presumably as a way to extend what was, after all, an extremely short-lived event. Still, while you can hear the crowd cheering on these broadcasts, they don’t join him in the countdown. Picking up on Grauer’s innovation, Dick Clark’s “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” which debuted in time to usher in 1973, featured confected countdowns that were staged on its dance party sets— and were sometimes painfully out of sync with the Times Square ball drop.

Impossible as it is to believe, my research into extant radio and television broadcasts and newspaper reports shows that it was not until seconds before the arrival of 1979 that a Times Square crowd counted down to the new year. At that moment, it was clear that countdown culture had arrived and was here to stay.

By the end of the 1980s, countdown clocks were installed in Times Square, television graphics began to show the amount of time remaining until midnight and television hosts guided enthusiastic audiences through the count. As the year 2000 approached, though, something different happened. Millennium countdown clocks proliferated across the globe (though 2000 was not the millennium), accompanied by apocalyptic fears about the end of time, or at the very least Y2K, the much-discussed epic global computer network crash. ...Read More

These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!

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Tune of the Week: Queen Bee feat. Taj Mahal, Ben Harper, Rosanne Cash | Playing For Change | Song Around The World

Also check out Gordy Schiff's and Mardge Cohen's annual holiday playlist

Dec 27, 2021 - The first time I saw Penélope Cruz’s face, contorted and weeping, was during the brief opening sequence of Pedro ­Almodóvar’s 1997 film, Live Flesh. Cruz plays a sex worker who gives birth on Christmas (to a boy who will be the movie’s protagonist) on a bus in the middle of the night. Hollywood hadn’t yet typecast her as a manic dream Spanish sex symbol, and I remember being struck—then, and again in Almodóvar’s 1999 masterwork, All About My Mother—by her odd, disarming configuration of flesh and bone. With her big sad eyes, long nose, and jutting lips, she looked awkward and almost comically defenseless. Cruz could have been a major star in the silent era—she can crack you up or break you open with a look.

What I hadn’t recalled about Live Flesh, a characteristically bright-colored, poppy, lurid confection of sexual obsession and revenge based on a Ruth Rendell novel, was that it begins under Franco. It’s 1970, and a “state of exception” restricts freedom of speech and association. In one shot, the bus Cruz is on when she goes into labor pulls away to reveal graffiti on a wall that reads LIBERTAD / ABAJO EL ESTADO DE ESCEPCIÓN! (Liberty, down with the state of exception!)

Such direct references to history and politics have been relatively rare in Almodóvar’s work. Having grown up in midcentury conservative rural Spain, he emerged as part of La Movida, the transgressive cultural flowering that took place in Madrid after Franco’s regime ended with his death in 1975. Amid a scene that mixed alternative theater, punk rock, and porn, Almodóvar began making Super8s and then features in the vein of directors like John Waters. In frantically paced, antirealist, antipatriarchal, and often farcical early movies, he sought out every possible taboo to bust, appropriated and inverted Francoera Spanish kitsch, and blended it all with the tropes of classic melodrama and noir. (The Roman Catholic Church is a favorite target, but there’s also Matador, in which a serial-killing woman brandishes her hairpin as a weapon in the style of a bullfighter.)

If Almodóvar’s anarchic, sensual early work has often been interpreted as a response to Francoist repression, his emphasis on social and sexual freedoms, hedonism, and psychological idiosyncrasies nonetheless tended to be received as apolitical. That held true as Almodóvar developed a richer, more melancholic and emotionally sophisticated mode, and secured his place as the most internationally famous filmmaker of La Movida (and probably Spain as a whole). Still, many of his films unfold in an almost aggressively fluid and feminine world, in which the interests and pleasures and difficulties of women, and femmes in particular, determine everything. (By the same token, you might sometimes detect an edge of misogyny in reactions to his work, both positive and negative—an assumption of unseriousness, indiscipline, morbid aestheticism, fantastical inwardness.) In that sense, his preoccupation with performance and artifice feels more like an examination of the conditions of everyday life than a retreat from them.

Almodóvar’s new film, Parallel Mothers, is both a departure and a return. It closes with a quotation from the Uruguayan leftist Eduardo Galeano about the persistence of the past within us, and takes the legacies of fascism in Spain as an explicit subject. The film begins when Penélope Cruz’s character, Janis, a middle-aged photographer, is sent to profile a handsome forensic archaeologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde). In the course of the assignment, she seeks his help in exhuming and identifying the remains of her murdered great-grandfather, one of the more than 100,000 missing Spaniards dumped in mass graves during the civil war. Their detailed discussion of this history unapologetically takes up a big chunk of the movie’s opening, before Almodóvar sends Janis into more familiar terrain: An affair with the married Arturo leaves her pregnant, and at the clinic where she gives birth, she befriends another single mother-to-be, an unhappy teenager named Ana (Milena Smit), whose own mother is mostly absent, preoccupied with the late and sudden flourishing of her career as a stage actress.

Arturo continues his quest to uncover Janis’s great-grandfather's remains, but most of the film’s run time is devoted to a version of a classic Almodóvarian formula: women building alternate family structures together as they contend with various soapy plot developments. Although the movie’s effects feel remarkably not reliant on these developments, I won’t spoil them here. Suffice it to say that there ensue romantic disappointments; secrets, deceptions, and mistaken identities; intergenerational conflicts and sufferings; a tragic death that compounds the impossibility of emotional resolution; semi-incestuous–seeming sexual entanglements in which painful legacies must be worked through.

The decision to draw such a clear connection between the personal troubles of individuals and families and the ills of an entire country is a bold one that can’t help but cast a strange light back on some of Almodóvar’s earlier works. His Hitchcockian interest in intergenerational trauma, compulsive repetition, secrets festering for years—sometimes pretty much out in the open yet insistently unacknowledged—may now seem to take on a more nationally specific valence. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist comes to mind, as the great model for a cinematic mapping of fascism’s psychosexual pathologies.

I also think of an interview from a few years ago in which Almodóvar cited the director Luis García Berlanga as one of the two great wellsprings of Spanish cinema (the other and far more internationally celebrated being the surrealist Luis Buñuel): He praised Berlanga’s 1963 The Executioner for the delicacy with which it eluded the censors’ grasp, the “amazing sleight of hand” it must have taken to make such a film under Franco, presenting a sharp treatment of the death penalty as a “comedy of manners.” This admiration for appealingly disguised political courage is intriguing, coming from a master of the sex comedy. Of course, Almodóvar has no censors to fear, and yet throughout his exuberantly noisy body of work, the theme of something coded or long unspoken recurs with striking regularity—as if constitutive to a sensibility forged in his particular time and place.

Political allegory is tricky to pull off. It can feel preachy or manipulative. Or it can simply risk removing any sense that something urgent is at stake, when an audience is invited to understand the action primarily at the level of metaphor. Does anyone feel much for the denizens of Animal Farm? And I might have been able to relax more into the genre pleasures of Tom McCarthy’s recent drama, Stillwater, had I not been distracted by the suspicion that the movie was positioning itself as some bien-pensant statement about U.S. foreign policy. In the case of Almodóvar, I also feel a reflexive resistance to the idea of having to reread him too thoroughly through this historical lens—as if that would confirm the concerns of his theatrical femme world as trivial, not worth representing after all; as if our fights and illnesses and rapes should always double as an analogy for something more significant.

Yet, while I actually watched Parallel Mothers, none of that unease seemed to kick in. I did sense that I was seeing the trappings of melodrama without its usual function. The suspense that such plots generally rely on feels unnecessary here—you can guess some of the revelations in store before they happen, and that doesn’t ruin anything; in fact, it sharpens the tragic irony. The film’s most striking accomplishment is that its conceit allows its historical and more intimate strands to heighten and enrich one another. That’s a credit to Cruz, whose performance anchors both these dimensions.

But it appears as well to be a sign of ­Almodóvar’s belief in and commitment to his own metaphor—his conviction, perhaps, that this isn’t just a device he happens to have chosen, but a part of Spain’s everyday reality. During a pivotal argument, Janis confronts Ana over her complicity in her family of origin’s insistent blindness to Spain’s shameful history: You have to understand what kind of country you’re living in, the older woman says, with evident feeling, implying a personal, intimate necessity as well as a moral obligation. So many thousands are still “missing,” leaving families unable to comprehend their own histories; only in 2019 were Franco’s remains removed, over considerable objections, from the Valley of the Fallen, where they had become an unofficial far-right shrine. Political amnesia, in other words, is an active, ongoing project in which whole societies participate. Parallel Mothers would seem to suggest that fascist legacies continue, in unpredictable ways, to deform people’s lives over decades and generations—the descendants of the immediate victims, and everyone else as well, down to their private lives, their psyches. It’s an alarming idea. And while it needn’t alter your interpretation of Almodóvar’s other works, it may help explain their eerie, painful resonance.  

Lidija Haas writes on film for The New Republic. She is an editor at The Paris Review. ...Read More

Dec 31, 2021 - Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist David Cay Johnston is not giving up on exposing how Donald Trump and his family fleeced America while he was in the White House. To that end, the bestselling author is back with a meticulously researched new book, "The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family."

I recently spoke to Johnston about his new book for "Salon Talks" and one thing is clear: His enthusiasm to see Trump held accountable has not waned just because the Trump presidency is over. In "The Big Cheat," he uncovers details on Trump's scams that began with his inaugural committee and ran straight through his "Stop the Steal" fundraising grift. In between, Johnston notes a range of corruption by Trump, such as stopping in front of his Washington hotel during the inaugural parade in 2017 to send a clear message: "If you want something from the Trump administration, you will first pay tribute to Donald." As Johnston writes, spending money at Trump's hotel was one way to do just that.

Johnston also takes aim at Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who saw their collective wealth rise by somewhere between $200 million and $600 million while working in the White House. This wasn't by happenstance, as Johnston details: It was because Javanka cashed in on Trump's presidency, with sweetheart deals from the Chinese government, the United Arab Emirates and more.

In our conversation, which you can watch or read below, the nearly 50year veteran reporter also lays out safeguards that Congress should enact to prevent Trump, or another morally bankrupt president, from ever repeating this Trumpian fleecing of America again. But one of the best deterrents to future corruption, Johnston argues, would be the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump himself. "I would be eternally in favor of a long prison sentence," he told me.

Well, Donald Trump raised $107 million for his inaugural, that we know of. The previous record was Obama in his first inaugural: $53 million. The inaugural for Obama had eight or nine balls. It had lots of events. They had numerous headline musical acts whose expenses had to be paid. Donald Trump had the skimpiest, cheapest possible thing you can imagine. Two balls, with almost nobody around, and yet all that extra money: $107 million. One of the key stories I tell is about Stephanie Wolkoff, who was Melania's best friend, and who is someone who puts on events. She's the person who puts on the biggest social event for the American elite each year, the Met gala in New York. And she was pulled aside and asked by Rick Gates, the corrupt deputy to the corrupt Paul Manafort, to take money off the books because they didn't want to report it, meaning foreign money.

It took her a second. She was so stunned by this. And then she said, "No, I'm not going to do anything like that." So that's why I say they took in $107 million, that we know of. I think they took in more money than that. And I hope we find out through the attorney general's investigation — but also the Trump White House dirtied up Stephanie when they knew this was going to become public. They said, "Well, you got $26 million." No, she got $480,000, which for the kind of work she did may sound to most Americans like a big fee. But that's, in that business, a more than reasonable fee. And all the rest of the money was directed to Trump cronies. She was told, "Here's the money. Now write checks to these people." And that's how the people around Trump were profiteering right at the start. That very moment, at the inauguration, they've got their fingers in there to grab the money.

None of the TV networks explained when this happened what was going on. I was astonished by that. When Obama was elected, the crowds lining the road to the White House were curb to building, packed thick as sardines. When Trump came, in many places there were more law enforcement and military guards than there were cheers. But when they got to a place about five blocks from the White House, the motorcade stopped and everybody got out, Melania in that beautiful ice blue dress that she was wearing. The family took a two-minute turn on the pavement. 

What every lobbyist, every foreign agent, knew was they did it in front of the Trump Washington Hotel, the old post office. And Trump, by law, should not have had that lease. It should have been taken away from him. And I explained this, how the bureaucrats avoided this in the book and were later taken to task for it, though nothing happened to their careers.

But the message was very clear. If you want something from the Trump administration, you will first pay tribute to Donald. And his restaurant, in the first 90 days, took in money at the rate of $25 million a year. Anybody in the restaurant business knows the thought of being able to take in $25 million in a single restaurant is mind boggling. The Saudi government took out two floors at rack rates. When the head of TMobile's American division wanted Trump to approve the merger with Sprint, he made a big show of repeatedly going there, sending his executives there, spending money there. There are parts of three chapters that talk about the $26 billion favor Trump did for this guy who made a big show of going there.

Donald Trump has raised somewhere close to a half a billion dollars at this point, through his "Stop the Steal" claims that the election was stolen. Of course there's no evidence of that and all sorts of Republicans have said there was nothing improper. We've had lots of audits and recounts and recounts. It's all nonsense, but he's raised a lot of money off it. He said, "I need the money to hire lawyers to stop the steal." He spent $9 million on lawyers. Well, that's a lot of money, except that he took in close to a half a billion. And Donald can spend that money on himself under our laws. So I call Donald today America's "beggar in chief." I don't know if you get these, but every day I get texts and emails from Donald Trump asking for money. I love the ones from Don Jr. that start off: "I just spoke to my father. You're the only person in America who didn't respond to my note earlier today, and Dad asked me to call you since you've been such a generous supporter in the past." It's just a con.

And we're supposed to believe that Donald Trump Jr. didn't tell his dad about the meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower, with the person who announced that they were there on behalf of the Kremlin to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. It isn't just that they were Russians, They said they were proposing a criminal scheme under American law in which — you're a lawyer, you know what I'm about to say! The duty of any American made that offer by a foreign power, especially a hostile foreign power, is to pick up the phone, call the FBI and say, "I need to speak to someone in counterintelligence."

Well, before Donald Trump took office, Jared had this problem with 666 Fifth Avenue, which is right down the street from Trump Tower. He paid $1.8 billion, 99 percent of it borrowed money. And the building two years later was worth maybe only $600 million. Talk about being underwater in a disaster. So he goes to the government of Qatar. America's most important military base in the Middle East is in Qatar. Our central command base is there. And he says, "Wouldn't you loan me $800 million under very favorable terms?" And the Qataris said, "No, we're not that stupid." What happens next? Donald Trump is president. He turns against Qatar. He begins arguing in favor of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are scared to death of the Qatar government. Trump accuses the Qataris of financing terrorism. They finance two terrorist groups, they absolutely do. But the Saudis finance 60 of them, the State Department says, and with vastly more money. So this is absurd, and it's indicative of Donald Trump's total ignorance about these matters. 

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But in Jared's case, he got people from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to bail him out of his problem, and that's why they went on the attack against Qatar. Later, the Kushner family — who are very much like the Trumps, they're both whitecollar organized crime families — got 18 sweetheart loans guaranteed by a federal loan agency. You or I would never have gotten such loans, interest-only for 10 years, which increased the Kushner cash flow and increased your and my risk as taxpayers.

We would never have gotten these deals, and nor would they but for Donald Trump being in the White House. And, Dean, to make a point here, these facts that I report all came out, one way or another. But something was in the Washington Post, and then the Wall Street Journal, the L.A Times, the Seattle Times. But you never saw pictures. So I took all these threads and wove them into a tapestry, a narrative, so you could understand it. In fact, the Washington Post gave me a rave review on Dec. 5, including the line pointing out that I long ago predicted Donald Trump would not leave the White House peacefully. I was told it was crazy for me to say that. I was vindicated. ...Read More