Dear Commons Community,

Over the past week, we have heard more about Donald Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank which is now the subject of two congressional committees and the New York State Attorney General.  The New York Times published an  article yesterday describing the Trump-Deutsche Bank relationship.  Here is an excerpt:

“As President Trump delivered his inaugural address in 2017, a slight woman with feathered gray hair sat listening, bundled in a hooded white parka in a fenced-off V.I.P. section. Her name was Rosemary T. Vrablic. She was a managing director at Deutsche Bank and one of the reasons Mr. Trump had just taken the oath of office.

It was a moment of celebration — and a moment of worry for Ms. Vrablic’s employer.

Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank were deeply entwined, their symbiotic bond born of necessity and ambition on both sides: a real estate mogul made toxic by polarizing rhetoric and a pattern of defaults, and a bank with intractable financial problems and a history of misconduct.

The relationship had paid off. Mr. Trump used loans from Deutsche Bank to finance skyscrapers and other high-end properties, and repeatedly cited his relationship with the bank to deflect political attacks on his business acumen. Deutsche Bank used Mr. Trump’s projects to build its investment-banking business, reaped fees from the assets he put in its custody and leveraged his celebrity to lure clients.

Then Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, and the German bank shifted into damage-control mode, bracing for an onslaught of public scrutiny, according to several people involved in the internal response.

In the weeks before Ms. Vrablic attended his swearing-in, the bank commissioned reports to figure out how it had gotten in so deep with Mr. Trump. It issued an unusual edict to its Wall Street employees: Do not publicly utter the word “Trump.”

More than two years later, Mr. Trump’s financial ties with Deutsche Bank are the subject of investigations by two congressional committees and the New York attorney general. Investigators hope to use Deutsche Bank as a window into Mr. Trump’s personal and business finances.

Deutsche Bank officials have quietly argued to regulators, lawmakers and journalists that Mr. Trump was not a priority for the bank or its senior leaders and that the lending was the work of a single, obscure division. But interviews with more than 20 current and former Deutsche Bank executives and board members, most of them with direct knowledge of the Trump relationship, contradict the bank’s narrative.

Over nearly two decades, Deutsche Bank’s leaders repeatedly saw red flags surrounding Mr. Trump. There was a disastrous bond sale, a promised loan that relied on a banker’s forged signature, wild exaggerations of Mr. Trump’s wealth, even a claim of an act of God. 

But Deutsche Bank had a ravenous appetite for risk and limited concern about its clients’ reputations. Time after time, with the support of two different chief executives, the bank handed money — a total of well over $2 billion — to a man whom nearly all other banks had deemed untouchable.

Kerrie McHugh, a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman, said: “We remain committed to cooperating with authorized investigations.”

The White House referred questions to the Trump Organization. A company spokeswoman, Amanda Miller, declined to comment.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in Congress or in the New York State Attorney General’s investigation.   It can have a serious impact on Trump’s business activities now and after he leaves office.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It is about time that two Senate Republicans have called out President Trump for his attacks on former Senator John McCain. 

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, denounced Donald Trump yesterday over the president’s latest attacks.  In an interview with CNN in January, Romney pledged to make his disagreements with the president known.

“Where I disagree, I’ll point that out,” Romney said, and he got that opportunity yesterday. Romney took to Twitter to write that he couldn’t “understand why” Trump would go after McCain “once again,” referencing a comment Trump made about not being “a fan” of the Arizona Republican after tweeting over the weekend about the “stains” on his career.

“I can’t understand why the President would, once again, disparage a man as exemplary as my friend John McCain: heroic, courageous, patriotic, honorable, self-effacing, self-sacrificing, empathetic, and driven by duty to family, country, and God,” Romney’s tweet read.

During an Oval Office appearance with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Trump railed against McCain’s 2017 Senate vote against a Republican bill that would have repealed the Affordable Care Act.

“I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be,” Trump said of McCain, who died of cancer on Aug. 25, 2018.

Trump also went after McCain over the weekend, accusing him of sharing a copy of the Steele dossier on the billionaire’s ties to Russia with the media before the 2016 presidential election.

“He spends his weekend obsessing over great men because — he knows it and I know it and all of you know it — he will never be a great man. My father was his kryptonite in life and he is his kryptonite in death,” McCain said Monday on “The View,” adding, “Your life is spent on your weekends not with your family, not with your friends, but obsessing, obsessing over great men you could never live up to. That tells you everything you need to know about his pathetic life right now.”

Sen. McCain’s longtime friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who had been, until yesterday muted in his criticism of Trump, also took issue with the president’s latest comments.

“John McCain is an American hero. He stepped forward to serve his nation. He risked his life. He spent five-and-a-half years in horrendous conditions as a prisoner of war. He’s one of the most consequential senators in the history of the body. Nothing will ever change that,” Graham told the Washington Post on Capitol Hill. “When he received the dossier, he turned it over to the FBI, it’s what he should have done. He didn’t turn it over to the press, other people did. So he’s my friend. I told President Trump that when it comes to John McCain, I think he acted responsibly. He’s an American hero and nothing will ever change that in my eyes. I want to help this president. I want him to be successful. I’ll help him where I can, but push back when I need to. When it comes to criticizing Sen. McCain and his service, I think that’s a huge mistake.”

More Republicans need to show the American people that they are not puppets of the president.  Up until yesterday, it was only McCain’s daughter defending her father.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, David Bloomfield alerted me to this article that appeared last night in the New York Daily News that describes how once again few black or Hispanic children are being admitted into New York City’s specialized high schools.  As reported:

“Fewer black and Hispanic kids were offered seats in the city’s elite specialized high schools in 2019, even as Mayor de Blasio attempts to integrate the world-famous schools where Asian and white students dominate enrollment.

Just 506 black and Hispanic students received first-round offers this year from the city’s specialized high schools, such as the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, according to enrollment data released Monday.

That’s down from 527 black and Hispanic students who received offers last year, a drop of roughly 4%.

The total number of first-round offers also went down slightly, falling 5.3% from 5,067 in 2018 to 4,798 in 2019.

The city’s specialized schools are known as some of the finest public schools in the nation but they have drawn fire in recent years because they are intensely segregated.

In 2019, only about 4% of 4,278 total offers at the top schools went to black students and 6.3% to Hispanic kids. That’s about the same as last year.

In contrast, black and Hispanic kids account for more than two-thirds of the city school system’s overall student body.

At Manhattan’s famed Stuyvesant High School, just seven of 895 offers went to black kids.

New York City Parents Union founder Mona Davids, a black woman whose son attends a public school, said that a lack of adequate elementary and middle schools in inner-city neighborhoods has resulted in a puny number of black and Hispanic kids getting offers to top city high schools.

“Until the quality of education in New York City improves, nothing is going to make a difference,” Davids said.

Eight of the city’s specialized schools, including Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, use the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) to admit students.

A ninth specialized school, the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, admits students based on a talent audition and review of academic records.

The schools that use the SHSAT test have become the center of a pitched debate on school segregation after de Blasio backed a plan to eliminate the use of the test in June.

That plan hasn’t gone into action but de Blasio has also put forth a number of other programs to diversify the elite high schools, including programs to tutor kids for the SHSAT test and efforts to boost the number of kids who take the test.

Another desegregation effort to set aside specialized high school seats for students from economically-challenged middle schools, dubbed the Discovery Program, prompted a suit that caused the city to delay the release of high school acceptance letters until Monday, about 10 days later than usual.

Brooklyn College and CUNY Grad Center Education professor David Bloomfield said the acceptance numbers released Monday show that de Blasio’s efforts aren’t making much of a difference.

“It doesn’t appear to be moving the needle,” Bloomfield said. “The iron hand of inequality isn’t solved by half-measures.”

A Department of Education spokesman said that more black and Hispanic students may be offered seats at specialized schools in the coming weeks under the Discovery Program.

But city schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said the elite schools’ dismal diversity numbers show that admissions based on the SHSAT exam must end.

“We need to eliminate the single test for specialized high school admissions now,” Carranza said.”

The City’s Department of Education just can’t get this right even after years of excluding minority students from these schools.

Tony

Jeanine Pirro

Donna Brazile

Dear Commons Community.

The fallout from Jeanine Pirro’s rant about the hijab worn by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar keeps coming back into the news media.  Yesterday, the Council on Islamic-American Relations(CAIR) called on advertisers to boycott Fox News entirely until the network axes the controversial hostess.

The call comes just days after Pirro’s Saturday night program, “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” was yanked by Fox after she said in the previous episode that the hijab worn by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) may be “antithetical to the Constitution.” In fact, the Constitution guarantees the right of free expression of religion. As reported by the Huffington Post:

“It’s not clear what Pirro’s future is on the network. Fox has refused to comment on “internal scheduling matters,” though it earlier issued a statement “strongly” condemning Pirro’s statement.

CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy and civil rights group in America, is also calling for advertisers to demand that Fox drop Tucker Carlson in the wake of unearthed audiotapes of the news host making racist and sexist comments on a radio program. Some advertisers have already abandoned the program.

“Fox News must clearly state that Jeanine Pirro will not be allowed back on the air after her long history of Islamophobic hate rhetoric, and the network must also take similar action against other Islamophobic hosts like Tucker Carlson,” Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director, said in a statement provided to HuffPost. “All existing advertisers should drop their ads on Fox News to ensure that they are not associated with the promotion of hate.” 

At least four advertisers — Botox-maker Allergan, online marketplace Letgo, personal finance company NerdWallet and pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk — have all indicated they’re pulling their ads from Pirro’s program, according to The Hollywood Reporter. 

President Donald Trump on Sunday called on Fox to bring Pirro back on the air. 

In a real twist to all of this, Fox News announced yesterday that it had hired former Democrat National Committee chair and CNN contributor Donna Brazile as a Fox political commentator.

In an appearance on Dana Perino’s Fox News show yesterday, Brazile said that she was joining the network as an opportunity to listen and reach out to the “Fox family” adding: “This is a critical period in our country. It’s a time for dialogue, it’s a time for civility. We’re not going to get ahead by yelling at each other and sending nasty tweets.”

Lots of goings-on at Fox News!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Meghan McCain hit back at Donald Trump over the weekend after the president attacked the legacy of her late father, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).  As reported in the Huffington Post

“Trump belittled McCain, saying he had “stains” on his career for moves such as his no vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act in July 2017. McCain stunned everyone ― including his Senate colleagues and the president ― when he became the deciding vote against the passage of the Healthcare Freedom Act, the GOP attempt to repeal Obamacare with a bill that would have stripped health care from millions of people.

The daughter of the war hero, who also co-hosts ABC’s “The View,” responded to Trump’s latest tweet about her father with a searing response: “No one will ever love you the way they loved my father,” she said. “I wish I had been given more Saturdays with him. Maybe spend yours with your family instead of on twitter obsessing over mine?”

In a since-deleted tweet, McCain also wrote that her father lived “rent free” in the president’s head. 

During his political rise, Trump attacked McCain repeatedly, first by saying early in his presidential campaign that the former senator was “not a war hero” because he was captured and held prisoner during the Vietnam War. The criticisms have not stopped even after McCain’s death last August, several months after he was diagnosed with brain cancer.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News anchor Shep Smith received Radio Television Digital News Foundation (RTDNF) Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award at a ceremony in Washington last week.  On receiving the award, he told the crowd of journalists that he was committed to the primary mission of journalism, which he said was being accurate, honest, thorough and fair, to never knowingly misinform, and to correct and apologize when the inevitable mistake happens.

Presenting the award was Shepard Smith Reporting executive producer Jonathan Glenn. Glenn said he had to be talked into working for Smith, who he said he found tough to work for, “but only with those who didn’t care.” He said that if you cared about being right, and being good at your job,” everything was great, because Smith cared, and was “frustratingly good” at his job.

Glenn said working with Smith was both exasperating and rewarding. The reward is that Smith cares about “the truth, and about facts. Shep cares tremendously about this business and he takes seriously what we all do,” he said. “When news is breaking or tragedy is unfolding, there is no one I trust more to take us through it,” including explaining what “we don’t yet know.”

Smith spent his time thanking all the people–colleagues, friends, family–who had helped get him to this point and this award, including Fox News President Jay Wallace, who was a tape runner on the overnight shift, and a desk assistant, then Smith’s line producer, senior producer and executive producer. He said they were the ones who made every day rewarding.

Smith said he shared the award with his team, who worked “so hard to get it absolutely right, because as you may know, people kind of pay a lot of attention to what happens over here in our little corner,” to which he appeared to be referring to the news, rather than commentary, corner of Fox News.

He said “being accurate, and honest and thorough and fair is our primary mission.”

Smith called that an ideal we all try to live up to. He also said that it was the duty not only of journalists but of anyone with “the honor of a platform of influence,” that, “when the inevitable mistake happens, we must immediately correct it and sincerely apologize…. We must never manipulate or invent. We must never knowingly deceive, because to do so is a disservice to our audience, and potentially injurious to our society, and I’m convinced that upon those who intentionally misinform, history will poorly reflect.”

Smith said the times ahead will test everyone, but his team will try to remain on task and ignore the Twitter trolls who relentless pursue him and to get the facts to the people, “all the people in every place.”

He said the First Amendment gives journalists the right to protect to do what’s right, “no matter what.”

Commentators, including CNN’s Brian Stelter, suggested Smith was throwing subtle shade at some of his Fox News opinion-based colleagues with his comments. Smith has a history of doing so and has been among the few at Fox News who have fact-checked President Donald Trump’s false statements.

Tony

Beto O’Rourke floating above the political fray, at least as a newly minted presidential candidate.

Dear Commons Community,

Beto O’Rourke sucked the air out of the Democratic presidential race this week with his announcement that he was a candidate. With lots of splash and pizazz, the media gushed over his candidacy.  Maureen Dowd in her column this morning examines what makes Beto run and compares him to Barack Obama.  Here is an excerpt (the full column is below):

“Beto floats above the fray, staying vague on nettlesome issues. The 46-year-old offers the politics of feelings.

“I don’t have a team counting delegates,” he told Vanity Fair, adding, “It’s probably not the most professional thing you’ve ever heard about this, but I just feel it.”

Joe Kennedy built his family’s political myth on good hair, white teeth and glossy star quality. Why shouldn’t Beto?

After all, during his 2008 campaign, Obama merely went back to Chicago to see Malia perform in “The Odyssey.” Beto loved the epic so much, he thought about naming his son “Odysseus,” settling instead for “Ulysses.”

Wandering alone, as Jesus, Barack and Beto did, is part of the hero’s journey defined by Joseph Campbell. Beto loves Joseph Campbell and “Star Wars,” which was inspired by Campbell’s work.

The last One, about the same age when he jumped into national politics precociously aiming to usurp his elders, was also a uniter who went on an odyssey of self-discovery in New York while at Columbia.

The last One also sold a cult of personality, offered himself as a symbol of modernity, sparked Oprah’s interest and had a preoccupation with being cool.

Indeed, Obama told David Axelrod recently on “The Axe Files” that Beto reminded him of himself.”

Run, Beto, run!

Tony

————————————————————————-

Is the Force with Beto?

By Maureen Dowd

March 16, 2019

WASHINGTON — The heavens part. The light shines down. The rise in the oceans begins to slow. The world is once more bathed in the mystical glow of a messiah. Our redemption from Donald Trump is at hand.

We have The One again, a New One — another lanky, bookish, handsome man with an attractive young family, a thin résumé, an exotic name, a hip affect, a rock star aura, an enticing smile, a liberal press corps ready to fluff his pillows and a frothing Fox News.

Let Elizabeth Warren knock herself out with policy proposals. Let Kamala Harris be the adult in the room. Let Bernie Sanders bellow away.

The magical man-boy, Beto O’Rourke, has come back from his 40 days in the desert — vlogging, contemplating, floating in and out of a funk — to share his gifts.

He has given us the blessed news: “Man, I’m just born to be in it.” He told Vanity Fair that his words at a Texas campaign stop when he was trying to unseat Ted Cruz were pulled out of him “by some greater force,” musing: “Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from.”

Annie Leibovitz advised Beto to wear a blue button-down shirt for her Vanity Fair cover shoot if he was going to run. And now we can hear, as Hillary Clinton noted sardonically about Barack Obama in 2008, “celestial choirs.”

Beto floats above the fray, staying vague on nettlesome issues. The 46-year-old offers the politics of feelings.

“I don’t have a team counting delegates,” he told Vanity Fair, adding, “It’s probably not the most professional thing you’ve ever heard about this, but I just feel it.”

Joe Kennedy built his family’s political myth on good hair, white teeth and glossy star quality. Why shouldn’t Beto?

After all, during his 2008 campaign, Obama merely went back to Chicago to see Malia perform in “The Odyssey.” Beto loved the epic so much, he thought about naming his son “Odysseus,” settling instead for “Ulysses.”

Wandering alone, as Jesus, Barack and Beto did, is part of the hero’s journey defined by Joseph Campbell. Beto loves Joseph Campbell and “Star Wars,” which was inspired by Campbell’s work.

The last One, about the same age when he jumped into national politics precociously aiming to usurp his elders, was also a uniter who went on an odyssey of self-discovery in New York while at Columbia.

The last One also sold a cult of personality, offered himself as a symbol of modernity, sparked Oprah’s interest and had a preoccupation with being cool.

Indeed, Obama told David Axelrod recently on “The Axe Files” that Beto reminded him of himself.

The One anointing the New One. Joe Biden, pushed aside by Obama in the last election, was understandably irritated.

Just as reporters once swooned when Obama made like Jay-Z and brushed imaginary dirt off his shoulder after a tough primary debate in Philly in 2008, reporters were entranced when O’Rourke air-drummed “Baba O’Riley” by the Who at a Whataburger drive-through after his debate with Cruz.

To many, Beto’s appeal is his persona as a quasi-rebellious ’90s suburban teenager, a skateboarding punk rocker who seems to have modeled his campaign logo on the spicy ketchup logo at Whataburger.

But others are less charmed. A satirical video on Twitter by skaters mocked “bad-skater Beto” as the kind of middle-school poser who “went to Zumiez and spent $27 on stickers.”

In a new Reuters story, Joseph Menn reveals that while O’Rourke was still a teenager, he was a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, a stealthy hacking group named after an old Texas slaughterhouse. A kind of Neo-lite, he used the handle “Psychedelic Warlord,” looking for free video games. (Socialist alert!)

A hacker might be refreshing after a president who refers to Tim Cook as Tim Apple. Still, Menn writes, “it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money.”

The 15th entry in the Democratic race is at the nexus of many tricky issues for a party desperate to oust Individual 1 from the White House.

Is it better to nominate a celebrity like Obama with a slight record that cannot be targeted or someone with established credentials? Should the nominee spring from the far left, the vector brimming with electricity and fight, or is that suicidal in a national election?

Can white men jump in, or is this post-#MeToo era the time when Democratic and independent women will demand a woman at the top of the ticket? Will Democratic voters longing for another Obama and the minority voters who strayed from Hillary want an African-American?

Can pugilistic progressives stomach a rich kid like Beto at a time when the country is in an eat-the-rich mood? Will they tolerate candidates like Beto and Biden, who speak well of Republicans and have a history of working with them?

As The Wall Street Journal reports, O’Rourke tried to please Texas Republican business leaders when he “opposed Obamacare, voted against Nancy Pelosi as the House Democratic leader and called for a raise in the Social Security eligibility age.”

The fever is running high in his party. Will Beto turn out to be born for it or borne away by it?

Dear Commons Community,

As reported by Reuters, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to President Trump on Friday after a white nationalist killed 49 people while they were praying in Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The prime minister called the attack the country’s “darkest day.” Ardern said Trump called her and asked what the United States could do. “I said to Donald Trump that New Zealand needed sympathy and love for all Muslim communities,” Ardern told reporters after the conversation. Ardern added that Trump “acknowledged that and agreed.” That same day, at a White House event during which the president vetoed a resolution to nix his declared national emergency to build his border wall, Trump was asked by a reporter if white-supremacist terror is a growing lethal threat, to which the president replied: “not really.” During the same event, Trump once again railed against the “border crisis,” stating that “killers” were “coming in.”

Kudos for Prime Minister Ardern!  She understands what it means to lead a country in a time of crisis.

Tony

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar

Dear Commons Community,

Freshman Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar mourned the “chilling” attack on two New Zealand mosques early Friday — opening her tweet with a verse from the Quran that is often shared in times of tragedy.

“Inna lilahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” Omar tweeted, using the Arabic phrase from the Muslim holy book that means, “We belong to Allah and to Allah we shall return.”

“This is chilling news to wake up to,” she added. “In the face of this horror, I’m mourning with, and holding our community extra close today.”

“Jummah Mubarak,” she added, which translates to, “Happy Friday.”

Omar is a former Somali refugee and the first naturalized citizen from Africa — and Somali-American — elected to US legislative office.

Forty-nine people were killed and dozens more injured when at least one shooter — identified as 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant — stormed into Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch and opened fire on Muslims who were there for Friday prayers. Another shooting happened a short while later at a nearby mosque in the city.

Muslims,Christians, Jews, and people of many faiths mourned the innocents killed yesterday.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Finally, in a rare display of independence, twelve Republican senators yesterday defied President Trump and joined Democrats in passing a resolution to nullify the President’s declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border.  Having easily passed in the Democratic-controlled House, the legislation is on track to draw the first veto of Mr. Trump’s presidency. 

We congratulate these twelve senators for putting country ahead of party.  It would be nice if other Republicans did the same starting with party leaders such as Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.

Tony